The Deep Whatsis
Peter Mattei
A gripping and hilarious satire of hipsters, consumerism, contemporary art, for fans of Bret Easton Ellis and Don Delillo. When a successful Advertising Executive meets a mischievous intern, his whole sensational existence begins to crumble around him.Eric Nye, a Chief Idea Officer at a New York advertising agency, is the ultimate corporate success story. Ruthless, talented and young, his employers pay him an extortionate amount of money to manage the ‘downsizing’ of their company, which entails firing dozens of longtime employees before their pensions kick in.It’s only when he meets ‘Intern’ that cracks begin to show in his seemingly triumphant existence. Eric could have ‘Intern’ any time he wants her. So why hasn’t he? And why can’t he stop thinking about her. Before long, what begins as sexual frustration becomes an existential crisis that causes Eric to question his careers, his relationships, even his sanity.Mattei’s addictive debut follows its anti-hero’s quest for contemporary self-identity in a toxic corporate world.
PETER MATTEI
The Deep Whatsis
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ubfa1f215-f1c2-5561-98c8-f63bb69e71d4)
Part One (#uf96dceae-2b53-556a-865e-22b5061c62e9)
Chapter 1.1 (#ub5b5c591-3100-5bae-86ac-a5dc5914de05)
Chapter 1.2 (#u5df80dff-9ae1-50ae-bcc9-932fb7d3850f)
Chapter 1.3 (#u8ced508f-688a-51ce-98c1-02e900726529)
Chapter 1.4 (#u24c3681d-fe93-5338-8c17-ab898b3941f4)
Chapter 1.5 (#ue3eb1fda-8983-5c3e-a338-e0d4183e1386)
Chapter 1.6 (#uf0ea521a-a66e-5b29-a837-f71780e5e145)
Chapter 1.7 (#ue1a45ca6-9150-5d60-b11e-4fda8e37a02b)
Chapter 1.8 (#u4dc47a9d-e39f-571f-ac8d-a509575e3a82)
Chapter 1.9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1.10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2.11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2.12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2.13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2.14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2.15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2.16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3.26 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
part one
1.1
The intern from the edit house is so drunk she is trying to take her skin off. At least that’s what it looks like. She is already half-naked and is grabbing at her flesh trying to find the edge of the Threadless T-shirt that she lost half an hour ago. I don’t remember her name.
“What are you doing?” I ask her as she pulls at her body, but it is no use, she can’t hear me and if she can she doesn’t understand.
Certain people when they drink too much they get an idea in their head and then it forms a kind of feedback loop in which the thought just repeats itself over and over, as if their brain is trying to grip on to something, anything, for dear life, because all of reality is slipping into the void. Megan? Morgan? Caitlin? Finally she speaks and her answer is she wants to take her T-shirt off because she likes to sleep naked, she’s going to sleep now, it’s one of the checkboxes of her still-forming self, sleeping in the nude, it’s who she is, she sleeps in the nude in her sleeping bag even in winter, that’s what she is saying to me over and over out of nowhere in the dark, so I just say good night and turn the lights off. She keeps babbling and looking at me with such a confused sense of joy that I want to laugh, so I do laugh.
Then I go into the bedroom and get a pillow and go into the bathroom and get the little trash-biny thing. I slide the pillow under her head and I put the trash-biny thing next to her and I tap her shoulder and point to the thing and explain to her that if she needs to barf she should barf in that and not on the floor, if possible, especially not on the pillow—it’s Icelandic eiderdown.
She looks up at me and smiles and then she passes out.
1.2
Intern is extremely cute, alright, granted, her face at least, no question, it’s like God smiling on sunshine, and she’s cool, she quote unquote gets it, but still I plan that after this morning’s pretend-awkward good-bye, which hopefully will happen in a mere couple of hours, to never see her again. For the moment however she is totally crashed and it’s around 6 AM and I’m not really tired, which may have something to do with the stimulants we were ingesting at the bar where we met.
“What’s up?” she said as I turned around, spun really, why I’m not sure, sloshing a double Rittenhouse rocks in my right hand. I was meeting this friend of mine, Seth Krallman, playwright turned pot dealer turned yoga guru, but he was blowing me off, what a surprise.
“Don’t I know you?” she said.
“No,” I said, never having seen the girl in my life.
“Yes, yes I do know you,” she said. “You got the tuna.” And then she told me it was she who brought the big sashimi platters into the editing session for us at lunchtime, the Viva Paper Towel editing session at the edit house where she worked, and she remembered me because I requested the Oma Blue Fin, rarest and most expensive of fish. It was like ninety dollars a roll and I barely touched the thing.
“I thought it was pretty lame,” she said. “For the price.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “Do you always eat people’s leftovers?”
“Do you always waste really expensive food that is a) on the endangered list and b) caught by slave labor?” she asked, cocking her head to the earnest side and waiting for an answer.
“Um, I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said.
“No you’re not,” she said.
“No?”
“No, you’re buying me a drink, aren’t you?”
Maggie Mallory Margot is an intern at Unkindest Cuts, and I posted a slew of financial services commercials there two years ago so they owe me “big time.” I’m not saying they told her she had to go home with me—I think she did that for her own reasons and because she drank too much, thanks mostly to my largesse. Now, sleeping there, she looks a bit more fleshy than I remember, curled up on the floor, pale, motionless. But, I must say, she’s quite good looking: I make a mental note that she probably ranks in the upper third quadrant of girls I have ever had quasi-sexual relations with in terms of physical attractiveness; when you look at her in a certain light or from a certain angle, she’s feral, and her eyes cradle a syrupyness you can almost taste. What would Howard Roark say about her? He was no writer but would always do something, something bold and innovative, writing being the opposite of that. I tap a note into my phone: “idea for short film, what if Howard Roark gave a TED talk?” I think about wanking but I don’t.
Then I decide not to go back into my bedroom, because I can’t sleep and because I want to make sure she doesn’t wake up and steal something from me. So I sit down at my desk in the living area and take a look at the latest draft of the screenplay I am writing, which is called either GAME THEORY or KILL SCREEN or MAD DECENT—I haven’t decided yet. I’ve been writing it for three years and I am still trying to figure out the inciting incident, which is the most important thing, at least according to some book I bought in LA when I lived there. Every guy in advertising is working on a screenplay they will never complete but I have more drive and discipline than most so maybe I will, although I am still on page two.
For the name of my main character I chose my own name, which is Eric Nye, and my own age, which is thirty-three, and my own hometown, which is Canfield, Ohio. I think that is a good touch. I think they call it self-referential.
I rewrite the opening sentence a few times and mostly I stare at the screen, adjusting my hard-on, which is perpetual for medicinal reasons, at least that is my theory, then I realize that the sun is coming up over the Williamsburg Bridge, which you can see outside my triple-pane window. Suddenly I can smell something funny and I go into the living area and sure enough she has upchucked—on my throw rug, believe it or not, which she managed to pull toward her and scrunch up to use as a pillow because she rolled off the nineteen-hundred-dollar St. Geneve one that I had provided for her.
I wake her up and she’s a bit more cogent than before and so I walk her into the bathroom and turn the shower on and stick her head under it. Poor sad little girl, whatever will become of you? Then I dry her off and hand her the T-shirt and give her a bottle of Voss to wash her mouth out with. Her beauty has been fairly well line-itemed at this point, and I am not happy to report that she is even more sexy when 50 percent clothed. When she finally gets dressed and exits with a halfhearted wave of shame I jerk off, take my pills, and call a car service.
1.3
I fire people. It’s my job.
But not only do I can them, in the process I help them, or should I say I wake them up, or I should say I take the time to write for them an honorable if not epic death, a death more dramatic and meaningful than the one they would otherwise be entitled to.
See, I was hired to “clean house” here at Tate, the ad agency in New York City where I am the Chief Idea Officer. I was brought in to create a culture of innovation and creativity, meaning get rid of the dead wood, shitcan the old and the slow and the weak, and that’s what I’m doing, because it’s my job.
