Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  It was an odd gift, Dane’s first account. Green Acres was a 55 and older community with houses, pools, tennis courts, a golf course, a community center, and a hyperactive activities office that was always planning “exciting” events and parties for its residents, which it promoted via newspaper ads to prospective home-buyers.

  Dane wrote advertorials about these events once a month—in October, it was Oktoberfest, in November, the annual Thanksgiving Plymouth re-enactment and visit to a turkey farm. In December Green Acres held a ballroom dance competition and Scandinavian Night featuring meatballs and gravlax, and in February, it was a Valentine’s Day romantic lunch at a New York bistro.

  In December, Dane wrote:

  December is winter’s gate, poised before the cold and the holidays, when people’s thoughts turn to warmth and indoor entertainment…

  December’s main event, Scandinavian Night, will offer a festive blend of food, music and dance—a typical recipe for Green Acres parties. After a savory full course meal of frikedeller (fried meat dumplings), raggmunk (potato pancakes), kottbullar (meatballs), red cabbage, and ris almande, there will be another Norse ritual—the “Swedish Lucia” in which a woman carries a cake with candles into a dark room singing ‘Santa Lucia’…Most ideas for Green Acres come from residents, says Margaret Atwater, the recreation director, and Scandinavian night is no exception…

  Dane relished his detailed descriptions of Green Acres events. He peopled the galas with lewd geezers and women with hair and nails done every week, all working hard to enjoy their golden years. He staged an imaginary choir of Swedish virgins in white robes singing Santa Lucia while lusty men with potbellies and ponytails ogled them and popped meatballs in the mouths of sexy grandmothers in skimpy dance costumes. Dane all but tasted the gravlax and the gherkins. The burn of aquavit coursing down his throat was so real to him that he coughed.

  When Dane snapped out of his creative reverie, he realized he was only 11 years younger than the Green Acres minimum age. Paul Wittman had given him this account because he believed Dane would fit right in with Green Acres. It was his “retirement” settlement from the agency—and he seemed to need one, with his short afternoon naps.

  The Green Acres account was a call to action. If he was eleven years away from a retirement community he had better do something with his life—and fast.

  When Dane’s pieces were approved, he placed them in every New Jersey newspaper where the Green Acres developers advertised. Simultaneously, he sent poems he had written recently to a literary magazine.

  A few weeks later, he received a letter from the magazine: two of his poems had been accepted for publication.

  37. PERFORMANCE ART

  Dane’s success with his poems revived his spirit but in a few days he was unsatisfied and agitated again. It was like stepping out into daylight after a good movie in a dark theater. Dane roused himself from his torpor. He could no longer submit quietly to solitary confinement in his closet office. He had an inexorable urge to connect with the world around him.

  Now free of Wittman’s influence, he let his WIF colleagues know who he really was—not the world’s oldest junior copywriter, but the world’s youngest immortal poet. He spent more time in the studio and became friendly with Julius, the studio manager.

  By appealing to Julius’s better nature, Dane was free to hang out in the studio, a vast improvement over sitting alone in his closet. There, Dane bantered with designers and mechanical artists who produced the ads that made WIF profitable. The artists were always busy with nerve-wracking drudgery and enjoyed Dane’s patter. Account executives, bounding in and out, badgered Julius and squawked at the artists to produce their jobs on deadline. “Oh, Julius is eating his lunch. That’s a higher priority than getting my friggin’ work done,” Al Vortman jeered. “Here, Julius, can I hold your sandwich for you while you stuff your face? I’ll do anything to make your life easier!”

  “Here’s something else you can hold for me,” Julius retorted, cupping his crotch. “And you can eat it, too!”

  Amid the banter and pressure, Dane made friends with the studio people. Cal was 6’8” and a former folk singer. Diane was the attractive girlfriend of a star deejay on a major FM station. The only artist who objected to Dane’s presence was Alfonse, a squat, chainsmoking curmudgeon who loved golf so much that he played in the snow. He once rode the bus with Dane to the Port Authority and confided that in his two years at WIF the Wittmans never learned his name or once said hello. “That’s okay,” he growled, “I got no respect for those clowns anyway.”

