“I don’t really give a shit if the guy’s a homo or not,” said Tom Mota, a week or so after his encounter with Joe Pope in the Michigan Room. “I just want to know what the fuck he means by ‘Your anger.’” There was an opening between two clusters of cubicles that allowed enough room for a couple of round tables and several chairs where we found ourselves congregating some mornings around a box of Krispy Kremes or a bag of bagels that someone, inspired by the possibility of a brightened day, purchased and brought in and shared with the rest of us. The human spirit shining through against all adversity. We were enjoying our breakfast, drinking our first cups of coffee of the morning, when Joe Pope comes by carrying some ad freshly ripped from the printer and asks who brought in the bagels. “May I have one?” he asked. Genevieve Latko-Devine said of course he could and he thanked her and we expected him to be on his way after that but he lingered to spread some cream cheese and then he sat down among us, thanking Genevieve again. It was all very casual, as if routine, nothing out of the ordinary. We felt it, though, right
here
— Joe Pope’s unexpected presence. Bonhomie took a holiday.
Things got very quiet, until Joe himself finally broke the ice. “By the way,” he said. “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?”
We were in the process of coming up with a series of TV spots for one of our clients who manufactured an analgesic to reduce cold sore pain and swelling. We took in Joe’s question kind of slowly, without any immediate response. We might have even exchanged a look or two. This wasn’t long after his second promotion. Doing okay, more or less, we said, in effect. And then we probably nodded, you know, noncommittal half nods. The thing was, his question — “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?” — didn’t seem a simple question in search of a simple answer. So soon after his promotion, it seemed more like a shrewd, highly evolved assertion of his new entitlement. We didn’t think it was actual concern or curiosity for how we were progressing on the cold sore spots so much as a pretense to prod our asses.
“You do know, Joe,” Karen Woo finally said, “that it’s only nine-thirty in the morning, right? Believe it or not, we
are
going to get to the cold sore spots today.”
Joe looked genuinely misunderstood. “That’s not why I was asking, Karen,” he said. “I have every confidence you’ll get to it. I was asking because I’ve been having trouble coming up with something myself.”
We remained suspicious. He rarely had a hard time coming up with anything.
“The difficulty I’m having,” he explained, “is that they want us to be funny and irreverent and all that, but at the same time, they don’t want us to offend anybody who suffers from cold sores. It seems to me those two things are mutually exclusive. At least it makes it hard for me to come up with an ad that’s worth a damn.”
By noon, we knew that the son of a bitch was
right.
It was extremely tough to strike a balance between being funny about the unsightly effects of a cold sore while protecting against offending anyone watching who might suffer the unsightly effects of cold sores. It was one of those impossible, harebrained paradoxes that only a roundtable of corporate marketers smelling of competing aftershaves could have dreamed up — in a different land, in a different era, those tools would have come up with the dynasty’s favorite koans. We had to admit maybe Joe Pope had no other intention in asking his question that morning but to inquire if we were having as hard a time with the cold sore spots as he was, and that our hasty assumptions were the result of a miscommunication. Some of us continued to suspect him, however, and as the fine points faded, on balance the episode probably didn’t go in his favor.
It didn’t improve matters when we gathered down at Lynn Mason’s cluttered office two days later to present to her our concepts for cold sore spots and Joe and Genevieve unveiled Cold Sore Guy. We knew right away that not only would Cold Sore Guy be one of the three concepts we’d send to the client, but that it would be the spot they ran, and ran, and ran, until you and everybody else in America grew intimate with Cold Sore Guy. The fucker
nailed
it, he and Genevieve, who was the art director of the pair, just fucking nailed the great koan of the cold sore marketers. Door opens on the background of suburbia, and standing in the bright doorway is a pair of attractive young lovebirds. “Hi, Mom!” says the girl. “I’d like you to meet my special someone.” Cold Sore Guy offers Mom his hand. He indeed has an unsightly, somewhat exaggerated cold sore on the right corner of his upper lip. “Hi, I’m Cold Sore Guy.” “Of course you are!” says Mom, taking Cold Sore Guy’s hand. “Come on in!” Cut to Kitchen. Stern-looking Father. “Daddy,” says the girl. “I’d like you to meet Cold Sore Guy.” “Cold Sore Guy,” says Daddy sternly. “It’s nice to finally meet you, sir,” says Cold Sore Guy, giving Daddy’s hand a firm shake and smiling wide as a bell with his egregious cold sore. Cut to Living Room. Alzheimer’s-looking Grandmother. “Grandma?” says the girl, shaking the frail woman vigorously. “Grandma?” Grandma comes to, sits up, looks at Cold Sore Guy and says, “Well, you must be Cold Sore Guy!” “Hi, Grandma,” says Cold Sore Guy. Voice-over explains features and benefits of the product. Tagline: “Don’t let a cold sore interfere with
your
life.” Final cut to Dining Room. Stern-looking Father: “More mashed potatoes, Cold Sore Guy?” “Oh, love some, sir!” Fade.
