---

Colton Caldwell had only ever met three successful salespeople.  The first one was in the Pecos county lockup, where he’d spent Thanksgiving of 1981, for reasons that aren’t relevant to this particular part of the story.

The jail was so overcrowded that inmates had to sleep head to foot on thin foam pads that the county had purchased through a small foam and adult toy manufacturing facility owned by Mayor Goodman.  By the end of the third day, when most of the inmates had reached full sobriety, there was a short rather nondescript guy who seemed to capture the attention of the group.  “Do you want to know how to steal a car using nothing but a bobby pin and some chewing gum?”  “Do you want to know how to open the back door of a police cruiser when nobody’s looking?”  “Do you want to know where to find the absolute best weed in the state of Texas that only a handful of people know about?”

Before long this guy had the other inmates gathered around him like he was a campfire and listening to him as though he was preaching the sermon on the mount.  Colton had no idea  whether anything the guy was saying was actually true or not.  But he realized that it didn’t matter.  The guy had commanded the attention of the assembled group and installed himself in the position of Top Dog just by sharing information he assumed they wanted to hear in a manner that made it sound compelling.  Despite the fact that he was sitting in jail, Colton counted the experience a positive one for his career.  He had learned first hand the value of being able to sell something.

Once released, he became a telemarketer.  That decision was based not only on the revelation he’d had by witnessing the master of crime trivia while locked up.  It was as much due to the fact that he’d failed at every other job in Fort Stockton.  Colton Caldwell had been fired from The Pinball Palace, a local arcade establishment in town, for taking advantage of the “free game” key way too often.  He was let go from Frisky Business, the adult toy store Mayor Goodman opened up next to The Scuttlebutt Men’s Club, for “getting way too into the job”.  These failures, however, would set up the success he would enjoy once he learned the ropes in the telemarketing game.

The shift in Colton’s career trajectory could not have come at a better time.    He was actually living in a 1956 Buick Century Estate out at Lake Leon.  The old Buick was in about the same condition as Colton’s dreams:  not completely lost, but in need of a complete makeover if it was going to survive.  Folks who saw the wagon described it as “plenty of surface corrosion on the roof, tailgate and various other panels. Although there is some primer in view, the factory color scheme looks like it could remain present in the form of faded blue and white–a nice combo.”  They were being kind.  Colton had gotten drunk and stepped on one of the Lone Star Longneck empty bottles which caused his ankle to roll and threw him off balance.  When he fell back, his head hit the driver’s side tail lamp, breaking the red plastic lens and causing a pretty nasty gash on the back of his head.  The sound he made as he went down woke up Shannon Hudspeth who’d passed out on top of the sleeping bag she and Colton had shared earlier that afternoon.

A few of the pieces of glass in the wagon were broken.  Nobody knew if they’d been that way when Colton gave Manny over at Manny’s Motor Mart a hundred bucks for the Buick, or if it had been part of the same injury that took out the tail light, or if Shanon had gotten particularly rambunctious in one of their couplings.  “There’s something about doggy style that makes that girl go absolutely crazy,” Rusty had mentioned to someone  at the Grounds for Divorce one Saturday morning.  He sheepishly added, “Not that I would know.  That’s just what I heard.”

When Rex Hall, the pharmacist in town, noted that the steering wheel had completely lost all the plastic surrounding the metal frame Rusty said, “Shannon probably chewed it off while she was bent over the front seat.”  That was when Lucinda told him, “That’s enough.  Let it go.  The poor girl’s been through enough.”

Anyway, the only options Colton had that were more limited than his lodging were those for his employment.  He was motivated to make the telemarketing gig work out.

After his first day on the job, Shannon was waiting for him when he pulled the Buick up near the old mesquite tree back at the lake.  “How’d it go?” she asked while pulling off some clothes.

“You know how everyone says telemarketing is the absolute worst job in all creation?” Colton asked.  Shannon nodded while pulling the loose sweatshirt over her head and down over her freely swinging bosoms. “They’re right.”

That first day Colton realized that he’d become a telemarketer as a culmination of every poor decision he’d ever made.  The building that housed the company was out on Billie Sol Estes Drive, about a mile past the sewage treatment plant.  There was as much broken glass on the storefront window of the offices as there was in his Buick wagon.  Duct tape held the pieces in place, but wind whistled through the cracks, bringing dust and the occasional scorpion in.  All but the most unhealthy scorpions turned around and made their way back out as soon as they could.

The first day of training was designed to flush out all the people who, either physically or mentally, were not able to remain seated for four hours at a time staring into a cathode ray tube.  Half the room did not return for the second day.  That’s when the remaining ‘new hires’ sat and listened to recordings of the successful telemarketers in order to learn how it was done from the Top Producers.  

That night out at Lake Leon eating burgers from the Dairy Twin, Colton told Shannon, “I expected to be wowed by what I was listening to.  I thought these people were making a killing because of their raw talent, their persuasive skills, the sheer magnetism of the presentations they’d fine tuned with practice.  There really didn’t seem to be much to it.”  Shannon finished unbuttoning her shirt so Colton could get his mind off his long hard day at work.

Later, as the two fell asleep in the back of the Buick, their pillows on the lowered tailgate, Colton said, “The manager asked me if I thought I could do the job after listening to the recorded calls.  Inasmuch as my entire life savings was just spent on those two bags of burgers and fries, I told him, ‘Hell yes I can do it.’”

Shannon considered herself lucky to have finally found a man with the drive, talent, and determination to make something of himself.

---

---