He had a way of coming upon you suddenly. This happened a lot at print stations. One time, Tom Mota was standing at a print station when Joe sidled up next to him and said, “Morning.” Just at that moment, Tom had something awkward coming out of the color printer. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly work-related. This was before the copy-code policy was implemented as part of the austerity measures, which also prevented Hank Neary from photocopying library books in the morning and reading the Xeroxed pages all day at his desk. Joe’s job no doubt
was
something official, and it was queued up behind Tom’s. Bad luck for Tom. So Tom said to him, “Are you just going to wait? You’re just going to wait there for your job to come out?” Joe’s response was to remain imperturbably silent. So Tom just came clean. “I have something coming out,” he said, “and be honest with you, Joe, I’d rather you not see it. It’s got some titties in it, and I know who you talk to,” he said. “And why do you always feel the need to rush over to the printer when your job is queued up behind all these other jobs, anyway?” he continued. “Why are you so eager? You do know it takes a while for these jobs to come out if they’re all queued up, don’t you?”
Who knows how Joe reacted to that. He was levels above Tom in the hierarchy but he probably suffered the man with more silence, patiently waiting for his job to come out. Maybe he tried to get a glimpse of whatever Tom was printing out, as Tom claimed, or maybe he kept his eyes straight ahead and thought, “Like I could give a good goddamn what this guy’s got printing out.” Either way he was probably inscrutable.
That was the word for him — inscrutable. His inscrutability created a pervasive uneasiness. Why did he have to be such a dull mystery? Nothing on his walls, nothing in his office but a bicycle. Which he
locked.
We heard it click every morning and tried not to take offense. Our opinion of Joe, he was too young to be inscrutable. If you’re thirty years old, you have
interests.
You make engagements with the world. Why was this guy always at his desk, surrounded by bare walls? “We have to show you this, this is our Joe Pope doll.” That’s probably how we’d explain Joe Pope to a new person. Not that we’ll ever hire someone new again. But if we did, we’d probably say, “We keep it in Karen Woo’s office. She hates Joe Pope. Come check it out. Now watch, it’s going to do a perfect imitation. Watch. Did you catch it?” “But it just sat there,” the new hire would say.
“Exactly!”
we’d cry. “Joe’s
always
at his desk. Now watch as he bends at the knees and pulls his chair in! Watch Joe Pope interrupt us over the cube wall! Pull the string and listen to Joe Pope say nothing! It’s the new Inscrutable-Action Joe Pope doll by Hasbro!”
WE HAD HAD A TOY
client, a car client, a long-distance carrier, and a pet store chain. We did TV, print, direct mail, and Internet. We had a business-to-business division. We drank too much on the weekends. We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war. If we had been recovering from the aftereffects of a significant campaign, we might have been grateful to be where we were. Eager, even. As it was, it was just us and our struggles to move up a notch chairwise. It was counting ceiling tiles in everyone’s office to determine who had the higher tile count. Sean Smith was in the first Gulf War but that hardly impressed us because all he did was drive a tank around a bunch of sand woefully devoid of enemy craft and when pressed, that was the extent of his recall. Frank Brizzolera might have seen World War II, but he died before we could ask him. We had one Vietnam vet but he never spoke of his experiences and quit within a year. Maybe he knew firsthand the blind jungle warfare we had learned about in school, had the sound of pitched battles in his head, and when he looked out his window at that proud parade of flags flying over the bridge across the Chicago River, he thought about particular sacrifices, men with names who had died, and said those names aloud to himself, and felt with palpable gratitude the simple luxury of returning to a chair in a building that was safe. Imagine the stories he might have told! Set in burning villages during darkest night — flares over riverbeds — choppers landing in rice paddies. We were always looking for better stories of more interesting lives unfolding anywhere but within the pages of an Office Depot catalog. But he never spoke of his experiences, and two months after he quit, no one could remember his name.
