Wiretap - The Pitch

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Live from the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, Jonathan tells the story of the ten years he spent telemarketing before getting into radio. With musical guests Imaginary Cities. Plus, Gregor tries to convince Jonathan to take a leaf from Kim Kardashian's book and invest in some plastic surgery.

A lot of news podcasts give you information, the basic facts of a story. What's different about your world tonight is we actually take you there. Paul Hunter, CBC News, Washington. Margaret Evans, CBC News, Aleppo. Jerusalem. Ottawa. Prince Albert. Susan Ormiston, CBC News in Admiralty Bay, Antarctica.

Correspondents around the world, on the ground, and at the source where news is happening. So don't just know, go. Your world tonight from CBC News. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. 10, 9, 8. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and you're listening to Wiretap on CBC Radio 1. Today's episode, The Pitch.

I call. I should be in all my phone calls. You respond. I am talking. I am talking. Blah, blah, blah. Incorrectly. you're always wrong

the words are dripping down the fire a taping song may I inquire A rock new balter for you know I love your anger What advice you have to give To brighten up my day You're talking talk, but no one cares, and no one's listening anyway.

Hello. I have a scalding hot tar pitch of great news, an aerial bombardment of concussion bombs of incendiary devices, falling down like good ideas, exploding all around you, and I'm about to burn the hair. Okay, all right. What's your ideas? You know what's the number one barrier to entry you face in your career? My agent doesn't believe in me. No, you're muttering. I mean, you have a bunch of problems, but your main problem is the way you look. What does it matter how I look? I'm on the radio. It doesn't matter how I look.

Yeah, you're not going to get off the radio. You want to be stuck in radio exile for your whole career? Yes, yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I want to do. You need a calling card. You need a product differentiation. And I start thinking about Kim Kardashian. You know what she's famous for? Being on a reality show? You know why she's got a reality show? Why? Because she has an extraordinary pair of buttocks.

Buttocks. Yes. That's why she has a reality show. It's because of her derrier. Her rear end. I see. Now, when I started thinking about this, I start thinking, what does Johnny have? Nothing, right?

He has no special purpose. What he needs is a special body part that would set him aside and get him national press. What could that be? Hmm, let me think. What could be Johnny's calling card? A big behind? I don't think so. You already have one of those, and it hasn't gotten you any press.

And then it hits me. We set you up as the guy who gets a pair of fake breasts installed. Cricker, what do you? This isn't like getting a sunroof put in there. You're not going to grow them. You're going to get them installed. And it is like getting a sundress. It's not installed.

I'm not even going to dignify this. What are you talking about? You're not going to dignify it. I've already arranged the surgery. You're going to have giant gazongas, and you're going to turn heads. You see yourself with A cup, C cup, whatever you want. They can do these days. Thaline, silicon.

You see yourself with a big pair of bazongas? We make it happen. All we do is write a check. Okay, Gregor, I don't want any gazangas, okay? Okay, fine. You want something more tasteful that you can fit in a jog bra, whatever you want. I understand your need for decoletage. All I'm saying is we'll get you a nice pair of breasts.

Okay, Gregor. Maybe you just want enough to fill a champagne glass. Gregor, I'm not going to live my life with breasts. Of course you're not living your life with breasts. After you get them, then you have the massive regret, and we have the surgery to remove it, and that's how we get you on My Plastic Surgery Nightmare. It's a hot new show coming out on TLC. I can't even picture where you're coming from with this.

I want you to know, Johnny, this is all going to be very tasteful. I know how you feel about doing nude scenes. We're going to put nipple tassels on you. You do realize I'm a man, right? I know you're a man. So what are you talking about? What are you talking about? I'm talking about nipple tassels. Can you stop talking about nipple tassels? You know what? I'm hearing that you have issues.

What issue? What are you talking about? You don't have to get breasts. I don't know what you're so fixated on breast for you. I'm not. Well, you're the one who said. How about this? I'm brainstorming. How about we saw off your foot and sew it on your head? And then you get yourself a foot dealer in commercial. Maybe a Dr. Scholl's sponsor. You see where I'm going with this? You're going to put a foot on my head? You'd be the guy with a foot on his head. I don't think they'd say, oh, which guy with a foot sticking out of his far head are you calling for? They're going to say, oh, you're the foot guy?

We're going to get you on Sally Jessie. And why do I need a foot out of my head if I'm on the radio? That's the stupidest question I've ever heard of my life. Yeah, I guess it is, yeah. We're going to wheel you down the field on the soccer matches to kick out the first ball of the season. You're the guy who's going to be wearing the new Nike sneaker as a very fetching chappo. Picture it. You're on the view.

