A Q&A With A Vacuum Cleaner Salesman
by Mike Riggs
Darrell did not cry when the mortgage crisis killed new home construction, putting him out of work. Instead, he packed up his bags and joined his girlfriend in South Florida, where he found a new job as an in-home salesman, pushing expensive vacuum cleaners and air purifiers to snowbirds and other crazy Floridians. While Darrell is but one of hundreds of such salesman in the South Florida area, we have obscured the city in which he works and changed his name to protect his identity.
The Awl: Every day, you go into peoples’ homes and pitch them really expensive shit. How did you break into the in-home sales industry?
Darrell: I was doing manual labor on the [east coast of Florida], and that kind of dried up. I needed eventually to make my way down to be with my girlfriend. I wanted to get my own place. I got this extended-stay kind of place, got the Sunday paper to find a job. I needed to find one real quick to make some decent money and get back on my feet and to start renting a place. The job just kind of stood out. I forget what it said, the ad, but they totally sham you into doing what you do. They say you either make $1,800 a month, or better. If you don’t sell anything, you make at least $1,800. If you sell, you get more than that.
The Awl: Is that happening? Are you making at least $1,800?
Darrell: For the most part. You might not make that some months if you don’t sell well. They trick a lot of people.
The Awl: What is your base pay?
Darrell: None. We’re independent contractors. We get paid to sell.
The Awl: Tell me about your first sale.
Darrell: We did three days of training, and then they kind of just throw you into the fire. You do your family for your first sale. I thought it’d be no problem to sell my mom, but she ended up being tougher than I thought. She’s a saleswoman, so she was trying to give me pointers.
The Awl: So of the two products you sell, a vacuum and air purifier, which one did she buy?
Darrell: The vacuum. And the air purifier, actually. And then I sold my dad. I thought they’d be the easiest, but they were the hardest. You have to play by the book when you sell, but your parents will say shit to you that a normal person wouldn’t say to you.
The Awl: Tell me about your first real-world sale.
Darrell: They send you to these middle-of-nowhere towns full of old people. So I go into one house and it’s a retired marine and his wife, and I’m sitting on my kit. We have like these big box kits with all our demo stuff and these people had these nice hardwood floors, so I’m sitting on my box talking to them, and I was just so fucking nervous.
That’s another reason I got into this. In middle school and elementary school I was fine doing like groups projects and talking in front of my class, but in high school and college I was fucking scared to death; I hated it. I needed to get over that, so I got into this job in part because of that, to get over my fear of speaking in front of people. And for my communication skills. I could communicate fine, but I wanted to be able to not so much manipulate people, but get them to see things a certain way, or totally get them to know how I feel about something.
The Awl: So, you’re trying to get them to know how you feel about something while simultaneously — what? — scuffing their hardwood floors?
Darrell: I guess I was kind of rocking around on the kit, and the instructor guy was right next to me, but he didn’t notice. We got a call back a few days later, and they were trying to get out of the deal, so they complained about me messing up their floor.
The Awl: Tell me about “getting out of the deal.”
Darrell: Well, it’s not high pressure or anything. At least, I don’t work that way. But some people wake up the next day and think, “Damn, I spent $3,000 on a vacuum.” Under Florida law, you have three days to get out of the contract. In this case it was after three business days, and Saturday was one of the business days, but I guess they didn’t agree with that. But Saturday is a business day for us.
The Awl: What’s in the kit?
Darrell: Sand, some big metal balls, coffee filters for the sand, a golf ball that you can float during the show that keeps the kids entertained. That’s what it’s all about for me.
The Awl: You can float a golf ball?
Darrell: Yeah, I have a tennis ball, too. But the golf ball can catch air, and you can float it up and down or out to the side. It’s pretty sick.
And that’s my show. It’s all about having a good time. I want it to be funny, I want things to be hilarious, I want things to maybe get a little out of control. I don’t know. But people are in their homes, so they’ll say anything; more so than they would out in public. After they’re like that with you, and you laugh or you have a good time, then they’re like, “Oh, I trust you,” or “Oh, you’re a good person,” or “Oh, I believe in what you’re saying now. And that’s not too too-much money. I’ll buy it from you now.”
