Smelly Gary’s Luau

by Jim Gavin

When he returned from Vietnam in 1969, Matt’s father had one goal in life: to work someplace with air conditioning. His dream, if such a thing can be called a dream, came true when he answered a classified and got hired to work the order desk at a toilet seat factory in South El Monte. This wanton decision led to a long career as a salesman in the SoCal plumbing industry and set in motion a chain of events that, 35 years later, ended with Matt being given a job he didn’t really want by Jack Mullan of Ajax Sales, one of his father’s old cronies. Such is the nightmare of history, thought Matt, who saw a grim and paranoid connection between the horrors of the Tet offensive and the sales meeting he was now sitting through at the Ajax warehouse in Compton.

Bob Virgil, the factory guy from Brentford, paced back and forth in the dusty light of the wood-paneled conference room. Ajax repped Brentford toilets throughout Southern California. It was one of their glamour lines. Bob, in his fifties, short and paunchy, with syrupy blue eyes and a wave of wispy gray hair combed neatly across his leathery forehead, finished his third can of Budweiser and held up the new Brentford catalog. He turned to a picture of the new vitreous china siphon jet urinals.

“The flushing velocity on these things is fucking breathtaking,” he said.
Matt noticed all the veteran outside salesmen taking notes. Realizing he didn’t have a pen, he sank down in his seat.

Bob assured Jack and the rest of the Ajax brass that the improved pricing and rebates would strengthen their position with commercial contractors. On the residential side, he hyped the Ultima 900, an open-rim gravity two-piece with a newly designed antisiphon ballcock, and apologized, once again, for the old ballcock, which was recalled last summer, causing chaos for new-work plumbers throughout Greater Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire.

Afterward, Bob repaired to the Panorama Lounge of the Holiday Inn in Long Beach, where, amid moody neon tube lights and smooth jazz renditions of contemporary pop hits, he bought drinks for all of Ajax’s outside salesmen and for a group of aerospace engineers who had been laid off earlier in the afternoon. When not relating anecdotes from the plumbing underworld or rehashing key points from his recent speech at the Association of Independent Manufacturers’ spring conference in Reno, Bob spoke with conviction on a variety of topics. He had his doubts about the war in Iraq, he was cheering for Duke in the tournament because they had the most white kids, and he thought the new season of 24 was “a total mind fuck.”

At some point in the evening, as Bob staggered around the bar, trying to make a case for the existence of the chupacabra—“I’ve seen some things, man”—lots were drawn, in secret, by all the outside guys, to see who Bob would ride along with the next morning. Matt, by far the youngest salesman at Ajax—“our new bottomfeeder,” as Jack liked to introduce him—drew the short straw, as he knew he would.


At nine o’clock, Matt pulled his black Kia Spectra into the Holiday Inn parking lot. He called Bob’s cell, but there was no answer. He idled for ten minutes, spacing out to Odessey and Oracle, then tried again. Another ten minutes passed. Badly hung over, Matt decided the only intelligent way to deal with the situation was to park somewhere and sleep.

Since getting hired six months ago, he’d averaged nearly six hours a day on the freeway, calling on wholesale plumbing accounts from Inglewood to Barstow. This constant and solitary pursuit, across landscapes bright, hazy, and inscrutable, had started to infect his dreams. Now, when he fell asleep—on the couch, usually, in his Long Beach apartment, after watching several hours of basketball and flipping between softcore offerings on Cinemax— he saw nothing but empty freeways. His dream freeways were always thousands of feet in the air, higher than the tallest buildings downtown, and the transition loops were banked at impossibly steep angles. Matt heard a sepulchral organ riff and found himself somewhere above the coast, among clouds, screaming across a vaulted tangle of concrete. His Spectra flew off the side, and he felt himself falling, falling slowly, with great pleasure, into a vast and merciful ocean.

“Look alive, you fucking goldbrick.” Bob pounded on the window. “Open up.”
Matt wiped drool from his face and turned off the music. As Bob opened the door, Matt cleared the mess that had been accumulating for weeks in his passenger seat: catalogs, price sheets, old newspapers, a basketball, a library omnibus of Ross MacDonald mysteries, and countless bags of Del Taco.

Bob threw a briefcase in the back seat and climbed in. He was wearing pleated khaki slacks, a bright orange fanny pack, and a gray golf shirt embroidered with the armorial bearings of Brentford Plumbing Inc. of Yuma, Arizona.

“No wonder Jack gives you all the dogshit accounts.”

“Sorry. I’m pretty wrecked.”

“Lightweight.” Bob pulled out a canister of Binaca Blast, opened his mouth, and fired off several rounds. He pointed toward the drab modern tower looming over Lakewood Boulevard. “These circular Holiday Inns fuck with my head. I couldn’t find my room last night. I woke up in a stairwell.”

“You can go back to bed if you want,” said Matt, hopefully.

“No, I just need some breakfast.” Bob took a pack of Kools out of his fanny pack and lit one up. “I don’t mind if I smoke. Do you?”

“Maybe you could just roll down the window a little,” uttered Matt, hearing a fatal note of politeness in his voice.

