by Mari Reiza
HALLELUJAH!
A brilliant day by The Few, The Proud, The Totally Insane: The Enterprise Boys.
Not even ten minutes for a wank, not even a piss. We should have carried an anti-freeze container and pissed in it like old-time taxi drivers. Still, we would have never dared to wank, out of fear of feeling like a test orangutan watched by some Enterprise gods up in the Olympus control room. Enterprise had eyes everywhere. They also had mouthpieces everywhere, selling us total madness disguised as talent and virtue. The eyes made sure that the mouthpieces’ messages went down well. It was a concerted effort.
Was this a speed we could live at? Like planes and cars, had we become faster just to get slower? What were we achieving and what was the overall journey time and price to get wherever we needed to be? By the way, where were we going exactly? Did anyone have the full picture?
I hoped Hammi did, Peter did.
After less than a year I was in tatters. I thought of following in the steps of the Slow Food movement and starting up the Slow Life movement.
Had someone done this?
We were powered by nerves and coffee during daylight, barely unpowered by a glass of wine at bedtime, on a good day. We batted back and forth between patient and senior leader and PEN-er and CPS, like a drum player on drugs. This new life troubled us very quickly over time. Nal, Tobias, Trojan, Alakrita, me. Everybody. I could see it even if we didn’t admit it to each other. We barely had time to talk to each other. We had a hard time flirting with our girls, having sex with our wives. We were even advised to be careful with the risks we took. Like we couldn’t go out on the terrace in our pants anymore because we could risk a fever or we shouldn’t go skiing because we could break a leg. These things could keep us away from our schedules! We became a swinging smudge of near-mortality that advanced and retreated as Enterprise tides moved back and forth, like a watery metronome.
At least Hammi was always the first one to the bar in the few trips we could afford out of the patients’ offices. He played us the piano, caressed it like it was the skin of the most beautiful nymph, and then we started dreaming the dreams that saved us.
But when I looked at a veteran like him I could see that, for all he laughed, in the background, he also lived in personal chaos. He had become an impulsive cheater, the only way to keep his dick alive given his travel schedule, he claimed. Or maybe he thought that the rope between two lovers had to be tested by a hundred more jumping on it indecently, who knows. It made for a string of porn adventures, at least on his side. He still kept up appearances. He holidayed for the whole of August at the Grand Hotel Riccione with his family, whom he seldom saw throughout the year. But despite his self-assurance I could sense fear. He would not break Enterprise lines in public, but beneath the apparent open friendships, he could be clubby and secretive. He played the game the best he could but this was no freedom. He had failed. Would I fare better? I didn’t have much time to think about it. Work took all my thinking.
Late feedback from Truth Leaders and continuous iterations striving for perfection would often ensure we were up to the early hours like bakers, our presentations coming nice and warm off the printer at daybreak. Patients loved them like fresh bread, but would not even look at them. Hammi would spend his time talking tennis instead with the patient’s CEO. He was a tennis player and told everyone about how close he felt to Federer after reading his autobiography.
And despite our best efforts to mobilise patient organisations to act, it was a sobering truth that most salvations failed to deliver. How did that make us feel, sacrificing for nothing? We were told from the top not to worry, that Enterprise’s help was at hand. Our CEO had created Enterprise Execution (EE), a specialised group that would turn recommended redemption switches into concrete performance improvement. Bev, our London head, had announced it in her latest speech, ‘EE will work directly at patient sites.’ They would apparently work there for longer than five minutes too, pressure testing all switches, coaching and empowering patient staff to ensure Enterprise Squads’ efforts would not go to waste. Would this justify wrecking our lives? Would EE give us more time to fuck our wives?
It helped only partially to be told that there was a system behind this battery, a method to this madness. Sometimes Hammi was not very convincing, though he was better than most Enterprisers. He used to say that sanity did not exist, and we had to find the degree of insanity we felt comfortable with.
‘Fuck. I have no clue. Maybe let’s take it down a few notches,’ I would say and he would laugh.
