There was a former FBI agent who sold us our handguns, a heavy-set,
innocent-looking cowboy who drove a truck and wore a baseball cap, and we
bought guns without serial numbers, just in case. I ordered a Glock — though
he preferred to trade in American-made revolvers and automatic pistols —
because it seemed to me to be the kind of handgun that fitted me. At this
time in my life, I wore Paul Smith blazers, whatever shirts Tom Ford was
designing, and Prada loafers without socks.
I thought a Glock was cool. I say we bought our handguns, but really we traded
them for heavy gold bracelets, cheap but flashy diamond rings and
stainless-steel Rolex watches: jewellery the retired agent could sell to his
buddies, some of whom, one guessed — especially by their choice of jewellery
— had one or both feet in the criminal life.
In the 1990s, my brother and I owned a small chain of luxury jewellers in
Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Every morning at this time, after I turned on
the lights and spun open the safes, and did a line or two of cocaine to wake
myself up, I would take my Glock from my desk drawer and go to the bathroom
out the back — this was the partners’ bathroom, with the marble sink and
jade faucet handles, used only by my brother and myself — and place the
barrel of the pistol in my mouth to try to shoot myself. I still remember
the oily, industrial taste of that gun. With the theatricality and the
narcissism of the would-be suicide, I stared at myself in the large gilt
mirror, trying to make myself do it. After a few minutes, I gave up. I
promised myself that, tomorrow, I would find the courage to do it.
Then, one morning — this had become part of my morning routine, almost like
brushing my teeth — I said to myself, “Clancy, this has got to stop.” I went
to my computer and wrote a short story about my hatred of the life I was
living, called Some Important Details of My Office. I sent it to a magazine,
they accepted it, and I wrote some more. Soon, that seed bloomed into more
stories, all about the jewellery business, until I suddenly realised I had a
novel, How to Sell, which is being published at the end of this month.
Why was I, as Keats writes, “half in love with easeful Death”? Those days were
full of BMW convertibles and $1,000-a-night hotel suites, of high-priced
hookers and Louis Roederer Cristal and international travel — we rode
elephants into the mountains of northern Thailand to buy rubies and
sapphires from the miners; we exchanged mazals with diamond dealers in Tel
Aviv — everything, on one account of the good life, a man in his late
twenties might desire. But I was in despair. More than anything, it was the
deceitfulness of the business I was in. I felt like I had descended to
Malebolge, Dante’s eighth circle of hell, to the ditch where they boil in
pitch and tar liars, counterfeiters, grafters, con men.
For centuries, the jewellery business has been home to trickery and deceit. It
is, after all, a business based on illusion: what value is there really to a
diamond, except in a drill bit? Why buy a Rolex when any £2 Hong Kong quartz
keeps better time? The rubies in the crown jewels of England are now
believed to be garnets: the jeweller himself may or may not have known he
was passing off a cheap and common stone for among the most precious and
prized (although, it should be added, one doesn't often hear of rubies
accidentally being sold at the price of garnets). Used Rolexes are cleaned
up and sold as new, with Chinese counterfeit boxes, hanging tags and papers.
Used Rolexes are sold as authentic with counterfeit bands — the best of
these are made in Italy, and the 18-carat gold is real, so that many
jewellers can’t tell a great Italian band from the Swiss product — with
little else on the watch that came from a factory in Geneva. Often, the only
authentically Rolex part of a used Rolex is the head of the watch — even the
movement has been replaced — because the head has a serial number stamped on
it that is difficult to duplicate with the precision of Rolex.
I remember a promotion we ran shortly after I returned from a buying trip to
Israel. We took full-page ads in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram boasting of
wholesale prices to the public, stating: “Direct from the cutters! 10% over
our costs! We will show you the invoices!” And, indeed, we did show the
customers the invoices from the Israeli diamond cutters who had sold us the
stones. What the customer didn’t know, of course, was that the cutters had
agreed to provide us with a set of invoices showing our cost at 50% higher
than what we had actually paid, guaranteeing us a respectable — though not
egregious — 65% profit on every stone we sold. It was one of the best
promotions I ever ran; within a week, we sold every diamond I’d brought
back. Local jewellers were outraged, but the truth was, they could only
complain so much: they were playing similar games in other ways. We all
cheated and lied to close a deal, that was the level playing field. If you
didn’t follow those rules, you would lose.
There was also a depraved satisfaction in it: you almost felt that the
customer deserved to be cheated, because his values were so confused that he
would squander his money on something solely for the purpose of impressing
his friends. I used to tease my customers, if I knew them well, that they
were only buying a seven-carat sapphire ring or a diamond-crusted Rolex
President because they couldn’t drive their Porsche inside the shopping
mall. That they were rich to boot didn’t help matters: loaded, with no
respect for real values, why did they deserve to be treated with respect, to
get real value for their (no doubt, ill-gotten) lucre? So the self-deceived
thinking of the deceiver runs.
In his Confessions, speaking of his first theft, St Augustine writes: “Who can
disentangle this most twisted and most inextricable knottiness?” (You wonder
if the pun on ‘‘naughtiness’’ works in Latin as well.) “It is revolting; I
hate to think of it; I hate to look at it.” I hate to look at it: this, I
think, is why Augustine (and Rousseau, and Walt Whitman, among many others)
felt the need to write down the history of his battle with sin. Recent
philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Peter Brooks (and Clancy Martin —
since leaving the jewellery business, I have become a professor of
philosophy, and now chair my department) have argued that confession is one
of the crucial means for not only recovering from our sins, but for learning
from them and even, perhaps, repaying them. Writing it down forces us to
look at it. Letting others read it forces us to acknowledge it, to take
responsibility for it. Yes, that was me, I did that, there is nobody else
to blame. The well-known fourth step in AA has us take a moral inventory and
confess it honestly to another; we must undertake this step before
progressing to step nine, where we make apologies. “It is the confession,
not the priest, that gives us absolution,” Oscar Wilde wrote.
I believe this is why that first story saved my life, and why the writing of
How to Sell, my novel about those sordid years in the jewellery business — a
real spilling of the guts, revealing many of the industry’s secrets (one
review of the American edition began: “People in the jewellery business are
going to hate Clancy Martin”) — was crucial to my beginning a new, more honest
life. Not that we ever get to leave these things behind; the process of
making amends for past sins lasts, I suspect, a lifetime. But here, as in so
many things, beginnings are everything. Parts of the novel, of course, are
pure fiction. Others, such as the time I was robbed of several hundred
thousand dollars of loose diamonds and cash by three African-American
prostitutes in my hotel room in Las Vegas, are straight reportage of the
facts. And there are places — this is how memory works, and how art works,
especially when trying to capture the interior life — where, rereading it
now, I myself cannot separate the fact from the fiction.
That is one lesson I took away from the jewellery business, however: the
appearance of reality can become the reality. Wallace Stevens said it best,
in his attack on Plato’s idea that there is the ordinary world we live in
and an ideal world where truth resides. No, Stevens says, to be human is to
be a tangled mess of the two: “Let be be finale of seem. The only
emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” We are all emperors, whipping our
concupiscent curds and selling our ice cream. But we can also admit it.
How to Sell by Clancy Martin is available at the BooksFirst price of
£11.69, inc p&p; 0845 271 2135, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
