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.

Southern-Style Cornbread Dressing

by Keely Durham

You Yankees don’t know shit about dressing.

It’s why, as a Southerner with a father from Macon, Georgia and a mother from the bowels of New Jersey, I have never been to Jersey for Thanksgiving. It’s why, no matter how many other Thanksgiving dinners my parents and I have had to suffer through, my dad would still get in the kitchen at some point over the holiday break and cook up an amazing gut-busting meal with collard greens, sweet potato casserole (topped with pecans, not marshmallows, duh), cornbread dressing, cornbread on the side and cornbread for dessert. Yes. Cornbread. For dessert.

Sure, turkey has always been the traditional centerpiece of, um, Turkey Day, but when you think about it, the best part of the meal is the dressing. It’s the ultimate comfort food. It’s carby, sagey (“back off, basil, I gots this” — sage), moist on the inside yet slightly toasty-crunchy on the outside (something you can’t get, by the way, when you bastardize it by shoving it up a turkey’s ass and calling it stuffing). Dressing is the fries of Thanksgiving dinner, the reason you always order the burger or sandwich instead of the ravioli at a restaurant. Why else are gravy or cranberry sauce also holiday requirements? Because even the best turkey is lackluster when up against a perfectly-crafted hunk of cornbread dressing.

Oh, wait. I’m sorry. You’ve never experienced cornbread dressing? Silly Northerner. While you’ve been up there in New York City working in the LIBERAL MEDIA and putting WHITE BREAD in your dressing (really? a pack of smokes are, like, twelve dollars and they’ve outlawed trans fats, but your nanny state won’t protect you from Wonder bread, which is supposed to be our thing anyways and COME ON you may as well just use paste instead), we’ve been down here, swilling moonshine and noodling and shit while fine-tuning the best part about having to be with a bunch of people you should love because they’re you’re family but you can’t really because you don’t see them very often and they kinda of make you uncomfortable.

So, anyway. Cornbread. You’ve at least had that, right? Let’s look up a typical Yankee cornbread recipe:

• 1 1/4 cups yellow cornmeal
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar

Sugar? What is it with you Yanks that you have to make a perfectly decent savory side dish sweet? You don’t put sugar on your grits (seriously DO NOT put sugar on your grits — it’s not Cream of Wheat, which, ew, oatmeal exists for a reason), and you certainly don’t put sugar in your in your cornbread. If you want it sweet, you slather it in butter, pour cane — no, not maple — syrup on it and eat it for dessert (told you).

Here’s a lovely and very traditional recipe. I use olive oil instead of bacon drippings, because I’m a vegetarian (we do exist down here!), but you can do whatever. Also, feel free to use yellow cornmeal if you can’t find white. Do take heed to the author’s note about using a cast iron skillet — it’s seriously not the same without it. You get this awesome crunch on the bottom that you just can’t get otherwise (once again, that good ol’ textural variation). My dad gave me my skillet, which is probably about eighty years old and I think was given to him by his family’s nanny/housekeeper, who was black and from whom he learned everything he knows about cooking soul food. Also, my dad apparently grew up on the set of “Beulah.”

So, you have your quality Southern cornbread. Now find a large mixing bowl and crumble up the cornbread into large-ish chunks. Now that your skillet’s free, put it back on the stove with about two tablespoons of butter and sweat a large chopped onion, about a cup-and-a-half of chopped celery and a large chopped bell pepper (otherwise known as the Holy Trinity, and it’s called that for a reason), until the onions are translucent and the celery and pepper are soft. This will take a few minutes, because you have to do it on low to medium heat so you don’t burn those fuckers, so you may want to get in a more Southern mood by re-watching the banjo scene from Deliverance. Did you know that Billy Redden, who played Lonnie the creepy-looking banjo kid, was tracked down by Tim Burton in Clayton, Georgia to play a banjoist in Big Fish, even though Redden never knew how to play the banjo in real life? Wikipedia is a great thing!

When the onions and celery are ready, dump them in the bowl, along with a couple of eggs. Add a bunch of stock (vegetable (herbivores fret not, it’ll still taste delish) or poultry), like three cups perhaps, enough to make the cornbread really, really moist, but like itty-bitty pools of broth moist, not submerged cornbread icebergs drenched. Mix in a couple tablespoons of sage (dried is fine, but fresh is best) and salt and pepper to taste.

Dump your mixture back into the skillet. You’ll probably have a good bit left over, which, yay! You can cook some more later! Or, if you had to go purchase a skillet because you didn’t have a appropriately-bestowed one like yours truly, maybe you were smart enough to buy a set of three. Now you can use the little one for the rest of the mixture and cook it all at once. Bake for a half-hour or so at 350, or until the top is a nice golden brown color. Slice and serve.

Congratulations, Cletus! You’re all done, and it was so easy! Now go reward yourself with a Bud and a little Hank Williams before it’s dinner time. You’ve earned it for not subjecting your guests to some Stove Top bullshit again. Happy Yanksgiving!

Keely Durham lives in Atlanta but still refuses to say “y’all” even though it’s really, really tempting down here.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

There’s never really a moment in which this particular bit of behavior could be in context, obviously, but the robot mascot of Fox’s NFL broadcasts plays guitar sometimes. Really works out on it, in fact — Steve Vai-style runs up the fretboard, dropping to its steely knees so as to enhance the rocking out, the whole deal. Is the robot playing along with the edgeless guitar-rock gallop of the Fox NFL theme song? I don’t think so, if only because the robot — which once was restricted to participating in animated football-related activities — now just kind of does whatever. Whatever being, among other things, an awkward, dancingbaby.gif-quality rendition of Ray Lewis’s pre-game berserker choreography, or emphatically counting off with his index finger like a punt returner checking to make sure there aren’t 12 men on the field. If the robot doesn’t wear a pilgrim hat and tote a blunderbuss at some point during the Thanksgiving Day broadcast, I will owe you a Coke.

