Flea Flicker

by David Chill

  "Never a problem, Johnny-Boy," laughed Blair, as we followed him onto a silver elevator. "We're here to make your life easier."

  What we were really here to do was earn a good living. Garter was about to unveil a supplement designed to enhance and extend female pleasure, a type of Viagra-for-women. They were certain it would be a boon to company earnings, and more importantly, to the executives' own personal wealth. I had nothing against people earning more money or getting more pleasure out of life. I did, however, hold serious qualms about how Garter would spread the word about their life-altering new product.

  It was over ten years ago when my daughter, Angelina, just six years old and exceedingly precocious, wandered into our kitchen one bright Sunday morning to inquire as to the meaning of erectile dysfunction. My mouthful of Cuban roast coffee nearly spewed back into the mug. When my wife, Leslie, asked where she had come upon such an interesting malady, Angelina said it was while watching a cartoon on a heretofore safe kids' TV channel. She then asked us what bankruptcy meant. I deflected both topics by offering her a slice of cherry Danish, a ruse that temporarily focused her attention on something less disturbing. In addition to not wanting to educate a small child about subjects beyond her comprehension, I also didn't want her to know the ugly truth surrounding some of these kids’ networks. That these channels, ostensibly aimed at providing wholesome entertainment for young children, had audiences comprised of a remarkably high percentage of under-educated, under-employed, middle-aged men. The ads, an eclectic mishmash of products, promoted toys and candy for children, in between more mature commercials geared toward a wildly different demographic.

  John led us into a glass-enclosed conference room, a transparent bubble within a busy office. There were a half dozen executives already sitting around a large, black lacquer table, chatting amiably. They were all well-dressed and attractive, looking every bit the part of the successful corporate elite. A round of hellos and handshakes were exchanged, and we eased into our Monday morning meeting by floating tales of our weekends. Tennis matches, hikes in Ojai, box seats for an Angel game, and sailing trips to Catalina. The leisure activities of the well-to-do. I plugged my laptop's cable into the HDMI slot, waited for the small talk to subside, and hoped the pain in my back would ease up soon. When the eyes around the table began to settle on me, I invoked Blair's standard consultant posture, which was to tell the clients precisely what they wanted to hear, and gloss over the things they did not.

  "Folks, I have some very good news. Exceptional, in fact. Reaction to your concept was great. We did eight focus groups, and virtually every woman loved the idea. Home run everywhere. Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas. The response was consistent. Their biggest question was simple. How soon could they get their hands on this product?"

  Smiling faces and knowing glances spread around the room. "I told you so," crowed Gretchen, a smiling, middle-aged woman with shiny, golden blonde hair that drifted down past her shoulders. Gretchen Heller was the general manager and the interim CEO of Garter, which was a fancy way of saying she was the one in charge. Their previous CEO, Glenn Keane, had been dethroned last year, as quarterly earnings missed the target Wall Street had established. They missed it by four cents a share.

  "You nailed it, Gretchen," said Victor, one of the young product managers, exhibiting not the least bit of shame in flattering the boss. "Got to give you all the credit. You fast-tracked this baby a few months ago."

  "Good team effort," she corrected him. "We need something. Our numbers have to get back up quick. The board wants to see earnings turn around by end of year."

  This reminded me of something, many decades ago, when I had registered for a finance course in college. On the first day of class, the professor harped repeatedly on his definition of money. There were three basic and unquestionable rules. More is better than less, sooner is better than later, and certain is better than uncertain. He told the class that if we recalled nothing more from him that semester, his job would be done. I took that as a sign, dropped the finance course, and enrolled in abnormal psychology.

  "So, tell us," Victor said, turning to me. "How much can we charge for DX-101?"

  "We can't really make that call with focus groups," I cautioned, thinking of the best way to lead them into the next paying project. "You need hard data now. Price testing has to be quantitative. Discrete choice modeling would be a good method. We can handle that. If you're interested."

