Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  “You fired me!” Dane shouted. “It’s time you moved on—with your miserable life and down the street.”

  “That’s one more of your award-winning headlines, ay? This man ruined me with cheap clichés,” Nigel taunted.

  “You did a good job of that, yourself, with ‘Allergies, Achtung!’”

  Nigel staggered toward Dane with his arm cocked to pummel him when Stump Weebler twirled his shirt sleeve around Nigel’s leg like a lasso and snared the cuff with his teeth. In seconds, Nigel sprawled on the pavement.

  “Help!” Stump Weebler cried. “This bully is attacking me!” Under his breath, Stump told Dane it was nice catching up and it was his cue to exit street right. “Go home, Dane, the drug company won’t mess with you.”

  Dane bolted as Nigel struggled to free himself from the mayhem.

  The furies of Advertising Past pursued Dane with drunken invective and sirens screaming, but after running several blocks, Dane outpaced them—for the time being. He knew that despite Stump Weebler’s sleeve-twirling interference, Nigel would sort things out with the police and Dane would eventually be flushed out of Toronto and deported to his corporate execution.

  As he caught his breath a few blocks from his performance and collected his wits to make a next move, a voice called out his name.

  “Professor Dane?”

  Dane took off again, acknowledging his name by running from it. Could even his distant past be haunting him?

  “Professor Dane. It’s me. Roderick Von Dronk.”

  Dane recognized the voice, stopped and looked in the direction of the man running after him.

  “Global Poet?” Dane said.

  Roderick Von Dronk, Dane’s former student, stood before him like a human non-sequitur. Von Dronk signed all of his essays and tests as The Global Poet when he was a student in Dane’s English class. Practical study meant nothing to Von Dronk. Money had not been invented so far as he was concerned. He lived for poetry. In his mind it was not a skill or talent but a spouse with whom he had an enduring love.

  After the international incident with Hogbine, Dane was cautious about meeting anyone from his past.

  “I gave you a good grade, didn’t I?” Dane asked.

  “I don’t remember, Professor. Grades were meaningless to me.”

  “Right, right,” Dane muttered.

  “I saw you back there reading your poems with the amputee. I didn’t know you wrote poetry. You were good.”

  “Thanks, Global Poet,” Dane muttered. “So why are you here?”

  “I could ask you the same,” Von Dronk pointed out. “But with respect for your age, I won’t.”

  “Thanks, Roderick, because I couldn’t tell you.”

  “I came to see my Russian girlfriend,” Global Poet explained. “We found each other on a poetry chatline. Her user name is Chernobyl’s Child. She is a sonnet, full of dignity and radiance. Her smile is rhyme.”

  “That’s, that’s—beautiful, Roderick. But see, I’d better keep moving. In fact, I need to go home, to New York.”

  “I was going back today,” Von Dronk said. “I have my aunt’s car. You want to come along?”

  That was how Dane escaped Toronto.

  The disgraced copywriter and the Global Poet drove the width of New York State a few miles in front of a massive low pressure system that bore down on them from the west. When they careened southward through the Catskills, the low pressure overtook them. The ineffective wipers of Roderick’s old car smeared dirty rain across the windshield from mud flaps of passing trucks.

  “Can you see the road?” Dane asked.

  “The poet’s medium is enchanted blindness,” replied The Global Poet.

  “That’s brilliant but I think you should pull over.”

  Dane wrapped a towel around the defective rubber wiper. It seemed like a good idea until the terrycloth disintegrated, adding fiber shreds to the visual chaos. After slowing to a mist, the rain came down in sheets as they crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge. The terrycloth around the wiper swept waves across the glass, turning all visual cues into flashes of white, red and green. Dane shouted in terror as The Global Poet clutched the steering wheel with more hope than conviction that he was driving in the right direction. Cars on all sides blasted horns of warning and rebuke. The bridge was finally crossed, the road was before them and the rain faded to a mist. They were alive. Dane was calm. He felt that whatever awaited him at home would be a comfort.

