by Dan Deweese
Two people entered the conference room then: a man with a shaved head, who wore a sport coat and designer blue jeans, and a woman whose khakis and crisp white dress blouse seemed pulled straight from the company’s catalog. The man introduced himself as Jeffrey and the woman as Lynn—her title indicated she was his superior. Grant introduced me as his financial manager, and then, as a series of seemingly benign comments about fax machines and freeways moved seamlessly into remarks about Grant’s toaster, Lynn began to reference industry details and design terms I had only a hazy understanding of, and I realized that the meeting was under way. Grant delivered some of his remarks directly to me, as if I were the appropriate audience for certain pieces of info, and each time he did this, he nodded as if what he was saying had ramifications between the two of us that didn’t involve Lynn and Jeffrey. I tried to respond by nodding in an appropriately knowing way, which felt mechanical at first, but then the oddest thing happened: I found myself responding to a conversation the content of which was almost entirely meaningless to me. I noticed that although they were dressed more casually than Grant and me, both Jeffrey and Lynn were perhaps a decade older than us, and I began to feel that there actually were two distinct teams present here, and that though we weren’t doing something as simple as playing a game, that was only because something real was at stake. When Jeffrey slid paperwork across the table to Grant at one point, Grant passed the copies to me without even a glancing at them, and I thought: Yes. Good move. And from then on, whenever a new piece of paperwork appeared, Jeffrey passed the paperwork to me while explaining aloud to Grant what it was. There were pages filled with statistical information regarding tensile strength, specifications for materials, for units of production, for manufacturing windows and production and distribution scenarios dependent on product sizes and availability dates. Organizing and studying this stack of paperwork gave me something to do, and I began to feel as if my role in the conversation was becoming more than ceremonial. Grant opened his portfolio and slid two large sheets of paper across to Jeffrey and Lynn, and I understood from the explanations between them that the figures and statistics I had in front of me referred to whatever it was Jeffrey and Lynn were looking at. Grant seemed possessed by an earnestness I had never seen in him before. When listening, he did so with an abundance of attention, elbows on the table and knuckles laced beneath his chin. When speaking, he gazed thoughtfully out the window, or ran his hand through his hair, or grimaced as he chewed on his thumb—actions that made it seem his every response was requiring intense thought and introspection. At one point he turned to me and said, “Not all of this involves you, but you’ll want to keep the paperwork anyway, because it’s all related.”
“He’s just here to look at the numbers that represent money, right?” Jeffrey said. There were smiles all around at that.
“Those are the only ones that will make sense to me,” I said.
Everyone laughed.
We moved on. And I was so taken with the way in which Grant was soliciting Lynn and Jeffrey’s attention through the manner of his delivery that I didn’t even realize Grant had begun talking about Sandra until well after he’d already started. She wasn’t a housewife, he was telling Lynn and Jeffrey, but neither did she reject the role of the housewife, and it was important to remember we were designing for a consumer who played multiple roles, and where, for instance, did Sandra get her thrills?
It was only when Grant didn’t answer the question himself that I realized he was actually asking me. “What?” I said.
“Where does she transgress?” he said. “Where does she rebel? What makes her feel guilty in a way she enjoys?”
I was baffled. No one seemed to be breathing. “She only mentions guilt about shopping.”
“For what kinds of things? Not the groceries, right?”
“No. She says she buys bedding too often.” I was about to explain that we had seasonal bedding now in our home, and that I didn’t understand why we needed a different comforter every three months, but hemmed in by Grant’s one-sentence rule, I bit my tongue.
“Is it our bedding?” Jeffrey asked.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“If sometimes means less than thirty percent of the time, then there’s work we need to do,” Lynn said.
“Exactly,” Grant said, and then went on to tell Lynn and Jeffrey that he knew they found his work a bit extreme, but that people wanted something extreme in their lives, because having or doing something extreme is what made them feel like individuals. But most people didn’t want their extreme experience to be financial or emotional, he explained—they would rather scream at a football game on television, or listen to loud music in their car, or try a spicy new recipe in their nice kitchen, or whatever it took to make an extreme experience perfectly safe and normal. As Grant continued to make what I knew was a perfectly coherent and standard analysis of the company’s demographic, though, I lost my feeling of relaxation, and found it replaced by a strange sense of terror. My mouth dried up; the room seemed to recede. I wasn’t frightened by anyone there, or by anything in particular that was happening, but I felt the urge to leave, immediately. I did not want them talking about Sandra. It wasn’t making me angry, so much as confused. Because how—there, on that day, in that conference room—had Sandra become a standard example? She was not a test case, or I didn’t want her to be. And she and I were not typical examples of predictable behavior. Or I did not want us to be.
“So by making basic products a bit extreme, your customers can have that sense of transgression,” Grant was saying. “The products will be mass-produced, of course, but extreme appearance comes across as uniqueness to most people, and because these products are also inexpensive and functional, they’re the very products you should start with. You’ll be giving your customers an opportunity to overpay and luxuriate in the sense of having made a decadent decision, but at a price below ten dollars, which is incredibly low for the privilege of feeling that they’ve not only indulged in the crazy impracticality of art, but then also got to feel pleasantly guilty about having supported the insanity of it all.”
