Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Dane’s boss, Dahlia Woods, was a prim woman, whose large, thick glasses covered half of her face. Dahlia had over 700 emails on her computer but rarely answered them. When she was not with clients, at research or in meetings, she walked briskly with folders under her arm like a professor heading to her next class.

  After the trauma of his dismissal from the highest position he ever attained, the solitude and inactivity at “The Hot Zone” made Dane feel lonely and useless.

  From his office, Dane overheard staffers bemoan problems, miscommunications and unreasonable expectations. It was a long psychiatric group session. Everyone cringed at the prospect of long nights and firings. They lamented agonies endured, calamities survived and damage done. They regurgitated desperate pitches, implacable clients, futile sacrifices, inexplicable losses and unjust recriminations. People produced materials without clarity or direction; shot at moving targets and missed. If things were not done badly, they were not done at all.

  In this apocalypse, Dane saw that his only salvation was to sell the novel he had just completed about a dysfunctional family, receive stellar reviews, sell the rights to Hollywood and become a celebrated author.

  He dispatched 300 letters to agents and editors. Within a few weeks, the book, titled Toad in the Toadstools, which had taken seventeen years of writing and revision to complete, was rejected by 300 agents and editors, based on letters and sample pages.

  After this swift and resounding repudiation of his slowlygestating creative passion, Dane faced his writing choices: he could do what he loved and earn nothing or make a living doing nothing.

  Despite his idleness and perfunctory tasks in “The Hot Zone,” Dahlia asked him to stay on for three more weeks. Dane was cheered by this approval and believed Dahlia liked him. One morning, she told Dane she would be at research in Philadelphia.

  Dane recalled the days when he and Goldfarb attended research in Philadelphia; the morning trains; the client praising him for being the one agency person to arrive at 8 AM; his concept, “I get around” defeating “A woman and a dog.” Dane had a staff position and a future then. In hindsight, it was his golden age.

  “Is it the research facility on Walnut Street?” he asked Dahlia. “I’ve been there.”

  “Too much chatter,” Dahlia scowled and walked off.

  Dahlia’s rebuff hurt Dane’s feelings, even though he knew he should not take it personally. He was paid to work, not to talk. He would be a more valuable resource with his mouth shut. Dane no longer expected to be creative; why should he be congenial?

  As he resigned himself to his situation, he was saved by the phone.

  A small agency, The Butcher Block, inquired if he was available for freelance. Dane had interviewed at The Butcher Block the previous summer. The creative director loved his work and set up a second interview with the account team. It went smoothly until the agency owner, an East Asian scientist, arrived late, wearing pajamas and sporting a bamboo cane. After yawning and glowering, the Asian genius rose to his feet and smacked the desktop repeatedly with his cane until splinters flew.

  “You change jobs too much! What for? You got fire-eating ants up you pants?” the Asian genius rebuked Dane. “We take pride in what we got here. We like family. So why we hire you?”

  “First of all, I have nothing in my pants…I mean, I have stuff in my pants, but that’s not a problem—and neither is my working different places. I’ve learned a lot by moving around and my experiences can benefit your agency,” Dane said. Despite his inspired ad lib, Dane went home that hot afternoon with a heavy portfolio, no job and his lucky sports jacket soaked in dog day sweat. From that day forward, The Butcher Block symbolized for Dane a place where he had his head chopped off.

  Circumstances had changed at The Butcher Block. Now Dane was needed there and he was offered a higher freelance rate than he was receiving at “The Hot Zone.” This simplified his decision.

  “I’m leaving,” Dane told Dahlia as she strutted to a meeting.

  “Is there a reason?” she asked.

  “Yes, but I don’t want to chatter too much.”

  Dahlia looked at him nonplussed and walked away.

  10. THE BUTCHER BLOCK

  The Butcher Block was in a spacious loft space in Chelsea. It had won Pharm World Magazine’s “Micro-Agency of the Year” title that year due to its reputation for innovation and diversity. The charismatic Cambodian scientist who owned The Butcher Block hired attractive, young people from all over the world. It was Madison Avenue, the United Nations and Babes in Toyland in one.