  The publication of Dane’s poems revived his hope for creative success. Each day he extracted the magazine from his briefcase and read his poems, but soon Dane wanted more. Walt Whitman had declared that great poets need great audiences. Dane would settle for any audience. He had performed his work at bookstore open mic events when he was a professor with free time. Was the recent publication of his work a portent that he should read publicly again? Maybe the overheated art studio was his venue and reading for its culture-starved artists was his lucky break.

  Dane devised a short act. He would enter the studio, recite his shorter poems and withdraw suddenly, like he was doing a guerilla poetry reading. He performed the act a few times and Cal and Diane found it entertaining. They laughed hard and applauded before Dane made a fast exit. He knew he could not linger or Julius would intervene because he had to keep the studio profitable and poetry readings might interfere with this objective.

  Dane soon added a costume to the performance. He slicked down his middle-parted hair and wore punched out plastic glass frames and a baggy, tweed jacket. He recited his verse in a nasal voice, with pompous pauses, and lifted a finger with pseudo-solemnity. Alfonse, who sat in the rear of the studio with his back to the door and a mirror propped nearby so he could anticipate an attack, shouted, “Shut up!”

  “Hey,” Cal said, “We’re listening.”

  Dane continued with the next verse.

  “Get a job!” Alfonse shouted.

  Julius entered when he heard Alfonse barking and told Dane he should probably save his poems for open mics in the East Village. Dane was shut down in another extraneous attempt to be creative at WIF.

  38. BREAKTHROUGH, BREAKDOWN

  Dane’s cancelled poetry event created a buzz. People heard of his antics. The WIF staff sensed that here was a subversive talent and a downtrodden, oppressed peon like themselves, who had to sacrifice his creativity, just like they sacrificed their hard-earned commissions to the Wittmans.

  Finally there was a breakthrough. Christine, the young and successful recruitment executive, gave Dane an assignment. This alone was no triumph; on the contrary, it was an unmitigated failure. Nothing Dane wrote pleased Christine. She dismissed him briskly. “Do you consider yourself a professional?” she asked. Being vilified publicly this way could have fatally damaged anyone’s career, and Dane’s was already on life-support. Yet, negative publicity from the right person can often be more effective than the best publicity from the wrong one. WIF was far more negative than most corporate cultures; it was ruled by feuds, not alliances. Here, you were judged on the basis of your enemies, not your friends. Christine had many enemies, and when other recruitment executives heard her eviscerate Dane’s reputation, they suddenly liked and respected him.

  Every month the WIF staff convened in the main conference room to celebrate employee birthdays. The birthday song was sung, two cakes were cut and everyone received a piece. There was always a portion left over from each cake. “This is a demonstration of shrewd management,” Al Vortman said. “See those two leftover pieces of cake? Management has a plan to save them in a freezer. They’ll carry them over until next month and reduce cake expenditures by 15%. You don’t believe me? Bill Gates invited the Wittmans to speak at his business summit in Switzerland. They’ll lead seminars and share this remarkable practice with world leaders.”

  “They’ll call it Let them eat cake…but no seconds,”
Dane replied.

  Dane had appreciated Vortman’s sarcastic business analysis for some time and now Vortman reciprocated by smiling wryly at Dane’s retort. He even chuckled a little and scratched the fringe of hair around his bald pate. It signified a victory for the world’s oldest junior copywriter since Vortman rarely responded to anyone’s humor but his own.

  WIF’s top earner was so impressed with Dane that he asked him if he was available to write ads for a major new client. “Absolutely!” Dane replied. Vortman asked Dane if he had experience with recruitment ads. Dane had no experience with classifieds beyond reading them, but was so eager for work that if he had been offered an assignment handing out toilet paper in the men’s room, he would have asked when he could start. He assured Vortman that recruitment ads were his specialty. Vortman did not believe him but agreed to show him the basics.

