Truth in Advertising (33 page)

Pam says, “Okay, just so I'm clear on the Magna Carta here:
On January 27th, Snugglies will introduce Planet Changers. The first non-toxic, one-hundred-percent biodegradable flushable diaper. And you'll see why 2010 will mark the beginning of a cleaner world
.”

Karen says, “
Could
.”

Pam says, “Excuse me?”

Jan says, “
Could
mark the beginning of a cleaner world. Legally we can't say they will for sure.”

Jan looks to Karen. Karen says, “Let's talk about the N.T.B. issue.”

I say, “N.T.B.?”

Jill says, “Non-toxic biodegradable.”

Ian says, “I didn't know there was an issue. Or an acronym.”

Jan says, all smiles, “In all likelihood, there isn't.”

Karen says, “But there may be.”

Ian says, “What would the problem be?”

Karen says, “Whether or not they're non-toxic or biodegradable.”

I say, “But isn't that the whole point? Wasn't that the revolutionary part?”

Jan says, “Absolutely. And we believe that they're still very much a revolutionary product.”

Karen says, “They're just not one-hundred-percent biodegradable.”

“Or non-toxic,” adds the client I don't know.

Ian says, “I thought you didn't know for sure.”

The client with no name says, “It's almost impossible to ever know these things for sure. It's science.”

Karen says, “We're hearing rumors of new results. Mind you, this is one result in a series of tests.”

Ian says, “Did the other tests come back negative?”

The nameless client. “No, no. Very positive.”

Ian says, “That's great. You mean positive in a good way, not positive in a test-result-bad way.”

Nameless client. “Oh, I see what you were asking. No. Positive in a bad way.”

“Do they do anything different than a regular diaper?” I ask.

Karen says, “Very much so. We're confident they will, once in the ocean, break down.”

Jan says, “
Could
. Confident they
could
break down.”

“At some point,” the nameless client says. “Though it's impossible to know when. Or if.”

More nodding.

Ian says, “Is it flushable?”

Karen says, “Not in any standard toilet, no.”

I look at Jill, who's taking notes and smiling. Alan shrugs.

I say, “I'm confused.” More sneezing.

Jan says, “New data. It's not a problem. The ship has sailed. We need to make sure the advertising works and that the wording is correct.”

I say, “How about this:
On January 27th, Snugglies will introduce Planet Enders. A possibly toxic biohazard that will clog toilets and destroy the sea. And you'll see why 2010 will be Armageddon
.”

Ian says, “Could be Armageddon.”

Long pause.

Keita—God love him—starts laughing his ass off.

•   •   •

Later, Pam and I sit at a table in the bar of The Four Seasons. Faux elegance, preternaturally good-looking people looking at one another, looking for famous people, known people, a model, an actress, so-and-so's boyfriend/girlfriend/ex-friend. Tori Spelling is at the bar. It's 10:00
P.M.
and the high-priced call girls have slowly begun their nightly prowl, sidling up to lonely rich white men, striking up casual conversations, things in common.
Ohmigod, you like tits!?! I have tits!

We're halfway through our second drink and tired and bored and it was time to go to bed an hour ago. I'm sneezing and feel mildly feverish. I bought Sudafed at the hotel shop and have taken two of them, along with that many beers. The effect is not unpleasant. Ian and Keita bowed out after one drink.

After the pre-pro we took the client to dinner at The Ivy, where the clients drank too much and Flonz talked about himself and Hollywood and famous people he knows. (Keanu Reeves is a “close friend.” Mel Gibson is an “old friend.” They used to shoot rats after a night of drinking with pistols Mel kept in his car. “Maniac. But I honestly never heard him bad-mouth the Jews.”)

It was on the way back that Pam told me. “FedEx fucked up. Your father is in Düsseldorf. They think. Or Hong Kong. They're not sure. I'm working on it.”

Hitchcock did a thing in the movie
Vertigo
. It's called a dolly zoom. Apparently a Paramount cameraman came up with it. To simulate vertigo, put the camera on a track—or dolly—and pull back fast, the
camera resetting its focal point. Zoom in, pull back. The result made your stomach flip. Pam's news is my own personal dolly zoom.