  Dane believed The Butcher Block’s reputation for doing things differently until he noticed their campaign for an arthritis drug had the same headline—Go Beyond—that Barber & McGill used for a kidney failure medication.

  “You’re here for the money,” he reminded himself.

  In his first week, Dane wrote letters, brochures, charts, guides, reminders and coding documents for an insurance kit for doctors. It demanded little flair but permitted Dane to create materials and show his speed and skill. Within a week he submitted a dozen pieces for review. Although Dane made a concerted effort to write concisely, the client complained that there too many words, and had the pieces stripped down to bullet points, icons and illustrations.

  The client’s logophobia aside, Dane enjoyed himself. The female employees at The Butcher Block were stylish and attractive, and they smiled frequently, though not specifically at him—but who was keeping score? It was like working in the pharma version of the Playboy mansion.

  There was one problem: Beatrice, his newly hired supervisor.

  Beatrice had many fine qualities. She was refined, sensitive and charming. She had once been a radio correspondent until she lost her job and crashed into medical advertising. Beatrice might have been cast by Hollywood as a town librarian with a steamy past. Her face was pale and worn, yet she retained a hint of youthful allure. She adorned her graceful body in tasteful elegance and her voice had a warm ring that softened insults. Yet, despite her demure dignity, Beatrice warned Dane of her dark side at the agency Halloween party when she wore a witch’s costume and laughed ghoulishly in his face. Dane thought she enjoyed her role too much.

  For a month, Beatrice had the best quality a boss could have. She was largely absent. Since she was on the road with clients, she informed Dane that she had no time to focus on his projects or to review his copy.

  However, just when Dane dared to think this freelance job would permit him to write without interference, Beatrice appeared at the office more often and compensated for her prior absence by hovering over him. She complained that he did not show her his work and demanded to see everything he wrote, probing and changing it all. Dane executed her changes but she forgot what they were and accused him of ignoring her directions.

  “You signed off on what I did,” Dane protested. “Here’s your signature.”

  Beatrice acknowledged her mistake but continued to micromanage him and his work. When Dane stretched or went to the men’s room, she pounced. “Are you busy with anything?” She generously provided him with an array of tedious tasks, like proofreading forty pages of prescribing information copy.

  “Just make the money,” he whispered to himself.

  One day Beatrice lectured Dane on a grammatical error she believed he had made. Rather than appease her, he reverted to the English teacher he had been and explained the rule to her. She looked shocked that he knew anything.

  “I’m qualified,” he told her. “That’s why I was hired.”

  “I thought it was because you’re a good schmoozer,” she cracked.

  Dane knew insults were part of freelancing but Beatrice’s misjudgment perturbed him. He was a terrible schmoozer! Anyway, what right did she have to demean his credentials? He had more knowledge and experience than she did. Quickly he stopped himself from dwelling on it.

  “It’s my job to write,” he repeated. “It is her job is to rewrite my writing. Embrace the process.” />
  Suddenly the process stalled. As the drug’s approval date approached, the FDA announced the need for more safety data. The launch was postponed.

  At first, the client and agency ignored the FDA delay. The creative team continued to work late nights to meet breakneck deadlines as if the drug were going to market any day. This urgency was predicated on denial and panic, not productivity. They believed frenzied effort could save their income source from desiccation.

  The Butcher Block entered a black hole. When an account imploded, employees rushed to the disaster because it exerted enormous gravity. More people attended more meetings that lasted longer. Yet, the longer and more frequent the meetings, the less anyone knew. By late afternoon, team members were perplexed about which projects were going out and how late they had to work. The staff was in collective hysteria—a silent, communal scream that obfuscated communication and comprehension.

  Beatrice had been out of town so often that she spent half of her salary on kennel fees for her dogs. Now that she was in the office everyday, she walked her pets and ripped Dane’s work. His projects, approved after multiple revisions, came under new scrutiny.

