Fire in the Firefly

by Scott Gardiner

  Long or short. Comic or Epic.

  For whatever arc your story takes.

  ARTEMIS

  “Daniel thinks that one’s too literary. We’ll see.”

  The tricky thing, in a pitch, is deciding what to explain and what to let speak for itself. Roebuck is convinced, and in turn has convinced Greenwood—whose job it is to make Roebuck’s convictions visible—that it’s best to do as little talking here as possible.

  Greenwood now silently displays a very different image.

  It’s a party scene, frozen in still life. A group of women stand in the foreground, drinks in hand, laughing and talking. They’re obviously having a good time; relaxed; social. In the background, all the men are propped like mannequins against a wall. It takes a few seconds to realize that every man in the picture is encased in a giant see-through condom. Greenwood has drawn the reservoirs to look like silly hats perched above each dimly leering face. Some of the men are clean-cut, others bearded; some tall, others short; some fat, others thin. All are smiling idiotically. They look indescribably ridiculous. Below, the caption reads:

  Too bad it won’t fit over the rest of him. ARTEMIS

  “Oh my God” says the girl in the white silk blouse. “I love the expressions!” She claps her hands with pleasure. “Such dorks!”

  Roebuck has been reading the room. The women aren’t his problem. “Daniel,” he says, “why don’t we go straight to the platform piece?” If Greenwood is startled, he doesn’t show it. Greenwood crosses the floor and taps a keyboard. A giant screen lights up:

  182 names …

  Adolf, Ankle Spanker, Baby-arm, Beaver Basher, Babymaker, Beef Whistle, Boomstick, Burrito, Bishop, Bratwurst, Braciole, Candle, Choad, Chopper, Cranny Axe, Cum Gun, Custard Launcher, Dagger, Deep-V-Diver, Dick, Dickie, Ding Dong McDork, Dirk, Dingus Disco Stick, Dog Head, Drum Stick, Dong, Donger, Dork, Dude Piston, Dragon, Eggroll, Easy Rider, Excalibur, Fang, Ferret, Flesh Flute, Flesh Tower, Foto, Fire Hose, Frodo, Fudgesicle, Fun Stick, Great Scott, Groin Ferret, Giggle Stick, Goofy Goober, Hairy the Hotdog, Heat-Seeking Moisture Missile, Helmet Head, Hose, Hog, Jackhammer, Jimmy, John, Johnson, John Thomas, Joystick, Kickstand, King Kong, King Sebastian, Knob, Lap Rocket, Lingam, Little Alex, Little Bob, Little Elvis, Lizard, Longfellow, Love Muscle, Love Rod, Love Stick, Love Whistle, Luigi, Manhood, Man Umbrella, Meat Popsicle, Meat Stick, Meat Sword, Meat Injection, Member, Meter-Long-King-Kong-Dong, Microphone, Middle Stump, Mushroom Head, Mutton, Netherrod, Old Boy, Old Fellow, Old Man, Old Buddy, One-Eyed Anaconda, One-Eyed Trouser-Snake, One-Eyed Monster, One-Eyed Wonder Weasel, One-Eyed Yogurt Slinger, Pecker, Pedro, Percy, Peter, Pete, Pied Piper, Pigskin Bus, Pink Oboe, Pink Torpedo, Pink Weasel, Piston, Plug, Pinot, Poinswatter, Pork Sword, Prick, Prince, Price Hal, Prince Harry, Private Eye, Private Part, Purple-Helmeted Warrior of Love, Purple-Headed Yogurt Flinger, Quiver Bone, Rod, Rod of Pleasure, Rod of Doom, Roundhead, Sausage, Sebastianic Sword, Schlong, Schlong Dongadoodle, Schmuck, Shmuck, Schnitzel, Schwanz, Schwarz, Sea Monster, Shaft, Short Arm, Shotgun, Skin Flute, Soldier, Spawn Hammer, Stick Shift, Sub, Surfboard, Tallywhacker, Tan Bannana, Tassle, Third Leg, Thumper, Thunderbird, Thundersword, Tinker, Tod, Todger, Tonk, Tool, Trouser Snake, Tubesteak, Twig (& Berries), Twinkie, Uncle Dick, Vein, Wand, Wang, Wang Doodle, Wanger, Whoopie Stick, Wiener, Wiener Schnitzel, Wick, Willy, Wing Dang Doodle, Winkie, Yingyang, Yogurt Gun, Zorro.

