How Did I Get Here?

by Bruce McCall

  Our genial hosts inevitably commenced their hospitality orgy with a mandatory dinner on the first night of our visit—more a test than a treat. Most of the American invitees had had no sleep in a day or two. Strict protocol meant that everyone at the table—probably twenty altogether—kept his mouth shut until the ranking Mercedes host and the head representative of MBNA had clinked glasses and said Mahlzeit (“Enjoy the meal”), releasing the party to drink and, eventually, to eat.

  No sooner had the group reached the hotel than a kind of tour-guide-cum-babysitter was herding everybody onto a bus that would take them out to the factory in nearby Sindelfingen. There, bone-weary visitors faked fascination watching engines dropped from above to the correct waiting car, then manhandled into place. An hour of trudging on concrete flooring with no respite for their feet left even gung ho Americans blurry, yawning, and aware of knots in their stomachs from breathing air that consisted of what seemed like fifty percent automobile paint.

  Monotony ruled on these trips: same hotel, same room, same breakfast in the gloom of winter mornings before dawn’s early light. Then in a convoy to—I never knew where, until our car stopped. There weren’t all that many choices. A weird feeling of something akin to despair overcame me one gray January morning when our small visiting delegation was driven half an hour out of town and herded into what could be called a blockhouse: the foundry where engine blocks are cast.

  Foundries are dark satanic mills at the best of times. But early on a winter morning, when you haven’t slept since leaving New York and your diurnal clock knows it’s actually midnight yesterday, your concentration wavers. Drag-assing around the foundry, pretending to listen to your tour guide when all you can think of is a warm bed (now exactly ten hours away at the earliest), your self-protective instinct takes over and forces you to think about anything but that warm bed. You shake your head violently to scatter those yearnings and return to reality. By the time the footsore factory visitor reaches the paint booth it’s been three hours; the thrill of all these behind-the-scenes glimpses has palled.

  Spirits revive when the afternoon’s final activity is a visit to the huge domed styling center. We’ve been granted the secret privilege of inspecting a new model, one not yet in production. It’s something of a kick, walking around a new car that the rest of the world is waiting for. Herr Bruno Sacco, the head of design, is gruff and formal. He wastes no time on small talk. His responsibilities are immense. Bruno Sacco is the keeper of the flame. In his hands he holds the image of the cars, and through them of the company. The challenge is to balance the temptations of a blank drawing pad with the necessity of keeping faith with the brand personality: a new model that breaks with tradition would jeopardize the familiar, vital “Mercedes-ness” that undergirds the meaning and the value of every car that rolls from the factory into the world.

  Italian-born Bruno Sacco is an old Mercedes-Benz hand. His critiques of Mercedes—and other cars—convey the sensibilities of a serious, ardent student of automotive design who thinks not in short-term annual changes to stimulate short-term sales but in how a Mercedes-Benz of today exudes values that have never changed.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Three years in, I sensed that McCaffrey & McCall was beginning to change. And not for the better. First, the agency was sold to those pirates of commerce, the Saatchi brothers in London, for cash and promises of creative support the Saatchis never honored, and probably never meant to. As chairman and principal strategist of the agency, David McCall had the right to do whatever he wanted with it. But despite his genuine belief in a democratic management style, he kept this transaction secret from his loyal staff.

  Shortly after the Saatchi deal—and again not bothering to ask anyone who knew him, including me—David hired Hank Bernhard away from Ogilvy & Mather for reasons that continue to puzzle me. He gave him the grand title of vice chairman, and nothing much to do. Not knowing Hank or what he was like, David hadn’t realized he’d just sent a wolf into a kennel full of puppies. Hank thrived on combat and wanted power. In every way imaginable, he and David were oil and water. Their fraught relationship lasted little more than a year and helped poison the atmosphere of the agency from the top down.

