Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Dane understood that if he backed down he would be humiliated but if he became violent Krassweiler would have him fired.

  “If I’m a janitor I should remove the trash,” Dane said. He pulled Krassweiler by the collar, threw him over the desk and landed an uppercut squarely on the creative director’s nose. Krassweiler tumbled and crashed head first against the bookcase, bringing plant pots, books and papers down on him. From the broken bric-a-brac the truculent creative wunderkind snagged Dane’s arm with one hand and flailed at him with the other, smacking his eye.

  “I’m talking to your supervisor!” Krassweiler shouted. “What do you think will happen when he learns what you’ve done?”

  Dane returned to his rational corporate senses and recognized the trouble he was in. His only hope of keeping his job was to frame Krassweiler as the aggressor. Eton smacked him in the groin from his cramped sprawl but Dane pulled away and bolted from his office, shouting, “Krassweiler’s had an accident!”

  Cubicle dwellers nearby did their utmost to ignore Dane’s outcry. Krassweiler, who had scrambled to his feet, pounced on Dane from behind and put him in a head lock to choke him into submission. Dane thrust his elbow into Krassweiler’s solar plexus, stamped on his foot and drove him backward against the plasterboard wall, where he had him pinned. At that point, other colleagues interceded to stop the fight. Krassweiler’s crew members peeled Dane off of their leader, who touched his nose, saw blood on his finger and wagged it at Dane.

  “You’re finished! I am a respected employee of this agency. You can’t make me bleed!” Krassweiler threatened.

  “You assaulted me in my office!” Dane countered.

  “I’m talking to your supervisor. What will Landon say? He’ll fire your sorry ass!”

  “Let’s both talk to him,” Dane agreed. He walked away from Krassweiler and headed to Landon’s office. Krassweiler did not know what else to do so he followed.

  “You can’t lead me around like an animal! I’m a respected employee of this agency!” Krassweiler objected.

  “Then behave like one!” Dane replied.

  When they entered Landon’s office, Dane stated his grievance.

  “Landon, with all the pranks, cliques and bullies around here, it’s like high school revisited!” Dane declaimed.

  Landon raised his eyes from his monitor and regarded Dane with measured consternation. “Really! I had no idea.”

  Dane summarized the situation, hitting all the low points—the locked door, his exasperated response and Krassweiler’s office invasion—before the young creative director gave his side.

  “Your employee has behaved outrageously, Landon!” Krassweiler cried. “He has falsely accused every member of my group and created ill will. Then he assaulted me in his office.”

  “His office?” Landon asked suspiciously.

  Krassweiler was on the verge of vehement protest when he paused as if he had forgotten something. He took stock of his appearance. His shirt was ripped and his face was streaked with dirt from Dane’s fallen plants. He lost his swagger and looked beaten, which was bad enough. But he absolutely could not have his crew perceive him as a victim or hear him whine for justice from a colleague he ridiculed.

  “Like I said, Landon, Dane is out of control because he doesn’t make enough money to pay his bills,” Krassweiler said.

  Dane and Landon exchanged a baffled look at this non sequitur. Krassweiler had abandoned his argument and was now demeaning Dane’s income, the corporate version of his manhood. He was also implying that Landon was too cheap to give Dane a raise. The moment passed. Landon promised Krassweiler he would investigate, which was his code for “nothing will get done and all will be forgiven and forgotten.” The young creative director sneered and walked off, dissatisfied.

  Krassweiler was an inveterate juvenile delinquent but he was also, as he claimed, “a highly respected employee of Green Healthcare Advertising.” He demanded retribution. Dane was summoned to human resources, where the new vice president of HR, Fiona Dumbarton, a plump, English woman with wet-looking hair that gave her a coming-out-of-the-shower freshness, inquired what had occurred in his office. Dane presented himself as the victim of relentless abuse. Fiona listened attentively and prescribed a remedy. “Dane, I want you to tell Eton how terribly sorry you are for the misunderstanding. Assure him that you only want to do a good job, and then express the hope that you can put all this nonsense behind you and get along like the teammates you are.”

