The Secrets Men Keep

by Mark Sampson

  “So are you nervous?” Muizz asks me.

  “About ordering?” I say, scanning the menu, which comes with a string tie. “Absolutely. I mean, look at these prices. I don’t know where to start.” I spot the apocryphal hamburger: it’s only $28.95, and comes with a ‘generous slice’ of asiago.

  Muizz laughs once, more like a cough, his cheeks squeezing upward around his thin, sharp nose. “No, no. You’re funny. I meant our meeting with Aspen and his team. Are you nervous, Mikey?”

  “Nervous how?”

  “I don’t know. You ever meet a celebrity before?”

  “Sure. Sure I have.” I immediately think back to when I was 11, growing up on the Island. I got to go on a tour of the local CBC studio because I had, even as a kid, begun to show interest in the news game. The tour guide introduced me to Roger Younger, who anchored the six o’clock news. Star struck, I remember thinking he was both taller and more handsome than he seemed on TV.

  “Who did you meet?” Muizz asks, his grin like a razor blade.

  “Uh . . . Kevin Spacey.” It seems probable; the guy gets around. “You meet anyone famous?”

  “Oh yeah,” he says, and leans back coolly in his chair. Muizz’s hair is always the exact same length whenever I see him—like a light dusting of pepper on his gravy-coloured skull. I think: How does he do that? “A client of mine gave us a box at the ACC, and we get to hang out with Sidney Crosby whenever the Pens are in town.” He sips his wine. “Of course, Tim Aspen is a slightly bigger deal than Sidney Crosby.”

  “He was,” I snort. I’m about to go on but then the waitress, high cheek bones and straight blonde hair, comes by the table. I balk and order an inoffensively priced stir fry. Muizz orders the Italian Delight pizza, but tells her not to put pork on it. She nods and takes our menus without writing anything down.

  “Muizz, I do want to be clear,” I continue. “We can’t do anything with this guy. I mean, you know that right?”

  “Hey Mikey, you’re in charge of sponsorships,” he reminds me for the third time today. “I’m just tagging along because I’m a sports fan. You know what you’re doing.”

  “I do know what I’m doing, and it’s a no brainer.” I rhyme a few things off. “Coke dropped this guy. Walmart dropped this guy. Hell, Nike dropped this guy and Nike doesn’t drop anybody.”

  “Hey, Aspen’s a sicko and a dirtbag. I’m not denying it.”

  “So then why are we doing this?”

  But of course, I already know. Aspen’s manager is a friend of a friend of a client of Muizz’s. He ‘leveraged’ that relationship to get a hold of Muizz, to say, Let us come up to Toronto and make a pitch to you. Tell your sponsorships guy that ODS Financial Group will be under no obligation—for anything. We’ll fly up in our own jet, make a two-hour presentation on a Friday afternoon, and then leave. If you like what you hear, we can discuss how to get ODS’s logo on Aspen’s jersey in time for next year’s Tour de France. If you don’t, then no biggie. But talk to your sponsorships guy.

  So Muizz came and talked to me. He already knew my answer, and I already knew my answer—didn’t even need to confirm my answer with the managing partner. Absolutely not, he would have said. We absolutely cannot associate our brand with someone like Tim Aspen. I relayed this to Muizz. But Muizz is not accustomed to hearing (or accepting) the word no. He said, Well let’s get him up here anyway. We already know our answer, but what’s the harm in watching a big-time celebrity beg us for money?

  He reiterates this at our lunch. “Mikey, don’t take this too seriously. It’s not like he’s going to convince us of anything. It’s just a bit of fun on a Friday afternoon.”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” I say.

  Muizz makes a face. “So what? Was it right, what he did to his wife? To the rest of his family? To the sponsors who’ve been with him from the beginning? Please.” He shakes his head just as his BlackBerry begins to buzz. He takes it out of its holster, glances at the screen. Soon his thumbs are dashing around the tiny keyboard with a manic, authoritative clicking. When he finishes, he sets it on the table. “That was Aspen’s manager,” he says, suddenly excited again. “They are here. Their plane just landed at City Centre airport. They still need to clear customs. I say we have about half an hour.”

  With perfect timing, the waitress comes with our food. Square porcelain bowl of noodles and veg for me; thin gourmet pizza on a wooden paddle for Muizz. He looks down at it. She forgot to keep the pork off; it’s covered in little turds of sausage. Strangely, he doesn’t send it back.

