The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  “Can I ask you guys a question?” I finally say.

  “Um, OK, sorry?” the curly headed one says. She’s wearing what looks like an Alexander McQueen jacket, she’s well brought up and I’m willing to guess by her overall look, a lack of youthfulness in someone so young, and her expensive taste, that she was raised on the Upper East Side, went to Dalton or possibly Brearley, college at Sarah Lawrence or Smith, and now judging by the Triple Canopy totebag she works for some kind of an art-related foundation like Dia, or Soros, she doles out tidbits of money to people who make documentaries about how bad things are in faraway lands made worse by Goldman Sachs, where her dad spent twenty-five years raking it in.

  “See that vehicle out there?” I ask her, pointing out of the lightly frosted glass faux-French café window to Seth’s Range Rover. “I’m thinking of buying it from my friend here and, what I want to know is, just looking at him, an overall first impression, would you buy a used car from this man?”

  Now the girls are with me because an actual purchase is taking place, there’s shopping going on at a high level, but also this is a quick little nothing that has no consequences, it’s like the conversational equivalent of an app. Seth is eating up the attention, too, they’re looking him up and down now, and he’s trying his best to look trustworthy, but the thing is he dresses like a fucking homeless person from the ’90s, he’s all worn-out hoodie and baggy jeans, what century is this, and he has his dreadlocks pulled back and a scarf on top. Both the girls shake their heads and say, “No, I don’t think I would!” kind of as a joke, but also because they mean it, and then I tell them that it’s too late I already wrote the check. They make some kind of comment about how I could always SMS my bank and have them cancel it, and no they don’t want to go for a drive with us to the Lower East Side, or down to Dressler for the moules frites, they are meeting some friends later, that’s so sweet but thanks.

  For the rest of the night Seth and I drink, eat chorizo on a slab of old knotty wood, do a line or two in the bathroom, and as Tote Bag and her friend leave I watch while the Yoga Doctor hits on pretty much every remaining chick in the place to no avail. He really has no style at all, or rather, his style is pure old school, part white-boy rapper and part tree-hugging stoner; it’s really revolting to have to watch him, looking like some refugee from a rained-out Burning Man, so I sit there and do shit on my phone, and watch the carnage pile up, as one girl after another politely turns away from him after a few moments of conversation. Finally I can’t take the heartache anymore, it’s too depressing, and I tell him we have to go, I have to put an end to this misery, this misery around me, the misery of perfectly turned-out young women living off their globalized daddies’ fake credit boon, the misery of not seeing this as misery at all, of thinking misery exists only elsewhere, ailleurs as Baudelaire would say if he were here and in a way he is, always; I wonder if he looks down on his creation, this fake bohemia, with pride or contempt, and if they pay him royalties.

  We get out to the street and I say I am far too wasted to drive at this point, and it’s true, although I’ve driven in worse shape before. Seth thinks we should leave the car where we parked it and take a cab and get it in the morning. I convince him that this is a bad idea because of alternate-side parking, and he’ll be fine just driving me home, it’s not far, don’t be a fag. We get in the car and Seth is having a hard time getting the key fob into the orifice because he’s even drunker than I am. I pretend to be pissed at him, and get out of the car and start walking south on Wythe. I hear the car start up and when I look over, he has pulled up next to me.

  “Get in,” he says, “you’re my bitch now,” which doesn’t even make sense. I get in without comment and he manages to get me down to Krave in one piece, it’s a straight shot with red lights, we do no talking, he drives at a crawl and pulls up in front and turns off the car.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “It’s your car now,” he says, “don’t you want to park it here?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Why not? I’ll get you the title tomorrow.”

  “Because I don’t want your fucking car,” I say, playing pissed off at him for about the third time tonight, as I open the door. “I drove it and it’s a piece of shit vehicle.”

  “Eric, dude, are you crazy?”

  I laugh.

