EPISODE 9

By this time, Allan’s class had gotten out and Bosco’s was due to wind up in another half hour or so.  On the first day of conferences, SlipNot liked to keep things light.  They’d only give short peeks at the marketing programs they’d be offering to clients who bought in to them.  It wasn’t a cheap deal either.  Generally, a studio owner had to spend at least $35,000 a year in hair to even be eligible.  Given that the hairpieces, or “units” cost about $60-$85 each, a studio had to push an awful lot of product to reach this level.  Bosco was key to this effort and he taught studio owners the numbers games needed to achieve these goals.  Allan and I were also involved in this, but at a different level.  Whereas Bosco dealt with overall sales and marketing training, Allan and I were literally going to have to become the Internet marketing gurus Bosco had touted us as being.

Allan had generated some good leads for me and he handed me several business cards to follow up on when we got back to SlipNot after the conference.  He was feeling pretty cranky, but I think all he really wanted was to get away from all of the clients and find some food that met his tastes.  That was tough for him on these trips.  While we were at a conference in Chicago one time, we stopped at a promising looking breakfast place to grab a bite to eat before grabbing a plane back east.  I saw Allan order a bowl of oatmeal, a dish of yogurt, a bowl of ersatz granola, a banana, and then politely ask the waitress to bring him a large salad bowl.  In utter astonishment, the waitress watched as Allan systematically poured each part of his order into the bowl, gently mix it together and then eat the whole thing.  I grinned at her as I took up a forkful from my scrambled eggs.

“He’s from out of town,” I told her.

“I guess so!” she replied, still in awe of Allan’s performance.

Shortly after Bosco’s class broke up, around six o’clock, people began to drift out of the conference room.  Frank Rotella sought me out and insisted that we have our drink together after dinner.  As he was such a big client of SlipNot’s, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to wine and dine him.  Naturally, he agreed and we went up Bourbon Street to the Redfish Grill.

The Redfish makes a really terrific crab and carrot bisque.  They also sell massive quantities of redfish, served up pretty much any way you could ever imagine it cooked.  Frank and I tucked into the bisque and a couple orders of broiled redfish, with lemon wedges and a half dozen raw oysters each on the side.  As I was now surpassing the two dozen-oyster mark for the day, I felt it was important to have a couple Abitas as well.  Frank allowed he was along for the ride and did the same.  So, when we finally finished our coffee, which was good and strong, the better to hasten the digestive process, we were more than ready for a night of good music.

I think there’s a law that a first time visitor to New Orleans is required go to Preservation Hall, pay $5 and stand in the dirty area behind the few homemade benches that serve as seating there to listen to the world’s most famous Dixieland band.  Seeing as both Frank and I had achieved that rite of passage on previous trips, we went out looking for someplace new.  We caught a set at La Maison Bourbon, which is just a half block away from Preservation Hall.  It was a perfect little club, built entirely for listening to jazz.  There was a dark mahogany bar on the left hand side of the room and a sprinkling of maybe two-dozen tables along the floor.  The small bandstand on the right had a ceiling high mirror behind it, which gave the illusion that the room was actually quite a bit larger than it actually was.  The band was excellent, a trumpet player backed by piano, bass and drums.  Although their repertoire was limited to standards, they played them with enormous polish.

We left there at around 11:30 with every intention of returning to the Renaissance and to our respective rooms to grab some sleep.  However, as we came close to the end of Bourbon Street, we heard an absolutely smoking R&B band covering Papa Was A Rolling Stone from inside Storyville.  We figured it couldn’t hurt to at least hear the tune to its conclusion before heading home.

The group was young.  They had a guy who played sax and trumpet, a keyboard player, a drummer and an electric bass player.  The guy on keys also sang the lead vocals and he switched easily from baritone to falsetto.  It was a virtuoso performance.  When they finished the song, the entire place went wild, clapping and calling out for more.

“Thank you!  Thanks everyone!” the keyboard player shouted.  “But now it’s my turn, my privilege to introduce to you…all the way from Oxford, Mississippi, ‘THE LION’, LION-EL ROGERS!”

