Kickback and Other Stories

by Peter Sellers

  At the end of the set, Fern Gold left the band to play her off-stage. Sonny took the opportunity to bend down to the microphone and say again, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the uniquely talented Fern Gold.”

  When they left the stage, Touch helped Sonny back to the green room. Lanford Steel went to the bar. I crossed the room to talk to him. By then, Fern Gold had disappeared. Probably hiding, I thought.

  “I really like your playing,” I said to Lanford.

  He just nodded and smiled. “Have you played Toronto before?” I asked. If he had, I’d no memory of it.

  “Not for a long, long time. Someplace downtown. A big joint with two floors, I seem to recall.”

  “Probably the Colonial,” I said, although the name didn’t spark any recognition in his eyes. “It’s long gone.”

  “Most of them are,” he said. “Most of the old clubs and most of the old cats.”

  This was the opening I wanted and I did not hesitate. “Except Sonny,” I said. Those two words were all it took and we were off and running on the legend of Sonny Carver. We talked about his career; his turbulent relationships with three ex-wives; his battles with record labels; how he came to be playing this gig.

  Back at my table, I waited uncomfortably for the band’s return. I thought about Sonny’s situation. It made me agitated, and I had trouble sitting still. My left leg started the unconscious bouncing it does when nervous energy takes over. I had no idea how long it was before I noticed and stopped it. A minute later, I found myself doing it again.

  I was drinking faster too. The beer disappeared in a series of steady swallows. I looked around for the waitress but she was not in sight. I went to the bar. As I waited to be served, I became increasingly angry. Somebody ought to do something to help Sonny. He should be allowed on stage, with Williams and Steel, to play the last set unencumbered.

  I gazed around the bar but no one else looked as if they cared as much as I did. If anything was to be done, it would have to be me who did it.

  I saw Fern Gold come out of the washroom. I picked up my bottle of beer and went to intercept her.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Miss Gold.”

  She turned to me with a smile, anticipating that she was about to be told how much I appreciated her singing. While I understood that she would be disappointed to discover what I really wanted, her feelings did not matter. Sonny’s did. He was the genius and she was incompetent. I’d be doing her a favour by making that clear. “Yes?” she said.

  “Miss Gold, we’ve never met.” I wanted to make it clear that I had no personal bias against her, and harboured no animosity other than that which had developed over the course of the evening. “I have a request for the next set.”

  Her smile grew wider, but her eyes said that she was going to let me down. “Well, that’s nice of you. But we’re really not doing any requests tonight. It’s the first time…”

  I wasn’t interested in an explanation. I needed to do this quickly. The beer bottle was slippery and I gripped it with both hands. “No, no,” I said, cutting her off but still being polite. “I don’t mean I want to request a song. I want to request no songs.”

  She looked puzzled. “I want to request that you not sing any more. I want to request that you sit down and just let Sonny play. He’s who I came to hear. He’s who we all came to hear. You’re really not very good and I think you should…”

  Her face turned red. “Go to hell, you jerk,” she said. There was meanness in her voice. “You stupid creep.” Obviously my assumption had been correct. She did not have any respect for Sonny.

  “You don’t understand…” I tried, but she rudely cut me off again.

  “I understand that if you don’t get out of here now, I’ll have you thrown out.” She stepped towards the green room. My mind was reeling. How had my attempt gone so wrong?

  I waited until she was at the green room door. She went in, trying to close the door behind her. I stopped it with my hand, pushed it open, and followed her in. I knew that Sonny would listen to reason. He was sitting on a battered couch in the corner and looked up at me. “Who the hell are you?”

  Fern Gold turned on me. “You creep,” she said. “Get out! Get out now!”

  “Wait,” I said, “please. Just let me talk to Sonny. He’ll understand...”

  Sonny looked bewildered. “Who the hell is this guy?”

  “Get out!” Fern Gold said. I had to make her be quiet and give me a chance to explain to Sonny. “I’m calling a bouncer.”