They're asking you some question. And you're like, I can't even hear you because my feet stink so bad. I can't think straight. Then you puke on Star Jones's lap, tweet heard around the world, before you know it, national press. I don't see how this can. I'm offering you an SUV that's so big you can hardly count the number of bathrooms in the backseat. They make SUVs with bathrooms now? Hey, look, bro, this is your call. Ask yourself, you want to go to Home Depot and buy a bidet that's not even hooked up to plumbing and stuff it in the backseat of your Toyota Corolla that you got for free from your hand?

I don't need a bidet. Or do you want running water, hot and cold running water. Okay, okay. No, no, let me finish. Let me finish. No, let me finish. No, I'm going to say. Let me finish.

Can I finish? You know, you're always wanting me. me to have, like, plastic surgery or telling me to act in the completely opposite way that I normally act or to talk differently, dress differently. Why do you even have me as a client in the first place? My poor Bubba. You really don't think you're good enough for me, do you? No, that's exactly the opposite. I'm asking you why you would even have me as a client. Would you assume yourself? Why will I have you?

That's what I'm saying. I know that's what you're saying. You're wondering why I would stoop so low to pick up a lowly insect like you, like a worm. You characterize you. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Okay, we're going to do some confidence-building exercises. I want you to go find some reflective surface anywhere near you right now. I want you to look into it, see your face, and I want you to gag and throw up. How is that building my confidence?

Because you need to get the insecurity out. You're full of poison, and you need to get it out. Okay, here, let me help. What's your worst feature? Your ponchy midsection? Your offensive odor? You're mincing mealy-mouth affect? Wow, I really feel my confidence building here.

Start with what you don't like about yourself. We're going to work it out. It's not my self-hate. It's your self-hate. hate of me. Pre-associate, think about all the stuff that's wrong with you. You want me to start for you? Okay, I'll go. I'm not doing this. You have kind of a funny-shaped pet. Okay, you go. Gregor, I just- Come on. Let's go around the room. You go. No, I'm not doing this. Okay, you have bad breath. Go ahead. This isn't helping my confidence. No, this is good. Big bushy eyebrows

like an old man. Okay, another one. Your bosoms aren't as purses they can be. I'm not a woman. Maybe who can get you a busier or a shirt with a built-in bras. Just another one of those nights I need it. Just another one of those nights I needed. Staying up late one more time to piece it. All together now, all together now. I'm gonna ride this out. Breaking my back trying to defeat it.

Nobody can read in me, but I'm depleted. All together now, all together now. I'm gonna ride this out. Lately I've been losing sleep investing myself in this thing. this thing, you tell me it's not happening. Well, I'm gonna ride this out. Maybe I'll be happier in the morning.

Something about the sun, how it keeps on shining. Sunny weather now, sunny weather now. I'm gonna ride this out. Baby's gotta give me a little loving. Show me there is nothing left are overcoming. All together now, all together now. I'm gonna write this out. Lately I've been losing sleep.

Investing myself in this thing. You tell me it's not happening. Oh, I'm gonna write this out. Oh, oh. Just another one of those nights I need it. Staying up late for my time to be stead. All together now, all together now. I'm gonna rock this out.

Breaking my back trying to defeat it. Nobody can greet in me, but I'm depleted. All together now, all together now. I'm gonna rock this out. Lately, I've been losing sleep. Fassing myself in this thing. You tell me it's not happening. Oh, I'm gonna write this out.

Oh, oh, oh, I'm gonna write this out. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, I'm gonna write this out. Oh, I'm gonna write this on. Oh, oh. Oh, I'm gonna ride this home. The great imaginary cities. You guys are amazing.

Before I came to Winnipeg on the night before I came I'm from Montreal and I was over at my friend Jackie's house. friend Jackie's house and she has two little kids, Rachel who's six and Samson, who's five, and they had just finished watching the sound of music. And you'd think that, you know, they would be into it because of the singing and the dancing, but in fact they're obsessed with Nazis. And all of their, and they've watched it already, like this was like the 15th time and all their questions are about Nazis, where they come from, and why do they look that way? And so I was waiting for Jackie in the kitchen

while she took them up to bed and put them to sleep and they both sleep in the same room and she overheard them through the door after she closed it. She overheard Rachel saying to Samson, Mama used to know Hitler. And Jackie comes down the stairs and she tells me this and she doesn't know whether she's insulted because her children think that their mother is that evil

or that they think that their mother is that old and I was thinking about it later on and I thought this is when life is good like when life offers you an array of various insults and you can actually pick the one you know that you can most easily live with and I think that's the closest I get to optimism and on that note

This is a story about the 10 years that I spent telemarketing. True. Some years ago, before I got into radio, I used to sell the Montreal Gazette over the phone, and this was my pitch. Hi, my name is Jonathan, and I'm calling from the Gazette. Do you read the newspaper? Because right now we're having a special.

