The Customer Always Comes First

The customer always comes first. That was one of Dave Hamilton’s mantras. I’m Okay, You’re Okay was another one. He was full of crap like that. From being in the furniture business so long, he was a philosopher, a Socrates of hard and softwood furniture, particleboard, and what-have-you. I was his student. You could call me, a Plato of particleboard.

His sayings weren’t idle chatter. Take the customer always comes first, for example. He demonstrated it to me one day, that’s the best way to do it, by experience, and we were all set to go, but first he had to run off the security guard, Kenny ‘Bocephus’ Atkins, before he and I left the waterbed store on the delivery. Kenny was up to no good, as usual. He could smell crotch a mile a way and he was already onto a scent: Penelope’s.

“Just checking, Dave, to see if you’d had any problems with shoplifters,” Kenny said.

It was all a big front as far as I could tell. His main objective, first and foremost: crotch. Kenny stood in the doorway with his hat off covering up the thirty-eight special on his hip. The hat, wide-brimmed and bluish gray with a dark green band around it, was part cowboy Stetson and part medieval Roman cleric. Besides all the glittery rhinestones, there were cloth tassels and finely-linked metal chains that crisscrossed in the front, back, and sides of the hat.

“No problems, Kenny. It’s hard to shoplift a waterbed at eight pounds per gallon,” Dave said.

“Well, I was just checking to make sure, you weren’t having problems,” Kenny said.

He stepped further into the back storage area. Official looking, but non-denominational patches adorned his shirt shoulders and front pocket. A black stripe ran up both sides of his pants. He must have gotten most of his uniform at a costume shop.

“I seen you around,” he said to me. “You the new set-up man?”

“Yeah,” I replied, but it wasn’t my crotch he smelled. It was Penelope’s.

Kenny turned and there was Penelope swaying in Dave’s chair. She brushed her jet black hair to the side.

The medallions and tokens on his uniform caught some of the fluorescent light. The tassels and silver chain on his shirt were attached to a whistle and other security equipment. He sparkled like a peacock ready for the mating two-step.

“Penelope, you’re looking…”

“Hi, Kenny,” she interrupted him.

“… fine, sugar.”

“Thanks, Kenny,” she said.

“Just remember, and this goes for all of you, just ’cause I’m wearing this gun on my belt, doesn’t mean I’m a fighter ’cause I’m not, but I’m one hell of a lover.”

Kenny opened his mouth and smiled at Penelope, exposing his teeth with gaps in them like a rotten picket fence.

“Kenny, Big Charlotte was asking about you,” Dave said.

Big Charlotte ran the ice cream shop a few doors down. Big. Pink. Confectionery. He was bird-dogging her too.

“She was? What she want?”

“Don’t know.”

“I hope she isn’t having problems with shoplifters. I better check.”

“Good idea,” Dave said.

Kenny put his hat back on, turned and walked towards the front door. Penelope glanced at Dave and rolled her eyes.

“I told you he was sweet on you,” Dave said.

“He’s a dog,” Penelope replied.

Dogs like Kenny had a philosophy. Dave taught me that too. If they couldn’t eat it or fuck it, they pissed on it.

~

We arrived at Dave’s light green house. It had orange shutters, the same orange as the lettering that glowed on the sides of the van and on the pocket of my blue work shirt. Duke greeted us at the door.

“Thatta boy,” Dave said, stroking the large, three-legged dog.

Duke had been successful chasing cars at one point in his life, but being successful at some things had its drawbacks.

Inside the front door, a purple, ceramic statue of Buddha meditated on a small, mahogany table. Even though Margo Hamilton was an atheist with no bra, she visited churches and flea markets all over the world looking for religious artifacts and tax write-offs. It was all legal too. She had a part time job as a humanities instructor at my alma mater, UUF, the University of Urban Failures . She must have picked up the plump figurine of Buddha on one of her tax-deductible vacations in search of religious objects not to believe in. There were scissors, pens, pencils, Scotch tape, paper clips, and rubber bands, all sorts of religious artifacts, stored in front of the Buddha in an attached dish instead of hard candy.

Beyond the figurine, we turned into a dark hallway and walked to their bedroom with diagonal, pink stripes, one stripe a darker pink than the other. Besides being an atheist and a humanist, Margo was also an interior decorator and a modern artist who like Picasso had different colored periods. She obviously had gone through a Pepto Bismal period.

“Margo has a name for it. Art,” Dave said.

