The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  Every few days, or as often as our morale could stand it, we’d pile into my beat-up old Volkswagen and drive down to the Peninsula looking for work. It was summer (the summer of 1977, to be exact), and my car had no air conditioning; on the contrary, it had a broken heater that wouldn’t shut off. To make matters worse, our only decent skirts were winter wool. Sweaty and rumpled, we would emerge from the car in some place like Redwood City, or Cupertino, or Mountain View, and march unannounced into the office of the chief city planning official. There we would try to talk him (it was always a him) into hiring us for cost-benefit studies, housing plans, growth analyses—anything, in short, that his office had money for, or happened to be doing. He would listen politely, accept our brochure, and show us out.

  I don’t know why we chose the Peninsula as our hunting ground. Perhaps we felt that the East Bay (where we lived) and San Francisco (where most consultants worked) were too poor to have the excess cash to waste on us. The Peninsula, that stretch of luxuriant suburban development extending south of San Francisco along the west side of the bay, seemed ripe for sacking. I had grown up on the Peninsula, and Katharine had hardly ever been there before. We both hated it, with an equal but opposite force. To her New England sensibility it represented all that was worst about California: squeaky-clean newness, shopping malls as cultural centers, tawdry highway-side development, and city halls that, in architectural terms, could just as well have been high school administration buildings or dentists’ offices. For me it was the giant maw of childhood, threatening to snatch me up from the realm of hard-won adulthood (my own car! a business brochure!) and swallow me whole.

  We were briefly rescued from this series of futile trips by a job secured for us by Katharine’s brother. A contact of a friend of his, or a friend of a contact (these things are hard to differentiate in the world of big business), was working or had been working for the B. Dalton bookstore chain, which was about to open a large outpost on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Some ambitious interior designer had envisioned a “bas-relief” (that was the exact phrase we were given) consisting of literary names, places, and titles, to be encoded in enduring plaster of Paris, just inside the main front window on a wall visible from the street. Katharine and I—or rather, our firm—won the august task of coming up with the names. We were to submit four lists: Fifty Great Authors, Fifty Great Books, Fifty Great Literary Characters, and Fifty Great Literary Places. We had quite a good time coming up with the items (I was particularly proud of Café Deux Magots and the House of Usher), and engaged in spirited arguments over “merit” versus “representation” (for example, could we list three Shakespeare plays and two Faulkner novels if we didn’t include anything by Ben Jonson or Hemingway?). For years afterward, on my occasional trips to New York, I would stroll down that block of Fifth Avenue merely to witness our triumph—a triumph only slightly marred by the fact that the B. Dalton people had thrown out some of our most carefully selected choices to make room for the likes of Scarlett O’Hara and the Valley of the Dolls.

  This amusing task, unfortunately, only took us about two and a half hours (already wily in the ways of consulting, we billed, I believe, for three), and we were soon out on the road again. We did eventually come up with one employer through the Drop-In Assault Technique: a place called Far West Laboratory for Educational Research. (You can tell by the name that they would hire someone off the street.) And in the long run we even managed to pile up a substantial list of clients, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Alameda County Legal Aid Society, the San Francisco Department of Social Services, and the United Farm Workers.

  We called ourselves Lesser & Ogden Associates. Katharine’s boyfriend called us the Rip-Off Sisters. This is not to say that we were bad consultants. I think we were probably among the more honest, useful (and certainly cheap) members of the consulting trade during the years that I have subsequently come to think of as the Golden Brown era—that bountiful period when Jerry Brown’s governorship, sandwiched between those of Reagan and Deukmejian, overlapped with Jimmy Carter’s presidency to produce (in California, at least) a rich panoply of social services. Such services are the carrion on which “good” consultants feed. Too pure to sully ourselves with business dealings as such we circled instead around the moribund carcass of America’s concern for its own poor. My partner and I wanted to help people, however indirectly; we also wanted to make a living. Our backgrounds in English literature ensured that “indirectly” would be the operative word, since our only access to the social services lay through the manipulation of language.

  Unfortunately, it was a form of language that, in its degradation, effectively counteracted any good intentions we may have had. For what the language of public policy and social service consulting does is to eliminate the human factor. “Planning is something you do to other people,” cracked a city planner at the firm where I did my high school apprenticeship; he seemed confident that he, at least, would never be redeveloped out of a home. But the situation is even more dire than that. Planning (in which I include all large-scale public policy activities) is a nearly autonomous process which supersedes both planner and plannee. Like the ferocious machine in Chaplin’s Modern Times, it threatens to consume even the individual at its helm.

  My partner and I were essentially hired guns. The fact that the agencies which hired us were the good guys in the “war on poverty” made some but surprisingly little difference. We were brought in to solve problems; we did our bit and departed. “A problem,” Richard Ohmann astutely remarks in his book English in America, “is a chunk of reality distanced from the self and made objective. There it can be manipulated, and a solution found.” We found solutions to the satisfaction of our employers, but whether our actions ever made the slightest difference to any “low-income populations” is something I seriously doubt.

