For some people it’s a dinnertime thing, but in my case it’s just as I’m about to drift off into my siesta. At that fateful moment when I blissfully let go of wakefulness and all its attendant worries — that’s when the phone rings. And it almost always turns out to be the most inconsequential call, too.
“Hello,” says an absurdly cheery voice, “this is [name] from [name of company] and I want to tell you about [name of product/promo]…”
What the — ? Hello?!? Which planet are these people from? What the hell makes them think that I’m even remotely interested in what they have to offer?
“I’m. Not. Interested,” I say, before calmly replacing the receiver. Anything more civil than that or a second or two of hesitation before ending the call will have been taken as an expression of interest, and before you realize it you will have committed to buy something you don’t need or are far less likely to ever use, for the simple reason that most of the time, the damned thing doesn’t work. This I know firsthand: we’ve got juicers, knife sets, exercise equipment, and weight-loss pills coming out of our asses and cramming the pantry and stockroom. I can’t forbid my father to go near the phone, after all.
Yes: my father. Those calls are meant for him. He’s on a first-name basis with the telemarketing set. The people at the home shopping channels have his number on speed dial. Car salesmen lurk in dark corners, waiting to catch him alone — that is, when my mother’s not around. Pa’s helpless in the face of a good pitch. He’d read about some new and “revolutionary” beauty treatment and race to tell my mother about it. Over dinner, he’d wonder aloud about the relative merits of the Ab-Away versus the Total Core. Thank God he has not shown any inclination to go online or there will be no end to our troubles. The Nigerians will have a field day.
On second thought, get-rich-quick schemes aren’t my father’s cup of tea. It’s more like my uncle’s, his older brother, who never says no to anything that involves buried treasure or promises an instant financial bonanza. He has been conned one too many times, but if there’s one thing he has come to realize, it’s that he will always be a slave to the speculator in him. “What can I say?” he’d chuckle after the latest fiasco. “I’m a sucker for those things.” My aunt, who does not share his enthusiasm or amusement, believes her husband has been possessed by the devil and often talks of submitting him to an exorcism. I don’t say it to her face, but I think what Tito needs is something along the lines of a lobotomy — before he discovers the wonders of the Internet and some African ex-dictator’s wife or mistress e-mails him to enlist his help in “un-freezing” an illegally amassed fortune in exchange for a hefty cut.
And now that I think about it, there’s one other member of my father’s family who should be kept out of the information superhighway. My aunt, his younger sister, is a compulsive shopper. She buys anything she takes a passing fancy to without any forethought to its eventual employment. Which may be just as well, considering that most of what she buys end up in the basement — unopened. One day she might hold a garage sale and her husband would be amazed to discover that he had been living on top of a department store all along.
Pa’s compulsions, I like to think, are fractionally more reasonable. If it’s a gadget or if it involves pseudo-science, you can count him in. Nothing too fantastic or spectacular, mind you; he probably wouldn’t spring for a cold-fusion reactor anytime soon. But a spray that instantly relieves chronic pain? He’s on it in a flash. He had it from a “reliable” source that X., who lived two blocks away and who had a debilitating stroke a few years back, now belted karaoke on steady feet after being misted over with the stuff. Or that Y., a doctor his age, was now free of severe back pain and fit enough to go ballroom dancing. Somehow he managed to get hold of a sampler and sprayed it on the cook’s arthritic hand, which only got worse over the next few days. Pa was flummoxed by such unpromising results, but Ma piped in with her own quasi-scientific opinion. “Maybe it doesn’t work unless you’re already a vegetable,” she ventured. “Or geriatric. Now, tell me again about that thingie you saw on TV that’s supposed to give your butt an instant lift.”
How did it come to this? Oh, I have a vague idea — something which factors in human folly, the communications revolution, and the fast creeping globalization of culture and the economy — which is to say that I am way out of my depth on the subject. So I take the lazy person’s tack when confronted with the new, the abstract, and the baffling: I look back to the good old days, when things were much simpler, more innocent, and, perhaps best of all, more malleable to fit into my narrow view of the world for having happened a long time ago.
