Goldfarb lifted four boxes of candies out of his backpack. “Every year Nadine sells sweets for her kids’ school and I buy them. With my bad teeth! When she calls for a birthday lunch, I go, even if I pay twice as much as I should to subsidize her drinks.”
For most office workers 5 PM was the hour of salvation but Dane dreaded it, because Nadine always waited until that moment when he was wrapping up his day to tell him he had to stay late on a client call or to sign off on a piece still in editorial.
Nadine never checked up on Dane after business hours. She had Rex, the traffic coordinator, do enforce her orders. Nadine was Sheldon’s muscle and Rex was hers. Rex had studied military coming-of-age movies and did a brilliant impersonation of a dapper Hollywood drill sergeant in European suits, wide ties and tasseled Bally loafers. He claimed he made the traffic department shine so Integrimedicom would be proud. Nobody knew what he was talking about.
Rex also extemporized about giving back to the community but what was he giving back—bloated job folders? He made Sheldon and Nadine laugh when he claimed his dad threatened to divorce his mom if she did not take DONARAL because menopause made her nasty. Rex spoke in the deep voice and long cadences of a lay-minister, but had the flirtatious manner and macho swagger of an expert in getting laid.
He patrolled Dane’s office every night to ensure that Dane did his job.
“When can I go home?” Dane would ask.
“When the job is done!” Rex replied imperiously.
“Is the last round coming anytime soon?”
“I’ll let you know,” Rex replied.
“Do I have to stay?”
“Are you are a professional?”
Dane nodded.
“Then you know the answer.”
“But is this piece really going out tonight?”
“O-o-o-h, yeah. Count on it!”
With a raised eyebrow and a crisp turn, Rex swaggered out.
More than once, Dane stayed at the office until midnight waiting for an omitted comma on a piece that never went out. He thought of complaining to Sheldon but Goldfarb warned him off. “This is what they pay us for. Complaining is the one thing that will get you fired.”
Rex was a lady’s man who wanted to command the respect of men. When Dane walked past Rex in the hall, he looked the traffic manager in the eye and nodded. Rex responded by grabbing his crotch.
“What does crotch-grabbing mean?” Dane asked Goldfarb, who lived in Winton, Ct. but grew up in the Bronx and thus had street credentials, in Dane’s mind.
“Can’t help you,” Goldfarb admitted. “Maybe he likes you?”
“Couldn’t he just say, ‘Yo’?”
“Maybe he likes you more than ‘Yo’.”
One afternoon Dane entered Nadine’s office to inquire about a correction she made, which he could not decipher. Rex was draped across her couch, with his legs crossed at the knee. He stroked his bald head abstractedly as if pleasuring his head. The mood was so intimate that Dane apologized for interrupting it.
That evening Dane worked late. The piece had to go out and major issues needed resolution—logos, typefaces and layout—Nadine’s domain.
When Rex had delivered the latest round to Dane, he warned that it was “hot” and required prompt attention. Dane had questions and waited for Rex to return. When Rex did not make his rounds, Dane phoned the traffic manager and reached his voice mail, then hunted for him in the halls without success.
Babette Mamenger, the account supervisor, appeared in Dane’s office, holding her jumbo tumbler full of diet Sprite in her gloved hands. Babette’s black gloves were no ostentation or fashion statement. They concealed bleeding cuticles, a side effect of a seizure medication she was taking.
“So you’ve got the hot job! Why is it on your desk?” Babette demanded, pointing at the ten pounds of paper in a five pound bag.
“Rex never came back for it,” Dane replied dolefully.
“I want to sign off already,” Babette snapped. “I need to blow this pop stand at ten. It’s my tenth wedding anniversary. We’re dancing at The Rainbow Room.”
“I want to leave, too,” Dane replied. “But only Nadine can answer these queries.”
Babette grabbed the folder and led Dane to Nadine’s office, where a sliver of light shone under the door.
“Knock,” Babette said.
Dane tapped on the door.
No answer.
“Knock hard,” Babette said.