At first it was something I dreaded. I knew I was being paid handsomely to be the one to blame, the one who does the Dirty Deed, but still, it was distinctly not cool. Then I grew up. I read on page 334 of The Fountainhead where Howard Roark, say, cuts his own testicles off with a fork in front of his cousin or something, I don’t remember, not that exactly, but he does some extremely fucked-up shit that is totally ridiculous but in the end is worth it. That hit me when I read it. So after firing a handful of pathetic art directors and copywriters in their forties and fifties my attitude changed. I realized that my problem with this aspect of my job was purely in my head and that if I were to be totally honest with myself I would admit that there was something heroic about it. The thrill of the hunt, I guess. I had my prey cornered, I had the HR Lady watching me (I call her Lady but she wasn’t much older than me; tall, half-Korean—she lives on Diet Coke, coffee, and wine), and I had my sentence to speak, which thankfully she had written and rehearsed with me: “I’m very sorry to say this but we’re going to have to let you go.” That sentence was like a quiet little knife in my hands, a hand-painted bespoke artisanal elephant gun loaded and cocked and all I had to do was open my mouth and speak it, destiny would take its course, there was nothing anyone could do. The aftermoment would hang there in the air like steam, and the HR Lady would look at my now-finished and cold-sweating prey with fake sympathy but really I knew what she was thinking, she was thinking she was in the presence of a hard-boiled killer and it turned her on.
Once I gave in to understanding the simple truth about human existence I began enjoying the primal beauty and manifest joy of the kill. I began to turn it into an elaborate ritual. The act wasn’t exactly the same thing as a hunt because the prey had no chance to escape, to run away and survive, as they do in the wild. A different metaphor comes to mind. Last year I was dating a woman, a model who lived in LA, and we went to Barcelona for a long weekend. On Sunday afternoon we went to the bullfight. She objected to this because sport bulls were on the PETA list and she spewed some line of rote nonsense about the cruelty of it and for the most part I bought into that. Of course I was also hoping to get blown one more time before we flew home.
“Think of it as anthropology,” I said. “Think of it as a window into another world.” And I suppose it was another world, in the way that, well, consider the care and patience that a serial killer will take with the body of his victims, or a medical examiner with a corpse, there is something horrific about it and honorable at the same time, like a sky burial. And the bullfight is not at all a sport, it is a dance, a performance art piece that originated on Spanish ranches and farms, or so I read online although I might be making that up. The bull is going to die regardless because it is going to be slaughtered for food, and so the matador honors his meal by risking his life in the ring, finally terminating it while leaping in midair, his groin exposed to the bull’s horns. The whole thing was pretty gay but at the same time also undeniably deep I thought.
So that’s how I began to think of my job. Sure, I could just follow my marching orders to the letter, call them into my office, shake my head, look at the floor, say my sentence, squeeze their hands, offer my help in finding them a new position somewhere, which we both knew was bullshit, let’s get a drink sometime, dude, we’ll miss you around here, the fucking bean counters up my ass we had no choice you’re not alone, and so on. I could kill them the way we kill chickens in slaughterhouses, in some kind of dehumanized way, and they have no idea what’s happening until the moment of their death, if at all, if a chicken even knows what death is, does she? Or I could send them out with the art and grace and dignity of a really good commedia, a good long bloody scene, replete with angels, demons, and clowns. They could be unwitting losers or they could be stars, and it was up to us, together, we were doing this as a team. But I was the one at the helm, with my year-long schedule of layoffs, my Outlook calendar entries, invites, and alerts. Outlook was my faena, my sword.
One of the hallmarks of Western industrial society is death segregation, the separating of the dying and the dead away from the masses and into so-called professional circles: medical practitioners, police, undertakers, military contractors. Some philosophers think this has resulted in neurosis if not psychosis; the exploits of Nazi Germany come to mind if not all of the pornography industry. Where am I going with this? I am bringing death back from the over-anesthetized margins, that’s my mission, my purpose, and it is bigger than right-sizing the creative department on behalf of the shareholders of the holding company that owns the holding company that owns the company that employs me. I am exaggerating and ritualizing the methods of corporate termination for all humankind, for posterity; I have created a new art form.
But mostly I’m just trying to get my bonus.
That morning, after I called my building’s concierge service and had them clean up Intern’s puke and toss my eight-hundred-dollar Dalai Lama Edition Tibetan throw rug in the trash, the car service brings me to the office just before 8 AM. I sign the voucher and go inside, flashing my ID quickly as I pass the security cameras and monitors and the sign that says YOU ARE BEING VIDEOTAPED. I hadn’t slept that night more than thirty minutes but it doesn’t feel that way to me; I feel fine, in fact I feel great, of course I am still high as a kite. I know it will get uncomfortable at some point later in the day when I have to tell the editorial company where she works that we will be taking our business elsewhere because their work is “sub-standard,” but for the moment I don’t have to deal with it. I go into my office and shut the glass door and crank up my iTunes and listen to this Girl Talk remix of a Deadmau5 track produced by Pretty Lights and re-remixed by Devon Aoki: I’m lying but it’s something like that. I am sure my enjoyment of this so-called music comes from the fact that I know these tracks are bootlegs, sent to me by a music company (called Earwig) that is trying to get into business with us, and so I am one of a handful of people on the planet who have them, and that is flattering, it would be to anyone. Although this story about them being rare bootlegs is probably not true, it’s probably just the line of mierda the music house gave me to make me feel extremely good about myself, which would translate down the line into more money for them. Everything is seduction, everything is sexual in the end, even the passcode to an FTP download site. I put on my Beats-by-Dre headphones and listen to the track. It’s really boring.
All forms of entertainment product have at their roots a base reason for being, a simple consumer benefit. If you ladder up to it, you see that certain things exist to make you frightened, for example, so that you can vicariously experience primal terror and survive it in the (relative) safety of a mall, endorphin rush as much a part of the experience as the popcorn. For millions of years Man lived with constant fear, in the wild, there were real monsters in the dark, things that would tear your head off and eat it while your eyes were still functioning, and we still need those neurons to fire now and then or they atrophy; this is a multibillion-dollar industry called movies and not to be confused with that other fear-based industry called politics. Or in the case of music, gangsta rap, the ultimate benefit is that it makes you feel empowered sexually when you listen to it, although if you are white and grew up in the suburbs like me fear is also a factor: again, I can experience this in the safety of my home or car, not on the actual Streets. And so it is a testosterone inducer, it has the same effect as the patch that ball-less guys are supposed to stick under their arms. The other chief benefits of entertainment properties are wish fulfillment and stress release (also known as comedy).
My calendar isn’t particularly full today. A few boring meetings in which I will listen to some of our industry’s least-talented creatives attempt to impress me with their awful, so-called ideas, and I will nod, pretend to hate them all, and say things such as “Do you really think this is the best you can do?” or “Do you really believe that bringing me work like this is going to help you keep your job?” They will always answer the same way, hemming and hawing and finally agreeing that there must be a better idea out there somewhere, and then I will just stare at them with feigned contempt for their vain struggle toward greatness which, deep down, none of us really cares about.
“If this isn’t your very best work, why are you showing it to me?”
“If you were me, what would you say to you?”
There would never be a reply to that one. I don’t think they could tell that the contempt was there in me, really. And I don’t mean to say it was completely real, most of it was not, it was an act. I do have actual contempt for them but it has nothing to do with their advertising skills because I barely even registered what it was they were showing me. I couldn’t care less. I have contempt for them because I have contempt for this entire industry, myself included. Some business writers say that you don’t motivate people by putting them down but I wasn’t trying to motivate them, I was trying to de-motivate them. I was going to have to fire half of them anyway, so why would I want them to do a good job? Why would I want to meet their kids? On the other hand, if I were to motivate them and they did a better job and then I fired them, that would be even more confusing to them, which would provide some additional absurdity-enjoyment to me, and to the universe at large. I suppose I don’t bother to motivate them because I am just too lazy to care whether or not anyone’s pain or dramatic arc is fully maximized. After all, this isn’t about me, I’m not the center of the universe, I’m just a cog in a larger wheel.
Around 1 PM I go to lunch by myself at Faco, which is a Mediterranean seafood restaurant specializing in Aegean shellfish prepared in wood-fired ovens. It is not far from the office. I sit at the bar, get the pan-seared octopus and the baked spinach and a $124 bottle of Sancerre. I have my laptop with me and look over the opening of my screenplay. It sucks. I stare at the octopus, but I don’t touch it for some reason, possibly because of how irritated I get by the waiters swarming around me, creating a vortex of ingratiating fantasy: hey, look, we’re all billionaires. The wine, the lack of sleep, and my thoughts wandering back to the night before contribute to making me feel unfocused, I can’t get any work done. I get up and leave a 44 percent tip. As I walk out my iPhone buzzes and I see there is an SMS from a 347 number I don’t recognize.
hey you
don’t remember much un4tunatly
sorry about the !@#$!
u mad @ me?