  Dane rewrote fifteen pieces and Beatrice demanded with a smile that he show her each one. Every draft came back to him bathed in her green ink, with changes ranging from punctuation to word choice to reworked sentences and restructured paragraphs. Dane made the changes, which Beatrice changed again. This sequence was repeated so often that the changed copy reverted to his original. Sometimes Dane substituted his word for one Beatrice scribbled in the margins, but she always detected his mischief, crossed out his word and reinserted hers with a rebuke: “You didn’t make this change!”

  “You’re getting paid,” Dane reminded himself.

  Yet, regardless how often he repeated the freelancer’s creed, Beatrice penetrated the thick skin of his prostitution. A lifetime of pride broke through. He reflected that his ambition and sacrifice to write from the age of 14 resulted in this—not one word he wrote stood as written.

  “Don’t take it personally,” his inner voice instructed him. “Be strong.”

  To buoy his spirits, Dane played a game with Beatrice to prove her copy changes were arbitrary. When she switched his infinitive to a gerund in one sentence, he changed her infinitive to a gerund in the next.

  When the draft came back, Beatrice had switched his gerund back to her infinitive. Dane laughed. Clearly she wanted the copy her way and did not care about making it consistent. He tossed corrected manuscripts on her desk like horseshoes and she ignored his impudence.

  Dane savored his moral victory until Beatrice came to his desk with a fresh pile of manuscripts scarred with green ink. She asked him to complete the changes before he left for the evening. As she walked away, she put her lips to his ear and whispered, “I’m thinking things I would love to be able to say but I can’t. You probably feel the same way.”

  She had never said anything remotely personal to him before so Dane suspected her words were a trap.

  “No,” he said. “I tell you what I think.”

  “Oh, well,” she replied. “I guess I speak for myself.”

  Beatrice’s mischief now escalated beyond word changes. By alluding to her suppressed and forbidden thoughts, she complicated Dane’s feelings toward her. Dane was bewildered. Was his autocratic boss coming on to him? Did she imply that she was no tyrant bent on his demise but a warm, vulnerable woman, who respected his writing and liked him, as well? Or was this her way of saying she reciprocated his loathing and arbitrary changes were her way of showing it?

  Then he recalled his insight that advertising people changed writing because they liked it. Perhaps he had misread Beatrice all along. Maybe they were copy-dancing. He used one word, she another. Back and forth they do-si-do’ed and both made money. Beatrice did not rip his writing to crush him with her power. She was just giving him more billable hours.

  Dane’s circumstance was now bathed in a splendid new light. He was no longer persecuted. Beatrice was out one day and he missed her green ink. When she returned, he was eager for drafts to come back to him with her loving changes.

  Just when Dane started to enjoy copy-dancing with Beatrice, he received a new assignment. A surly editor sat with Dane and interrogated him for hours about a long document Beatrice wrote. Forty pages were covered with spidery red lines, inscrutable circles, scribbling, cross-outs and queries with exclamation points—and Dane had to answer them all. He had a new theory about Beatrice’s recent niceness—it was a set up.

  “What does this mean?” the surly editor demanded, pointing to an illegible word.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Wake up, Dane, you’re the writer.”

  “I didn’t write this,” he said. “Beatrice wrote it. Ask her.”

  “You’re the writer of record. See? You signed off on it.”

  “I signed off because I was the only writer who stayed late.”

  “Where is the reference for this claim?” the editor demanded.

  “There are no references,” Dane explained. “We weren’t given any.”

  “How can a piece be written without references?”

  “The drug isn’t on the market so there are no published articles about it,” he replied.

  The editor badgered Dane for these and other evasions. The discussion went in circles until the editor went to dinner.

