Ana squinted at her. "But different."
Bruce shook his head. "It's actually more of a wellness center, like a fitness club."
"That sounds cool," said Adrienne, turning to Ana, her brows raised. "That sounds perfect for us."
"It's also kind of a resource center for women," continued Bruce. "A place for them to go for information, for counseling, for guidance."
Ana felt the tightness in her chest increase fivefold. "Oh no. WomanLyfe? It's not that crazy Christian health club, the ones that are all antiabortion? It's not that one, is it?"
Bruce took a long breath through clenched teeth. "Actually, I believe they prefer to think of themselves as pro-child."
"Why is the agency getting involved with something like this? It's crazy."
Another breath, then Bruce's shoulders dropped slightly. "It appears that our esteemed chairman is married to someone adamantly committed to the company as well as the cause."
"What cause?" said Ana, her voice rising. "Bombing abortion clinics?"
"The biggest political hot potato in America," said Adrienne, putting both elbows on her desk, then nesting her face in her hands. "What are we supposed to show? Happy, smiling nonaborted children working out?"
Ana joined in: "And the joy they bring to poor, unemployed women who can't even feed themselves?"
Adrienne put on her best schmaltzy announcer voice. "WomanLyfe. It's spelled with a y because there's no room for I in your life."
"There's our tagline," said Ana.
Bruce held up a hand. "Okay, enough, my little bleeding hearts." He looked as stern as Ana had ever seen him. "First, no more of that kind of talk. It will get you fired. Not by me, but by other folks who are close to those in charge around here and whom you don't know are listening. Second, we're going to work on it whether we like it or not. And thirdly, it's not really a new business pitch at all. We've got the business. I just thought it would go down easier if I couched it in that manner. A new business pitch that we don't have to pitch."
"Well, fuck me," said Ana.
"Ack," said Adrienne.
Bruce peered at her, then continued: "There's nothing we can do about it, you guys. It just happened."
Ana tipped her head to one side, her spirit collapsed. "Bruce, we're an ad agency," she said. She didn't even care that she was whining. "Ad agencies are notoriously liberal. How can this be?"
Bruce regarded her as if she were a child. "No, Ana. The people who work in creative departments are notoriously liberal. Ad agencies themselves are notoriously self-serving. And the people who run them are notoriously greedy."
Adrienne slumped forward till her face was resting on her desk, then started singing in a snarky falsetto, "I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way—" She stopped. "It's always about the children."
"Adrienne, hush." As soon as Ana said it, she regretted it.
Adrienne gave her a piercing what the fuck? glare. "Hey, lady, need I remind you that I picked up all that shit from you? You're the one who's always ranting about how any time these bullshit organizations want something, they just say, It's for the children."
Bruce stood up. "All right. Both of you, knock it off. There's nothing to talk about. It's done. Fait accompli."
Ana, not wanting him to brush by her again, stood up as well. Together, they moved toward the doorway of Adrienne's office.
"Look, I know you're upset, but I wish you could see this for what it is: a chance to work and get some much-needed money for the division. Okay?"
Ana stared at Bruce, half pouting, half pissed. "I'm sorry, Bruce," she said. "You can make us do this, but you can't make us happy about it."
He did not look pleased.
15
Cool in Europe and the Tao of Funny
Joe's parents were so very proud of his new job writing for a real newspaper. Joe's got a real full-time job! It's about time! He knew too that Ana's folks were beaming as well over her new senior vice president associate creative director position and its accompanying raise in pay and status. (He had a sneaking suspicion that both were also saying: Now if they would only get married, buy a house, and start a family, everything would be fine.)
Despite their successes, they were both miserable. He knew Ana was discreetly looking for another job, but there were none to be had. It seemed to Joe that every decade Detroit went through another of its economic slumps as dictated by the vicissitudes of the auto industry. This was the worst one ever, and they both knew a lot of people who had just been laid off. All anyone said to either of them was, "You should be happy you even have a job."
