The Learners: A Novel (No Series)

by Kidd, Chip

  And the biggie:

  5) How to draw a straight line. “Pretend it exists already and just trace it. Keep your wrist stiff but let your arm glide. Try to forget that straight lines are truly unnatural—created by humans to convey a sense of the mechanical, which isn’t human at all. Think of food.”

  “Food?”

  “Something yummy. Spicy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have to think of some thing. Don’t you like food? Cats then. Fluffy cats. Something.”

  “Why don’t I think about drawing the line correctly?”

  “Try it.”

  He was right, of course—now I was thinking about it to the point of stage fright and the result was not uniform in width, slightly slanting downward to the left, and dotted with blobs. All of which I would have (and did) ignore back in school. As did my teachers (Winter excepted). But now, seen through eyes re-focused by Sketchy, these were high crimes.

  “You need distraction when you do this stuff. We all do.” For that, he had the added help of the old Victrola, his pipe, his Felix dolls, lunch.

  And I had Tip.

  “What does green sound like?” He would just…appear. With questions like this. Tip was forever trying to jump-start his brain to come up with ad copy, and I became his muse of choice. His favorite method was word association, and when that got tired he’d suggest the opposite.

  “The opposite? Of what?”

  “Of the first thing that pops into your head. Give it a whirl.”

  “That’s nuts. Like trying to—”

  “Apply yourself.”

  Right. Anyway, back to “what does green sound like?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Answer, please.”

  He was working on something that had to do with fertilizer at the time, that much I knew. “Green?” Well, not my thumb, that’s for sure. “Hmm, I don’t. Um.” I soon learned to give up trying to find the “right” answer and just answer. Which was the whole point. Green sounded like…the woods behind our house.

  “Trees.” In a high wind. “Trees walking.”

  “Oh. Oh. That’s wonderful. Preston couldn’t come up with that in a million years.”

  Preston Ware. Tip’s boss. Head copywriter.

  When he was awake. How to describe him? Tip: “He’s kind of like Frankenstein’s monster, only without the electricity. In a Brooks Brothers suit,” and, “Pally pal, in our cigar shop, he IS the wooden Indian.” Perhaps more kindly, Lars Rakoff, our dear departed co-founder, was quoted in a local news feature on Preston from 1935—clipped, framed, hung just to the left of the subject’s pristine desk. He put it this way: “My partner is first and foremost a patriot, a Rotarian, an inspirational communicator, a knight.” Sketch, in a private moment once at Saluzo’s after work and feeling a couple thrown back, was a little more succinct: “I’ve always thought of him as a well-wiped asshole.” I had to agree—he certainly was hygienic. Whatever the shambles of his interior life, there wasn’t a hair out of place. Tip even claimed he once caught him in the men’s room of the Quinnipiac Club combing his head with a salad fork after a high wind on the croquet lawn blew his comb-over to the wrong side. Square of jaw and high of forehead, he looked like an amalgam of Dag Hammarskjöld and an Easter Island monolith. He came from old money, a clan of Lake Forest Episcopalians who actually frowned on advertising as a profession, a fact that enabled Preston to think of himself, quaintly, as something of a rebel.

  Company lore: Lars and Preston opened the doors of Rakoff & Ware in 1922. They met in Chicago the previous year while working at Otis & Shepherd, where they’d just landed the Wrigley’s account. In a move bold for its time, they split off, fled east, and managed to take Wrigley’s with them—a sort of advertising elopement. They soon brought on Spear, barely out of high school, though it would be many years before he made partner. The launch of Doublemint gum was to be their greatest triumph. Wrigley’s eventually went back to O & S, under dubious circumstances, but a small slice of ad history had been carved.

  “You know, Mimi notwithstanding, Lars really was a genius,” said Tip. “God, I would have loved to meet him. That quote in the paper about Preston. Just brilliant—it took me forever to figure it out.”

  “Figure it out?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  We snuck into Preston’s office early the next morning and he brought it down from the wall.

