“Arlen should have his own action movies,” Dane remarked. “Blow hard. The sequel would be Blow harder.”
Roger laughed.
“They pay him $90,000 to blow hard,” Roger remarked. “Think about it when you get your paycheck.”
Dane needed Garber’s alliance. He had alienated everyone else. Yet he knew Roger reported on Arlen’s lucrative compensation, not to sympathize with him, but to trigger his emotional meltdown. Dane shrugged coolly and deprived Roger of his entertainment, but the disclosure of Arlen’s $90,000 retainer secretly did Roger’s work, killing Dane’s gratitude for his inadequate paycheck. Yet how could he demand a raise when he was not busy enough to justify more money—or even his current salary? As long as Paul underemployed him and used Arlen as a creative director, Dane was stuck where he was.
After the restaurant ad, Dane and Roger received a new assignment, a full-page spread for Green Acres. They had teamed successfully before but the Green Acres ad was different. Green Acres was a brand Dane knew well. He had authored several Green Acres advertorials and believed himself an expert on the 55+-year-old mind. At any rate, he thought he knew the topic better than Roger did and expected a more equal partnership than before. However, for Roger the power structure was unchanged. He expected his junior copywriter to defer to him.
After nearly losing his job in the DUMBO showdown, Dane vowed to accept his abject position and never risk his livelihood for an idea. In this spirit of resignation, Dane would have accepted subservience to Roger with due humility. However, remorse has an expiration date and Dane’s had passed. He was angry and impatient with his mediocre situation. Dane’s abused ego was highly volatile. A deficit of money and respect inflamed it and a thwarted creative opportunity made it explode.
When Dane spilled his ideas to Roger, with marketing rationales for each of them, the creative director exhaled smoke from his nostrils. When Dane coughed, Roger said, “This is what I think.” And that was that.
Dane had considered Roger a fellow traveler who respected his intellect and talent. Now Roger showed he was a dictator like Arlen Lesser. Dane felt doubly betrayed.
He hoped that Paul would reverse Roger and endorse his concepts but Paul believed the Green Acres Estates client had no taste anyway, so why should he further alienate his disgruntled creative director by overriding him? He supported Roger’s ideas and Dane saw one more creative opportunity squandered.
Dane reached a personal milestone. He was more frustrated than ever. “You were not meant to create!” the world screamed at him. If only he accepted this mantra in his heart he might be happy. He could give rave reviews to derivative movies, lavish praise on tuneless tunes, and tell Arlen and Roger how brilliant they were. Life would be easy.
40. CLEARING THE AIR
However, ego-suppressive therapy came with significant risks—total personality destruction. Dane could not suppress his ego or deny his creative drive. As a result, he despised Roger, his former friend and newest oppressor, as much as Arlen. Yet this hatred burned hotter since it was exacerbated by daily contact. Arlen did his damage and disappeared for months, whereas Roger was next door and ineluctable. Each time Roger’s door opened, smoke billowed into the hall to trigger Dane’s rancor.
Roger suffocated Dane’s lungs and his creativity. He and Alfonse, the poetry-hating snow-golfer, huddled silently over Roger’s desk, sucking and belching smoke fifteen times a day like peasants supping in a hut. When Roger’s door opened, smoke rolled out like a fog. Dane coughed and was reminded of the botched ad and his banned poetry readings. Roger and Alfonse would not stop at spoiling his creative opportunities; they must also ruin his health.
In his closet office, Dane wheezed and seethed with feeble wrath. How could he change the situation? The WIF rule about smoking was:
“Do it behind closed doors.”
Of course, this rule had as much effect as a cigarette filter. Smoke was airborne, it defied enclosures. Dane coughed constantly. His clothes and skin reeked of Roger’s fumes. He overcame his fresh loathing of Roger and asked the creative director if he could smoke less indoors or keep his door closed more often. Roger curtly recited his mantra, “I close my door when I smoke, which I have a right to do. Now get out.”
