my game is hard

About a year ago, I ran across an individual who seemed more caricature than flesh and blood. I was eating breakfast on a Saturday morning, with my son, at a local McDonald's. We were not alone but it was not crowded, either. A man in his mid-to-late twenties came in with a younger man, and they ordered and sat near us. While I ate and chatted with my son, I listened closely to their conversation. Or, I should say, I listened to the older of the two talk at the younger one. He was schooling the other man in a way of living, but more importantly in a job, and his tale was told through a mercurial braggart's voice. It was the speech of salesman-as-DSL-conduit. He didn't speak so much as his language blurred the very air surrounding the two men. And he seemed, loudly, to be starting his day off with references of how he got a trio of women from a club to take part in a noisy foursome after a long day of successful barter. In fact, for a while I thought all he was going to talk about was how to get women. He talked about which ones to shoot for, how you could begin the conversation as sales pitch and then after the product was sold, you could get any one of them in bed if you had the right skills. The talk morphed from women to basic sales, and he boisterously went on and on about how he was number one in his organization, and apparently for good reason: "because I always bring my full game, and my game is hard." I felt like a character from the film Boiler Room had slipped out of a DVD case, thrown on his Saturday comfort clothes, grabbed a new recruit and gone to McDonald's for a bite. He was one of the most overtly sleazy, obvious and comical human beings I've ever encountered. He was equal parts oily pretense, preternaturally virile posture and affected determination. He was the artist's dream, for whatever portrait, movie, novel, sitcom, poem or stand-up act was based on him would kill. And it wasn't until the end of his DIY/sucker-every-minute diatribe that he let slip what his product was, and it capped off the experience for me more sweetly than anything I could have envisioned or made up.

He sold magazine subscriptions.