As the band played, out wandered gentleman in his mid-sixties, dressed in a lime green three-piece suit, wearing a lime green fedora, and playing a Fender Stratocaster.  His guitar was wireless and he had a wireless headset on, so he was able to walk between the tables as performed.  He played like a dream too.  Finally after at least five minutes of soloing over the vamp the band had laid down, Lionel turned an appraising eye at a table where two very pretty young women sat together.  He motioned the band to stop, which they did, on cue.  Lionel leaned over the two women and purred.

“Are you two ladies…together?”

The women were laughing like hell, as was everyone else in the place.  Lionel looked around the room in mock shock at the reaction.

“Ladies?” he asked politely.  “Ladies, do you know why it’s better to go home with an old man than a young one?”

One of the women was able to stop giggling long enough to shake her head.

“No?  Well, honey…it’s like this.  With a man my age, you’re just safer, y’know?  I mean, to get to be this old, you just know I’m clean.”

He ripped a few notes off his guitar and looked back at the table.

“And you know what else darlin’? An old man doesn’t need more than 10 minutes to be happy all night and that leaves you free to go out afterwards.”

He strummed a few chords and grinned broadly at the crowd. 

“And an old man will be an awful lot more grateful for that 10 minutes than any young stud is ever gonna be.”

Lionel strode away from the table and onto the bandstand.  He counted off the beat and the band began a slow blues.  Lionel played without comment for another minute or so.  Then he leaned forward and introduced the next tune.

“I’d like to play you one of my favorite compositions, ladies and gentlemen.”  Lionel soloed over the simple chord changes and when he opened his mouth to sing the first verse, I knew there was no way that Frank and I were going to head back to the hotel anytime soon.

“Baby fried your eggs for breakfast

You made her bacon crunch

Yeah, she fried your eggs for breakfast

You went and made her bacon crunch

You stayed in bed all day together

She made such a fine lunch.”

           We didn’t get out of there until close to 2.

**********

The next installment will be posted on November 4.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

 

EPISODE 8

Joey Romano was the nastiest son of a bitch I ever met.  Actually I have to take that back.  He was really the biggest bully I had ever run across.  Joey wasn’t a very tall or terribly imposing looking man.  He stood about five feet, eight inches and weighed maybe 160 pounds.  He was just a prick, through and through and anyone who’d ever dealt with came away with the distinct impression that he enjoyed being a prick.  His white hair was always cut short, but it was hard to tell that most of what stood on top of his head was made from the finest quality yak hair.  Most of the human hair used in the hair replacement industry comes either from India or China.  The hair takes almost every color dye you can apply to it, except for gray and white.  When the dyes that are normally used to turn hair these two colors are applied to human hair, the hair becomes extremely brittle and it’s almost impossible to insert it into the fine mesh bases that are later attached to a client’s head with one of several adhesives.  So, hair systems that must be dyed either white or gray are made from the hair of yaks.  Yak hair is close enough to human hair in texture and feel, and it won’t go brittle when its color is changed.  Joey bought, sold and wore a lot of yak.  But that wasn’t on his mind as he came over to where I was standing.  He was pissed off.  I put out my hand to greet him and he grabbed it, pushing me back into the hallway and towards a vacant wall.

“You little fuck!” he whispered hoarsely. 

“Hi Joey, how are you?”

“Shut the hell up!  I’m talkin’ here.”

I learned a long time ago that when Joey told you to shut up, it was usually a very good idea to do so.  When he got worked up, you had to let him vent, although he could do so for such long periods that he would quite literally wear you down to a shell.  He liked to insult prospective customers when they first came into his studio, berating them over their appearance.  There was a famous story about his reducing a young woman to tears by asking her why she was hanging around her fiancé.

“Jesus, honey!  He looks like your damned father!  Worse, really.”