Peter occasionally called to tell me that I would get paid and promoted, and just to get on with it. That was the method to the madness. And Peter’s pep talks became the most uplifting moments in my early years, when Confrères distrusted me and most lowly patients I was allowed to meet hated me. Peter’s pep talks and Carlo’s emails from Goldman’s trading floor: ‘100% committed to work. 10% on Mondays, 25% midweek and 15% on Fridays.’ I WISHED IT SO BADLY.
Alakrita’s deadly charms
At least I had something to look forward to when Alakrita announced she would be coming for a couple of days to London for a project in September 2002, when by pure chance I would also be there rather than elsewhere around Europe.
It had been two years since we had started at the firm, and we had kept in contact mainly via emails and conference calls. The thing was, at Enterprise, there was endless virtual contact, but unless you were stuck in the same Squad forever, which was rare and the best way to get to hate a colleague, most people managed two head-to-head meetings a year at best. Even university reunions come round more often! I sometimes wondered whether it was intended, that there was no room at the firm to grow real companionship, no room for intimacy, no spontaneity. Colleagues definitely didn’t enjoy each others’ company. We were no incubator for sustainable cohesive teams feeling entirely responsible for long-term, large, meaningful projects (few patients could hardly afford us for longer than ten weeks), and enjoying every second of them, from regular, long, heated-up office gatherings to celebrating wins or commiserating in the pub. We did not go to the pub. I had only gone to the pub with Zainab once, in two years.
At Enterprise, we felt the modern world had conspired to remove the necessity to be physically together in the same room and, even when we were, we felt there was no need to talk to each other and preferred to be plugged into our virtual worlds, sending each other emails. Well, we had been chosen for being solitary...
Still, I had kept in contact with Alakrita and, by Enterprise standards, we had a good relationship. So when she told me that she would be in London, I had, overexcitedly, a bit like the lap dog that she expected me to be, arranged to take her out to a recently opened upmarket Italian in Mayfair. Carlo had recommended it. I did consider at the time whether I should have gone for an Indian chef, given there were very decent ones in the city, but I did not want Alakrita to think that I was courting her as an Indian wife-to-be. (My dad had always wanted me to take girls to Indian restaurants when I was courting, which is perhaps why I ended up marrying Miriam?) Although, subconsciously, I probably was courting Alakrita. Things with Miriam were not going well. I wasn’t fucking her, right? The days would have needed thirty-six hours and even then Enterprise would have managed to fill them all.
Entering the restaurant that day I was on edge. I had been in charge of the logistics and would have to take full responsibility for the date. I was no longer used to that. I noticed that I was becoming one of those men whose little whims are most often carried out by other people, mainly support women, so that someone else can be made accountable. And I didn’t even have my own personal secretary yet. You wait!
Inside the eatery, I immediately blamed myself for choosing a place that humbled me, even haunted me. I felt seriously intimidated. I even cursed Carlo, how could he suggest this millionaire’s retreat? Next, I envied him for devoting himself with monomaniacal energy to making money, and succeeding. ‘God bless Goldman Sachs!’ I impercep
tibly, I hope, reexamined my outfit, which was just about good enough for the scene. I had moved up from the M&S suits to some shitty, third-rate tailor, the only one Hammi could recommend that suited my budget in Paris.
Tignanello double magnums laid stacked at the cosy bar on the right side of the entrance, where an old-fashioned Venetian butler seemed busy preparing perfect Bellinis à la Harris bar: £20 a pop. Soft music, a lingering aroma of truffles, and the women, rich Edwige Fenech-like beauties and young adorned trophy wives out of Dolce & Gabbana hot baroque ads, I had no eyes for the men that night. I could not recall how long it had been since Miriam and I had had sex, but these women were melting me until I thought that perhaps it wasn’t the wrong restaurant after all.