Dane rapped a little harder. He thought he heard Nadine saying, “Right there. That’s it.”
“She must be working on a layout,” Dane whispered. “Maybe we should come back.”
“I’m not missing midnight supper in the stars for this!”
Babette opened the door wide, prompting a scream, a thump and a deep, involuntary curse from under the desk.
Nadine lay back in her ergonomic chair, face flushed, eyes glassy and disoriented. Her blouse was unbuttoned, exposing pale breasts and hard nipples. Her skirt was bunched up around her hips.
“Damn! My head!” Rex’s manly baritone bellowed from under the desk.
“We need you to sign off,” Babette said as nicely as she could.
“I will! Just get out.”
“I have to be out of here at ten.”
“Get the fuck out!”
“Should I close the door?” Dane asked.
“Get out!”
“I guess that’s a yes,” Dane whispered.
He closed the door.
As they walked away, Babette smirked.
“Every woman has her own way of treating vaginal dryness.”
Case 3-D
RESEARCH: THE MOST CREATIVE ADVERTISING
13. JOB RELATED ILLNESS
Like many diseases Dane wrote about, his situation at Integrimedicom steadily deteriorated. With nothing of interest to do, and a lot of it, he experienced a common affliction—he hated his job. Before entering the building each morning, he stared at five bas reliefs on the façade above the doors. They were WPA-style representations of impassive workers fixated on their work, sculpted with Paleolithic roundness and a smooth absence of detail. Dane imagined stories for these figures and the truth they imbued, their devotion to labor. It was his only creative exercise of the day.
Dane’s morning ritual was well-known among his colleagues. Nadine mocked him and gossiped about his quirk. Babette, the account director, also noted Dane’s absorption in the sculptural reliefs as he paced before the building. One morning she stopped to ask him, “Have you lost your way?”
Throughout the day, Dane waxed nostalgic about old jobs and scouted for a new one. One afternoon he saw Landon LeSeuer in the street and asked how things were going. Dane had left Green a year before but his stint there was already cast in the amber afterglow of false positive memories. Trying to escape his present in a delusional past, Dane nearly asked Landon for a job but his former boss reassured him that he had done well to leave: there were major layoffs at Green and no new business.
Dane walked back to Integrimedicom feeling more trapped and desperate.
Desperation is the beginning of the end for most people but for Dane it was only a beginning. Others in his abject position might have been crushed and fled to a new field but Dane’s creative will was like a mutant bacterium overcoming lethal toxins—adapting and evolving into a stronger life form.
It was Dane’s good luck that Integrimedicom was worse off than he was. Clients were leaving, accounts were scaling back and the agency had nothing in its pipeline to replenish them. Leads were few and invitations to pitch were so rare that they were joyous occasions during which people dashed about excitedly as if the business were already won.
It was a time for fear—and flux. Old processes were ineffectual and old dogmas in doubt. The old order needed new ideas—anyone’s ideas. This was good news for bottom-feeders like Dane. He was summoned from his dungeon of drudgery, where he had been forgotten, and re-introduced to the quorum
of his colleagues.
“Meeting in the conference room!” Babette Mamenger, the account services director, called from the hallway as she clapped her gloved hands.
Dane saved the case study he was writing about a woman with overactive bladder, who urinated on her wedding gown and refused to go anywhere until her doctor prescribed Uribilox.
He rose stiffly from his chair and hobbled into the hallway. Just as Landon LeSeuer had observed, medical writers tended to internalize diseases they described and to imagine symptoms—Dane was highly susceptible to this occupational hazard. His job problems aggravated his medical empathy, transforming him into a psychosomatic mess. He limped on pseudo-arthritic knees, sat after a few steps due to illusory leg cramps and experienced extraneous urges to urinate. He expressed his frustrated creativity in imaginary diseases, which became his principal mode of expression.
“Oh, my aching legs!” Dane moaned, echoing his letter to patients with intermittent claudication.
“Come on, we’re late,” Goldfarb exhorted him.