But while the Fox robot is probably possessed of some interpretable symbology — why must the football broadcast be represented by something mechanical and non-human; why is this childish bit of sci-fi corniness is there at all; fucking guitar solos — I think doing so would be a mistake. Some things can’t be taken seriously, after all, and robotized Yngwie Malmsteenery would most definitely seem to fit that category. You cannot reason with the Fox NFL robot, and you cannot reason it away. Its persistence doesn’t make sense, serves no particular interest, and adds little to the experience of watching a football game. But while so much of the persistence of what’s unpalatable and unlovely and unjust about the NFL is predicated on unstinting, unthinking fan acceptance of numerous heartbreaking atavisms as integral parts of the game, there are also absurdities that, like that stupid robot or the idiotic cackle of the pre-game shows, we can accept and ignore with relative and guiltless ease. And then there are the more embraceable inexplicabilities. This would be the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving.

There are a great many reasons why the Lions should not be playing on Thanksgiving. Squeakers like Gregg Easterbrook — the wearyingly contrarian, reliably self-enamored Brookings Institute scholar and part-time anti-Semite who writes an Aspergersianly detail-bound weekly NFL column for ESPN — have groused that it gives the Lions the special advantage of a home game on an unusual day for football. Which is true enough but ignores the fact that even a home game on America’s day of tryptophanic rest still leaves the Lions with the staggering and often insurmountable disadvantage of being the Detroit Lions, and having to play football against a team that is not the Detroit Lions.

For almost all of the last decade, the Lions were both the NFL’s worst and most easily allegorized franchise. Blessed with the furious calm and avant-garde cutbacks of genius running back Barry Sanders during the 1990s — here’s a Sanders YouTube highlight reel scored, for reasons I can’t even guess at, to what I’m pretty sure is an Enya song — the Lions proved themselves content to let Sanders win the team between 7 and 10 games per season, before the inferior personnel around him conspired to bounce the team from the playoffs. Their quarterbacks were a parade of strong-armed interception machines, their defense was for the most part notional, and the coach was a personable, gravitas-free deli-owner type named Wayne Fontes. They ran an endearingly all-out run-and-shoot offense known as The Silver Stretch, and were generally pretty fun, but also generally just one brilliant running back away from mediocrity.

When Sanders retired in 1998, at the height of his powers and just one year removed from the third-best season any running back has ever had, the team collapsed into that entropic mediocrity for awhile, then got worse with the hiring of animate mustache Matt Millen as president and general manager in 2001. Over seven seasons, the former linebacker and TV commentator proved himself utterly, poignantly unqualified for the gig — a hail-fellow incompetent prone to laughably backwards draft strategy, hilariously unforeseen personnel moves, and on-the-record usage of the word faggot. When he finally stepped down in 2008, Millen’s team was on its way to the NFL’s first winless season in 32 years, and Millen was the NFL’s highest-paid GM. So, yeah: even if the Lions weren’t owned by the Ford family — the Detroit Fords: Taurus, F-150, The International Jew — it would be easy to trace the team’s collapse over that of the city’s signature industry. It’s that abject, that easily attributable to entitled laziness and cruelly poor management and inbred boys’ club intellectual backwardness. Richly deserved, then, but still hugely sad.

That winless season, the Lions lost on Thanksgiving by the score of 47–10, to the Tennessee Titans. But they played, because they always play on Thanksgiving. The Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions have been playing on Thanksgiving for longer than 24 NFL teams have even been in existence, and the Lions played their first game on the holiday back in 1934. The NFL is ripe unto rotten with unexamined ritual, inexplicable legalism and incautiously canonized icons, and even less interested in altering any of this because-it-has-always-been-thus ridiculousness than is baseball. The NFL’s craven, glacial conservatism is downright Senatorial in its pompous inertia, and puts the progress-aversion of any other pro sport to shame — this is a league that is still calling for more study on the (obvious, manifestly proven) link between concussions and their savage later-life echoes and slow-walking serious rules regarding helmet-to-helmet killshots, which puts the genteel revanchism of baseball’s ongoing debate over the relative moral worthiness of statistics in perspective somewhat. A lot of things get done in the NFL because they’ve always been done, in short, and most of them suck like crazy.

But the Lions on Thanksgiving, even when the Lions — as they have in recent years — are objectively depressing in football and non-football ways, is not one of those objectionable traditions. This year’s model is actually pretty sparky, for one thing. They’ll lose on Thanksgiving, because they’re up against a Patriots team currently playing with their familiar vicious and bilious brilliance, and because Detroit will be without Matthew Stafford, a terrific and terrifically injury-prone young quarterback who suffers incredibly painful-sounding shoulder injuries with even more frequency than the average NFL quarterback; Stafford’s backup, Shaun Hill, will (somehow) play with a broken left forearm. All very bad/sad, all very Lions-y, but this team could be good as soon as next year, and are kind of fun to watch even now. That’s not been true in years past, though, and yet I’ve always loved watching the Lions on Thanksgiving.

Well, “loved” is a strong word for watching Joey Harrington lob terrified picks into the middle of the field. But I watch sports to be surprised and amazed, and despite the fact that it has been happening since Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, there’s still something surprising and amazing and incongruously endearing about the ritual slaughter of the Lions each Thanksgiving. The Lions haven’t always been bad, of course, and they did get there first, but a better game — that is, one with two good teams in it, instead of the Lions and Winning Team TBD — would almost certainly draw more viewers. So there’s something bracingly bizarre about the NFL — a reliably brand-sensitive, relentlessly on-message marketing juggernaut seemingly dedicated to expunging any traces of human frailty or unpredictability from its product — continuing to run this lousy franchise out there in its holiday showcase.