  Von Dronk dropped Dane off in upper Manhattan, near the entrance of a park and a subway station. Dane called home to warn Becky and Iris of his proximity.

  Iris came to a park plaza where Dane waited near ping-pong tables.

  “Darling,” Dane whispered.

  “Daddy?”

  “Over here.”

  She let out a cry when she saw him. To escape identification in Toronto, Dane had shaved his hair and wore wet, muddy clothes and a baseball cap.

  When the pharma company called Becky, she said Dane was out of the country. She never heard from them again. But Dane was not content to be left alone. He struggled to understand why. Dane scoured the internet for drug industry news and learned that the company which pursued him had been sold to a foreign conglomerate.

  Dane was free.

  Case 7-E

  WHY REVENGE is SWEET—AND SOUR

  15. UNDER THE GUN

  Business improved when he returned.

  He received a call from Grayson, Upshire, and Newby, known across the industry simply as GUN. GUN was the most feared and fabled agency in drug advertising. After years of sending in his résumé to GUN with no response, Dane would now learn about this mystique from the inside. In the first hour of his first day, he received an assignment to write a four-page brochure. He found his sources and wrote the brochure in a few days. The GUNNERS, as they called themselves, liked his resourcefulness and extended his assignment for six weeks.

  Dane’s term at GUN followed a typical progression—various assignments were done fast, revised faster, and reviewed until they were finished, leaving less work to do. At the start of his sixth week, Dane was told to find reference publications for a project. He worked on this assignment for two days, only to be told there was no money to order articles GUN did not already own. Then the account team said new support documents were unnecessary. Before leaving one night, Dane told Patricia, a staff writer supervising his work, that the reference materials he was able to find for free were in a folder on his desk if she needed them. They chatted briefly. He said it was a shame so much work and time were wasted, wished her good night and left.

  The next morning the head writer for the account, an affable man in his 30s who liked beer and football, called Dane into his office and asked him to close the door. Closed doors were usually objects of dread in Dane’s emotional lexicon. As a freelancer, though, he could not be fired, which allayed his anxiety. Also, he had acted in such an innocuous manner in six weeks at GUN that he felt confident he had offended no one. To the contrary, Dane thought he might be offered a full-time position.

  “Dane, what happened yesterday between you and Patricia before you left?”

  Dane still had the capacity for surprise—and was filled to capacity at that moment. He sensed he was in trouble but not why.

  “Nothing. I went to her office, I said I was leaving and that the references I worked on were on my desk if she needed them.”

  “I believe you,” the copy chief said. “But she went to my boss and said you threatened her. He wants you out of here immediately.”

  “But what did I do?”

  Dane was stunned. He had been dismissed before but always for a reason, so he tried to find one now. He rifled through his memory of interactions with Patricia—words, responses, a cold look, a remote sign of her resentment—and found nothing. In movies, falsely accused people often appeared stupefied. Now it was his turn.

  “I was respectful. I never even went into her office,” Dane said.

  “
You’re a big guy. You’re fit. Some people could find that intimidating.”

  “Me?”

  “Listen, we’ll pay you to the end of the week,” the copy supervisor told him.

  GUN compensated Dane generously and promptly for his swift evacuation but Patricia’s lie galled him. He thought of contacting the creative director who believed the defamation but did not know what to say. Should he threaten the man or try to persuade him with good will? In the end, would a supervisor who believed his underling’s lie have an open mind and concede an error? Dane doubted he could win so he did not look back. He was on to the next job.

  But the next job did not come. The media said it was the economy. Dane did not take it personally. Drug companies were slow to initiate projects. Mergers outnumbered new drug applications and FDA denials and product recalls surpassed approvals. But rationalizations gradually ran out.

  The dry employment spell evolved into a slow siege. Dane feared that his advertising life was really over. Each morning he was so anxious he could barely face the day. He was wracked with guilt as his family slid toward poverty. He searched for work by reaching out to people he knew and by scanning employment search engines--without success. Doubts crept into his routine. How could a person with his proven ability to write fail to find work? Had someone cast aspersions on his name?