  “Man, you are so gullible,” I say. “You’re so earnest. It’s good, it’s cool, don’t go changin’.” Then I walk off toward my building. The night doorman clicks me in and I go toward the elevators without looking back. When I get up to my loftlike abode I open my sliding door and lean out onto the little balcony and look down at Kent Avenue. The RR is still there and I think that Seth has fallen asleep in it and I assume he’ll stay there like that all night. But then I see the lights come on and the Rover starts up and he lurches away into the night, mad I can tell, and far too drunk to drive all the way home to Bushwick, but doing it anyway out of sheer will. I vow at that minute to block the check first thing tomorrow and then, looking at the skyline of Manhattan, I vomit over the rail and onto the grass twenty-three floors below.

  2.15

  My loft is white and the furniture is white, even the floors are white. I have custom white cabinets that contain a few books and some DVDs that I will throw away soon because I’m putting everything on a server, and there’s an Albert Collection white sectional and a matching Albert Right-Facing Chaise, in front of them a white Eva Zeisel coffee table with an inch-thick glass top. (I ordered it custom because I felt the three-quarter-inch standard glass top was too thin for the base, it just looked wrong.) I also have a Sony Bravia KDL-70XBR3 seventy-inch flat-screen television on one of the walls, and some white lilies in a glass vase next to a Vitra Miniature Kuramata How High the Moon chair, and that little metal chair and the flat-screen are the only non-white things. Of course in the dark, the space isn’t really white per se, but some light filters in at night, from the street, and from the ajarish bathroom door, because I always leave a light on in the bathroom, and so anyway at night the main room is infected with a kind of pathetic ochre wash, enough to see and move through without having to turn on an overhead. I hate overheads.

  After Seth drives off, the car moving “erratically” I think out toward Bushwick, I go into the main bathroom, not the “powder room” half bath next to the kitchen, and throw up again into the sink, then I turn on the faucet and let the water run and I walk out. Much better, I think, I’ve purged now. I like the sound of running water, it calms me, but isn’t that the most naturally calming sound in the world? I am not so unique, after all, as I would like to lead myself to believe, and even that thought isn’t very original. I then take twelve Tylenol PMs because all the Ambien is gone and I go to my bed and lie down and actually sleep.

  About two hours later I am jolted up but I don’t know why. The pills must have kicked in enough for me to fall asleep, but now, strangely, I’m wide awake when I should be completely groggy if not fully under. Was I dreaming? Of what? Who? I get up, daylight is just breaking outside, and I check my e-mail. There’s only one, it’s from HR Lady, no text in the body, just a subject header that says “Google yourself.”

  The top hit if you Google me has always been an article in Advertising Age from a couple of years ago; there are other Eric Nyes in the world, of course, but for quite a while now I come up first when you get to the N. But now I type in Eric N and the Ad Age article comes up second; the topmost hit is Wikipedia. I wonder if there isn’t a more famous Eric Nye somewhere else in the world, an Eric Nye worthy of his own Wiki entry. There were seventy-seven Eric Nyes the last time I checked on Facebook, and Google returns 3,312 results for “eric nye”; it’s not the most uncommon name on the planet. Most of the matches are for me, mentions of me in relation to various awards shows or articles in advertising publications, there’s an Eric Nye who is a motocross champion, and an Eric Nye who went to Columbia University. I have never met these Eric Nyes nor do I pl
an to.

  But when I click on the link I see that this is not the Wikipedia page for Eric Nye the motocross champ, it is the Wiki page for Eric Nye the advertising creative director, aka myself. The first thing I notice is my picture. It’s the sort-of official portrait of me that the agency uses for press releases, and it’s all over the web, so whoever made the page could have gotten it anywhere. I’m sitting on a fancy red couch in front of a wall spray-painted in fake grafitti; you might think I am somewhere in Bed Stuy, or down by the Navy Yard, or in Red Hook, but actually I am in the agency. One of the hip young art directors who I hired is a pretty decent street artist and he did it for us; it says TATE FORWARD™! in angular fat letters, and the building management complained about the paint smell for weeks.