In reality, the persistence of the Lions on Thanksgiving is probably just proof that the NFL’s dedication to each and every Treasured NFL Tradition outweighs its signature ice-cold avarice. Probably, but you don’t need to squint too hard to see the tradition of Thanksgiving in Detroit as something finer, sweeter, and better attuned to the spirit of this most inclusive of holidays. The Lions are a shabby guest, most years, and one that has showed up in years past reeking rudely of disinfectant-grade booze and bearing bummer-y, inedible desserts that seemed to have been plucked from the dumpster behind the Safeway. But in a league dedicated to crass corpocracy and steroidally dim power worship and the subjugation of all component oddities to Brand NFL, the fact that the Lions — the epically flubby Lions — have a standing invite to Thanksgiving is inexplicable in the best way. The NFL has always been brutal and exploitive, and it will likely remain that way — because most major business concerns kind of generally trend that way, and because there’s no compelling bottom-line reason for it not to — but it also used to be weird. But at least on Thanksgiving, the reliable presence of this humblest of guests on the doorstep is blessedly weird, and weirdly welcome.

Did you think I was going to go with “something to be thankful for” there? Because I sort of did, too. But yeah, if I may permit myself that bit of hackery now that the actual essay part of this is done: I am thankful not to have slipped behind the coin again. You still absolutely should never bet any of my picks — I surely don’t — but it’s at least nice not to be trailing the inanimate object for a second straight week.

Week 11 (and overall): David Roth: 8–6–1 (77–75–9); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 8–6–1 (77–75–9)

Thursday, Nov. 25
• New England (-7) at Detroit, 12:30 pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: Detroit
• New Orleans (-3.5) at Dallas, 4:15 pm — DR: Dallas; ATTLCTDC: Dallas
• Cincinnati at New York Jets (-9), 8:20 pm — DR: New Jersey J; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J

Sunday, Nov. 28
• Carolina at Cleveland (PICK), 1:00 pm — DR: Cleveland; ATTLCTDC: Carolina
• Jacksonville at New York Giants (-7.5), 1:00 pm — DR: New Jersey G; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G
• Philadelphia (-3) at Chicago, 1:00 pm — DR: Philadelphia; ATTLCTDC: Chicago
• Pittsburgh (-6.5) at Buffalo, 1:00 pm — DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• Green Bay at Atlanta (-2.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• Tampa Bay at Baltimore (-7.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Baltimore; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• Tennessee at Houston (PICK), 1:00 pm — DR: Houston; ATTLCTDC: Tennessee
• Minnesota at Washington (-2.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Washington; ATTLCTDC: Minnesota
• Kansas City (-1) at Seattle, 4:05 pm — DR: Kansas City; ATTLCTDC: Seattle
• Miami at Oakland (PICK), 4:05 pm — DR: Oakland; ATTLCTDC: Oakland
• St. Louis at Denver (-4), 4:15 pm — DR: St. Louis; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• San Diego at Indianapolis (-3), 8:20 pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: San Diego

Monday, Nov. 29
• San Francisco (-1) at Arizona, 8:30 pm — Whoops, this is your Monday Night game. Have fun, America! DR: San Francisco; ATTLCTDC: Arizona

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Photo by WRAY, from Flickr.

by Andrew Piccone

Tell me about your job.
As a literary agent, authors query me and pitch me their projects and I then help them edit and revise and submit them to major publishing houses. When we sell the books I negotiate everything from the rights to the advance to the contract. After the work is sold I help them with publicity and guiding them with their career. If there are any kind of problems, which there always are, then I’m sort of the author advocate so the editor doesn’t have to be the crazy person calling and saying ‘I don’t want to do that!’ We get to keep the author nice and happy and I’m the person who calls and says “No, we’re not going to do that.”

Who’s the most high-profile author you’ve worked with?
I’ve only been doing this for about a year and a half, I was a high school English teacher before this, so most of my authors are debuting and aren’t coming out until 2011 or 2012, so its the beginning of the process. My first author who’s book just came out, her name is Lisa Desrochers and we’re really excited about that, that just came out in September. One of my clients who is actually only 19, Hannah Moskowitz, her first book just came out last August and we’ve since sold four more titles to her publisher.

Why did you make the jump from education to the literary world?
I loved teaching and I really loved the in-classroom aspects of it, but I got sort of disillusioned with the politics and the bureaucracy and the grade inflation going on in our school in San Diego. Then the budget crisis hit California and I saw it as a sign to take a year off. So I loaded up a 14 foot truck and towed my car behind me and drove from San Diego out here and got an internship at Fine Print Literary Management and I just loved it.

Do you miss San Diego?
I miss the weather. I’m from Philadelphia actually and when I first moved back here I commuted from Philadelphia into the city for like a year which was insane. I was just so shocked by how many people would make that commute every day, Philly to Trenton, Trenton to Penn Station. I just couldn’t do it. But so I definitely miss the sun, and I had forgotten how much it rains in other places, which was kind of a rude awakening for me. I really like the culture of the city, and there is always something going on here, I definitely like it here better.

Which state’s budgetary woes do you think are worse, California or New York?
Well I saw it first hand as a teacher in California because my job was so dependent on the state budget. Whereas with my job now, publishing is sort of going through its own economic downturn, but I haven’t really experienced that. Working primarily in the young adult market, things are kind of exploding and doing really well and I’ve had a lot of really good success with it, so I haven’t really felt the effects of the downturn.