  I’d been badly treated by bouncers before and I raised my hands to ask her to stop. The beer bottle, slick with condensation, slipped from my grasp and smashed on the floor.

  All of us went silent, looking at the broken glass and the spreading puddle. The respite was brief and she started in again, now trying to push past me to the door. “What the hell?” Sonny said. “What the hell?”

  It should have been simple but the situation had become confusing. I couldn’t think straight. I needed Sonny to be quiet and I needed Fern Gold to stay put. I have no memory of picking up Sonny’s saxophone. All of a sudden, it was in my hand.

  Sonny started yelling in earnest, his voice strong and forceful. “Get your god damn hands off my horn. Put down my god damn horn.”

  I raised the horn and looked at it, full of surprise. Fern Gold shrank back from the shining instrument. Sonny’s voice kept at me, “Put down my god damn horn. Put down my god damn horn.” I felt a sharp jabbing in my back. Sonny was standing now, and stabbing me with his cane, shrieking now, “Put that horn down, god damn it. Nobody touches my horn.”

  I needed time to talk but Sonny wouldn’t stop the painful jabbing. I was doing this for his benefit, after all. I turned towards him, swinging the sax. It had been so long since I’d held a tenor that I’d forgotten how heavy they are.

  The horn came around with more momentum than I’d intended. It clipped Sonny on the side of the head and he lost his balance. He waved his arms helplessly, dropped his cane, and fell back on the couch, blood starting to well from his temple. He touched the wound and gaped at the blood on his fingertips.

  Fern Gold’s behaviour had caused me to hurt Sonny. In my anger I swung the horn again, smashing it against the wall. It made a sharp clang, probably the worst sound it ever produced, and the vibration ran up my arm. One edge of the bell was pressed flat.

  “My horn,” Sonny said. “Look what you done to my horn.”

  I could not fathom how the situation had come to this. All I wanted was to hear Sonny Carver play. I could have wept with frustration.

  After that, Fern Gold claims, I smashed the saxophone several more times against the wall and then three or four times on the floor. I don’t remember that. I can’t believe that I smashed it as many times as she said.

  What I do remember is that the horn was bent and crumpled in my hand. Sonny was on the couch crying. Fern Gold was gone, the door to the green room wide open. There was noise and yelling coming from the club but it was indistinct. In the room where Sonny and I were alone all I could hear was the sound of his playing, sweet and mellow and heart breaking.

  Kickback

  (Originally published in Down & Out: The Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 3)

  THEY SAY THAT PEOPLE FROM MONTREAL drive like maniacs. The first time I drove with him, I figured Gilbert was the guy they had in mind. His dad owned a printing business, and Gil used his knowledge of printing terminology to lie his way into a job as print production manager at the ad agency I worked for. It took about two days for them to figure out he was utterly unqualified, but, for reasons beyond understanding, they didn’t fire him. They made him an account executive. I guess they figured if he could sell himself into a job he couldn’t do, he could sell clients ads that didn’t work. If they’d canned him, probably none of this would have happened.

  Gil walked into my office on his first day, grinning. “Have you written a novel yet?” he asked.

  My mind said, Fuck off, but t
he part of me that likes to get along with people said, “Yeah. It’s shit, but I wrote one.”

  Gil asked the same question to Lynne, the other copywriter, who shared the office with me.

  She laughed and shook her head. “You must have some work to do,” she said. Later, Gil confessed to me that he did have work to do but had no idea how to do it.

  Lynne responded to many questions by laughing and shaking her head. She did the same thing the first time I asked her out. Then she said, “You don’t make enough money. And you live with your parents.”

  “Not much longer,” I said, stung by the truth that I had not realized was public knowledge. “A buddy and I just got a place. I’m moving out in two weeks.”

  “Great. What about the money part?”

  Eleven grand a year seemed like a lot to me, but not everyone saw it that way.

