His next pick up was Roger the bed salesman and
his pal Eddie, who regularly went to Charlie Chan`s Night-club by
Walthamstow Dog Stadium. Eddie was a polite well-spoken man in
his fifties, and not at all the kind of person Streetgeezer would
have expected to be going out "on the pull" with Roger.
Roger was a curly perm, craggy face, dark green double breasted,
Eternity for Men type in his early forties with the swagger that
goes with having a thick gold chain around your wrist and holding
your cigarette with the lighted bit pointing at your palm.
Not for the first time within Streetgeezer's earshot, Roger
boasted how he had sold a bed to a whore and got a freebie for
his trouble. He then went on to explain the psychology of bed
sales.
'This couple are lookin' at two of the best beds and they ask me
what the difference is between the £1200 bed and the £1500 bed,
so I turned round and said the £1500 bed was in a different
class but I suggested they tried them both out. Then I turned
around and told them that if, after trying them both out they
could not tell the difference, they would be foolish to buy the
most expensive.' With this Roger tapped his nose with his
forefinger and said. 'It's called psychology.'
Streetgeezer despaired that there were people with £1500 to
spend on a bed and that they could be taken in by a prat like
Roger. It seemed that the highest rewards went to those who could
sell the largest amount of the least essential goods and
services. The best way to sell the non-essential is to create a
fashion for it; offer a bean bag on a wooden pallet and call it a
Futon. Streetgeezer despised fashion and had developed his own
set of rules to live by:
1 Fashion is just a con to get you to buy clothes before the old
ones have worn out. Streetgeezer definition of fashion: Anything
that makes you look stupid in old photos.
(A black T-shirt and blue jeans may never be fashion but it is
never unfashionable.)
2 If it's on the floor it ain't gonna fall anywhere.
3 Buy all your socks the same colour and design so you never have
to waste time matching pairs.
4 If the hole ain't making your bum cold.....forget it.
5 If you don't put it away.....you won't have to get it out
again. It is as easy to remember where you left something as it
is to remember where you put it away.
6 It is just as easy to wash a plate before you use it as it is
to wash it after you use it.
7 At the end of the week the room is just as tidy whether you
tidied it every day, or just the day before.
They passed the Cooks Ferry Inn, boarded up and about to be
demolished, taking with it the Trad Jazz memories of North London
and leaving behind an uninterrupted landscape of superstores and
drive-thru's. They pulled off the Circular at the Billet
Roundabout, named after another pub that had disappeared, and
then up Chingford Road drawing ever closer to the "Welcome
to the STOW" neon sign that punctured the night sky like the
threat of a Stanley knife attack.