  "Believe me, we're interested," Gretchen smiled, and a low level of chuckling could be heard around the table. "We also need a consumer-friendly name for it."

  "Of course," said a round, balding man named Jack, whose face had a natural sneer to it, as if he had shoved a pair of peppermint lifesavers on the inside of his upper lip, "we're going to need your full attention on our business. We're assuming you two guys aren't going to be distracted by doing polling for politicians in the near future."

  "What?!" Blair interrupted, displaying mock outrage but making sure to keep a smile pasted onto his face. "Come on Jack, it's not an election year. Besides, one thing I can say and I guarantee this to be true, your business comes first. It always comes first. We love working with you guys. Garter takes precedence over everyone. Even the president. And I'm going to tell him that next time we speak."

  More laughter around the room. The president wasn't running for anything now, and in fact, the last time he even spoke to Blair was twenty years ago when he was still a fledgling mayor in Phoenix, and Blair was managing the primary campaign of a woman who was trying in vain to unseat him. The gist of the president's comment to Blair was to angrily admonish him to stop lying about his record, or he'd be scattering Blair's ashes across the Arizona desert.

  I led Garter's executive team through the remaining details of the focus groups, findings that should have come from our moderator, Haley Comey, who had conducted the groups last week. I omitted the gnarly details of our traipsing through airports choked with too many people, eating room-service sandwiches at midnight, and staying in supposedly smoke-free hotel rooms that still had the faint, lingering smell of stale cigarettes. I also didn't discuss Haley's flattering advances toward me, which of course, was my problem, not theirs. I regaled them with anecdotes about the women Haley interviewed, ones who described their marital relations in remarkably candid detail, women who were intrigued by Garter's fast-acting supplement. The new product could supposedly arouse them in mere minutes, evoking smiles from a few seniors whose eyes glimmered at the thought of jump-starting their sex lives again. The team listened rapturously to our results, as if I were relating how their young child swished a game-winning basket in a YMCA league.

  "This is great stuff," said Luke, a sturdy-looking young man with the hint of a brown beard covering a square jaw. "But why isn't Haley here? You normally have the moderator present findings."

  Taking a breath, I considered how best to respond to this. I also noticed my back starting to hurt whenever I breathed hard, and I tried to put the pain out of my mind. I normally moderated the focus groups, but in this instance, when the subject was of a sexual nature and the participants were all female, there was no way a man could lead this intimate conversation. Haley was one of our employees; the operative word being was, because I needed to dismiss her upon our return to L.A. Her work had been good, but her advances, both coquettish and churlish, had reached a breaking point on the trip. I had warned her about her behavior, but the warnings went unheeded, as they often do with people who maintain agendas.

  After conferring with Blair when I returned to the office on Friday, I finally convinced him there was no other option. His argument for retaining her bordered on the personal. Blair and I were remarkably different in so many ways, but we managed to find common ground. Our company was the equalizer; we normally agreed to do what was best for the business. We had seemingly incongruous backgrounds, but they managed to come together to shore up the other's deficiencies. My South Carolina-low country sense of decency and mora
lity, coupled with Blair's breezy L.A. sophistication. Our partnership had meshed, though at times it was jagged and uneven. We still moved in concert, but lately the dance had been strained. I was a little surprised at his resistance to dismissing Haley, but apparently there was more there than met the eye, mine being partially blind. That he had slept with her was a subject that went unspoken, but confirmed nevertheless.

  I had taken Haley aside on Friday and delivered the bad news, told her that her services would no longer be needed, her personal belongings to be gathered and taken with her immediately. She demanded to speak with Blair, a request that would not be fulfilled, as he had conveniently departed the office for an exceedingly long lunch. After the initial wave of shock wore off, she angrily responded that a lawsuit would quickly be filed, and she also took the opportunity to relay her fervent wish that both Blair and I would rot in hell. Needless to say, it was not the type of professional parting one hopes for.

