by Mike Edison
Thanks to having such cheap rent, even making slave wages at the record store, I was able to sock away a few dollars, and luckily I found another rent-controlled sublet from a pal who had moved but wanted to hold on to his lease, since rent-controlled apartments in New York are the world’s most precious commodity. This one was twice as much as Go-Go Boy’s palace, but still a thousand bucks less than I would have paid without such a sweetheart deal. It was a real honey of a place, too, a garden apartment in the West Village, with a big ol’ gas grill out in back, which I promptly named Lucille.
Meanwhile, I was still conducting a hard-target search for a new job in publishing. Porn was not what it had been. Cheap video, a glut of new product, and the Internet—which was showing all signs of being here to stay—were shaving points off the sales of the magazines, which were now doing almost all of their writing in-house and down-sizing their staffs. I gave Carmine a shout, but he had nothing for me— the same chimps that were working there five years ago were still firmly installed in their jobs. It was a closed shop. But perseverance and industry bring sure reward. Once again I answered an ad in The New York Times and found a new career on the straight and narrow—as a business journalist.
The ad was for Soft Drinks & Beer, the leading trade magazine for the beverage industry. Trade magazines are notorious snoozes, but beer and soda pop? All those bubbles? What could possibly be more fun? At that point I would have taken a job with Floor Covering News or the Journal of Human Resources (both actual periodicals), anything to get back in the game. With SD&B, I hit the jackpot.
Jet-setting around Europe to do brewery tours was about as close to rock ’n’ roll as I was going to get in a straight job. Hey Mike, do you want to go to Amsterdam and talk to the people at Heineken? Okay. Would you go to Dublin and visit Guinness? You bet.
What sealed the deal is that they were looking for someone who not only had magazine chops but could navigate Spanish well enough to edit their Spanish-language publication. Somehow I had turned a three-year coke jag into a marketable skill. While I was at SD&B, I went to London, Paris, and all over Germany and Italy, and I even made it to St. Louis to visit the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales and the geniuses who make Budweiser.
I learned a whole headful of beverage-related arcana, all sorts of insider poop about dynamic right-angle transfer in low-friction conveyor systems, polyethylene terephthalate (the stuff they make plastic soda bottles out of), and high-intensity sweeteners. I did a lot of financial stories and had to learn how to speak Wall Street. I spent a great deal of time interviewing financial analysts and CEOs, and I often had to decipher stockholders’ reports for, say, Coca-Cola or Cadbury Schweppes and turn them into breezy feature stories.
But the marketing stories were the real powerhouse education, and I began to formulate a theory that magazine marketing shared the same principles as beverage marketing. Beverages, like magazines, were highly affordable luxury items that depended on consumer satisfaction to generate repeat sales. It was so much about the packaging, getting people to pick up your product, letting them discover for themselves just how good you were, and then adding value in every phase of the experience. Ultimately the goal was to create a successful, long-lasting relationship between the product and the consumer.
Innovation was Rule Number One. This was the case with every consumer product, but you were lucky if you could sell someone one iPod a year. Buying magazines and soft drinks had to be somehow benignly habit-forming. This was drilled into my head every day by the best minds at Pepsi, Coke, Sam Adams, you name it. Every top producer had marketing wizards of the highest caliber, and these people never stopped thinking of new ways to grow their brand and make their core products better. Fritz Maytag III, the brewmaster at Anchor Steam Beer, told me, Every day I try to put something better in the bottle. I had him sign a photo of himself to me with those words inscribed, and I hung it in my office at SD&B and later took it with me when I signed on to run High Times.
Unfortunately, this otherwise upbeat gazette of soda pop and beer was run by Ally Alpacka, the single most disagreeable person I have ever met in my life. A hog-bodied Hun of a woman cursed with toxic halitosis—which she treated by chain-smoking Kool 100s in everyone’s face (it was incredible how she could actually smoke at you)—what she lacked in personal charm she made up for with ill-advised cosmetic schemes built around disco-era blue eye shadow, blush that would have been better suited for a ten-dollar whore, and shit-colored lipstick that someone probably told her “softened her features.” It did not. It looked like Willem de Kooning had puked on her face.
Her hair was red like canned borscht, the unfortunate result of years of chemical rinsing, made more ghastly by her insistence on wearing colors that clashed with her head—puce pantsuits and mauve sweatshirts—the kind with sequined butterfly appliqués, straight out of the Golden Girls’ spring collection. When she had an important meeting or had to do business out of the office, she would squeeze her rolls of fat into dated pin-striped suits, which she thought made her look corporate and powerful but really made her look like the comic relief in an all-drag production of Guys and Dolls.
Ally Alpacka had previously run a few successful trade shows and had somehow managed to put together a team of investors to buy SD&B, which she had identified as not being fully optimized, especially in a newly emerging global market. There was a lot of money out there.