“I’ll be there in a minute. Nature calls!” Dane replied, afflicted by a sudden twinge of overactive bladder like the December bride in his patient brochure.
After standing at a urinal for no real reason, Dane’s delusional aching knees intervened and persuaded him to sit in the conference room.
14. THE MOTHER AND THE MEGALOMANIAC
Sid Gorfine, the self-proclaimed father of direct-to-consumer advertising and CEO of Integrimedicom, now a subsidiary of a global network to which had he sold his agency years before, built his reputation on one insight: gullible consumers, with a little information, could obtain any drug they wanted if an advertiser made them want it.
In recognition of this landmark discovery, the advertising establishment paid Gorfine its highest honor. It heralded his success, studied and adapted his methods—and left him fighting for his job. When his improbable theory became standard practice, Sid learned that imitation is not only advertising’s sincerest flattery, but its most lethal weapon. Advanced biologic drugs for cancer and arthritis were now sold on the 6 o’clock news and during sports programs. Gorfine was a shoo-in for the Pharma Advertising Hall of Fame in Parsippany, New Jersey, but the success of his ideas had unintended side effects that were destroying his agency.
Portly and disheveled, Sid stood before the packed conference room, conducting research for a business pitch to a baby needs company. His silk shirt was missing buttons, his leather pants were unzipped and mustard dappled his tie. Angelina, an office assistant, newly returned from maternity leave, sat beside Sid, as the in-house expert on a new mother’s attitudes.
“What are your needs?” Sid asked Angelina. Her eyes were closed and she did not respond.
“What are your needs?” Sid repeated testily. His expert seemed to be a somnambulist.
The father of consumer drug advertising clapped his hands close to Angelina’s ears and her eyes shot open with fright.
“I could use sleep,” she replied candidly.
“What are your needs for the baby?” Gorfine badgered her.
“What do you mean?” She asked.
“When you buy a baby bottle, a formula, baby food, or diapers, what goes through your mind?”
“I look for price. ‘Cause baby things are so expensive.”
“That is not your first concern, is it?” Sid demanded.
“I want my baby to be healthy and safe. I want to keep things simple.”
“Yes!” Sid raised his arms to signal a conceptual touchdown. “Simple as a mother’s trust. Simple and strong as a mother’s love! But sweet as a mother’s milk…”
Sid’s eyes shut tight. Perspiration beaded above his upper lip and streamed down from his bald pate over his face. His lips quivered.
“I love it when Sid brainstorms,” Goldfarb whispered. “Nobody gets wet but Sid.”
Suddenly Sid’s eyelids snapped open like haunted window shades and he gazed at an audience only he could see.
‘That’s it!” Sid proclaimed. “Simple, soft and strong as a mother’s loving and lovable love!”
“It’s a bit long,” Sheldon, the executive creative director, remarked as he fingered the diamond dangling from his ear.
“You creatives can wordsmith it!” Sid retorted with a peremptory wave of his hand.
Anyone who believed an interruption would brake Sid’s train of thought hadn’t been riding it long.
“So we’re inside Mommy’s head,” Sid’s finger eddied in the air, “But we haven’t completed the branding circle.”
He aimed his key chain laser pointer at a wall projection of the four-gated branding wheel, whose gates were guarded by threeheaded dogs. Each dog icon had a word caption. The four words were “Envision,” “Empower,” “Endow” and “Embody.”
Sid pointed to “Embody.”
“We can’t put baby to bed,” he chuckled, “until we’re in baby’s head…So, what is baby thinking?” Sid asked Angelina.
Her eyes pleaded for direction.
“Feed me. Change me… Mommy?” she guessed.
Sid shook his head violently. “You call yourself a mother! What is baby thinking?”
Chastened yet convinced that her 4% raise depended on a correct response, Angelina tried again.
“Ehhhh! Grrr. Ehhh. That’s what my baby says.”
Everyone laughed. Sid dropped a pile of books on the table to restore order.
“That’s what you hear but what is baby saying?”
Encouraged by the audience response, Angelina took a risk.