Dane called the city government and learned about the laws governing cigarettes in the workplace. Technically Roger was in the right. He could smoke in his office behind closed doors if such was the company rule, since each firm determined its own smoking policy. Dane’s only option to improve his air quality was to persuade the Wittmans to make WIF a smoke-free workplace. Dane circulated a petition. He canvassed the office like he had done when begging for work, explained the situation and cadged signatures. Even Mildred Walters, who denied him crumbs of creative assignments, signed his petition. After an hour Dane had obtained forty signatures among fifty employees. He submitted the petition to Paul Wittman, who was impressed by Dane’s initiative but warned him again not to make enemies—advice which in Dane’s case always came too late.
Two days later Dane found a memo on his desk that had been distributed to every employee. Effective the following Monday, there would be no smoking at WIF. Anyone who wished to smoke would need to do so outside the building.
It was a stunning coup for Dane. He was in advertising strictly for the money but had inadvertently become a political activist and public health advocate. People who never spoke to him now thanked him for his efforts. Once reviled and ridiculed, he was now a respected member of the WIF community. Despite his status as a low-wage flunkey, Dane demonstrated the long-lost innate leadership his fifth grade teacher claimed he had. Maybe not keeping a good man down and cream rising to the top were not mere clichés.
For one Thursday afternoon—the day of the edict—Dane felt good about himself. He knew without being told (but was told anyway by several colleagues) that Roger and Alfonse, the two smoking malcontents, were furious with him. Roger was conveniently absent for a few days. However, when he returned, he glared balefully at Dane and spewed expletives at him, loudly declaring him a backstabbing bastard-asshole.
People wondered if Roger would finally quit in protest of this final affront to his indispensability. They could not foresee the fallout of going smoke-free.
41. BAD DÉCOR
When Dane arrived on Monday, Gary, the office manager, told him he had moved his personal effects to another office at the far end of the floor. It was the first reprisal for Dane’s anti-smoking activism. The Wittmans were appeasing Roger, who had threatened to quit if he had to be next door to “that backstabbing prick.”
Dane was warned about the new office. It had problems, including excessive summer heat, a glass wall along the hallway and a tendency to flood from a faulty AC unit. But Dane was determined to see his new office as a victory. It was thrice the size of his closet office and he immediately saw a creative opportunity to transform the glass wall along the hallway into the world’s largest construction paper mosaic. He foraged sheets of colored Xerox paper—green, yellow, pink, and blue—and taped them like tiles to the glass expanse. Within hours, Dane had turned the transparent surface into an opaque wall that resembled a childish Mondrian and afforded optimal privacy.
Deirdre Ryan, the office administrator, had written Dane out of her personal romance novel and was seen making out at office functions with an account executive. However, she now recognized that fate placed Dane near her office for another amorous assault. Perhaps this was an augury that he would leave his family and accompany her on a long-overdue vacation tour of lovely New England bed and breakfasts, the promotional brochure for which she now held in her hand.
Deirdre found a way to be close to Dane and to lord it over him, as well. As soon as he had mounted his construction paper mural, Deirdre came by to complain.
“The construction paper must come down,” she said.
“Why? I just put it up. It looks great,” Dane said.
“It looks tacky and it violates the WI
F rule on office décor,” she said.
“What rule? I can’t work with people walking by and looking in,” Dane said. “I need privacy in which to create.”
“Create?” Deirdre laughed. “Is that you’ve been doing?”
Dane blushed at his admittedly grandiose job description.
They struck a compromise. Deirdre provided thicker, better quality paper squares in tasteful shades of brown and beige.
42. SCRAPS
Paul Wittman called Dane into his office. Almost a year had passed since Dane walked in with his landmark real estate brochures. He had been with the mercurial Wittman long enough to be unfazed by his paradoxical management style. Wittman could be counted on to hire a man only to let him languish, to promote his creativity only to suppress it, and to ban smoking only to punish the man who instigated the ban. Being summoned to Paul’s office no longer produced dread but curiosity.