Her plan was to build a task force of editors and salespeople and, with the precision of a military strike, become omnipresent in the beverage industry and usher in a new, aggressive era in ad sales. In theory, I liked Ally Alpacka’s hard-ass approach to the business. Sadly, however, no one has ever done more to alienate and disillusion talented people who actually liked their jobs and were excited to do good work. As far as joie de vivre goes, it seemed that Ally Alpacka, contrary to every one of her stated goals of running a successful business, was on a mission to stamp it out wherever it lived. She was like a combination of Big Foot and Foghorn Leghorn—to whom she bore an uncanny resemblance—stomping around the office and ruining everyone’s day.
She had a huge chip on her shoulder about being a “woman in a man’s world,” and she would pointedly ask her male employees how they felt about “having a woman as their boss.” Which is not only a kick in the nuts to the last fifty years of progressive gender politics in the workplace, but also probably illegal. It did not help that every time she opened her mouth, it sounded like someone stepped on a duck.
All of this was bad enough. Then she decided to start bringing her dog to work, a real Marmaduke of a hound, about as tall as I am, with a jaw the size of a panel truck. Poopsy had the run of the place. If I left my desk for a second, I would come back to find him drinking my coffee. Then, jacked up on caffeine, he’d go tear-assing around the office—he was big enough to knock down a cubicle—and work would shut down until Ally Alpacka could corral him back into his pen. Then I’d get yelled at.
I had little in common with most of the staff—the editors were largely starter chimps with communication degrees from B-list schools, and the ad guys were typically fast-talking gorillas with slicked-back hair and pinkie rings—but everyone was very nice, and we were at the very least able to bond in the shadow of the World’s Worst Boss.
The one guy I worried about was Carlito, a potbellied intellectual from Mexico who had come to New York with ambitions of becoming a literary giant à la Jorge Luis Borges. Toiling under the weight of crushed dreams, he came to SD&B to be our chief Spanish translator. He believed with every cell in his body that this work was beneath his gigantic intellect, and he was miserable all the time. He looked at Ally Alpacka as the very embodiment of the Evils of American Capitalism, and he would stew at his desk, fomenting his own private Workers’ Revolution. The possibility of him snapping and coming to work locked and loaded never seemed terribly remote.
And then there was Frank. On Frank’s first day of work he showed up in a dashiki and a tricolored Rasta cap,
accented by some sort of smelly hemp jewelry. He was fresh from a stint with Amnesty International, and his was not exactly the off-the-rack uniform of the associate editor in training, but he had apparently got past the gatekeeper by waving his English degree from Rutgers.
Someone had tipped him off about my background, and when we were introduced, the first thing Frank said to me was, “Yeah, man, I heard you played in a band. Do you guys still jam?”
“Listen, hippie,” I pressed him, “we do not jam. We play songs.” He thought about that for a while, until he realized that I was just busting his balls, and we became great friends.
Frank is a very intelligent guy, but he always had something to prove. He was rebelling in every direction. This was his first job, a leap for him, since he considered employment of any kind a sellout. He had joined Amnesty straight out of college, ostensibly to help save the world, but more likely to piss off his parents, which is why he kept covering his arms in tattoos.
One night after work, Frank and I were drinking with some of his pals. Mostly they were a nice bunch of Jewish kids from Long Island who followed the Grateful Dead when they were in college and now, freshly sprung, were getting back to their true roots and working for enormous brokerage firms, doing right by their upper-class suburban upbringing, and achieving nouveau yuppiedom in record time. Frank was the iconoclast. He wasn’t making as much dough as some of his pals, who thanks to family connections were now swinging at Goldman Sachs, but he was always going to be the Player.
Frank’s friend Martin, a Brooks Brothers–wearing no-neck with a pedigree from a long line of Wall Street Jews, was mopping up the Glenlivet and complaining about his car, a cherry red Audi 6. The poor thing, he had grown tired of it. Now he wanted a Porsche. But he didn’t know how to tell his folks, who had just bought the Audi for him last week.
“Dude,” said Frank, and I knew this was going to be bad, “just report it stolen and get the insurance money.”
“That’s a good idea,” said his friend, “except first it has to be stolen.”
“No problem,” Frank assured him. “Just give me the keys. I’ll get rid of it for you. I know some boys who’ll chop it, and then you can call the insurance company.” Frank left driving the Audi.
No good was ever going to come of this. No matter how much Frank liked saying it, there were no “boys,” and there wasn’t going to be any “chopping.” For a few weeks Frank tried to find someone to take the car, bust it out into parts, and make it disappear. He asked the various pot dealers and low-level criminals he knew, and they all said, sure, I know someone who knows somebody. There was so much smoke up everyone’s ass it was like being at the All-Nude Slo-Cook BBQ championships.
Unfortunately, it was a lot harder to get rid of a brand-new Audi than Frank had prophesied at the bar, and his friend was starting to get pissed off that the car had not been stolen yet. He didn’t have any wheels, and he couldn’t call it in. What the fuck was going on? Well, for one thing, Frank had taken to driving the car around town, using it as flash to pick up girls and to joyride with his buddies, and he wasn’t that eager to let it go. He drove it to work every day and never thought twice about where he parked it, since it was going to be stolen anyway. At one point he even gave me the keys and told me to have my way with it.