  ~

  You’d think throwing my father out of the house would’ve made my mother happier, but no. I call home to the Island every week to discover her languid and depressed, curled up on the couch and watching reality TV—Fear Factor and Survivor and The Bachelorette. I ask: How can you watch that stuff? Snuffing out torches, voting people off, rejecting suitors in front of the whole world—isn’t it all just Humiliation Porn?

  She brushes off my concerns. Everyone needs a guilty pleasure. All she ever wants to know is when I’m coming home next. Which is code for: When are you coming home permanently, Mikey? Why can’t you just work at the local paper, like you used to?

  My sister is a respiratory therapist in Calgary. My brother teaches ESL in Poland. I think Mom was convinced we’d all move home after she evicted my father from the family. But we know, each of us, that the past cannot be undone. Sometimes our second chances stay just out of reach.

  ~

  If you’re an athlete and ODS sponsors you, this is how you’ll know you’re gone. If you commit a crime, you’re gone. If any part of your buttocks shows up on CNN, you’re gone. If a photo of you with a prostitute appears in a legit newspaper, you’re gone. If you’re white and word gets around you said the n-word in a bar fight, you’re gone. And if you’re Tim Aspen, well, we can’t even talk about what you did.

  In other words, don’t embarrass ODS Financial Group in any way. That’s the message I bake into every arrangement I develop for “Team ODS,” a program sponsoring amateur and semi-professional sports across Canada. These are the arguments I have with managers, agents, flacks and various other hangers-on. How did I get here? is a question I can ask myself only so many times a day. All I can say is: beware of slippery slopes. The road from real journalism to business reporting to PR to marketing is a short one. And then you end up here, running a warm-and-fuzzy sponsorships program for a multinational financial services conglomerate. I help trick the world into thinking that we have souls.

  Now Muizz is a different entity entirely. I get the sense that he wasn’t so much educated as he was incubated in the MBA program at Rotman. By the time he arrived at ODS Financial Group, he was already a superstar. They brought him in to run an advisory offshoot of our business called ‘Outsourcing Consultants International’—or as I like to refer to them, Assholes without Borders. Muizz’s career-defining ‘win’ was an engagement with a venerable and hugely unprofitable national general interest magazine. I don’t need to say which one—virtually every Canadian household had a subscription at one point. The company’s operations proved to be an outsourcer’s wet dream. What function could not be sent overseas? The subscription department—off to Uruguay. The layouts and design—now done in China. The advertising sales force—led by “Steve” in Bangalore. Muizz’s recommendations probably jumped the shark when he outsourced the proofreading to a country where English wasn’t the first language. But by the time the “revolt” had come and gone—readers cancelling subscriptions, advertisers bolting, and the carcass of the company transmogrified into a surprisingly lucrative distribution centre in Mississauga—Muizz had long been paid his bonus, given a personal assistant (despite the hiring freeze imposed last September) and moved into an office on the 25TH floor. I’ve been up there. His screensaver is the logo for his beloved Pittsburgh Penguins. His desk is adorned with framed photos of him
and his buddies playing laser tag and a vanity shot of his wife, kept right at his mouse pad, her soft dark hair falling all over her soft dark shoulders. She’s stunning.

  ~

  Tim Aspen became an instant celebrity in the mid nineties when, at the cherry-cheeked age of 18, he won the Tour de France despite crashing twice. Multimillion-dollar endorsement deals poured in, running the gamut from Gillette and Nike to Midas and McDonald’s. What’s more, Aspen singlehandedly kindled an obsession in North America with professional cycling. What had been seen as a marginal sport—enjoyed mostly by luxuriating Europeans with their seven weeks of holidays—was now big business in the States and Canada. The sale of 10–speeds skyrocketed. High schools began introducing cycling clubs. And every July, the Tour de France led the ticker on TSN, consistently pulling higher ratings than Major League Baseball.

  Aspen was, through it all, ubiquitous, what with his boy-next-door, blue-eyed, blonde-haired visage on every billboard, his long, powerful legs pedaling madly as he led countless pelotons on the sports highlight reels. He went on to win, with Middle America humbleness, nine more Tours de France over the next 13 years. The only flack he ever took from the media—until two winters ago, that is—was the occasional gibe over his eight-figure endorsement deal from Nike, which required him to have, regardless of what he was wearing (jersey, golf shirt, business suit), their monolithic swish displayed prominently over his heart.

