Death of a Salesman

My step-dad (father #3 if you’re counting) has been in my life since 1972 and when I dare to count the years, which I often don’t, it adds up to a majority of my adult life.

On Sunday morning, May 24th, 2009, he passed away due to cancerous complications.

From the moment I met Bob I wondered if the word ‘gregarious’ were too meager a term to describe this guy. His personality lit up like a neon Vegas sign; open for business 24/7. How could he keep the energy flowing like that? And yet, he was clearly feeding off of the same electricity he was expending. He was like one of those self-winding watches that sustains itself off of simple motion.

His entire working life, he was a master salesman, entrepreneur and idea-man with an unstoppable enthusiasm for people and an insatiable appetite for the joy in life. Bob wasn’t just a salesman because if he were only interested in raw profit margin he would’ve had only moderate success. He was never selling just a product but an idea as to why you needed the product and why you needed him and how he could actually help you in some tangible way.

He researched and understood his clients and suggested innovations for their products (many of which became the practical property of his employers because of contract) and he made a personal connection with his clients that endeared them to him for the whole of his working life and beyond. Businesses that routinely dodged salesmen, looked forward to spending time with my dad because he was genuinely interested in them and they sensed his earnestness. He wasn’t just a smart and clever salesman, he was someone you ended up trusting and caring about…a collaborator, an ally, a friend.

Selling was what Bob did for a living but, in a larger sense, it was just Bob being happy being Bob, putting himself out there because he loved the interaction. He relished the chance for his cleverness to convince your common sense that he was acting in your best interest as well as his own. This is, perhaps, where his salesmanship took a definite turn from the commonplace.

Bob often blurred the lines between business and friendship because he liked people. He was ecstatic to know you and when you were with him, you were the focus of his attention…you were special. That is, unless you were a transparent schmuck, and then he had a course of action for that as well, because under that gracious exterior, Bob was a very shrewd person and as genuine as he was with his friends, was how conversely cunning he was with folks he didn’t care for.

That larger-than-life persona was his ultimate strength (and legacy) but it was also his biggest weakness. Like two sides of the same coin, his constant quest for joy, success and satiation also left him, on the flip side, somewhat ill-equipped for the more negative personal challenges in life. Dealing with sticky family problems, in particular, seemed a chore that he needed to hand off to my mother. He probably didn’t quite look at it that way but that is how I saw their roles playing out from the earliest days.

He didn’t defer these family problems for lack of insight or critical thought, which he had an abundance of; it seemed to be the sheer drudgery of having to tackle discomfort. I think his inability to tend to some of these things was an anomaly in his character for which there seemed no other answer than his wiring just didn’t work that way. He wasn’t superficial or cruel. He just simply didn’t understand how to cope with untidy parts of life and found it necessary to channel all his unbridled enthusiasm to where he could get the best bang for the buck. I found it occasionally unsightly but we’ve all got holes, so…

To me, he was kind and generous in ways that I never had from a father when I was younger and, in that sense, I was fortunate to have him in my corner even though my lack of paternal parenting in the developmental years left me ill-equipped to know what to do with his attention. Nevertheless, I worked some of that out as we both got older.

That final week in the hospital, a day before a kidney biopsy would go all wrong, I sat in his room with my mother while he downed a bowl of ice cream. Bob was a dedicated eater and we all needed to get out of the way while the operation was underway. But it was strange this time because, as he made waste to that dessert, he looked straight at me in a way that forced me to lock in on his eyes. At that moment I knew that this wasn’t going to play out well, and it’s as if he were concentrating on this ice cream because it might be the last bowl.

It was. The next day internal bleeding from the biopsy sent him into an unrecoverable tailspin. Even though doctors stopped the bleeding, the damage was done. Already on the precipice, with an incurable  cancer he had been on the run from for longer than most survivors make it, Bob settled into a world that steadily, throughout the week, receded from ours.

My mother asked me if I thought that he’d go home eventually and I couldn’t bring myself to deny what I was sure was the truth. “No, Mom,” I told her, “I don’t think he’s ever coming home.” I suspect that she knew the truth of the matter herself but everything happened so quickly that we were all unprepared for the course of events.

Bob was, as the saying goes, a bull in a China shop; unaware of food dribbling down his shirt or the ear-splitting volume of a voice that had the potential to make dogs howl. I’ll say this, it got your attention and there was no mistaking who was in the room: “HI, SON!!!”, he’d roar as if he hadn’t seen me in 30 years.

None of us escapes this world without our flaws and weaknesses, and Bob wasn’t without his, but people passionately loved him and he loved them in return, often stopping to cajole, council or commiserate and, if his memorial was any indication, he touched a whole hell of a lot of people.

Occasionally I found him a little too self-indulgent, but then he’d turn right around and give you the most generous part of himself. I think he used self-indulgence like a blunt weapon against boredom and sadness, and a host of other life-wrenching moments; that loud, boisterous voice, knocking down misery like a row of tumbling dominoes.

There are days I wish I could do that…it sure worked for him.