The Awl: Do you ever try and pitch the sale as them helping you out?
Darrell: It sometimes comes out that way. Sometimes we have these contests, so in the beginning of the demo I’ll say, “Hey, we’re doing this contest, and if we have so many” — I try not to say sales — “if we do so many shows, then I get to go to Vegas or Atlantic City for a weekend getaway.” I’ve been on every one of those trips so far.
The Awl: So they send you to Atlantic City if you sell a lot of vacuums?
Darrell: Yeah, we get to go party for a weekend. So, I’ll close with that. I’ll say, “If you go ahead with this today, I’ll be that much closer to going to a casino for free.” And people are like, “Oh, well, OK. Send me pictures from your trip.”
The Awl: Florida is full of pious old-timers. Do potential customers ever proselytize you?
Darrell: Most older people are, you know, super-religious. And not just a little bit, but Jesus-out-front, crosses-in-the-home religious.
The Awl: Jesus out front?
Darrell: Like, I don’t know, a Jesus statue or something like that.
The Awl: How old are these people?
Darrell: There’s a range.
The Awl: Retirees, mostly?
Darrell: I’d say 55–80, but most are in the middle, in their 70s.
The Awl: So they’ve got Jesus out front and crosses inside. What else?
Darrell: It depends. Some people are way more forward. You walk in the door, and the wife might be on the phone, and the husband will just be like, “Do you know Jesus?” And I’ll be like, “Yeahhhhh.” And he’ll be like, “How do you know Jesus?”
It’s fucking ridiculous. It caught me off guard in the beginning. It’s a deep subject to talk about.
The Awl: Do you ever pretend to have a conversion so that they’ll buy your vacuum?
Darrell: I don’t do stuff like that; I don’t act like they’ve saved this horrible person. I’m pretty honest with them. I tell them I live an ethical life; like, you know, I don’t kill people.
I also tell them that I did commit to Jesus, which I did. I’ve been confirmed and baptized; I went to summer camp and Christian-retreat type deals. I used to be really into it. So, I tell him that. I say, “I did commit to Jesus back then,” and he’s like, “Ah, well that’s great.” But then he says, “Let’s pray about it right now.” And I’m like, “I don’t know man, I’ve already committed before, I don’t think we need to go there again.” And he’s like, “OK. Fine. Blah blah blah.”
The Awl: So those people, when you say you’ve already committed to Jesus, do you do better sales with them? Do they buy the vacuum and air purifier?
Darrell: Most of the religious people don’t work out. At the end, they say they need to pray about it. That’s pretty much a “no.” Just a nice way of saying it.
You have to pretty much agree with whatever they say if you want to have a chance. You can politely disagree if it’s super, super ridiculous. But if they have a drink of alcohol, if they want you to smoke a cigarette, you do that.
The Awl: They ask you to smoke cigarettes?
Darrell: Yeah, sure. During the demo they’ll say, “I need to smoke a cigarette, do you want to come?” And I always say “sure.”
The Awl: So you become their buddy for a while. Do they offer you alcohol?
Darrell: I’ve gotten drunk with people before. One time I was with these two really southern people — this one was a great demo — and I get there a little bit late. She was from Louisiana or something; something super southern because I couldn’t understand her. She’d get going and be like, “Uh-huh.”
So I was talking to her in her living room, and I knew she was married, but the husband wasn’t around. The best chance of selling is when two people are there. Like, how would you feel if your girlfriend spent $3,000 on a vacuum without speaking to you? Everybody has to agree. So I was like, “What the fuck? I gotta get him out here.”
I forget why, but I went out back to look at their pond, and I saw a room with a sliding glass door, and the husband was lying down on the bed in there, so I just walked up and was like, “Oh, hey! What’s going on back here?” And he was like, “Uh, I was just taking a little nap.”
