alittlepoison

I was employed for a short time to distribute flyers on the streets of Manhattan. It was part of a promotion for the Build Your Own Bear store. I don’t know whether you have ever been inside a Build Your Own Bear store, but the idea is you select various teddy-bear parts that you like the look of - arms, paws, ears, face, snout etc. - and then assemble them with the professional help of trained Build Your Own Bear store staff. The flyers I was employed to hand out advertised a five dollar discount.

I took a box of about a thousand flyers downtown and found a busy street to hand them out on. There was a nice, steady flow of pedestrians here, and I selected a location right in the middle of the pavement where they couldn’t very easily avoid me. Every ten seconds or so, as instructed by my employers, I called out: “Five dollars off Build A Bear! Build A Bear, five dollars off!” I tried to look as non-threatening as I could, and smiled cheerfully at any children.

Pretty soon, I began to feel ridiculous. The sun was hot, the street was crowded, and I was deliberately getting in everybody’s way. I realized, also, that the majority of these pedestrians were businessmen hurrying to meetings and Orthodox Jews from the nearby diamond-selling district. Clearly, none of these people desired to build their own bear at all; and even had they done so, they all looked rich enough to buy one at the store without the five dollar discount I was offering. They had no reason whatsoever to take one of my flyers. I found this idea dispiriting.

Once my confidence was undermined, my motivation started to go too. I found myself simplifying my sales pitch to: “Five dollar bear discount! Five dollar bear discount!” And then, before long, I was saying in a quieter voice: “Five dollars off bears. Please.” And: “These flyers are free.”

Then a little fat man approached me shyly. He was the first person who had yet taken the slightest bit of notice in what I was doing.

“Excuse me,” he said, scratching his nose, “I didn’t hear you clearly. Are those actually real bears you’re promoting?”

“Yes,” I replied at once - in the three-quarters of an hour I had been there I had given out less than twenty flyers, and was desperate to start getting rid of them - “there’s a five dollar discount on your very own real bear.”

“Good,” the little fat man said, “I like bears very much.” He took a flyer from my hand and hurried excitedly away.

My confidence returned. So this was the way to disseminate the things. “Real bears!” I started shouting, “five dollars off real bears!” A commuter grabbed a flyer in passing, and the man behind him noticed this and took one for himself. Before long I was handing them out rapidly. “Real bears for sale! Bears going cheap! Bears, bears, bears! Lovely bears!”

“What kind of bears?” yelled a delivery man as he dashed past me.

“Any bear you like!” I answered, stuffing a flyer into his mail sack, “we’ve got them all!”

“Have you got any polar bears?” asked a security guard from the doorway of a nearby bank.

“Polar, grizzly, black, brown, panda!” I cried, hurling a fistful of flyers into the air, where the city wind whipped them up towards the skyscrapers, “bears, bears, bears, real live bears!”

“What about koalas?” shouted an Orthodox rabbi, almost fighting his way through the crowd to get to me.

“Yes, koalas! Koalas too!”

“Then give me a flyer, quickly! Oh boy, I love koalas!” he cried out in delight, laughing with happiness.

“Who doesn’t love koalas? Who doesn’t love bears?” I yelled triumphantly, clambering on top of a newspaper stand to get a better view of the crowd. There were probably about one hundred people gathered around me now, spilling off the pavement into the road and blocking a lane of traffic. The people at the back were climbing on top of each other to see what was going on, and, when they had heard the news, clambering desperately past one another to get closer to the front. The people at the front were reading their flyers delightedly and slapping their companions on the back. Before long, some of the younger office workers set up a chant.

“Bears, bears, bears!” they chanted, beating a rhythm on the pavement with their briefcases and umbrellas, “bears, bears, bears!”

“Bears, bears, bears!” I shrieked along with them, like some wild and furious god of war inciting his troops to mayhem, “bears, bears, bears!” The chanting grew louder and the crowd grew bigger as motorists abandoned their vehicles in the road. Shop-keepers pulled down the shutters of their shops, bankers came whirling through the spinning doors of banks; executives, street cleaners, bus drivers, politicians, all drawn unstoppably by the irresistible attractive force of discount bears. The crowd surely numbered a thousand by this time. And above this bubbling sea of elated faces, the brightly-coloured flyers whirled in their hundreds, swooping and flapping like flocks of ecstatic birds.

And just as the frenzy of the crowd reached its crescendo, I threw back my head and cried in a strong, kingly voice: “Lovers of bears, your moment has come! It’s time to use that five dollar discount in your hand! Everyone, to the Build Your Own Bear store, quickly! Bears, bears, bears, they shall be yours! The store is located on 46th Street and 5th Avenue!”

And with a mighty roar, the crowd turned as one, and charged southwards waving their flyers triumphantly before them.

Within a minute, the street was empty. The traffic began to move as it had before. I looked in my bag. There was one flyer left. I put this very carefully in the bin, and set off home.

I imagined I had, on the whole, done rather well; that my employer would be pleased with me, hopefully rewarding my efforts with future flyer distribution work, and pay me well. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The next morning I received a phone call from the nice lady at the temping office, in which I was told that the Build Your Own Bear store had been burnt down in a riot the previous day, and a senior staff member badly trampled by a hysterical crowd of maniacs. For this reason, there were no flyer distribution jobs for the foreseeable future. Also, the police were making inquiries. She wished me luck with finding alternative employment, and even said at the end, “You take care now, sweetheart.”

You take care now, sweetheart. I put down the phone and repeated this several times. You take care now, sweetheart. What a lovely thing to say, I thought. This is truly a wonderful world.