How did she get my number? I delete the text. It’s possible she looked at my phone when she was at my house—I vaguely recall setting it on my Ligne Roset dining table where she could have perused it—but she seemed far too drunk to have memorized a ten-digit number. Why am I feeling twinges of desire all of a sudden? I dial my assistant and she puts me through to the head of our production department—his name is Tom Bridge—and I tell Tom to pull the plug on Intern’s edit house after the Viva gig and if they ask why tell them it’s because of This Goddam Fucking Economy.
1.4
Henry Graham’s name had been on the master termination list since the day I arrived. Because he had a good relationship with one of our medium-sized clients it was delicate and so HR Lady and I agreed to fire him in six months and we posted it in the spreadsheet, which was on Google Docs, and into the Outlook calendar. That would give us time to find a reason other than the fact he was forty-eight years of age and had been at Tate for years and was nearing the time when he could take a small pension; one of my mandates was to not let any more employees reach their vesting date. When I was hired I had sat down with HR Lady and we did the math, made a chart of all the people in the department—there were eighty-six of them at the time, a number which now strikes me as strange—and we figured out which ones would stay and which ones would get the sack in the coming fiscal. In order to get my bonus I had to trim the department by at least 50 percent. That’s forty-three people; I remember thinking I was glad we were starting with an even number, as it would have been difficult to fire half a person, although technically speaking anyone who worked in this business for very long was half a person already. Then we did a schedule and we figured if we let four people go every month we’d get there. We picked certain dates, trying hard to make it look random so we can say that the word came from on high, or peg it to some client’s decision to cut back spending, etc. We pretended with each other in big, long sighs that it was difficult work, very hard, and we would go out afterward and have a nice meal and get shitfaced and take limos home and expense it because of how difficult it was.
Henry had had a pretty interesting life, you might say he had nine lives going until he met me and I guess I capped it at less. He was an actor in his teens, school plays and musicals and so on, and then he went out to Hollywood where he did OK for a while. You can IMDb him. He was in a bunch of films and TV shows and had a few scenes here and there with some name actors. James Spader, for example. But Henry had been born in a trailer park in Florida and so when he got a tiny bit of fame and some money he blew it all up his nose in his twenties. Yeah, he got laid a lot and had a good time but when he started showing up on set high his days were numbered. He just didn’t have the sort of juice that would let him behave like that for long, and he had refused one of the producers who had hired him in the hope of sexual dalliance and so his career went away. According to Henry, pretty much every straight male Hollywood star has had to submit to the gay mafia at some point if they wanted to work; I pointed out to him that this kind of talk was homophobic in the extreme and could potentially be a violation of the firm’s HR policies, and then we laughed and I bought him a drink.
I learned all this, by the way, the night I took Henry to dinner and made him tell me his life story. He didn’t want to drink but I insisted he join me; I told him I thought we should be friends, and I think this came as a shock to him seeing as how he correctly was intuiting that he was on the chopping block.
Anyway, as his story goes, Henry found himself high and dry in LA, with no career, no money, and no friends. Then he met Victoria. Victoria was an ex-model and a nutritionist. She had been down the same road Henry was on and she knew where it led. She had become a junkie and ended up living with an abusive club owner in Miami, getting beaten up regularly, and finally she found the strength to get out. She went to the place where all abused junkie wannabe models go: LA. She got into some kind of all-kale-juice-and-codfish-oil diet thing and supposedly it saved her life. She was studying to become a licensed nutritionist at one of those schools on the second floor of a building on Melrose when she met Henry. She was working at a juice bar and he wandered in drunk, needing to use the bathroom because, after all, he was living in his car at this point. He fell asleep on the toilet and Victoria had to break the door down because they were all afraid that someone had died in there. She found him comatose and called an ambulance and accompanied Henry to the hospital. You can guess the rest. Henry moved in with Victoria to clean himself up and they became lovers. It’s a beautiful story, and it almost prompted me to fire him on the spot when I heard it.
Henry’s fourth life began when he and Victoria moved to New York so that Henry could pursue his true love, which was art. In New York, Henry and Victoria lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn; Victoria worked in a health food store and tried to set up her nutritionist practice only to discover that people in New York didn’t really give a flying fuck about nutritition. And Henry, not coming from a wealthy East Coast or European family with deep ties to people with tons and tons of money, didn’t stand a chance in the art world. So, digging down deep and finding a gallant streak he probably didn’t know he had, Henry decided to go back to school. He had a pretty good sense of design—his paintings aren’t bad, by the way, although they’re blurry, the ones I’ve seen on his website—so he enrolled in one of those graphic design programs at the School of Visual Arts. For two years he studied advertising and he hated it but he knew it was what he had to do.
So Henry miraculously gets a job as a junior art director here at Tate at the really-for-this-business advanced fucking age of thirty-four and he and Victoria start living like human beings. Fourteen years later he’s an associate creative director and he’s making decent coin, in fact he’s pulling in $184K as of the day he was let go. He was actually the go-to guy on the Allstate Insurance account—not thrilling advertising by any means, but he’s making the clients happy doing these crappy testimonials. The campaign is doing well in the marketplace, too, but that’s not really the point. The point is, Henry was old and he wore pleated Dockers, which I told him not to wear but he did anyway.
The first step in the dance would be to let Henry know in advance that he was in danger of being fired. This was pretty common practice for human resources professionals but I took it to another level. I mean you couldn’t exactly go to someone and say “You’re going to get the boot in three months no matter what you do” because they might cause all kinds of trouble around the office in the interim, possibly even take legal action against the company, not to mention spreading their negative energy around. And at the same time you don’t want to say to them “You’re doing a great job you don’t have to worry” because then they could claim wrongful termination based on age or something. What you want to do is be considerate, give them a hint that there’s a storm coming in, give them a chance to find another job (not likely, but one can always hope) and all at once, and without adieu, give them a swift, unforgiving exit from the shitshow.
So one day as I was standing outside the fish tank (what we called the open-plan creative floor) and was waiting for an elevator, Henry came up and gave me a vaguely Reaganesque nod and earnest smile. At that moment I knew it was time to begin. He said Morning, Eric! or something equally pointless. Normally I would ask him how things were going on Allstate, when was that client presentation again? I mean just to seem interested and to pretend that I was sober or knew or cared what the fuck was going on in my department. And the elevator would come and we would ride together and then when one of us got off I would say Keep me in the loop or something like that, and Henry would get off thinking he had had a worthwhile moment with Mr. Chief Idea Officer. He would probably mention it to the dolts he worked with, saying something like Well Eric and I were talking earlier this morning … to make it sound as if he has my ear, we’re close, we’re like this.
But I just stood there and ignored him. I didn’t look up, or rather, I looked up for an instant, enough to let him know that I had heard him but had no interest in replying or engaging with him in any way. He said Morning dude again and I just stared at the wall. I could tell without looking at him that he was momentarily freaked out but immediately pretended to himself that I hadn’t heard him even though he knew I had, I guess that’s called denial. Then the elevator came and we got on and just stood there like two people who once knew each other but were no longer speaking.
And that was the beginning.
After the elevator incident, Henry started acting predictably tense around me. He would, for example, be the first to arrive at a meeting. I usually tried to arrive fifteen or twenty minutes late for anything. Partly because that was the custom in advertising for the creative people to be late and partly because I was the boss and one way of being the boss was to make everyone wait around for you. So one afternoon as Henry stood lingering outside my office I asked him what he was doing there.
“Aren’t we having that Swiffer meeting?” he replied. To which I replied, without looking away from my computer screen, “Are you working on that?”
“Yes, you asked me to chip in on the campaign, you asked me to have some thoughts ready this morning and so I spent the weekend on it,” he said in a high-pitched squeal, not wanting to seem confrontational, the raising of one’s voice by half an octave or more meant to dissuade the more powerful from attack.
“Well I think there are better uses of one’s time than stuffing more shit into that particular shithole,” I said with a chummy laugh.
“So I shouldn’t stick around for the meeting?” he mumbled, and I said nothing, and I said it without looking at him, pretending to stare at my screen but out of the corner of my eye I could see him there, his body suddenly stiff, him staring at the bare floor with an expression of both confusion and panic.