Do you read only young adult books in connection with work? Do you have time to read for yourself?
I am a book addict in the best or worst kind of way. I read 116 books last year that were not connected with work. I’m neurotic so I counted. I’m probably on track to do the same amount this year. I read everything, I just finished Dennis Lehane’s Moonlight Mile this weekend which is the sequel to Gone Baby Gone, and that’s not a young adult book at all. I don’t read that much non-fiction unless it’s Malcolm Gladwell.

What’s your all time favorite book?
I’m not sure I can pick one. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is my favorite classic. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is one of my favorites. I love Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I read it when I was a kid and I wanted to name my first child Ender. There’s a really great YA book called How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff which is one of my favorites. And my favorite thriller is probably The Breach by Patrick Lee, what an awesome book. I could probably keep going.

Do you write?
I had that moment when I was 18 when I was like ‘I want to be a writer!’ I don’t think I’m a bad writer, but I’m not as good at writing as I am at editing and noticing problems in other people’s work. At one point when I was in college or just out of college I had joined a writer’s group and but I never wanted to show my work, I just wanted to edit other people’s.

Where did you go to college?
University of Miami, so yeah I’ve kind of been all over the place. I double majored in Film and English. For a brief period of time I wanted to get into the film industry and then I worked on some films and commercials in Philadelphia one summer during college and I realized that I didn’t like it at all. Then I got my masters in teaching from National University which is in California.

Are you in a relationship?
No. I’m divorced. I was one of those people who when I was 20 my boyfriend at the time proposed and I was like ‘Yes!’ and people said I was too young and I was like ‘No way, I totally know what I’m doing.’ Four years later I realized actually, maybe that was a bad idea. He was in the military so he was being moved from Miami from San Diego and once we got out there it kind of occurred to us that this really wasn’t a good idea, and being 3000 miles from everyone we know made it kind of obvious. When I first got divorced I thought I would never get married again. I went through a brief time when I thought I should be a lesbian, which didn’t work. The next guy I dated proposed and we were engaged for three years and I kept pushing the date back because I wasn’t ready. And then right before I left California and we both realized that this wasn’t going to work out. He was a really nice guy, like the opposite of my husband, but it just was not quite right. I try really hard not to be bitter and I’ve dated other people and I know I have no problem with commitment. I think part of the reason why I got married so young is that there is some aspect of our culture that gives girls the idea that you really need a relationship, a man to make you happy. I’m finally at a place where I know that I don’t need that. I’m happy by myself. I’d love to meet someone who can challenge me intellectually and all that stuff, that would be great, but it’s just not a priority.

What advice would you give to someone under 25 who is the position you were in?
It’s hard because no matter what you say to someone the more they’re going to think you’re wrong. There’s no rush, I didn’t understand that at that age, everything felt so great and exciting, thinking that someone wanted to marry me, it’s every little girl’s dream. It’s really easy to get swept up in that. I think if someone proposes when you’re 21 or 24 or whatever you should wait until you’re 27 or 28, you don’t have to jump so fast into something that’s supposed to be forever. I think people change a lot in their 20s: people change jobs, identities, you go through a lot. Sometimes to no fault of anyone. People just kind of change, and they don’t always change together. Waiting and getting towards the end of your 20s, when you know you’re ready is so important.

How do you think technology has affected our generation?
Speaking from a literary and teaching standpoint, I worry about communication like texting and emailing, and it’s amazing to me how many people will write or speak in ways that just make no grammatical sense. You get used to doing things on your phone, using shorthand, but I can’t believe that people actually talk that way. ‘Totes.’ ‘OMG.’ I didn’t realize that people actually talked that way until I moved to New York and I couldn’t believe it! If you go back to the 1800’s when people had to write letters to communicate, there was such an art in that, in expressing yourself, a knowledge of rhetoric that people had to have and I feel like that’s been lost with the immediacy of sending a text message or making a phone call. When I was teaching I saw that so many teenagers don’t know how to interact face to face because they do so much of their interaction behind the safety of a screen.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.

by Jeff Hart

My Joining lasted about eight minutes. I didn’t take my time.

The Virtue shoved me onto a mattress and straddled me. She pinned my hands above my head. As per the rules of The Joining there was no speaking and, as per the rules of sex-workers, no kissing. Her face inches from mine, close enough that I could smell the Newports lingering on her breath, and still I couldn’t make her out through the room’s oppressive darkness. Deprived of sight, I wouldn’t have been opposed to some mood music. Instead, I was forced to focus on my increasingly erratic breathing and the growling of my stomach as The Virtue ground against me. If the silence, darkness, and aloofness of partner were meant to coax some spiritual awakening out of me, much like The Virtue, it didn’t come.

Afterward, The Virtue lay next to me for only a moment before slipping into the darkness. I considered what amount of guilt I should feel at making my client Paul Fennel a soul mate cuckold. I decided on none. If Fennel was indeed a clairvoyant, he should’ve seen this sort of behavior coming when he hired me.

“That was nice,” I lied into the darkness. “But now we need to talk.”

My clothes fell in a lump on the bed next to me. I could sense her nearby, but she didn’t speak. I pulled on my pants and tried a tack I’d had some success with in the past when negotiating with women in The Virtue’s trade.

“I’ll pay you a hundred dollars just to talk to me.”

The Virtue shuffled around in the darkness, sighing.