  Lynne’s desk and mine faced each other with a five-foot partition between. It meant I could not see her when we were seated, but it was not high enough to block the clatter of typewriter keys or the smoke from Lynne’s constant cigarettes.

  The partition was also the perfect height for me to lean against and talk with her when we weren’t typing. She always left her top few buttons undone and from that angle I could look down the front of her shirt. This was the first sign I had that she was interested in me.

  Despite her feelings, I would never have asked her out if not for the photograph. She had returned from a vacation at an adults-only resort in the Caribbean where she had gone with a jingle house sales rep she was seeing and some of his high-powered ad agency friends.

  “How was the trip?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Good. It was great just to be able to kick back and relax.” She took out a four-by-six colour print. In the photo, she was standing up to her knees in the turquoise water next to a man I recognized as the creative director of a major agency. He was holding a drink, and she was turned sideways to him with her arms around his neck and her lips against his cheek. She had a cigarette between the fingers of her right hand and she was wearing a white T-shirt. The water stretched off to the horizon, uninterrupted by boat or any other sign of life, and the sky was cloudless. It took a second for me to realize she was wearing nothing other than the T-shirt, which came to just above her waist. When I handed the photo back, Lynne gave me a look that seemed to be asking what I thought.

  “It looks very relaxing,” I said.

  There was no way she would show me that photo if she wasn’t interested.

  The first time I drove with Gil was eye opening, though I reckon Jackie spent the time with his eyes closed.

  Gil had a Honda Civic, which was a very small car. Jackie, our boss, had to take his Corvette in for service, and I didn’t have a vehicle, so he asked Gil to drive us to a meeting. I squeezed into the tiny back seat with Jackie riding shotgun. I was smart enough to do up my seatbelt but Jackie was more cavalier about things like that. Gil lurched towards the exit of the parking lot. A line of vehicles waiting for a light blocked access to the street. Gil turned onto the sidewalk, drove past the end of the line of cars, and bounced over the curb onto the road. I watched Jackie’s head smack off the roof. “Jesus”, he said, rubbing his head then grabbing the dashboard with both hands as Gil roared down the street. Six blocks later, Jackie yelled at Gil, “Stop the fucking car. Now.” I was surprised at the outburst as the whole thing stuck me as fun and amusing.

  Gil pulled to the curb and Jackie climbed out, slamming the door with a violence that shook the vehicle. He raised his arm to hail a cab. “I guess we’ll meet him there,” Gil said, not put out at all.

  When Jackie hired me, I assumed that he and his partner, Alan Thomas, knew what they were doing. I figured that everyone at the agency was competent. My first clue to the contrary was when Jackie told me I had the job. He asked me if I could bring my own typewriter. I was smart enough to say no, and they supplied a stiff and noisy Remington upright.

  I was rolling in a sheet of paper on my first day when Alan came and stood next to me. “So you’re the asshole who wanted to get into advertising,” he said.

  Jackie had no previous advertising experience beyond watching commercials on TV. Alan knew a bit more than Jackie. He’d worked as ad manager for a second-rate discount retail chain that had gone out of business a couple of years before. The rest of us were basically enthusiastic amateurs who worked cheap.

  The two agency art directors, Kent and Bev, sat together in an open area of the office. They spent most of their time hunched over their drafting tables, assembling print ads for shipping to magazines and newspapers. In those days, sheets of typeset copy arrived from the type house, and the art directors used scalpels to cut the sheets apart and to make any necessary changes. Spacing was refined. Words were moved. Headlines were shifted. Hot wax was used to stick the copy to the art boards that were sent out for photo-static reproduction once approved by the client.

  I was talking with Bev one day when Jackie came over and picked up Kent’s scalpel. “I need to borrow this,” Jackie said.

  He used the blade to slice a hangnail off one of his fingers. “That’s better,” he said, putting the scalpel back and walking away.

