Lost Yinzer: Bought and Sold                                                               John Grochalski

I don’t like to be sold things.  I hate commercials.  I don’t even like to be sold the stuff that I want to buy, because having it pushed on me makes me want it less.  But being sold products is pretty much inescapable in America.  The buses and subways cars are full of ads, and billboards line the streets.  Television is corrupt with ads, to the point where they’ve become just as much of an over-rated spectacle as the Super Bowl.  Movies have been trying to sell us shit for nearly twenty years now.  Product placement is rampant in banal comedies, overwrought dramas, and those lumps of turd that they nominate for the Oscars every year.  Those social networking games that you so-called friends plague my Facebook with are mining our information in order to sell us something.  My gmail tries to sell me shit every day along its not-so-subtle sidebar.  Hell, even the 3G or 4G or however many “Gs” there are now in networks offer you the ability to get online even when you find yourself as deep into the wilderness as one would dare go.  And we all know that the Internet is ripe with ads, with people trying to sell you things.  I haven’t stated anything here that we don’t already know, and have accepted blindly.

Yet I found it a little off-putting last Friday when I came home from work to find that corporate solicitors had set up a table in the lobby of my building.  Who were these corporate raiders you ask?  For legality reasons, let’s just call them…..Perizon.  I found it off-putting because, well, it was my fucking lobby, the last place where I thought I’d find some asshole in a headset and uniform polo shirt asking me if I wanted to try their new mobile phone/cable/Internet plan.  But there they were, two of them, typing like Neanderthals with their thumbs into their little gadgets, playing rap music, and basically being loud in the lobby of my building all under the bright red of the Perizon banner.  I was aghast, flabbergasted, and a lot of other adjectives for horrified and astonished.  I hadn’t even had my first drink of the night.  And I needed a drink.  It had been a bad week.  I’d gotten into an argument with a fellow co-worker, and a member of the administration told my superior that I dressed like a homeless person.  The last thing that I needed after a work week such as the one I’d had, especially after coming off of a crowded, advertise-laden bus full of children screaming and yelling while I tried to catch up on Green Lantern, was some smiling peon from a corporation that I have a particular hatred for, trying to push “smart” phone literature at me in my own goddamned lobby.  But there they were.

My wife and I found out that the capitalistic horror in which we were being subjected to was something called a lobby event.  The kind, if not slow-witted, representatives of Perizon informed us that this event had been approved and sponsored by the members of our co-op and the board of directors in our building.  But who were these mysterious co-op members?  And when in the hell did my little apartment building get a board of directors?  Were these the same people who complained to my superintendent that my wife and I were the ones smoking pot in the building? The same people who sneered at me as I took our mounds of beer cans, wine bottles, and plastic scotch tubs down to the basement in my underwear?

I asked the Perizon rep, and he turned the blaring rap music down just long enough to inform us that apparently co-ops do these things all of the time, these lobby events.  We informed him that we’d never heard of the goddamned things, and he was happy to enlighten us.  My wife and I were apparently a part of a grand “happening,” a collaboration between home living and the tools necessary to simplify the average existence.  The poor Perizon fools could not understand our disappointment at being the unwilling dupes in this scenario, the anger at having to hear their muted sales pitch from behind our evening door, as we struggled with a bottle or so of wine, the first season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD, and remaining methane exhaust from our work week.

There was essentially nothing we could do to put a stop to this event.  We’d been bought and sold by our landlord, our co-op, and our building’s faceless board of directors.  Bought and sold without our consent.  Because we shared an address with the dozen or so other assholes who wanted Perizon to greet them on their way in from work on a Friday night.  And I hazard to say that there were a lot of people who stopped in the lobby to talk to these corporate thugs.  From behind my locked and secured door in our bastion of economic freedom, my wife and I heard the muted Perizon sales pitch given to dozens of my building’s co-inhabitants.  Granted, humanity failed me on a daily basis but I was sure some of these people would question Perizon as my wife and I had.  But that wasn’t the case.  There was laughter and gaiety coming out of the people who lived in my building, an actual joy in being sold something in the lobby of their own home.  Humanity had stumped me again.  Was there no morality left?  No desire for privacy and autonomy in our own domain?  Had the human thirst for product and pitch become so extreme that it had to be satiated every so many feet?  Jesus Christ, what a strip mall life we lead.

Perizon has been back at least two more times in the past week, and I’m sure they’ll be at the building many more times.  I’ve walked by their little table twice already, and have been solicited as many times.  I hope those poor bastards don’t catch me when I’m drunk.  Stumbling off the bus last night, I passed some goon in a red polo shirt trying to pass out fliers on the street.  He was just walking along as if it were normal to pass out brochures to joggers, people walking their dogs, and tired idiots such as myself.  If the paper from the brochure wasn’t so thick and glossy, I would’ve wiped my ass with it.  My wife and I aren’t sure what to do about this corporate invasion in our home, our neighborhood.  Her calls to the landlord have gone unanswered.  I fear he may be too busy counting his payoff to take our phone calls of wrath.  Every time I try to locate the superintendent where he smokes cigarettes in his usual crevice, he is surprisingly not there.  Perhaps he is on an all-expense paid vacation brought to him by the good folks at Perizon. Who knows?

All I know is that the future is getting scarier by the day.  Search engines are mining our information and selling it to companies who, in turn, are trying to sell us their crap.  Other sites are simply collecting our data, the stuff we freely pour into the feed every single day.  Schools and public institutions, desperate for cash, are saddling up with corporations and making suicide pacts with them.  The games we play on social networks are just aggregates for a larger capitalistic conspiracy.  Even the average beer commercial freaks me the fuck out.  I fear that one day we’ll each have to sign up for corporate sponsorship just to get out of bed in the morning.  Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds crazy.  Maybe it is.  Up until last week I thought the idea of walking into my lobby and having someone from a company push their product at me was a little bit nuts as well.  But today is new comic book day.  And tonight is pizza night.  I’m probably going to save the guys from Perizon a slice or so, maybe a couple of cans of beer, because I’m sure they’re going to be hungry from sitting in my lobby once again, trying to sell me all of that precious stuff.

John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out and Glass City.  He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.