“Jesus Christ, dude,” she hissed. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

She lit a candle, the tiny flickering light almost enough to blind me. Able to see again, my first move wasn’t to take stock of my surroundings or appraise the woman that’d just finished humping me, but to check my chest for a burn like the one The Virtue had inflicted on Fennel. I appeared to be clean of any spiritually transmitted diseases.

“You didn’t burn me,” I said, surprised by the note of disappointment in my voice. “Did our souls not touch?”

“Come on,” snorted The Virtue. “We wouldn’t be talking if you believed in that bullshit.”

I looked her over. She was definitely more a Darlene than she was a Virtue. I pegged her for mid-twenties but could’ve gone five years in either direction — coquettish mannerisms betrayed by the weathered edges of a workaholic. She was short, but gained an inch or two thanks to a piled mane of hair-sprayed brown curls. She’d pulled an official Unfettered Souls black ritual robe over the curvy proportions of an average chain-smoking Long Island transplant. She fixed me with an impatient look that made me nostalgic for our sex.

“Or maybe,” she continued, pulling a stick of gum from her robe’s pocket and stuffing it in her mouth, “you don’t have a soul to Join with.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today,” I said.

Darlene held an empty palm out and snapped her gum.

“We’re talking,” she reminded me.

I slipped her one of Wayne Maker’s hundred-dollar bills.

“Tell me what you do here.”

“I think you’ve got a pretty good idea, man.”

“Are you being held against your will?”

She laughed at me.

“Are you kidding?”

“So you’re just a whore?”

Darlene scowled, fingering the money I’d just handed over.

“This is a place of healing. I help people open themselves to goodness.”

“Come on,” I said. “We wouldn’t be talking if you believed that bullshit.”

For the first time Darlene looked at me like I might be more than a John playing loose with a roll of bills. She cinched her robe tighter around her waist.

“How did you get this appointment, anyway?” she asked. “You’re not like the other guys.”

“I bet you use that line a lot,” I replied. “Your boss Wayne and I go way back. He set it up.”

“What for?”

“So I could convince you to come with me,” I explained. “I’m working for a kid you’ve previously opened to goodness for. Built like a ghost with an eating disorder. Probably sweat a lot during the whole Joining thing. Hobbies include predestination and Jesus.”

“That could be a dozen guys.”

“You burned a circle onto his chest.”

Darlene hesitated, weighing the pros and cons of opening up to me in the time it took to blow and burst a bubble. She kneeled down next to the bed, slid open a discreet panel, and produced a small wooden kit.

“It’s just a gag, man,” she said, holding up the kit for my inspection. “Something we use to make sure the more committed Souls keep coming back.”

I looked down at the contents of The Virtue’s kit. A collection of small, half-empty vials dully reflected in the candlelight, some containing powders and others oils. It was something I’d expect to see tucked in the nightstand of Claudette’s vegan grocer, various new age wonders for the purpose of erotic massage and tantra.

“What is this shit?”

“Do I look like a scientist?” asked Darlene. “Just tell your friend his rash should clear up in a week.”

A rash. The same part of me that had hoped to find my own heart branded following my dalliance with The Virtue cried out in disappointment. Luckily, my muscular skepticism had gagged that weaker part of me, bound it, and left it to weep in the dark crawlspace of my subconscious. So Fennel had been tricked, mistaking the machinations of unscrupulous people for the hand of fate. Wasn’t that always the way?

Outside the Joining room, I became aware of raised voices. Trouble was here. Yossarian and Pilgrim, the Fennel-hunting marines I’d misdirected into the arms of Unfettered, had crossed paths with Bo Harkins. Something, a body, slammed against the door. Darlene stared in that direction, her eyes wide.

“Do you have real clothes?” I asked. “We need to get going.”

She hopped to her feet, glaring at me.

“I don’t do out calls,” she stammered.

I shoved what was left of Wayne Maker’s money into her hands. There went my one chance to turn a profit. I was back to even. Zero.

“You messed that kid up,” I said. “You need to tell him you’re not his soul mate, that he’s confused. To his face. Until then you’re stuck. Part of the knot.”

“Not fucking what, dude?”

I made a nebulous all-encompassing gesture with my hands. Here I was invoking the concept of cosmic debt to a girl that bilked the gullible and horny out of their money by inflicting them with existential eczema. My brief time with Paul Fennel had made me impractical.

The door rattled again, harder this time, and that was followed by a howl of pain I recognized as belonging to Bo Harkins. Darlene looked frightened. I stood up and grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Also,” I said, “those men out there might kill you.”

I stared into her eyes until she believed me. It’d been a long time since I’d needed to do that to a woman. Darlene stumbled back to the bed, opening up another panel where she kept her street clothes.

“I’ll change,” she said.

“Famous last words,” I replied, as I inched out of the candlelight toward the door, beyond which the hallway was suddenly quiet.

Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.

by Tim Czerwienski

While traditional Thanksgiving pies tend to be gourd-, nut- or cut hand fruit–based, I would contend that with yet another cold, dreary, interminable winter right around the corner, Thanksgiving is when we need a bright, sunshiny lemon meringue pie the most. Outside of the clearly necessary psychic boost it imparts, the reason I’ve been making lemon meringue pie since I was a kid is that it’s secretly very easy, but the folks who eat it can’t help but gush about how crafty and skilled a baker you are. For an insecure middle child desperately scratching for attention and familial approval at every opportunity, this fact is crucial, and Thanksgiving is the biggest stage of all. Maybe it’ll work for you!