The Awl: So you just walked into this guy’s bedroom while he was napping?
Darrell: Well, they had this nice-ass pond out back.
The Awl: Do you call people before you arrive at their house?
Darrell: Yeah.
The Awl: So you have their permission to come sell them shit?
Darrell: Oh yeah. I don’t set up the appointment, they do.
Anyway, so I finally get the husband involved and start showing him the air purifier. I went from no chance of selling it, to them really liking the air purifier. They smoked a bunch in the home, and it took away that smell. It was awesome. I was like, “See how that benefits you?”
Then I was showing them the vacuum, and the husband was like, “No, man, I don’t want to see a vacuum.” And when people say that, I tell them I get paid to show off the products, even though I don’t, just so that I can show them and maybe sell them.
They ended up liking the [vacuum] a lot. In the beginning of the show, he said, “If it comes around to 5 o’clock, we’ll have a drink,” or something like that, and it was only 2 p.m. He was saying, like, “I’m not going to have to give you a drink,” and I was thinking, “Bitch, we’re going to get drunk today.”
The Awl: Do demos really take that long?
Darrell: With older people, yeah. Like, I got there at 2:30 p.m. or 2 p.m., and if it’s a sale, it’ll be three hours, probably.
The Awl: Did you sell to them?
Darrell: Mm hmm. And clearly they had this defense mechanism to not allow it to happen, and I broke that.
The Awl: And then you got drunk with them?
Darrell: So, it rolled around that time, and I was just about to leave, and I was like, “Hey man, can I get that drink we were talking about?” And he was like, “Oh, I forgot what time it is,” or something ridiculous like that.
He leaves and comes back with scotch and water and I was like, “You got anything else, man?” And he said, “This is what my wife drinks,” which was him saying that I’m a big fucking pussy.
He had Bloody Mary mix back there and he was acting like it was the pussiest drink ever. So I had a bunch of Bloody Marys. I can’t drink scotch.
The Awl: You got drunk on bloody mary’s in some stranger’s house? You’re sure about this?
Darrell: Yeah. I called my boss and was like, “I’m sealing the deal, I don’t want it to backfire, so I’m just bonding with them.” I had three or four drinks. Just got buzzed and talked about random shit even though they were like 85.
The Awl: Whoa. You sell to 85-year-olds?
Darrell: It probably sounds worse than it is, but I’ve sold to people who were 94 and 95. They have house cleaners. And I tell them —
The Awl: Are they wealthy?
Darrell: Yes. But I won’t take advantage of anybody. Especially those kind of people. Sometimes they’re so old that when I get there I just want to walk out of the home. But, uh, with those people I normally say, “I’m here to show you a cleaning machine and an air purifier; they are a little bit of money, but they’re really nice, the best out there. Would that be something you’re interested in?”
And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s definitely something we’re interested in!”
And I’m like, “Alright.”
The Awl: Do you think people are intimidated by you?
Darrell: Some people are. One lady wouldn’t let me in her house. She was — a lot of them are — smaller, you know. She was 5’5 or 5’6. Everything was fine with me walking up to the door, and then she opens it, looks up, and she’s like, “OH MY GOD,” and shuts the screen door.
Then she’s like “How do I know who you are? You could be anybody.”
And I’m like, “Well yes I could, you know. But I’m me. I’m a good person. You have nothing to worry about with me.”
And she says, “Well I watch the TV and the news,” and I’m just like, “Sometimes the news, you know, tries to make you a little bit scared.” And she was like, “Well, maybe you’re right, but…”
The Awl: So you didn’t get in that house?
Darrell: No.
Another time, there was a woman who said she needed me to come show her how to use the machine. She said it was too heavy for her after I sold it to her, but then I found out that she fell and hurt her shoulder or something like that. She couldn’t use the machine with her left hand or something.
She kind of made it into a big deal. My company called me up, and I thought I was just going over there to show her how to use the machine better, because I have a few tips that I can show people to make using the vacuum a little easier on yourself. And I get there, and her neighbors are there, and they’re trying to paint me as this horrible, horrible person.
