The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “Bullshit,” Marat declared, hating himself for saying it but feeling justified, something overly simplistic and goading about this presentation, the only hope that it was misdirection for a whiz-bang finale. Which he doubted.

  “Friday morning, jeans day,” Maureen pushed on. A grainy amateur video appeared on the wall, junior staff members strolling out of a small stucco home. “A family’s leaving the house in Levi’s, mom and dad on the way to work, kids going to school,” Maureen narrated. “There’s a big traffic jam on their little street, everybody trying to get out at once. Meanwhile, the Levi’s family takes their time going into the garage, nice and easy. Suddenly dad roars out of the driveway on a motorcycle with a kid in the sidecar, zooming around traffic. Then mom and kid number two hit the street on horses, galloping around the snarled traffic and off to attack the day.” In the film two giggly copywriters hopped broomstick ponies out of the garage.

  “Gap did jeans day last year,” Marat noted. “I guess they’re smarter than us.”

  “Neighborhood kids are throwing around a football in the front yard,” Maureen flipped to the next clip, “a boy and a girl in Levi’s, everybody else in shorts. The boy hits the girl on a long bomb, she catches it, touchdown. A truck drives by.” An animated truck puttered across the wall. “Now it’s ten years later, and the guy’s playing football with a bunch of friends. He’s in Levi’s, friends are in sweats and athletic pants. The girl, now a beauty, walks down the street in Levi’s. He throws the ball up on a pass—and she runs onto the lawn to make the interception.”

  Marat closed his eyes and listened to his brain palpitate. “Have you ever seen Levi’s do a sports commercial before?” he asked wearily. He waited while the table went dark, his staff braced for the predictable outburst he was doomed to deliver. “LeBron James doesn’t wear Levi’s when he’s on the court. I don’t wear Levi’s when I play tennis. Can somebody explain to me why Levi’s should try to be a sporting goods brand?”

  The video on the wall sped through a high school basketball game and a street hockey shootout, settling on a shot of Garrett shoving a lawnmower. “A kid mowing lawns in Levi’s,” Maureen picked up. “It’s tropically hot out, the kid’s sweating buckets. He peels off his shirt—and notices a pretty girl in Levi’s watching.” Maureen swayed on screen, not bad looking at all with a supportive bra and some postproduction work. A couple of creatives along the wall whistled. “He throws his shirt in front of the lawnmower. Boom, lawnmower eats it. He smiles, keeps walking. Then, bang, the girl’s right in front of him. She throws her blouse in front of the lawnmower.”

  Marat snorted. “I presume this spot will run exclusively on the Hustler channel?”

  “She’s wearing a tank top underneath.” The videotaped Maureen had one on, pink and form-fitting and made of sensual high-end creative-director-salary material. “And it’s more of a flannel shirt than a blouse. They lock eyes. He runs over the shirt.” A thousand cotton balls blasted from Garrett’s discharge pipe, and Marat felt the gathering steam of a midday erection.

  Fine. Done. He stood, causing the rest of the room to rise too, a pseudo-respectful-sarcastic gesture they’d implemented over the past month. “Get me a script and budget by Tuesday. I’m meeting with Dirk on Thursday. Tomorrow’s Tide. Something colorful, guys, I’m sick of whites all the time and so is the rest of the universe.”

  He sped back to his office and barricaded the door. He turned off the lights and sat down in his chair and took three blasts from the vaporizer he stored in a false compartment in the back of his filing cabinet. He stared at the ceiling, examined the holes punctured in the ceiling panels, wondered what they were there for, ventilation maybe, possibly to relieve structural pressure, exactly how he couldn’t say. He gauged the color of the atmosphere in the room, not all the way to pitch black but darker than gray or slate, the color of early afternoon shadows, undiffused static, a windowless bar for night-shift workers. Twenty minutes slogged by. When the octane chortling in his forehead reduced to a simmer, he asked Joan to set up the call.

  “It’s Marat,” he said into the phone.

  “You gotta see the film we made,” Joel Lumpkin said, female voices and clinking glassware in the background. “They turned out to be fucking dancers. San Francisco ballet, I shit you not.”

  “I’m here,” said Ankra, Joel’s accountant.