This recipe calls for a baked 9-inch piecrust. If you’re a diehard who insists on preparing your own homemade crust, knock yourself out. [Ed. Note: SIGH, YES, COME ON PEOPLE.] I’ve always found making crust from scratch to be a joyless bit of drudgework. Pre-made crust works fine here, and anyway, the pie is supposed to be the star of the show. After you’ve baked the crust, set your oven to 350, and if you’ve got a metal mixing bowl, throw it in the freezer. (If you don’t have a metal bowl, don’t worry! Any bowl will work. I just mention the freezer trick because it sounds like a savvy pro tip.)

The prep work is where the magic happens for this pie, so put a little heart into, won’t you? Separate three eggs, and toss the whites in the fridge. Do you have a citrus zester? Congratulations! Blow the dust off it and zest two lemons. The rest of us will make due with a fine grater. Do you have a third lemon? Zest it! There’s probably such a thing as too much zest, but I don’t know anything about it. I’m a big believer in a tart, lemony filling, and the two ways to achieve that are more zest, or more lemon juice. Go the juice route, and you run the risk of making your filling too drippy. Plus, zest is just a fun word to say. Zest! You will need to juice those lemons, though. Enough to yield a quarter of a cup.

In a pot, stir together a cup of sugar, a quarter cup of corn starch, a cup and a half of water, and the three egg yolks until you’ve got a smooth, goopy, eggy paste. (True story: I made this pie once, and for whatever reason, no matter how much I stirred, I couldn’t get the mixture to smooth out. Of course, I just figured the magic of the oven would solve all my problems, and it wasn’t until I was pouring the filling into the crust before I dipped my finger in and tried it out. It tasted like a combination of dish detergent and snow melt; I had mixed up the two unmarked jars of white granular powder in my mom’s kitchen and used a cup of salt instead of a cup of sugar. The lesson, as always, is to use the actual ingredients, and also not be an idiot.)

Bring this mixture to a boil, stirring the whole time, and keep it there for a minute. Take it off the stove, and mix in the lemon juice, zest and a tablespoon of butter. Pour it evenly into your already-baked crust, and set it aside.

Here comes what could potentially be the most frustrating part of the whole endeavor. When making meringue, you’re really at the mercy of the elements. If it’s rainy or otherwise humid outside, you’re pretty much doomed to a limp, droopy meringue. (I’m sure high-pressure systems or something like that are also involved. It’s very mysterious, meringue.) If you have any choice in the matter, you should be making this pie on a dry, bright, cloudless day. If you don’t have a choice, throw caution to the wind, tempt fate and hope for the best. It’ll still taste good, I promise! If you put your mixing bowl in the freezer earlier, grab it and beat the egg whites on high speed with a hand mixer until they’re nice and frothy. Under no circumstances should you be beating these eggs manually. There’s too much at stake! Once you’ve got a good egg foam going, very gradually mix in a third of a cup of sugar. (The better you get the sugar mixed in, the less susceptible your meringue will be to whatever humidity is in the air.) The cookbooks will tell you to beat until “stiff peaks form.” You’ll know when this happens. It’ll be like seeing the Platonic ideal of meringue in your bowl. It will be beautiful.

With a rubber spatula, spread the meringue on top of the lemon filling, starting from the edge of the crust and working inward. You’ll want a tight meringue seal on the crust. Some people will try to make some fancy little peaks and patterns in the meringue before putting it in the oven. If you dare, you’ve got more courage than me. I’m pretty clumsy, and peaks are a high-risk move, so I usually wind up settling for a competent, workmanlike, smooth top. Put it in the oven and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, keeping an eye on the meringue. Once it starts getting a golden brown touch, it’s done. Let it cool on the counter for a half hour, and then chill it in the fridge for a few hours, preferably in an airtight container. (Remember the humidity?) Serve it cold, preferably the same day you baked it, and do your best to enjoy it, because it’s probably going to snow tomorrow.

Tim Czerwienski is trying to be a writer and editor in Boston. He blogs here.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

Hey ladies, do you want to snag a man? Of course you do, what a remarkably silly question. Anyway, here is something very important for you to know, from a study carried out “by scientists at Manchester University to mark the launch of QVC Beauty”: Dudes want you to wear bright red lipstick. Like a WHORE. Otherwise they will totally focus their attention on some other clown-faced trollop, and you’ll be spending Saturday night alone, watching TV, with your bland face marked only by tears.

My mom was a single mom, raising my brother and me with no help. She worked as an Art Director at department stores back when there were lots of ’em, with in-house Art Departments, and then later she worked at Advertising Agencies. It was a lot like “Mad Men” still, in the Nineteen Hundred and Seventies, except there was no justice like on “Mad Men,” where the ladies win one every once in a while. My mom worked early, late and weekends.

So she didn’t have the time or the inclination to cook in the kitchen like Betty fucking Crocker, and she had never really learned to cook Home Made Food because she was too busy drawing pictures and reading books when she was growing up, not learning to cook from her mom.

We had lots of cook books around, but my mom bought ’em because she liked the layouts, and she watched the Julia Child’s French Chef show on Public Television because it was entertaining. The idea of actually doing any of the wacky shit that Julia Child was doing didn’t occur to us. It would be like deciding to build a space ship because we watched the Moon landing.

My mom depended on Convenience Foods, and this was back before we all found out That Shit Will Kill You. If there was an Instant anything, my mom would buy it, and all that stuff was and still is designed to go straight to the TASTES GOOD part of your brain, so we never complained about mashed potatoes out of a box, or powdered milk, or TV Dinners, or pizza kits, or powdered Instant Breakfast that you added to the powdered milk. My brother was seven years older than me, so I was mostly a latchkey kid on my own schedule, and convenience foods insured that somehow we would eat if my mom was late coming home or too wiped out to do anything but go to bed. I never went hungry.