Yes, I wanted to say to him, this is happening, it is, it’s happening now. But I couldn’t for legal reasons. And then as if he could read my thoughts, he just walked away.
Post incident I let a couple of weeks slide, to both allow his feelings of terror to stew in him for a while and also to lull him into thinking that the weirdness was maybe over. I had read on the internet that they raise the toros in perfect comfort so that when they are first stabbed with the banderilla and begin to bleed and the blood is running into their eyes and there are thousands of people around them screaming but they’ve never seen more than two or three humans in their lives, these bulls, it just adds to their inability to react appropriately and so they are less of a threat. I had my assistant call Henry in for a meeting. Ten minutes before the meeting was to take place I left the agency and went for a walk. I may have gotten something to eat, I don’t remember. When I got back three hours later my assistant informed me that Henry had been by and he thought we had a meeting and I said, Yeah, I know. The next day I called Henry into my office and this time I didn’t leave him hanging. I looked him in the eye and told him he was being taken off the Allstate account. He was stunned. He hadn’t seen this coming. Frankly, neither had I, it just came out. He finally asked me Why? and I said something about the client wanting some new blood and how actually I was pleased because this meant Henry was freed up to work on various other assignments.
“What kind of assignments?” he asked me. I said I wasn’t sure but that I would think about it and get back to him.
At that point he had to know that he was being fired. But there were still nearly two months left until his end date. For a couple of weeks I just said nothing to him. I’d see him come in and sit in his cubicle and surf the internet and try to look busy. I’d see him go around to the other creative directors and ask them if they needed any help on anything, but everybody knew intuitively that he was going to be let go and they avoided him the way people do in any corporation when they sense someone has lost favor. For weeks no one would make eye contact with him or even say hello to him in the hall. It was if he were literally dying of a contagious disease and so he was being ostracized by those hoping to survive him.
Then one day I had another brainstorm. I called Henry into my office and asked him what he was working on. He tried to cover his shock at the inanity of this question and said he was trying to get on a new business pitch that he had heard was coming down the pike. “So in other words you’re not working on anything at the moment,” I said with the barest hint of indignation in my voice. He said he was pretty wide open at this point and would love to work on whatever I wanted to toss his way. I let a long silence hang in the room before informing him that it would be difficult for me to justify his salary if he wasn’t billing to any client. He sat there, a smiling rictus of fear. I told him that he ought to think about bringing some new business into the agency. Did he have any connections? He said he would think about it. When I had gotten him drunk a few weeks earlier he had spilled to me a couple of interesting facts. One, that he was separated from his wife, and two, that she was living in an apartment on the Upper West Side that had once been owned by a Famous Actor, whom she had briefly dated in LA and had helped through a rough patch.
“What about your wife’s nutrition business?” I asked him. Maybe we could do some commercials for her and get her friend to be in them? That would certainly be good for the profile of the agency. Henry agreed wholeheartedly and said he would speak to his ex. Our danse macabre was moving along.
So Henry called his ex-wife and told her that he was going to get fired if he didn’t come up with something. She agreed to let him pitch the idea of making a few web-based commercials for her consulting practice, which was called Newtritionals, LLC, and she agreed to call her friend about appearing in them. Henry told me that the actor was in Australia filming a movie and couldn’t do the spots; I knew that was a lie because I asked one of our casting people to call his agent and find out what his availability was, and they said he was living in Palm Desert and doing nothing at the moment. Nonetheless I’m sure that he had no interest in hawking food supplements on the internet for a girl he banged a few times during a dry spell. But Henry must have really laid it on thick because Victoria pressed Famous Actor, who eventually talked to an old friend of his, a Famous Actress, who played Superman’s wife in the ’80s. On a rainy night in the fall we got her to show up at a studio on Tenth Avenue. We shot improv until the wee hours and got nothing usable; throughout the ordeal I could see how much pain Henry was in. Then we spent two weeks trying to cut something; I declared the results not worthy of the agency’s name, and took Henry to lunch as a way of thanking him for coming through under pressure. And then a few days later I fired him.
It was a beautiful morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the air had the tiniest hint of a chill in it, the kind of perfect morning that still reminds many New Yorkers of the day the planes flew in. I will never forget the look on his face. He probably thought I wanted to talk to him about the Newtritionals project and maybe what other curiosities we might cook up together. But when he stepped into my office and saw HR Lady there with the beginnings of tears in her eyes, he knew. That’s how they all know, by the glistening. He sat in one of the two Eames chairs I had purchased online from the MoMA Design Store and he tried to chuckle as if to say, OK, I get it, and I’m fine with it, but it was obvious that he had been blindsided. Of course in some sense he knew all along but the whole Famous Actor/Actress incident had no doubt distracted him, as it was meant to do.
I looked at him with my best sad-eyed expression and then there was a pause that could have only lasted a few seconds but seemed much longer. I saw him glance over at a stack of fashion magazines I had put on the floor waiting to be thrown away. I almost had the sense he was counting them, his mind grabbing on to anything to keep it from careening into the abyss. He crossed his legs and looked up at me.
“I’m sorry to say this,” I said, nodding with as much earnest emotion as I could muster, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”
In any good narrative, say a detective story, when at last you know who the killer is, it should be the kind of surprise that you realize was inevitable all along. What Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, what I now suppose I have no choice but to call The Henry. At that point if I were him I would have strangled me to death, but just as the urge to commit an act of senseless violence was rearing up in him—the urge to slap me on the face or smash my Noguchi tabletop with his fist—this is when HR jumps in and tells him about our generous severance package which includes his full salary and health care for nearly five weeks if he agrees to our terms. Realizing he needs the money, Henry just stares at the wall.
“Alright,” he says and that was pretty much it. A couple of them have called me a douchebag, one in a voice that was crackling with pain and hatred, he could barely speak he was so angry, he had four children and a fifth on the way, it was tremendously moving. But mostly they’re not surprised. The initial clues having been, you know, homeopathic: they’re a tiny dollop of the disease, and then the antibodies rush in, and that’s the second set of positive clues, and so the subject has a false sense of wellbeing until the bottom drops out. But just as Henry’s lips part to speak, to say something else, perhaps a final statement, the two African-American security guards, Damon and Terry, step into my office as if on cue. Henry senses the men behind him, gets up and walks out with them toward the elevators without a word.
1.5
It’s about 9 AM, I’m being crushed by a hangover and so I’m working out at the health club in my building, trying to sweat it out of my body, all corrupted flesh pixels needing a diagnostic, when a new text pings me. Without breaking stride I fondle my device and see it is from Intern.
hey!?! wtf!
so i guess we won’t be working together …
no, wait!!
change of plans!!!!!
we WILL be working together!!
i’m on 8 *cum* c me...........
She’s on eight? I can only guess that the editorial company is helping us in-house on something and that’s why she’s here for the morning? But the tone of her text, very snarky, who does she think she is?
This should be easy. By noon she will be gone.
After concentrating on cardio for five minutes I get a ginger-wheatgrass juice and a green tea infusion and then I head for the showers. The juice girl is incredibly beautiful, she has long skinny arms that look like young birch branches that could wrap around you twice. In the showers, I notice that my cock is a bit harder than it usually is after a workout, I’m feeling pretty horny, I may have mentioned that ever since I began my medications (Adderall, Zoloft, Klonopin, Ativan, occasionally Haldol although I don’t always like to admit that) I’ve had an erection that I can’t get rid of no matter what I do. The only comforting thing about this is that I know my boner has nothing to do with Intern, it’s just a part of me now, like hair, and no amount of sex or masturbation seems to cure it. For no reason I consider hitting on birch-like juice girl but I fear there is a too-high chance she will say yes.
After my gym time I decide to take the subway to the office just for a change of pace. Usually I call a car service. I live in Brooklyn just off the Williamsburg Bridge, as I may have said earlier, in a loft-like apartment in a brand-new waterfront high-rise called Krave. I usually take a car to work because it’s a bit of a hike up Bedford Avenue to the subway and a car is more comfortable and it’s also in my contract that I have unlimited use of the Dark Car Corporate limo service. But today I felt like being outside, the weather was nice, which felt like more of an excuse than an actual reason, because I didn’t really buy the notion that the weather being nice meant it was a good idea to be outside. It didn’t really matter to me one way or the other what the weather was like; if I felt like being outside, or if I had some reason to go outside, then I would generally engineer a way to be out of doors, it was that simple, the weather had little to do with it, except to be able say to myself, when the question arose in my head, “Why are you taking the subway, Eric?” I would have a ready answer and the answer was the niceness of the weather.