“I understand that,” Lynn said, “and of course our customers want nice-looking things. But I don’t know that they’re interested in design theory to that extent.”
“Your company, though, needs to have a coherent design theory,” Grant said, “or else you’ll continue to fill your shelves with products whose design is just dumbed-down or absent, and that won’t work. Because even though your customers might not think about design theory overtly, their instincts are sharp, and they know cheapness and emptiness when they see it. Just think of all the products you’ve put out that end up in the dollar bin.”
It seemed to me that Grant had just insulted the very people he was talking to, and yet his tone was energetic and upbeat. Trying to escape my own state, I tried to study Lynn and Jeffrey, but I didn’t detect any change in their demeanor. And when Lynn agreed that no, the customers weren’t dumb, Grant stood and began pacing at the front of the room, gazing at the carpet or out the windows while he continued speaking about how manufacturing advances meant that even cheap products could be perfectly durable and wouldn’t necessarily break any time soon, and so their company could probably only differentiate themselves from other companies either ethically or aesthetically. If they wanted to differentiate ethically, he said, they would have to be willing to try to prove that their company was somehow ethically clean.
“We’re not at all interested in that kind of positioning,” Lynn said. “Not just because in an industry that relies on mass production it’s pretty much impossible, but also because it’s an ugly stance, and quite frankly, kind of boring.”
“Right,” Grant said. “It’s Pollyanna-ish, so neither fun nor sexy. And that’s not what people go to the store for. What you really want to do is differentiate aesthetically, and the way you do that is to have products that work just as well as anything carried at Wal-Mart, but that look comple
tely different.”
“So our toasters look like melting butter,” Jeffrey said.
Grant smiled. “I’ve been saying ice cream, but I like that. So yes, like butter.”
“But this has been done,” Jeffrey said. “The competition just copies our designs. Jesus, we copy other people’s designs. You can’t differentiate for more than a month.”
“Sure,” Grant said, “but we want to set the terms. When they copy us, we’ll change. And when they copy us again, we’ll change again. And in that dynamic, where they’re mimicking us, we’ll be in control of each change. And therefore in control of the market.”
Jeffrey smiled as if Grant had delivered an amusing but predictable punch line, while Lynn looked again at the pieces of paper Grant had given her. “Well, we’re obviously interested in what you’ve shown us here,” she said, “and you’re right that I find it a bit extreme. But you’re also right that it doesn’t look like Wal-Mart.”
“And so this aesthetic differentiation that you’re after,” Jeffrey said, “you feel it can be delivered in something like this?”
He held up one of the drawings Grant had given them, and I was finally able to see what we were talking about: it was a mechanical drawing, complete with exact dimensions and material specifications, of a spatula. “Yes,” Grant said. “If I design it.”
After the meeting, Grant and I went to dinner. We were seated at the restaurant’s bar and having our first drink, in fact, before I even realized that the light coming up from beneath the glass sections of the floor not only illuminated the entryway and bar, but also an entire sub-floor environment in which immense koi and waving green plants rippled through water lit a white so blinding that it was almost heavenly. Surrounded by a crowd of incredibly attractive and mostly younger people, I mentioned being surprised by how friendly the young women were about apologizing when they reached past me to get a drink from the bartender. Grant laughed. “We’re wearing suits in a city of unemployed actors and writers,” he said. “They’re wondering whether we might be studio executives.” It wasn’t until we were seated and had our dinners in front of us, though, that Grant mentioned he’d been meaning to ask me about Miranda’s boyfriend, because Sandra had told him we were having problems with him. This surprised and angered me. Sandra had told me I had limited input on these decisions, but she apparently chatted about things with Grant between sets? “The situation isn’t completely clear,” I said. “Miranda’s full of secrets and privacy these days.”
“You know, every time I watch TV shows or movies, I feel like the relationships presented as normal are actually either completely preposterous or outright abusive,” Grant said, looking around the restaurant as if the surrounding tables held the writers of the very shows he was referring to. “And I think a lot of young people’s first relationships or even marriages are just attempts to copy the crap they’ve seen on television. And the problem is that when these relationships go wrong and people become unhappy or scared, that unhappiness and fear makes everything seem dramatic and adult and serious in a way they kind of like, but only because the people who make these shows present serious and mature adulthood as a state of fear or dread or unhappiness, in which people just hurt or cripple each other over and over again. And I guess I think that’s mostly just a bunch of bullshit.”
“You think that’s what’s happening with Miranda?”
“That kid she’s hanging around with seemed like a liar, and also kind of crazy. I can’t for the life of me figure out why she would give him the time of day, except for the fact that crazy lies told by an older guy might seem sophisticated to her. But you and I know that crazy lies are just crazy lies. It’s the opposite of sophistication.”
“Sandra says we shouldn’t intervene. That we have to let this run its course.”
“I’ll be blunt with you. And I know I’m probably just riding this whole speechifying energy I started using in that meeting this afternoon, but what I’m going to say isn’t something I’ve mentioned to Sandra, and I’d suggest you not mention it to her, either. I don’t want to see Miranda get hurt. And it seems to me that the fact that you and Sandra are her parents is the very thing that’s preventing you from protecting her right now.”