  Me? I never got into it. I could never sit through an entire race, which took weeks. I thought: Who has the time? I thought: Who the hell watches cycling anyway?

  Well, my mother for one. Aspen converted her, like so many North Americans, to the sport. Every July she’d roll the TV out onto the patio so she could watch the Tour de France in the sunshine. If I called home while the race was on, Mom would speak about it with an alarming esoteric zeal. “My boy will be wearing the yellow jersey by this time tomorrow,” she’d say. The what? That was the other thing. She began referring to Tim Aspen as ‘my boy.’ Did you see my boy was on Oprah the other day? . . . My boy’s gonna clean up at the San Francisco Grand Prix next week. I tried not to take it personally.

  It was cycling, in fact, that precipitated the end to my parents’ marriage. Mom took up the sport, acquiring an expensive 10–speed, along with helmet, gloves, water bottle, bicycle shorts and a portable tire pump. She joined a cycling group comprised entirely of women who were middle-aged like her but who had never been married. This infuriated my father. In his books, if these ladies didn’t have men in their lives then this made them, by definition, lesbians. On those rare occasions when I got him on the phone that first summer, he would grumble, “Your mother has gone biking with lesbians.” I doubted his assessment when I got to meet them during a trip home. They had all convened in our driveway to collect my mother before a big ride, straddling their bikes expertly, their helmets strapped tight to their heads, their water bottles sweating, their Spandex shorts doing wonderfully tender things to their wonderfully tender backsides. “Libby, this is your son?” they cackled when I came out to say hello, and eyed me up and down.

  For the first few summers, Mom limited her bike trips to the Island’s Confederation Trail. But she soon pronounced herself ready to accompany the girls on a trek to the mainland where they would bike from Moncton to Rivière du Loup in seven days. For my father, this was the last straw. The hell she was going anywhere overnight with those lesbians; and besides, who would feed him while she was gone? A massive row ensued, one that I stayed out of like a coward. The next time I heard from Mom, she was calling me from a payphone in Rivière du Loup. “I feel amazing!” she said with exhausted ebullience. “Well, actually I’m in a lot of pain. This must be how my boy feels after a big race. My butt’s got welts; my knees are shot; my sciatica is killing me. But I did it! I finished the trip!” She let out a prideful whoop! “Fuck that fucker!”

  She got home two days later to find that my father, in a drunken rage, had smashed a set of tacky figurines—cats wearing tuxedos—that she had inherited from her own mother, who has been dead for nearly forty years. Within a month, he was out on the street.

  ~

  We ride the paneled elevator, smooth as a cloud, to the 25TH floor. The woman beside us is lugging three separate handbags and has a BlackBerry clutched in her hands. Disembarking into a hallway of plastic plants and indecipherable corporate art, we sidle up to the front desk, a U-shaped command zone where our large Jamaican receptionist, Helen, sits with a headset and computer. She has a Barack Obama calendar pinned to the wall behind her.

  “No sign of the Tim Aspen party?” Muizz asks her.

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, good. I booked the Friedman Room. We’ll wait in there. Can you buzz us when they arrive?”

  “Yes I can.”

  “Thanks Helen.”

  I follow Muizz into the large corner boardroom on the south end of the floor. He makes himself at home as we enter the cavernous room: one switch on the wall pops on the lights; a second raises the blinds with a creepy automation. Through the windows is a great view of the back of the Royal York, its roof like an emerald pirate hat. Beyond it, Lake Ontario glitters with expansive opulence. We slip into leather chairs at the boardroom table. In front of us sits what I call the Star Trek phone, as well as a built-in projector pointing at a white screen on the wall.

  “Now don’t let me talk too much when they get here,” Muizz jokes. “This is your meeting, Mikey. You’re in charge. I’m just here because . . .”

  “Because you’re a sports fan.”

  “Because I’m a sports fan. And because I set this meeting up.” His grin is sleek and cold. It holds a sleek, cold excitement.

  In an instant, I decide I’m going to ask Muizz to leave. There is no reason for him to be here. But before I can, the Star Trek phone beeps to life, its tentacles blinking maniacally. Muizz reaches over and presses a button. “Hell-low!”