  … and every one accounted for. ARTEMIS

  A longish silence.

  “Adolf?” someone asks.

  “Fudgesicle?”

  Another snort. Roebuck wonders if it’s the girl in the blouse, but he isn’t looking. He’s watching the CEO.

  “Meter-Long-King-Kong-Dong?” A ripple passes through the room.

  “Rod of Pleasure! Jesus, who came up with these? One-Eyed Wonder Weasel?”

  Outright laughter now.

  “I dated a guy who called his Clyde,” remarks the VP Brand Development with the lizard-hide pumps. She looks over at Greenwood, arching eyebrows. I don’t see Clyde on your list.”

  Greenwood doesn’t miss a beat. “We’ll add it. That’ll make it one-eighty-three.” The women titter. “Note, however, Pedro, Percy, Peter, and Pete …”

  “And Quiver Bone! God help us, Quiver Bone!”

  Greenwood clears his throat. “This larger image is designed for bus shelters and subway platforms. It could go outdoors, of course, as well. Anywhere, really, that offers time and opportunity for our audience to take it in.” The women seem to find this idea funny too. Roebuck is still concentrating on the CEO. The other three men present—brand stewards of various strains—have gone so quiet they’re invisible. Roebuck gets out of his chair, leans in, and grips the CEO’s shoulder. “You are not enjoying this, are you?”

  “What the …!” The man gapes and shakes him off. He is taken so off guard, he’s speechless. But he recovers, furiously. “What are you running here, a fucking Tupperware party?” The women have stopped laughing.

  Roebuck strolls back to his chair. “Come to think of it, that might be a strategy we can think about, in future. But for now I have to tell you how wonderfully you all have demonstrated the nature of this campaign.” He clasps his hands behind his back and bows—to the women. “Thank you.” The CEO begins to speak, but Roebuck cuts him off.

  “Artemis is female. It’s a female product. It’s something used not so much with men as despite them. Your competitors have the together angle covered. There are lots of clever condom ads out there. It’s a very creative field, if you’ll forgive the levity. Artemis needs to differentiate. We know the standard condom ad is aimed at men. When they do target women, we also know they tend to take the rosy-pink approach. Artemis, therefore, is going bright blood red. Forget love. Forget closeness. Forget all that skin-to-skin togetherness crap. Artemis is a product women choose apart from men. Despite men. Daniel, show.”

  Greenwood touches the keyboard and a new frame appears. This time it’s an image of a wood screw, jagged and rusty, crudely driven through a plank. The screw is inside a condom which has been drawn to cover it like a buffering sheath.

  “Hard to miss the symbolism,” Roebuck says. “But let’s read the copy anyway.”

  ARTEMIS. A new twist on getting screwed.

  He turns to face the CEO. “One of your people just hit the nail on the head. Dorks. That’s what men are. And if they’re not dorks, they’re something worse. Artemis understands. From a cultural perspective, what we represent is one more element that has finally been pried away from men and placed with women, where it belongs.”

  Greenwood is quietly stacking his boards. “Five out of ten women with a college education or better,” he says, “earn higher salaries than the man they live with. Men are falling behind, and women are picking up the slack …”

  Roebuck waves him off. “Listen. A minute ago you asked why I was wasting your time with my canned history of the Ripreeler campaign. Point is, by doing things so differently, we caught a buzz. Whoever thought of using fashion models to promote fishing lures? Answer: The same folks advising you to run a condom campaign in which men are not relevant. You may not remember this as well as your female associates”—Roebuck is looking at the CEO, but talking to the women—“but because of that campaign, women actually started buying our merchandise as accessories. That was never part of the strategy, we just lucked out. You remember! How Oprah appeared on her show wearing a Yellow Dot Spinner, if memory serves. And suddenly women were wearing our lures out to the clubs on Saturday night!”

  Roebuck draws a breath and appears to dial it down a notch. “The craze lasted all of five minutes, sure. That’s the nature of buzz: it moves on. But meantime it moved, well, lots of units off the shelves and to this very day eight out of ten consumers will answer Ripreeler, if you ask them to name a brand of fishing lure. Happy to show you the data, if you’re interested.”

 
The CEO is not interested. “Are you trying to tell me you’re expecting women to wear our condoms in their ears?”

