The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  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 a
s 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.