In the months that followed, I got other responses from the world as well. From the sixty-seven blind mailings I sent out to advertising agencies nationwide, each complete with a résumé, mini portfolio, and personalized cover letter, I received: nine form-letter rejections, four equally impersonal brochures for summer internships showing pictures of smiling kids nearly half my age, and one actual request for an interview. The letter, from an agriculturally focused firm in Dallas, said that the successful candidate must to be willing to locate to Philadelphia, Mississippi, which, from my research, seemed an even scarier place than the real Philly itself. I got one nice letter from a man in Portland, sent on his own stationery, saying that he liked my work and thought I had ‘promise,’ but that they didn’t recruit unproven talent straight from college, particularly from out of state, something he advised would probably be the norm at other agencies as well. His last line was, ‘But don’t worry, you’re young so there’s no rush.’ The date of my thirty-second birthday was now closer than my thirty-first was.
Of the seven graduate schools whose advertising programs I applied to the previous fall, I was accepted to five, two of which were both very good and very expensive. Neither one offered me enough cash to make accepting realistic or wise since I’d already blown the money from my mom’s policy trying to become middle class (undergraduate tuition and fees). Two of the other schools I was accepted to offered me partial tuition reimbursement, and one program in Ohio even offered me tuition and a stipend, but all three of the schools were just like the one I was already at. Those paths were not inclines, they were plains; at the end of each I would be no higher, just further along.
So, with fantasies extinguished, I walked down that same hall, listening to the sound of my feet beating a track on something that was already dead, moving towards the opportunity to prostrate myself before an advisor in the slight chance that he could help me compensate for the time I didn’t have. Staggering and injured, I stopped in the mailroom to check my box and clean out whatever memos had accumulated.
I saw it before I even got close. It barely fit into my slender slot, this envelope, grocery bag brown, so tightly shoved into the cubby hole that I nearly took down the whole structure pulling it out. Its far right corner was covered in odd stamps, different in sizes and colors but all with the profile of the same plain woman, caught watching something dull. The package couldn’t be mine. It said my name, but Chris Jones was common; there were two others even on that campus. I wasn’t even given that distinction: the sole ownership of my name.
Slipped quickly into my jacket, I held it under my coat by my armpit all the way to the deserted men’s room and into a stall. With my teeth, I ripped the envelope’s top free, my fingers plucking its contents like a mugger with a pocketbook. What I found: another envelope inside. This one was gray, with ‘Chris Jones’ typed in large letters on the center. From its corner, a loose string hung, bright orange and as thick as a shoelace, from a small hole. Typed below it was a note that said, ‘To Begin, Pull.’ I yanked on that thing like it was a parachute cord.
Detonation. Blast. Silence into roar. Fleeting recognition of mortal inevitability as I dropped the package to protect myself, to shield my ears from the pain as noise exploded out from it, hit full speed against the glazed tile walls and then bounced back, making me trip over the toilet and fall back into the urine-stained wall. Even more startling than the sound, on the ground before me the envelope spun around like an insane top. Tangerine smoke rose out of the movement, pouring up into the ceiling in a thick stream and forming an orange cloud there. Everywhere around me the smell of burnt matches, and something like citrus. And then, it began to rain a heavy storm of confetti, gold and white, tiny squares upon me.
I didn’t move until most of it had landed. It was everywhere, on my shoulders, hands and hair, stuck to the mirrors over the sinks, in the toilet behind me. It lay on the floor like magic sand, covering something that had broken free of the envelope during the explosion.
It was a card. Plain white, decorated with a golden exclamation point. Careful of further surprise, I opened it. Inside, in bold orange lettering, it said:
‘I saw your work in Market Edge. The fruit thing. Stunning. Original. Call me for further conversation.’
Underneath that was stapled a black business card:
David Crombie, Urgent Agency, Brixton, London SW2-4H6, (171)654–782
.
Home I was skipping. Urgent. London. Job. Me.
An odd double ring occurred when I dialed the number.
Bring-bring. Bring-bring. Bring-bring
me somewhere lovely where people are so alive you can hear their pulses bump-bumping as they pass you on the street. Take me somewhere like that and let me get going. Save me from Philly town.