Two blocks into my eleven-block walk to the L train I realize why it is that I don’t do this very often. A virtual stream of young, fashionable white people, what the savants in our media planning department would refer to demographically as the Creative Class, are rushing toward the train. I don’t hate these professionals, since that would be disingenuous, after all I am one of them. I don’t really have any opinion about them one way or the other. They are a kind of temporary migration, they are the product of certain economic conditions. About halfway to the subway I am feeling exhausted by the tide I am swimming in and so I need a rest; the night before I had ingested eight or nine saffron-infused apple-ginger absinthe, cognac, and vodka cocktails, the name of which I can’t remember, possibly the Caribou Whisperer or the Ragamuffin or the Merkin Sniffer and I’m still feeling somewhat ill. I pop into a coffee place called Silhouette that is frequented for some reason by mixed-race French people from Paris who are living in Brooklyn because the dollar makes it cheap for them, and I order a scat coffee for twenty-six dollars and a bowl of fresh berries for twelve dollars. I’m not in the least bit hungry but somehow the idea of fresh berries seems like a good one, like a smart idea, a smart way to start my morning, even though my morning began hours ago at some sleepless and unremarked moment between night and day. The scat coffee comes first and I take a sip and wonder if it isn’t just burnt Maxwell House. Then a bowl of fresh, locally grown berries arrives and the moment I see them I know I will not be eating them. I sit and look out the window at the pretty little fishies darting up and down the stream on their way to their exciting jobs in the worlds of fashion and art and reality TV and suddenly I don’t feel well. What is it? I ask myself, and I respond by saying “I don’t know, Eric,” out loud. “I don’t know what it is.”
And I don’t. I’ve been diagnosed before with certain somewhat common illnesses, most of them mental in nature, but that doesn’t explain why I haven’t eaten in almost three days, since the time I met her.
On the sidewalk outside a young woman in a Ted Lapidus jacket and carrying a Stella by Stella McCartney by Stella M for Talentless by Rich Daddy bag is tying her shih tzu to someone’s bicycle, and now the owner of the bike is coming up to her and saying, like, um, that’s my bike? And this woman is saying she’s just getting a Clover-press coffee to go and she’ll be back in four-point-two minutes, she promises, and suddenly I’m having a full-blown panic attack: the desire to jump in front of a bus is so strong in me I grip my chair and sit there, rigid, and hope it stops. This has happened before so I know what to do, only I don’t have any Klonopin in my Crumpler shoulder bag. After about an hour I decide I’m not going into work today. After another hour I realize I’m not doing anything today. I am aware that I am having one of my episodes, since as I’ve said I’ve had them before, and they always do pass eventually, although this one seems a bit more persistent than the others. My phone has been ringing and buzzing from time to time because I have some important meetings, in fact I was supposed to meet with HR Lady and let two more copywriters go today, and no one knows what has happened to me, I can just imagine the concern growing with each voice mail. But I have the sudden and I realize nonsensical thought that if I answer my mobile device or even check my messages something terrible will happen to me, that all manner of doom will be unleashed upon me, from financial ruin to torture and death, which I am fully aware is silly. There is also the text from Intern that I would rather not see, even to delete it, which may be contributing to my unalterable inability to deal with my unreality.
At this point the patchouli-scented half-Senegalese woman from behind the counter comes up and asks if there’s anything wrong with my fresh berries because I haven’t touched them and I say, no, they’re absolutely delicious, I just changed my mind, I’m so sorry. I almost add that if I were to leave this place I may run headlong into a truck just to stop it from going on any longer. What from going on any longer? I don’t know, all of it. I want to laugh, and for a brief moment I do. Some people look at me and then they ignore me. After another half hour the episode subsides and I am able to get up and walk back home and play Halo for a few hours. Then I go to sleep without checking my e-mail or returning any calls. It occurs to me that maybe I’m a) experiencing some unexplained resistance to sacking the two copywriters I was supposed to have sacked today, and b) I am semi-falling in love with her, the girl whose name I don’t know, or care to know, which is impossible, but I can deal with all that when the fires die down.
1.6
After a good many hours of lying there trying to sleep I finally give up at 5:45 AM and instead of going to the gym I decide to check my mail and deal with what inevitably will be the crisis of my not showing up yesterday. I am surprised to discover only two e-mails from my assistant, the first one inquiring about my travel plans for an upcoming commercial shoot in Los Angeles, California, and the second one, from about midmorning, inquiring as to my whereabouts.
“(HR Lady) was just wondering where she might locate you, Eric, she left a couple of messages, will reschedule a check-in for this afternoon?” was my assistant’s query. I checked my voice mail, and there were also two, both from HR Lady herself as had been expected, both polite and professional, and both employing the verbs “touch base” and “loop back.” What this means is it is not even 6 AM and I’ve already decided not to go to the gym, a plan I could easily change, as I really don’t have to be into the office for four hours, but I find it hard to rearrange a plan once it has been commenced, and besides, yesterday’s panic attack had occurred not long after going to the gym, so maybe it is a good idea to not repeat myself. The only problem is what to do with the intervening hours before I am due in the office. I could go online and search for other gyms in the area, I could just join a new one, but that seems a bit excessive. Time passes. I look out the east-facing windows at the sky, pinkish like plated salmon croquettes, and blueish like, I suppose, deskulled brains, cold enough to see steamy smoke, or was it smoky steam, rising from the oil furnaces in the three flats that lie between me and the bridge. I call and order delivery of two almond-soymilk lattes from Marlow & Sons, and then I call Silhouette, the Franco-Senegalese-Brazilian café, and try to order a bowl of fresh berries again but they don’t deliver. I hang up and look around my flat, thinking about getting some furniture one of these days and then I wait for my beverages. Waiting, I realize, isn’t the time between things, it’s the thing itself.
When the lattes finally do arrive ($14) they are less than piping hot and I refuse them, though I do pay for them and tip the guy twenty dollars for his trouble (total $34). Three and a half hours later, at the Tate headquarters in midtown, HR Lady is waiting for me in the holding area outside my office. Her name is Helen, she is not married, reputed to have a longtime boyfriend who she never speaks about, lives alone, and enjoys foreign films and getting outside the city on weekends, according to her Match.com profile, which I looked up once. She is feigning concern about my health, wondering if I am alright.
“Are you alright?” she asks, adding, without meaning it in the slightest, “We were worried about you!”
“I haven’t had my Starbucks if that’s what you mean.” HR Lady uses “Starbucks” to mean coffee so around her I do too.
“I’m talking about yesterday!”
“Didn’t you get my text?” I lied.
“No,” she lied, pretending she didn’t know I was lying.
“Oh they musn’t have gone through. Fucking AT&T!” I thought it would be interesting to push the lie a little further and see if HR Lady would go along with it to the bitter end. “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you so I sent the same text again and I left you a voice mail? I think I left you two voice mails, in fact, I’m so sorry you didn’t get them, shit, Jesus, I don’t know what’s going on around here anymore.”
“Me neither,” she says, wondering what I was up to. “I didn’t get any of them. Did you send them from your iPhone or your BlackBerry? It’s T-Mobile, right?” For a moment I thought she meant it, that she didn’t know I was only toying with her. But she kept it up so I knew she was just playing along. “You know how telcom is around here ever since Kyle was let go,” she says with a shrug and a smile and a little wave of her hands, or is it a rolling of her eyes and a look of minory contempt? I can’t quite tell. I don’t say anything.
“Shall we do it now?” she then asks. And I say “Sure! Let’s do it! Let’s get it over with!” And then, “Ugh, what a life!” to which she says “Here we go!” with mock-ironic morbidness. Then she asks my assistant to call the copywriters, Dave and Bill.
Meanwhile I have mail, the usual stack of bubble-wrapped DVDs from production houses touting shitty directors—“Peter Rossi Shoots Kids!” as if that’s either funny or original—and I throw them all away immediately without even considering watching a single second of this crap. There is also an interoffice envelope which feels empty. I am about to open it when Dave and Bill arrive and see HR Lady there and immediately they know.