Before I could reply, a moan came from a nearby bedroom. It scared the bejesus out of me.

“Just a minute, Pop,” Dave called out. “Wilbur, can you get the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen? I forgot them this morning.”

I returned with the tray of stacked sandwiches. The bread had stiffened. Dave unlocked the bedroom door. The decrepit old man’s presence shocked me.

“Here’s your eats, Pop.”

The old man, the Ancient One, with a notebook next to him, grunted.

“You have to go to the bathroom?”

“No,” the unshaven, ashen-colored Ancient One replied.

“We had him in an old folks’ home, but they strapped him down all day. That’s when we brought him here.”

Dave locked the door.

“He’s kind of a mean ol’ cuss, and he’s gotten worse. It’s a trade-off. His Social Security check paid for the central air and the Japanese garden we put in,” Dave said.

We returned to their bedroom. Besides the stripes there was a long mural hung on another wall. It was so abstract I had no idea what it was, except that Margo dripped purple and black paint on a white background, or maybe the Ancient One did it.
On the adjoining wall hung an equally unusual painting. A landscape. It was an orange and yellow forest scene. The paint on it was thick and crispy like corn flakes. The focus was a single tree in the woods painted with shimmering yellow and orange leaves. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Dave adjusted his polka-dotted work gloves.

“Some nights I wake up, the thing glows in the dark. I don’t know how she does it. That’s her creativity coming through, ol’ buddy.”

It made me feel good when Dave called me that, like I belonged somewhere, not like the tree in the painting, all by itself in a clearing surrounded by a forest.

I stared at the tree a few moments longer before we hoisted the bookcase headboard off Dave and Margo’s waterbed, then lumbered down the hallway and loaded it into the van. After that, we departed for the house of the customer who always comes first, but I kept thinking about the orange tree in the forest and the Ancient One with his notebook of scribbles locked in his bedroom.

~

Not far from our destination was a large, real estate billboard on which another artist spray painted, “YANKEE GO HOME,” in bright red.

A half-mile down the same road, we entered the subdivision advertised in the billboard. A four-foot high, light-tan stucco wall lined the road in front of the subdivision. Each house was the same color as the wall. Across the street from the sales office lived Mr. Abner Neeley, the customer who always comes first.

Dave parked the delivery van in front of the house. We walked up the flower-lined sidewalk toward the front double doors. I pushed the doorbell with my free hand and held the silver toolbox in my other hand.

“Come in,” someone yelled.

Dave reached for the handle on the left side of the double doors. To his surprise there was no handle. He stepped back, looked down, and peered over the top of his glasses.

“What the hell is this, for God’s sake!?”

He bent down further and looked closely at the double doors.

“It’s not a door. It’s fake.”

He pulled at his scrubby beard, then rubbed his reddened and enlarged nose that had been on the wagon ever since the marriage, divorce, and remarriage to Margo.

“It looks like a door. Feels like a door. But it ain’t a door. What’ll they think of next?” he asked.

The right side did open so we walked in.

Abner Neeley, a middle-aged man with thin, black hair studied brochures and pamphlets scattered on a glass-topped table in front of him. A salesman pushed another brochure for him to consider.

“When can you get the pool in?” Abner Neeley asked.

His wife and daughter stood to one side.

“My brand new headboard must have come in!” the daughter squealed, her eyes sparkling like diamonds, when she recognized Dave.

She had brown hair and was built large and soft like one of the haystacks in the nearby pastureland that hadn’t been tilled for homes of light, tan stucco.

“Howdy do,” Dave said.

He extended his right hand limply at an angle to the girl’s mother.

“We been waiting two weeks for our shipment from California to come in. It arrived yesterday.”

“It’s a California bed?! That’s great!” the daughter said.

“Missy! It’s from California !” Mrs. Neeley said.

“Oh, yes,” Dave assured her. “When I set up your Riviera frame that was the last one in stock. But no headboard. I’ve had ten people asking about the Riviera . I was honest with them, ‘Neighbor, we don’t have’em in right now.’”

Dave had them licking the polka-dots off his gloves.

“That’s how things can be sometimes. You have to adjust in the furniture business. I learned that a long time ago. I hope this hasn’t been an inconvenience for you folks.”

