a liquor salesman in a diner never uses the word "please." Instead he'll always say "hon." Thus, "Coffee, please," becomes "Coffee, hon." I never mastered it. When it was my turn to order I'd mumble something like, "I'll have a Reuben, please." For Steve Venucci, the man who was going to teach me the ropes of the liquor business, this wasn't good enough. Becoming a liquor salesman didn't begin with how you spoke to liquor store owners, it began with how you spoke to diner waitresses. "Don't bring him a Reuben, bring him a BLT," he'd say to the waitress, and then, turning to me, he'd add, "They can't make Reubens here." "He says he wants a Reuben, Steve," she'd answer, "our Reubens are very good." "Your Reubens are terrible." "What do you know?" "I know plenty. You pre-slice the meat and then it's all dried out." "Now he's a short-order cook!" It was no use varying the order. If I asked for a BLT in another place, that would be the one place on Long Island that couldn't make a BLT. The exchanges would quickly escalate into shouting matches that have since helped me to fully identify with the "Seinfeld" character George Costanza when he's caught in the crossfire of his parents' fights. But by the time we'd leave for our afternoon sales, everything would be all right again: Steve would have commented on the construction of the BLT and the waitress would be beaming at the $5 tip. I slowly came to understand that it wasn't fighting, it was flirting; between men who spent their days driving from liquor store to liquor store and women who spent their days pouring coffee, between men whose lives revolved around the word "please" and women whom no one any longer called "hon." "Let's roll," was the phrase with which we always left diners. Steve was a wiseguy manqué and I didn't want to be the one to burst his bubble. "Let's roll," I'd answer. We'd roll his in maroon, late-model Cadillac and pull to a stop right in front of the next liquor store on his rounds. I knew that there was an instant as he got out of the car when his mind went "Hit it!" and he was no longer a guy picking his teeth but a sales machine in red suspenders, cuff links in the form of dollar signs and a don't-fuck-with-me way of entering each store that, if you didn't know he was selling booze, might cause you to mistake him for a stick-up man. When I was trained, my turf was going to be the $4.99 Champagne market in Manhattan. Steve wanted me to master his way of pushing the stuff. First he'd get all the easy sales like Bacardi and Absolut out of the way and then he'd lock his gaze onto the liquor store owner's eyes and he'd pitch. "We're launching a new Champagne, Morty. It'll retail at $4.99. I want you to help me build the brand." This was a key phrase that was meant to convince Morty that he was going to be Seagrams' point man in Mineola. Next came the sale and it always went something like this. "I want you to play ball with me on this. I'm going to drop five cases on you for the price of four." The liquor business is fast. No sooner would Morty have agreed to play ball than the order would be written and I'd be sent out to the car to phone it in to the distributor. By the time I was back inside, Steve and Morty would be talking ponies and I'd have a quiet moment standing amid the stacked displays when I'd wonder whether I'd ever be able to do this. The $4.99 Champagne market was completely saturated. I wouldn't even have the likes of Bacardi or Dewars to warm them up with. The only reason I'd been hired was because no self-respecting salesman would agree to push the stuff. I'd been employed for that purpose. Building the brand was my project. If Steve didn't make the sale, the drive to the next store could be hell. (I'd been with him when he'd repeated the word "asshole" for 35 minutes in the fast lane of the Long Island Expressway.) Not because he cared about the lousy commission on a couple of cases of cheap Champagne but because he'd been embarrassed. If he couldn't sell it on his home turf, how was an innocent like me supposed to sell it in Manhattan? He worried about me. He even went so far as to change my name. "Patric," he said one day as we drove between stores. "Yes, Steve?" "Patric, I'm thinking of your name." "What about it?" "You'll never make it if you call yourself Patric. I'm going to call you Pat." "Pat's different from Patric?" "Totally different. Sales are about who you are, Pat. Patric's cold, but Pat's a pal." I knew that Steve had high hopes for me and took my training seriously. He even went so far as to take me to product-presentation mornings just so that I'd get to know other salesmen. These events were held in a warehouse in Newark, which from the outside looked ominous in a mob-related sort of way but inside was the scene of festive dancing. Chairs were set up in front of a stage and groups of dancers performed around displays of whatever brand of liquor the distributor was trying to get the salesmen to push. It was always rotgut stuff. The dancers would dance jigs around an Irish Cream blended in the Bronx, or do Russian peasant dances around vodka distilled in Queens, or the rumba around white rum from Gainsville, Fla. The salesmen didn't much care. They talked to each other all the way through the entertainment. They knew what they had to know: The commission for getting rid of this stuff was double the usual amount. Otherwise, coming to these promotions was just an excuse to get together. Afterwards, we would all invade a nearby diner and Steve made sure that he introduced me to them all. They were like uncles to me. They encouraged me. They pinched my cheeks. One of them even wanted to share. "Pat," he said to me as we waited to order, "I woke up this morning and I knew I had to get back to the old country. Ever been there?" My mind raced as I tried to figure out whether by old country he meant Ireland, Italy or Israel. But the waitress saved me. She was standing over us waiting for his order. "What's the meatloaf like here?" he asked her. "It's meatloaf," she shrugged. He handed her the menu and ordered. "Meatloaf, hon." Eventually, of course, I was on my own. I walked up and down the freezing avenues talking in Spanish through bullet-proof partitions in liquor stores in Spanish Harlem and in French to fancy mid-town wine stores. Nobody wanted the stuff. Occasionally a liquor store owner would tell me that I reminded him of some particularly bad moment in his life and he'd order a case and I'd do a little dance at a phone booth in a snow drift as I called the order in. Calling myself Pat may have helped a little, but it didn't help much. Phrases that sounded so definite when they came out of Steve's mouth sounded like the jabbering of the insane when they came out of mine. The store-owners' jaws would drop when I asked them to help me build the brand. They seemed to grow faint when I asked them to play ball with me. When I informed one of them that I wanted to drop five cases on him for the price of four, he jabbed his finger in the direction of his stock room and he shouted at me. "Ya think I got space! Ya think I got a mall hidden back there! Ya think this is California!" After two months and one particularly bad day, I resigned. I simply called the man who'd hired me and told him I didn't want to do it any longer. "Fine," he said and he hung up on me. I felt great. But before it was over I knew I had one more phone call to make. I reached Steve in his car somewhere on Long Island and I told him what I'd done. He said that he understood. He said that it was a hard gig. "Hey, good luck Patric," he said as he hung up, and I felt kind of sorry to hear my own name. March 12, 1997 Cooking questions? Ask Patric Kuh at TasteTalk A R C H I V E S Previous columns: Flavor This! (03/05/97) My Ireland (2/19/97) An Afternoon in Chelsea (02/05/97) "You Yelled, Madam?" (01/27/97) Basic Instinct (01/13/97) The Burnt-Out Cook archive

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