A better story than ours might be the one of two interoffice competitors, one male, one female, finding true love through rivalry in the workplace, written by our very own Don Blattner. Blattner was all Hollywood by way of Schaumburg, Illinois. He had another screenplay about a disaffected and cynical copywriter suffering ennui in the office setting while dreaming of becoming a famous screenwriter, which he claimed was not autobiographical. He was always talking about potential investors and wouldn’t let us read any of his screenplays unless we signed confidentiality agreements, as if we had positioned ourselves surreptitiously in these cornered lives so as to steal Blattner’s screenplays and whisk them off to Hollywood. Like Jim, he made us wince, especially on those occasions he called Robert De Niro “Bobby.” He studied the weekend box-office grosses very seriously. If a movie failed to perform as the industry expected, Blattner would come into your office on Monday morning carrying his
Variety
and say, “The boys at Miramax are going to be
awfully
disappointed by this.” It was such horseshit, yet we felt something had been lost the day he announced he was giving it up. “I gotta face it,” he declared in a resigned and unsentimental voice. “The workshops aren’t helping, the how-to books aren’t helping, and nobody’s optioning any of my shit.” We took back all our ridicule and practically begged the man to continue, but he remained firmly and pathetically committed to his sober-eyed conclusion that he would never be anything but a copywriter. Months passed before one of us experienced the relief of startling him at his desk again as he secretly tried to close out of his screenplay software. Hope had risen like a perennial once again.
There
had
to be a better story than this one, which was why so many of us spent so much time lost in our own little worlds. Don Blattner was not the only one. Hank Neary, our black writer who wore the same brown corduroy suit coat day after day, so that either he never cleaned the one, or had an entire closet full of the same, was working on a failed novel. He described it as “small and angry.” We all wondered who the hell would buy small and angry? We asked him what it was about. “Work,” he replied. A small, angry book about work. Now there was a guaranteed best seller. There was a fun read on the beach. We suggested alternative topics on subjects that mattered to us. “But those don’t interest me,” he said. “The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me.” Truly noble, we said to him. Give us a Don Blattner screenplay any day of the week.
Dan Wisdom had gotten encouragement in college from Miles Buford, the painter, who said in his twenty-year teaching career he had never seen a talent like Dan’s. Then Dan graduated and went to work, where he sat behind a Mac manipulating pixels for a sugar-substitute client and wondered if Professor Buford’s flattery was just an attempt to get laid. Dan continued to paint, though, at night and on the weekends, and if his portraits were a little grotesque, we could nevertheless discern a unique vision and a steady line. Maybe it would happen for him. He said no. He said figurative painting was dead. But we liked what he could do with fish.
Deliver us!
You could practically hear that plea crying out from the depths of our souls, because none of us wanted to end up like Old Brizz.
Among the very first to be let go, Brizz walked Spanish down the hall like no one before or since. The season of layoffs was interminable, and to give a sense of that, Old Brizz’s termination took place a full year before Tom Mota got the ax. Old Brizz handled it much better than Tom did. He came by all our offices to say farewell. Usually people raced out to escape our gaze. Brizz said he didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye. That was grace under fire, and he carried himself with dignity and pride. He didn’t mind knowing that we knew that they didn’t value him as much as they valued us. Because that’s basically what they said when they walked you Spanish down the hall. He didn’t mind talking to us even after they said that to him in so many words. Or maybe he didn’t even think of it that way. Maybe he wouldn’t have understood our talk of value. “This has nothing to do,” he might have said, “with who’s worth more. Is that what you think? You guys, take it from an old man who’s been in this business a long time. This process has nothing to do with weeding out the worst of us so that the only ones left are the talented and the productive. Come on, don’t fool yourselves. Ha, don’t be foolish. Ha ha, don’t be naive!” We could hear his rattling lungs laughing at us. His coming around to fare us well, so calm, so self-controlled — it was a little unnerving. What did it mean that minutes after walking Spanish down the hall he had the poise to encourage us not to worry about him? He came by each one of our individual offices, he visited the cubicles and the receptionists. We even saw him talking to one of the building guys. They hardly said anything to anyone, the building guys. Just stood on their ladders handing things up and down to one another, speaking in hushed tones. There was never much of an opportunity to get to know them. But Old Brizz was standing at the elevator talking to one building guy in particular for half an hour while holding his box of personal items. One would speak, the other would nod. Then they’d laugh. Who knows what you laugh about with a building guy. But Brizz found it — the funny thing to be shared, even on the day he had been shitcanned. He filed for unemployment right away. A few months later, he still hadn’t found work. He took on a few freelance jobs. Then we didn’t hear from him. Next we knew he was in the hospital. No insurance. He went quick. It was unfortunate, how prescient we were when we said the guy had six months, tops. We visited him — ours seemed his only flowers. We wanted to ask him, Hey, Brizz, man, where’s your family? Instead we snuck him cigarettes, strictly forbidden when one is laid out in the cancer ward. We put one of those smoke-be-gone ashtrays right on his chest, and it caught the exhaust good, so Brizz got in three smokes before the old guy next slot over complained and we were reprimanded by the nurse. When he died, it was hard to believe he was gone. Not just walked Spanish down the hall. Gone gone.
