Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman (16 page)

My prom date Maureen and I had remained close friends despite the fact that she may (everyone else thinks so) or may not (as she claims) have kissed another guy
that memorable May evening in 1988. She and a large group of her pals from the University of Delaware rented a beach house every summer in Sea Girt, New Jersey. Every night was Saturday night, and they knew which bars had what drink specials when. On a Friday morning, we lounged on their front porch treating Parker House happy hour–related side effects with cold hair of the dog. As beach-bound families pulling carts filled with chairs, pails, shovels, and towels passed by, little children gleaming with sunblock and wearing “swimmies” paused to gawk at the strangely pale, red-eyed creatures sitting in the shade, their mothers quickly urging them to move on. Kicking his way through the sea of empty cans toward the front door, one of Maureen’s housemates asked why another of the regulars hadn’t come down on Thursday night as usual. “He couldn’t get off work today,” came the answer.

This stirred a memory in Maureen’s clouded brain. “Do you guys know that Jamie didn’t even take vacation to come here? His boss never knows where he is. Does he have a great job or what?” Unanimously, the group agreed with her assessment. The conversation shifted to a more important topic when the winner of the previous night’s hook-up contest (competitors kicked in $5 and the first person to kiss a member of the opposite sex collected the purse) shuffled home in familiar clothes, eleven hours after the rest of us. As the inquisition raged, I sat back to consider the employment risk I had taken to enjoy this
classy visit. Unauthorized absence from the sales territory was grounds for immediate dismissal. I had just tripled my odds of getting canned.

On my second beer of the morning, it occurred to me that there would be very little monetary activity on my next expense report. Specifically, there would be
no
activity for Wednesday through Friday, a surefire red flag. Reps routinely went a day or two without incurring an expense—we didn’t bring lunch in every day, and there were plenty of offices that didn’t charge for parking—but it was rare to go three straight days without spending cash someplace. The fact that I had been in New Jersey for two days was not helping my spending in Indiana.

Eventually, our energy level revived and we began multitasking, eating lunch and playing whiffle ball while drinking. I left the obligatory success story voice mail, probably sounding happier than ever, at two
P.M.
, and before I could say “two-for-one long necks” it was four. Suddenly, I realized that I needed something concrete to establish that I had, in fact, been in Indiana. I needed a receipt, and it was pretty tough to get a receipt in Indiana when sitting in New Jersey at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Who in South Bend could get one for me? After several minutes of casing my mental Rolodex, I thought of Brian, the only person I knew in Indiana who had nothing to do at three in the afternoon Central time.

A friend from Notre Dame, Brian had recently been cut as a linebacker by the Indianapolis Colts and moved
back to South Bend to be with his fiancée, a law student. Since he was a dinnertime waiter at a local restaurant, he had a schedule conducive to helping me out of my jam. I called just as he was leaving for the gym. “Dude, I need a little favor.” Brian listened silently and paused before responding with a laugh. I could almost see him shaking his head in disbelief.

“Fucking Reidy. Are you serious?” I assured him that I was and that several adult beverages with his name on them would be served upon my return.

“I only need to drive to Elkhart and back?” he asked, referring to a town twenty miles and three highway exits east of South Bend.

“That’s it, man,” I said, accepting a congratulatory beer from Maureen. “Thanks!”

When I got home and checked my mailbox, two scraps of white paper imprinted with
INDIANA TOLL ROAD
sat atop the bills and magazines. Worth just 75 cents each, to me they were priceless. I submitted the receipts with my next expense report, careful to omit another charge for the same amount in order to avoid profiting from my scheme.
What do you mean I wasn’t working? You have the toll receipts, don’t you?

That little journey cost me $20 in beer, but it was money well spent. From there, I began to refine my skills. Computer experts will tell you that in order to build a successful security system you must ask yourself, “If I were a hacker, how would I get in?” Looking at it from
that point of view, I asked myself a similar question: “If I were Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane and it was my job to catch lazy, sneaky guys like me, what would I look for to clue me in?”

Answer: easy-to-get, impossible-to-dispute receipts, like those worth less than a dollar with time stamps from parking lots or tollbooths.
Yikes
.

I had to find ways to get receipts with higher charges. This posed a problem, not in terms of the purchases themselves, but the means of payment. For example, if I submitted a cash receipt for $50 worth of whatever to my boss, his spider senses would’ve begun tingling like crazy. “Why didn’t you use your credit card?” And if Bruce approved such an expense, the watchdogs in HQ certainly would ask questions.

Clearly, the most airtight way to document expenses incurred while I was not working was for someone else to use my AmEx corporate card in Indiana. Unfortunately, this was potentially hazardous; even if Brian or another friend agreed to purchase something with my card, a store clerk might ask for ID. The possibility of jail time, my accomplices explained, was a slight deterrent to their assisting me.

Back at the drawing board, I wracked my brain for a way of using the AmEx card to cover my shady tracks without endangering the anal virginity of my friends. To do so, I needed an establishment that was above reproach (someplace a sales rep would normally make a purchase),
that accepted American Express,
and
that didn’t ask for an ID to compare to the name on the credit card. I came up with nothing.

Shortly after returning from New Jersey, I was leaning against my car while getting gas, and I watched people insert their credit cards into the gas pumps, fill their tanks, accept or decline a receipt, and drive away. Done pumping, I grabbed my receipt and drove off. About three days later, I realized, “Some of those other drivers got
receipts,
and
I
got a receipt. Gas stations give receipts!” All I had to do was find someone to get my gas while I was out of town. This person would have to fill up my car instead of his own, since Pfizer matched company car mileage to the amount of gas purchased. Receipts turned in with zero miles added to the previous total would smell fishy.

