The Great Kirby Vacuum Standoff of 2006: A Lesson in Aging (Un)Gracefully

One of the last jobs I had before becoming unofficially unemployable due to alcohol and drug addiction was in sales. That’s a classy way to put it. It was the beginning of a year-long downward spiral in which I desperately sought to get my shit together. Having worn out my welcome in Boston, I decided to move back to Rhode Island to be closer to my family. My mother is a narc and I figured daily invasions of privacy would certainly curb my drinking. I moved into a dilapidated apartment building with one other tenant—the house was condemned and turned into condominiums after we left—bought a nice kitchen table and some dish towels, got used to the house centipedes, and prepared for my new life as a healthy, soon-to-be employed 25-year-old woman who drank socially.

This child was more successful than me.

This child was more successful than me.

I worked a lot of menial jobs in my life and they seemed to get, well, more MENIAL as my addiction progressed. There was a lot of toilet cleaning, coffee serving, sandwich making, and I had been fired from my last job packing used records for coke heads in a Warehouse in Brighton. I didn’t want to work at Dunkin’ Donuts, so I responded to a vague ad in the classifieds section of my local newspaper. Something to do with sales. Potential to make lots of money and keep my apartment and 1991 Toyota Tercel.

I arrived for an interview in my one ‘business casual’ outfit; a pair of grey slacks, white shirt, and loafers purchased for me by my mom in a show of good faith. The office was in a run-down part of Providence, RI (it has since been gentrified) and the apparent directors of the operation were painting wet hot rooms wearing dress pants and white tank tops, their gold chains swaying in the breeze of industrial fans. Clay and Jose ran this office, and they were longtime Kirby Vacuum salesmen. Clay conducted my interview. He asked if I was a go-getter, and about my attitude. He told me how much money I could make selling Kirby vacuum cleaners and showed me pictures of his boss’ mansion which he had purchased thanks to his vacuum slinging ability. He asked if I could start tomorrow. I said absolutely and he shouted “POSITIVE!” which I later learned was part vocal tic and part placeholder for words of affirmation.

What Clay failed to mention during the interview was how fucking hard it is, not to mention EVIL, to sell a $1200 vacuum cleaner to poor people and old ladies. I never sold one, but I did shampoo a lot of carpets for free. Once, when I was close to selling to a single mother who considered putting the purchase on her uncle’s credit card, I called Clay and Jose to let them know—this was all part of the procedure and then they were in charge of manipulating the person into closing the deal. The single mother was not seduced by their charm, her uncle said no, and I cleaned her carpet and got home at around 1am after another 18-hour day of apparent failure. Every morning, I arrived at the office at 7am to get pumped and positive with the rest of the sales crew but most of them were selling vacuum cleaners and making money. We drank coffee, the coke addicts snorted their lines, and we formed a prayer circle around dry erase boards with our names and columns written on them. Clay and Jose had us walk up to the boards and mark how many sales we’d achieved the day before. If you didn’t make any everyone offered encouragement and Clay would say something like, “POSITIVE! POSITIVE! TODAY’S THE DAY” and I’d take my seat on the floor next to my personal Kirby and wait for my assignment.

Heritage and convenience.

Heritage and convenience.

Once a month, as a group, we would meet at the office at 5am, pile into a few cars, and head to a Regional Kirby Conference at a 2-star hotel in Vermont or New Hampshire. Kirby Salespeople mingled with Branch Executives and CEOs in poorly lit banquet halls. Everything was cheap, business casual, Anne Taylor loft, all the time; cream blazers, dark suits and bold ties as far as they eye could see. I was part of an elite minority group of failures at these conferences and we were sometimes called out by name and cheered on by hundreds of Kirby folk who had made it rich. Executives shared PowerPoint presentations about their personal Kirby journeys, photos of their families and McMansions, and initiated call and response chants about making bank and buying boats. One sweaty guy, after giving a complete virtual tour of his glamorous house shouted, “I make sales so I can buy…” and the whole room shouted back, “A HOUSE LIKE THAT!” I knew I was an addict, out of control, and probably couldn’t trust my judgment, but I felt swindled and uneasy, like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. I would not have been surprised had a goat’s head dropped from the ceiling in a flaming pentagram while us no-sale losers were lined up and prepared for sacrifice.

After about two months of driving around with a vacuum cleaner, canvassing neighborhoods and receiving $0 I decided to quit. In typical alcoholic fashion, I didn’t quit, I simply stopped showing up and stopped returning Clay’s phone calls. I drank all day and all night for almost a week and shampooed and waxed my floors with my stolen Kirby. I’d made a decision to sell it so I could pay my rent. I felt it was owed to me and doubted they’d care.

Clay’s phone calls became increasingly less POSITIVE and more aggressive. He’d call the cops. I’d stolen private property. It was a KIRBY vacuum and therefore sacrilegious and grand larceny. One morning I woke up to Clay and Jose sitting in my driveway on the roof of their car, smoking cigarettes, waiting for me to come outside. They left more messages demanding their Kirby back. I was determined to wait them out. The thing about salesmen though, is that they’re fucking assholes. They’re stubborn and lifeless. And they will call the police on you while they are high on cocaine because they do not fear the strong arm of the law. They did call the cops, and that phone call officially ended the Great Kirby Vacuum standoff of 2006.

 

The aging process is a bit like selling Kirbys and, in hindsight, the standoff was a metaphor for aging ungracefully. Aging gracefully—and by grace, I mean with dignity, whatever that might look like—means forfeiting what has already been lost by design. In this case the vacuum. Rich people get butt implants and botox while poor, unemployed, addicted people with nothing to lose hold vacuum cleaners hostage.  It was a way of securing myself justice for unpaid time served in life and under the Kirby Empire. But I should have let the whole thing go because what justice is there when Kirby men and the cops and the landlords and Jack Daniels are waiting around every corner and none of those men do favors for women over 25 if they’re not getting something in return. If I’d known then, what I know now….

 

The moral of the story is, let go of the vacuum.