“I’ve called you in, Dane, because we have more work from National Luxury Rentals. They want a tagline to brand all of their promotional pieces as well as a new ad. I want you to work closely with Arlen.”
“That’s an oxymoron,” Dane pointed out, “Arlen doesn’t work closely with anyone. At best he just steals ideas.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dane, you’ve been in advertising for over nine months but you’re still not reborn as an advertising man. This business is all about collaboration.”
Deirdre Ryan appeared at the door with a large paper bag between her manicured fingers. She held it far from her body as if it contained a feral animal, but it was only Paul’s take-out breakfast. Along with running the office, pacifying clients, supervising production, and planning her boss’s travel, Deirdre ordered and brought him his meals. The aroma of fried egg quickly suffused the office. Deirdre dropped the bag on Paul’s desk and rushed out to remove her dignity from the compromising act.
Paul tucked into his breakfast—an egg white omelet with Monterey jack cheese, cherry tomatoes and fines herbes, pan-fried red potatoes and a container of Tropicana orange juice. As Paul shared his advertising wisdom and a creative brief with Dane between plastic forkfuls of fried egg white, Steve Pomodoro, director of creative services, walked in.
“Saroja is a difficult woman,” Steve announced, as if imparting strange news.
“She’s worth it,” Paul said flatly.
Pomodoro received this message.
“I am 100% committed to working with her!” Pomodoro said.
“Steve, sit,” said Paul, who preferred eating in company, especially when his company was not joining him. “Steve-o, how would you like to work with Dane on a new project?”
“Cool,” Pomodoro said with his well-known positive energy. Pomodoro had arrived on the WIF scene as an emergent star. In strictly personal terms, the director of creative services was impressive. Tall, athletic, a devoted son, who played golf with his dad, Pomodoro strode the halls with the vitality and purpose of a linebacker, performing even mundane movements such as standing and sitting like an action hero. Pomodoro was also a can-do executive with innovative ideas, such as introducing plastic job folders—a huge hit. In addition to his many gifts, Steve had the most important trait of a true leader. He was unabashed about sharing his personal life with his colleagues. When he arrived at WIF, he courageously “put it out there” that he was undergoing a revolutionary hair growth procedure using computer-guided nano-needles to transplant hair from his buttocks to his scalp. For months the staff marked the passage of their lives by the growth of Pomodoro’s coiffure, only to note wistfully that both progressed too slowly. Mabel, a pretty woman in accounts payable, lamented, “Isss such a shame…Steve iss such a handsome man.”
Dane liked Pomodoro but when he looked at his head, he could not avoid the thought that it was a piece of his ass.
After his propitious start, Pomodoro was a casualty of the Wittmans’ penchant for blaming employees for their mistakes. He was cruising with a perfect record until the SPACEFINDERS brochures were produced. Paul Wittman and his art directors thought white cardboard was too yesterday for their trendy SPACEFINDERS client so they chose pale green stock. When photographs were printed on green cardboard, the models’ skin tones had a morbid verdure. Paul Wittman was irate. “You’ve made a luxury building look like a morgue!” he lambasted Pomodoro.
As director of creative services, it was not Pomodoro’s job to make impractical decisions—only to make them work. He was blamed for the fiasco and because he accepted blame, he became a trusted employee.
Now Paul Wittman briefed Dane and Pomodoro about the National Luxury Rentals campaign. However, Pomodoro was distracted. He could not take his eyes off of his boss’s breakfast.
When Wittman made a business point and asked for Pomodoro’s opinion, he had to shout, “Steve!” to startle him from a trance.
“I’m sorry, Paul. Your breakfast looks so delicious,” Pomodoro said with watery eyes and a slack jaw.
“It is. You want some? Here, I’m finished with it,” Paul said.
Wittman passed the aluminum container with its scraps of egg white omelet and untouched home fries to Pomodoro and looked on with amusement as the director of creative services wolfed down his breakfast remains. When he was done, they discussed the next assignment.