  Eric Nye

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  Eric Nye (b. August 13, 1978, Canfield, Ohio) is a world-famous advertising creative director known for his award-winning work on Nike, Tide, Bank of America, and Subaru. He is currently the Chief Idea Officer at the New York office of Tate Worldwide, Inc. Tate has offices in 58 countries and their New York office is the flagship. While on his watch at Tate in less than two years, Nye has overseen a client roster that has dwindled from more than $650 million to less than $400 million in billings, marked by the departure of longtime Tate clients Tide, Bank of America, Southwest Airlines, 7UP and JC Penney.

  Early Career

  Eric began his career as a junior copywriter in the San Francisco office of the renowned agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. At Goodby he was known to work well into the night and every single weekend. He was also known for his overall malignancy, including backstabbing, asskissing, stealing ideas and taking credit for them, and running every account he’s ever been on into the ground. He was fired after one year at Goodby and then was offered a job at the famed Wieden + Kennedy agency in Portland, Oregon, where he worked on the Nike golf account. While on Nike he managed to get his name attached to a multi-award-winning spot, “Saviour,” directed by Spike Jonze, even though the idea was completely his art director’s, who he repeatedly tried to throw under the bus to his bosses, saying that she had a questionable work ethic because she refused to come in every weekend, even though the woman had just had her first child. When the Nike clients left the agency, after nearly two decades, citing a dislike of Nye’s arrogance, W+K fired him.

  Nye then moved to the Netherlands, where his wealthy father supported him for a year as he tried to write a novel, which he abandoned after 20 pages, finally taking a job at boutique agency 180 Amsterdam. While at 180 his shameless, abject sycophancy in regards to the company’s president/CEO was so obvious that he was hated by every person in the shop; this being advertising, the firm had no choice but to promote him. His work won awards at Cannes and D&AD in the UK, and four years later when the CCO left under mysterious circumstances, Nye was given the top job, staying on only 6 months and then leaving for Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in London, days before 180 finally imploded.

  As ECD at AMV Nye routinely appeared in the pages of Campaign magazine pontificating about the death of the television spot, and when three of his four global accounts jumped ship, he was quietly asked to resign, although in the press it was stated that he had left in order to move to Los Angeles because he had been taken on as a commercial director by MJZ; the latter claim was completely false. Nye lived in LA for two months, attempting to try his hand as a screenwriter, but tweeted that he had writer’s block and didn’t produce a single word. He was then hired to head up the creative department at Tate, where he is presently, until senior management wakes up and realizes that he has tanked every agency he’s ever worked at, including this one, and he’s toxic.

  Family life

  Nye’s father, Eric Nye, Sr., inherited a firm called Amalgamated Solenoid from his father, Tony Nye (Niallo); AS manufactured small parts for the auto industry and Nye, Sr., sold the company for $5 million in 2002, but lost all his money in 2008.

  Friends

  Nye has no friends.

  My first thought is that the entry is astoundingly accurate and must have been posted by someone who I knew pretty well, and fired, someone who would have had a grudge, but the phrase “this one,” in reference to “every agency he’s ever worked at,” throws me off. This one? Wouldn’t they say “that one”? Or “Tate”? It feels like a slip, they always give themselves away, don’t they, the Criminal Class; it could be almost anyone at the agency, I know I am not well-liked. That said, I find the Wiki amusing in its own way, and assuming Tan can help me figure out who wrote it, I will call him or her in and promote them. If it was done by someone I sacked, Henry perhaps, or Juliette, I could hire them back on a freelance basis at least. Of course it could also be a good-natured joke, but since most of it is true, too true, that leaves out the one or two people at the agency with whom I have a friendly relationship, such as Tom Bridge, who would put up a bullshit Wiki on me as a goof but he’s too lazy to get his facts right. Then there’s her. But it can’t be her, she would have no way of knowing that much about me, especially the details about my father’s business and the fact that, as a first-generation Italian-American, he changed his surname, Niallo, to Nye. In fact, no one knows that much about me or my career except perhaps for my headhunter, Lynette, and she loves me or at least views me as a potential commission at some point down the line.

  I click on the “history” tab at the top of the web page and there I learn that the person who wrote the bio is not a registered Wiki editor and thus their IP address is made public; in this case they were posting from a computer with the designation 191.126.92.420. I copy that number into my clipboard and send it immediately to Tan at the office. I don’t include the Wikipedia URL; why risk having this sent around the gaga-sphere? Of course it’s barely 6 AM and so he won’t be able to deal with this for some time, but it’s possible that before I get on the plane for LA I’ll know who was stupid enough or brilliant enough to write this.

