Pep Talks

What was Dad saying to himself? What am I saying to myself?

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that on the opening night of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the playwright’s parents brought some friends - first-generation success stories in the garment trade. After the show, the friend-patriarch goes up and says “Arthur, great play, absolutely marvelous! Just one thing - the title is all wrong. It should be Life of a Salesman!”

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My father was a salesman, and I remember him talking to himself in the mornings, tying his tie while I grunted and sulked into my Catholic-school uniform. He’d debate, introduce himself, and get into little dialogues. Years later, I mentioned this to him, and he responded, “Who else was I going to talk to?” My father did a lot of things, many important and many good. But he didn’t make it look easy. Growing up with him was one of those mixed blessings you hear about.

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As a salesman, what he wore was part of what he did. Early memories include weekend trips to House of Doherty off Main Street in downtown Worcester. I’d play with the electric shoe buffer while older men sold my dad shirts and ties. The place had been around since the thirties and must have seemed like quite something when my dad was growing up in reduced circumstances in a three-decker beside WPI. By the time I was around, he’d travelled the world with the Army and with work. Doherty had to be a little dowdy and behind the times, a fulfillment and a letdown. He stopped going when I was young.

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Clothes were part of what I resisted, and still do. Decked out in my khakis and button-down for a day’s labor, my wife remarked that I looked nice one morning. For context, I’m not a morning person. So understand that when I responded, “I look like a slave. Is that what you like? Why not accessorize with a chain around my neck?” she understood.

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Extremely fit people make me uneasy. Just think of all the awful self-slander you have to say to yourself to get to the gym. Then imagine the humorless toxic waste boiling inside the skulls of those beauties with no wiggle. In a way, they’re an unkind mirror. Like me, they’re unwilling to be anything but who they are. Among such standards, how can anyone allow for anyone else? How can anyone forgive deviation? Why would you? Especially once you’re not horny or starving all the time so much anymore, why would you forgive?

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My daughter says she hears me talking to myself. She says she hears me cursing. I apologize for the cursing.  

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Hiding in the almost-hidden conference room, I spy blue skies within strips of square, reflective windows. Who am I? What am I doing here? What happened? The pep talk murmurs in the background, its momentum more powerful than doubt. Two hours until leaving time. One meeting. Days like this, my uncomfortable shirt does most of the work, as uncomfortable shirts often have. The consequences of relying on uncomfortable shirts are all around us.

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In one of his finer moments as a father, he told me the story of Tommy Lasorda. By the time I was a kid, Lasorda was famous as the colorful manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and perhaps moreso as a Slim-Fast spokesman. But he’d been a player once. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a pitcher, I think. At the time, the team had to decide between Tommy and another player who wasn’t as good, but who had a better pedigree, more experience. They chose the other guy. And Tommy’s career was over after a single year in the majors. Tommy got screwed. That was why I was going to Catholic school for the fourth grade, my father explained.

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My kids started a new school this year, and complained the first few weeks. My daughter had enjoyed school up to that point. She was entering fourth grade. I’d hated grade school, nearly every single minute of it. And I felt as though I’d made some terrible mistake by having kids only to feed them into the same miserable system. I was at a loss for a pep talk, and told them that school was a fact of life, not a negotiation. Let them figure out their own pep talks.

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Pep talks can get rough. A few years ago, with a baby son and a young daughter and a full-time job, I was working on a novel after their bedtimes in my closet office. I was so tired that my eyes would start to droop shut as I typed. I’d hit myself in the face to stay awake, the pain and reflexive anger keeping me alert. Because otherwise I’d lose the thing I had in mind. Because otherwise, I’d lose hope.

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A good pep talk connects something stupid and unpleasant with something meaningful and immense. In high school, our football team was losing the big Thanksgiving Day Game on the slushy, muddy field of Holy Cross Stadium. By then, we’d seen enough over the last two months to know that our team was nothing special. Still, at halftime, the coach pulled out all the stops - invoking the recent death an ancient old man who’d hung around practices and was indulgently referred to as a coach. He was looking down on us. The head coach also invoked the recent birth of his own son as something that was supposed to mean something to a bunch of teenage boys.

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We lost. So what does that mean for the dead old coach or the newborn boy? Was the game really so important as all that? Win or lose, you have to move on, eventually. But what happens to all those frothy stories you make up to get a little more out of yourself than you honestly want to give? They sink to the bottom of the ocean. They cut your feet like broken shells when you try to set your feet. In a strong tide, when all you want is to escape the crashing surf, they make something as simple as finding ground to stand on almost impossible.

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There are collective pep talks. They go in and out of vogue. They’re never quite as true or as thorough as intelligent people would prefer. But they give everyone a sense that their little roles add up to something. In America, we had the story of making the world safe for democracy and spreading the freedoms that come with it, of being a shining example and so forth. It worked in some places. We won the Cold War, and gave the Russians democracy, where it’s been a mixed bag at best. The biggest freedoms seem to have been the freedoms the powerful few can wield over everyone else. Then we tried dropping democracy on a few countries in the Middle East. It turns out they were more interested in what they had going on before we started bombing. The pep talk wasn’t playing like it used to. Why not? The easy answer is that the Americans cheated. I’m not saying that’s what happened, just how it feels sometimes. Suddenly every foul institution, shady deal and national crime became the story of America. People can get motivated to fix the present, but fixing the past is impossible. The only thing a moral person can do about the past is grieve, and grief is the opposite of a pep talk.

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Without a pep talk, discipline wanes. Drugs and gambling are fun. Throughout the ages, people have come to the consensus that drugs and gambling are a waste of otherwise productive energy, perhaps a waste of life itself. But if no one’s doing anything anyway, then why hassle people over it? The recent wave of legalization hasn’t felt like a liberation so much as an abdication.

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You can imagine anything is happening, or ignore anything, but not forever. And you don’t have to be a genius to see through these pep talks (see “Why Teenagers Win Arguments”). That said, a world without pep talks is a world with nothing to do. And for many, having nothing to do is part of our pep talk - as a terrifying state of failure, or as a goal.

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I don’t know much about the landed British gentry, but I know they hunt. Every so often, they rise early, dress up, get their friends together, gather a pack of hounds and go hunt a rabbit or a fox or something. The hunted animal isn’t causing them any real problems. But it’s something to do, something to pursue, a memory of difficulty, of chasing something.

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Outside the castle walls, though, the pep talk is necessary. It’s hard not to gamble and take drugs. It’s hard to stay sober and go to work. A pep talk helps hold it together. We all look around and see the human damage. Absent a good pep talk, all that’s left is the damage, the damaged and the guilt.

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In the end, maybe you catch the rabbit. Or maybe you go back to your castle empty handed. Maybe your so-called career only enriched your enemies and harmed your loved ones. Maybe your cleaning of kitchens is what made humanity’s eventual effervescent thriving across the galaxies possible. Maybe it was all nearly-cheerful toil in the service of a story that doesn’t hold water. Maybe it really is the life of a salesman.

Selected bibliography

Why Teenagers Win Arguments