  “Read it again. The language is too awkward—not Lars’s style. That’s the tip-off. This is the man who came up with ‘HOLD YOUR TONGUE!’ for Buster Brown. No, when I first read it I thought, Something’s going on here. I let it go for a while, and then it came to me, like when you abandon a crossword puzzle and it stews in your head for an hour or two and you come back to it and all of the answers are suddenly obvious. Only in this case it took me weeks. Look.” He pointed to the citation. “The clue is ‘First and foremost,’ but then there’s a laundry list, which is weird. And I finally realized: take the first letter of each ‘attribute.’ This is what he’s really saying:

  “Preston’s a

  Patriot

  Rotarian

  Inspirational

  Communicator

  Knight.”

  “Oh my God. That’s amazing.”

  “And no surprise—I think he hated him. And figured out a way to vent it—in the press.” Tip gently re-hung it. “I have yet to exercise the opportunity.”

  Tip and Preston: could there have been two more discordant souls? Ware had long since sold his stake in the company to Mimi—first emotionally, then, much later, financially. Something about him made it hard to believe that he was ever young, it just seemed biologically impossible. He was born seventy. One sensed that he came to work only because he needed the ritual of leaving the house. His two children were well into their failed second marriages, and we often wondered how they were ever conceived in the first place.

  “Surely not through any human contact.” Tip was certain: “They must have ordered them from Rogers Peet. The only thing of Preston’s that’s ever been stiff is his shirt. If the world only knew: the man who wrote the selling copy underneath the immortal words ‘DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE, DOUBLE YOUR FUN!’ wouldn’t know EITHER ONE if he woke up naked in a harem covered with Karo Syrup.”

  This was hard to dispute. Eyelids perpetually at half-mast over their ice-blue orbs, Preston showed up (impeccably dressed, yes), he wrote things, he muttered phrases, he went to lunch, he staggered back, he passed out, he woke up around five, he went home. Just in time for cocktails.

  Conventional office wisdom: If you needed something from Preston, manage to get it before twelve thirty. Or wait till the next day. Before twelve thirty.

  Or try to talk to Nicky.

  Nicholas Rakoff, the only son of Lars and Mimi, the inheritor of the family business. I met him by accident when I was looking for Tip one afternoon with a phone message. I heard him outside the door of the conference chamber and thought he was alone, rehearsing a pitch. I bolted in. “Tip, I—”

  “Shhhh.”

  He was at the other end of the long room, talking to someone—a distinguished man of middle age, in shirtsleeves and bow tie, hunched over. Tip murmured, gravely, “Yes, that’s a better strategy, definitely.” I thought at first the guy was either doubled over with grief or looking for something on the floor and couldn’t bring himself to get down on his hands and knees. I could tell—he wasn’t a hands-and-knees sort at all. And then I realized that he hadn’t lost anything. Not yet.

  “How’s this?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay, here we go.”

  Cigarette clenched into lips pursed with concentration, he tilted the considerable bulk of his upper body oh so slightly to the left, and then released it. It snapped back, as if attached to a small spring, and the stick in his hands connected with something on the floor—PAP!—which shot perilously across the carpet in my direction, to the man’s intense concern, and then—PLUNK!
— into an overturned coffee cup a yard to the right of my wing tips. His face, his whole head, glowed with supreme satisfaction, like a jack-o-lantern.

  Tip, still solemn: “Bra-vo. See? That new thumb technique is flawless.” And then, brightening up a bit and finally acknowledging me, “Nicky, this is Happy—Sketch’s new assistant.”

  Still savoring his hole-in-mug. A careless glance. Then a thought. “Great!” He approached me. Now I could finally see: he was all Golden Boy gone to seed, a Ken doll left out in the sun too long. Once molded, now molten. “We could use some new blood around here. ’Bout time!” He reached down, with effort—“Oof”—picked up the cup, rolled the ball out of it, and handed it to me. “Black. Two sugars.”

  “Uh—”

  “Thanks, sport.” And he turned back to Tip.

  “Sure.” It was plain from the beginning that I was nothing to him—just another admirer from the peanut gallery, ready to follow him to the next hole, to the clubhouse, to the ball washer.

  I didn’t think this a problem, because there was no reason to take it personally—he treated just about everyone this way because it never occurred to him not to, and yet there was something pathetically charming about it. This man was the progeny of the divine Lars, after all.