  Then I decide it would be best to get some more sleep; I don’t like flying much, especially when I feel guilty for drinking in public with my breakfast, but that’s something I’m going to have to live with because my flight leaves at 9 AM. As I go to turn off the iMac my phone rings; it’s Tan calling from his cell.

  “You’re up early” I say.

  “Online,” he says. “Multiplayer RPG with some assholes in Tokyo, Kenji Do Brian Joey Rat, and one other person, his name his name his name …” Tan gets stuck like a dusty CD and I have to give him a bump.

  “Tan,” I say, “you’re breaking up.”

  “You hear me now?” he says, “These crazy Japanese motherfuckers have a different time zone, keep me up all night they crazy these motherfuckers!”

  “Cool,” I say. “I can hear you now.”

  “So I get your e-mail, it’s not one of ours, they all ‘dot ninety-threes,’” he says.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning no problem let me get my laptop and log onto the admin server I see if I can locate.”

  I sit there while he does what he said he was doing. I tell him, by way of explanation, that someone using that particular computer posted something on the Internet that was potentially embarrassing for the company and I want to know who did it. He says “Oh yes that is not good!” and then I can hear him keystroking and repeating the numbers over and over as if he is memorizing them.

  “One-ninety-one dot one-twenty-six dot ninety-two dot four-twenty …” he says to himself three or four times. Then he stops, says, “huh.”

  “What does that mean, ‘huh’?”

  “It mean, this not your IP,” he says.

  “No, of course not,” I s
ay.

  “Where you get this?”

  I figure I might as well tell him. “Wikipedia.”

  “I thought so,” he says.

  “Someone posted something and I want to know who did it.”

  “Two possibility,” he says.

  “And they are?”

  “One, your home machine, not fixed IP, could be iteration.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you do it yourself?”

  “Not possible,” I say. “Not possible.”

  “OK then two, no idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This IP not showing up, could be masked, and there two to the thirty-two power unique address on the planet,” he explains.

  “Is that a lot?” I ask.

  There is a pause and he says, “Four billion two hundred and ninety-four million nine hundred and sixty-seven thousand two hundred and ninety-six.”

  “OK,” I say. “That’s a lot.”

  “Yes, that’s a lot. Could be anyone, anywhere, no way to know.”

  “No way to know,” I repeat.

  “No way to know,” he says. “Although likeliest story?”

  “I did it myself.”

  “You do it to yourself.”

  I spend the next nearly two hours packing, taking things in and out of my Rimowa Topas aluminum suitcase, I can’t decide if I should bring my Varvatos suit, my G-Star RAW belted suit jacket with the eyelets and the matching Hugo pants, or the Tom Ford, or all of them, which seems a little indecisive. I lay them into the trolley one by one and take them out one by one and I do this for a time, wondering how it is that Intern got into my apartment and posted the Wiki page without me knowing it. Actually, there are two questions unanswered: the first is when she did it and the second is how she gleaned all this info about me. Some of the basic job stuff could probably have been gotten from various articles about me in AdWeek or AdAge, but how she could have known that the idea for “Saviour” was Veronica’s, or that I talked her down to senior W+K management after she had her kid, or that I only wrote twenty, exactly twenty, pages of my novel, I don’t understand. I’ve never told anyone these things. But then I wonder, did I spill all this to her during our last encounter? Was I that high? No, I don’t think I would have confided in her, why would I, it would be completely unlike me to say anything negative about myself, I’m not falsely self-deprecating like, say, Seth, am I? But is there something about Sibi, Sivi, Sari, something so disarming about her that I got super high and just poured my guts to her? Every self-loathing detail of my life? Impossible. I don’t even believe in the opening up of the soul, the interior, it’s all just bullshit, fashion statements for the bored; we can’t ever really know ourselves, the journey inward is just more narcissism and you can’t let go of the ego using the ego in defense of ego.