  Since Dane was the party whose door was repeatedly locked, who found melted feces in his desk and a lewd troll in his bookcase, and whose office was trashed, he refused to “make nice” with Krassweiler. Fiona did not press him to do so. The HR director viewed Dane and Krassweiler as two members of the same childish tribe and hoped they would both find employment elsewhere. However, to resolve the matter, she determined that Krassweiler was the more important miscreant and placed Dane on probation.

  25. DANE’S SECRET TORMENTOR REVEALED

  After his raid on Krassweiler’s office, Dane’s door was treated with respect. It was left open while he was out.

  Then the door was locked again.

  Dane’s anger was tapped. Now he was merely curious. Who would repeatedly do such an asinine thing after the ugliness that transpired? Dane asked the three people in cubicles closest to his office if they had seen anyone behaving suspiciously around his door.

  Bettina, the art buyer from Uruguay, a petite, young woman with a gold stud in her nose, came to Dane’s office when security had opened his door and told him she would give a special discount to see her topless—only $50.

  “Bettina, I can’t. It’s wrong and it violates the employee manual.”

  “But I need money. Anyway, I’m more than worth it.”

  “You’re much more than worth it,” Dane replied with due chivalry. “Look, I’ll give you twenty if you tell me who’s been locking my door.”

  Okay, she agreed, before whispering the name. “It’s Austin.”

  Good natured, pasty-faced, depression-medication-taking Weebler? Since Landon was out of the office too often to mentor him and Dane never lunched with him on high-priced sushi, Weebler fell into the wrong crowd. He was seduced by the violence and immaturity of The Boys. Now he was “pledging” with them to join their pack. But since he had no creative flair to offer the gang, he performed pranks to obtain their respect.

  When Dane suggested to Landon that Austin Weebler was involved in his door lockings, The Savior called in his protégé who swore his innocence. Like a doting absentee father, Landon thought his son’s word was sufficient.

  Dane finally confronted Weebler.

  “Why did you lock me out of my office?”

  “I didn’t do it,” the young copywriting star replied.

  “You were seen doing it.”

  “It wasn’t me. Maybe it was somebody who looks like me.”

  “Nobody looks like you.”

  “Thanks, Dane. You think I’m unique?” Weebler asked.

  “Uniquely disturbed. You once welcomed me. Now you lock me out of my office. Why?”

  “Because…because…you wouldn’t eat sushi with me.”

  “Do you think this is funny?”

  “It is kind of hilarious,” Weebler admitted.

  “You mean, humiliating. When I leave my office, I wonder when I’ll get back in. I felt at home at Green but you killed it.”

  “Sorry,” Austin said. “I should have been more sensitive…but it was just so funny—your face when you realized you were locked out!”

  “Tragic if it happens to you, but hilarious when it happens to me,” Dane retorted. He was about to punish Weebler with a stern explanation of the Mel Brooks adage about comedy, when young Austin winced and gripped his chest. “I really need water. I have bad heartburn.”

  Dane suspected the mischievous junior copywriter of squirming out of the confrontation but he looked truly ill, so he let him go.

  26. INAPPRO
PRIATE CONTACT & A GRISLY DISCOVERY

  Now that the launch concept was in place, it needed to be applied to a plethora of marketing items, including promotional premiums like pens, prescription pads, calendars, and paper-weights; informational pieces, such as sales aids, brochures, and direct mail letters; and packaging, including bottle labels and boxes. As the writer of record, Dane wrote copy for every item and needed to sign off on each project before it left the agency.

  Although his creative satisfaction index had hit a 52 week low, Dane was spending on average 12 hours a day at the office. After editors reviewed a piece, Dane evaluated their remarks and answered their queries, then handed off the layout to the art director, account person and studio, where changes were flowed into new layouts. Even an inconspicuous error triggered a new round of changes. And if anyone procrastinated, a piece scheduled to go out by end of day might sit on a desk until 5 or 6 PM, resulting in a very long night.