“I guess this is it,” one of them says with a forced chuckle. They always say that, to soften the humiliation, to own it, they always chuckle, as well they should. But I’m not concerned with Dave and Bill right now because I am too pissed off at the stupidity of my assistant who called both of them in at the same time. The rules of this are, according to the lawyers, that we can only fire one at a time, unless they are a team, and Dave and Bill are both copywriters and thus not a team. Meaning one of them, either Dave or Bill, we haven’t determined the order yet, is going to have to stand there while the other one gets the news in private. It’s humiliating, but on the other hand, the gyrations that I’ve put both of them through in the past few months were much more intense.
Dave, for example, is forty-six and his wife just had a child not more than two weeks ago. Disgusting, ugly little knot of fat, frightening really, and when I first saw the picture he e-mailed to the department I thought perhaps the child was a bird-headed dwarf, which sounds like something I made up but actually that’s a real medical term for a kind of mutation, or birth defect, related to but not entirely the same as being a pinhead. So I had my assistant, I suppose I should include her name here at some point, it’s Cheryl, or Cherie, and she is not as attractive as I’d hoped for, but it’s too late to say anything, I had Cheryl or Cherie send Dave and his wife a cute onesie and a bottle of champagne and a warm note from me personally. This could, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, that it was part of my slow turning of the spit that Dave was curing on, since I had begun dropping hints that he was getting the boot months ago, or that I was gifting him out of guilt at what I knew was his fate. Bill, on the other hand, was single and homosexual, although he doesn’t admit this publicly, but no one whose shirt is that perfectly pressed and shrink-wrapped into his trousers could possibly be straight with the exception of myself. I had called Bill into my office around the same time I was dropping hints with Dave, and I told Bill he was going to get a big promotion and a sizable raise, I just had to get approval from the holding company. Every so often he would ask how that was going and I would tell him they had a salary freeze or something but not to worry. Since we had decided long ago to fire both of them on the same day I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to compare their reactions back to back. I mean this whole business is pure evil, why sugarcoat it? In fact, why not broadcast it?
When we finish terminating them, Damon and Terry stand hulkingly by the elevators with them, waiting to take their ride of shame down to the street, and HR Lady asks me if I want to go to lunch because there is something we need to discuss.
“I’m not hungry,” I say, thinking that it is strange I have no appetite since I haven’t eaten anything for three-point-five days now.
“What is it?”
She gets up and closes the door while I open the interoffice envelope in my hand. She immediately begins to talk about this new intern in the production department on eight when I pull a single sheet of paper from the envelope and look at it.
What’s a girl to do? Well, the sensible thing is to disappear. But some girls are not so sensible, are they? Some grrrls get so drunk they can’t remember things & then they get kicked out of the lair (so maddeningly rude & annoyingly kewt all at once) & then they try to stay in touch but that doesn’t work & then—life is strange & beautiful all at once is it not?—they go & get a new internship—where?—OMG what a coincidence!!!!
The printout is not signed. As I read it HR Lady is asking me if I have anything to say. “About what?” I ask. Then she says they didn’t know that the girl and I had a relationship prior to us taking her on as a production intern, and if they had they wouldn’t’ve hired her, but on her first day, which was yesterday, she comes to HR Lady and says she needs to divulge something of a personal nature for reasons of personal integrity, honesty, due diligence, and all around professionalism.
“A prior relationship?” I say as if I don’t know what the words mean.
“Yes.”
“A prior relationship with who?”
“With you.”
“She said she had a prior relationship with me? Like what did she mean by that?”
“Well she didn’t elaborate but I understood it to mean you had had some kind of …” And then she hesitates before sing-songing the word “liaison” in a lurid key.
I sit there for a few moments and consider my options. I had guessed she was capable of pulling some kind of stunt like this, and I had planned on getting rid of her anyway (can you fire someone who isn’t getting paid? I think you can) but she had trumped me, now it would be impossible to remove her because it would look like retribution, but if I had been able to fire her before she said anything about it, and then she said it after the fact, that would look like revenge on her part. Meanwhile I could lie and say nothing had ever happened between us, and everyone would believe me, or at least they would believe I had the upper hand, which would amount to the same thing. Besides, it was true, pretty much nothing had happened. All this to say: she is a smart girl.
“She was working at Unkindest Cuts, which is where I met her, and then I ran into her at a bar in Bushwick and she picked me up,” I say, leaving out the part where I asked her to go into the bathroom and do some coke with me and bought her round after round of Cîrocs and then a bottle of prosecco and poured her, as the expression goes, into a cab and peeled her shirt away when we got into my place where we made out before she barfed on my floor.
“And that’s the extent of it. I don’t even remember her name.”
“Seriously?” HR Lady says, with an expression that contained both contempt for my womanizing and, of course, admiration for it. “You don’t remember her name?”
“Is it Sarah? Saree? Marilyn? Something like that.”
“Didn’t you know how old she was?” HR asks. I don’t even honor the question with a look of feigned lack of understanding. Then HR Lady tells me that there’s nothing they can do but fulfill her internship for the summer and that I should perhaps just steer clear of the eighth floor for a while? OK, sure fine. But then:
“What did she say about me?”
“What do you mean what did she say about you?” HR says.
“I mean did she say she, like, had a thing for me?”
“No. Why? Are you saying she’s into you? Or, wait, you like her, is that it?”
I don’t bother to answer her, I just say “I’ll stay off eight. Promise you. Won’t ever step off the lift.” The less HR Lady knows about my theories regarding the dangers of this particular girl, the better. She nods, our business finished for today. But she doesn’t get up. She sighs and gives me a look. Is this her “Eric you should know better than to sleep with nineteen-year-olds” look, or is it her “Eric why are you wasting your time with nineteen-year-old girls when there are full-fledged women available to you, living breathing women sitting right in front of you” look? Or is it her “Fuck, dude, you are the Man” look? I don’t know and I don’t ask. She is making me extremely uncomfortable so I pretend to get an e-mail in my phone and I swipe at it and ignore her.
“They’ll be OK” she finally says, making it clear she is talking about something else. “Won’t they?”
“Who?”
“Dave and Bill?”
“Gee, I hope so,” I say, meaning it, meaning: wanting her to know I mean it. “They’re really good guys. They’ll land on their feet.”
She gives me another one of those looks. “Sometimes I wonder.”
“You wonder if they’re good guys? They’re awesome guys!” I say. I know that’s not what she was wondering about but I just don’t want to go down any kind of quasi-moralizing or regret or second-thoughts path or anything like that with her.
“No, I mean I wonder sometimes about what we’re doing. About, you know, all the pain we’re causing. Do you believe in karma?”
The moment she says the word I picture her going all Namaste, up near the front of the yoga class, with her prayer hands, trying to get the eye of a male instructor, the one ten years younger and with a topknot. A topknot on a guy is like a sign on his forehead saying “I’ll go down on you for a really long time and make it seem totally unselfish but really I’m kind of worried that I’m gay.” So I try to look at her as if she is being overly sensitive, I get that, and I appreciate it, but.
“We’re ensuring the survival of the agency,” I say, repeating the rote justification speech that she herself handed me when we started this whole firing thing months ago. “Over four hundred people work here and if we don’t cut back significantly due to the ongoing economic situation they’ll all be out on the street, every one of them.”
She sighs again and gives me that look, which I now interpret as a look of pride mixed with shame, pride at her power in this whole thing, pride at being entrusted with so much responsibility, but all of it mitigated by pride’s shadow side. That’s a human being for you. I had neither pride nor shame in what we were doing. It was just my job. I was saving the agency and conducting a thought experiment at the same time, one that could have far-reaching implications for corporate culture. I had carefully and painstakingly created a very specific milieu, a culture of fear and paranoia, and we were watching it unfurl and grow, like something in a large and fetid petri dish, our own Milgramesque biosphere of doom. I suppose one might be justified in being proud of such a creation but that would be self-serving, and shame equally so; I was doing it for larger reasons, and I was giving it away like you would a vaccine that saves millions of lives.
She still sits there and doesn’t move, or won’t. I want her out of my office. If I am being completely honest I would say her body language means she wants me to hold her and cuddle her and tell her everything is going to be fine. A week ago I might have entertained the thought of such things, cuddling or at least making out, but I feel nothing for HR Lady today, not a shred of interest even as she crosses her legs and fails to readjust her skirt. They really are great legs, and it isn’t that she’s unattractive, as I have said, it’s just that for the past several days, whenever I catch a glimpse of a thigh or a breast the only thing I can think of is Intern’s fecund, glowing lips, her shining eyes, her breasts. It’s driving me nuts and I don’t know what to do about it but jerk off into the trash basket for the second time today, only I can’t do that at the moment without a certain degree of embarrassment because there’s someone in my office.