We had all this for the first time only on storyboards, but the immediacy was undeniable, and we just knew he’d nailed it, him and Genevieve. The entire family was welcoming. They liked the guy. They shook hands with him. It was funny, but the subject of the fun was
embraced.
Cold Sore Guy was the hero. Plus, he could eat mashed potatoes. No one eats mashed potatoes with a cold sore like his, but superhero Cold Sore Guy did. And what’s more,
it never said we could cure a cold sore.
That was always the toughest maneuver we had to make with that particular client. We could say we could treat a cold sore, but we were forbidden from saying that we could cure one. Joe’s spot said nothing about treating or curing — he just managed to make the cold sore sufferer a sympathetic person. The client loved it. And when they cast it with the right actor, the guy looked even more sympathetic and performed it hilariously, and the ad was replayed on the Internet and took home awards and all the rest.
The day following the unveiling of Cold Sore Guy, Joe came into his office with his bicycle as he did every morning and found the word
FAG
written on the wall with a black Sharpie. It slanted up, in the hand of a child or a man in haste, not unlike what you might see on the back of a stall door in a bar.
Now
something was on his wall — nothing big, but definitely noticeable. We thought, sure, we’re a dysfunctional office sometimes, but nobody we know could do a thing like that. Maybe it was somebody harboring animosity against Joe in some other realm of his life, who snuck past security one night, found Joe’s office, and Sharpied away his soul. But in the end, that didn’t sound very likely, and we had no choice but to conclude that Joe, in search of some local attention, had put it up there himself before leaving late the night before.
MORE LAYOFFS — WHY MEDIA BUYERS SUCK — THE BILLBOARD — YOP AT THE PRINT STATION — THE DOUBLE MEETING — LYNN IN SURGERY — WE KNOW WHAT JOE KNOWS — THE TWO-MARTINI LUNCH — AMBER’S REAL CONCERN — HONEST WORK — SOME GUY TALKS TO BENNY — GENEVIEVE’S ACCUSATION — JANINE GORJANC IN THE POOL OF PLASTIC BALLS — THE SETUP — WE APOLOGIZE — PAINTBALLS
IN THE EARLY WEEKS
of 2001, they let go of Kelly Corma, Sandra Hochstadt, and Toby Wise. Toby had a custom-made desk in his office, which he’d commissioned out of a favorite surfboard — he was a great surfing fanatic. The desk took a while to dismantle, extending his period of stay beyond the usual protocol. Then he asked for help carrying the pieces down to the parking garage. We loaded the desk in the back of his new Trailblazer and prepared to say good-bye. This was always the most awkward time. Everyone had to decide — handshake, or hug? We heard Toby shut the tailgate on the Trailblazer and expected him to come around to where we had congregated. Instead he hopped into the driver’s seat and powered down the tinted window. “So I guess I’ll be seeing ya,” he said, with a jolly lack of ceremony. Then he powered up the window again and took off. We felt a little slighted. Was a handshake too much to ask? If he was just bluffing his way out of a bad hand, if that was just his poker face, it sure was an exuberant and bouncy one. He stopped at the curb to look for cars and then pulled out with a little squeal. It was the last we ever saw of him.
In the weeks leading up to Tom Mota’s termination, in the spring of that year, Tom was found departing Janine Gorjanc’s office with great frequency. Hard to say what they were talking about. We loved nothing more than to lay waste to a half hour speculating about office romance, but we could not conceive of a stranger pair. The petulant, high-strung Napoleon exiled to an Elba of his own mind, and the acrid mother in mourning. Love worked in funny ways. We forgot they had things in common — lost children. They consoled each other, perhaps. They shared the long indefatigable nightmare of not knowing what to do with the burden of a materialized love that refused their private requests to wane, to break, to please just go away, and so they found themselves directing that love toward each other. But that was only how we killed time. In fact, there was no love affair. Tom just wanted the billboard to come down.
Our media buyers, like Jane Trimble and Tory Friedman, tended to be small, chipper, well-dressed women who wore strong perfume and had an easy knack for conversation. They kept bags of sweets in their desk drawers and never gained any weight. They spent most of their time on the phone talking with vendors, the deadening prospect of which made us gag, and for their services, they received random gifts and tickets to sporting events, the blatant unfairness of which angered us with a blind and murderous envy. Because they put the orders in and talked with friendly inflections in their voices, they were bribed with largesse, like dirty checkpoint guards, and we thought they deserved a special ring of hell, the ring devoted to corrupt mayors, lobbyists, and media buyers. That was how we felt, anyway, during our time in the system. When one of us walked Spanish and got out of the system, we thought back on those loquacious and smiling media buyers as just some of the nicest people.
