The Chain Wallet Stays
In this issue: Telemarketers, Jersey dirtbags, El Duce, the god Alan Alda, the Cherry Hill Mall.
Oh hey, what up.
I haven’t been updating this thing that much because I’ve been trying to direct that energy into a book proposal I’ve been working on over the summer.
Yeah, that’s right. A book proposal. Over the summer. Don’t tell me I don’t know how to party.
(I usually don’t talk about works in progress publicly until there is something official to announce or it’s published, but I’m taking a page out of my dude Alan Alda’s book and using fear as a motivator. When Double A was a kid, he put up a sign in his neighborhood advertising a film festival featuring his movies. The only problem was, he was a kid who had never made a damn movie in his life. But just putting the sign up and promising a finished product motivated him to make a batch of short films. It’s a stressful way to live your life, but the Aldanator is the first person to win Emmys for acting, writing, AND directing, so it sounds like he’s got some shit figured out. Anyhoo, I’m writing this to light a fire under my ass re: reaching out to another round of sources. )
I’m not gonna talk about what the proposal is about, but I will go on tangents and such regarding things I learn during the research and reporting phase and let you revel in the mystery. Fun!
***
I know a guy who used to work a telemarketing job with El Duce in the ‘80s. The same El Duce who fronted the Mentors while wearing an executioner’s hood. The same El Duce who, along with GG Allin and the like, made the ‘90s talk show rounds as the latest “shock rocker” to corrupt the nation’s youth.
I used to have a hard time imagining as feral a motherfucker as the late Eldon Hoke sitting in a call center in Hollywood, making tens if not hundreds of sales calls in a day, evoking a salesman’s genial, gregarious tenor.
That was before I saw the HBO docuseries Telemarketers. Telemarketing call centers are a place where charismatic psychopaths, people in the throes of active addiction, various and sundry dirtbags, formerly incarcerated folks, and the otherwise unemployable/exploitable seem to thrive. I should have known as much when a perma-stoned looking kid a year below me in high school was promoted to a supervisor role when he was just a junior at the call center in an office park behind the Cherry Hill Mall. You could tell he was working a shift after school because he switched out his jeans with a more respectable pair of Eddie Bauer khaki cargo pants paired with sweater. Like a true Jersey dirtbag, the chain wallet remained.
That call center was a source of consternation for many passengers on a certain NJ Transit bus in 1996-97, as relayed to me, a fellow passenger/captive audience with a face that seemingly screams “Unload all your frustrations onto me in an extended, unyielding monologue.” Unlike the HBO doc, these callers weren’t making fraudulent fundraising calls on behalf of crooked police unions (like there’s any other kind), but signing people up for credit cards with predatory interest rates. While commuting to my shitty job serving coffee (junior year) and my shitty job selling women’s shoes (senior year), I absorbed the lamentations of callers who desperately wanted to talk their telemarketing marks out of whatever grift they were being cajoled into before closing the sale. After about two months, that person disappeared and a new one appeared in their place with the same complaints about how they’ve been spiritually broken by this misery factory. Not everyone has the resilience and fortitude of an El Duce.
***
Hm, it sounds like people should have listened to Danii Minogue in 2006. She couldn’t have made it any more clear.
***
If you think I didn’t show up two hours early to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in 2005 to see Alan Alda and get my book signed, you’re out of your goddamned mind.
I told him about how my mom nicknamed me “Hot Lips Houlihan” when I was a kid since my name is Margaret. He asked me how I felt about that, and I told him I was far too young to realize how inappropriate it was. He laughed. It was probably a polite laugh, but he sold it really well. One of those laughs where you can see the laugher’s fillings.
That’s it for me.
See you next time,
-m