  Even as he says it, he realizes the extent of his misstep. Roebuck watches the man’s mouth form a small, involuntary O, as if he hoped to suck the words back in. His female colleagues stiffen, some literally edging away.

  “Here’s what I do know.” Roebuck is now back directly with the only audience that matters. “If there is one defining feature of our era, it’s that this is a time when gender roles have never been so misaligned. There’s a deck of research we’re about to show you. But for now, I want to focus on its significance—significance for marketers, I mean. All the polling, all those satisfaction-surveys taken across the board by researchers of widely varying perspectives—all that sum of data informs us of a universal trend, and that’s that women today are less happy than at any time since this kind of data started being gathered. That’s my first observation. The second—and the more important corollary for our purposes—is that it’s very, very easy nowadays to remind a woman how …”

  “Pork sword!” says the girl in the white silk blouse.

  It’s hard to tell which of them is more startled, Roebuck or the CEO.

  “Uncle Dick,” she chants. “Trouser Snake.” She is pointing at the screen.

  Greenwood has clicked back to his penis list. He looks around, reddening. “Notice how I’ve bolded the ones that seem a little more, um, egregious. I was thinking we could maybe even throw them out on Twitter ...”

  “Clever,” says the girl in the white silk blouse.“So clever.” She is grinning as she says it, but it isn’t Roebuck she is grinning at.

  3

  Philogyny means progeny.

  The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

  Roebuck and Lily are having lunch. They have a lot of lunches; once or twice a week on average. Roebuck’s favourites, Lily’s too, are the ones they arrange to have at her place. But today’s isn’t one of those. Today they both have appointments: his with his chief financial officer, hers with the editor of a small-press literary magazine. Lily is nervous. It means a lot to her, this meeting. One of Roebuck’s objectives is to put her mind at ease, to relax her, and send her off to this important interview confident and sure of her abilities. He tops her glass and recommends she take a little sip. They are sharing a bottle of her favourite Alsatian Riesling. Roebuck is not in the least concerned about his own engagement; he’s sat through countless meetings with countless C-suite variations.

  But he too is apprehensive. He has been apprehensive for quite some time and, right at this moment, his unease is notching sharply upward. A woman has entered the restaurant, backwards, in the way of women navigating baby strollers, pulling the rig in behind her. Lily has jumped to her feet to hold the door, but it’s clear that mother and child will be through before she gets there. Lily settles back into her seat, sighing, staring, as Roebuck ponders his foreboding.

  What matters is that he come to grips.

  He spends the afternoon on Google. Results have not been reassuring. By now he’s calmer and convinced himself Lily isn’t pregnant—though this conviction arises more from intuition than any hard supporting evidence. But Roebuck has learned to trust his instinct, and Lily, somehow, doesn’t feel pregnant. She’s not behaving like she’s pregnant, at least. He’s been through three of them and, although he knows this doesn’t guarantee him expertise, Roebuck believes he has developed a sense for how a pregnancy affects a woman’s nature. It always did with Anne, certainly, and so far he hasn’t picked up any similar indicators in Lily. What she is behaving like, though, is someone who wishes she were pregnant. Which is just about as bad.

  He is acutely, agonizingly aware of his position.

  Condoms.

  Condoms or abstinence. That’s it. One option so absurd it’s farcical, like getting your lips sewn shut as a weight-gain prevention—only religious zealots or Austrian economists could come up with solutions so impossibly abstract. The other one vetoed by Lily herself. This was early on in their relationship. “I hate the feel of them,” she’d said, gently taking the preventive from his hands into hers. “Plus, you know I’m on the pill. So why bother?”

  And, to be fair, Roebuck has never put up much in the way of counterargument. But then again, how could he? “I don’t sleep around,” she told him, tossing his rubber like a Frisbee back into its shiny box. “And I assume the same of you.” Part of him finds it almost comical. Roebuck has a native tolerance for comicality.

  And he does trust Lily. Absolutely. It’s just that professional experience has taught him how profoundly skilful people are at removing obstacles. Much as he adores her, much as he admires her integrity, much as he believes what she herself believes, Roebuck knows he would be foolish to overlook the fact that Lily belongs to precisely the demographic he has made his life’s work studying. She is—according to all the literature—precisely the age when childless women start obsessing. Bang on. And she has been obsessing. Perhaps not consciously, but all the signs are there to see. Just this afternoon he found her gazing through the window of Baby Gap.