“If you say so, boss.”

They went to IHOP.

“I’ve been on the factory side for a while now,” explained Bob, as he emptied a bottle of Tabasco on his omelette. “But before that I was in the rep business for almost 20 years. Brass, china, tools, pumps. You name it, I sold it.”

A seraphic haze poured through the window, illuminating the spotty silverware. Matt had to squint to see Bob, who seemed a blur in the morning light.

“Do you like living out there in Yuma?” he asked.

“It’s hot,” Bob said, “but nobody hassles you. I can sit in my yard and shoot jackrabbits all day if I want. I can shoot other things, too. Crazy things.”

Desperate to avoid another of Bob’s lurid disquisitions on the feeding habits of the chupacabra, Matt said, “Is there a lot of new construction out there?”

“It’s starting to pick up.”

“I call on some plumbers in the high desert. In ten years, everything between Victorville and Vegas will be paved.”

“That’s the circle of life. As long as they’re building houses, we make money.” Bob, shielding his eyes from the morning glare, looked out the window toward the parking lot. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your car is a piece of shit.”

“It runs.”

“Where was it made, Pyongyang?”

“It was my mom’s car.”

“Oh, right,” said Bob, squinting briefly with concern. “Jack mentioned all that.”

Matt pushed around the gravy on his chicken-fried steak.

“Listen. When I started in sales, Pete Mutu gave me some advice.”

“Pete Mutu?”

“Before his stroke, Pete Mutu was the guy at Mulhern Sales. Booster systems, vertical turbines, he killed it top to bottom. When I came on, he told me that if I wanted to make it selling industrial hydronics the first thing I should do is get a loan and buy the most expensive car possible. That way, I’d have no choice but to bust my ass trying to pay for it.”

“Makes sense.”

“I bought a Coup de Ville. Robin egg blue.”

“Nice.”

“It got repossessed after Mulhern went under, but that’s a whole other story.”

“I just want something that gets good mileage.”

“Yeah, but you need style.”

Matt felt slighted. At 28, he considered himself an industry fashion plate, if only because he refused to wear poofy pleats and knit golf shirts. His typical ensemble—crisp charcoal-gray slacks, a plain white button-down with tab collar, skinny black tie, cardigan, aviator shades—evoked, in his mind, at least, an air of mod sophistication. If others in the industry were retro, they were retro by accident, like Ron Ciavacco, of Five Star Pipe & Supply in City of Commerce, who, in defiance of all natural laws, still wore Sansabelt pants.

“I can’t afford a fancy car,” Matt said.

“What else are you going to spend your money on?”

“I’m saving for a trip to Europe.”

“What’s so great about Europe?”

“I don’t know. Museums, cathedrals.”

Bob laughed. “My first wife and I wanted to do Europe for our honeymoon, but she went off and fucked a Dominican.”

“A priest?”

“No, a shortstop. Some single-A nobody making a hundred bucks a week. Are you gonna finish that?”

Matt handed over what was left of his chicken-fried steak.

“Jack showed me your numbers,” said Bob. “You’re not exactly setting the world on fire.”

“I know.”

“Jack thinks you’re a lazy prima donna.”

“I try not to be, but it goes against my instincts,” said Matt, sounding waggish to cover the absolute truth of the statement.

“I don’t tolerate laziness. It’s a form of treason.”

Bob began ripping open sugar packs and dumping them three at a time into his coffee.

“I have no sales experience, and Jack doesn’t believe in training.”

“Baptism by fire,” said Bob.

“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Your job is to go out there every day and get your face kicked in. It’s the only true path to enlightenment.”

“But I don’t know what I’m selling,” pleaded Matt. “Once they start talking spec, I’m totally lost.”
“Nobody’s born with a priori knowledge of plumbing fixtures, or anything else. That’s been proven by philosophy.”

“We rep 30 lines. It’s a lot to learn.”

“So. You’re a smart guy. Jack said you’re a writer.”

“No, I just wrote for a newspaper. Sports.”

“How come you quit?”

The waitress brought the check.

“I don’t know. Shitty pay, shitty hours. Some family stuff.”

“I know how that goes,” Bob said, grabbing the check. He twisted his head to get one last look at the waitress walking away.

“I’ll buy lunch.”

“Lunch is taken care of,” smiled Bob. “Smelly Gary is having a luau.”

For a moment, the name hung in the air, like the tolling of a distant bell. Matt had heard of Smelly Gary. Plumbers throughout Los Angeles spoke his name in reverent whispers, though Matt could never quite figure out who he was or what he did. During his first week at Ajax, Matt was standing on the loading dock with Jack, going over an order Matt had screwed up, when one of the secretaries came running toward them. “Smelly Gary’s on the line,” she said, breathless. Jack, who usually kept no less than three people on hold at any given time, immediately ran back to the office.

“So who is Smelly Gary?” asked Matt.

“He’s my guy in Boyle Heights.”

“Is he a contractor or a wholesaler?”

“I have no idea,” said Bob, throwing a fifty on the table.