Pop Tarts

 

 

The blueberry harvest is coming to an end in Maine. When it is finished, all the legal/illegal migrant labor will head off to the next area in the US where another kind of crop is just about ripened. I had never known migrants went as far north as the Maine coastline to rake blueberries. To me, migrants mean forever stooping Mexicans picking lettuce heads in California’s Central Valley.

Shows you how much I know…

I’ve been to Maine twice. As a kid visiting Portland and Sebago Lake and as a young 30’s guy skiing down SugarLoaf USA out in that thick and overgrown western part of the state. In the Carrabassett valley, our little tour bus had taken a stop at a Quickie Mart on the way home and a local wanted to sell us a German Shepherd/Wolf dog hybrid. I had looked in the back of his cabbed pick-up truck to see this dog. Once it noticed me, it fixed it’s eyes on me like the targeting avionics of a HellFire missile. I read his face and I swear it said that if I put one finger into the open crack of that back window, he was going to cruelly snip it off with his crossbreed teeth.

It was in Portland as an 8 year old that I discovered rock candy and Kellog’s Blueberry PopTarts. My Dad, infuriated with driving the jammed streets bitching at the other tourists, had pulled over and we all went browsing the stores in hopes the traffic would lighten up when we got back. In some store, my brother had found a non descript box marked “Rock Candy!” He pulled out a string of huge, clear crystals of sugar. We had never seen anything like this before. After begging Dad to buy it, he relented but told us not to eat it till we got back to the car. Once back in the car, I luxuriated in the sweetness of it and it’s bizarre shapes. Candy created by NASA scientists it looked like, perfect latticed prisms on a string. Now that I remember it, we two in the back seat were quiet as church mice while we ate it and I figure my Dad’s proscription to wait to eat it made sure he’d have a quieter drive.

Today they have all sorts of flavors of rock candy and I bought some a few years ago to relive that Portland memory. It took me 10 seconds to be repulsed by it. “Ughh! Gawwd! TOO MUCH SUGAR! Auuughh!” I never finished it.

At Sebago Lake, which is shockingly cold in late July, my Mom had brought some small snack items along. I watched her open a package and hand me this square thingy. It smelled like pastry and was dry and easily crumbly. I had asked what it was and she said “a blueberry PopTart.” I had heard of blueberries but never actually had any until that day. So I bite into it.

“POWWWWWW!” My mouth lit up with this intense flavor which I immediately liked. I had never known any fruit could be this nice, as I thought most fruits sort of sucked. (As a kid, I pretty much hated anything plant based, except oranges, those I loved).

After asking a bunch of questions I learn blueberries were grown right in the state we were in but along the coastline, the good ones anyway. At 8 I learned of high bush vs. low bush blueberries...how the hell did my Mom know anything like that?

**

I’ll call him Ray as he looked pretty close to Ray Walston. He was a nurse at a facility in Pawtuxet village and he and I began to know one another after some doing on my part. 

 

Ray Walston (Mr. Hand)

 

He was raised in Aroostock county Maine, about as far north as you can get and about as far from any urban sophistication you can get as well. He had that typical New England standoffish-ness but multiplied by 10. I knew it wasn’t plain rudeness as I recognized the attitude. Add the fact northern rural New England produces these kine of people that are even more unconvinced of your authenticity. After 10 years of closely watching you, maybe then they’ll trust you and open up.

When Ray and I sat beneath a tree in the back, I would talk to him and all I got were four word responses at best, mixed with a strange accent. He’d answer my questions fairly truthfully but never elaborated on them. I wondered if he thought I was far too gabby and wished me to shut the hell up.

The breakthrough happened when I learned he got his nursing degree through the US Navy. I had a best friend who spent his life in the Navy and I could talk with some credibility on the whole experience. Once I mentioned Navy ports such as Rota, Doha or say Diego Garcia, he opened up like a book finally.

Growing up in northern Maine was incredibly insular but you didn’t really know that, he said. The only idea you had of the larger world was TV.

He had gone to the regular schools, worked on farms, froze in the winters and hunted with his Dad. After graduation, he was expected to find a full time job and do what everyone else did, work. However, he tells me there were no longer any good jobs around. There was lumbering, if you could find it, farming but that was tight as Maine’s soil totally sucks for large scale farming or some other piddly service job that paid nothing. The most coveted jobs, the ones his Dad and Grandads had, were in the paper mills. But they were leaving one by one for cheaper labor elsewhere, till they eventually vanished.

Ray tells me, “I had seasonal jobs in farming, tourism...picking crops, that sort of thing...none of them paid.”