“A dying man's request,” Phoebe had said.

“He deserves to be in the garbage,” Eddie had said.

No, he doesn't. Nor in Düsseldorf, for that matter.

There is a minor commotion as a man and a woman and their entourage walk in.

Pam says, “You know who that is?”

I say, “The guy is Nikita Khrushchev. The woman is the great female athlete of the 1920s, ‘Babe' Didrikson Zaharias.”

“Close. The guy is Cam Kendrick and the woman is Cindy Steel. They're the hosts of
Inappropriate Candid Camera
.”

“You're making that up.”

“I'm not. You've never seen it? It's huge. They put cameras in toilets, in dressing rooms, bedrooms, confessionals, therapist offices. People masturbate. People screw. They pixelate the screen. It makes
The Howard Stern Show
look like
MacNeil/Lehrer
. But people watch. I watch. I don't know why. They call it entertainment. It is the end of civilization. Of any modicum of decency. It's on MTV but Fox owns it. Right after
Jersey Shore
.”

“What do the hosts do?”

“They comment. They set up. They flirt with each other. She wears whore-ish outfits. He has a massive bulge in his jeans. Cartoon arrows appear on the screen from time to time and point at her breasts, her snatch. They point to his dick. The camera zooms in and out and they put in stock noises.
Boing
. Humping noises. Fart sounds. The crew laugh. Her nipples stick out. She says with a giggle, ‘You
guys
! Who turned the AC on?!'”

“Who's worse: us or them?”

Pam says, “Us. Much worse. At least they're entertaining.”

“We have the wrong director, don't we?”

“We have the wrong director and the wrong script.”

“What are the chances this will be good?”

“Oh, Dolan. You poor boy.”

We watch an unnaturally beautiful woman take a seat alone at the
bar, look around, take in the male crowd like an MI-6 agent in Berlin during the Cold War. She's wearing what appears to be a vacuum-sealed dress that someone didn't quite finish making, because it's missing a lot of material that might cover the thighs. She crosses her legs and even Pam stares. It's a show, after all. It's been three days since I've talked with Phoebe, the longest stretch we've gone in two years.

Pam gets up. “I'm done.”

I say, “What if they can't find them?”

She pushes the side of my head. “Get some rest. Meet in the lobby at six. And don't fuck a hooker.”

I'm tempted to close my eyes for a moment. The Sudafed and beer have thrown a light blanket over me, muted the rough edges, lowered the extraneous noise. I watch as the sex bomb marks me, a bleary-eyed man sitting alone at a bar, surely a look that suggests
lost
, because otherwise why wouldn't this guy be in bed, where any normal person is. Easy target, she thinks. She smiles and it's so good that for a moment I'm convinced she actually likes me. I break the stare and then notice that my parents have walked in.

My father is wearing what he almost always wore, dark blue work pants—Dickies was the brand—and a matching blue work shirt, like a guy from a filling station in the fifties. His uniform on his days off, work clothes. His fingernails are dirty. He was always fixing something. Anything to get him out of the house. The lawn mower was upside down and he was readjusting the blade or cleaning the gutter or pouring concrete into the back of the rusty swing set, which he put in wrong and which came out of the ground if you swung too high. It had fallen when Eddie was on it. Six stitches in the back of his head.

They do this at some point on every shoot I've ever been on, every business class flight I've ever taken, every fancy restaurant I've ever eaten in. And they ruin it. They sit down, look around at the crowd, the swank of it all, the money. They never stayed at a hotel like this in their lives. My mother is wearing a simple skirt and a sleeveless white blouse and a pair of faded red Keds, with a small hole cut out of the fabric to allow for her bunions.

“What a nice place,” my mother says, pulling a wide-eyed face as if to say,
Wow
.

My father smiles. He always smiles at first. “So they sent you on a business trip, huh?”

My mother's still making the
wow
face, the
I'm so impressed and proud of you
face.

“It's no big deal,” I say. But I want them to think it's a big deal.