They’re like, “You sold to an old woman.” And, I mean, she was 90. She was. But I definitely try and make sure that old people want it. “You want this right?” I say that. But the neighbors were like, “I would never sell to somebody that old.”
But I was like, “How can you say no to somebody if they really like something?” And I said that to the old lady, I asked her if she really liked it, and she was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” So, fuck you guys, you know? They tried to make me sound like the worst person ever.
Then the old lady pulled up her shirt, and there was this huge bruise, and I was like, “That’s not from the vacuum, right?” And she was like, “Kind of, yeah.” And then she was like, “No, I just fell down over there.” No wonder she felt horrible!
The Awl: Did the neighbors think it was from the vacuum cleaner?
Darrell: No, they were just being dicks. They wanted to get her out of the contract, but it was after three business days. Technically, I think there are ways to get out of it, I think it just fucks up your credit a little bit. But I just said, “No. No way.”
The Awl: What other awkward incidents have you had?
Darrell: I was riding around one day with a partner because he needed a little help with referrals.
The Awl: What are referrals?
Darrell: That’s the air purifier, which is basically just to get referrals. Clean air is nice, you know? People will refer you to other people who might use an air purifier. It generates leads.
So, I go into this house with these two crippled people and I show them the air purifier, but the woman was being a stickler about referrals. This is why we started off on a bad foot: She didn’t want me to tell her neighbor that she referred me to her. She didn’t want to be to blame for me showing up at someone’s house to sell them stuff.
I was like, “Ma’am, it’s called a referral. We’re gonna call them, and we’re gonna tell them you referred us. I’m just being honest with you.” She was like, “No, no.” And I was like, “Ok, just write down their name,” because we are going to fucking do this.
So, this woman is using a walker and the other guy, her husband, is in a wheelchair.
I wanted to go back to the bedroom to start the air purifier experiment. We have a little dust particle counter on the machine that can tell you how dirty the air is. So I set that up, and I wanted her to see the whole situation and what I was doing so that she could understand the process and be impressed at the end. But she wouldn’t get back in the bedroom.
I was like, “Come check this out,” and she was in the living room saying, “I’m good.” She didn’t want to move at all.
The Awl: Do you have to get people back in their bedrooms?
Darrell: It’s a pretty big part of the show. So I tell people, “I get credit just if you see this.”
The Awl: Do you always set up the air purifier in the bedroom?
Darrell: Yeah.
So with this woman, I was finally like, “I could be back here stealing something,” or something like that, and she totally freaked out — screamed “Oh my God,” and immediately got up and came back to the bedroom.
She gets back there and I’m like, “See, this is what this looks like. This is what we’re looking at. Let’s go back to the living room now.”
She just fucking hated me from that point on. One, people she referred to me are going to know that she did it, and two, I told her I was going to steal from her when she wasn’t looking. Basically, that’s where that was.
While I’m showing the vacuum, she says, “I’m probably not going to get one today, but if I did, I’d get it from you,” and she pointed to my sales partner. I’m thinking, “What a fucking cunt.” So I told the other dude to do the rest of the presentation. He was new, so the presentation wouldn’t be as impressive if I did it, but I was like, “You go ahead, man, because clearly she likes you, and if she’s going to buy it, she’s going to buy it from you. So you go ahead and do the show.”
It was a little rough. He unzipped the back of the vacuum they already owned, took out the bag [containing everything he vacuum had picked up] — which I would never do, but didn’t think was a bad idea — and he hit it with a lamp so that dust would fly out.
The Awl: With a what? A lamp?
Darrell: We have these special hand lamps that show dust floating in the air. He hit it with that.
And he hit the bag while the vacuum was on, and there was this huge explosion. It was probably the most violent non-fire explosion I’ve ever seen. It was ridiculous. Dust and debris went everywhere and slowly trickled down. It was impressive.