  He remembered the incident at GUN.

  When he was dismissed months before, he deposited his fat paycheck without protest. Now he was convinced that Patricia’s calumny had spread like oil and polluted his career. To get hired again in advertising, he must restore his reputation. He must track down his detractor and make her recant her slander.

  It was a difficult objective with significant impediments. Conventional communication was unlikely to succeed. What was the point of phoning or sending emails that would identify the sender but receive no response? Dane’s only satisfaction would result from confronting his accuser. The sixth amendment afforded him that right even if GUN did not.

  Dane returned to the office building GUN occupied early one evening and stood before the security desk. He wore a blond wig, trench coat, heeled shows and rouged cheeks to impersonate Loni Loomis, whose ID he pinched between two painted nails. Loomis was a former employee of another agency where Dane had freelanced. The ID was issued to Dane so he could come and go freely, only he never returned it. Loomis had resigned from the agency to work closer to home before a stroke erased her long term memory.

  Beads of perspiration trickled from Dane’s hairy armpits and made him feel unfeminine. He gambled that the guards would see the faint resemblance between Loni’s picture and his disguise and accept a freakishly tall woman more readily than suspect a transvestite.

  They glanced at Loni’s ID and let Dane pass. The moment revealed to him one of human nature’s secrets: in a woman, ugliness can have the power of beauty.

  Dane took an elevator to the tenth floor to confront his accuser.

  The ID card was only good for access to the building. It did not open the GUN lobby doors because it lacked the proper magnetic strip. This did not matter to Dane. He had no intention of entering the GUN offices. Patricia Holmes occupied a windowless office in the middle of the floor; if she saw him there and cried out, he would be trapped. His plan was to lure her outside GUN’s offices to the elevator bank, where she would be isolated and alone. He used a phone outside the glass doors to dial her extension and affected an Asian accent when she answered.

  “You awdah take-out from Happy Wok.”

  “I did?”

  It was a calculated risk. Patricia did not order take out from Happy Wok, but at six o’clock she was probably hungry. Dane timed this operation for when GUN people working late had their dinners delivered.

  Dane spoke softly. A six-foot four transvestite in a blond wig with an Asian accent holding aromatic Chinese take out in a greasy paper bag might raise suspicions of passersby. There were none.

  “Yeah, you did. Pushy Ho?”

  “Patricia Holmes! Doesn’t anyone speak English?”

  Dane was nervous. He had made her angry. Would the scheme work? He knew food was often delivered to the wrong floor and it was highly probable that Patricia’s order had been pilfered by a colleague.

  “Okay,” Patricia conceded irascibly.

  Dane pushed a button so an elevator car would be waiting when she came. It was the only private place he could think of. He would draw her into the elevator with the promise of food and speak to her there.

  “What are you doing there?” Patricia called out from the glass doors when she saw the take out bag dangling from the delivery person’s manicured hand. Dane’s false accuser was angry but her hunger was stronger. It drew her to the bag of take-out in Dane’s hand. When Dane saw her striped jersey and dark painted toenails peaking from the espadrilles that constituted her uniform, he pulled the bag inside. Patricia stepped into his trap. He pushed the “door close” button and handed her the take-out bag.

  The bag was in her hands, the elevator started to move and she saw before her a 6’4” transvestite—this was not what she expected.

  “What the—”

  “I’m sorry for doing this. I would have tried to phone or email you but you would have blown me off or called the police, right? I just want to know why you told your boss I threatened you when all I did was mention where the references were on my desk.”

  “Who are you? I never worked with you!”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know me. Do I look familiar now?”

  He pulled off the wig and revealed his face.

  At first, Patricia was startled by the wig removal. But she quickly recognized Dane.

  “You! The freelancer. Why are you here? What are you going to do?” Patricia demanded.

  “I’ll ask the questions. Why did you try to ruin my reputation? Do you realize that when you lie about someone it’s like assaulting them and the people they love? My family needs me to provide and you threatened that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I told my boss we didn’t need you. Now let me go. You’re in trouble. Your family—!”