  But Nicky was not his father. He pretty much saw the firm as a handicap to his golf game, in both senses of the word. Whenever the weather would allow he’d skip out to the Quinnippiac, with some client or other in tow “to do the back nine.” And during the winter he would hole himself up in his office and putt. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the ad business—he did, with an accounting major’s sense of directive.

  He just completely hated it.

  Now, while Mimi was the firm’s legal owner, and it was Nicky’s responsibility to actually run the place, it would be three weeks before I met the real, driving force behind the agency. And when I did, it completely changed my mind about how an office works. On a Monday during our lunch hour, Tip and I were conducting an experiment in the second-floor hallway, he on the stairwell landing and me half a flight above, my back to his. He wanted to do a sort of blind word test. Our goal was to develop catchphrases for Krinkle’s new line of flavored pretzels.

  He began: “Onions!”

  Me: “Tears.”

  “Chives!”

  “Confetti.” From somewhere downstairs burst a faint cry. Mimi: “Oh Haaaaaaaammeeeeeeeee!” I turned and looked at Tip, who either hadn’t heard it or was too consumed with his analysis. I turned back. Suddenly a dark shape rounded the corner at the far end of the corridor. Moving. Fast.

  Tip: “Garlic!”

  “Power…” It skidded into the water cooler with a sloshy thud, regained its balance, and made for the other end of the hallway. Sprinting.

  “Bacon!”

  “Saturday?” Toward me.

  “Brilliant! Barbecue!”

  “Sunday. Tip?” Holy shit.

  “Pork!”

  I was frozen. Look at it!

  “Oh Haaaaaaaammeeeeeeeee! Heeeeere, darling!”

  “I said PORK!”

  Help! “Tip!”

  “What?!”

  SLAM! Its head went into my stomach, then herky-jerked and rolled and—huk!—in a single gesture tossed me against the wall. And then was gone. It scarcely broke stride.

  Tip: “Hamlet! No!” He threw himself out of its way, shielded his head with the arc of his arm. “You lummox! Bad!”

  Papers scattered everywhere. The thing faltered and tumbled mightily down the steps, falling over itself, landed on the first floor, shook, and reared. Vanished.

  I asked, trying to learn how to breathe again, “What—what was that?”

  “That,” scowled Tip, gathering up his notes, “was Mimi’s husband.”

  Shortly before Lars’s untimely death in 1955, he bestowed upon Mimi a pedigree Great Dane puppy for her sixtieth birthday and named it, yes, Hamlet. She never got the joke. And never needed to, because of what she did get—something she thought she’d had once, many years ago. But here was Hamlet—proof in the quivering, hirsute flesh that she was wrong. She’d never had this before, and now that she did…oh. Oh. How could she have lived without it? It wasn’t that she made the dog any kind of replacement for Lars, or his keen mind, or merely his companionship. Frankly it wasn’t about Lars at all. Their marriage had worked well only to the extent that He was the Money and She was the Class. What Hamlet represented, in the most concrete, literal way, was the first time that Mimi had ever experienced, ever found…true love.

  Hamlet had full run—not just of the agency—but of Mimi’s life, her soul, her nervous system. Which was incalculably nervous. The two of them together would practically vibrate in frenzied syncopation, like mixed plaids that somehow harmonized successfully, despite the laws of aesthetic cohesion.

  Few who beheld it were ever able to erase the sight from their minds: Mimi on a temperate day in her pink cadillac convertible (top down, natch), cruising along Trumbull with Hamlet in the passenger seat, his monstrous head flopped over the side and leaking viscous drool like transmission fluid from a faulty, quivering hose.

  Tip: “That is not a dog. It is Jerry Lewis, undergoing perpetual heroin withdrawal, in a dog costume.”

  Usually heard, sensed, and smelled before he was ever seen, Hamlet would stagger or stamp by in the hall, in frantic search of a nameless quarry, his cranium covered with dozens of Mimi’s lipstick stains. The first time I encountered that, I was with Tip and he just couldn’t help himself: “Check between his legs. Go ahead. You’ll find a whole rash of them.”