When she finally leaves (was that a backward angry jealous glance she gave me on the way out? yes) I check my stocks as a means of killing a few minutes and then I go up to eight.
1.7
The eighth floor houses our production department. At any given time, the New York office of Tate Worldwide (New York being the largest of our fifty-six offices around the world) will be in the midst of producing eight or ten commercials for our various clients. The way advertising works is simple: we charge huge companies millions and millions of dollars a year to come up with the big ideas that will help them to grow their businesses, to define for themselves an expandable niche in their market, to give them something to stand on, a mission to purport, a flag to wave. Ad agencies exist for the same reason that mercenaries do. An oil company can’t be in the business of, say, executing the popular leader of a left-wing opposition group in some Central American democracy, that just isn’t a job description that they can put up on their LinkedIn page. So they have to hire a consultant who hires a global risk-management firm who hires a mercenary unit who hires a local criminal gang to get the job done. It’s the same with what we do. XXX Pharmaceuticals wants to believe that it is in the business of making the world a better place, not of convincing people to take overpriced drugs they don’t need (and that can’t be proven to be much more effective than a placebo). So they outsource their lying to us. We then pretend to help them make the world a better place. All we really do is enable their fantasies about themselves by holding their hand through the difficult years-long process of bringing a drug to market. In the course of that, it’s our job to pretend to be coming up with ideas when really all we are doing is taking the ideas that they have already given us in their PowerPoint documents and making them look like they were ours in the first place and therefore worth the many millions they are paying us. It’s useless but in the end what human endeavor isn’t? We have meeting after meeting and write draft after draft of a single fifteen-second commercial, exposing these scripts to real people to get their feedback, in what is known as qualitative or “qual” testing, before gauging the spot’s real-world CPI—Consumer Persuasion Index—in quantitative or “quant” testing, in which each commercial is assigned a numerical value supposedly indicating its true effectiveness, the entire process meant to ultimately determine whether it would be more effective to frighten people into buying a drug because without it their children might die or frightening them into buying a drug because if they don’t their peers will ostracize them for being terrible parents. Once real moms and dads have signed off on our concept, we hand these so-called ideas to a director and a production company and ask them to “add value,” which means, “Can you try to take this mind-numbingly boring piece of machine-made bullshit and force-fit a modicum of humanity into it?” Normally this is done via casting, trying to find human-looking people to stand in front of the camera and smile and give the thumbs-up to life. That usually works. Then when the commercial is finished, we celebrate ourselves and our achievements at an awards banquet from which we take home prizes in categories such as “Best Editing for a Fifteen-Second Unbranded Direct-to-Consumer Web-Based Pharmaceutical Campaign” and so on.
I always get confused on the eighth floor. When you get off the elevators you can go one of two ways: toward the bathrooms or toward the receptionist. Having made that decision you can then go either right or left, ultimately giving you the option of the four compass directions. I can never remember where anyone’s office is and so I always end up just walking around the perimeter of the building until I find who I am looking for. Today I get off the elevators and decide to go toward the receptionist, who is on her break apparently, as there’s a temp sitting in her spot and he looks like a young Paul Rudd with facial hair, obviously an actor who doesn’t have a trust fund; i.e., hopeless. From the receptionist’s desk I randomly choose left, and I walk toward the Twenty-ninth Street side of the building. When I get to the row of offices that rings the floor I randomly choose to turn right and I start walking. Everyone sees me and looks up from their desks and waves or grins; this isn’t something they would do for anyone who walked down the hall, but one of the consequences of creating a dynamic of fear is a high degree of sycophancy resulting in a good deal of performative smiling. Our poor wannabe-actor temp thinks that by sitting there stone-faced and not participating in these corporate rituals he will save his soul; what he doesn’t understand is that all of the phoniness required of his soulless peers takes far more acting skill, courage, and devotion to craft than he will ever see on any not-for-profit stage in his entire life.
If asked I will say I am looking for Tom Bridge, but I happen to know that Tom is in Prague shooting a series of spots for a tire company. I get to the corner of the building and turn right (the only way I can go unless I want to retrace my steps) and then I see Tom’s assistant, a hipster clown named Jake. I call him a clown because he is one; he works on weekends at a children’s hospital in Westchester. Apparently he was a drug addict and then he became a clown as a part of his recovery program; we even honored him with our Actually Good Person We Mean It of the Month Award.
Jake the Clown sees me walking toward him and says, “Are you looking for Tom?” I don’t know if I should lie and say yes since that is the ostensible reason I’ve come to this floor in the first place or if I should lie and say no since that’s the truth but it means I must have another reason for being here and that one I don’t want to divulge.
“Isn’t he in Prague?” I say, splitting the difference.
“He was supposed to leave last night but his flight got canceled can you believe that it was a nightmare he’s leaving in an hour do you want to see him I can maybe squeeze you in just kidding.” I’m staring at Clown, who’s in full ’80s mode today, parachute pants and one of those Palestinian scarves and a Members Only warm-up jacket, and I’m wondering what his getup is, does he put on a big pink wig and a red nose and paint his face white, or does he know he already looks enough like a clown to make a sick child laugh? Just then Tom’s voice is heard from inside his office.
“Eric!” he is yelling. “Eric you douchebag come in here don’t go away I need to talk to you before my car comes!” I go into Tom’s office. He is sitting amid a pile of DVD reels that is almost as large as he is, which is considerable.
“Yo, asshole,” I greet him, closing the door, “why aren’t you getting your knob sucked by a Czech hooker right now?” This is how Tom and I talk to each other; the day I learned that I would have to terminate him in Q2 of the next fiscal I considered not being so buddy-buddy with him, then I changed my mind. “Close the door,” he says, even though I already have. He tosses a DVD of work from an animation company called Phawg into the trash basket and takes his earphones off. “Did you say something?”
“No,” I say. The sounds of a live Rush concert are coming from his iPhone. Rush is Tom’s favorite band; he turns off the trollish sounds and looks up at me.
“I can’t believe you fucked her,” he says.
“Fucked who, your wife?” I say. “Ha ha just kidding, in case you were wondering.”
“Funny,” he says. “I’m talking about that very hot girl we just hired.”
“First of all, she may be funny and smart and all but she’s insane,” I inform him, “so you might want to stay away from her entirely, or find a way to fire her before I do. And second of all, I didn’t have sex with her.”
“Which is not what she’s telling everyone.”
“Oh bullshit she’s a drug addict,” I say.
“So are you,” he says.
“Have a nice trip, dickhead,” I say to him as I open the door and head out, turning back to ask him what he’s doing with the DVD cases. He says he doesn’t know he just felt like saving them.
“See you in lala,” he is saying as I leave.
“What?”
“I’m flying directly from Prague to LA for the FreshIt thing. I’ll be there for callbacks.”
“Cool,” I say, “that’s awesome, but I’m not going to that shoot.”
“No?” he says. “I thought you were.”
“Why would I waste my time with that shit?” I say.
“Because the account is in trouble.”
“Not my problem,” I say. Then as I am closing his door he says, “By the way, she’s uploading some spots to the FTP, I’d try the dub room. I mean, assuming you want to find her.”
“I don’t, actually,” I lie. “I want her out of here by EOD.”
“Right,” he says. “Will do.”
I walk out of his office and down the hall I hadn’t walked down before, hoping for a random encounter rather than having to actually set foot in the dub room which would be too obvious. I end up circling the floor two times but I don’t see her. I probably would have kept doing it all afternoon except my phone rings and it’s Seth Krallman, my old friend whom I hate.
