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.
3
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.