  Dane’s first assignment was an innocuous Systems Analyst ad, which the client inexplicably loved. This led to a Field Specialist ad and an Operations Chief ad. In a month Dane wrote ads to recruit for every position in the company, including Chief Financial Officer and Chief Executive. Dane’s 20 classified ads were inserted in publications in all major markets.

  Vortman and his partner were getting rich with this client and Dane contributed to the success in mysterious ways. Not that he wasn’t working hard. Vortman would spend an hour struggling to articulate what he wanted in a headline, which always came down to “Be a part of our system.” Or “Work with our system.” After chewing his glass frame stems to Twizzlers, Vortman threw up his arms and shouted at Dane that he should know what to write—he was the writer! When Dane produced several alternatives, Vortman pondered these short, apparently perfunctory ads like abstruse physics equations, before issuing his edict. “No, it’s not right…it should be loftier. But not so far out there that nobody believes it.”

  This assignment did not fool Dane into believing he was doing anything creative but it reassured him that he could keep his job for another month. Writing recruitment copy also won him the respect of other account executives. He felt he finally fit in at WIF. He was no longer the freak, just another freak.

  For reasons unknown, Dane’s want ads were highly successful. He had a baffling knack for writing Great opportunity for the right person. Business was so good that Vortman induced the Wittmans to buy Dane a fax machine for his apartment in case a recruitment ad emergency required that he write from home.

  The Wittmans might have used Dane’s breakthrough as a bridge to their disgruntled vassals, but Paul Wittman had other ideas.

  Paul paged Dane in a stern voice, “Call Paul.”

  “So I hear you’ve been writing copy for Vortman.”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s that been going?”

  “Very well. They like my work,” Dane boasted.

  “I’m glad to hear it. You’ve been busy. So how many hours have you worked?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A lot.”

  “You mean, you haven’t been filling out timesheets?” Paul asked.

  “Was I supposed to?”

  “Of course!” Paul said. “How do you think we get paid around here?

  Dane should have known success would lead to disaster. Now that Dane wrote for someone other than Paul, he was supposed to bill his time like a studio artist. Paul ordered Dane to account for every hour he worked on Vortman’s business and to submit the timesheet, which Wittman would tender to Vortman as an invoice. Finally, Paul’s original plan to turn Dane’s copywriting into a profit center might succeed.

  Did Vortman understand this arrangement? He may have assumed he was doing Dane and the Wittmans a favor by giving the junior copywriter something to do. Meanwhile, Dane felt like a traitor and a spy. He was friendly with Vortman and his partner, Josh. They treated him like a human being and appreciated his work. Now he would make them wish they hadn’t.

  It was Dane’s first encounter with timesheets but not Vortman’s. When WIF’s biggest earner saw the timesheet and Wittman’s bill for Dane’s copy, he stormed around the office spasmodically, bumping into furniture, waving the crumpled invoice like it was a severed limb. He thrust the printouts under Dane’s face and jabbed at the numbers.

  “Did you know about this?” he cried.

  “Paul told me to report my time.”

  “You spent this many hours on those ads?”

  “Probably more,” Dane said. “That goes back six weeks.”

  “You blood-sucking parasite!” Vortman shouted. “I wrote those ads. You don’t know the first thing about recruitment ads.”

  “That’s a lie,” Dane said. “I’ve answered thousands of them.”

  Vortman stared at Dane with venomous intensity before he waddled off, waving a letter opener and vituperating in the hallway. “They charge us for these humping desks and these stinking phones and this crap studio!” Vortman shouted, “Now they’re bleeding us dry with an incompetent copywriter! Here, just get it over with!” He stuck out his arm and drew the letter opener across his veins. Nothing happened. “Even the letter opener is a cheap, substandard rip off!” he concluded.

  Dane was humiliated by Vortman’s tirade and disappointed to lose a potential friend and colleague. However, he felt worse for what he did to Vortman’s personality. For months after the billing event, Vortman was always red-faced and ranting; yet he lost the sparks of humor that lit his darkness. He no longer took joy in his urination or bantered with Betty, the receptionist, about his lost virility and her lost virtue. Paying for Dane’s copywriting, which he claimed he never needed, was the provocation that set loose every one of his resentments and wreaked carnage on his soul.