“Oh, no. I’m just glad the right headboard finally came. And it’s from California ! I can’t wait to tell someone I have a waterbed from California , but I don’t know anybody here. We just moved from Illinois,” the daughter said then looked directly at me, but I couldn’t look her in the face after I figured out Dave was pulling a fast one by swapping out a used bookcase headboard he and Margo had bumped their heads on, probably hundreds of times.

He was a master of it – slick as whale shit. That was another one of his sayings. The headboard might have been from California , that part was true, but it had been on display in Margo’s museum of modern art for some time.

“Well, ol’ Wilbur, let’s get this headboard out of here and get this young lady her brand, NEW bookcase headboard from California ,” Dave said.

I waited a moment for the Neeleys to clear out so I could say what I really wanted to say.

“You mean the used headboard off your waterbed?” I asked.

Dave raised an eyebrow, then smiled.

“You’re learning the ropes, ol’ buddy. The customer always comes first.”

“Which customer is that?” I asked.

Before he could answer we turned the corner with the bookcase headboard. Someone else knocked at the front door.

“Come in!” the chorus of family members yelled.

A man with blonde hair, tanned face, and a smile full of shiny teeth stepped inside the living room. His leisure suit was the same color as the stucco and the walls throughout the ‘Yankee Go Home’ subdivision.

“Did the contractor get with you on the problem you were having?” he asked Abner Neeley who still conferred with the pool salesman.

Mr. Neeley looked over at the man in the leisure suit.

“Yeah.”

“Good enough. Any more problems just come over to the sales office,” the blonde haired man said.

He looked over at us holding the large bookcase headboard.

“How you doing today?” he asked Dave.

“If I don’t break a window or a wall with this headboard I’ll be just fine,” Dave said.

“No problem. You got plenty of room there. Let me get this door for you. Nice to see you folks again,” he called out to the family.

“Make sure you open the right side of that door,” Dave said. “There’s only one side that opens. The rest of it is fake.”

“Gotcha covered,” the salesman answered.

We returned with the headboard that, until an hour before, had rested on top of Dave and Margo’s waterbed. Abner Neeley scrutinized more pool brochures. The salesman tapped a pencil on the kitchen tabletop, waiting for a decision on a new pool. We maneuvered into the bedroom and positioned the used headboard on the waterbed frame.

“Looks just like new,” Dave said.

He took off his gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket.

“That’s not easy for an old man like me, Wilbur,” he said.

“You’re not that old,” I answered.

I was thinking about the Ancient One, locked in a room staring at a stack of stale peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, scribbling in his notebook. Dave said he was writing the history of the world in unrhymed, heroic couplets. He had written eight couplets in two years. He was old. Not Dave.

“You’re only as old as you feel,” Dave said, “and I feel old.”

I was surprised, even flattered by his openness. It made me feel more like his son or, at least, a foster child. Their own son, Cranston , was somewhat of a disappointment to Margo. Once a long-haired bird counter for the Audubon Society, Cranston switched gears and joined the Air Force. Fighter pilot. Much to Margo’s chagrin too, because she had been a peace activist during the Vietnam War. Cranston turned out all wrong.

Five minutes later the Neeley family crowded into the doorway of the bedroom. Even the pool salesman stuck his head in to see the new waterbed from California . It was another milestone in their Florida lifestyle, but instead of celebrating, something was wrong. Maybe Mr. Neeley had figured out what Dave had done, that he had pulled a fast one, that Dave was as fake as the double doors leading into the house.

“There you go, folks!” Dave said. “I had ol’ Wilbur remount the heater control on the side of the headboard. I didn’t know if you wanted him to turn it on right now.”

“Turn it off,” Abner Neeley directed.

“No, turn it on. I’ve got to have the heater on,” his daughter insisted.

Her father had a strained look on his face.

“What’s wrong, Abner?” his wife asked, noticing the change, the suntan wilting from his cheeks.

“I didn’t know it was going to cost this much to retire,” he said.

His eyes bulged nervously. The pool salesman raised his arm at an angle to glance at his watch.

“I’ve got another appointment in ten minutes down the road. Can I get you to sign those papers?”

Abner Neeley had a downcast look.

“Don’t worry, honey. I start at the convenience store on Monday. We’ll make it,” Mrs. Neeley said trying to reassure her husband.

“I worry about you getting stuck up by those bandits that’s been robbing ‘em lately,” Mr. Neeley said.

“Just remember,” Dave advised. “To give them the money. The customer always comes first even if he’s robbing you.”

That was ol’ Dave. Slick as whale shit from as far back as when Moby Dick was a minnow.