The thing was, Ana and he were both happy to have jobs. There it was again: that old Detroit factory worker ethic, the one that pervaded every aspect of life in the area. You didn't just quit your job because it was making you unhappy; you sucked it up and ground it out. After all, you had responsibilities—families, mortgages, car notes. (The latest model of whatever you built was parked in the driveway.) Certainly there were casualties: people drank, beat their spouses, ignored their children, or just silently suppressed all their rage at the systems (both corporate and societal) that voluntarily indentured them to a physically fatiguing, mind-numbing, spirit-crushing but well-paying union job. They shoved it deep down into a tiny dark cubbyhole inside of their hearts, until those organs eventually ruptured, often shortly (and ironically) after retirement. There were generations of stories like this. It was what people did in a low-self-esteem city like Detroit.
Now even Joe felt it, perhaps more strongly because of his years of low-paying freelance work and his surprising reluctance to go back to it. Joe, the so-called sensitive boy of his family, whose father had told him that he was going to college no matter what, that "no son of mine is going to work in a factory." When a Detroit factory worker father said that to a son, it meant something. Joe had listened to his father. Apparently, he had listened too well, for he never bothered to get a full-time job anywhere until now. (Was it a coincidence that he had never bothered to get the wife, kids, or mortgage either?)
Despite how much Joe hated working for the Dollar Daily, now that he had this full-time job, like Ana, he didn't want to lose it. (Even though Terrance still wouldn't change the name, not to a typical alternative newspaper moniker, or even to the eminently more appropriate Dollar Weekly.) It was like his long-dead maternal grandfather who worked in chrome plating at the old Cadillac plant on Clark Street all his life was somehow telepathically communicating (complete with thick Armenian accent) with Joe from the grave. Joey, don't you quit that job. You got a good job, you stick at it, you hear me? And don't take drugs. Hell, he could barely remember what his grandfather sounded like. The guy died when Joe was twelve, so why was he hounding him from the grave? The funny thing was, Joe's grandpa used to tell him stories about how when they wanted to take a break, they would throw the wrong part in the chroming machine. The machine would break down and they could take a breather until it got fixed. (Thus revealing a lesser-known codicil in the Detroit Worker Ethic: just because you should never quit your job didn't mean you had to work all that hard at it. At one point, even GM, Ford, and Chrysler decided that it wasn't mandatory to work that hard to build something of quality, e.g., the rustifying, self-deconstructing, planned-obsolescence cars of his seventies childhood—the Vegas, the Pintos, the Gremlins, with their tinfoil-like sheet metal, built to dissolve. Those cars would be physical proof of this codicil if any of them were still in one piece. They certainly weren't in Michigan, not with its five-month-long, salt-strewn winters.)
And it wasn't just the Detroit economy, since even Chick, who'd had a long, lucrative streak of optioned and unproduced scripts, had not sold anything in quite some time.
"They're killing me out there, Keen," said Chick, one night at the Midlands. "Those LA motherfuckers. I keep getting pulled in to pitch jobs. I work on them for a month, like an idiot, because I can't help myself. Then they just choose some local hack
to do it."
Joe was accustomed to this from Chick because he much preferred to talk about his failures rather than his many successes (more local modesty), but he had never heard the guy so down.
"I'm doing treatments for animated features and they keep telling me that my ideas are too adult, too smart." Chick shook his head. "No they're not. You've heard my ideas—they're infantile."
"Quit it. They're not infantile at all. They're just populist." Joe had said this to cheer Chick up. Since Chick liked to regard Joe as some sort of nose-in-a-book egghead, he occasionally liked to actually play the role. "You have your finger on the pulse of popular culture. You're tapped into the trailer-park zeitgeist, Chick. You're Joe Six-Pack."
Chick held up a hand. "Stop it. You're just being nice."
"Seriously, though. You think it's because you live here, instead of LA?"
"Maybe. I don't know. It used to not be a problem that I was here. In fact, I think it kind of gave me, uh—"
"What? Like a kind of cachet?"
Chick shook his head. "No, not quite. Almost like street cred."
Joe leaned back and nodded knowingly. "Okay, right. You were the badass guy from Detroit."