Benny came around to collect. We couldn’t believe it. Benny wasn’t really going to profit from this, was he?
“He was on my list,” he said innocently.
We all shouted, Benny! Come on!
“Come on what?” he cried. “He was at the top of my list! Those are the rules.”
He wasn’t wrong. Those were the rules of Celebrity Death Watch. We all paid him his ten bucks.
At Brizz’s funeral we discovered he had some family after all, a brother with a health-club glow. We called him Bizarro Brizz because he had good skin with a good color. Probably never smoked a cigarette in his life. It was as if jowly, ruddy Brizz had taken off a terrible mask. We offered him our condolences. After preparing ourselves in the pews for a while, some of us braved the front. Brizz in the box looked much healthier than Brizz at his desk. Afterward, at the wake, we tried to recall memories of him. We remembered one thing, the time we stood with him at the parking garage waiting for the bow-tied Hispanics to pull up with our cars. We had our single-dollar tips folded in the palms of our hands. God was it freezing. We were out of the way of the wind under the bright light of the garage, but Chicago in February, if you’ll allow an homage to Brizz, was colder than a witch’s tit in an icebox. He still called a refrigerator an icebox. He sat at his desk once and told us of being a kid and having the ice delivered. “That’s how old I am,” he confided to us in a rare moment. “I remember the ice being delivered.” “Did you used to call Australia ‘Tasmania Land’?” asked Benny. “Not that old,” said Brizz. Just then, Joe Pope arrived at Brizz’s doorway and asked him if he had those headlines ready. That’s what we were talking about with Old Brizz as we waited for our cars in the final freezing February of his tenure as one of us, certain aspects of Joe Pope’s character. We couldn’t pin Old Brizz down, though, try as we might. His car was the first to come out. It was a gray Peugeot, a one-time looker, but rusted around the trim now and dented in places high and low. The real story was the interior. Stuff — crap — accumulated junk — how else to put it? — filled the backseat windows
to the roof.
Paper mostly, but smashed against the glass we also made out a winter hat, a beer cozy, an unopened package of nude hose — things like that. Along the ledge of the doorframe we noticed scattered coins and green plastic houses from the game of Monopoly. “Brizz,” said Benny. “All these extras come from the dealership?” “Have you guys never seen my car before?” Brizz asked with pride. “Is that what this is?” asked Larry Novotny. “A car?” He bent at his knees and resettled his Cubs cap on his thinning hair while peering through the windows at the trash heap inside. The front passenger seat was hardly any better than the back, but there was a nice niche carved out for the driver behind the wheel. We had to wonder — who keeps a car like that? Was he really one of
those
people? The car-park man got out and turned the car over to Brizz, but Brizz never tipped. That was another thing about Brizz: he usually stayed in and ate his baloney sandwiches, but when he came out to lunch with us, we had to supplement his share of the tip so as not to screw the waitress, which made us hate him momentarily. “I got a
tip
for you,” he replied, when someone asked him once why he was so cheap. “Never take no wooden nickels.”
We heard that time and again — “Never take no wooden nickels” — until we wanted to clobber him over the head with a mallet. Except for the surprise of his homeless-man’s car, and his half-hour conversation with the building guy on the day he was terminated, Old Brizz was fatiguing in his predictability. He came in, he proofread in a pair of nineteen-fifties eye frames, he left at ten-fifteen for the day’s first smoke break. Good god, we could still see him standing in the winter freeze outside the building in nothing but a ratty sweater vest, jowls like a hound dog’s, pulling on his pointy cigarette. He came back in smelling like fifty butts in an ashtray. He brought out his baloney sandwiches at quarter past noon and chased them down with a Thermos of black coffee that he made at home because he claimed the stuff down the hall was too gourmet for his taste.