Thanksgiving meant everything it still means to me now: Watch the Macy’s Parade, glom lots of food, and then we all lie around on the floor in front of the Boob Tube like a pride of lions after The Kill.

We had no experience with Home Made anything, so here is a breakdown of what I remember as a Classic Thanksgiving meal my mom made one year.

There would be a salad made outta iceberg lettuce with shredded carrot and some other vegetables I would push around, like maybe green peppers. We had an awesome big wooden salad bowl and these little wooden bowls for serving, so that always looked festive. Thanksgiving was always when my mom got out the cloth napkins and put ’em inside these big colored bracelets for even more Festive. She found out about Bac~Os® and those went on the salad on top of the French salad dressing, or sometimes “Russian,” even though we had a theory it was just mayo with ketchup mixed into it. Sometimes I would eat like half a jar of Bac~Os® as a snack, so she stopped buying ’em. Anyway.

The frozen rolls out of a tube were always perfect. My mom bought this tabletop Electric oven called a “Turbo Oven” (Convection Oven) because it was supposed to cook shit super fast. Not Microwave fast, (Microwaves were still new and way expensive) but faster-enough that there was a special chart for figuring out the adjusted times for cooking stuff because it didn’t really match up with whatever was on the Instructions. Sometimes we’d burn stuff, but not often. The oven had a fan inside of it, to, I dunno, speed up the hot air. I guess the thing was basically like a Toaster Oven with a fan, or a super powerful hot-air hair dryer inside a metal box to trap the heat. I remember it made a comforting whirring sound, very Domestic Tranquility to hear the oven on, because it meant Food, you know?

My mom knew a few recipes, like for Green Bean Casserole, and we dug it because it had French-Fried Onions on top of it, and that, along with Candied Sweet Potatoes pretty much rounded out the Vegetables Department of Thanksgiving since even I knew Instant Mashed Potatoes were just infrastructure for the Gravy, which came out of an envelope.

For dessert a lot of times we would have some sorta Frozen Pie like a Boston Cream or Lemon Meringue, so we had to remember to get that out of the freezer and thawing out way before the turkey got done. My mom bought a lotta Morton’s brand frozen food (they don’t make it anymore) I think because she liked the Art Direction on the packaging. It was very clean and 70s-Future-Modern, none of that homey earth-toned settings with warm wood-grained kitchens crap, nope, all the Morton’s product photos had the food item in black space with sans serif type. You didn’t bake the cream pies like you would with an apple pie, but you were supposed to thaw ’em out, so timing was Critical, however, if you get it right before it’s completely unfrozen, it tastes pretty good.

So OK, if you do Turkey, Thanksgiving = the Turkey, and we had the Cranberry Sauce out of a can and some kinda Stuffing just like you’re supposed to have on The Big Day, and my mom found the perfect Convenience Bird, a Frozen Turkey Loaf. No giblets, no bones, no nothing but open the package and stick it in the oven. It’s kinda like that Neopolitan ice cream that only has chocolate and vanilla, only it’s Turkey, with dark meant and light meat, and I still remember what that thing smelled like when it came out of the Turbo Oven, all crackling with the juices coming out. It smelled like Thanksgiving.

Joe MacLeod knows that sauce is a privilege.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

Like all good New Yorkers I adore Fran Lebowitz, but even I was starting to get a little exasperated with all the coverage surrounding Public Speaking, the new Martin Scorsese documentary about the talkative writer. Having actually caught the film last night I now realize I was wrong to be impatient; it’s terrific. There were many audible guffaws on my part, and I’m one of those assholes who usually just nods and says, “That’s funny.” If you’re stuck far from the city during the holiday this weekend and need a reminder of what brought you here in the first place, well, hopefully you have access to HBO On Demand. You will definitely enjoy it.

Make Your Own Tofurkey®: Faux Turkey Without Fear

by Nozlee Samadzadeh

One of the more miraculous things about the Thanksgiving industry is that it’s managed to produce the Tofurkey®, a food product for vegetarians that is just as tasteless and poorly textured as turkey itself, complete with a cutesy, matching name. As a bonus, it’s also ridiculously expensive for what it is! The going rate for a Tofurkey® at Whole Foods is twenty dollars. Think of it this way: with twenty dollars’ worth of potatoes, cream and butter, you could make half your body weight in mashed potatoes instead of purchasing a tiny vegetarian meatball. Look, it’s time for America to abandon the pretense that turkey is an edible meat. You can’t really change the fact that your turkey will be dry, and there are foods much more worthy of being slathered in gravy. Foods that don’t require basting, injecting, brining or shielding with clever bits of parchment paper. BUT! You CAN make your own Tofurkey® — or at least your own stuffed, seitan-based vegetarian meat, which for convenience we’ll call faux-turkey — and it will be great.

Why bother? Weren’t you listening? It’ll be great! Vegetarianism aside, think of all the reasons there are to make a faux-turkey. Maybe the only Thanksgiving invitation you could snag was to a potluck at a friend of a friend’s vegan co-op/art collective. Maybe your turkey baster broke. Maybe it’s noon on Thanksgiving day and your turkey is still frozen, or the organic one you ordered at the Greenmarket never arrived. Maybe you’re crusading against eating meat because you’re in college, and that’s what you do when you’re in college. Maybe you’re screwed up enough to just like fake meat because it’s so darn delicious.