  The poor do not exist in the world of public policy consulting; they have been replaced entirely by “the low-income.” Like all the other euphemisms which pepper the consulting trade, this one has its deleterious aspects. Poor people are distinct and disturbing. They ask you for money on the street, or show up in sad Christmas columns in the daily paper, or sit on the sidewalks with their meager belongings (and pets, and sometimes even children) spread out around them. They impinge on your sensibility. The low-income, in contrast, are a faceless mass of statistics, a portion of a government chart about annual family incomes. The word, moreover, has no inherent negative connotations: it could even be something good, like “low-cholesterol” or “low-cost.” Ostensibly introduced to salvage the self-worth of the population it describes (since nobody in supposedly classless America would want to be categorized as “poor”), the term actually removes those it denotes from the arena of public concern. It somehow implies, with its thermometer-like objectivity, that their condition is merely due to a temporary drop in the collective economic temperature.

  Money is a dirty word in the consulting business. Perhaps this is because the social planners don’t want to be accused of “throwing money at a problem”; more likely, it is because there is so little money to throw. And the consultants themselves are not eager to be reminded that they are earning filthy lucre for their good deeds. So the standard requests for proposals (RFPs, in the professional lingo) never describe a consulting contract in terms of a bare amount of money; rather, the expected payment is expressed as “degree of support,” which in turn boils down to “person-hours” or “person-days” (or even “person-months,” in a really lucrative contract). And the social service agencies to which consultants consult do not spend money either: they have “budgetary requirements” and receive “funding.”

  To counteract this vagueness at the heart of their profession, consultants have seized in desperation on the language of the machinist. The part of a proposal which can be used over and over again for different clients (the part describing the consulting firm’s capabilities and general problem-solving approach) is called the “b
oilerplate.” The basics of an area of expertise are referred to as the “nuts and bolts.” “Does he know the nuts and bolts of redevelopment?” one might ask about a potential new employee—not querying his ability to put up a steel-core highrise, but trying to find out if he knows how to get through the requisite government paperwork. In its futile attempt to force some kind of concreteness into inherently abstract pursuits, such language drains these mechanical terms of any real meaning. Consulting is mechanical, but only in the idiomatically metaphorical sense.

  In addition to its person-hours, its boilerplate, and its nuts and bolts, every consulting document to which I was ever a party had to have its “Executive Summary.” This appendage, which always came at the front of the document, consisted of two to ten pages recapitulating, in brief, the contents of the whole proposal or report. In other words, it was a plain old summary. What was “executive” about it? Rumor had it that the practice had begun during the gubernatorial reign of Ronald Reagan, when the state’s chief executive professed himself unwilling or unable to read any document longer than ten pages. Whatever its origins, the Executive Summary had its practical uses: it gave a false air of efficiency and managerial adeptness to what might otherwise seem a morass of interminable verbiage. The opening remarks implied (without having to assert it outright, which would have entailed taking some responsibility) that there were executives in charge, people who knew how to execute things.

  “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams strenuously advocated. The entire history of the consulting profession might be viewed as an attempt to give the lie to that poetic dictum. “No ideas but in other ideas,” or, more accurately, “No ideas but in meaningless abstractions,” is the implicit battle cry of the consultant. Even the professions that ostensibly deal in tangibles—the urban planners, the housing experts—linguistically reach for intangibility. Once I was interviewed for a subcontract position by a man who produced environmental impact reports, housing plans, and other pieces of paper connected with urban design. Casting a suspicious glance at my mainly literary educational résumé, he barked, “Come on, would you know a housing element if it hit you on the head?” I responded with a look of affronted self-justification. In truth, I had no idea what a housing element was; all I could be sure of was that it was not a house. My potential employer’s bizarre turn of phrase left me with a haunting mental image: unlike the Wicked Witch of the East, who in The Wizard of Oz was actually squashed by a house, I was to be brained by a technically nonexistent, purely linguistic “housing element.”

  Sometimes a consultant’s sleight of phrase is entirely purposeful, aimed at avoiding rejection, detection, or (at the very least) uncomfortable cross-examination. I’m convinced this was the case, for instance, in a project Lesser & Ogden Associates did for an eccentric little San Francisco organization. Consisting almost entirely of a battered but natty-looking ex-alcoholic and his female sidekick, this “organization” proposed to cure alcoholism through the heavy application of various vitamins and minerals (zinc, I remember, being chief among them). We were to write a proposal for the treatment center. Actually, the technique appeared to make some sense, and there were even a few medical reports to back it up. But our clients, wary of being written off as health-food faddists, forbade us to use the word “vitamins” in the proposal. We were to refer exclusively to their “orthomolecular” approach to alcoholism.