Tom’s gripe was with Jane. “He’s got to take that goddamn billboard down,” he said to her after walking into her office without a knock or a greeting. Unfortunately Jane knew just what he was referring to: the vendor with whom she had placed the order. Flyers of the missing girl were not the only effort we had made to help Janine and Frank Gorjanc during the days of their short-lived search for their daughter. Using some of their money, supplemented by hastily raised funds, we had the same image of Jessica from the fourth grade with the word
MISSING
and a number to call placed on a billboard on I-88 facing westbound traffic. Long after the girl had been found, that billboard was still up there. Jane tried to explain that nobody wanted to see that billboard come down as much as she did, but that these things took time when there was no immediate turnover. “No immediate turnover?” cried Tom. “It’s been six months!” “He promises me he’s working on it,” Jane replied with the courtesy and patience expected of media buyers. “Well that’s not good enough,” Tom barked at her. “At least have him strip it.” “Stripping,” explained Jane sheepishly, knowing how crass she must have sounded, “unfortunately costs money, Tom.”
It was an unpopular space, that was the problem. Far out on I-88, west of the Fox River, metropolitan Chicago effectively came to an end, yielding its industrial parks and suburban tract housing to fields of alfalfa and small towns with single gas stations. Billboards in North Aurora were good for casino boat and cigarette ads, and maybe the occasional AIDS awareness campaign, but little else. The vendor might have taken a hit on the rental fee but to rent it at all was likely a great boon to him, and he probably never had a client complain about continued exposure after the lease expired. Free advertising — who could complain about that?
If there was an opportunity to complain, we complained. The creative team complained about the account team. The account team complained about the client. Everybody complained at one time or another about human resources, and human resources complained among themselves about each and every one of us. About the only people not complaining were the media buyers, because they were showered with bribes of tickets and gifts, but when Janine complained to Tom about the billboard, Tom Mota took that complaint to them. The billboard, he said, advertised Jessica as missing, when Jessica had not been missing for months. Jessica had been found. Jessica had been buried. He complained that Janine had to see that billboard on the side of I-88 every day on her way home from work, had to be reminded of the week she spent waiting in numb and desperate hope that that billboard might help in some way to bring her little girl back, and of her devastation when she learned that it would not. Now that billboard was nothing but a vicious reminder, broadcasting from a great height the girl’s cruel fate. Tom wouldn’t stand for it. He complained about the son-of-a-bitch vendor who moved unconscionably slowly, and about the bright, uncomplaining dispositions of media buyers like Jane Trimble — complained so much that Jane had to get on the phone with the vendor and complain. When she got off the phone with the vendor, Jane called Lynn Mason to complain about Tom Mota — just one more complaint that must have contributed to his eventual termination.
On the morning in May Lynn Mason was scheduled to be in surgery, the day after she let go of Chris Yop, Yop was back in the building, standing at a print station. Marcia Dwyer was startled to find him there. It was early morning. Marcia had come to photocopy the inspiring tale of a cancer survivor featured in an outdated issue of
People
magazine. When Yop turned and saw her, he gave a start like a cornered animal. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “I thought you were Lynn.”
“Lynn’s in surgery today,” she said, “remember?”
Marcia spoke with a hardcore South Side accent and wore the accompanying tall hair with bangs. Her black curls in back were held in place by some miraculous fixative. If we knew her at all, as she spoke with Yop she probably had one hand on her hip with her wrist turned inward.
“What are you doing back here, Chris?” she asked.
“Working on my resume,” Yop said defensively.
Marcia told us about this encounter a half hour later, when the day officially began. We had congregated by the couches for a double meeting. The day after a meeting with Lynn we usually had a postmeeting meeting conducted by Joe, where the finer points of the project were hammered out without wasting any more of Lynn’s time. Of late, Lynn spent her days in meetings with her fellow partners in an effort to keep us solvent. Not wasting her time had become an imperative.
It was just like us to have two meetings for one project. No one ever wondered if the existence of double meetings might have some bearing on Lynn’s need to have solvency meetings — or if they did, they kept their mouths shut. After all, we liked double meetings. Only in a double meeting could you ask the questions you were reluctant to ask in the first meeting for fear of looking stupid in front of Lynn. We wanted to die looking stupid in front of Lynn, but we didn’t mind it in front of Joe.
One agency we knew about, out in San Francisco, had architects come in to design a floor plan that included live trees, dartboards, flagstones, sun panels, coffee kiosks, and a half-court big enough for a game of three-on-three. Those lucky bastards knew no such thing as a conference room or a frosted-glass door. We had to suffer such insults, but in recompense, we were given mismatching recreational furniture intended to inspire the creative impulse and upon which we were encouraged to lounge. Located in open spaces where the windows lengthened and allowed sunlight to pour in, these little hot spots were a nice break from corridors and cubicles, and where we always went to double meet. Marcia was perched on the edge of one of the recliners, and her hair was particularly tall and sculptural that morning.
