“So now you understand why the account people hate the Wittmans and view themselves as peons paying blood money to the man,” Deirdre said. “And why they see you as the man’s monkey.”
“Yes, this is all clear now, thank you.”
“I know I can trust your discretion because I am the only friend you’ve got,” Deirdre said. “And just so you know, I take no sides, I don’t judge. I like the Wittmans even if they have not given me a raise in three years.” Deirdre stood up and straightened her raincoat. “This conversation never happened.” She wiped a smudge from her raincoat with annoyance.
“You’re paying for my dry cleaning.”
23. DEFENDING TURF
One morning only weeks after he was hired, Dane found a young man in the lobby with a portfolio hanging from his arm. He was tall, thin and well-dressed. Dane identified the visitor as a younger version of himself, although Dane was neither well-mannered nor well-dressed as a young man. The portfolio in the young man’s hand meanwhile tagged him as a copywriter. Dane’s projection switched to resentment and concern. Betty the receptionist had not arrived so the visitor turned to Dane.
“Do you know Mildred Walters?”
“Yes.”
“Can I leave this here?”
Dane now saw the young man as his competitor. This was the problem of reinventing himself a generation late. Dane was pitted against men or women who could have been his children—or nephews and nieces.
“I’ll take care of it,” Dane said.
When the young man left, Dane put the portfolio on Betty’s counter with a note: “For Mildred.”
Dane felt threatened and violated. He was starving for work and clinging to his job, but Mildred didn’t care. She was trying to hire a young man with less experience than he had! His first impulse was to heave the portfolio in the Papaya Boy dumpster but he did not want to hurt the writer, who was like him—only twenty-two years younger. Dane needed a more effective and mature way to protect his domain or he would be like a medieval king of France—all title and no turf. He aimed to write for the entire agency, to be the go-to scribe they asked for to give eloquence to their incoherence. Now he was only known as Paul’s private copywriter, or, as Evan, an obnoxious junior account executive, had the gall to call him, “the unemployed staff copywriter.”
“I have to stop being the office joke,” Dane muttered. He sauntered into Paul’s office, oblivious to the fact that he was barging in.
Paul looked up, sensed that Dane was “off” like a rabid animal, so he deployed his trusted defense—feigned friendliness.
“So, Dane, there you are! How are you?” Wittman asked.
“Fine,” Dane replied. “Can we talk for a second?”
“Sure thing. Are you keeping busy?”
This question, which often unnerved Dane, now rankled him.
“No, I’m not busy. You want to know why? Because your esteemed colleague, Mildred Walters, assigns copywriting assignments to an outside freelancer.”
Paul Wittman had trained as an actor and did not miss his chance to improvise a riff that ran from eye-popping, jaw-dropping shock to pucker-lipped, brow-creasing outrage.
“This will not stand,” he snarled. “You are the copywriter. I’ll take care of this.”
Now Dane could see Paul do what he heard Paul do all day. The agency owner pressed two numbers, held the receiver away from his face—turning the phone from an instrument of communication to a weapon of intimidation—and paged.
“Mildred Walters. Call Paul.”
When she did not respond, Paul left a stern message on her voice mail and gave Dane a peace sign.
Later that day, Dane saw Mildred leave Paul’s office, visibly distraught. By the end of the week, she had recuperated enough to stop Dane in the hall.
“I know what you did. It was reprehensible.”
“You threaten my job and my family by hiring freelancers and you call me reprehensible!” Dane replied.
“That is my business.”
“You work for WIF—and I’m the copywriter—so it’s my business, too.”
“Nice,” Mildred said, “It won’t help you. But you already know this.”
She walked off smartly. Dane had prevented Mildred from hiring a freelancer but it was a pyrrhic victory since she would never give him work and would always be his enemy.
24. SMALL VICTORIES
Failure is a singular catastrophe but success accumulates in a myriad of small efforts and events. For two months Paul gave Dane a series of projects and Dane responded splendidly, indulging his imagination, usually going overboard and landing on his feet.