  "We unfortunately needed to undertake ... " I started.

  "Haley," Blair broke in, "had to tend to a family emergency. We told her to take all the time she needs. She'll be out a while. But Ned went to all the groups, he was in the back room, so he's totally up to speed on this. More so, in fact, since he was sitting behind the glass watching."

  My partner came into our business knowing precious little about focus groups, but Blair did know how to spin a yarn. An improvisational actor with impeccable timing, the truth was like warm clay, stretched and molded to fit whatever purpose lay in front of him. It was a skill that came effortlessly to Blair, one which often left me befuddled. Blatant lying was a trait that was becoming tiresome to endure.

  "I love this," Gretchen beamed and turned to Quinn. "Can you get the agency to start developing a creative brief, John? I'd like them to brainstorm and get some product names for Ned and Blair to test. PAA should also start looking at a media plan. This is going to be fantastic!"

  John nodded enthusiastically and then looked up at me. "Say, Ned. Did you get any feedback from the groups as to how best to position this?"

  "Thank you for providing a segue to my next chart," I said, the pain in my back growing more severe. I smiled broadly, not in reaction to John's question, but to avoid wincing. In some circumstances, a person exhibiting pain would evoke sympathy; this was not one of them. In the corporate world, appearing physically weak was akin to being weak in every other area. I tried taking a deep breath but the pain registered even more harshly. I thought longingly of the bottle of Advil sitting in my medicine cabinet at home as I soldiered on.

  "Let me step back for a moment and explain what we did. We sometimes use what's called projective techniques in focus groups. This allows people to get creative and personify a product. It gives them permission to either praise it or trash it, but without losing the veneer of being polite. If the product were a person, we ask what they would be like, how would they look, how would they dress, where would they live, what would they eat. I once moderated a focus group and asked them to describe an internet site that was under-performing. Someone depicted it as a man who had been wealthy at one time and now ate most of his meals at Burger King."

  "So what'd they think of DX-101?" asked Victor.

  "In this case, we had them describe the kind of a car a person who used this new Garter product would drive. The answers we got ranged from Porsches to Lamborghinis. We then asked what kind of home they would live in and they said a swanky condo, maybe in Manhattan. Or Miami, right on the water."

  "Wonderful!" someone said. "Sounds like we'll be able to charge a lot for it!"

  "But a word of caution," I said, tightening my abdominal muscles as my back pain intensified. "The lifestyle this kind of person lives is not necessarily aspirational. We are still a sexually confused nation. On the one hand, people admire those who have an active, freewheeling lifestyle. But they don't necessarily see that in themselves. These people acknowledge they don't live in a Park Avenue penthouse, and were a little hesitant to do what it takes to get there. They admire the life, but they don't necessarily approve of it."

  "Meaning?" John asked.

  "Meaning," I said, grimacing now at the heightened degree of pain, and feeling less able to choose my words carefully, "this needs to be positioned in a classy way. Any sexually related product can be tricky to promote. This is one of those. Do it wrong, and it can kill you."

  A pall of silence filled the conference room. Someone coughed. I took a deep breath and the pain in my back expanded sharply for a brief moment before starting to ease when I breathed out. Blair looked aghast for a moment, although he quickly morphed into good-old-boy mode. "But you guys'll never do it wrong," he told them. "You're Garter! You're the best!"

  The tensioned subsided, Gretchen heartily agreed, and the conversation around the table began to flow again. I sat down and pushed my back tightly against the soft chair. I eased back and tried to listen, although I barely followed the discussion, focusing more on breathing slowly and rhythmically through my nose, keeping my teeth clenched. After a good twenty minutes of discussion, Gretchen concluded the meeting by thanking us and saying they would be in touch with next steps. John led us back down to the lobby.

  "Great presentation, fellas," he said. "We definitely want you involved in the price testing. The discrete ... what was that?"