So, all of a sudden it goes from being this normal living room to covered… completely… with dust. Just sprinkling down from the sky. The woman gets up with her walker and goes back to the bedroom, but the crippled guy from the wheelchair, sometime during the demo he got moved into a regular chair, and he didn’t have any power to move. He was just sitting there, and I could tell he was so disappointed. Like, thinking, “I wish I could move out of this chair, but my wife left, and these two guys, what are they going to do?”
My reaction was that I began laughing hysterically and ran out of the house through a sliding glass door. I went out back by the pool and just kept laughing. The other guy, my sales buddy, was like a deer in the headlights, just standing there holding the bag in the middle of the living room.
The Awl: Did you go back inside and clean up the room?
Darrell: Yeah, yeah. Eventually I contained myself and went back in there. We used the vacuum we were selling to clean up. It was pretty fast. We got to use the brush attachment on the old man, getting shit off his shirt and stuff.
And after all that had happened, I was like, “Hey man, let’s just get out of here. I don’t think we’re gonna sell these people. After everything that’s happened today, I don’t have a good feeling anymore.” But he was like, “No man, let’s do this.” We stayed another hour and didn’t sell anything.
I just figured it would be hard to overturn that, uh —
The Awl: bias?
Darrell: Yeah. And it was.
The Awl: Tell me about another Demo.
Darrell: I just thought of another one, actually.
If you do a demo with the air purifier in a house where the people are heavy smokers, and then you go to another home, the air still kind of smells like smoke when you first turn on the machine. It works really good, but it’s just the first faint smell when it turns on. In a house with no smokers, it’s really noticeable.
So, I go to this house. It’s a good house. We got a good referral on it. The woman was super nice, but the husband had just had a stroke, so his communication skills weren’t great. He would say something, and it would be totally off from what he was trying to say. What he came out with, it would just sound like little catch phrases. “Let me tell you here,” and, I don’t know. He couldn’t speak sentences.
Basically. Goddamn. Basically, this guy’s trying to play hardball with me, and he can’t. He doesn’t want me to be in the home, and he’s trying to say, “Get out, we already have all this stuff,” but he can’t. And so the wife is just like, “Don’t worry, I want to see what you have.” I acted like everything was fine, and he eventually started to like me a lot.
The air purifier is in the beginning of the demo, so the wife is off doing something and I’m placing the purifier in the bedroom, and he’s just in there trying to explain to me why air purifiers are good, and that they produce fresh air.
He got his point across eventually, and I was like, “Yeah, they’re great.” So I plug it in and turn it on, and he’s like, “Yeah. Fresh air.” And he holds the machine right up to his face, and it smells like cigarettes. It’s just cigarette smell right in his face, and I see him just make this awful expression, just horrible, and then he puts it down and says, “Fresh air,” but he was clearly trying to say, like, “Not fresh air.” He keeps trying to say that it’s not fresh air, but what keeps coming out of his mouth is “FRESH AIR FRESH AIR FRESH AIR.”
And I’m thinking to myself, “Thank god this happened in this house.” Because there’s no way that the wife could know the demo machine was spitting out cigarette smoke.
So, I put the air purifier down and let it run, and eventually it stops smelling like cigarettes. It has charcoal in it to filter out smells. We all come back to the room later and it smells fine. The old man eventually forgot about it. So, it worked out perfectly.
By the end of the demo, the old guy was trying to tell me jokes. Really corny ones. “I saw the yard people outside, and I called them Juan, two, three” or something like that. His wife was named Pat, and he’s like, “I hear Pat walking around the kitchen, pat-pat-pat-pat.” I don’t know. Stuff like that.
The Awl: Have you ever had anybody yell at you?
Darrell: A lot. Especially in the beginning. I didn’t deal with it well.
The Awl: Why did they yell at you?
Darrell: Well, this one guy was awful. I almost fought him.
The Awl: You almost fought an old person who you were trying to sell a vacuum to?
Darrell: Yeah.
The Awl: Please explain.