43. A CREATIVE FANTASY
The new project was unprecedented for WIF. It was bigger than a building or even a residential complex. This was a condo resort and spa with a dozen golf courses in the mountains of New Jersey.
Pomodoro, Saroja, and Dane brainstormed pitch concepts together. The unique selling point of these condos was that they were all situated on a golf course, so that a resident could roll out of bed to play nine holes. Pomodoro in particular appreciated this amenity since he often drove long distances to play golf on weekends.
Rather than have people close their eyes and scribble down ideas according to WIF tradition, Dane suggested that the team truly collaborate. He took the lead by asking questions, eliciting ideas. Saroja offered some. So did Pomodoro. Dane transcribed their thoughts on a flip-chart and by posing more questions, he induced Saroja and Steve to see how their ideas connected and formed larger themes. Dane also offered his own thinking and asked for feedback. While the session was in full-pitch, Pomodoro exclaimed, “This is fun!”
Spontaneously, Dane applied teaching methods to brainstorming. He realized that this had been missing from his advertising experience thus far because supervisors showed little interest in involving everyone in the creative process—or because no process was in place.
44. ANNIVERSARY
It was the one year anniversary of Dane’s first day on the job. He could track his progress by the distance of twenty feet between the dusty conference room where he started and his musty new digs.
Much had happened at WIF in a year. Betty, the angry receptionist, got pregnant and married, and several recruitment executives claimed to be the father of her child, prompting ribald arguments. Perhaps in response to the slander, Betty filed a worker’s compensation grievance against WIF, alleging that the toxic environment made her too sick to work. Deirdre Ryan was furious. “That whore,” she muttered. “This place makes me sick but you don’t see me staying home to collect!”
That afternoon, Deirdre Ryan opened Dane’s door and peeked in.
“Do you have a moment, Dane?”
“Sure,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”
“You are,” Deirdre replied as she sashayed to Dane’s desk and leaned over to whisper. The office administrator made sure that her designer scent “Lust” filled the junior copywriter’s congested nostrils and that her full breasts filled his eyes like two plump pastries on a tray. “You’ve been here a year but instead of being promoted you’re regressing.”
“Please don’t remind me,” Dane ruefully replied.
Dane was staring at the same ad with a seductive woman Maury Wittman gave him to work on when he arrived at WIF the year before. Now under its headline, “Do you love
where you live?” Dane was rewriting Wittman’s twenty words of body copy for the tenth time.
Deirdre sighed heavily with the hint of a purr to suggest impatient desire.
“Do you want to go on like this?” she asked. “Don’t you want to advance in your career?”
“You mean, get another job?”
“No, keep this one,” Deirdre insisted with droll annoyance. She smiled indulgently at Dane like he was a difficult child. “I just talked to Paul.”
“You did? What about?” Dane asked.
She chuckled as if Dane were playing dumb to be cute, rather than just being dumb.
“About you, silly. I convinced him to give you a better position with more responsibility and a real future.”
“What could that be?” Dane asked with foreboding.
“Starting next week, you’re the new copy chief!” Deirdre replied with a throaty hush of excitement.
“Copy chief? What is that?”
Deirdre inhaled deeply to show intense bosom heaving and replied, “You’ll find out.”
For Deirdre, “copy chief” was code for inserting herself in Dane’s life by currying his gratitude and affection. For Dane, being the copy chief meant he would no longer be involved solely with his own piddling copy, but with the entire agency’s verbiage. He would be responsible for every word written at WIF to ensure that it reflected client changes and was accurate in every way. The more this sank into Dane’s porous brain matter, the heavier it became. “Copy chief” sounded less like a promotion than a cruel punishment. Deirdre had cleverly foisted one of her burdens on Dane. And with good intentions or sweet revenge, she gave the job a title that conferred no honor, prestige or pride.
If anyone asked what he did, Dane would answer, “I’m a copy chief!” It sounded like a fatuous job featured on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
“Who is that at our door? Oh, it’s the Copy Chief. Hello, Mr.
Copy Chief. Did you bring us some copy today?”
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