In any case, let’s do it. You’re going to need to go to Whole Foods, but walk past the displays of refrigerated, boxed you-know-whats and their $7/pound free-range, never-frozen counterparts (if they’re not sold out by then). Instead go to the flour aisle and get a box of vital wheat gluten. What is this, exactly? I have no idea — something mysterious and oxymoronic like flour without the starch? You’ll also need to visit the bulk aisle and get some nutritional yeast, which smells like musty vitamins, looks like yellowcake uranium, has nothing to do with bread or baking, and makes vegetarian things taste magically cheesy. You probably have the rest of the ingredients in your kitchen, but grab mushrooms for the gravy, cranberries, and some bacon or sausage for the stuffing. (Oh yeah, cue the outrage, but I’m not a vegetarian at all; I’m the weirdo who just likes fake meat products. You actual vegetarians: don’t buy bacon.)

When you get home, you’ll want to make your favorite stuffing first. I like to cook a bunch of bacon, saute lots of chopped onion and garlic in the bacon fat (it’s Thanksgiving, live a little), then add cranberries and raisins till the cranberries pop and the raisins get plump. Add a cup of stock, scrape up the bacon-onion bits from the pan, and try not to eat it as-is. Toss it all with a ton of toasted bread cubes and the crumbled-up bacon, and you’re done. Okay.

The next step feels almost alchemical: meat… from flour! Put a cup and a half of the vital wheat gluten, a quarter-cup of nutritional uranium yeast, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of pepper, and two teaspoons of garlic powder (or a ton of chopped-up garlic) in a bowl. In another bowl, mix together three-quarters of a cup of stock, four tablespoons of tahini (I’ve used peanut butter before and it was weird but awesome; I bet hummus would work just fine), two tablespoons of soy sauce (or white miso if you want a lighter-colored fake-meat), and two tablespoons of olive oil with a fork until it’s a uniform brown goo. Now pour the goo onto the dry ingredients, and stir it in with the fork no more than five times.

Have you ever made bread from scratch? If you knead it too much, the overdeveloped glutens will make it tough and weirdly chewy. Now think about how much you should stir a product that is made ONLY FROM GLUTEN.

Okay. So stir five times, then the gross part: get your (clean?) hand in there and kind of smoosh it around. The idea is to get all the dry ingredients incorporated into the wet, and then stir it around just enough for it to form a spongey-looking mass. I hope I’m making this sound pleasant for you.
Get a friend to rip off a big piece of foil, because your hands are slicked with faux-turkey and you’re not done yet. Finesse it into a flat-ish, big-ish shape — say, a squarish circle. Grab two big handfuls of bacon-stuffing and kind of form the faux-turkey around it. I’m not being imprecise, here: the fake-meat doesn’t stick to itself, but that’s what the foil is for. Wrap it tightly around the lump into a ball. Throw it onto a baking sheet and put it in a 325-degree oven. You did it.

Spend the next hour and twenty minutes or so cleaning the faux-turkey off your hands and getting serious about gravy, which you actually shouldn’t make with bacon even if you aren’t a vegetarian — gravy made with bacon grease should only ever be the pepper-flecked white kind meant for biscuits and chicken fried steak. But we can talk about my Oklahoma heritage another time, because we have gravy to make: cook half a finely chopped onion and a ton of finely chopped mushrooms (the cheapest kind is fine) in two tablespoons of oil on very low heat for at least fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally until it goes from greasy-looking to watery-looking to caramelized- and delicious-looking. Add two tablespoons of flour and one tablespoon of nutritional yeast, then stir around constantly until it’s about to burn. Whisk in a cup of stock and a cup of water; let it boil till it’s as thick as you want. If your Thanksgiving gravy consumption is anything like mine, you might want to double this.

Hey! It’s been a little less than an hour and a half. Take out your faux-turkey ball and burn your hands while unwrapping it from the foil. It’ll be firm, slightly browned, and only very slightly unappetizing-looking. Cut it in slices to show off that stuffed center, douse in gravy and don’t worry about side dishes. With the money you didn’t spend buying name-brand fake meat, you can hire a vegetarian college student to make all those mashed potatoes for you.

Un-Vegetarian Stuffing
4–6 slices of bacon

1 onion, chopped

4+ cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup fresh cranberries

1/2 cup raisins

1 cup stock

1 smallish loaf of bread, cubed and toasted

Cook the bacon until the fat has been rendered, but not until it’s totally crispy. Remove, crumble, and set aside. Saute half an onion and a ton of garlic in the fat left in the pan on medium-low heat until everything is soft but not browned. Add cranberries and raisins, stir around on low heat until the cranberries start to split, and the raisins get plump. Add a cup of stock and let it bubble for a while, scraping up bits from the pan. Add toasted bread cubes and toss. Season with salt and pepper.

Definitely-Vegetarian Gravy
2 tablespoons neutral-flavored oil

half an onion, minced

12 ounces mushrooms, finely sliced

2 tablespoons flour

1 tablespoon nutritional yeast

1 cup stock

Saute mushrooms and onion in oil over very low heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the water from the mushrooms has evaporated and the onions are beginning to caramelize. Add flour and nutritional yeast, stirring constantly, until the flour is uniformly toasted. Whisk in stock and one cup water and let boil, stirring, until it reaches desired thickness. Add more salt if needed.

Faux-Turkey Worth Eating
1 1/2 cups vital wheat gluten

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

2 tsp garlic powder

3/4 cup stock

4 tbsp tahini

2 tbsp soy sauce or white miso

2 tbsp oil

Preheat oven to 325°. In a large mixing bowl mix dry ingredients. Whisk liquid ingredients in a smaller mixing bowl til uniformly mixed. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients. Stir briefly, then knead until fully combined. Form into a square 1/4–1/2 inch thick, then fold around 1–1 1/2 cups of stuffing. Wrap ball tightly in foil. Bake for 80–90 minutes.

Nozlee Samadzadeh moved from Oklahoma to live and cook in Brooklyn.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.