  “Good fucking morning!” Joel said. “Pun intended!”

  “We’re working a Levi’s pitch,” Marat began. “A new angle of Americana. Playing the suburbs.”

  “I was playing Shanghai last night. And Bangkok. How’s the tax shelter?”

  “The foundation set a record for donations last quarter,” Ankra reported. “Also, Marat’s December billing just closed. Five percent growth over last year, also a record.”

  “Hey now! You really stuck it to inflation, kiddo.”

  “I moved all profits into the fund for mayor’s race,” said Ankra. “So far, twenty million dollars total.”

  Marat’s stomach seized, his head pinched shut. “The mayor’s race?” he asked. “For Robespierre?”

  “For me.”

  The whir of Marat’s computer rose to a furor; dueling tidal waves rushed through his ears. “Murphy, you’re running for mayor?”

  “Do not address me by that name.”

  “You motherfucker.”

  Fifteen years of leaden history summed up in a painfully accurate word. They gave the line a moment to freshen.

  “I want you to work exclusively on my advertising campaign, starting now,” Joel said. “Right after I announce my candidacy, we hit primetime.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m advertising on television, Marat. Also on the Internet, cellphones, billboards, radio. The works.”

  Marat rolled off his chair and onto the floor, rocked fatalistically side to side like a beetle on his back. “I can’t work on this,” he said. “Not now.”

  “I thought you might quit outright. Not that I want you to—you’re very talented and have a lot of damaging insider information. But I could see it.”

  Marat placed the phone on the hook and took another shot from the vaporizer, then called his sister. Voicemail. She never took his calls on the first try.

  Marat explained that Joel Lumpkin was in for mayor, that he owned 247 coffee franchises, twenty-nine pornography websites, an island in Dubai, three office buildings in midtown Manhattan, half of the acreage abutting Yellowstone National Park, an chain of upscale assisted-living facilities, eight suburban office parks, a thriving international advertising agency, the largest foster care foundation in the country, a dive bar, the most profitable bagel shop west of the Rockies, and a banana-yellow house out by the ocean for which he’d fantastically overpaid. All this built in just over a decade, arranged out of the public eye to avoid scrutiny, and he was obsessed with construction so she could expect a lot more. The man was only twenty-seven. He did whatever he wanted. The auto-attendant overrode his soliloquy, and he hung up with a smash.

  Motion overtook him, shuffling and clicking and resetting, the possibility of battle an enthralling option. He deleted files on his company laptop and took down the framed picture with his sister on his tank in Iran, his baseball autographed by the 2014 World Series champion Giants, and the photocopy of his first massive paycheck, packing them in a grocery bag along with the bandages and ointments for his arm. He loaded the bag in the trunk of his BMW and drove west into the Tenderloin. Grungy men leaning on shopping carts watched him park with great interest, offering advice and access to fabulously discounted prescription meds. Marat passed out dollar bills and asked them to watch the car, then walked uphill past dingy Indian restaurants and massage parlors and cigarette discounters. Robespierre’s campaign headquarters was located between a pizza stand and a nonprofit arts agency in what used to be a neighborhood insurance office, bars on the windows and a huge green banner draped across the second story.

  STOP THE WA
R!

  He said hello to the volunteer manning reception, a smiley college kid clearly relieved Marat wasn’t a homeless acidhead. He looked around the empty open office, phones ringing, a platter of dissected Danishes beside a row of industrial coffeemakers, pizza boxes on the floor, piles of paper shoveled across desks.

  “They’re in the back,” the receptionist called. “Weekly staff meeting.”

  He smelled the conference room before he saw it, grubby volunteers packed in too close, college kids, high school kids, old folks with time on their hands, thrilled just to be there, sweating their belief. Breathing through his mouth, Marat found a folding chair in the back and watched a Cal upperclasswoman in a stupendous purple skirt call out precinct assignments.

  Robespierre slipped into a chair beside him. Her face was thicker than when he’d last seen her in person, though when that was he couldn’t recall. She punched his solar plexus, hard.

  “Go back to work,” she whispered.

  He doubled over until breath returned. “I can’t work there anymore,” he said.

  “I need you to go back in there and do what you can.” Her fingernails crimped hairs on his wrist. “For us.”