I sat at the bar, Bellini in hand, and enjoyed babe-watching, making the most of a rare occasion. It did not take long to feel the restaurant suddenly flown up in the air, pulled by huge balloons, headed to land in Soneva Gili where the Rolling Stones were about to arrive by Riva motorboat to sing for me exclusively, ‘You Can Always Get What You Want’. Had Enterprise Milan advised on that new Montenegro campaign? Who had thought of those musicians in the Riva-like boat ads? My mind was shifting cheekily back to work even if I had promised myself not to do that tonight. Yes, it had been one of Hammi’s projects. He said if you worked in advertising you were entitled to want to kill yourself, but still busied himself arselicking every European head of customer journeys.
Alakrita finally arrived, huffing and puffing. She looked horny or maybe I was ravenous, and drunk. I suddenly had a déjà vu. It was UB40’s ‘Madame Medusa’, a monster of the night. I wanted to enjoy the scene for as long as possible but Alakrita’s swift kiss made me spill my drink, knocking it off-balance with her huge treasure handbag. Then she instructed the waiter to sit us at our table quickly, and the spell had been broken, as if Martin Luther had just walked in to shift the whore of Babylon into the resplendent bride of Christ. Who had said that before?
‘Shit, fuck,’ I said to myself. Then to her, ‘Why the rush?’ but got no answer.
Once seated, though, she queried assertively.
‘What do you eat here, pasta?’
I was about to explain to her, as Carlo would have better than me, that Italian food was not just about pasta but superb quality meat and fish ingredients or treats like bottarga, ricci and truffles. But I was cut-off sharply, whilst she was still glancing at the neat sheet of paper we had been handed.
‘Vittal, pasta is pasta, and I usually refuse to pay more than twenty dollars for a plate of pasta,’ she barked out of her huge lips.
It made total sense. Shit sushi, two hundred dollars plus; pasta maximum twenty dollars. Black and white. And of course I was paying, which we both knew from the start. Carlo would have chopped Alakrita’s head off, but she looked too sexy and I had to make allowances because she was American. Suddenly, she was not even Indian anymore. Would she have known any better her balti from her biryani, her bhuna from her dhansak? Alakrita summoned the waiter once again and, after a thorough interrogation over the menu, she said that she would have what I was having.
I had asked for fritto misto antipasto and calves liver alla Veneziana with fried polenta, which was not following menu etiquette, but most importantly it was not vegetarian. I broke the news to Alakrita and suggested she could have spinach and ricotta ravioli with asparagus. She settled for my advice grudgingly, but without the ricotta and asked for the asparagus to be changed for another vegetable.
‘Which vegetable?’ It was a fair question from the waiter, I thought.
But she could not come up with the name of another vegetable when pushed. Maybe Americans did not know their vegetables anymore and ate out of astronaut sachets, or perhaps Enterprisers were too busy for vegetables. Eventually, she accepted that she would leave the asparagus on the side, and immediately asked me not to tip this ‘inept guttersnipe’ of a waiter.
Never open an upmarket restaurant in London, I reminded myself, it must be worse than hell.
‘And for drinks?’ the waiter was braving it.
‘A latte,’ Alakrita barked again.
A fucking latte, with dinner? Are you joking me? I wanted to set fire to my insides just for fun, but instead I focused all my inner strength on her lips, to remain calm. Vittal, just think of something funny, I said to myself. A Good Year came to mind with Russell Crowe, ‘McDonald’s in Avignon, fish & chips in Marseille,’ but Alakrita is pretty, and that will save the day. But I could hardly let it go. What a fucking groupie! I will have what you are having, I could not believe that she had said that. And then the latte!
Prompted by stress and trying to save the image our waiter would be building of us, I asked for an extra glass of white wine from Alto Adige for the fritto, on top of the bottle of Le Volte that I had already ordered.
‘Is Alto Adige a country?’ she was at it again. She probably also thought that Caesar Augustus was a type of salad. Could this woman ever be Enterprise client-ready, and if so, who the fuck were our clients?