  As the process hijacked his life, Dane habitually stayed at the office until anywhere from 9 PM to midnight. He was like an organ of the agency body. Jobs circulated through him. He imparted his enzyme here or stripped away a molecule there.

  However, Dane adapted to the grind of medical writing, its succession of late nights and artistic dead ends. Though greatness was unlikely to be achieved here, Dane found other compensations. He came to appreciate the grim camaraderie of colleagues who habitually worked late, each with a different motive. Some were workaholics; others feared their empty apartments. There were perkpeople who dawdled late enough to qualify for free dinners and later still for free cab rides home. What the night shift shared were fluorescent light overlapping shadow, the reek of hot feet, a plaintive quiet and the patient fight against fatigue.

  What Dane experienced in the bleary-eyed, head-aching, feetsniffing late nights at Green was a sense of one-ness with the heartbeat of humanity, of having reached the molten core of existence. It was a comfort to live, work and suffer like most people in the world. Dane would have considered this a spiritual compensation and been satisfied with it.

  One evening, a piece requiring paltry changes disappeared between 7 PM and 10 PM. When an hour passed and the traffic person did not stop by his office, Dane searched for her. She had gone to dinner. When she returned, she belched and reproved Dane for his aggressiveness, as Sarah Bittman instructed her to do. She told him the layout he was “hot for” was with an editor.

  “You’ll have to wait patiently,” she admonished Dane as if he were a five-year-old. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

  “But there were only a few tiny corrections—a comma here, a colon there!” Dane said. “How can that take three hours?”

  “People all work differently,” the traffic girl replied. “You want it to be perfect, don’t you?”

  At approximately 10 PM Dane thought the process was stuck, something had gone awry. The job was just an envelope with a logo and the words, “Learn about GERD” on the flap. How much could be wrong with it? He left his office to investigate, starting with the account executive, who was out of her office. Dane noticed a paperback on the floor with an intriguing title, The Account Manager’s Guide. The subtitle read: “How to Get Anybody to Do Anything Anytime!”

  A spoiler on the cover promised success to anyone who followed the precepts set forth in the slender tome. Dane was curious to illuminate his long hours of drudgery. He opened to the middle of the book and read a random passage:

  Take the pressure off yourself by putting it on everyone else…Stay on balance by knocking everyone else off theirs. Give others less time to think so you have more time to act. Keep people guessing to keep them alert. Talent and intelligence produce good work; adrenaline produces great work. Tell your creatives to get it done yesterday, so you can look at it next week and the client can see it a month later. Employees work best under tight deadlines and intense stress, and ask fewer questions. Never accept one or two drafts when you can ask for ten. The more you ask for, the better you get. Make people work late as often as you can. It will make the work seem more important.

  Dane was stunned and angry. He felt like a tool. He had accepted late nights because he believed they were necessary. But working late and endless revisions had nothing to do with process or a job well done. It was about control; the agency intended the job to consume his life until the job was everything and he would do anything to keep it. Writing about drugs was like being on one.

  Now Dane would get answers about the lost envelope, sign off and head home. It was 11 o’clock. He had renounced the hope of dinner and a quiet evening with his family but he might salvage a few hours of sleep. He went to the editor’s office. The door was closed. He knocked. There was no answer. He opened the door and found the editor, an older man and a freelancer, slumped over his desk. A dark stream of blood crossed from his ear across his cheek and down into a dark pool on the envelope layout.

  The paramedics said he had suffered a massive hemorrhage at around 8:30 PM. Death followed shortly thereafter.

  Dane barely knew the dead editor. Still, he was shaken by his demise. The man was a jazz saxophonist just scraping by. Sympathy aside, Dane could not help thinking, “I could have been out of here, if only he were scheduled for nine!”

  However, death, like agency work, was rarely convenient. Sarah Bittman insisted that the piece go out that night. Another editor would need to review it. That morning, Dane came home at 4 AM and returned to work at 10.

  27. RETURN OF THE HEADHUNTER

  Later that day, Dane’s phone rang.