“He’s thinking, Mommy feed me. Waaaah! Mommy, clean me. I’m cold and wet. I have stinky poopie!” Angelina improvised in a tiny, high-pitched voice.
Angelina’s performance was no fluke. After playing the Mother Superior in her high school’s production of “The Sound of Music,” Angelina attended night acting classes at the Herbert Rogoloff studio—as part of Integrimedicom’s tuition reimbursement program—where she specialized in sensitivity to stimuli and belief in imaginary circumstances.
“You’re not a real mother!” Gorfine scoffed.
Angelina’s mouth quivered. “It’s not true. I am a real mother…” Suddenly, her eyes teared. “Yes, it’s true. I am a bad mother. But what can I do? I have to work!”
She bawled and covered her face.
“Can you believe Sid?” Goldfarb whispered. “He convinced a mother he knows more about her baby than she does.”
The room was silent as if the air itself were holding Sid’s ire like a mist. Then, out of the pall, one small voice could be heard.
“‘Love me forever, Mommy! Love me soft like a blankee. Rub my nose with a hankie, Mommy. Pat my soft little baby tooshie.”
It was the high-pitched, lisping voice of “Little Sid,” Gorfine’s inner child. Sid held his fists small and tight by his face and shook them like an infant. Coughs cluttered the silence to disguise the irrepressible laughter humming in the closed air.
“Soft as my mommy! Sweet like Mommy’s milk! Mommy, love me always purely! Smile at me pretty Mommy, I love you, Mommy, love me, love me love me!” Sid cried. His fists were clenched, his cheeks quivered, his rigid body hopped. Sweat beads flew from Sid’s creased forehead. Then his shaking stopped. Sid opened his eyes and glowered at his staff. “See where we’re going with this? This client has a line of baby products and we can brand every last sucker…”
Angelina sat at the front table, spent and wet-faced like a used towel. Dane could not bear the sight of a new mother, and a working one at that, looking lost and distraught. With indignation inflaming every nerve fiber, Dane shot to his feet before he could reason with himself.
“Excuse me, but what you’re doing isn’t research,” Dane declaimed. “It’s performance art.”
Sid blinked at Dane. His mouth opened and closed but no words emerged. Not one of his research meetings had been disrupted in twenty years. He was stunned and so depleted by his performance that he had no respon
se.
“What right do you have to make a mother cry?” Dane demanded. “Isn’t giving birth hard enough? Have you ever done it? I was with my wife when she gave birth and I’ll tell you something, Sid: unlike the stunt you just pulled, there was nothing fake about it. Giving birth is a brave act…And I can’t sit by and let you trash someone who’s done it…”
Dane heard the echo of his voice trail off and realized that it was the only sound in the room. He was also the only one standing, now that Sid collapsed in his chair. Dane feared the silence; it made him consider what he was doing, so he stammered on.
“I saw my daughter being born. My wife screamed for hours. I saw the pulsing vagina and throbbing hemorrhoids till I thought they would burst. Any man who says he knows motherhood more than a mother is lying.”
Dane paused. He had no idea what he would say next but his hands and knees were shaking and his mouth was too dry to produce more language, so he sat down. His colleagues were dumbstruck at witnessing a career suicide.
“I think we can all go now,” Babette said. “Thank you for coming.”
15. UNEXPECTED FALLOUT
The stampede from the room was thunderous.
After his puzzling outburst, Dane sat deflated in his chair and skulked back to his office to absorb what he had just done. His knack for making enemies had metastasized beyond the creative department. Dane-hatred would creep into every corner of the agency like mold or fungus, become ubiquitous and unanimous, and Nadine would have him fired by consensus.
“Why did I do that?” he asked himself repeatedly.
Before his protest of one, Dane hoped research would provide egress from his creative doldrums—the challenge and advancement lacking in his writing job. He recognized that headlines and concepts were no longer transcendent vehicles. To become an advertising giant he might need other tools. Research generated messages from consumers’ insights and helped consumers make wise choices. Good research would justify his paycheck and give his career new “legs.”
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