“I should say it is, mister,” my mother says.

My father says, “They fly a man across the country, pay for his flight, put him up in a swish hotel. Says something about how that company thinks of a man.”

“Do you remember the government cheese?” my mother asks, smiling.

I nod. We got government assistance after he left. Large blocks of cheese in a plain cardboard box.
CHEESE
, it said on the side. Not Kraft. Not a name brand.
FLAKES
, too. A plain box that said
FLAKES
. Not Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Not Frosted Mini-Wheats or Cap'n Crunch or Post Raisin Bran. Flakes. I was aware of it, knew that we needed help, that we had very little money. I was embarrassed by it. Worse, I was ashamed that I was embarrassed. My mother knew it and I knew it made her feel worse.

“I didn't mind the cheese, Mum. I swear I didn't.”

She smiles and says, “Yes you did. It hurt my feelings.”

“Please don't say that. I was stupid. I just . . . I didn't know. I will buy you anything you want. I will put you up here. Please.”

I say “Please” out loud. I hear myself say it out loud. The people at the next table look at me and laugh.

The waitress is looking at me funny. “Maybe it's time for the check?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

When I turn back my mother is on the verge of crying.

“What happened?” I ask.

My father says, “None of your goddamned business.”

That's how it would happen. That's how fast his mood would change.

“Don't talk to the boy like that,” my mother says.

“He lost my ashes,” my father says. “I asked him for a favor. I said I was sorry. But goddamnit. I was a soldier. I volunteered for my country. I was given
nothing
. I was a cop. I protected people. What do
you
do? What have
you
done? You whining, white-collar waste. You pussy. You have it so easy you have no idea. Has a man ever died in your lap? What have you ever done?”

I say, “Dad, please. What did I do wrong? Please tell me.”

My mother says, “Leave the boy alone.” To me, “You didn't do anything wrong, Finny.”

My father stands and turns. I can no longer see his face.

She stands and looks at me. She looked at me before she left to go to the store that day. She stared.

I say, “Please don't go. Please.”

But she simply walks away.

A few years ago the agency invited a professor from the University of Chicago whose area of expertise was the social sciences to give a talk. It was called “Understanding the Consumer's Psyche.” I remember nothing of what she said, except this. She said that our interior monologue, our little Gary voice that narrates our lives, is largely responsible for whether we are happy or not. Where does it originate? How do we change it?

While I consider this the sex bomb decides to make her move. Liquid hips and thighs. A practiced walk. She smiles, doe-eyed, leans over, a free sample of her abundant décolletage, which she knowingly puts at eye level, and says, “Looking for a date?”

I stare at her breasts for a time but I'm not sure I'm really seeing them. I look up and say, “I'm looking for my dead father, actually.”

She says, “I don't do threesomes.”

I
read somewhere that on average each of us is exposed to something like five thousand advertising messages a day. If you sleep for eight hours that's something like 312 messages—commercials, print ads, Web banners, T-shirt logos, coffee-cup sleeves, sneaker swooshes—an hour. Where once you simply ran an ad in the local newspaper or on one of the three networks, now teams of people sit in corporations with their advertising and marketing and PR counterparts and talk earnestly about 360-degree branding. “Let's surround the consumer.” I have been in meetings where people have suggested buying the space in urinals, in toilets—hotel toilets, airline toilets, the toilets at Yankee Stadium—for a Snugglies ad. We had someone mock up a board of both a toilet bowl and a urinal. We realized there was vastly more space to play with on the inside wall of a urinal. But then someone from the account group pointed out that our target was largely female and that “she'd be left out of the urinal creative.” (Should I ever start my own agency, I've found my name for the company.) Mine is a business wherein we—in the service of our clients—are fighting for every inch of emotional space available in a consumer's increasingly crowded mind. Our brand managers and media strategists speak boldly of the
new
media, of
guerrilla
marketing. No physical or digital space is off limits. Sure, nature is beautiful, but couldn't it be made lucrative with, say, a giant ad wrapped around the Grand Canyon? (
You think this interior is roomy? Wait until you step inside the new Cadillac Escalade
.)