For a minute, I feared the evening was threatening to be Le Volte, me and my liver, calves liver. I had excelled myself this time, taking all this shit for an unlikely fondle. How many cracking friend dinner stories could this have made though? If only I still went out for dinner with friends. Vittal, just leave it, I said to myself again. It had taken the Romans hundreds of years for refinement. Americans had not had enough time or they had perhaps peaked too quickly and I had caught them on the retreating phase. I tried to relax and enjoy.
After endless unengaging conversations combining technical babble and malicious gossip about Enterprise life, title, prospects, career, achievements, title again, opportunities, but never money, I felt certain that Alakrita would only ever be good for a fuck if she kept her mouth shut. Alakrita, I want your sex, the tune was playing in my mind. She was my dick’s desire that night, perhaps anything could have been after so long. I kept drinking and focusing on her hands. The big scary engagement ring was off, that was some good news. Her hair, her neck, her cleavage. Eventually I arrived to her lips, which she was moving quickly, barely eating, just talking. What came out of them was nonsense but the shape of the lips was so pretty. I tried not to think, not to hear and to be carried away by the lips. I had Alakrita fever and it felt like some kind of demonology revealing itself in clouds of red smoke lips...
In any case, I could not get a word in edgewise. Something about her review, about a PEN-er that had been a fuckpig bastard. It was all disappearing into the smoke. I was back in Crowe’s Provence. The kiss at the pool. The wet lips. ‘Pardonnez mes lèvres, elles trouvent la joie dans les endroits les plus inhabituels. Pardon my lips, they find joy in the most unusual places.’
My brain jump-started its powers of persuasion. It was urging me to see the real Alakrita, pushing me from the swimming-pool trampoline and leaving me to drown, or driving a Smart car like a maniac down the pretty French countryside, knocking me off of my bike into a ditch, or as Crowe’s secretary, she had a similar high-pitched voice, cheerfully telling me that my mother was in hospital, my dog had died and I had just been fired. My brain was wise, cleverer than my dick, but my dick was winning. Flashes kept returning of a desert flower and those lips. I sat transfixed, making understanding faces to Alakrita. I wanted to understand, I wanted to be understood too, and to touch her hand, and to not go to bed alone. I wanted all those things and I kept drinking. Drunkenness was sometimes necessary in this difficult life. There was the whole bottle of red wine for me to go through, after I had quickly finished with the country of Alto Adige. Close your mind with your eyes open, Vittal. Enjoy, I told myself. I wanted her to play that lips scene again… and again, and again...
Next, our main courses arrived and I PASSED OUT.
I must have literally fallen off my chair.
When I woke up Alakrita had thrown a glass of water on me, tap water, lots of ice, the way Americans like it. She had refrained from hurling the latte at least.
How long had I been on the floor?
I politely reassured staff and other diners that everything was fine, that I was not on drugs, that it must have been exhaustion. God! I looked like a prick.
I went to the toilet and dried off, then Alakrita insisted that she had work to do and I got us separate cabs home.
‘Vittal, do not fuss,’ she said, ‘it was only a pasta. We will do it another time.’
Alakrita, my dick’s desire.
In the cab on the way back, I reflected on the evening.
It went to show that even at Enterprise we were human, that we did fuck up sometimes. Could I stop thinking about bloody work? No, I couldn’t. It was becoming a fixation.
‘For example,’ I was thinking aloud and soon came down with a long list...
We had only in the last few months: sold Top Talent Throughout, TTT, as a viable outperforming strategy which drove a patient/client bankrupt (you do not need an engineer to clean the bogs!); published slanted workforce survey results creating undue panic in the insurance markets; advised a patient to buy a company because of staff complementarities, without checking that the target’s market cap was four times that of the acquirer’s; casually slashed someone’s workforce after miscalculating sales projections by a factor of ten (due to a unit error on a multiplier, this would never happen to our fees), leading to the worst product launch of all time for a heart drug that could have saved millions of patients; we had even thrown a client party the week before last which turned out to offend our entire female workforce, with scantily clad women in stilettos, stripping inside human-size, plastic champagne glasses. Had that been a fuck-up? It had certainly worked out better client-wise than putting a call out to be entertained by Helen of Troy.