A new client who converted small manufacturing buildings into luxury lofts in Gramercy, Chelsea and the Village needed to intrigue a select clientele with million dollar lofts of a thousand square feet. Paul assigned Dane to write three brochures. Dane approached each slender volume like a collection of poetic sketches in which every facet and nuance of the building and its locality was revealed in a photograph, a word, a passage. He wandered neighborhoods, absorbed the mood and life of the streets, and took detailed notes about all that he perceived.
He noted trees blossom in pocket parks, studied rows of Greek revival houses with stone and brick facades, shoulder to shoulder like subway passengers; strolled down quiet side streets lined by storefronts with faded awnings and odd signs, and sampled pizza from shops redolent of basil, tomatoes and garlic. He admired the façades of magnificent churches built from the funds of faithful immigrants on the model of old world basilicas; they now served new communities with soup kitchens, thrift shops and off-off Broadway theaters. Though Dane wrote of million dollar lofts, he did not confine his prose to cathedral ceilings, oak floors, granite counters, copper splash-backs, Viking stoves and Sub-Zero refrigerators. He opened the French windows in these brochures to the sensations, spirit, and humanity of the cobblestone streets and let the city pour in.
When the brochures were done, Dane was summoned to jury duty. He could not build on his momentum. Rather than be idle at WIF, he twiddled his thumbs in the glutted jury room and worried for three days that he would be usurped and forgotten.
He had good news when he returned to work. Deirdre Ryan told him that Wittman was behaving strangely, laughing and clapping his hands in his office. When she burst in to see what was wrong, Paul was kicking back and smiling with a manuscript in hand. “Are you okay?” she asked her boss. I’m reading Dane’s copy,” Wittman replied. Later, Paul told Dane that his brochures were exciting.
There were other highlights. Dane received a last minute assignment to write a magazine ad for a hospital. The excitement and anxiety of doing a major full-page ad under such a tight deadline gave Dane palpitations. His teeth hurt and he felt a tingling in his arm. He thought he was having a heart attack. His first impulse was to pace the office, as if he could fend off death by out-walking it. “I can’t drop dead now. I’m getting paid next Friday. And this is too big an opportunity. I have to write this ad.”
After pacing the conference room and drinking the water cooler dry, he felt better and a headline came to him: “You don’t have to open a heart to heal it.” The client loved the ad and it ran in Time Magazine the next month.
Those were the bright moments between the dark matter of days and weeks when Dane waited for work in the cluttered conference room. Despite occasional good reviews, Dane steeled himself for termination before each payday on alternate Fridays. His idleness preyed on his sanity and self-esteem but was a humorous sideshow for the agency.
Dane’s fear of firing was more than paranoid. He viewed his niche at WIF scientifically: He was a transplanted organ; while he had not been rejected by WIF, he was not accepted. Common sense suggested that his underemployment, Paul’s moods, and the hostility of his colleagues would inexorably result in his termination.
25. A TASK NOT IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION
Although Dane was next door to Paul’s office, the owner insisted on paging him.
“Dane, call Paul!”
He stared at the phone like it was a pistol, closed his eyes and lifted the receiver to his head.
“Dane,” Paul said. “Can you swing by?”
Dane stood up and walked eight paces until he stood at the agency co-owner’s door.
“So there you are,’” Wittman said cheerfully.
“I’ve been here all day,” Dane said defensively.
“I paged earlier but you were out.”
“I must have been in the men’s room.”
Dane was so rigidly intent on maintaining his frozen composure that Paul’s voice hummed in his consciousness. He waited for verbal cues like “it isn’t working…” When he did not hear them, he listened for a clue to this meeting’s agenda. There was none. Paul simply wanted to talk.
“Are you keeping busy?’
Once again, the question impaled Dane. He did not know how to answer it with indemnity. If he was truthful, he would be fired. If he lied, he would be found out and fired.
“I could do more,” Dane replied.
“Have you spoken with the account people?” Paul asked.
