“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.