She told us Yop seemed offended when she asked him what he was doing at the print station. “It was like he expected me to be a major bitch about it and start hollering for security,” she said, “but I was just asking what he was doing. I mean, just yesterday the guy was laid off, right — and this morning he’s back in the building? What’s that about?”
We couldn’t believe Yop was back in the building.
“I asked him, I says, ‘You shouldn’t be here, right?’ And he says to me, ‘No, I shouldn’t be here.’ So I says, ‘So what happens if somebody catches you?’ and he says, ‘Well, then I’m fucked.’ ‘What’s that mean, you’re fucked?’ I says, and he says, ‘Trespassing!’”
We couldn’t believe that. Trespassing? Would he be arrested?
“Yeah, can you believe that?” Yop asked Marcia. “That’s what I was told right after the input yesterday when Lynn called me back into her office, remember? My presence in the building will be construed as
criminal
action.
I was like, ‘Lynn, you have to be kidding me, right? After all I’ve done for this place, you’re going to have me arrested for trespassing?’ She stops drawing the blinds — she wasn’t even looking at me when she said it! But anyway, she sits down, and you know that look she can give you, where it’s almost like she’s burning your brain out with her laser eyes? She pulls her chair in and she gives me that look and she says, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t still be here, Chris. You’ve been terminated.’ So I say to her, ‘Yeah, I know that, Lynn, but when we were having our conversation earlier and I couldn’t keep it together, remember? and I had to leave your office? I didn’t think I would have to
leave
leave until we had a chance to finish our conversation, like how we’re doing now. Because I still have one important thing to say before I go.’ So she says to me, ‘Chris, tell me whatever it is you have to tell me, but then you need to leave. Understand? I can’t take any chances with you in the building.’ What the fuck, right? She can’t take any chances with me in the building? What am I going to do, steal Ernie’s chair? Maybe I could get down the hall with it into the freight elevator. I’d still have to walk it past security. How am I going to get out of the building with Ernie’s chair? ‘So go ahead,’ Lynn says to me. ‘What do you have to say?’ ‘Okay, I just want to know one thing,’ I tell her. ‘Do you know or have you ever known anything about serial numbers?’ This is what I ask her. ‘Does the phrase
serial numbers
mean anything to you personally?’ How does she respond? She says, ‘Serial numbers?’ Yeah, she looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chris,’ she says to me, ‘serial numbers.’ You see — I KNEW IT!” Yop howled in a frantic whisper, flinging a furtive glance in the direction of the print-station doorway. And in a softer voice, “
I fucking knew it!
That office coordinator made the whole thing up!
It’s her own personal system.
There’s nothing official whatsoever about the serial numbers! She has a punch gun. You know what I’m talking about, with the wheel? That’s where they come from! The serial numbers!
Lynn didn’t even know about them!
She was like, ‘Serial numbers?’ So I tell her everything about the serial numbers, about how the office coordinator made them up, keeping tabs on everything like Big Brother or something. But so anyway, she listens, very politely, but then she says, ‘Is that it?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, yeah, but —’ I thought at the very least she would call the office coordinator back in and we’d start over and this time I’d get a fair shake. But it was obvious there was no chance she was going to give me my job back. So that’s when she tells me that if she finds me in the building again, she’s going to have to report me to security, who will call the police, who will arrest me for trespassing. Can you believe that?” Yop’s tumid, rheumy eyes bulged out at Marcia. He really wasn’t in the best of health. “After all my time here,” he continued. “So that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, watch me come back here tomorrow and print out my resume using your machines. You know what they charge at Kinko’s for printing like this? No way I’m spending my last paycheck at Kinko’s. I’ve given a lot to this place, and I think I should be allowed to save a few bucks on printing. By the way,” he said. “Would you proofread it for me?”
“So I says to him, ‘Proofread what?’” Marcia said to us just before the double meeting began. “He wanted me to proofread his resume! I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Chris, I’m an art director. You’re the copywriter. You do the proofing, remember?’ I mean, honestly, I spell like a person in an institution. But still he says, ‘Yeah, I know, but I really need another pair of eyes on it.’ And then he stands there holding out a pen. A red pen! He wants me to do it right there in the print station!”
So Marcia stood at the copier proofreading Yop’s resume, stealing glances at the door now and again because she didn’t want to be seen with somebody who could be arrested for trespassing. As she worked, he engaged her in conversation. He asked if she wanted to know the twisted thing about being terminated. “The really sick and twisted thing,” he said. “You wanna know what it is?”