  This event affected Dane in other ways. He experienced firsthand a side of business which he had previously only glimpsed at and overheard; it was combat and people often got hurt. For one, his growing credibility with the recruitment executives was destroyed and their area was off-limits. He was forced to reroute his office traffic pattern to avoid Vortman. He could no longer enter the studio for more than a moment or walk the long corridor without looking askance. WIF had become his private Yugoslavia—a once unified domain carved into hostile zones.

  One afternoon, Dane walked into the men’s room. Vortman was standing at the urinal. As soon as he saw Dane, his face reddened and he muttered curses under his breath.

  Vortman grew more agitated and he could not relieve himself. He discharged his anger at Dane. “See what you did? You’ve ruined the best part of my day!” Vortman gulped. His body trembled and jerked. He turned spasmodically and discharged at Dane, before collapsing on the floor of the tiny men’s room. Betty called 911. Dane had to wash the last of his new polo shirts which he had saved from the previous summer.

  39. ROGER OVER AND OUT

  Hate forms a bond as strong as love. Since nearly 90% of WIF was enemy territory to Dane, he retreated to his closet office. And since he was a hated person at the agency, he formed an alliance with its resident misanthrope, Roger Garber, the creative director of art, whose office was conveniently next door.

  Garber was a brilliant, disillusioned man who smoked all day and let account people’s demands carom off his hard façade while he stared at a monitor, tweaking layouts with fleet-fingered ease. Garber was a Pratt alumnus and a veteran of prestigious agencies, but his eyesight was weak, his lenses dense, and his eye sockets limned by crow’s feet, leathery as scars. Divorced, a chain smoker and a Ponzi scheme investor, Roger was an apotheosis of self-loathing.

  Yet, despite his faults, Garber was WIF’s creative guru. He never concealed his scorn for the Wittmans, whom he considered bean counters and poseurs, nor viewed his job as anything but the last chapter in his book of bad luck, a life sentence for the crime of being alive.

  Garber liked Dane because he perceived him to be a luckless misfit on a lower rung of life. As a neighborly gesture, Garber asked Dane to write headlines for an ad campaign he was doing for an obscure restaurant near JFK airport, where a
four-star New York chef had fled to escape the pressure. Still guilt-ridden for making Vortman sick with timesheets, Dane asked Roger if he would need to bill his time.

  “Bill as much as you want. It’s for the Wittmans,” Roger replied.

  Dane believed he had found a creative ally in Roger but aside from their discontent, they were not kindred spirits. Elements in Roger’s personality made Dane uneasy. While they brainstormed, Roger bragged to Dane that he was a high-class hack. “I have a repertoire of twenty layouts,” he said. “When I get an assignment, I analyze which approach works best. It’s that easy. These people don’t know the difference. They like it better if they’ve seen it a thousand times.”

  “Don’t you want to try something new—just to prove you can do it?”

  “No,” Roger said.

  To be an unabashed hack, Roger needed an off-setting virtue—like making a lot of money. In his mind, this sanitized his corruption. By contrast, Dane was too indigent to take pride in being an uninspired sellout. Out of psychological necessity, he aspired to be great. When he showed discomfort at Roger’s admission, Roger put a mentoring spin on his cynicism.

  “It sounds canned and formulaic but you can’t be any other way or the work kills you,” Roger said. He leaned forward until his thick glasses blurred his eyes into gray puddles. “Don’t let it kill you, Dane.”

  One bond Roger and Dane shared was their mutual hatred of Arlen Lesser. Arlen was always barging into Roger’s office, making imperious demands. One afternoon, Lesser stormed in, stuttered inarticulate orders for last-minute layouts, smacked his hands, snapped his fingers, shouted, “Chop, chop!” and stormed off in confusion.

  Roger knew Dane loathed the itinerant creative director of copy even more than he did and enjoyed teasing him.

  “I just saw your friend, Arlen. He sends his regards,” Garber asked.