"Exactly. It was cool that I was from this place that the rest of the world didn't give a shit about. Detroit was so far off the radar, it was kind of cool."
"I hear you. So bad that it was good."
"Yes!" said Chick, poking a finger into Joe's arm.
"We're cool in Europe for some of the same reasons. We're like a different universe to them. Despite being messed up, they think it's beautiful in some inexplicable dadaist way. It's like they believe that Detroit possesses some majestic authenticity."
Creases formed in Chick's forehead as he waited for Joe to stop talking. "You done theorizing, professor? 'Cause I'm spilling my guts here."
"Sorry. So what happened?"
"I don't know." Chick exhaled, let his hands drop onto the bar. "Yes, I do. They just got bored. They just moved on to the next guy that's got a little heat."
"So now the badass from Detroit is just the dope who should be in LA?"
"Exactly." Chick drained his pint glass and focused on the polished concrete of the bar. "I don't know. I just want to write something really funny and get it out there, get it made. Then be done with the whole business."
"Really?"
"Yeah—" Chick stopped speaking as the guitar intro of a Detroit Cobras tune blasted way too loudly through the jukebox. Someone behind the bar turned down the volume a few notches and Chick continued talking. "I don't care if it's animated or whatever. I wouldn't even care if it were dumb humor. Actually, I'd love something that parents could laugh at with their kids. That would be great. I just want it to be funny."
Joe could tell that his friend was being serious. He was not usually this forthright. "Why does it matter so much to be funny?"
Chick shrugged slightly. "I don't know. I just think something that's really, truly funny is pure. Laughing is an involuntary response. It takes you out of yourself. You stop thinking. You can try to write something for the ages, but funny is for the ages. I mean, you can acquire all this wisdom about life, yet ultimately what else is there to do but laugh about it? Funny means something."
"I think I understand."
"God is in the punch lines, my friend."
"The Tao of Funny," said Joe. "Wow, listen to you—Earnest Chick."
"Ugh, now you've ruined it."
"How? What's wrong? It's good. I like Earnest Chick."
"Don't call me that." Chick shivered for a moment, as if a demon spirit had just entered his body. "And stop being all touchy-feely."
Joe had to laugh at the abrupt reappearance of Chick Classic.
"Forget everything I said," said Chick. He rubbed his hands together. "New subject: how's Ana and the pro-life Nazis?"
"Dude, I don't even think she refers to them that way."
Chick made a face. "You're forty years old, man. Don't say dude. What are you, trying to seem 'hep'?"
Joe sighed. "She's not really happy at her job, as far as I can tell, but I really don't know because I never see her. She's always working."
Malcolm walked up to the bar just then. He was wearing a green leather motorcycle-style jacket over a T-shirt with a raven on it. "Hey, you guys."
"I don't know about that jacket," said Chick.
Malcolm's expression grew serious. "I guess I better get rid of it then, if you're not sure about it." He caught the bartender's eye, held up three fingers to indicate a round of Two Hearteds for all of them.
"I'm going to hit the head," said Chick, starting to walk away. "I don't want to see that jacket when I get back!" he yelled over his shoulder.
Malcolm turned to Joe and moved slightly closer to him. "Hey, I wanted to talk to you about something. I'm sure it's nothing, but there's a strange vibe around work lately."
"What do you mean?"
"About Ana and Adrienne."
"Really? What's up?"
"I've just been hearing . . . things. People think they're getting preferential treatment from Bruce. A couple people have mentioned it. I'm not sure everyone knows that we're all friends. Anyway, I kind of get the feeling they think Adrienne is hooking up with Bruce."
"Shit. Really?"
"Yeah, it's totally fucked up." Malcolm took a breath. He looked genuinely distressed. "I feel funny about it. I'm not sure what to do."
Joe nodded. "Yeah, I see what you mean."
Chick returned to his stool and said: "Man, is there anything in the world more satisfying than peeing on ice cubes? I don't think so." He looked at the two of them suspiciously. "What's up? What are you hens talking about?"
Malcolm spoke up: "It's me. I just really like this jacket. Joe suggested that I ask you for a reprieve."
