Attribution: Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that 70-plus years may not be enough time for the keeper to recall some of the details of his very brief career as a vacuum cleaner salesman.
It was to be a “lucrative” parttime job while he was a UW journalism student, and on his very first call, the keeper, who was still a cigarette smoker, burned a hole in the prospective customer’s favorite stuffed chair which called for a complete reupholstery job at the keeper’s expense.
On another call before a slightly inebriated man, a startled cat jumped onto a windowsill and caused several potted plants to smash down on the living room floor just as the lady of the house made an unexpected appearance. The keeper still remembers the conclusion of her remarks as if they were made yesterday: “You get your goddamn vacuum cleaner junk the hell out of here right now and don’t you ever come back!”
It was not long after that experience that the keeper retired as a vacuum cleaner salesman and went back to working in gas stations at the kind of dirty manual labor he understood.
Phyllis would probably be bored with the keeper’s vacuum cleaner stories, especially the one about the only vacuum cleaner he sold to the lonely widow in a Langdon street penthouse, so he will spare her the details as he daydreams of days that might better have been vacuumed up and forgotten a long time ago.
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