  “Tim Aspen and party are here to see you.”

  “Thanks Helen. We’ll be right out.”

  I raise my butt off the seat but I’m too late. Muizz is already up and bounding gleefully toward the boardroom doors.

  ~

  “He’s the scum of the earth!” my mother bellowed into the phone, and I just assumed she was talking about my father.

  But no. It was her boy. He had betrayed her. He had betrayed everyone. When the story broke two winters ago, Tim Aspen was all over CNN, Fox News, CBC NewsWorld, BBC World Service, and Entertainment Tonight. There was no escaping his sexual transgressions; they had hijacked the global news cycle. Forget massacres in the Congo or trapped miners in China. Give us Tim Aspen, the world said, 24/7—and his filthy little deeds. Women’s groups cheered when his wife refused to stand with him at the press conference where he read out his scripted apology. Sponsor after sponsor dropped him like a sandbag. Posters and billboards came down. His name was expunged from charity foundations. It was like something out of the Soviet Union.

  “He’s not worth a damn,” my mother said. “He’s not worth a dead dog ten days unburied.” Despite my attempts to dissuade her, Mom insisted I explain one of Aspen’s more elaborate proclivities to her. “It’s just sick,” she said when I finished. “Do people actually do that?”

  “Some people do, yes,” I sighed.

  “Do you do that?”

  “Mother, I’m hanging up the phone!”

  We never spoke of Aspen again. Except when I called, last weekend, to tell her about my upcoming meeting. She just let out a guffaw of dismissal. “Don’t you give that asshole a dime, Mikey.” And then, apropos of nothing, began telling me about a seat sale she’d seen in the paper.

  ~

  Muizz is already in mid-conversation, laughing, when he holds the door open for them and they file in. Them. Three guys in suits and Aspen. I stand up. The suits are expensive, Armani, and one of the guys wears a thick
gold chain. Over their shoulders I can see the hallway beyond the boardroom where people have crowded out of their offices, grinning as they try to get a glimpse of the visiting celeb. Muizz closes the door, cutting off their view.

  “Gentlemen,” he says, “this is Mike Gallant, our sponsorships coordinator.”

  Handshakes and business cards all around. I look at Aspen. He is not in a suit. He is wearing a simple golf shirt and slacks. I’d like to say he looks different than he does on TV, but this is not true. He looks exactly like he does on TV: thin but not skinny, slightly taller than me, and disarmingly handsome with his Aryan good looks. The only thing conspicuously missing from his TV image is the swish on his shirt. Its absence is like an amputated limb.

  “Please everyone, have a seat,” I say, and everyone does, except Aspen. He continues to stand for a moment after the rest of us have settled in. He gives the boardroom table a once over, lets out a cryptic little sniff. His team looks up at him ­awkwardly.

  “Tim,” says the guy with the gold chain, whose name is Tito, “do you wanna sit? Or would you prefer to stand?”

  Aspen pauses, as if for theatrical effect, and then says, “I’ll sit.” He pulls back one of the leather chairs, puts himself in it, tucks it back in.

  “Alrighty then,” says Tito, yanking a laptop from a sleeve in his satchel. “Do you mind if I . . .” and motions to the projector.

  “Not at all,” Muizz answers before I can. “Help yourself.”

  So Tito plugs in and turns on. Within a moment, he’s gotten on to our WiFi; within another, his PowerPoint presentation is glowing on the screen. He tells one of the hangers-on to kill the lights and the guy gets up and does so. The room is now cast in a harrowing cinematic glare.

  Tito walks us through his agenda slide and what we can expect over the next 90 minutes. His next slide contains an embedded video. He clicks play, then goes full screen. Suddenly the boardroom is a blaring rock concert—screeching electric guitars atop guttural bass, and images of Aspen on his bicycle, sunglasses strapped to his face, legs pumping in metronomic precision, arms hunched over handlebars, his helmeted head down as if in anguish, then back up, then back down. He’s climbing mountains, descending hills. He’s zooming by a camera on the ground. He’s crashing and then getting right back on. He’s throwing his arms up in exhausted victory as he crosses another finish line at the front of a peloton. This is a blockbuster recap of thirteen triumphant years. It’s meant to hit us right in the adrenalin glands.