I asked what he picked and tells me “I used to rake blueberries in August.”

I light up and tell him how I loved blueberries and he agreed but gave me a more knowing look about it.

“You ever rake them?” he asks.

“Nope...wouldn’t know how.” tell him.

“You gotta be strong, and being young helps, but it destroys your spine in time if you keep at it, never get out of it. You work 12 hours rain or shine, constantly bending over, standing up and repeating that all day.”

He goes to tell me it was in a blueberry field was where he made his decision to flee Maine and join the Navy. He had been told by some of his teachers he was smarter than your average bear and would benefit from further education. But how do you pay for it and there are no fabulous universities in Aroostock county.

But the US military would educate you if you qualified.

He signed up and left.

I asked him if he ever went back to Maine as to hear him tell it, it was the last stop before you fell off Edge of Earth.

“I have visited...relatives, friends...I miss the quiet, the very slow pace of life...but there are still no jobs there to this day...it’s the Nebraska of New England you know...so very little there. But you know what? I’ll probably retire there, everyone ‘goes home’ in time.”

“The blueberries.” I tell him.

“Yes, there are those, but you can’t pay the rent with them. When I go back home, retire, I’ll have the money this time.” 

 

South American migrants in Maine...see the cowboy hat no real Mainer would ever wear?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Low Bush variety and tiny, the best. Not those blueberries the size of  your thumbnail you get in Stop & Shop.

Probably takes a while to fill one of these, but you have a field boss telling you to "hurry it up" I bet too

 

 

Memories Again...

 

 

I’ve been on some sales job interviews back when you answered ads in the ProJo, sent in a paper resume and went through a tiered interview process. Two of those I tried for stick with me to this day. IDS Financial (now defunct) and Corey & DeWyre Insurance (also now defunct).

IDS was a firm that sold retail finance packages to anyone who had some retirement savings socked away. The trick was to convince those people to let IDS manage them. At the time, the early 90s, wasn’t such a great time to be investing in the market short term but if you were in it for the long haul, perhaps it would pay and it usually does.

Roy Halston

The guy who headed up the local IDS office in Providence, the sales manager, looked like Roy Halston, the designer. Every hair of his was in place, cleanly shaved and wore what I thought was the latest in men’s fashion for 1992. I could not identify the cologne he was wearing which was not noxious, he used the right amount. This guy’s airs tole me he knew he looked the part and played it. He oozed confidence to nearly seeming smug. You don’t get to run a sale’s office unless you’re the Top Dog in sales, repeatedly, and this guy must’ve had the interpersonal skills to read and then persuade people to make them part with their cash numerous times.

“That’s a European suit...where did you get it?” he asks me when I met him for the first interview. I was surprised he knew that it was. Euro suits have two slits in the back instead of the American single cut. I wasn’t about to tell him the truth that I bought it at a re-sale hole-in-the-wall shop in N. Providence. I didn’t know it was of Euro design till I had it tailored to fit me when the guy asked my if I knew that I had that kind of suit.

“Men’s Warehouse.” I lied as I answered the manager’s question. It was an evasion to hide how cheap I was. I wasn’t about tell him I spent a whole $50 for it.

“Really? I didn’t know that chain sold those kind of suits from Europe.” he says.

I sat there, looking around his office and was surprised at how austere it was. The desk was just, what seemed, a high quality dining room table. There were no pictures on it or piles of paper to process. Just a phone, a yellow legal pad and my resume. The rest of the office had a few plants, a small couch and just his awards and licenses on the wall. Very sparing I thought. What I was to learn later that this was a “fashion,” the office décor of successful finance types.

He goes on to tell me I would be selling $20,000 to over $2 million worth of product. The compensation would be a sliding percentage by commission. The more I sold, the higher the percentage.

“We have someone here who once sold $8 and half million dollars worth of our financial packages to one person. The company awarded him a 4% commission on that, $340,000 for two days work. That person was me.” I guess that’s one of the reasons he ran the office. When he told me that, he seemed rather proud, a bit too proud.

He goes on..

“Our process here is to throw the net out there, bring in applicants, you’d be surprise at what walks of life they come from. We hire only 2% of them. I and the home company in Chicago will decide on the final hires. Do you have any problems with taking tests?”

“No” I tell him.

“Great, let’s get started!”

I go into another room and the secretary brings me a booklet full of questions. She tells me I have a whole hour to finish it, where upon they send it off to Chicago and I’d be brought in for a second interview to discuss it and perhaps more.

