A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Advertising Memories

153 Advertising Memories “I really like where your head is at,” the first advertising creative director to hire me said as he offered me a job. He was a hoary old advertising copywriter, and he had no qualms about using clich és or hanging prepositions off the end of his sentences as long as it sold. He had the bright red complexion of a practicing alcoholic . We were in his office, in that low point between his threemartini lunch and cocktail hour. I had been suffering for my art as a real writer, and I had holes in both shoes as well as in both my cheap black cotton socks. I kept both feet flat on the floor. He had seen something in the writing samples and speculative ad campaigns I had shown him. I did not know what it was at the time. I do now. He had seen the ten miles of broken glass across which I had to crawl in order to establish contact with the rest of the human race. He had seen my junk drawer of a mind. He had seen the way I could rummage around in there and come up with some “growing up in the Midwest” experience or some analogy glimpsed through a mirror darkly—an experience or analogy that might help one of the agency’s clients to appear more clever and sell more stuff. He had seen the narrow, frayed, rope bridge of humor and light-hearted whimsy that was my writing style and how that style spanned the gorge between others and me. He had seen the river of alcohol flowing in the mists far below, and he had known he would be able to deal with me, alcoholic to alcoholic. 154 ADV ERTISING MEMORIES Advertising had been good to him. He was rich enough to keep horses and bed the kind of middle-aged ingénues who love horses. He had become a fine judge of horseflesh because he had become a fine judge of advertising writers and art directors, and here I was, a promising young emotional gelding, an intriguing addition to his creative stable. He really liked where my head was at. I took the job, and minutes after I started, I knew that—in the creative department at least—I was among fellow travelers. There were brooding, paranoid workaholics. There were brooding , paranoid alcoholics. There were highly competitive schemers and overeducated, chip-on-the-shoulder, unpublished but professorial poets and failed novelists. There was a stunningly beautiful ice queen of an art director. There was an over-the-hill, raspy-voiced, chain-smoking woman writer with a fainting couch in her office and a come-hither presence that scared the crap out of me. There were a couple of big-eyed, small-voiced vamps— cast-off Daddy’s girls with loose morals and self-esteem issues. There were dope-smoking, acetone-buzzed art directors and keyliners finessing type to Pink Floyd cassettes for hours at a time. Every damned one of us was brilliantly flawed in some unique way. We were inadequate or abnormal or socially autistic or too bright for our own goddamned good. We were—each of us—willing to walk through fire to prove ourselves worthy of something— anything—in the eyes of the creative director, agency management , and the rest of the human race. We had cracks and fissures. Genius seeped, sometimes bubbled , and on rare occasions flowed through those fissures. The creative director—indeed, the entire advertising agency—prospered because of our seeping genius. It was a satanic symbiosis. The creative director and his account service director partner —the two men who owned the place—fostered an ingenious culture and nurtured our anxieties. They tended individual flaws in the way that best suited you as an individual. They did whatever it took to maximize your genius flow. If you needed to be ADV ERTISING MEMORIES 155 admired and told you were a genius, they admired you and told you that you were a genius. If you needed to be reminded you were a worthless piece of shit, they reminded you that you were a worthless piece of shit. If you needed a company car, they got you a company car. If you needed to feel unworthy of a company car, they somehow managed to do that, too. Had you needed a daily high colonic from...