  Had I ever lifted my nose from the grindstone and looked around me, I would have detected flaws that eventually proved fatal. David’s almost neurotic optimism blinded him to the sensitivities of his senior creative people. Ignoring the notorious bugaboo of nepotism, he allowed his sister Peggy—who lacked any of his charm or other attributes—to run the J. C. Penney account. The most gregarious of men, he kept his distance from Peggy and she from him. I can’t remember his ever mentioning her name; she was never seen in his office, the agency’s nerve center. Was this bad blood from some ancient family feud? Was it David’s natural generosity, mixed with guilt about his success and paying for it by giving a sibling a job? I never knew, and I knew enough not to ask.

  David stocked his namesake agency with mediocrities in every senior position. Mediocrity begets mediocrity. The team he had assembled lacked fire in their bellies. The talents at his agency drifted away until it was a weak, colorless blob. If David hadn’t fooled himself and run the place on the basis of his strong personal delusions, then McCaffrey & McCall might have survived.

  I fell into a routine, driving to New York on Monday mornings and back to Conway late on Thursdays. My Manhattan digs were lavish: a room in the UN Plaza, a boutiquey new hotel serving United Nations visitors. (The UN itself was right around the corner.) Hotel life in New York suited me; I’d stroll over to the UN Plaza after work, order the finest cheeseburger known to man from room service, and luxuriate in bed, reading a book.

  My Willy Loman life in New York did much to quell my dissatisfaction in living the crummy country life. Phone calls home wiped the delight off my face, fast: my gain was Polly’s loss. Depressed to the brink of tears when I wasn’t there to share our failed dreams of rural life, she had no company in that big, echoing house, night after long night. I was forced to face a fact: my otherwise bulletproof wife harbored a genuine phobia about being left alone in the silence of a gloomy old house in the epicenter of nowhere.

  How could I rewind Polly’s desperate plight and help make her life at least bearable until I could invent another way of earning a decent livelihood? My meek suggestions sounded feeble even as I spoke: read the entire oeuvres of all your favorite writers; brush up on your Italian; scope out a nearby YMCA and use the swimming pool. To which suggestions Polly responded with a variety of derisive snorts.

  Farmwife Sophie Hart from next door phoned one summer day. “We got three kittens we’re drownding,” she rasped. “So if you want ’em you better hurry!” In minutes Polly had dumped three cats—one orange, one black, one beige and white—on the kitchen floor. Goldie, Tommy, and Tuffy had arrived, in all their softball-size wiggliness.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Franklin County had been dirt-poor since the Civil War: a woebegone northern spur of Appalachia populated mainly by hardscrabble farmers, laborers, and sixties-era hippies lying low. Our lack of rapport with Conway remained from first day to last. But in the end, the town failed to live up to the idiotic delusions by which we judged it.

  What finally budged us out and back to New York happened around dinnertime on a sullen mid-March afternoon in 1980. Polly’s car pulled into the driveway. A minute later she burst into the kitchen area where I was sitting on a couch, browsing The Boston Globe.

  I managed to get out “How was your—” when Polly barked, “Guess what—I’m pregnant!”

  The celebration was muted: this pregnancy was Polly’s fourth after three miscarriages, none of which had made it past the first trimester. This run of abrupt failures had mystified Polly, a healthy thirty-seven-year-old who’d given up smoking and didn’t drink. When the pregnancy surpassed that previously sad milestone, Polly took that fact as a positive
omen. Because I didn’t care for another gripping drama ending in sorrow, I joined the positivity team.

  Park Avenue obstetricians had examined Polly after her run of miscarriages, and no cause seemed obvious; the simple explanation, she heard from her relays of medical experts, was that birth was a serious and mysterious thing. “So keep on trying, Polly,” went the advice, “and one of these days you may get lucky.”

  Polly had gone to a doctor in Greenfield once we were settled in. His examination yielded a heretofore unremarked clue: her supply of corpus luteum was low. This meant that when the fetus in the womb reached a certain weight, the sac it occupied wasn’t strong enough to support it. Invariably, a miscarriage resulted.

