Jinxed Jane-A True Account As Told To Me By A Retired Travelling Salesman

In my travels as an encyclopedia salesman, over these past 50 years, I’ve come across many wonderful people and their tales of love and woe and end up with happy endings, you know, the usual “boy meets girl falls in love has umpteen babies and lives happily ever after.” As a traveling salesman, I sold set after set after set of encyclopedias to libraries, firemen, policemen, schools, churches, museums, little old ladies, widows, young couples and so on and so forth.

Now, many folks say that the traveling salesman is as obsolete as the newspaper boy. Frankly, they are right! It was a boring job, but I took it, because I needed to put food on the table and clothes on my back and pay the bills and buy birthday gifts and Christmas presents. I had to make it interesting, so I ended up by giving away premiums with every sale. I realized in the beginning that it would eat up a lot of my profit, but I persisted and soon enough, I had a nice customer base I could live comfortably on, for what turned out to be a lifetime.

Little did I know back then, but I learned early on, that having a gimmick is what makes the world go ‘round. The business world has gimmicks. Something to bring you into the door just a little bit. Enough so, that you will virtually be begging for more and more as time goes on. That is exactly what they want you to believe, that their gimmick is the only one tailor-made exclusively for you.

I collected many stories while traveling on the road and among them was this strange tale of gimmickry that happened to a friend of mine named Jane. Jane was a nice young woman who was one of my earliest customers. It seems that one day, Jane was asked to take care of a couple of pets that belonged to an unfriendly neighbor who was going out of town for the weekend at the time.

“No one will watch my dog and cat, won’t you will please do it for me? I have no one else to turn to and I can’t go unless the pets are taken care of. Won’t you help me out?” this neighbor woman asked Jane.

And of course, Jane said yes, even though she was not fond of her neighbor. So when Jane goes to open up the apartment with the key to feed the animals, she finds that not only did this woman leave no food behind for her pets, but the apartment is completely filthy and the dog and cat are covered in feces and there are flies as far as the eye can see. And the stench was unbearable.

Therefore, Jane ends up taking care of the dog and cat for an entire month. Meanwhile, there is virtually no word from her neighbor. No trace of her whatsoever. So, one day when Jane is feeding the dog and cat at this woman’s apartment, the telephone rings, it is a man from the local sheriff’s office. The officer asks for a name, which she does not recognize. Jane says she is there, just taking care of the dog and cat, can she take a message? Then the officer says, “Well if you see him, tell him his mother is locked up.”

And Jane stammers in horror, “Locked up? What for? What’s going on here, officer?”

“Well I may as well fill you in. Your neighbor was arrested late last month for trying to kill her mother and collect her insurance policy. Poor old woman, nobody in the world deserves a daughter like that," he says.

Jane feels bad for this woman, so she looks in the local phone directory to see if she has any relatives in the immediate area and finds this woman has a son; so naturally, Jane tries calling this woman’s son, only to learn that he is also in jail, but for non-related charges. The trouble is, Jane really loves the dog and cat, but she knows she cannot take them in forever. Therefore, she brings them down to the local animal shelter only to find out later that the animals were diseased and had to be destroyed.

Jane was heartbroken. Well now, Jane came out of that episode virtually shaken, but still okay. This was nothing, compared to what happened to her a few weeks later. I was beginning to wonder if Jane was jinxed or just had a string of bad luck tied to her soul.

Jane meets a man who she really likes. The trouble with this guy though is that he purposely uses her and takes no pity on her soul. He enjoys slapping her around and humiliating her in front of all of her friends, in public. Still, she puts up with this jerk because she has a big crush on him. Unfortunately, one night, she goes over to see him and he is stinking drunk and in the process, she is slapped around, beaten bloody and is sporting several black and blue marks on her face, arms and legs.

So I say, enough is enough and I decide to meet her for dinner the next night and see if I can help her out. Poor Jane. Even though she lives two blocks away from the diner where I was meeting her at, she decided to ride her bicycle. The moment she walks out the door and begins pedaling, a massive thunderstorm appears out of nowhere and pounds raindrops like overflowing river of tears. Two blocks away! Can you imagine that and she comes in soaking wet, as if she had just taken a shower with her clothes on!

Well, Jane tells me she is “Starving’ H. Marvin,” if you catch my drift and she is really craving a cheeseburger and an order of French fries and she had not eaten for several hours. She works nights and sleeps like a vampire during the day. Well, we give our order to the waiter and the waiter’s face turns sheet white, as he tells us that the diner has run the out of French fries.

“How in the devil could they have run out of French fries so early in evening,” she exclaims angrily. “It’s not even six o’clock and there are no French fries? What in God’s name is going on here?”

So the waiter goes back to the kitchen and talks to the manager, who comes back to our table expressing his sorrow that there are no French fries, so as a token of kindness, he gives her a free large order of mashed potatoes.

Trouble is, the potatoes are rotten and she ends up getting a bad case of diarrhea. What we find out later is the manager says he had spare helpings of other people’s food from leftover plates collecting bacteria and bugs because his icebox busted the night before last. Kinda gross, but true.

Jane died a week later as a result of eating those potatoes. Poor girl, the cause was botulism. That restaurant went out of business shortly thereafter. And me, well, I’ve never eaten potatoes since that time. It is funny how little things like that make an impact on one so great that it changes an entire lifestyle of living.

Ah. Nevertheless, such is life, you know. It sort of reminds me of a strange dark tale about a man named Joe whom I met 10 years ago, that couldn’t find lubricant one day to take care of a rash, so he used salsa, but that’s another story for another time.