‘Aw right’ was how the male voice answered the phone, very relaxed, hands on his balls, probably. I could hear the muted trebles of a television in the background.
‘Hello, I’m calling for David Crombie,’ I said. There was a pause. More television: an unintelligible sentence, and then laughter.
‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ he said, finally.
‘Yes.’
‘I know who you are and I know why you’re calling.’
‘I’m calling for David Crombie?’
‘You’re calling because you either want a job or I blew your fucking hand off.’
He was doing an American accent, poorly. A ghetto John Wayne. ‘Christopher Jones! The tangelo fellow, finally making his appearance onto the scene. Fantastic, man, fantastic work. Bad picture, though, the one they took of you. Pick your afro even next time. You really must mind that. You looked like one of those troll dolls from the sixties, like. One of those little dolls with the big nose and the eyes bugging out and the hair shooting up in the air, cute bastards. Do you know what I’m talking about?’
Yes, I offered. He kept talking. I could almost see him, somewhere on a couch far away in a room I couldn’t imagine, staring into that magazine at a picture of me. ‘You’re a little bit older, aren’t you? Than most of the other prizewinners in the magazine, you’re a little bit older. Am I right here?’
‘Yes, actually I am bit more mature than my peers. I only began my undergraduate degree three years ago. Previously, my mom was suffering from cancer, so I provided home care assistance for her for a while, for my first six years out of high school. I only began my undergraduate studies three years ago and, as of this August, will have managed to finish a year early by taking courses during the summer and Christmas sessions, as well as an increased credit load during the regular terms. A major in marketing and a minor in photography. So, yes, I am mature, and I think I bring that maturity to the work that I do as well.’
‘Fuck mature, mate, you’re talented. That’s what you are. I didn’t ask you to call because you’re long in the tooth, I called because your work’s brilliant.’
We spoke of oranges.
After that, David called me. Usually about once a week, but never at the same time or on the same weekday. I sent him my portfolio, just some clippings of print ads I’d done for groups on campus and a few black-and-white ads in the local paper for some mom-and-pop stores, but he liked it. Every time the phone rang I thought it was David, and due to the state of my social life, it usually was. I feigned illness and stopped going to class so as not to miss a call, but since I’d never been absent or even late before, nobody questioned my claims. I had a sense that school didn’t matter anymore. Finally, almost exactly one month after the first contact, David called and asked, ‘What’s the Grand Canyon like?’
‘It’s really big, kind of red and orange color, and you can rent donkeys to ride down into it.’
‘You’ve never been there, have you?’
‘No.’
‘How about Mardi Gras? All that music, the dressing up and the beads. It looks brilliant.’ No, it doesn’t look smart, but it does look fun, doesn’t it? Never been further south than D.C., and then just inside the Smithsonian pushing my mom around, right before she passed. ‘Okay then, what about New York? The Big Apple itself. The missus, she’s been a couple times for business recently, but I haven’t been in years. Usually all I have time for is holidays on the Continent; when I do get a chance to visit, it’s down to Jamaica to see my family. I got a job offer in New York once, from Binger-Strauss. How close is that to Philadelphia, then?’ Two hours, no more. ‘So, do you go there a lot?’ I went once, in sixth grade, to the Natural History Museum. I remember the tunnel we drove through. I tried to hold my breath the whole way but couldn’t.
‘Well, when you weren’t in university, what did you do for fun? What did you do to tell yourself you were alive?’
‘I don’t know. Like I said, I took care of my mom. I read books a lot, got a lot of books from the library. I rented movies. Basically stayed inside and avoided all the craziness.’ He was laughing at me now.
‘You mean life.’
‘That life, the Philly life, yeah, basically.’
‘Well, now you’re going to start going places.’
‘Yeah. I’ll be done with school in August.’
‘Right. And then you’re coming here.’ Here?
‘London. You’re coming to work for me now. Urgent’s not much. I broke off from the Patterson Group about nine months past, took some clients with me. But it’s just a beginning. I need a real talent by my side, someone I can build something with.
And I know you’re the one to do it. So, you willing?’