  So Polly began a drug regime to increase her corpus luteum supply, and it worked. She went to term, and our daughter arrived without incident. Chalk one up for the country way of life.

  Pregnancy instantly reordered our minds, our priorities, our values, and the habits of our lives. Those lives now meant more than daydreaming: we wouldn’t stay in this backwater a minute longer than needed to take our prize to thrive in civilization. A fresh wave of action bestirred even me. We would rent out the Conway house and rent an apartment for ourselves back on the Upper West Side, real estate permitting. (For reasons that can only be attributed to the power of necessity, we succeeded without much incident in letting out our Paradise Abandoned to a pleasant younger couple beckoned by the same call we’d succumbed to.)

  The dark, stuffy, and never other than creepy attic was plundered for its treasures and its junk, in the standard country-to-city ratio of one part treasure to twenty parts futureless flotsam, lugged to the municipal dump.

  By October 19, the baby was overdue. An hour after driving to Greenfield, during lunch at Herm’s, Polly took a sip of her coffee and announced, “My water just broke.” My 1980 Mercedes 300D wagon far exceeded the power limits of a diesel in a mad sprint to the emergency entrance of Greenfield’s sole hospital. Overpowered by the significance of this moment, both excited partners now fell silent, realizing that our quotidian existence, our individual lives, were turning upside down.

  This wasn’t the comfy pondering of our choices anymore. We had just entered the realm of real time as Polly was rushed from the hospital entrance to wherever births are managed. Our snobby plan to arrange for a drug-free childbirth was jettisoned as soon as the doctor recommended a cesarean birth. The baby’s position in Polly’s womb wasn’t precarious; still, a risk existed—so, given the shaky state of two first-time parents, we said no thanks to the fashionable natural procedure.

  The reality of childbirth pulled us onto a higher plane. The atmosphere changed. The McCalls, calmer than they’d felt in months, now saw themselves as stable graybeards. Around suppertime on Monday, October 20, 1980, we greeted the arrival of a nine-pound, seven-ounce gift. Joyous relief flooded my parched system. It was all my emotions could handle to simply admire this miraculous creature as she was lifted from her mother’s belly, weighed, wrapped in swaddling, and then officially handed over to her mom.

  We named her Amanda Christine McCall, after a spirited competition waged for months. An unsurprising name, given Dad’s pressure to keep all McCall names traditionally conservative. So although we toyed with classy, original names we stuck with Amanda. A classy name, but lacking the singular charms of our first choice, Havana.

  The medical center’s rule was that fathers change to hospital greens—for bacteria neutrality, I suppose. Later that day, when I retrieved my civilian pants from the locker, they had been lightened by fifty bucks in cash. So what? I said to myself: suddenly life was too exciting to waste time on trivia.

  The small Greenfield hospital supplied a bevy of pleasant surprises. Nurses and staff were efficient and friendly, a meaningless sort of compliment until the chips are down and the patient needs a kind word.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  One dark and stormy night six months earlier, Polly had glimpsed a shadowy figure moving slowly along the gravel road leading to the highway. On closer inspection the figure revealed itself to be a big, rough-coated black dog. He was limping. Protruding from his chest was a thin stick—he’d been walking the trail up on the ridgeline and had a mishap stumbling downhill.

  Polly whisked the exhausted dog down to the local vet. The dog suffered the insult to his system more stoically than most humans—me, for example. The vet said the dog was half Labrador, half some similar breed. He exhibited no cringing or flinching. Fear never clouded his liquid, trusting eyes or ruffled his calm nature. His personality endeared him to us. He sat patiently in the rear of the station wagon, and by next day he had settled into our midst, a part of the family.

  The renters agreed to keep him at the house and care for him until our return in the spring.