For me, that would be the late ’70s to early ’80s. All we had back then were clunky rotary phones, the telegraph, and credenza-sized black-and-white TV sets that, in our lousy neck of the woods, picked up intermittent signals from channels 3 and 13 and so much white noise in-between — that is, when the electricity was on, which it often wasn’t. Then there was battery-powered AM radio, which was the only kind of radio then. We relied on it for news (the papers did not arrive until late in the afternoon) and everything else besides: political commentary, public service announcements, laughs, drama, music, and base titillation. Radio was cheap and it was everywhere — an advertiser’s dream. The ads themselves were unmemorable, lacking the sleaze appeal of a grainy Pia Moran gyrating beside an electric pahn or the come-hither sensuality of Carmi Martin astride a white horse, but for sheer raciness you could not beat radio, where sexual innuendos ran rampant and unchecked in the main programs. The illicit pleasure of listening to the hyper-sexed-up Verboten! (you could hear the exclamation point, along with the moans) was often the high point of our day. Ironically, that show was slotted smack in the middle of siesta time. I wasn’t aware of any complaints about that — but that’s another story.
Other vendors just knocked. That was how the Electrolux man got into our house. Same with the Mormons, or the drunkard whose ugly and sometimes blasphemous garden sculptures my father didn’t have the heart to turn down (they were usually bare-breasted Madonnas). Or, I’m quite sure, though I wasn’t there, the person who sold him the turbo broiler.
The turbo was one of the few cooking vessels of that era that was powered by electricity, but unlike its similarly-powered cousins the rice cooker or crock pot, it had a distinct gadget-y appeal. Industrial in size and sound, it easily accommodated a whole chicken or leg of pork, and with a clamp of its lid and handle sent a rush of hot air swirling around its transparent cavity with a satisfying whoosh. It looked like the sort of contraption that could have come straight out of Star Wars, which screened at the local theater the year before. Never mind that it was just a dolled-up convection oven — it looked cool. The first time we used it, we crowded around and stared in bug-eyed awe at the browning chicken. That was entertainment, too.
Not that we got to use it often. Like I said, electricity was an iffy affair in those days. The power company thought nothing of turning off the switch in the daytime, on moonlit nights, and when anything more than a signal-one typhoon hit the region (in which case we went without electricity for months). That was why we were better off depending on gaslight for illumination and firewood for cooking. That was also why you had to wonder at the practicality of the turbo broiler, because if you counted on it to make dinner and the power suddenly died, the family would go to bed with empty stomachs — or worse, salmonella poisoning.
It may be unnecessary, but I will say it anyway: the damned thing delivered — as did the aforementioned rice cooker, crock pot, and vacuum cleaner. In fact, they’re still very much around and in good working condition. (We’ve changed rice cookers about six or seven times since then and the turbo broiler maybe twice, but put that down to wear-and-tear.) Other ’70s wonders like the bell-bottom pants and Niño Muhlach* came and went, but the turbo broiler, etc. survived and adapted to the changing times. They only had to wait until electricity was in steady enough supply to justify allotting them permanent places in the kitchen (save for the vacuum cleaner, it goes without saying). That was what I was trying to tell you when I said that I preferred to view my father’s compulsions through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia, because the fact is that never since has his faith in the unsolicited vendor been justified as much or rewarded so richly. Perfectly cooked rice; tender, slide-off-the-bone meat; sinfully crispy pork and chicken skin… If those were not reward enough then I don’t know what is. I believe it’s also called “value for money.” As for the Mormons, they promised a more intangible form of reward, but my father has never been sold on religion of any sort, so that was that. Some of them were cute, though.
Ah, but for those good old days… People often say it without a hint of irony, pining for some distant past that the present can somehow never live up to. But like what? Month-long blackouts? Irksome party lines? Choppy, grainy TV? The Nutribun? These days we have it so easy. Unfortunately, so do the people who want to sell us crap. As science enables us to communicate in ways unimaginable just two decades ago, so have merchants of the mediocre found increasingly novel ways to lure unsuspecting consumers: text messages that urge you to subscribe to this or that service, spam mail offering a cure for erectile dysfunction, ads that pop up, under or sideways as you surf your favorite porn site… However, my particular personal vexation remains the disembodied voice faking enthusiasm for some dubious doodad that probably came from a sweatshop in southern China — although last week I had good reason to pause and ponder after I intercepted this call meant for you-know-who. God strike me dead on the spot if it wasn’t an elevator salesman.
Elevator, not as in footwear, but that contraption the Mythbusters purposely let free-fall from the top floor to see if there was any truth to the rumor that a last-second jump before impact could save you. I have often wondered about that myself. The bigger question, of course, was why my father would even consider buying an elevator in the first place. That had me stumped. Then it dawned on me that I had missed the point. I should have put myself in the salesman’s shoes, thought what he was thinking — which, in all probability, was: “Why not?”
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