The Base Cop (Guest Post by Mitch Clinton!)

Sasha asked me to write this one, because he doesn't remember it.

Regular readers know me as Mitch Clinton, but you can call me Clint. Back in the fall of '93, I was a travelling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman too, and when Sasha (as we knew him then) joined the crew, I was the one assigned to train him. So if you've enjoyed his stories, some of the blame is mine.

Recently I brought up a day from those first few weeks of his, and he drew a complete blank. Not a flicker. So here it is, for the record.

We were working a Canadian Forces base in Alberta. Calgary, I’m pretty sure, though thirty-odd years will blur a map. We’d driven our boss John Schertzer’s red VW Jetta onto the base, parked it in the visitors’ lot, and started working the family housing. As you’ll know from Sasha's stories, we were taught to target houses with obvious evidence of children, and base housing was full of them: rows of neat little homes, kids’ bikes on the lawns, the whole picture. A goldmine, on paper. There was just one problem. 

Everybody knew you weren’t supposed to sell on a military base. That was a definite rule. But John and his merry band of hucksters had made thousands upon thousands of dollars selling encyclopedias a generation before us, and he had taught us that a “No Salesmen” sign just meant knock harder. So a whole base full of rules? That wasn’t a warning - it was a sales lead. Schlesinger had a salesman’s selective memory: he knew every trick in the book and was able to forget that his generation was the reason those signs existed in the first place. What made him rich had left doors everywhere a little harder to open by the time we came knocking. 

Sasha got a taste of that almost right away. At one of the first doors, a guy answered, and the second he clocked what we were, his face said everything. He might even have said it out loud: you guys aren’t supposed to be doing this. We thanked him and kept walking, but I knew he was going to sell us out. 

Sure enough, about three doors later, the base cop pulled up.

He was decent about it, genuinely friendly. We told him we'd been dropped off at the gate, walked in, and were waiting to get picked up. Of course, that was a lie. I couldn't tell you why I told it. Nobody trained me to say it. It just came out. But that little lie would end up saving our bacon — I mean, our brisket. He gave us a ride to the gate and explained, nicely, that we couldn't sell on the base. We nodded, said, "Okay, we get it," and waved goodbye.

We started walking away from the gate while he drove off. The second his cruiser was out of sight, we turned around and walked right back in. That's how we'd been trained. Sasha, ever the eager apprentice, took it all in.

We knocked on another three, four, five doors. Somewhere in there it became obvious that one of them was going to call the cops on us again, and I decided to pull the pin. We headed back to the visitors' lot and got into the Jetta.

It was dusk. Just as we shut the doors, the base cop came cruising past, slowly, scanning the sidewalks. The friendly guy from an hour earlier was gone. This guy was livid, red-faced and furious, peering into the gloom for two guys on foot. Thankfully, that's what I'd told him we were.

He never even glanced at the car.

We didn't sell any encyclopedias on that base that day. In fact, I never sold a set on any base. Reserves, on the other hand... well, Sasha's already told some of those stories. My training may have taught him something that day, though I couldn't tell you what. Either way, it was a fair preview of his next six months: bad ideas, good stories, and the occasional getaway.

— Clint (Mitch Clinton)