  I must have looked surprised because Kent said, “He does that all the time. I think he uses them to pick his teeth.”

  The next time I asked Lynne out, I had come back from lunch a little drunk. Lynne was smoking and reading the paper. I gave her a charming smile. “Let’s go out on Friday night,” I said. “We can go dancing. I got my own place now.”

  “You’re sharing it,” she said with a laugh. “And did you get a raise that I don’t know about?”

  “No, but I got a car.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’ve seen it. Although just barely through that smokescreen it throws up.”

  The car needed new piston rings and burned oil, causing a blue haze when I drove, but it really wasn’t that bad. The good news was that she still hadn’t given me a flat out no.

  One day, the marketing manager of our shoe store client called to complain about a brochure that we had created. “Pure puffery,” she said. Gil and I took the initiative and drove to her office to resolve the situation.

  We spent half an hour defending our work, and grudgingly agreed to make changes. When we got back, Jackie called us into his office. He was opening his mail with a scalpel. As soon as we were through the door, he pointed the blade at us, and started yelling. “What the hell were you idiots thinking? Never go to see her without me. In fact, never go to see any client without me. In fact, never go to see any client. Period. Do you know what I had to go through to calm her down, you morons?” He went on like that for some time. I had never been on the receiving end of Jackie’s temper and it shook me. I felt frightened and angry. Finally, he told us to get the hell out of his office. A day later his outburst made sense.

  Around two o’clock the following afternoon, Jackie was on the phone, behind closed doors. His voice was raised, and it sounded like he was making an impassioned pitch that was not going well. The receiver slammed down suddenly and sharply, and I was about to knock on his door, when the smashing started. It was loud and persistent, coupled with the sound of breaking plastic, Jackie swearing all the while. When the noise stopped, Jackie stormed out of his office. He found the office manager and said, “I need a new phone, Iris. Mine doesn’t work anymore.” His voice was surprisingly calm.

  I looked in and the floor was covered with smashed plastic.

  “Jesus,” I said to Lynne. “That can’t be good.”

  The call had been from our biggest client, firing us. The next day another piece of business did the same thing. The morning after that, a third of the staff was fired, including Lynne. Gil kept his job but they laid me off and then hired me back on a freelance basis. I guess they thought that would save them money. In fact, my new rates gave me a raise.

  A few days after the mass firing, I called Lynne at home. “You can go out with me now,”
I said. “I’m making more money than you.”

  “Don’t make me come down there and hit you,” she said. “Call me when you have a good car.”

  In an attempt to salvage the agency, Jackie and Alan merged with Ryan Clark, a friend who owned the recording studio we used for radio spots.

  Ryan had a few clients of his own. His answer to every advertising problem was to use radio, preferably commercials with a bouncy jingle. He wrote the commercials, produced them in his studio, composed the music, played piano on the recording sessions, and even did the voiceovers. His background in radio news made every spot he read sounded like a recap of the day’s headlines.

  After the merger, our use of jingles increased beyond common sense. Ryan believed that a jingle could boost sales for a custom drapery company by repeating the company’s phone number over and over. This approach had worked well for a chain of pizza joints. Ryan was certain it would work for curtains, too, as if people ordered sheers and vertical blinds as frequently as they ordered a double pepperoni with extra cheese.

  Jackie fought the idea in several heated discussions to no avail. I was puzzled by the client’s willingness to buy a campaign that was so ill advised. Ryan must have been a heck of a salesman.

  Three weeks later, we won a modest piece of new business. A brief article about the acquisition appeared in one of the trade rags. The client was quoted as saying, “We picked the agency more for what Ryan Clark knows about radio than for what they know about advertising.” Jackie read this and destroyed his bookcase by kicking it repeatedly with the bottom of his foot, leaving the shelves canted and books and splintered wood on the carpet. Gil and I got a hammer and some finishing nails and did our best to repair the damage, but it was always rickety after that. Putting a cup of coffee on top of it was an act of faith.