A short version
The full-page advertisement in London's Evening Standard asked ten questions. Do you believe you can succeed? Do you want to be rich? Can you exercise authority? The final question lingered: Are you prepared to do whatever it takes?
Scott called the number. A stilted French voice scheduled him for three o'clock at Number Five Hasker Street in Chelsea—right near where his Uncle Frank and Auntie Vi used to live when he was small.
The waiting room was crowded with hopefuls. Nobody talked. No direct eye contact. Scott read Albert Camus' The Plague and waited.
Four o'clock passed before he was ushered into a bare room with fading white paint. Two men sat behind a large black desk: Christophe, with bushy black hair and thick moustache, and Ali, sharp-featured with slick hair and a single curl over his collar. They interrogated Scott about his Durham University degree in Film and Television Studies, his background, his ambitions. All the while observing, sizing him up. The company was called Advanced Art—they specialized in experimental art forms using velvet, selling directly to the public.
They'd be in touch.
Two days later, the phone rang at Mandalay Road in Clapham. "You start Monday." Click. That was it.
The Advanced Art office occupied a basement in Hollywood Road, opposite St. Stephen's Hospital—virtually the last house on the right coming down from Fulham Road, past an attractive restaurant called Keaton's. The office manager, Dom Patel, would be their controller. Christophe and Ali didn't stick around.
The other graduates were a mixed bunch. Nicky was tall, lean, dark, and devastatingly handsome with success written all over him. Larry was an American with lank dark hair, perpetual black shades, and a long creased leather jacket—definitely something to hide. James looked like an actual graduate: fresh from Cambridge with fluffy blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, blue jeans.
Dom Patel didn't waste time. He supplied each graduate with a red portfolio folder containing ten large velvet paintings and five small. They'd be selling that very night. In at the deep end.
On the drive to Canvey Island, Dom explained the pitch: Painting on Velvet® was a new experimental art form produced in an artists' commune in West London. In this New Age era, they were re-introducing art to the masses, rejected by all the dealers and galleries. "In the end," Dom said cynically, "it's like taking money from blind beggars."
Scott found himself at seven-thirty on a Tuesday evening, walking down a street alone, an art folder under his arm, knocking on doors. Soul-destroying. Everyone else was home in the warmth watching television. But Scott was no stranger to this—he'd sold encyclopedias door-to-door for Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press.
What makes a salesman is desperation and nowhere else to go. Once inside a house, a different personality took over. Scott became a young, hungry artist. A newly married couple even remarked on his artistic hands. He sold a large painting called The Audience and a small one, The Peasant Girl, for twelve pounds. He handed Dom nine pounds and received a joint in return. The other graduates were nowhere to be seen.
The next day they needed to recruit. Dom wanted an advertisement for the Standard. Nicky's suggestion was too wordy. Larry leaned back sarcastically: "How about 'fake young artists needed to cold-sell door-to-door to the public en masse!'"
Scott shuffled his feet. "How about 'Bread for Heads'?"
Silence.
"That is brilliant!" Dom declared. "Right on the money!"
He booked it immediately for every working day for a month, in reverse-type to stand out.
The advertisement was a massive success. New Age types descended in droves: long-haired, unkempt, broke, clothes of many colors. The Lost Children of the Empire were out in force.
Nicky and Scott conducted the sales talks in the basement salesroom. They'd hung four velvet paintings on bare walls and arranged second-hand stackable chairs in rows. Music played—Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Frank Zappa. Twenty-some hopeful faces stared back at them.
Scott stripped himself naked metaphorically before this audience of hippies, freaks, heads, dropouts, undesirables. "How do you get inside a house?" he challenged. "You're an artist. You're broke. If you can't respond to me right now, what chance are you going to have on the doorstep?"
A couple of trainees scraped their chairs and left.
"Wake up!" Scott clapped loudly. "You're a hungry artist from a commune in West London. Keep it vague. Someone will take pity if you knock on enough doors. You can look scruffy, unkempt, a Joseph of many colors—but don't stink! You're not tramps selling pegs. You have to fit their idea of a bohemian artist."
They developed stories around the paintings. The Audience—red touches of faces and eyes in darkness, as if the observer stood on stage looking out. The Greek Mask paired with it perfectly: theatre, Athens, two and a half thousand years of western drama. Get the television switched off. Capture their attention before life's interruptions invade. Be an entertainer.
The sales talk lasted fifty minutes. Some walked out halfway through. Not everybody's cup of tea, advanced art. Nicky and Scott got first pick of the hopefuls. Larry selected for himself, mixing the weirdest with the straightest in some macabre fun. James got the three left over. Dom was relieved he didn't have to go out.
After the second day, Scott headed to Milner Square in Islington. Patricia from the Elgin Avenue squat had offered him a room. A handsome Japanese-looking guy let him in. Second floor—one room with a mattress, a chair, a table. A note from Patricia: "Welcome Scott" with a smiley face. Filthy toilet on the stairs but it flushed. The electricity and gas worked. Miracles.
Very quiet. No bath or shower, but Patricia had offered hers upstairs. Definitely the predatory type—keep your distance. The Public Baths in Ironmonger Row weren't far. He'd swim and shower there three mornings a week.
Scott lay on the mattress, lights from bare windows filtering in. Suddenly he had the strongest sensation: he'd been a scribe in a busy capital city in a previous reincarnation, taking down words on stone tablets for those who couldn't write, desperately wishing to be a creative writer amid the din and dirt of a dangerous metropolis.
Ridiculous, perhaps. But no weirder than relying on an advertisement in the Evening Standard and inventing "Bread for Heads" to bring reward and success.
He fell slowly to sleep, lost and found in the same breath without reason.