“You have some interesting ideas,” I butted in, “but I don’t think you have a straight line on the ad game. It’s a little more complex than all that.”
“Oh?” She favored me with a look. “Are you in advertising?”
“I handle the Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti account over at MGSR&S.” It was a more-than-slight exaggeration, but I could have told her I was a Third Assistant Skyhook at TWA&T. She was duly impressed.
“I’ve had too much coffee,” I said. “Let’s get a drink.”
We got a drink. She was terribly young, and terribly naive, and, when you came right down to it, stupid as the whole Jukes family, I cried on her shoulder about the Ulcer Gulch rat race, told her how I ached to get away from it and write the Great American Novel in a humble garret. Midway through the fourth drink she was deciding to be my constant inspiration in the wars against crass commercialism. Midway through the fifth drink I had my hand in her leotards. We had the sixth drink in my Barrow Street roach farm, where she took off all her clothes so that she wouldn’t feel inhibited.
As it turned out, she did not feel inhibited, not in the least. She was thin, with cute if bite-sized breasts. I could have counted her ribs, if I had been so inclined. A lean horse for a long ride, say the Arabs knowingly, and Saundra proved them right.
I snacked on her little bite-sized breasts while she warbled about the meeting of true minds. I dined on her body with hungry hands while she told me how I was selling my soul to the devil of commerce.
Then I ran her up the flagpole, and everybody saluted...
There my reverie gave way to sleep. I’d sort of planned on thinking back to the beginning with Helen, but sleep saved me from such heartache, and I forgot all about Helen and dreamed pleasant dreams of Jodi. The night passed slowly in slumber, and then dawn winked too bright an eye at me, and Jodi was beaming at me.
A wonderful girl, Jodi. She cooked breakfast and fed it to me without saying a word, and I for my part said nothing at all. I finished my third cup of coffee, thinking all the while of a suitable explanation to heave at Helen, and then, finally, I said: “Good morning, Jodi.”
“Good morning,” she said. “Did you forget?”
“Forget what?”
“Last night.”
“Jodi,” I said, “I shall sooner forget my name.”
“You’re nice, Harvey.”
I lit the ends of a pair of cigarettes and passed one to her. Then I remembered in part why I was still at Jodi’s, instead of being on the 8:12 out of Rockland County.
“Jodi,” I said, “the proposition.”
She nodded sagely. “Listen to this, Harvey,” she said. “You may like it.”
Five
There was time, in my not particularly innocent youth, when I considered myself an essentially moral type, a young man who was a bit shrewd perhaps, something of a corner-cutter and a doubt-benefiter, but nevertheless containing a solidly moral and ethical core.
We all believe that when young, I suppose. Some men — I imagine they should be considered the lucky ones — never do find out the truth. Alas, those self-ignorant ones are not to be found in the advertising profession, not outside the mailroom at any rate. It was relatively early in the game that I discovered what was really at the core of me — a black, sinful, unashamed and overwhelming concern, interest and fascination for number one. Or, I should say, Number One. Me. I quite frankly don’t know what I’d do without me.
“You may like it,” said Jodi, and I’d never realized till then just how well she really knew me. Her proposition, if it included someone like Al the Neanderthalus Chicagus, would inevitably be something highly illegal. Only a man who has learned to live with his nasty true self can be expected to sit still when someone begins a criminal or sinful proposition with the words, “You may like it.”
She expected me to sit still. Ergo, and all that.
I gained my precious self-understanding, by the by, at just around the same time as I was promoted from the ten-dollar desk and the Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti account, as so often happens in real life or whatever it is I’ve been doing for the past thirty-one years. The promotion and the self-understanding both were the end result of a little conversation I had with Fehringer one day after I’d been hitting the bull’s eye for about seven months.
I looked up from my pencil that day, and saw Furry Fehringer approaching my desk. He wore one of those smiles that makes you instinctively look to see if there’s a knife in his hand.
As a matter of fact, there was. But not for me.
“Min, keed,” he said. I think his years in the racket had made him learn to hate the English language, and he was gradually trying to divorce himself from it completely. He was doing a pretty good job.
“Sure thing,” I said. Both sensible English words, pronounced the way schoolteachers do it in Iowa, which just goes to show how new I was.
“Around the quad,” he said. “Kay?”
“Kay.” I was learning.
I got to my feet, and we roamed together around the quad. That is, we traversed the corridors of MGRS&S, up one pastel alleyway and down another, every once in a while passing that section of translucent glass-brick wall with the eight-foot free-form pink beer bottle in it celebrating a five-year-old MGRS&S coup, and Fehringer newspoke about this and that, mostly conversational chaff, from which I herewith extract the wheat, with my responses:
“You know Tom Stanton, eh, keed?”
“Uh huh.”
“Brought you into the corps, didn’t he?”
“Uh huh.” (My responses gained in directness what they may have lacked in vivacity.)
“Feeling of loyalty, eh?”
(Dangerous ground, that. I wasn’t that new. Was Fehringer a loyal Stanton man, or was his suzerain in our hierarchy? The best answer, I decided, was no answer at all.) “Well,” I said, “you know how it is.”
“Mmm. Just traded the flivver in, did I tell you?”
“Oh?”
“Mmm. Trade in every two years. Like to keep the old boat, sentimental attachment and all, but got to be practical. New one cuts the mustard. Sense?”
I nodded. “Sense,” I said.
“Pity about Tom,” he said.
I endeavored to look as blank as I felt. “Pity?”
“Booze. Fifteen to one in the club car lab now, you know. Poured into Westport every night.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Been covering for him, holding the flanks. Loyalty myself, you know. Sentimental attachment. Grand guy.”
“Sure.”
“Pity,” he said again, and gloomed at the pink beer bottle on the way by. “Used to cut the mustard.”
“Uh huh.”
“Got to look out for myself,” he said. “Wife and kiddies, that bit. Name and game, you know. Expect a hassle on the Wilmot Toothpaste. Sales on the downydoo.”
“Oh?”
“Like to have you in my corner, Harv. Step up, eh? Think it over.”
And we went back to our respective desks.
I thought it over. Fehringer claimed he’d been doing Tom Stanton’s work for a while now. He had the game, and he wanted the name. All I had to do was manufacture a little damaging evidence concerning Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti — which was also, ultimately, in Tom Stanton’s bailiwick — and I could have a piece of the game for myself. When Fehringer moved up, so would I.
I thought it over. All afternoon at the desk I thought it over, and homeward bound on the IRT I thought it over some more.
Come to think of it, I wonder just how many decisions to foreswear goodness and virtue in favor of evil and degradation were made homeward bound on the rush-hour trains of the IRT, between Lexington-51st and the depths of the Village. (For the benefit of foreign citizens the IRT is the Metro. Geh?) This daily voyage involves three trams and a lot of subterranean walking, all in the close company of a surly mob which, for pure meanness of spirit and nastiness of behavior, holds no equal in all history with the possible exception of Robespierre’s crowd in the French Revolution. (Could it be that old Tom Jefferson’s — what a copywriter! — second revolution never came about simply because, for the urban masses, all revolutionary humors are dissipated in the mere process of getting to and from work? A thought I toss out for political scientists in the arena.)