After hammering on the couple for all of 10 minutes, both the man and the woman were sobbing as they contemplated how miserable they were: him for apparently being such a loser and her for having settled for him in the first place.  Like many of the poor souls who walked into Joey’s studio looking for help, they were met with abuse and a blindingly fast $2500 a year program that would make their lives okay again.  Joey was in many ways a genius.  He tore folks down and then built them back up, according to his own specifications.

He had some excellent technicians on his staff and they were all very proficient at making the customers feel relaxed and then making them look great.  The only problem was, you had to go through Joey first.  He franchised places all over the mid-Atlantic and was opening new locations in Georgia that year.  He also ran his own marketing program as part of the package he sold with every franchise.  It was a classic trap.  He didn’t care where you bought your raw product, but you had to follow his formula.  Joey had a deal with a media buyer that he dealt with for example, who regularly kicked back a piece of every television or radio ad buy that one of Joey’s franchisees placed with her.  Joey made a lot of extra money that way.  He never lost sight of that and he hated the thought of anything or anyone getting in the way of it.  So now he was focused on me and he was working himself up to a real fury.

“Listen you little douche-bag!  I heard what you did in that class of yours.  You’re just like that dickhead, Bosco you used to work for.   Don’t think I don’t forget that.”

I kept me eyes on his eyes and resisted the urge to look away as he took a deep breath and launched back into me.

“I know just what you’re doing.  Bosco used to do the same thing.  You two pricks come into town and wow my people with all that candy coated, self-help, marketing bullshit and they eat it right up.  They come back to their stores…my fucking stores and they start screwing everything up.  It takes me forever to get them back on track because you’ve got their heads all filled up with that crap you spout like it’s the fucking word of God!

“Well it ain’t!” he roared. 

A few people who had been passing through the hallway had stopped to see what was happening.  That didn’t deter Joey a bit; in fact it only seemed to drive him on.

“I know what my people need, not you!  I treat them like mushrooms.  I keep them in the dark.  I shovel shit on them and they grow they way I want them to or they fucking die!”

He looked to his left, giving me a full view of his profile.  His eyes were hooded and his brow was creased with anger.  His mouth was in an ugly snarl and he seemed to gaze out at something a hundred yards away, although all that was in his line of sight was the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.

“Stay away from my people” he muttered and he abruptly walked away from me.

It was tempting to give Joey a cheerful: “Good seeing you, Joey!  My best to the little woman!” But I deferred.  I figured it might be like leaning into a right hook and who knew whether Joey might not actually take a swing at me.

**********

The next installment will be posted on October 27.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 7

Bosco had neglected to tell me that I would be making a presentation to a group of about 100 people at the conference.

“I’ve told them you’re a marketing guru,” he said as he handed me a sheet of paper.

I was so surprised to hear this that when I first looked at the paper, I found I was attempting to read it upside down.  I turned it around and read:

Web Marketeering – Michael Drabeck, SlipNot Internet Marketing Specialist

Do you know how to sell your products and services on the World Wide Web? Do you have an email account?    Do you even know how to connect your PC to the Internet?  Not being able to communicate on-line could be driving potential customers right away from your door.

Web Marketeering will show owners and managers how to take advantage of 21^st Century technology without you having to know your bits from your bytes. 

“Bosco, this is terrible!” I exclaimed.  “Who wrote this shit?”

Bosco just smiled and pointed back at the paper.

“It’s not really a big deal.  Just show them how to write a coherent email message and then talk up SlipNot’s consulting services for a half hour.  That’s why we’re here.  Now get ready.  You go on at 4:30.”

Fine.  So now I was going to have to put together some kind of lame dog and pony show on no notice.  I had to admit that the task wasn’t all that big of a deal.  What irritated me was that Bosco had clearly known ahead of time that I had been “volunteered” to this little service, but he’d chosen not to share this fact with me until quite literally an hour and a half before my little presentation was supposed to start.

I ran into Allan about ten minutes later and our fearless leader had bestowed upon him a similar honor.  He grumbled that he’d been tapped to give a talk to an even larger group, almost 200 people, on the basics of Web site design. 

“The only Internet connection I’ve got in my classroom is dialup!” 

