I Could Never Sell

Can’t be right, you’re thinking.

Whatever you buy, you buy a story.  Whatever you sell, you sell a story.  Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the story business.

I’ve spent too much of my life in a desk chair, at a keyboard, you’re thinking.  Everything looks like stories and more stories from there.

Take the guy with the pushcart, you think, who sells coffee and rolls to people rushing for the peak trains at 7 AM.  You’re telling me he’s in the story business?  When his father started this business, you happen to know, he couldn’t count change, and he studied the coins and bills like English as a second language: the guy owes you this and he gives you that, what do you do…?  Remember the change-for-a-ten scam Ryan and Tatum O’Neal do in Paper Moon, outsmarting shop-keepers everywhere they go?

You happen to know this about the push cart man and his father?  Their story?  Maybe that’s part of why you buy from him, when you could get better coffee and rolls down the line.  You’re the same way.  You get ahead one day at a time, day after day, no skips, no jumps, just one step after another.  Same train every morning for years.  That’s your story too, and the guy’s pushcart warms you with that story on cold mornings.

A story is an explanation.  That explains it, says the first guy.  That’s no answer, says the second.  The two guys are worlds apart in their idea of what explains something and ends it.   They may become enemies over that and that alone, their idea of a good-enough or not-good-enough excuse.

“I was upset,” someone explains.  Oh, thinks the first guy, that explains it.  The hell it does, thinks the second guy.  Anyone can get upset, he thinks.  It’s what you do with it, and where it’s coming from, that’s what I want to hear.

Charles Baxter is the master at this.  In Burning Down the House he traces one era passing into another by the the kind of excuses that are fashionable from one year to the next, the kind of ending people accept as an ending.  Richard Nixon, for example, offering his story of Watergate, and his excuses, and a new generation asking “yes, and…?” because his ending doesn’t end the matter for them, his explanations don’t explain, his answers don’t answer.

“I needed money,” explains a culprit.  Yeah, one guy says, I get it.  It happens.  Not so fast, says the second guy.  How did that happen?   “I had just come down with the same disease that killed my father,” adds the culprit.  Say no more, nods the second guy.  But if the culprit said “Somehow my ship never came in,” the second guy would nod a different kind of nod, thinking,   “this guy will never have a dime and will never have a clue why not. ”

You’re in court for custody of your pre-teen daughter.  You offer the judge one story, your wife offers another.  Your story explains the way you got here, and points ahead to a better future.  So does your wife’s story.

You and your wife and the judge are in the story business.

The judge doesn’t need your whole story.  Once you end an answer with “I guess I never liked sitting at a desk,” the judge knows your kind of story, your kind of explanation, your kind of excuse, your kind of ending, and the kind of story you would teach your pre-teen daughter to accept, from herself and others.  The judge sits at a desk all day every day, long past the time when sitting hurts.  She doesn’t like it, but she does it.  She does it for you and your pre-teen daughter, when you won’t do as much for yourself.

You lose.  She doesn’t seem to be listening to your stories.  Why should she?  She knows where all your stories end…

“And that’s why…” every story ends.  Once the judge knows the ending where you stop, where you think you’ve explained and told why, she doesn’t need more of your stories.

Here’s an attorney writing about overestimating his clients and making assumptions that hurt them in court.  He defended clients who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and commited minor crimes again and again.  These are kids damaged before birth by alcoholic mothers, but they could be Charles Baxter’s first-term fiction students, who don’t know what makes a story, a start, an end, a progression.  You may never write a fictional story in your life, but…

Look what happens to your life if your story-sense is damaged, if you don’t know how to tell a story:

I assumed that my FAS client could tell the Judge what happened in a way that would make sense.

I assumed that their problems were fixable.

I assumed that after they got caught the third or fourth time for the same offense in the same circumstances, they would at least learn not to get caught.

I assumed they understood consequences: steal from cars and you go to jail.

I assumed they understood time: three days in jail is not the same as three months.

I failed to see that my client was usually the number two or three person in the group that committed the offense, but the first and only one to get caught.

I failed to notice that their crimes got no bigger over time, and no smaller either, it was just the same thing again and again.

I failed to understand that when my client left holes in his story, those were holes in his memory, in his  mind, holes where the story had fallen through.

I failed to see that the threat of jail had no effect on my client.  The main reason he didn’t want to go to jail was because he couldn’t be with his friends.  But maybe his friends were in jail too.

I failed to see that almost all the offenses were impulses of the moment, without planning or forethought.  The judge gave probation that required looking ahead and planning, arriving for appointments and following rules and such, but my clients were no more capable of planning their reforms than their offenses.

I failed to ask the mother directly about her drinking…

Until this attorney understood why his clients couldn’t tell a story, he couldn’t tell their story to the court, couldn’t explain or excuse them.

Our skills at story are tested every hour of our lives.  We are our stories.  Set to music, we are story, we are song….

When some young woman buys this shampoo instead of that, humming a tune inside, she is piecing together a script for her future, a script she offers also to men her age, mostly men she never sees but who see her hair flying like a flag with the way she strides  a sidewalk or a corridor;  a script she is making for their future together, she and some man, the right man for the part, and their children.  She can still smell the shampoo her father used when she was no taller than his knee, and the she can already smell the shampoo her first child will smell at his father’s knee, in a future she knows better and sees better than the present world coming at her every moment of every day, with all its sights and noises and smells…

===