Alex was driving, and I didn’t notice she was taking Exit 34 off 176 until we were already snaking too fast along the curves of Lincoln Drive into Germantown.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Dread, realization that escape was not to be so simple, that I was being forced to confront the beast before passing it.
‘Chris, shut up. Your flight isn’t for four hours. Why don’t you just lean your head back against the window and continue drooling like you been doing since Harrisburg,’ Alex said, and kept going. She’d gained a little weight, but she was still that skinny ass, bucktooth, high yellow, crazy thrift-shop-clothes-wearing camera clicker she was when we had gone out years before. My buddy, my confidant, my fellow freak. That’s how we understood each other: in this place we were twins of rejection. Alike except she was crazier than I would ever be, because Alex’s way of negotiating this city’s disregard was to counter with her own blind adoration. Wasting good love on this place.
Kelly Drive: a coiled pathway through a forest where traffic insisted on driving as if the road were straight, a slalom beside a creek within a cave of trees so big, so old that they had been here even before Germantown was a ghetto. Before the blacks, before the Irish, before even the Germans themselves. We drove, under the stone angles of the suicide bridge, into that dip in the road that makes your stomach yo-yo. Together, leaning into curves even before we saw them because our bodies knew this path like that.
‘You need to eat something,’ Alex told me. ‘Get a cheesesteak in you, a hoagie, a couple of Tastykakes, maybe take a goodie bag with you for when you get homesick.’ We turned right, along the exit into Washington Lane, up the hill and under the train bridge and another right at the abandoned gas station on Pulaski, turn left and park in front of the Stop ’n’ Go, turn the key and listen to the car cough a bit before letting go. Finally motionless, for the first time since we left my campus two hours before, Alex stared at me.
‘I’m not eating. They serve food on the plane,’ I told her.
‘Plane food.’
‘That’s right, plain old food. That’s all I need.’ Stop ‘n’ Go on Chelten Avenue. When I was a kid this was the only place that would sell me beer. Forties of Red Bull I could barely pull down.
‘You coming in?’ Alex asked me, but she knew I wasn’t. She just didn’t comprehend why. She didn’t understand that if I put a foot down on the sidewalk it would turn the rubber of my sneakers to concrete as well, fuse me to the ground and force me to live the life I was originally destined. The city wanted to keep me here even though it had no use for me.
‘Fine. You sit there.’
‘Please hurry. I need to check in. It’s an international flight, you know? You’re supposed to check in early for those,’ I reminded her. Al slammed the door on me.
The car stunk like forgotten garbage. She’d parked in the sun, probably on purpose, and it was getting hotter, like Philly could. Outside was home, and I wasn’t going to open the door. Home was too many niggers. Too many guts, too many sweaty brows. Too many hand towels held on shoulders as if it was a symbol of elegance. Too many radios on different stations, each one blaring songs about boning or blasting someone away, every noise fighting to take control of the air. Too many
pop-pop
gun shots peppering the night, divulging neither location nor story, only the knowledge that eventually it would come for you. Too many damn kids yelling for their moms, yelling at one another, some just crying to themselves as they walked alone down the sidewalk. Why are poor people so fucking loud? Why can’t they all just shut up and go home? Why are the same guys who were here when I left three years ago still standing in front of Stop ’n’ Go like anti-security guards, drinking septic beer and speaking some language that sounds as if their mouths are half closed? What is the point of home if this is the way it makes you feel?
‘Dukey-head.’ I turned around, and Al, crouching, with her Canon 35mm in hand, clicked at me until I put my face down.
‘Stop with the pictures. You ready?’ I asked. Alex held up a white paper bag.
‘Eats,’ she said.
The ticket David sent me was in my hand. I had to get on a plane, go to London, get out while I had my chance, and Alex was taking pictures.
‘Come on, smile. Pretend you’re selling teeth whitener. I don’t have any shots of you.’
‘You have tons of pictures of me, you have more than I have.’
‘You’ve hardly been back all year. Get out of the car,’ Al said. I looked outside my window at the concrete, the litter glitter of broken bottle glass on cracked beige asphalt. A lump of dog crap harder than life. No step outside for Christopher. Christopher was not stepping outside till he got to the airport. Chris’s quitting this place for good.