“Take ‘em to SlipNot’s site and select ‘Text Only’?”  I said, as always, trying to be helpful.

“Nice.” He replied sarcastically.

“You could use the DSL connection I’ve got to show the micro camera.”

“My classroom’s down the hall from the booth by about 100 feet.  Even if we could find that much cable, we’d probably have to boost the signal somehow and I don’t know how the hell we can do that…unless.”

“Unless,” I interrupted as I smiled at him and he grinned too when I added, “unless we can find a wireless router somewhere in this hotel.”

Armed with a company credit card, Allan and I tracked down the head of the Tech Department in Guest Services.  He was somewhat grumpy when we suggested that he hook up a wireless network on the fly and he told us the cost for the router and the labor would set us back about a grand for the day, not including the fact that we would see an increase in the Internet connection fee of another $500, seeing as we were now opening up that connection to at least one additional computer above and beyond the one that SlipNot had ordered for the micro camera’s hook up.  When we were finished adding a third connection for Les Bernstein, one of SlipNot’s salesmen who ran across us while we were negotiating all of this (he had been trying to find a way to get on line so that he could place about $15,000 in orders that he’d taken from a few of his better customers), we tacked on a little over two thousand bucks in fresh charges to the company account.  We also ordered a sandwich for Les, a couple of beers for me, and a big bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water for Allan.

I barely had enough time to toss the beers down before 4:30.

When I finished my talk on the proper etiquette for sending emails, I walked into Bosco’s class, where he was teaching a seminar on advertising.  This was really what he was best at.  Bosco could work a room and when he was on, as he was that day, it could be great entertainment.

“Raoul!” He called out to a guy sitting in the middle of the room.  “How long you and I know each other?  30 years?  Anyway!  Huh?  It’s true ladies and gentlemen, I’ve known this fellow since he stopped cutting hair and started selling it.  That was a long time ago, but it’s made you lotta money, hasn’t it?

“This guy is a success ladies and gentlemen.  He’s taken risks.  He’s planned his work and worked his plan.  That’s how you get to own 8 stores and to pull in over a half million a year from each one of them every year, year after year.”

The guy smiled, a little red faced with embarrassment for having been singled out, but still very pumped for having been named by the great Bosco Ignatz as a player.  People tended to like Bosco and to crave his attention.  He had charisma and his approval mattered.  I had to admit that even though I’d known Bosco a long time, that he’d infuriated me and appalled me as many times as he’d amazed me – I still liked to hear his praise.  Raoul Liston was from that same place and right at that moment, he was the envy of more than just a few of the people in that classroom.  Bosco continued to dissect the things that Raoul had done.  He’d run a pair of very successful hair styling salons in St Louis, making about $35 an hour for himself and then leasing a total of 27 chairs to other stylists.  He was doing well and then, as Bosco pointed out, he’d met Bosco at a trade show.

“You know what I told him to do?” Bosco asked the class.  “I told him to burn his studios down.”

This got most of the group chuckling.  It was a line almost every one of them had heard.  It was the gospel according to Bosco Ignatz.

“I’m serious!” Bosco went on.  “I told him to get out from behind the chair and learn how to sell hair.  Now, selling’s a dirty word.  Who in here wants to admit that he’s a salesman?”

I put my hand in the air and Bosco laughed.

“This is Michael and you know what?  He really does like to sell.  And do you know why?  Michael’s motivated.  He’s motivated by money.  He has very simple needs.  He always needs more money and so he’s become a selling machine.  He doesn’t care what anyone thinks about that.  He knows how to help people make decisions and that’s what it takes to be a great salesman.  You have to be a decision-making consultant.  If you can figure out what your client really, really wants and you can help him find it, he’ll give you anything you want in return.”

It was classic Bosco.  He’d taken two people from his audience, showered praise on them and used them as examples of the sales principles he would outline in the rest of his class.  He’d included everyone in that room in a private conversation and in doing so; he’d tapped into them all.  They all wanted to know more.  They needed what Bosco was selling.  And they’d give him what he wanted to hear how they could own 8 stores and become selling machines themselves.  I gave Bosco a small wave and stepped out the door and into the hallway.  I was just entering the main ballroom when someone caught my eye and began to stride across the floor towards me.

