I READ episode nineteen of Dead Air, “If Saucers Attack,” to a sizable Saturday audience that probably included a few lawyers and several potential litigants.
TODAY, in every Kap’n Klam Family Restaurant from Kenosha to Kinshasa, you will find on the counter, in a glass case, a flying-saucer detector. Let me explain how they came to be there.
Overnight, shortly before my thirteenth birthday, I had become a manufacturer of flying-saucer detectors. I had sold one to my mother, and with the money from that sale I had bought the parts for two more. Flushed with success, I calculated that, at a profit of eighty-nine cents each, if I went through twenty cycles like the first one, doubling the number of detectors I sold in each cycle, my profit on the last cycle would be nearly a million dollars: $933,232.64, to be exact. Of course, I would have to make 1,048,576 detectors in that cycle, but that was a problem that I somehow expected to take care of itself. For now, the important thing was to move the two detectors I had on hand — that is, in stock.
I went to my grandfather, Guppa, for advice. Guppa was the best salesman I knew, a master of the art, and if there was a trick to selling I knew he could teach it to me. He sold Studebakers, and had for years, but it had become a losing game. The Studebaker company seemed to have fallen permanently out of step with public taste, and that made a salesman’s job awfully tough.
As Guppa listened to my plan to double the number of detectors in each cycle, he grinned a wry grin and a gleam came to his eye. Put the two together, and even I could tell that he had once made a calculation like this himself. I’m sure that while I explained my plans I had a gleam in my eye, too, but experience hadn’t yet given me the wry grin. I kept glancing at him as I laid out my plans, my hopes and dreams, until finally the wry grin stopped me.
“It’s not going to work, is it?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It didn’t work for me, but it might work for you.”
The only real advice he gave me was to believe in what I had to sell and to be myself when I spoke to a prospect. Guppa liked the flyer I had made to advertise the detectors, and before I left he bought a detector himself. I didn’t even have to sell it to him. (At least, it felt at the time as if I hadn’t had to sell it to him. Thinking back, I realize that I had followed his advice. I believed in what I was selling, because I had reason to believe in it, empirical proof: my own detector had consistently detected an absence of flying saucers when, so far as I knew, no saucers were around; and I had been myself, because with Guppa I couldn’t have been anyone else.)
My first real prospect, someone not related to me, was Porky White, the mastermind behind the Kap’n Klam chain, my business partner, not in the saucer-detector trade, but in the esculent mollusc trade.
I practiced my sales pitch in front of a mirror, trying to make myself sound like myself, and when I was convinced that I did, I pedaled on down to the clam bar. I took a stool at the counter and set the detector in front of me.
“You know,” I said, “it’s a funny thing about these detectors. When I built the first one — ”
“This is a new one?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “When I built the first one, I thought that the purpose of it was to warn people if saucers were attacking, but now I see that the real purpose is to reassure people that saucers aren’t attacking. Take the case of my mother, for instance — ”
“You’re selling them, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“It’s your manner.”
“My manner?”
“Yeah. It’s a little different. Hard to say just how it’s different, but it’s different. You’re not speaking to me as a friend — ”
“I’m not?”
“Oh, you’re being friendly — too friendly, in fact. Maybe that’s it. It’s a little studied.”
“Studied?”
“You practiced in front of a mirror, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a good idea, definitely a good idea, but you don’t sound like yourself. You sound like a salesman.”
“Well, I am a salesman, right now anyway.”
“In that case, you want to sound like your other self, the one who isn’t selling anything. Anyway, I’ll take one.”
“You will?”
“Sure. It will look great on the bar. Good for conversation, too. Might even bring a few people in — curiosity seekers. Lends a little note of uncertainty to the evening. ‘Will flying saucers attack while I’m eating?’ Hey, I’m on to something. If the saucer detector goes off while you’re eating, your meal is on the house.”
“Your money back if saucers attack,” I said. It just came to me, just like that.
[to be continued]
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