“What up, gangsta?” I say into my phone as I head toward the elevator. “Why’d you stand me up the other night, dog?” One of the reasons I hate Seth Krallman is because he talks like he’s from the ghetto when actually he is from Greenwich, Connecticut, and I tend to talk that way when I’m with him just to mask the fact I dislike him so intensely. I’ve hated Seth Krallman ever since he got clean and became a yoga teacher and changed his name to Hanuman or Ganesh or something. No, the truth is I always hated him; we shared a big house together at Brown and he thinks this means we have some kind of Special Bond. He’s a pretentious idiot, a so-called avant garde playwright who had twelve or thirteen seconds of notoriety in the East Village in the late ’90s when he chained himself to the stage of a tiny theater for a month as some kind of protest slash performance, peeing in a crystal bowl and mixing it with champagne and drinking it every night at precisely midnight, while reciting some poetry. I avoided him for years but he friended me recently and keeps wanting us to hang out, I’m pretty sure that he’s gearing up to ask me for a job. He comes from a rich family, as I alluded, but his father invested badly and lost most everything in ’08 so Seth’s monthly automatic deposit has dwindled away—he has to work now to pay his rent and his medical bills, because he is bipolar, and without his meds and his therapy the man is useless. So he wants to invite me to this really cool opening and after-party in the ’wick and maybe, I’m guessing, that’s when he’ll ask me if I can help him get into advertising. I have nothing to do tonight and need to take my mind off myself and maybe talk to people so I say yes. Then I immediately regret it but he doesn’t know that yet. So he starts to ask me how work is going and I pretend that the elevator is killing my reception even though I am not in the elevator.
1.8
I get to the opening before Seth does. It’s at a storefront gallery on an industrial section of Johnson Avenue; the space used to be a skateboard shop and now it’s rented out by the three guys who started Rodney magazine, and they show art in it. Rodney is considered the epicenter of cool in Bushwick right now and since Bushwick is the epicenter of cool in New York that makes Rodney the most boring thing on the planet. Normally the thought of the Fucking Rodney Scene would send me into an uncontrollable rage and thus I would avoid it entirely, but I am here to see the hateful ex-junkie yoga master and hang out with him and listen to him go on about how avant garde theater is dead, seriously, it’s a tragedy, I mean Heiner Müller wouldn’t even get his work seen today. His shtick is really one of the saddest things ever and maybe that’s why he cheers me up so easily.
The art space is packed and the kids are spreading out into the street like a fungus. Never before have I seen so many people in one place who are exactly the same: the same age, the same race, the same wardrobe, the same facial hair, the same taste in music, socioeconomic background, college experience, shoes, political beliefs, and hair; but I suppose what really unites them is the shared fantasy that they are rebels, subversively unique individuals creating their own style for themselves.
I make a quick spin through the crowd and can’t find Vishnu. He’s always late anyway, it’s one of the many things I can’t stand about him. I squeeze inside the storefront past a girl wearing a Shepard Fairey Obama Hope T-shirt in which she’s sliced his eyes out, showing her nipples through his empty eye sockets, and I can’t tell if she means this ironically or if she means anything by it at all, maybe her nipples doubling as the POTUS’s eyes is just a coincidence. I then get it, I make a connection to the concept behind the art show, which is called “Show Us Your Tits!” and it features lots of photos (taken, it seems, by anyone who can push the button on a camera) of girls flashing their breasts in bars, at parties, on the street, and so on, the pinnacle of art world cool reappropriating bad TV from over a decade ago, and with unicorns.
All in all it’s a pretty good show. A lot of the pictures are so lo-res they look like they were screen-grabbed off YouTube or at best shot on old phones. The whole thing must have taken at least an entire Saturday to curate and hang, affixed to the wall as it all is with duct tape; perhaps it took the whole weekend if there was any marijuana in play. The truth is I’ve never liked art very much, and I can’t decide if I like this show because it’s not really art at all, it’s just stupid, or if maybe I hate this shit because it’s trying so hard not to be art and there’s nothing more arty than that. I try to think of another profession in which people do something all the while claiming they aren’t. Would a doctor do that? Anyway, I begin to feel sick to my stomach so I go to the one makeshift bathroom at the back of the space but there’s a long line of drunk girls and so I head back outside for some so-called air.
That’s when I see Gandhi talking to two black guys in the middle of the street, and not the kind of white black guys you normally see at these sorts of things, the kind of white black guys who can stomach us like the white black guys in the band TV on the Radio seem to be able to. No, these were actual black guys, they really stood out, they did not even have semi-ironic Afro picks in semi-ironic ’fros and they did not call each other “Negro” or wear bow ties or read James Baldwin on the subway. Seth introduces them to me as P-Mouse and Grain or something like that, it’s hard for me to hear because a faux–hair metal band is playing out of the back of a Budget rental truck parked on the street.
“Hey, did you guys see the art? What do you think?” I ask. Titmouse and Plain are in the music business, Seth is telling me, and they don’t give a shit about art.
“We don’t give a shit about art,” D-Louse says. “It’s stupid.” He then says he doesn’t think this crap here is art anyway, it’s just some bad pictures of some like dumbass rich girls flashing some of their rich-ass skin. I start to say something about the art being about a subversive, if not downright gangsta, appropriation by the highbrow culture establishment of a lowbrow pop icon, and Plane says “Who gives a fuck?” which kind of makes me want to hug him. Then Seth says these two guys wanted to meet me because they have just started a music production company, they’ve been producing some tracks out of the back blocks of Crown Heights, they are going to blow up any second, and, wait for it, they were thinking of getting into commercials. I could, see, get in on the ground floor, get a good deal on some demos before they were snatched up by the likes of Nike and Diesel.
Ten minutes later we are sitting at a rusty metal table in the back of a place called Midnight Drab on DeKalb Avenue. It has no sign and not even much of a door and nobody is even sure if Midnight Drab is really the name of it, it’s just what the place is called, at least by Seth. The blacks are ordering gin and juice and so I order one, too. I’d already had the better part of a bottle of red wine at my apartment before coming to the art show, and for a moment I fear the dangerous combination of grape and juniper, as it’s not something I’ve experimented with before, but we’ll see. An hour later the conversation turns to all these great commercials that people have been seeing on ESPN, the one where the guy runs up the side of a building and explodes, the one where the car comes out the guy’s ass, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But as I am thinking about excusing myself and going home to masturbate to the pictures in some French fashion rag, B-Louse, or is it Painboy, unfurls a one-hit bumper in his enormous hand. Alright, maybe I’ll stay for another G&J, even if it does mean enduring the kings of alt-garage hip-hop pressing on me their sampler CDs. I grab the bumper and lean down under the table and pretend I dropped something and do a hit; when I arise the guys are chuckling while Ravi Shankar makes some kind of face.
“No worries, I bought it from the bartender,” says Louse, meaning it’s all good here. I do another hit, left nostril this time, without attempting to disguise it. Seth gives me a micro-look like, That’s cool, you do your thing, and I can be here with you, because I’m a superior being now, I’ve reached this higher yogic plane of sobriety, I am but a mute witness to the fog of human sadness here before me. I try to hand the vial to Seth as a joke and he waves it off, not getting me. But to my surprise, Louse and Jane wave it off, too.
“All you, dog.”
So now I’m drunk and high and sitting with three idiots, guys who finish sentences with “dog” or “yo” or “fag”; unfortunately this constitutes the most satisfying social event of my week, not including the sexual encounter of four-point-five days ago.
We decide to leave and go to the after-party for the opening, which is at a loft in Ridgewood. Seth still has the Range Rover that his parents bought him as a birthday present back when they were flush, and he hasn’t sold it yet even though he can’t afford the upkeep; I think he may have said something about the insurance having lapsed and what a pain in the ass alternate-side parking is. After we are at the loft party for a few minutes, which is packed with the same people who were at the opening, and our hip-hop friends are still the only African-Americans in the crowd, some guy with a waxed mustache and an eye patch comes around holding a bucket collecting money to pay for the keg of Milwaukee’s Best that is already gone and that’s when I realize I made a mistake in coming out tonight at all. Seth and the guys are talking to a couple of young girls; Seth thinks he is getting somewhere with them because of how Street his friends are, and how this confers status on him, but really the girls are not paying attention to him, they’re just thinking about the possibility of hooking up with Louse or Pain for the tweet of it.
I take out my phone to call the car service to come pick me up when I see there’s a text I didn’t know I had.
turn arownd !!!
Fuck.
I make a point of not looking around the room, I just stuff my phone back in my jacket pocket and watch Seth and the girls and black guys standing in a little circle. One of the girls is wearing a diagonal-striped Diane von Furstenberg dress from the ’80s. She has the wrong body type for it, but she doesn’t seem to care. In my mind I’m just getting into this heavy critique of her because I don’t want to look around and let Intern think I am looking for her. After a minute or two I realize I forgot to call the car service, but that will entail taking my phone out again, which Intern, if she is indeed watching me from somewhere in the big crumbling warehouse of poseurs, will interpret as my caring.
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