  After his editorial bludgeoning, Dane shambled past a large bookstore on his way to the subway. Inside, a young man was reading for fifty avid listeners. Dane stared at the event through the window with morbid fascination. It was the worst possible nightmare—watching his dream lived by someone else. A piercing sensation in the back of Dane’s neck drew tears from his eyes. The motive for all that he had done from the age of fourteen was in that bookstore. Dane had entered advertising because publishing a book seemed an impossible longing. Now he saw it was possible—only not for him. He retreated from the window, stepped awkwardly on broken pavement, and collapsed on the concrete. A woman asked if he was okay. “Never,” he said. Ashamed, he lifted himself to his feet.

  At a meeting a week later, Dane opened his mouth to speak but no sound came out. He forced a cough to mask his disability. Earlier, he had noted his voice growing hoarse and believed he was becoming ill but now he was mute. Since these meetings were dominated by garrulous people and filled with discussions about minutiae to which Dane rarely contributed, he thought his inability to speak would go undetected. However, some of his colleagues smirked and nodded in his direction as if to solicit his opinion, like fish nipping at the tail of a sick comrade. Suddenly, he felt the need to hide.

  “I’m hoarse,” he told himself.

  Beatrice hovered over his cubicle with green-inked manuscripts in hand but she was only a shadow, eclipsed by her magnified hand holding a manuscript that levitated before his eyes like a blimp.

  He tried ignoring the blimp hand. But when he glanced up from the screen, the hand nudged the manuscript in his face. He swatted at it but the hand danced away. He grasped at the floating hand, which performed aerial shows with manuscripts above his head.

  Coworkers across from Dane stared with curiosity as he swatted at the air and worried that he was about to “go postal.”

  Three manuscripts lay across his chair, covered in more green ink. While he stared at the circled words the letters separated into dots, reformed as strands, and trooped off the page like columns of organisms. He did not know what the words had been or how to bring them back. He hoped the next sentence would help him recall the previous one, but the letters on the next line dissolved, as well, pixel by pixel, into dots that rolled off the page.

  He blinked and reassured himself that he was only tired. He picked up a second manuscript and his eyes swept a sentence. The words made sense. Yet, when his eyes moved back from right to left, the ink lifted from the paper like a black stain and spilled off the page.

  Dane wanted power over words�
��but not this. His reading annihilated content! He knew if he mentioned this to anyone he would be finished at The Butcher Block. He was supposed to work until the end of the month but for that moment he needed a break. He tossed the manuscripts on Beatrice’s chair while she was sitting in it and they landed on her lap.

  “Oh, special delivery?” she joked.

  He tried to bolt without explaining.

  “You made all of the changes?”

  “No, I-I-I can’t read these.”

  Her eyes widened. “Is something unclear?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t understand something?”

  “No, it’s my eyes. I can’t see. It’s a blur.”

  “You should have that checked,” she said. “Leave them until tomorrow.”

  11. A BREAK

  The next morning Dane had coffee with Becky and glanced at a newspaper before taking a train to work. He started to read the sports pages with trepidation. The words were there until one by one they disappeared.

  “I can’t read this,” he told Becky.

  “What? Did one of your teams lose?”

  “I can’t read the words.”

  She believed he was working out a situation for a short story so she improvised along with him. “Oh, have you tried Clear Eyes? Maybe your eyes are overtired.”

  “It’s not my eyes. I can see. It’s the words—they vanish.”

  “Oh, the words disappear,” Becky repeated calmly like she had seen this disease on her favorite hospital show. “Well, maybe you don’t like the words and this is how you eliminate them.”

  She did not know how close she came to a diagnosis.

  Dane agreed with her low-key response. He wanted to believe his problem was nothing serious but suspected otherwise. He blamed it on himself, imputing it to over-exposure to advertising. After resolving to work freelance, he had taken a full-time job, and when that was over he subjected himself to repeated pharmaceutical writing abuse until he snapped.

  He hid his anguish from Becky and Iris. It was easy to add one more abnormality to his behavior. Blurting silly names and nonsense words, making facial contortions during internal monologues, having vehement arguments with invisible adversaries, and staring into space at a traumatic memory were already staples of his repertoire.