  "Discrete choice," I said. "It's multi-variate research. We show consumers a product with different prices in different size jars featuring different brands. The consumers then get to select trade-offs. It works very well. You wind up with the optimal price point. The one where you make the most money."

  "Well that's the one we want. And we trust you guys. We'll be in touch, this was great. Thanks."

  We said our goodbyes and Blair and I walked silently across the lobby toward the parking garage. We passed a Starbucks, its long line snaking out all the way into the street, as caffeine-deprived office workers waited for their late morning fix. Had the queue been shorter, I might have stopped off for something. But I also sensed Blair's unusual reserve; Blair being quiet usually meant Blair wanted to talk. He just didn't want to do it in public. As we entered the garage area, he lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. We waited a long minute in silence before the garage elevator arrived. With timing worthy of a philharmonic maestro, Blair turned to me at the exact moment the elevator doors closed.

  "Did you really need to ask that?" he snapped. "Do you want to blow everything?"

  I stared at him. "Can you expand on that?"

  “You bet your ass I can expand on that. Were you really going to tell them about canning Haley?"

  "I don't think you need to worry about her."

  "I'm more worried about you. And that other comment. That if Garter does it wrong, they'll kill their product? What was that about?"

  "I don't know," I said, not wanting to talk about my back pain. "It just slipped out. Why is this a problem?"

  "We're on the brink of landing the biggest client of our lives, the break we've been waiting for forever."

  I felt my breathing grow rapid, and the pain in my back intensifying. "You're not talking about Garter. You're talking about the vice president."

  "Of course I'm talking about the vice president," he said. "You've got to be very careful about what you say, and to whom you say it. Especially if we're going to start playing in the big leagues with Richard Sudeau."

  I shook my head. "Don't you think your concerns are unfounded?"

  "I have a funny feeling they're very well founded. There's something going on with you today. Don't you want to be successful?"

  "Sure," I said, eyeing him warily.

  "You're not becoming one of those guys who's scared of success, are you?" Blair asked, wrinkling his nose. "The ones that self-sabotage?"

  "Of course not."

  "Then you should feel very lucky I was there to step in."

  "I'm beginning to wonder how lucky I am," I responded, the pain in my back weighing heav
ily. "I thought the meeting went well."

  "It did. Because of me. What if I weren't there? Where would you be without me?" he demanded, pointing the lit end of the cigarette in my face.

  "The same damn place you'd be without me," I replied, the restraint draining from me, but not enough to verbalize where he could stick his cigarette.

  We stared at each other for a long second, our words resonating, becoming louder through the silence, as we had nothing else to fill the void. It was not the first tense conversation we had had, and I sensed it would not be the last. Our partnership often went down this rocky path. Argue, confront, reconcile, repeat. A cycle engaged.

  The elevator door opened and we exited, Blair and I nodding silently, sullenly to each other as we walked off in different directions. Climbing inside my Honda Pilot, I shoved my back against the seat and grimaced at the pain. I wondered if this agony I was feeling was a harbinger of things to come. And I drove off, not realizing I was about to enter the wildest ride of my life, a hellacious journey that was beyond anything I could have ever possibly imagined. The pain in my back was merely the beginning.

  Chapter 2

  It only took a few minutes for me to reach the medical plaza, but I kept shifting my body around in the car, never quite getting comfortable. When I walked into the doctor's office, the waiting room was empty. I sat for a long twenty minutes before a nurse in dark blue scrubs ushered me into the exam room. Dr. Elijah Sterling had been my next-door-neighbor in the freshman-year dorm; we bonded over a love of basketball, spy novels, and Belgian ale. It had been over twenty-five years since we first hoisted those brown bottles of Chimay, a bit of contraband smuggled in by another kid in our dorm, a fast talking New Yorker who had acquired a reasonable facsimile of his older brother's drivers license. Eli had always dreamed of becoming a doctor, an internist just like his father. He aimed to be a caring, respected, distinguished member of the community.