This would prove to be a special that endured the entire 10 years I was employed there. When you're a little kid, you never decide that one day you're going to become a telemarketer. It's not something you plan. It just happens, like the way going bald just happens. Or the way falling down a flight of stairs just happens. One minute, you're at the top of the landing, eating hors d'oeuvres and crudy tays, and the next, you're at the bottom.

And you'll be damned if you can remember each one of the individual steps that led you between the two. All during the time I worked in the Montreal Gazette pitching room, I found it nearly impossible to bring myself to tell anyone I was a telemarketer. When people at parties asked what it was I did for a living, I'd simply say that I was a salesman. A word I believed held greater dignity. And when they asked me what it was I sold, I would say dreams. And then I would look at them all quizzically.

Then I would say that I was only joking. and then they would say, oh, and I would become uncomfortable, and then they would become uncomfortable, and then they would stop asking me anything. As you might expect, the hard thing about working at the Gazette was that there was just so much rejection. Even though you were calling almost 200 people a day, 98% of whom wanted to see you dead,

you still had to bring a certain hopefulness to each call, a feeling that this one, the call you're making right now, could be the one. It was almost like trying to hypnotize yourself into believing that something as certain as, say, gravity didn't exist. And the next time you drop the apple, it won't fall to the ground, but it will float up into the sky like a helium balloon. I would often pretend that the people on the other end of the line were sock puppets to soften the sting of their hang-up. I once shared this thought with a girl who just started working there. Pretend there's a little sock puppet on the other end, I encouraged.

cute with coat button eyes holding the phone in his mouth. How does he talk with a phone in his mouth? she asked. And for this, I really didn't have an answer. If you're absolutely loving your summer read and don't want the book to be over, your experience doesn't actually have to end when you finish reading. I'm Matea Roach, and on my podcast bookends, I sit down with authors to get the inside scoop behind the books you love. Like, why Emma Donoghue is so fascinated by trains,

or how Taylor Jenkins-Reed feels about being a celebrity author. You can check out bookends with Mateo Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. In the pitching room, we all wore these headsets that connected to computers. As soon as we hung up the computer automatically dialed the next number, so that we were always speaking to someone without respite. Generally, I found the repetitiousness of the job comforting. You're never at a loss for words. You always know what you're going to say because what you are going to say is,

Hi, my name is Jonathan. And I wanted to know if you're interested in reading the Montreal Gazette newspaper. Our sales manager was a man named Ray, and if you made two or three sales a day, then you were doing okay, and Ray wouldn't scream at you. Ray was a fat, loudmouthed bearded man who usually wore skin-tight Hawaiian shirts. One of his responsibilities was to keep us inspired with pep talks. Ray would explain to us that when he first started working at the paper, he was sitting right where we were,

and that now, seven years later, he makes as much money as a plumber, and that, in fact, we all had the opportunity to make as much as a plumber. I'm going out tonight and eating a big fat steak, he would say, just like how plumbers do. Another way Ray had of inspiring us was with a bonus system that involved games of fun and chance. As if working in telephone sales wasn't bad enough, Ray had invented a whole incentive system that revolved around Yahtze dice. Seeing grown men and women rolling these dice all excited was so bad that to this day I can't hear the word Yotsie without wanting to kill myself just a little. The weird thing was, though, that from my very first week at the Gazette, I was surprised

to discover that I had a natural gift for sales. Whatever I was and whatever aspirations I had before I started working there, I became an instant Gazette legend, sometimes selling up to 10 subscriptions in the course of a shift. I would look around at the other sad sacks in the pitching room and wonder how they could just go on scraping by with their two or three sales a day. The fellow marketing had been my backup plan, but now I found myself faced with the uncomfortable fact that it was what I was truly good at. I got myself a lucky ballpoint pen and spent half a day's pay on a fancy attiche case to put

my leads in. I even had a special way of filling out the order forms that involved clear capital letters and X's, never checks in the boxes marked Visa or MasterCard. There was a bell on Ray's desk for when you made a sale, and when I made a sale, I had a special way of hitting it with the balls of my fingers that made it sound as crisp and clean as a glockenspiel. I always kept to the one tap per sale rule. I respected the bell, not like some of the other guys who rang the crap out of it, like they were five-year-olds riding their first two-wheeler. Eventually, though, as happens to all the mighty, I fell. Even now, I can't explain

it. Hubris, my diet. Perhaps I started taking my myself too seriously and lost my sense of fun. Who knows? But whatever the case, I suddenly found myself so desperate for sales that at the end of a shift, still with nothing, I would order the paper to my own address and then cancel it the following week. I even tried going to the local library where I found a book on telephone salesmanship written in the 1950s. The book said that you need an alter ego and that it should be a name that ends. in an e sound, because then it forces the client's face into a smile when they repeat your name in their heads.