  He was crazy with joy when we pulled up to the house. A full summer followed; then it was time again to leave. Departure day arrived on a cool October afternoon. Packed into the wagon were three cats, two pugs, Polly, our baby, her babysitter, a bunch of black plastic garbage bags stuffed with quaint utensils, and me. A big country dog, we were advised, would be unhappy in the city. I checked my rearview mirror as we pulled away; there was the dog, lunging after us. He kept up the chase until exhaustion forced an end to the pursuit. I glanced back for a last fleeting look at High Meadow Farm. There he sat in the middle of the gravel road, exhausted. I knew dogs could be trained to imitate human emotions, but until that moment I never realized that a dog could express disappointment, confusion, and a sense of betrayal.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Coming back to New York City reversed every aspect of our durance vile in Western Massachusetts. It took a couple of weeks to synchronize. Polly traded her Nurse Ratched house-mothering duties in Greenfield for a re-return to Columbia University and her rudely interrupted pursuit of a master’s degree in social work. I went back to advertising. My plan/dream to haul myself up to the status of a literary lion and an artist of fame and fortune got sidetracked even before I got to New York. We needed money and lots more of it. The sole route to a stable income, I thought, was advertising, and I would operate under this assumption through two Reagans and most of a Bush.

  All the while, in case it hasn’t been established over the course of this book, I’d kept up with my artwork. Liz Darhansoff, my friend Dan Okrent’s book agent, wised me up on publishing and what it could mean for me and my work. I’d cobbled together a myriad of reasons based on my own low self-regard and semi-moronic grasp of the industry why I’d never have a book with my name on it. Everybody in Letters was an Ivy League graduate who’d read every good book in print, knew the night-shift hatcheck girl in every bar in town, and crewed on the second-place spot in the most recent America’s Cup race.

  But behold! My first book, Zany Afternoons, its title provided by young Ben Pesta for an earlier, much-briefer collection that appeared in the January 1975 issue of Esquire, was released at the start of the 1982 Christmas season. The American reviews topped Canadian critics’ responses (apparently they took umbrage with some of the good-natured ribbing from a distant countryman). Similar treatment has followed with every subsequent book I’ve published.

  Canadians resent critical satire, more so when it comes from the USA. And when the critic is a Canadian expat living in the USA, the blow is tripled.

  Zany Afternoons is 123 pages of childish wackiness that captures some of the joy of finding my career after years of fecklessness. But joy hardly gushes from those pages. Much of the content is dark. Still, the creator was as happy, as productive, as masterful of his material as he’d probably ever get.

  Seventy-seven New Yorker covers and I’m still flabbergasted.

  (Courtesy of Bruce McCall and The New Yorker)

  Chapter 11

  Under the Covers

  After a decade-plus in the ranks of McCaffrey & McCall, I realized I�
��d had enough. Not just enough of that agency, but of advertising altogether. This had been true since the early 1980s, when I’d started to get some traction with my humor pieces and artwork. To a more confident person, publishing a book, appearing on late-night talk shows, and having your work featured in national magazines might be sufficient proof of one’s creative merits. But I was not yet convinced.

  As I saw it, just because you’re on the ice for a long time doesn’t make you Wayne Gretzky. Even if everyone in the stands knows to the number how many goals you’ve scored, if you don’t see yourself as a player, you might as well be trying to skate in flip-flops. (Speaking of ice, this metaphor is starting to show some cracks, but you get the idea.)

  When I finally mustered the guts to flee the corporate world and get going on the career I wanted, whatever fears I’d had were, at that point, less scary than living the rest of my life as an adman. So in 1993, after nearly forty years with one foot out the door of the ad industry, I finally dragged the other one out, ending it all not with a bang but with two weeks’ notice. I was fifty-eight years old when my real creative life began, at least as far as I’d understood it.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  In the months after I left McCaffrey & McCall, I wrote and illustrated pieces for Car and Driver, Forbes FYI, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Toronto Globe & Mail, and others. As assignments continued to come in, I realized I hadn’t made a terrible mistake leaving the adbiz. My real mistake had been allowing myself to be trapped there for so long.