  At other times, though, the euphemisms may be merely the unintentional linguistic cruelties habitually spawned by large bureaucracies. In one case Katharine and I were hired to create a “cost of living index for G.A. recipients” in Alameda County. This sounds pleasantly clean and statistical, with the distasteful truth safely hidden away in the usual alphabet soup. (Part of what distinguishes members of the consulting guild from outsiders, incidentally, is their pronunciation of acronyms and abbreviations. HUD—the Department of Housing and Urban Development—is always “Hud,” like the Paul Newman movie, whereas General Assistance is “Gee A,” not “Gah.”) What the Alameda County job in fact entailed was coming up with a monthly sum on which the poorest of the welfare poor could survive by living in single-room-occupancy hotels, eating foods that fulfilled only the minimal nutritional requirements of the Department of Agriculture, and taking no more than one round-trip bus ride per day. The fact that we were doing this research for a good cause (to raise the minimum General Assistance payment from an excruciating $159 per month to an only slightly less unbearable $286 per month) hardly made us feel any better about the existence we were envisioning for the beneficiaries of our work. A “cost of living index” had, in this sense, no relationship to a life.

  In carrying out the G.A. project we relied on a basic tool of the consulting trade, the specially tailored survey “instrument.” The word, standard in all surveyusing professions, suggests either fine tuning or delicate surgery; in either case the implication is one of subtle movements, regard for aesthetic form, and skilled elimination of pain. But the reality is just the opposite. A survey instrument is a blunt tool with which one bludgeons the frequently unwilling victim into virtual unconsciousness, at the same time numbing one’s own sensibilities into a similar state. Even before the proliferation of computers, it was a device aimed at promoting dialogue between one machine and another. The only way a human being could effectively use it was to memorize the questions and then throw the damn thing away, hoping that all the salient points would somehow be raised in a normal conversation.

  Katharine and I realized even at the height of our consulting careers that there was something drastically wrong, or at best ludicrous, about the language of our profession. To keep sane, we developed a series of private jokes and references that played off our sense of this ludicrousness. When we first started the firm, I remember, I was in the midst of reading J.R., William Gaddis’s marvelous and horrifyingly accurate rendering of corporate babble. One highly placed executive in the novel kept talking about “putting out brushfires” every time he had a minor crisis to handle. Lesser & Ogden Associates seized on this phrase, trotting it out gleefully whenever a snag presented itself. Part of our delight in the formulation lay in its utter inappropriateness—and therefore its ironically pleasing aptness—to the work of a consultant. Taken literally, the phrase suggests a band of resolute cowboys, ranchowners, and rural sheriffs joining together to stamp out a blaze that threatens homes and livestock. It has the romance of a western, the immediacy of flame. Consulting, of course, has neither. Yet on some level the consultant would like to think of himself as the modern equivalent of the old self-reliant dogooder, a kind of white-collar Wyatt Earp rushing out to right wrongs and then moving on to the next “problem.” But the real problem is that there are no brushfires in the consulting business—no rectifiable emergencies, no burning realities, no urgent demands for action. It’s all just smoke.

  In retrospect, however, I have many reasons to be grateful for my brief public policy consulting career, which lasted from 1977 to about the end of 1980 or possibly the beginning of 1981 (the demise of our firm corresponding closely with the election and inauguration of President Reagan). For one thing, it enabled me to survive for more than three years without getting a real job, a lesson I absorbed so well that I have yet to hold down a forty-hour-a-week, benefits-paying, promotion-track position. More important, it taught me that what I needed from my work was a tangible product, something I could point to at the end of the day or the year, or the lifetime, and say, “I did this.” (It seems to have had pretty much the same effect on Katharine. After an interim job at Bay Area Rapid Transit, she went on to an unusual career in real estate development, including the construction of some incredibly beautiful stone-and-tile houses in the Umbrian countryside.) My first response to this realization was to found a little magazine, The Threepenny Review, whose preservable, complete-in-themselves quarterly issues were intended to provide the concrete proof of my labor—as indeed they have. But it would be ten years before the fledgling ma
gazine could pay me any kind of salary, and in the meantime I had to support myself. With this crass motive in mind, I sold my services, at the beginning of the 1980s, to a wealthy Bay Area foundation in need of an “arts and environment” consultant.

  STRANGE MEETING

  n 1981 I briefly served as the point of contact between the Synanon drug rehab organization and a group of ranchers in Marin County. As I knew nothing about drugs and even less about ranching, I was perhaps not ideally suited to my role, but this didn’t seem to bother my employers at the foundation, who had engineered the encounter between the two parties.

  Shortly before I appeared on the scene, the increasingly embattled Synanon, already famous for its unconventional (not to say bizarrely authoritarian) residential treatment methods, had decided to move out of Marin County to a less accessible location. This was just after the Point Reyes Light, a tiny West Marin newspaper, had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing some of the creepier aspects of the treatment program’s operations. Synanon wanted to sell its 3,300 acres as quickly as possible; the locals feared this meant that prime agricultural land would be lost forever to vulture-like developers. To avert the potential environmental disaster, the foundation bought the land itself, all the while planning to resell at least some of it to local ranchers. My job was supposedly to oversee the transition.