“What do you mean?”
His elbows were on the table, his chin propped on his fists—just as he had done during the meeting earlier—and he spoke to me as if I were the only other person in the restaurant. “I understand you’re trying to treat her with respect, and you’re hoping she’ll make some of her own decisions and learn something from her relationship with this kid—I get that whole line of approach. But I have to tell you that I think what you’re really doing is asking her at age sixteen to understand things about life that a sixteen-year-old can’t understand, and you’re not keeping in mind that kids are perfectly capable of hurting each other very badly, in very real ways. Because that Ira guy isn’t a kid. And I know you know what I mean, because I could tell how tense you got when he was talking to us at that party in your yard the other day.”
“It’s just that it’s all new territory for me,” I said. “I’ve never had a teenage daughter before. I don’t know how much freedom she’s supposed to have.”
“But why should it be new territory? If you’ve defended your daughter from dangerous situations before, why stop now? In this very city, right now, kids are hurting or killing other kids. And I’m not suggesting this Ira kid is a murderer, but neither do I see why you and Sandra shouldn’t take steps to keep him away from your daughter.”
“It just doesn’t seem like he’s done anything wrong. It’s hard to sell the idea of doing something about it when there hasn’t been something to do something about.”
“Why do you need to sell the idea? If you and Sandra disagree and are going to argue about it anyway, why not just do what you want to do, so that you’re arguing about the way you handled it, instead of complaining about the way she’s handling it? I think you’re asking for permission to do something you don’t need permission to do. And he’s not going to do anything wrong in front of you, you know. He uses that bizarre fake courtesy in front of adults. It sounds like you’re waiting for an event that will give you an excuse to do something, but I’m saying that you should act now, before that event occurs. You don’t want that event to happen at all.”
“Of course I don’t want anything bad to happen. It’s just tough to see how to get there.”
He shrugged, as if what I was saying was difficult was actually perfectly simple. “Look, if things go like I hope they’ll go, I’ll be opening a small office in Los Angeles. Not much will happen there, but I’ll need an assistant, and a job in Los Angeles, largely unsupervised, would be a pretty hard thing for a kid to turn down. And even a super-low, entry-level salary would probably seem like a fortune to this Ira kid.”
Confused by the rapidity with which Grant was moving between scenarios, the last sentence seemed a non sequitur. When I realized the connection Grant was suggesting, though, I laughed. “Moving Ira to Los Angeles is an attractive idea, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing people actually do.”
“Of course it’s the kind of thing people actually do,” he said. “In the business world, if someone isn’t working out in one place, they find themselves either out of a job, or transferred somewhere else. And I don’t see why you wouldn’t protect your daughter with at least as much care as a business shows its employees. And though a kid Ira’s age might not follow money directly yet, he’ll follow sex, and selling him on the idea that money plus Los Angeles will equal starlets taking their clothes off for him can be done very easily.”
I felt as if I were being given the hard sell on a product I knew almost nothing about. “It’s too much money,” I said. “Not to mention that it feels like playing God with the kid’s life.”
“He wants to play God with Miranda’s life. I can assure you of that. You can see it in his eyes. And I know all this might sound extreme, but I’m tel
ling you, there are a hundred thousand young men exactly like Ira in Southern California, and it’s very normal for them to prowl around and attack each other and live out their generally fucked-up lives with great satisfaction and brutality. I’m more familiar with it than I’d like to admit, and the fact that it’s not normal in your family, and that this kind of fucked-up stuff doesn’t exist in your life, is why your family is important to me. So sleep on it, but let’s decide soon. Because I think we need to act quickly.”
When we returned to the hotel after dinner, Grant thanked me for my help, and then apologized for being too tired to show me any more of the city. “I think I’m not only tired, but I’m even tired of myself at this point. I’m tired of hearing my own voice,” he said. So I returned to my room, took off my shoes and, sitting on the edge of the bed, turned on the television. Neither Sandra nor Miranda had called, and I couldn’t help but think, as I moved through the channels without finding a single interesting program, that they were each probably happy to be rid of me for a day. Casting the television remote aside, I stood and went to the window. The traffic below, the chattering television behind me, the contents of my suitcase open on the bed: these all seemed items to be considered idly, from a remove. It was still early, and I still had my suit on, but I had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and the question of how to get through life—how to kill all that time, really—seemed pressing. I stretched out on the bed and searched the texture of the ceiling for recognizable images, until what seemed only a few minutes later, when I was startled by the ringing phone, and discovered that I was wrapped in the bed’s comforter, though still in my suit, and that sunlight was coming through the window. It was morning, and Grant was calling to make sure I was up, because our flight home was an early one. I told him I would be ready shortly, and as I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and straightened the suitcase I had brought but had hardly touched, I tried to figure out how I’d slept through the night in my suit and shoes. I hadn’t the slightest idea what time we had returned to the hotel, though, so it was impossible for me to know if I’d been asleep a long time or hardly at all.