“Yes, with limited success,” Dane admitted.
“Hmmm,” the chief creative officer nodded to simulate concern and raised one eyebrow behind his Teddy Roosevelt glasses to simulate thought, then glanced at his Rolex.
“I have to rush,” Wittman said. “We’ll talk. But I’d like you to do something for me.”
Dane swallowed hard. “What is it?”
It was a summer Friday. The sky darkened with an impending thunderstorm.
“I’m vacationing in Spain for a few weeks. Before I take off I need you to witness me sign my will,” Paul said.
“Sure, no problem!” Dane agreed cheerfully. It was a morbid request but to Dane it sounded like a reprieve.
26. ADTHROPOLOGY
Now that Paul was out of the office, Dane knew he could not be fired.
Dane had only one assignment. He wrote headline after headline for SPACEFINDERS, an agency that guaranteed an apartment for anyone who qualified. Around him WIF business proceeded per usual, in curses, shouts, taunts, laughs and frantic questions.
Paul’s vacation left Dane alone and unsupervised, which permitted him to become acquainted with the agency environment. He ambled about and unobtrusively observed office life at various times of the day so as not to modify behavior while gawking at it. He inventoried the sights, smells, sounds and dimensions of the place with the method of an earnest social observer.
WIF occupied three sides of a rectangle on the second floor of a modest, glass and steel office building, one flight up from a hotdog stand called Papaya Boy, whose confused effluvium of spiced beef filler and fruit drinks permeated the agency’s air supply. Dane was ambivalent about the proximity of this fast food favorite. Nostalgia was irresistible. When he was a young ad salesman trying to get his bearings in New York, Papaya Boy was an oasis—one of the few places where he could afford to eat. Those were not happy times but they were full of dreams. Now when Dane bit into a crisp casing and savory juices squirted over his tongue, he tasted the 22-year-old’s hope and longing. But nostalgia had a downside. As delicious as Papaya Dog’s products were, their pungent odors were down-scale, making it hard for WIF employees to view themselves as upwardly mobile professionals. Dane noticed that he felt lethargic and reeked of garlic after Papaya Boy. He also gained weight and Becky warned him of the danger of self-indulgence. He switched back to yogurts from a nearby grocery.
WIF’s employees were slow to reveal themselves to Dane. They showed occasional flamboyance—shouts, crass jokes, obscene gestures—but for the most part they had the reticence of oppressed people who believed that self-expression and collegiality could only lead to firing. Work week fatigue compelled them to save energy and limit their gestures. Even so, some people made strong impressions. Betty, the receptionist and an aspiring veterinarian, had a perpetual scowl, suggesting that her passion for animals stemmed in part from her hatred of humans. Julius, the studio manager, a divorced 50-year-old grandfather, ate voraciously because he aspired to weigh 200 lbs—although he stood 5’6”—in the belief that it would make him more substantial. And Al Vortman, the largest grossing account executive, proclaimed, while relieving himself at the men’s room urinal, “This is the highlight of my day.”
Each afternoon between 12:30 and 1 PM the account executives congregated around reception and traded crude insults with Betty. She impugned their virility while they vilified her chastity. Whenever Dane observed this social ritual en route to the men’s room, he marveled at the consistency of mutual abuse—apparently political correctness had not come to WIF—and he wondered what motivated it. Did lunchtime hunger trigger hostility or did personal attacks stimulate appetite?
The invective, it turned out, was incidental. Dane passed reception once as the mailman arrived and witnessed an extraordinary event—a postal feeding frenzy. Like a ravenous pack, several account executives tugged at the stack of mail, passed it, and rifled through envelopes, looking for checks that clients promised were “in the mail.” This was the ignominious back end of the agency life cycle—bringing in clients was hard; getting paid was harder.