The book suggested using the name Pat Murphy, because not only did it bring the lips into a smile, but it conjured the image of a good-natured rosy-cheeked Irishman. It's a very real thing, the stink of desperation. It's an actual odor, and people can smell it over the phone line. Your jokes become a little more hurried and forced. Your confidence a little more false. Your pauses, more awkward. I soon found myself gazing longingly at the filled-out order sheets clutched in the

fist of the new office superstar, a 17-year-old girl with the phone named Candy, who would stroll past my desk coming, taking care of business. Now when I came back from the bathroom during my shift, Ray would ask me what the hell took so long. The toilet, he said, was for closers. Although you weren't actually allowed to read while working, I would undertake little projects to have something to do and to show for the time I'd wasted while there.

Once I spent the entire shift ripping up a piece of bazooka bubble gum into small balls. Without any sails at the end of a shift You'd be surprised by what a sense of accomplishment Little balls of chewing gum can bring you Yes, these were some seriously tiny pieces So tainty they could break your heart If you were in fact quite mad

Which I feared I was fast becoming Then I got into keeping a minute-by-minute log of each shift It sort of put me in the mindset of a bookish Devil's Island Inmate trying to preserve his mental faculties Here are some highlights from a much longer work. 9.46 a.m. Ray's fake laugh is like a thousand rusty hooks

I have accidentally swallowed in one gulp. 947. Observation. Ever notice how the word bed looks like a bed? 948. There is a basketball of despair. in my stomach. 9.49, I am so sad.

9.50, I am so, so sad. Each minute until the end of the shift was with little variation, a repetition of those very same words. Since the numbers were automatically dialed, you never knew who was going to pop up in your headset. One time I got my friend Mark Zellnaker on the phone, a guy who I hadn't seen in years. Mark was in my junior high phys ed class.

He used to get so excited while playing hog ball that he'd clutch the ball to his chest and roll around the floor, drooling. I tried to keep him on the phone as long as possible, never saying who I was, gleaning whatever I could about his life. I could hear his kids playing around trying to steal the phone from him,

and all throughout I was shocked by how unfailingly decent he was with me. I felt like the anonymous stranger who shows up on Christmas Day to test a family's kindness. Mark didn't buy the paper, but he didn't rush me off either. It felt good to know that Mark Zellnaker had grown up to be a really nice man. And then one day, I got my own number. I can't explain it better than to say that having that happen is sort of like rounding the corner and running into yourself.

At first, you don't quite recognize that it's you. You look a little shorter and less handsome. But then all of a sudden, in one naked instant, you're face-to-face with yourself. I was the telemarketing dog that had caught its telemarketing tail. The message I left myself, because you just can't resist leaving yourself a message, when something like this, yep, here I am. boy this is awful this is just terrible

this has to mean something but of course it didn't mean anything and then for the next several seconds I listened to the silence on the other end of the line my own line as I worried about the rapid fire calls that would start again the moment I hung up when I got back home that night

I had exactly two messages on my machine One was the message for myself. I was surprised by how loud the background noise was behind me and how much smaller I sounded than I'd imagined all these years. The other message was from my friend Tucker asking me if I had dinner plans. I didn't. And so I called him back and suggested we go for a big fat steak,

just like the way plumbers do. Thank you. All right. So the imaginary cities are going to take us out. Thank you guys so much for coming out. Darkest night Now it surrounds us Coming to an end

Easy when you pretend It hasn't found us It hasn't found us Bring the open light Let them all lead the way we need to see them. Knowing time would pass, we're opening it lands. That's where it's at sail. That's where it's sail.

That's where it's made. Put all our energy into our love. Hoping we made it through together. On Wiretap today you heard Gregor Erlick, and a theme song by listeners Mark Lang, Robin Lang, and Bernie Murrow. Visit cbc.ca.ca slash wiretap for details on how to submit your own theme song. Part two of today's show is recorded at the Winnipeg Comedy Festival with a live performance by Imaginary Cities,

whose debut album, Temporary Resident, is now available on iTunes or at hiddenpony.ca. Special thanks to recording engineer Joe Dudich, Assistant Engineer Greg Baboski and Patrick Knup. Wiretap is produced by Mira Bertlintonic, Crystal Duhame, and me, Jonathan Goldstein. Thank you so much, everybody, and thanks to what your time, Jonathan Gibson.