I asked all my buddies, but got no takers. In this case, it wasn’t the fear of prison showers that limited their interest, but the location of my apartment. I was the only member of my crowd to live in Mishawaka, a town twenty minutes from central South Bend, and no one wanted to “drive all the way out there, park my car, get into your freaking
company car,
pump your gas, return your car, and then get back into my car to drive all the freaking way back to South Bend.” I could see their point. Additionally, since only spouses were insured while driving company cars, I was liable for any damages incurred with a friend behind the wheel, although I would have
gladly rolled the dice on a $500 deductible for the thrill of enjoying a cold beer après ski in Vail while supposedly working in the Hoosier state.

When offers of unlimited beer failed to recruit any small-time crooks, though, I resigned myself to cutting back on “days off.” Thankfully, a new world of opportunities presented itself. Dr. Wacky, a young, single, female physician, gave me a hard time from the start. While routinely ignoring my sales pitches, she’d roll her eyes and make derogatory comments like, “Shush, everybody, so we can hear Jamie’s spiel.” For drug reps, the word
spiel
ranks just below
peddle
—as in, “What are you peddling today?”—on the DCSs, or Doctor’s Condescension Scale. She made fun of my ties and picked on me incessantly. If we had been in the fourth grade, she would have kicked me in the shins. It became clear that she
liked me
liked me.

Because she worked in one of my more important practices, I saw her often. Over time, Dr. Wacky realized I wasn’t a typical drug rep looking to push product; on the contrary, I rarely
mentioned
Zithromax. Eventually, she started asking me about my weekends and what bars I frequented, sharing her own tips for nighttime fun. Phone calls at home became commonplace. Before I knew it, she had invited me out for drinks a few times, but we couldn’t get our schedules together.

This behavior was not lost on my colleagues, who worked under the assumption that my having sex with a
doctor would be good for our Zithromax sales and begged me to date her. Sales success, however, was not the only driving force behind these requests. Every male drug rep had at least one story about losing business to a female competitor who dated a doctor, so it was every guy’s fantasy to turn the tables on the lady competition. Thus, my dating Dr. Wacky was a no-brainer. I disagreed.

For starters, she was already using a ton of Zithromax. Dr. Wacky had gone from prescribing no Zithromax at all to using it in 45 percent of her patients who got antibiotic prescriptions (according to the sales data Pfizer purchased from the third-party company that got it from the pharmacy chains), making her our second-biggest writer in town. If we started sleeping together, sure, sales would probably soar to 70 or 80 percent for a month or two, but when it ended—and it always ended—she would immediately return to her zero usage days. To me, twelve months at 45 percent were better than two months of 80 percent followed by ten months of nothing.

I thought we could just be friends, get drinks, maybe see a movie once in a while. Friends. She had other plans.

We finally went out for drinks on a Wednesday night. I wore shorts and a golf shirt, while she had on a black skirt and an expensive top and wore more makeup than I had ever seen on her. Dr. Wacky ordered a gin and tonic, and I got a large draft beer. Before I was a quarter of the way done, she tilted her head back, milking the glass for the last drops. She ordered another, and finished
that one before I finished my beer. “Nervous?” I asked. She laughed—nervously—and quickly looked for the waitress. In short, she got loaded. I couldn’t let her drive home in that condition, and since I lived much closer to the bar than she did, I brought her back to my place. Unbeknownst to me, this was all part of her plan.

I was hoping she’d sober up in an hour or two, but she could not or would not. Dr. Wacky chased me in circles around my apartment like the crazy, love-struck witch chased Bugs in the cartoons. I hadn’t run that much in years. At one point, I sought refuge in the bathroom, emerging only when I heard a male voice call, “Jamie?” Returning cautiously to my living room—
Can she morph into another human form and change her voice to suit her evil needs like the Terminator?—
I found my future roommate, Steve, standing in the doorway and my inebriated physician sprawled on the floor, skirt hiked up her legs.

“Uh, I’ll, uh, call you tomorrow,” Steve said, as he dashed out the door. I chased after him, yelling for him to
please
hang out for a while, but my protests echoed off the stairwell walls, unanswered. Trudging back inside, I slumped against the closed door. Dr. Wacky was no longer lying on the floor, though. Thankfully, she was also not a member of the Terminator class. Finally exhausted from chasing me around my apartment, she had moved herself to my hand-me-down couch, where she had passed out. After covering her with a blanket, I locked my bedroom door and fell asleep. She was gone by the time I
woke up in the morning. I figured it’d be a while before I saw her again.

The next evening I was packing for my second trip of the summer to the Jersey Shore when my doorbell rang.
Dr. Wacky! What a nice surprise.
Very sober and very contrite, she apologized for her behavior the previous evening and asked if there was anything she could do to make it up to me. I shook my head no and told her to forget it.

“Please!” she said. “I’d really like to.” Feeling uncomfortable, I rubbed my neck and looked around the room to avoid her persistent eye contact. After spying my half-packed bag, I turned back to her.

“Seriously,” she said. “Let me make it up to you.” Not wanting to be rude, I gave in.

“Well, there is one
little
thing. …”

And that was how it came to be that at five-thirty on a Friday night, while drinking beers at a poolside bar in Sea Girt, New Jersey, I actually filled up my gas tank in Indiana.

After leaving her office, Dr. Wacky drove to my apartment, where she got out of her car and into my unlocked Lumina. She found the keys under the mat, then drove to a gas station a few blocks away. Once there, she took my American Express corporate card out of the glove box and, as if she were Jamie Reidy, Pfizer employee, inserted it into the machine and filled up my tank with regular unleaded. After which she took the receipt, placed
it—along with the AmEx card—in the glove box, drove back to my apartment, and parked my car.
What do you mean I wasn’t working? You have the gas receipt, don’t you?

CHAPTER