Darrell: I did my show for him, and we were doing small talk. I’m trying to be his buddy, you know? But he and his wife were really short with me. You know, they didn’t talk too much, they just wanted me to do the show and get down to business. So I did the show, but at the end, I said, “May I have you as my customer?” or something like that, and he said, “No, I did this for the gift card.”
And I was like [silence]. I was like, “Are you kidding me right now?” I mean, this is two hours! Two hours of sitting and talking about vacuums. So I’m like, “Out of everything that could’ve come out of your mouth right now, I am going to say that that is the worst thing you could’ve just said to me. Why did we just waste both of our times if you had no intention of buying? Why did we just do that? Why did you keep sitting there, you know?” And he was like, “Well, we just really wanted that gift, but you just kept going on.”
They wanted some gift. The woman said, “You promised us twelve gifts,” and I was like, “We don’t have twelve gifts. We have six gifts, and they’re on this piece of paper.”
Well, the guy was like, “No. There are more gifts. Why are you holding out on me?” And I was like, “Dude, these are the gifts we have for you for watching the demo. That’s it.”
Apparently, that day, we started offering seven gifts, but not twelve. He was thinking of a gift that I didn’t know about yet. But I didn’t know that, so I started getting fucking pissed with him. He’d already disrespected me. And I was like, “Dude, I don’t get paid unless I fucking sell something you. But look at you! You’re not getting paid either! You’re getting a three-night, two-day stay in a shitty hotel, and you have to listen to a timeshare spiel before you can get it! It’s going to be fucking miserable!”
I call the office at the same time to find out about the new gift, and the guy is in his kitchen also calling my office. I’m like, “Dude, I’m calling about your fucking gift,” and he’s like, “No, I have to say some things now.”
This guy was already yelling at me, so I felt fine to yell back at him. Anyway, so he tells my boss that, saying, “Things got really heated and I know he’s just holding out on me. He did a bad job. Blah blah blah.”
I was ready to go then.
The Awl: Were you guys up in each other’s faces?
Darrell: He would’ve been fucking dominated. He just couldn’t stop running his mouth. If it came to that, he would’ve been destroyed.
So that was a bad one. I’ve eaten dinner with a lot of people.
The Awl: How do you do the buddy thing?
Darrell: You just have to break the ice. People love talking about themselves, so you can ask them where they’re from. “You from around here? No? How about Michigan or Ohio?
Cool! I have family from there.” Most people are from Michigan or Ohio, so it’s a safe bet. That gets that going. Stuff like that.
Usually I’ll say some funny stuff. Make some jokes. Then they laugh.
The Awl: Do you like it? How many hours a week do you work?
Darrell: A lot. One time I was in the ghetto to do a demo at like 8:30 p.m., which means I’d get out of it at 10 p.m. I park, and there are just tons of people in the street. So, I don’t know. A bunch of these guys were smoking weed and standing really close to my car, so I was just like, “Can I get some of that, guys?” Everybody was staring at me, and that made them laugh.
The Awl: Did he give you a toke?
Darrell: He was like, “No, white boy. You’re too good of a boy.” I was wearing khaki pants and a collared shirt. I told him, “I just gotta look presentable for work. I’m going in here and I gotta look presentable.”
Well, it turns out one of the kids was the son of the people I was doing the demo for. I go inside to do my show, and he comes in fucking ripped out of his mind. I’m talking to the dad, doing the demo, and making the whole family look dirty pretty much, because I’m pulling all this shit out of the carpet.
And the dad looks at the son and is like, “Go clean that fucking kitchen over there.” Just starts making him do all kinds of cleaning and shit because the demo makes it all look horrible. The kid was just so ripped, I felt bad for him. He just wanted to sit down and chill. And he knew I knew he was ripped. Maybe his parents knew. I have no idea.
So I’m waiting for the wife, because she left the demo to answer the phone, and I’m just making small talk with the husband. Like, you know, there’s stuff on the wall, and we’re talking about it. The wife starts answering, too, so I call back to her. “What’s going on back there?” And she’s like, “I’m just on the phone.” But then she keeps talking to me like she’s not on the phone, so I get up and head back to where she is, and she’s on the computer playing Farmville.
