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The Kirby
Going door-to-door can really suck, sometimes
by Franny French

My brother-in-law Ronnie got a job selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. He was nineteen and from a rich family, and he had no skills. Being a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman was the only job he could get. His family had high hopes for him. They were the richest people in my town. We were the poorest people I knew.

Ronnie also had a little heroin problem. During his whole vacuum cleaner sales career he only sold one vacuum cleaner. He sold it to my mother who couldn't afford it, so Ronnie loaned her the money to pay for it. My mother liked all men, especially when they paid for things.

The Kirbys were very expensive and elaborate. They came with a number of attachments. Ronnie insisted on giving my mother the full demonstration; he said he needed the practice. During the demonstration, he called my mother Mrs. French, as if she were a stranger, and as if he had just come to the door, instead of living in the basement with my sister. He showed us a bunch of the attachments and explained that the vacuum cleaner doubled as a carpet shampooer. He had us follow him into one of the bedrooms, and lifted up the bedspread. "The mattress, Mrs. French, is the dirtiest thing in the house. While you're sleeping, you don't realize it, but thousands of tiny mites are living there." "What's a mite?" I asked. He said, "It's in the ant family." Suddenly he seemed nervous and confused. He said, "I'll be right back," and went into the backyard to get high. I saw him out the kitchen window, sitting in a wheel barrel smoking a joint.

When he came back inside he had taken his shirt off. My mother, who was kind of a prude, seemed surprised that he was half-naked. "It's all part of the demonstration," Ronnie said, trying to keep his eyes in the front of his head. He pulled a bag of dirt out of his display case and said, "Okay, Mrs. French, See this? This is a bag of dirt." My mother nodded. "Now I'm opening the bag of dirt." He took a handful and rubbed it on his chubby chest, then began to vacuum himself with one of the smaller hose attachments. He yelled over the sound of the Kirby, "Dirt and grime can get deep into your shag carpeting. The Kirby makes cleaning your carpet a joy and a pleasure each and every time you vacuum!" he yelled. My mother smiled. "It's a beautiful vacuum!" she yelled back. I sat on the couch with a peanut butter sandwich and watched with great interest. I was ten years old and thinking about career choices.

Ronnie handed my mother the attachment. "Here, Mrs. French, you try it." She took the hose and ran the attachment over his chest, stopping too long on his left nipple. You could see the pain register on his face and he blurted out, "Please turn off the Kirby, Mrs. French. Mrs. French, please turn off the Kirby." "There's so many bells and whistles on this thing," my mother said. "I can't find the on-off switch." Ronnie walked around to the front of the vacuum with the hose still stuck to him. He started hitting switches until he turned the Kirby off.

After "selling" his first vacuum cleaner, Ronnie continued to try to sell more Kirbys. He went all up and down our street, but dragged it out and never hit more than two houses a day. Most of our neighbors couldn't afford such an expensive vacuum cleaner, but in an effort to be neighborly, and because they liked my mother, they let Ronnie come in and do his demonstrations. He didn't seem to care that he never made a sale, but seemed only to want to prove to his parents that he was doing something to deserve the money they regularly gave him.

Ronnie was a Kirby salesman for about a month, knocking on people's doors in a short sleeved shirt and purple knit tie. There were a few houses he went to more than once, and from the way he stumbled out of them I soon realized that these were the places he went to get high. Somewhere along the way, he lost his official Kirby salesman display case. He borrowed a carry-on suitcase from my mother and made his own, filling it with baggies of dirt, wood shavings, and broken glass. He had bottles of liquid in there too, his own idea, which he would pour on people's carpets when demonstrating the Kirby's shampoo capabilities. He poured bong water on the carpet at Mrs. Bayes's house and she became alarmed. Later, Mr. Bayes called our house. "You tell that junkie fatso that if he ever comes around here scaring my wife again I'll knock him from here to Kingdom Come!" Because Ronnie's sales record was so bad, the Kirby company eventually fired him. They charged him for the missing display case.

We had our Kirby for years. My mother was never big on cleaning up, and she continued to claim that she wasn't good with complicated machines and never could figure out that one. I grew to like the Kirby very much. It had a nice loud whirr and could suction up almost anything. It had smooth wheels and lights in three places, and in dark corners it looked like a tiny house with lit-up windows. Our family had it for much longer than we had Ronnie. It was a beautiful machine.