  Roebuck knows he knows this. He, of all people. Reduced to its essentials, advertising is the business of encouraging the consumer to give herself permission to obtain the things she wants to obtain. Including things she thinks she shouldn’t. Like, for example, his gametes. And he would be …

  Although, not quite.

  Not quite absolutely powerless. There is another option. Plan V, call it. It’s been skulking in the undergrowth for quite some time now. Roebuck is not sure he likes it. In fact, he’s certain he isn’t going to like it. Gingerly, his fingers return to the keyboard and begin to type the word whose first three letters make his sphincter tighten. The door swings open, and Daniel Greenwood walks in.

  “Got a minute?”

  Roebuck almost answers no. It’s on the tip of his tongue, just for an instant, to say the door was closed and what does that suggest? But his better nature reasserts itself. “What’s up, Daniel?”

  “Am I interrupting?”

  Roebuck lets a little pause go by for Greenwood to absorb. “What can I do for you?” He nods toward an empty chair.

  Greenwood replies with a calculated hesitation of his own, returns the nod, and then accepts the invitation. Once again, Roebuck finds himself expecting that he’s going to like this guy.

  “I’ve never seen a pitch go down quite like that.”

  “Pitch?” Roebuck has not yet returned to the present.

  “The Artemis pitch. What other pitch was there?” Greenwood is puzzled. “I’ve never seen a creative director deliberately antagonize the head of a company he’s courting. That, I have to admit, was a first.”

  Roebuck drags his eyes from his search engine. “That’s because you haven’t fully embraced the ethic here, Daniel. But you will.” He removes his fingers from the keyboard. “When I say that only women count in this business, I mean it. Especially, especially with this account.”

  “You manhandled the CEO!”

  “Manhandled.” Roebuck rolls the word across his tongue. “Evocative. But sadly obsolete.”

  “The guy’s the fucking CEO! If I were him, I’d just walk away. I think he’s going to blow us off.”

  “You are not him. And he can’t blow us off. That’s what he’s paying us to help him understand. That’s the depth of insight we’ll be billing him for. He’s a man. It doesn’t matter if he’s CEO or the guy who mops the floors at 3:00 AM. If the women in that group have made up their minds they want this, there’s no man going to contradict them. And don’t worry, he gets that. He’d never have got this high up the ladder if he didn’t. He’s an MBA, for Christ’s sake. He runs a condom company. That’s the most important thing they teach them at biz school, the trick of taking pride in having no pride. He won’t let that stand in the way.”

  �
�And I’m getting the impression you have an issue with MBAs?”

  Roebuck considers. “My kid came home from school the other day, having learned that there are as many bacteria in our bodies as there are human cells.”

  “Yeah,” says Greenwood. “I remember learning they play a crucial role and that we couldn’t get along without them.”

  “So imagine you’re a nascent batch of protoplasm, wondering what you’re going to be when you grow up. Will you study hard and someday be a brain cell? Or maybe you’ll stretch yourself until you get to be a neuron or a nice white corpuscle. Our MBA is the kid who decides he wants to be E. coli because there’s double-digit growth-potential in the pathogen sector. I understand their function. I just wouldn’t want to be one.”

  “Right,” says Greenwood. “Funny. Such a funny guy.”

  “Look. It’s just good business. Artemis is a fempro. That’s the brief—internally, with the client—not just the consumer. Think tampons. Think brassieres. Think IUDs. Exclusively female. That’s our mindset. Something men have no business even thinking about. Never mind whose dick it ends up on, Daniel. Artemis is female.”

  “Then what are we for? If it’s all about women, how do we fit in, guys like us? Wouldn’t the client be smarter to go to an agency staffed exclusively by women and cut the dicks out altogether?”

  Roebuck is certain, now, that this will be a fruitful relationship. He reaches across the desk and closes his laptop; Greenwood is humouring him and Roebuck has decided now will be as good a time as any.

  “Because we’re the experts, you and I,” he says. “Because we’ve been programmed as advertisers—by virtue of our maleness—since the very first Y chromosomes mutated into being. We’re the fiddle on the fiddler crab, Daniel. We’re the lyre on the lyre bird. The antlers on the elk. The fire in the firefly. What we are, my friend, is billions and billions of years of evolutionary strategy aimed at one thing and one thing only: Getting Girls. We understand, you and I, as advertisers—above all else—that what life is all about is catching the female eye. That’s it. Only women count. And by the way, you did great in there today. I had no idea.”