**********

The next installment will be posted on October 20.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 6

I arrived at the booth SlipNot had prepared for me and was immediately confronted by a highly agitated Bosco Ignatz.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.  Before I had a chance to answer, he tripped over the power cord to the laptop, pulling it off the booth table and onto the floor.

“Bosco, get outa here!” I said. 

“You’re late,” he responded in a somewhat subdued manner, realizing that he might very well have broken the key component to my display.  He muttered something that I couldn’t understand and then knelt on the floor, cradling the laptop in his hands.  He brought it back up to the table and began fiddling with it.  The screen was still lit, but try as he could; Bosco wasn’t able to get the Web site to come up.

“Is the Internet connection live?” I asked him.

He showed me that he was able to connect to Yahoo and to SlipNot’s Web site, but he couldn’t get the micro camera’s site to come up. 

“It’s that fucking CGI script!” he said through gritting teeth.

I started to laugh.  Bosco always blamed Web Snafus on CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script.  He’d picked up the phrase listening to Allan or someone else who knew how to write code and had applied it to any unexplained behavior he experienced on the Internet.  He used it so often that every once in a while, when there really was a problem with how we were able to retrieve information from the company’s database over the Web, his diagnosis would be accurate and he’d beam with satisfaction.  This time though, it turned out that in his haste to gain access to the micro camera’s site, he’d typed in a comma instead of a period before “com” in the URL.  I pushed him aside, made the correction and the site sprang up on the screen.

Bosco was still very nervous and he kept looking over my shoulder as I tested the micro camera and the site.  He made suggestions and offered his opinions on how I should present it.  I tried to block out what he was saying and managed not to bite his head off.  He was irritating the living hell out of me, but I also knew that he personally had a lot riding on the success of this new product. 

I opened one of the pages on the site to make sure that I could take pictures with the camera and then upload them to the site.  I placed the camera on the top of my head and clicked the mouse attached to the laptop.  Suddenly and image of my scalp appeared on the screen.  It was in sharp focus and you could clearly see the old dead follicles as well as the healthy ones that still had hair growing out of them.

I uploaded the picture to the Web site, where it stood in stark contrast to the sample picture there of a healthy scalp.  The sample picture showed a dense concentration of black hair.  The control scalp itself (what little of it you could see) was a pale white.  Not a hell of a lot of sunlight penetrated there.  In fact, given how Allan had taken that sample picture, it was unlikely any scalp I photographed at this conference was going to look all that good by comparison.

Allan told me that he’d been fooling around with the camera one night at home when he decided it might be fun to take a picture of his dog’s stomach.  Dupree was a very furry Australian Shepard and so when magnified 200 times, his hide looked like an overgrown forest of black hair.  Allan took several more pictures of Dupree with the camera and then photographed his own scalp in several places before burning a CD of all the pictures.   The following day, he’d handed the disc off to Bosco.

Of course, Bosco had loved the pictures of Dupree.  Allan decided not to mention that those shots were of an animal’s hide.  He just figured that no one would ever notice.  Bosco marveled at how lustrous the hair was and how healthy the scalp looked.   He often remarked that he’d never seen anything like it, even on the best fashion and TV models he’d ever worked with.  Allan figured that if Bosco was happy, knowing where that sample came from could only make him unhappy.  Allan could be very considerate that way.

When I did a side-by-side comparison of my scalp with Dupree’s, Bosco clapped me on the back.

“Incredible!” he exclaimed.  He took a closer look at the screen and then looked at my head.

“Forget it, Bosco,” I said, not looking away from the screen as I clicked the mouse and watched as a new sample picture came up, this time a shot from Allan’s head.

“I think you’re beginning to really show on top, Michael.”

“I’m good with that.”

***********************

The next installment will be posted on October 13.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.