To collect from deadbeat clients, WIF had Nuno, the collections specialist, an accomplished weekend painter, whose portrait of Maury Wittman, hanging in the conference room, assured his ongoing employment. Nuno was one of the few who talked to Dane, perhaps because he sensed in him a kindred outsider. He confided to Dane that up to 20% of WIF accounts went into collections and he was doing a good job if he collected on half of those. Nuno never worried about keeping busy. The Wittmans and the account people constantly complained to him as if he, not the clients, failed to pay.
At times Dane needed to escape to the only place out of range of the crackling intercom, but even the men’s room was no save haven. It was a sad, narrow enclosure with three little cubicles and two urinals. As he stood at one urinal, Al Vortman was spending the best part of his day at the next one.
“So, giving it a cool drink?” Vortman asked. Dane had no answer for that. “Nice facilities, right?” Vortman continued. “I hope you realize you’re pissing into a priceless antique. These urinals go back to the introduction of indoor plumbing.”
Dane laughed. Vortman was harping on his usual theme—the shabbiness and discomfort of the WIF offices and the Witmans’ indifference to improving them. The toilet stalls were worse than the urinals—dilapidated, cramped and affording little privacy. The door of one cubicle had no latch. To keep it closed you had to press your foot against it.
One day, Dane sat behind the defective door and Donny, a bilious Brooklynite, who worked in the publications room, burst in, crying out for emergency relief.
“Bad fried rice,” he gasped and jiggled Dane’s latch, then pushed against the door. “I’m dying! Please! Help me!”
Dane’s foot met Danny’s door pressure from inside with equal force, barring the desperate man. If Dane had spoken up, Danny would have respected his right to finish. However, Dane observed a rule of silence while sitting on the can. He believed that speaking at the moment of relief polluted “the sanctity of the act”—a quasi-religious concept rooted in the humiliation of his past. During his stint at Lumbago Associates, the science magazine advertising firm, a garrulous salesman named Jim Mackey noted Dane’s sneakers under the partition and joked at a staff meeting that Dane must have been the guy in the next stall. Dane denied it with a red face but the damage was done—people knew he crapped!
Now Donny called out to another colleague. “The door is friggin’ jammed! Will you help me?”
“Sure.”
The two men heaved their collective bulk at Dane’s stall door, ripping it from its hinges, and landing on Dane. The potty-crashers sprawled, thrashed and scrambled to their feet, trampling and elbowing Dane as his body curled against the pipes and water tank. Only being painfully smacked in the mouth and suffocati
ng under the man crush distracted the junior copywriter from his shame.
“Couldn’t you see I’m in here?” Dane cried out.
“My bad, Dude,” Donny said. “But why didn’t you say something?”
Dane could not admit that he kept a silent vigil in the john to prevent his bowel movements from becoming a hot topic around the water cooler. Instead, he gave what he considered a more measured response. “I was meditating.”
“Meditating?” Donny yelled. “Did you hear that? He was meditating!” That was it. For two weeks, Dane, “The Flushing Maharishi,” was the #1 topic in office toilet humor.
27. THE COPYWRITER’S NEW CLOTHES
During the hiatus, Dane also tried to improve his appearance. For years as a college instructor, he dressed like a beggar because teachers and students shared a culture of poverty and studied neglect. In advertising, nobody studied so it was just neglect. “Shabby isn’t cool or respected here, son. Trendy rules,” Evan, the obnoxious junior account executive, said. “Keep looking like crap and people will think you’re a weird guy doing research, not a serious creative. I know it hurts, but hey, I’m trying to help.”
Dane found himself at the crossroads between stale perpetuation and reinvention. With a few months of steady income to draw from, Dane shopped for new clothes.
It was an upgrade he was going for, not an overhaul. He did not aspire to Paul Wittman’s high-end designer look, yellow ties with little pig motifs, but he hoped to look at least contemporary within a modest budget. Becky was a master shopper. While the summer clearance sales were in swing, she escorted Dane to the outlet centers in New Jersey and helped him find attractive casual summer wear. He bought two shades of khaki pants and several polo shirts in teal, eggplant purple, coral, sage and bottle green, and a light cotton plaid shirt for times he felt like buttons.
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