I Was a Travelling Door to Door Encyclopedia Salesman

I just finished watching Coyote vs. Acme and was inspired to tell a story from back in the days when I was a traveling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. Our merry little band of misfits was heading out of town (Vancouver) on another quest adventure sales road trip. We were taking the Trans-Canada Highway east toward the interior, probably headed for some small town in Alberta or Saskatchewan, but we were barely out of town, crossing the old Port Mann Bridge into Surrey. As we were in the middle of the bridge, I noticed a strange flutter of movement to my right (I was riding shotgun) and turned my head to see something so odd that in the intervening 32-odd years my mind has on numerous occasions tried to convince me that it never happened, that my brain's wiring somehow got crossed, inserting some half-forgotten cartoon into a real-life memory. But no, this happened. A perfectly round piece of heavy plastic sheeting had somehow ended up on the roadway until a gust of wind lift...

Ever since leaving the city of Vancouver when I was 5 years old, moving to neighboring Richmond, I considered myself a small-town guy. Everything is relative, of course. At the time Richmond had a population of around 90,000 (today it's much more than double that), but given its enormous size and relatively concentrated population, I could ride my bike with friends during summer vacation and easily reach wild areas where we could walk through fields and catch garter snakes. Of course, we only did that during the day. That means that nighttime was spent with streetlights and all the light pollution that they come with. It never occurred to me to look up and expect to see anything more exciting than the big dipper. When I was 13, we moved to Ontario, to a city of 130,000 outside Toronto. Comparing my environs to Canada's largest city nearby, I was still able to tell myself that I was small-town. (Flash-forward to me as a 30-year-old, living in an Israeli village whose population ...

Getting stoned with John Schlesinger was a bad, bad idea. I knew it would be a bad idea, but John and Mitch insisted, and it's not like I had any veto power. So we got stoned. Now, John, who was an a**hole at the best of times, became nearly intolerable when his thin veil of self-control was removed by the weed he had smoked. His high pitched cackling laughter was increased in volume and frequency and his desire to piss people off grew beyond all reason. We went driving to get some munchies and gas. Mitch was behind the wheel. This was not the first time I had ridden in a car driven by a stoned Mitch Clinton (in addition to Crazy Sheldon), and while I shudder at the insanity of it all with my 18 years of hindsight, at the time it didn't seem so strange. And while I'm sure his reaction time was impaired, to his credit, he certainly showed a reasonable level of attention and care to the road, to the pedestrians in his path, and to other drivers. John rode shotgun and I wa...

Dear reader, thank you for your patience. Seven months of writer's block and crazy busy life have left my little blog neglected, but not forgotten. Hopefully, we'll be back to regular posting. I may have mentioned in the past that travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen were not a very politically correct community. We had all sorts of stereotypes about different types of people (wealth, type of car, neighbourhood, and yes, race, gender, and country of origin) to try to model our sales pitch or even give up at the beginning to save time. One of the groups that we tended to avoid was immigrants. Not always, especially if they seemed really friendly, but as a rule I guess if English wasn't their native language it was just too much of a communication barrier against forming a trusting repartee to make a successful pitch. One of the interesting little bits of trivia I never noticed until Mitch pointed it out to me was how different immigrants would tell you at the ...

So there we were in Edmonton: two crews sharing adjacent motel rooms and hanging out together every night. In addition to the folks I introduced you to last time, there were also Bryan and Crazy Sheldon. Bryan was a former member of the Canadian military who talked about his stint in the army all the time. I was intensely jealous of him for one particular reason: he had been stationed as a UN peacekeeper in the Golan Heights, and I, a Jew, had never even been to Israel. But, aside from his interaction with Crazy Sheldon, I'll write more about Bryan another time. Crazy Sheldon. I wonder what his problem was. I mean, I wonder what his official diagnosis would have been. Borderline personality maybe. Still, a nice guy, and aside from the time I went along with him in almost getting us both killed, he was definitely a fun guy to be around, if you were able to make concessions to his craziness . One of the ways it manifested itself was in his utter lack of fear of dogs. Dogs are on...

When you're on the road with a travelling door to door encyclopedia sales crew, you gotta let off steam on a regular basis. And karaoke is as good a way as any. I'd say that in my six months behind the lines, we probably went to karaoke bars three or four times. And the star on our team was definitely Andy Bailey. He was fearless and shameless. One time he saw " Knockin' on Heaven's Door " on the song list and picked it. Of course, it was Bob Dylan's original arrangement, but Andy did a full-on Axl Rose impression anyway. "Aww, aww, aww-aww yea-eah!" I still smile when think of it. But without a doubt the funniest karaoke memory I have is from when we were at a redneck bar in some little town in the middle of nowhere. Most of the men there were wearing cowboy boots, and I believe there was sawdust on the floor. Ah, but the karaoke machine was off-the-shelf! In addition to country hits and standards, it had every other genre ever made for kar...