  “Dane, Albert Griffin. Do you have a few moments to talk?”

  “Do I ever! How did you find me?”

  “I find everyone. I’m a vulture. That makes you or your job dead meat.”

  Dane was never happier to hear from a scavenger. Like all headhunters, Griffin had a telepathic instinct for his clients’ employment troubles. Yet, his appearance was a sign of hope. It meant the end of one opportunity and the start of another. Dane had not heard from Griffin since his third month at WIF, when the recruiter proposed a “once-in-a-lifetime-you’ll-never-stop-thanking-me” opportunity to take a junior copywriter position in Shanghai, China, which included a generous relocation package. When Dane was offered the job and turned it down, Griffin excommunicated him. Now, nearly two years later, all was apparently forgiven.

  “So I hear you’re doing big things—on heartburn, of all things. Ha-ha! You and I and heartburn go back awhile, right, Dane? I always knew you’d be a success. So, is your agency taking good care of their star copywriter? Are you happy?”

  Dane was slow to respond due to exhaustion.

  “I see,” Griffin continued. “So you’re open to change, a better salary, a bigger title. Do I hear you right?”

  Dane remained speechless. Since the death of Left off…takes off and his Refluxydyl reversals, he had been discontented and restless but hearing the headhunter describe his emotions in such detail made him feel vulnerable.

  “I hear you,” Griffin said. “Well, let me tell you something. I’ve got a few openings for someone with your experience and skills. Would you be interested?”

  Dane cleared his throat. Did he dare to divulge his subversive yearnings when his phone could be tapped, his conversations taped?

  “That’s what I thought,” Griffin concluded. “I’ll tell you more later and set up the interviews.”

  “Thanks for thinking of me, Albert,” Dane stammered.

  “How could I forget the man in the gasmask? Talk to you later, kiddo.”

  Dane took Griffin’s fortuitous call as more than a sign of deliverance. He saw it as a confirmation that he had not prostituted his talents after all, but found his true calling. Writing had brought him hardship until now, but after a year at Green Advertising his creative reputation was so widely known that various agencies were willing to throw more money at his gifts. When Griffin phoned him the next day, Dane agreed to an interview.

  28. INTERVIEW
WITH A MAN WHO LOOKS LIKE A VAMPIRE

  Griffin sent Dane on an interview. Dane scheduled it around lunch. Regardless how close the other agency was, he knew he would be out longer than an hour, but no one at Green noted his absence. He had doubled his income but his perceived value was what it had been at WIF.

  The job search was conspiratorial and exhilarating—and it depressurized his relationships with colleagues. Dane no longer craved their affirmation or hated them for withholding it. He did not care if they nodded vacuously at his opinions and declined to collaborate with him. If they ignored his value, the joke was on them. He was hot.

  Well, closer to room temperature. Dane intrigued other agencies because he was the perfect human resource—a copywriter with one year of experience. At that point in his career, he did not need to be 180 taught or paid too much. Creative managers also liked conducting job interviews because it filled the down time between meetings. And best of all, discontented job seekers provided spicy insights about competing agencies.

  Dane’s first interview was with Giles Bubis, who owned a small agency. Bubis had switched from copywriting to client services because it seemed more creative. Everything about Bubis was stiff, from his dark suit to his ravaged face, which was as cold and grim as the wet clay of a fresh grave.

  Bubis asked Dane why he wanted to leave Green. Dane blathered about needing more challenge and creative freedom. Bubis stared at Dane with bemusement and slid an article across his desk. The piece described a clinical study for a hypertension drug.

  “I want a writer who can read an article like this, pick out the main points and turn it into a selling message…in ten minutes,” Giles said, “Can you do that?”

  “I can learn fast enough,” Dane said brashly.

  “You can learn it fast enough but can you do it long enough? Over and over for years? That’s what I need.” Bubis emphasized each “over” until the word turned like a greasy chicken on a rotisserie. The grim man’s monotone matched his stiffness and made Dane shudder. Bubis was telling Dane the story of his life and foretelling Dane’s future.