  The elevator had stopped in the basement. Patricia reached for the elevator button but Dane clasped her wrists. She screamed.

  “No, stop! Don’t do that,” Dane shouted.

  Panic overcame him. Patricia’s scream was another false accusation and this one would destroy him and his family. He beat her with the wig at first but to little effect. Then he stuffed the wig against her face to smother her cries. Patricia kicked and struggled but he pressed her against the elevator side and finally she stopped struggling.

  “What have you done, Dane? What will you do now?” Dane muttered repeatedly. He lifted her and spilled her into the dumpster, then covered her in books and papers. He hoped she was alive and that she would forget.

  Dane pressed the sub-basement level where he bolted from the elevator. He stuffed the wig in his canvas bag, walked slowly, turned a corner and hustled down another corridor, seeking an unguarded exit. He found a maintenance uniform on a hook outside a closed mail room. It was past quitting time and anyone working late was at dinner and oblivious. Dane slipped into the jumpsuit, put on a Mets cap so the brim shaded his eyes, and opened a fire door, setting off an alarm. He walked briskly down a narrow street behind the office tower, crossed a wide avenue and fled in a cab.

  When he arrived home, he ate dinner with Becky and Iris. Becky wondered why he was nervous. Dane said he had been stricken by terrible remorse for never visiting his mother’s gravesite since her death three years before.

  “But you didn’t go to her funeral,” Becky reminded him.

  “She didn’t invite me,” he said.

  Iris rolled her eyes. Was this her father’s insanity talking or was he making a macabre joke?

  “You know what I mean. I didn’t go to her funeral because I didn’t know she died until later. I need closure.”

  “Are you all right?” she a
sked.

  “No. But if I do this one thing, I think I will finally be at peace.”

  “How long will you need?”

  “Only a few days,” he said.

  Dane packed a few personal effects in a gym bag and left that night. He told Becky and Iris he needed to travel by night so he would be at the gravesite at dawn to mark a symbolic new day.

  He could not risk them knowing more if the police questioned him. His mother’s grave was in Pennsylvania. Dane went to Maine.

  16. MENTAL IN MAINE

  Dane bought a bus ticket to Hartford, where he boarded the next bus out for Springfield, Massachusetts. From there he rode to Boston and onward to Portland, Maine. He stayed in Portland long enough to know it was not obscure enough for him to feel safe there. He bought a shrimp roll from a street vendor and took the next bus out, eastward to Camden, Maine. Even Camden seemed too familiar and close. He kept riding until he ran out of energy and fear in an obscure town called Mathias, Maine.

  On a scale between significance and oblivion, Mathias tilted toward the latter. It was a few square blocks of retail and two intersecting county roads, one leading east, the other to the beach. Dane found a rooming house near the center of town. It was a cluster of corners, gables, dormers, and turrets, owned by a large woman in thick glasses, a tent dress and sneakers. Leaning on a cane, the proprietor waved at Dane from the porch though he was a few feet away.

  “You’ve come a long distance,” she said kindly. “I’m legally blind but I see that much.”

  “Portland.”

  “You will find rest and sustenance here,” she said with biblical eloquence. “It’s $50 a night. How many days will you be staying?”

  “Only a day or two,” Dane said.

  “You can give me $50 now and tell me more tomorrow morning. We have complimentary coffee and you shouldn’t miss it. They say it’s the best in town.”

  Dane’s hostess processed Dane’s check-in before rising slowly from her seat like a pullout sofa unfolding on rusty hinges. The long ordeal made the woman’s wrinkled eyelids open and shut like accordions. Vertical at last, she poked her cane against the unvarnished floor before leading Dane up three flights of creaking stairs to his room. The brightness and space of Dane’s first resting place in two days exposed its decrepitude. Former homespun touches were reminders of present poverty and neglect. The wallpaper, once green and patterned, had stained to sepia. The brass bed frame was tarnished and the mattress was soft and lumpy as moist pizza dough.