I start the test and I realize it was a personality inventory. In college and at an old social work job, I immediately recognized it for what it was. What I couldn’t ascertain, was what it was measuring. You can tell what kind of test it was but not necessarily what it was assessing. The tests are designed like that and I won’t go into how they do it because it’ll take a whole ‘nother page and it would bore you. There was one test I saw, being designe, where it was looking for any psychotic personality traits and asked: “Does peach pie come out perfect every time?” Yes or No. Ah, one day I’ll explain it…

Since I know what this test is, I begin to feel annoyed that I’m being probed for something I cannot figure out and deeply too I bet. So I start purposely answering the questions in any damn way I want, randomly. All of them.

Two weeks later, Halston guy brings me back in for the second interview.

“We got your results back...they couldn’t make heads or tails of them so they put it to one of the psychologists..he says you’re “foxy and dodgy...squirrely...not easy to get a fix on.”

I sat there with my poker face saying...”Who? Me?” But I was kind of surprised that they figured out that much. That my intentionally trying to avoid an honest assessment of who I was was showing up on the test. So what, I wasn’t happy this corporation was trying to sneak a deep peek into me and purposely threw the test like a rigged mafia boxing match.

Halston goes on, with an annoyed look on his face. “We need people who, on the surface, are honest, open, seemingly free of deceit...a...”look” or “countenance” they have…that on first look engenders trust in the customer. First get the customer’s trust, then persuade them to purchase.”

He was saying I wasn’t it. No problem. I wasn’t interested when I had found out a few days after the test, had I passed, that I’d have to spend a month in Chicago for training. Training meant this in sales circles. I’d be intensely competing with others from across the country picked for those few 2% job openings. The contest can be ruthless and I’d be going up against people who had few ethics or morals. So I shook Halston’s hand off I went.

**

I saw it again at an insurance sales jobs I went to in Milford MA, the austere office with the expensive Ethan Allen like dining room table for the desk and an office with little else in it. I began to wonder why these sales guys decorated like this as  seeing this was becoming common. It spoke of Puritan restraint to me, denial of self and the world. Or that’s what they wanted everyone else to see and think.

The sales manager this time was very polite, much older guy. He too was impeccably dressed and if he had any hair, that too would be in place. We sat and spoke of my background and he lit up when he saw I went to Saint Raphael’s. How he knew it I don’t know.

“You were taught by DeLasallians? They’re brutal! You have to be well educated if you graduated. This will help with the position we have.”

“I wasn’t in the top ten of the class...I was in the top 20%...which is OK I guess. Nothing stellar.” I tell him.

“No matter, you have the background to analyze...you have to have it spending time with them…they're like the Jesuits...Nuts.” he says. Later on in life, I’d hear that from others as well. DeLasallians were Jesuit-Lite and that true Jesuits could be wholly insane in their zealotry.

The position was to sell insurance products to homeowners and small businesses. He assured me that once I got going, that within a year I’d be making $50,000 as a fresh new comer, if I had the chops. In time as I learned, it would go up. What opened my eyes were what he called “residuals.” If the customer stayed with the company for years, I’d still be collecting a cut from their policy, as long as they held it. Every year they paid the insurance premium, 2% of that would end up in my pocket. So the trick was to sell as many and as expensive policies as I could.

The interview ended well and he walked me out. In the foyer, I shook his hand and told him the date for the second interview would work. I walked to my car and I noticed him watching me from that foyer, not leaving.

As I sat in the car, he comes out, walking a bit hurriedly to my car and I roll down the window when he comes. He then asks this odd question out of the blue.

“Have you ever, in your past, ever have to deal with some pretty unfair situations, where you had to struggle...thinking there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel? That it’s all for nothing?”

“Yeah, sure..medical problems in my family. I had to play nurse/psychologist/Dr/cabbie...only to know all these efforts will end in death due to their terminal illness.” I tell him.

“Thank you! Thank you!” he says and quickly turns and leaves.

I drive off wondering what the hell that was all about.

A day later I get a curt call cancelling the second interview w/o explanation.

Years later, I was talking to a sales manager at an Irish pub and I told him the same story.

“That was a trick question.” I was told. “He wanted to know if you’ve ever dealt with ugliness...and if you had, he knew you didn’t have that silly optimism other people have who lived an easy, charmed life. He wanted sales people who were perpetually assured of success as their lives so far, have given them that. He wanted people who never had been exposed to adversity. What you’ve been exposed to...has changed you in ways you probably can’t see and it can be a determent in sales.”

I guess he wanted unfailingly happy horseshit people who exude bright sunny, springtime mornings. That ain’t me, I know otherwise how life can be.