  By the second week, I’d earned enough of Sketch’s trust to start penciling some hand lettering for him to ink. He was a master of what’s called display type, usually elaborate script, which was used for the headlines and sub-heads. As a rule he relied on as little machine typesetting as possible, only for the large blocks of sales copy. This was an aesthetic decision; but because he was as fast at it as he was brilliant, it also helped keep the bills down. And that, I soon learned, was what it was all about. I had to precisely record exactly how much time I spent on each job and for whom, so the billable hours were charged to the right client for the right amount. I’d never had to literally account for my time this way in my life and at first it was oppressive and draconian. I considered myself an organized person, but this crossed a line. As long as I got the job done, on time, what the hell did it matter? There were also times when for reasons of technical complication I was working on two jobs at once. What to do then?

  “Bill ’em both the same.”

  “Gotcha.”

  This, when I thought about it, was as ingenious as it was unethical, and I came to learn that most ad agencies do it. And nearly all law firms.

  However, once I got used to meticulously chronicling my hours and who was to pay for them and it became second nature, I began to rely on it as a comfort. It was an imposed diary, recorded evidence of my life on Earth that I otherwise wouldn’t have created. I kept personal copies of all of my time sheets out of a fevered nostalgia, the way I still had all my valentines from fourth grade. See? I was needed.

  It wouldn’t be long before I was summoned to my first client meeting. Sketch thought it was time I met one of the people I was really working for. We had the week’s new potato chip ads to show and I’d done all the coupons myself. I was terrified, convinced that I’d be recognized as the feeble neophyte I was.

  “Happy, Mr. Stankey.”

  A hand was extended. Or was it a baseball glove molded out of human skin?

  “Pleased ta meetcha, kid. I’m Dick.”

  Just one of the many attributes of Dick Stankey, the client representative for Krinkle Kutt, was there was no need to waste time coming up with something funny to call him behind his back. Even Tip didn’t bother. “I just use his real name and try to keep a straight face. How do you improve on perfection? Dickens couldn’t have come up with better: ‘Let’s see, what do I call a three-hundred-po
und potato chip salesman who’s scarcely five feet two, sweats like a roasting ham hock, plays the theme to Your Show of Shows on the ukulele, and once got stuck in a diner booth during a fire alarm?’ ” All true. But what a good sport—when it came to making fun of him, he’d beat you to it. He was the first flesh-real jolly fat person I’d ever met, smiling even when he wasn’t smiling, his eyes forced into delighted squints by the physics of face flab. A bag of Krinkles forever grafted onto one of his mitts, he devoted himself to enjoying his company’s product in full view of humanity and did so with unashamed abandon in his office, his car, at our drawing tables, before and after lunch. Unfortunately, he also chewed tobacco at the same time. How he negotiated these two digestive actions (which I held to be at alarmingly violent cross-purposes) I could not know. I tried not to think about it, but did. A lot.

  On top of all of that, he had man-bosoms. Tip was enthralled. “Talk about he-lights! You just know Meem’s bitty titties lie awake at night, desperately longing to somehow usurp through osmosis the heft and shape of Stankey’s.” Mimi was flat as a mesa. “And they shall be forever wanting.”

  Even if he hadn’t had such an agreeable personality I would have liked Dick Stankey anyway because he regarded Sketch with something like worship and genuinely greeted each new ad with the infectious enthusiasm of a mongoloid child grabbing a nice bright red balloon.

  “That’s amazing! Oooooooooh! Ooh! Oh!”

  And boy, was he right. Sketch didn’t so much draw newspaper ads as he created magic worlds to step into that just happened to be populated with potato chips and pretzels. I came to understand that he took as his inspiration the Sunday comics pages he’d read as a child, back when they truly were an art form. Gasoline Alley, The Kinder Kids, Polly and Her Pals, Skippy, and of course Little Nemo—all of them were made with a virtuosic care and skill that wouldn’t survive to the 1940s. And they were regarded by most of the public as fishwrap. Yes, some of them survived and were reprinted, but many were not, and what Sketch was doing—at least for himself as much as for Krinkle Kutt—was keeping their spirit alive. I’m sure Mimi never understood that; but Dick did, and this, I have since learned, is the key to every single interesting piece of graphic design that you have ever seen. Winter explained to us in graphic design class once, during a critique on corporate trademarks, his face a mask of righteous accusation. But we were too naive to grasp it: