Panorama City by Antoine Wilson

recognized her as a fellow wage slave and gave her a smile, she smiled back quickly with her mouth only, no other motion in her face. I sat on a bench, the box at my feet, I tried to place the smell in the air, laundry, sweat, and a third thing, an air freshener that must have been designed in a lab somewhere, there was no way to describe it. Paul sat next to me and explained that we were waiting for the head honcho, that he would liaison with the head honcho and then let me get to selling, he explained that he would love to stick around and help me, but that in order to keep up appearances he would have to return to the field office. I was about to ask him what he meant when the so-called head honcho came out. His name was Carter, he had a bumpy bald head and strange eyebrows, it looked like he had shaved off his eyebrows and then darkened the skin where they’d been, his skin looked like it’d been burned and then fixed by doctors, is the best way I can put it. He was large, I mean he was thick, I couldn’t tell if he was in shape, or had been in shape but no longer was, there was no way to know whether he was built of fat or muscle without touching him. I realized immediately that he and Paul had talked before, which was a relief. Paul explained that as the West Coast regional sales representative for a pharmaceutical firm he couldn’t name because of market research-related privacy concerns, all his words, he couldn’t be more excited to roll out this new antioxidant cream through selected, by which he said he meant exclusive, outlets in Southern California, by which he meant Carter’s health club. He then introduced me as a rising star on his sales team and told him I’d be handling the table today. I shook hands with Carter, his hand was warm like it had been resting on a radiator. Carter said that if there was anything he could do for me, and then he didn’t finish the sentence. Paul and I set up a folding table near the entrance, just past where people swiped their cards, and together we arranged a few rows of antioxidant creams and penlights, and then he pulled out a little folding cardboard sign that listed the benefits of the product and so on. He said that there was one thing I shouldn’t forget while I was working today, which was that we were in a temple, that we had entered a sacred space, that this was a temple to the body, and that the most important organ was not the brain, as some thought, or the heart, but the skin, without the skin the brain and heart would be useless. We had brought with us a product to honor that organ, we had brought with us the most advanced antioxidant skin cream available, and then he said surely I could riff on that for a while, surely I could elaborate on that pitch, he had many things to take care of, he was already late for the lunch shift, but soon there would be no more parking cars, he said, no more picking trash off dumpsters, he was putting his faith and trust in me, he had no doubt I would succeed.
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    I didn’t have an opportunity to use Paul’s sales pitch, exactly, I mean that by the time I’d asked someone what the most important organ was in the human body, they had already swiped their card and nodded at the girl behind the counter and were gone inside. Or, if they were on the way out, they pointed at their watches, or just smiled and apologized and kept moving. A few people paused long enough for me to say that the skin was the most important organ, but then they kept going, one said huh, and more than one said, as if asking, but not really asking, The skin is an organ? before going deeper into the health club or out the front door. Finally a guy approached my table, he was on his way out, he smelled like a fresh shower, his hair was still wet, he was wearing a suit and had a duffel bag over his shoulder, he asked me if this was the sort of shit his wife would like. I explained that the special qualities of the cream