We’re talking, like, 10 o’clock at night. So I say, “Ma’am, I have to go home eventually. Don’t you have to go to work tomorrow?” And she was like, “Yeah, I have to wake up at 6 a.m.”
So I’m like, “Let’s get this done!” And she’s like, “I just had to get to my crops” or something like that.
The Awl: What’s the most memorable deal you’ve ever done? Do you have anything particularly horrifying that sticks out in your mind?
Darrell: One day I was running late, because I had some stuff to do. The company says be there between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., and I know that if I get there at 2:30 p.m., I’ll be fine. Well, I wasn’t getting there until 3 p.m., but it was fine because my company said, “This lady really wants that two-night, three-day vacation, so have that ready.” So, I knew even though I was late, it’d be OK because I had something the woman wanted.
The Awl: Do they get the prizes just for inviting you in?
Darrell: Yep.
So, I know I can definitely get in this home. Even if I’m late, I know I can talk my way in. “Watch real quick, and you can get this prize.”
I text my boss at 2:45 p.m. to say that I’m in, just so that I don’t get in too much trouble. Then the lady calls a few minutes after to say that I’m still not there. My boss gives her my number, so she calls me and is like, “Where the fuck are you?”
The Awl: Did she actually say “fuck”?
Darrell: Yes. And this type of thing never happens. Customers never call to ask where I am. Most of them don’t even want you to come over.
So I get there, and I’m like, “Wow, what a fucking bitch.” You know? Calling me out. So I’m walking up to the house, and she’s out in the fucking yard! She’s pissed! She’s in her 80s, and she’s saying, “You fucking young kids, you don’t care about anybody’s time.”
We get inside and she’s like right in the doorway yelling at me. I see around her that I can get use the kitchen as a shortcut and then cut back into the hallway, so I just went around her and went into the living room.
The Awl: Did she not want you to come in?
Darrell: No, she just wanted to keep beating that fact into my head that I was late.
So I was like, “We need to get something done here.” I kept talking to her about the demo, but I could tell that she was really upset. So I said, “Ma’am, I am 30 minutes late. Is that the biggest deal in the world right now? Do you have something to go do? If you need to go and do something, or get something done, be my guest.”
She was just like, “No, it’s really not that big of a deal. I’m just really depressed.”
I’m like, “Oh. OK.” You know? Like, where is this going? I can tell you: It went the worst place possible. I keep going on with my show, but now she’s telling me that one husband died, and now she’s trying to find another good man, but she can’t. One guy stole something from her. She loved him, but he turned out to be a horrible guy.
All the while I’m trying to do the demo I have to play psychologist. I just have to be like, “It’s OK, you know, you’ll find another good man, and you know, it’s — uh, blah blah blah.” But then I’m showing her the air purifier, and she asks, “Will it kill me?” She kept talking about she wanted to fucking kill herself.
I told her it was supposed to improve the quality of her life, you know? I mean, nobody tells us this, but maybe the air purifier will make her live longer. She was like, “Oh, well, that’s not going to work then.”
The Awl: Because she didn’t want to live longer?
Darrell: Yeah. And I’ve actually gotten that answer a few times. The crazy Jesus people say, “I actually don’t want to live longer because I want to be closer to Jesus.”
But back to this lady. She kept asking, “Will it kill me?” and I kept saying, “No.” But in the back of my head, I’m thinking, “Maybe if you drop it in the tub with you or something.” But I couldn’t say that.
So then I showed her the vacuum, and she kept asking me if it would kill her. And then she said, “I’m just going to kill myself.” And I finally said, “You need to talk to some friends and tell them what you’re telling me.” It was ridiculous talk. I just kept saying, “You’re a great woman. There’s so much to life.” But it didn’t end well. She could be dead right now.
The Awl: Did you sell her anything?
Darrell: No. I didn’t want to. But I got her to say sorry for yelling at me.
Mike Riggs works and lives in Washington, D.C.