Finally, when none of his posse of potheads came through with a connection to get rid of the car, and Martin was threatening to come over and break Frank’s legs, Frank started leaving it on the street with the door open and the keys in the ignition.
This went on for a week, and no one came near it. He’d drive it up to Harlem and leave it running, and when he came back, it would be out of gas, but untouched. And giving the car back was not an option. It was just too embarrassing.
And then it happened. Frank left the car on the street in Soho, had a few drinks at some trendy hotel bar, and when he came back, it was gone. He went back into the bar to have a few more and celebrate.
Pretty soon his cell phone rang. It was Martin, who had just received a call from the New York City police, who had impounded the car because it had more than a thousand dollars’ worth of unpaid parking tickets on it, all written in the past few weeks. Frank had to go to the impound lot and pay the fine in cash to get the car back.
When he started this caper, Frank was sure he was going to make some fast bread, and now he was out a thousand dollars and he still had the car to get rid of. He finally drove it to a remote location a few hundred miles north of New York City, set it on fire, then walked five miles through the woods to get a bus back home.
Let me tell you a story about two monkeys. Just regular monkeys. Cute ones. The first monkey (Fig. 1) is very sad. Sad and angry. There is an unpleasant monkey scowl on his face. He is suffering from monkey malaise. The other monkey (Fig. 2) is smiling. He is alert and happy and ready to take on the world. This is the kind of monkey you’d like to set up shop with, the kind of monkey you’d like to work next to, the kind of monkey you want in your posse. He is holding a banana.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Now let’s take a closer look at that banana (Fig. 3). What’s that? A price tag? Five cents? Hmmm. So the only difference between an angry monkey—one with his mind polluted by evil thoughts of work stoppages and industrial sabotage—and a happy, motivated monkey, who feels empowered and is eager to please, is a nickel? Well, who wouldn’t want to spend five cents to have a happy monkey? And that’s the moral of our story: it is easy to make monkeys happy . . . almost as easy as it is to make them unhappy.
Fig. 3
Ally Alpacka taught me that. Well, by example. I’m not so simple or naïve that I believe a piece of tropical fruit is in and of itself the Philosopher’s Stone of modern management technique, but half a dime’s worth of banana every so often can make for some mighty cheerful chimps. Ally Alpacka was surrounded by a gang of misanthrope apes who wanted to kneecap her sorry ass.
She once invited the art and editorial staff out to lunch to “reward” them for the great job they were doing. Of course everyone likes to be taken to lunch, but no one likes to be constantly reminded that it is some kind of gift. She had a way of lording it over the place, kind of like Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau, and made it seem like it was a great act of charity for her to come down from the mountain, and at the risk of soiling her muumuu feed us and let us bask in her magnanimous personage, presumably so we would offer her our undying thanks for letting us put out her magazine by continuing to toil obediently in her royal trenches.
Everyone already had their hackles up, but nonetheless we were generally looking forward to having a nice time out of the office. Some of the girls in the production department had actually come to work dressed up for the “company lunch”—when Ally Alpacka announced that instead of going out, she thought it would be “more fun” to have pizza in the conference room. Suddenly her reward seemed like a punishment. Pizza in the conference room? That’s what we did when editorial meetings ran long, and no one liked it then, either. She could have pulled down her polyester stretch pants and rained drizzling shits over the entire staff and received a warmer reception.
My favorite part was when she really started twisting the knife in the wound with a nauseating speech about how “the company likes to do this for its employees so they know how valuable they are.” People were seething, the general perception being that we were worth more than a slice of crappy pizza. Like maybe lunch in a restaurant?
I was treated better in the porn business—I wrote a few overheated books and got a cash bonus, not to mention some gravlax canapés and very decent champagne. At Drake, my salary had doubled in two years. All my editors at Hustler and Penthouse had to do was call me and say “great job,” which they never failed to do, and I beamed with pride and made sure my next job was even better. That was my banana. But Ally Alpacka just didn’t have it in her cavernous self to be kind without strings attached. She was a pig who wanted to eat all the bananas—
and the coconuts, and the pineapples, and the mangoes, and the papayas—herself. It was the single most ungracious performance by an employer since Truman fired General MacArthur.
Except for the Soft Drinks & Beer Christmas party, a depressing, low-rent fiasco in the basement of a smelly Irish pub. I still can’t believe I put a suit on for it. I shouldn’t have even bothered to shower.
Ally Alpacka’s speech that day was an award winner. “We had a very good year, thanks to everyone here. And that’s why we wanted to have this party for you, as a little bonus.” And that was it. That was our little bonus.
13
ESCAPE FROM DOGGIE VILLAGE
I was in love. I fell hard. I felt like I got hit with a sailboat. Or a two-by-four, right to the soft part of my skull. My head was swimming. The sidewalks jiggled like aspic. I was one smitten kitten.
When I got back from Spain, the phone was ringing constantly with calls from people asking me if I wanted to play the drums in their bands—and I would politely tell them to fuck off. I had given up that life, I would explain, to begin work on an avant-garde outer-space ballet to be set on board an interstellar Iberian drug frigate.