Chick made a show of deliberating. "Fine, but you have to call me before you wear it again." He glanced up at the sole TV screen in the bar. "Anyone catch the Tigers score? I think there was a day game today." He was met with empty stares from Joe and Malcolm. Chick exhaled loudly. "Oh, right. I forgot who I was with."
"Sorry," said Joe. "We'll try to be more manly in the future."
"Maybe we should get testosterone injections," said Malcolm.
Chick shook his head. "I'm hanging with eunuchs when I should be out chasing tail. Christ, would you look at that down at the end of the bar? She's killing me."
"You should talk to her. I'm sure she'd love being referred to as tail," said Malcolm.
Todd walked up and nodded to everyone. "Lads," he said. The bartender with the lower-back tattoo sauntered over. "Could I get a Guinness, please?"
Chick stared as she left to pour the stout. "Todd, did you see the game?"
Turning back to the group, Todd simultaneously scratched and smoothed the patch of long hair under his lip. "If you mean European football, I did indeed."
"Oh, for fuck's sake."
"Todd loves his Man U," said Joe, smiling at Todd, who was obviously torturing Chick. He wasn't done.
"Little Bang Theory is playing over at the Majestic Café tonight," said Todd. "Who's in the mood for whimsical silent film music played on antique toy instruments?"
"Sounds interesting," said Malcolm, looking directly at Chick. "Let's do it."
"I'm in," said Joe, also looking at Chick. "Those guys are really good."
"I am so fucking out," said Chick. "I couldn't be any more out."
"Come on," said Joe, joyously poking Chick in the shoulder. "It'll be great."
Todd stood there, looking innocent.
Chick turned to him. "You son of a bitch."
* * *
The next morning, Joe managed to drag himself out of bed mildly hungover, but in time to get ready for work. Ana was just about to leave as he slammed down a cup of coffee in the kitchen. That was when he decided that he should probably mention what Malcolm had told him.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" was Ana's enraged response. H
e had known that she probably wouldn't be pleased, but he didn't expect this wrath. She also had three cups of French roast in her and was pretty wound up. These days, she was stressed before she even walked out of the door. "I can't believe this. People at work think Adrienne and I are getting preferential treatment? We're fucking killing ourselves there. We're working on a horrible account run by idiots. Did he say who was saying it?"
Joe shook his head, wishing he'd poured himself a second cup before he started all this. He'd hoped that Ana would just shrug it off. It seemed to him that ad agencies were full of petty jealousies and competitive bullshit. "He didn't say. He just said that he had heard it from a couple of people."
"Goddamnit. Did he say anything else?"
Joe stared at the bulging tendon in Ana's neck. He did not want to say what he was going to say, but he knew that he had to. "Yeah."
"What, Joe?"
"He said some people think that Adrienne and Bruce have hooked up."
Ana raised her right hand to her forehead, then pinched her thumb and middle finger between her eyebrows just above her glasses, as if trying to staunch the neuralgia. She closed her eyes. "Are you fucking joking?"
Already exhausted from this conversation, Joe just shook his head. "Still not kidding or joking. Too early."
"I've got to track down Malcolm today and find out who's behind this."
"Maybe you should try to calm down first before you do anything."
Ana sat on the step just off the vestibule. Her face was blank for a moment, then she let out a solitary sob.
Joe walked over to her. He now wished he'd waited for tonight to do this, but most likely no time would have been right for it. He squeezed down next to her as she held her face in her hands. "Baby, it's okay. Who cares what these cretins say? They're just envious because you guys are doing so well." He caressed her arm. "Ana. It's not worth it. Come on."
She put her hands down and gazed up at him. "It's not only this. It's everything. I'm just getting tired of it."
"I know you are. Look, if it gets too bad, you can just quit. Isn't that why we live the way we do? We don't have a mortgage, we don't have kids. Why stay in jobs that we hate? I have a full-time gig now. I can support us." It had sounded wrong in his head and even more so coming out of his mouth. He looked at Ana and got the feeling that she just didn't believe him.
The Narcissism of Small Differences Page 11