  “Let me buy you lunch,” he insisted, discovering a deep thirst for company, loneliness lining his blood vessels.

  “Go back to work. Go.” And with one last pincer tug, finally her point got through.

  He returned to his office, replaced his photographs and knickknacks, and got cracking on strategies for Joel’s campaign, something that might seem like a good idea at first blush but would spoil soon enough. Not unlike the night in the Khorasan desert escorting Robespierre on her first official visit to the front, when he’d sat on a kitchen table smoking a hookah while two soldiers under his command tore apart an Iranian home searching for weapons, overturning the stove, slashing the mattresses, tearing off wallpaper and punching holes in the doors, kicking toilets off their settings, peeling the soles off shoes, ripping apart pants at the seams, hurling underwear into the street, then locking all the men in the closet and threatening to rip the clothes off their women unless they gave up five terrorist addresses, at which point Robespierre had asked him to stop. He’d continued smoking as she’d laid out her justification, as her arguments grew louder and more indignant, as the men began pounding and whining in the closet, as his soldiers tossed shredded medieval brassieres out the front door, as his tobacco burned down to gray pellets. He put down his hookah hose and told her that he’d pieced together the money trail—Slippy’s uneven birthday donation, the rewrite job on Fanny’s will, cash dug from his shoes. The unidentified snitch and her timely arrival at the principal’s door, blocking his escape with convenient concern. This with the family bankrupt and Marat doing the dirty work, knocking off grandma and trafficking narcotics and eating shit in the army, a hellish hustle decade. How easy it was to slingshot ahead with all the money she ever needed, her competition hunting snipe in Iran.

  A long suck on the hookah and the haze in his head told her how he’d dreamed of killing her, it would be a cinch to put a slug in her skull, there were millions of bullets lying around, she had to sleep some time.

  She’d responded with noncommittal silence, her eyes constricting to brown pins, standing with her feet together and arms crossed, her tormented disapproval holding his complete attention while an Iranian civilian came up from behind and whacked his arm with a tire iron, fracturing his ulna and radius in two and four places respectively, never to fully heal. He was unable to fight back, the shock had him frozen, but his soldiers responded with massive force, fifteen rounds at close range, his attacker’s face like a rifle-range tin can. Robespierre cried lavishly while they mopped up the blood, then sat on the floor holding hands with the women of the house while a medic escorted Marat back to camp.

  A night he deeply regretted, and had to get past.

  He called Joel at home. “I’m in,” he said.

  “Good,” Joel said. “Maybe you’ll land that rematch with your sister you always wanted. I’ll put a hold on the defibrillator.”

  Marat’s instinct was to get aggressively vocal, but he stopped himself before sound materialized and instead delivered a slow, droll joke about Joel’s parentage he knew would hurt a lot more.

  Joel laughed pleasantly, practicing the measured response behooving an imperturbable politician. “Forget Tide. I’ll be in tomorrow, and I want ideas.”

  Marat hung up before another insult slipped out and set to work hungrily, developing banal creative briefs to soften things up artillery-style, crafting a cavalry charge of inefficient media-buying guidelines, diving into infantry combat with ad scripts loaded with incomprehensible, outdated street lingo. The pre-fight ritual comforted him—creating time-tested baseline documents and aligning with industry standards—and win or lose, he felt progress coming, the slight succor of hope.

  On a Wednesday morning in early June Esmerelda noted an unusually large group of men huddled by the Bagel Stop entrance when she drove by on her nightly hunt for parking. Drunk bachelor party, she guessed, jonesing for late-night booze sopping carbs. She found a parking spot a half block away and nailed it on the first go, two good omens long overdue, this small spate of luck an odd feeling. By the time she hiked over to the store, the group had swelled to a couple busloads’ worth of loud dressers, maybe a pro sports team or a fraternity event, except the men were older, forty and up, their heavy faces marked by unexpected sweet glances in her direction.

  She was digging her keys out of her purse when music fell on her like rain, sliding down her hair and into the rivulets of her jacket.

  And my lights are lit down this county backroad

  And wheels are looking for some place to stay

  And my engine’s tickin’ to some old love song

  The radio don’t know how to play

  The voice moved toward her, an old black man wearing a purple Nike sweatsuit, purple Kangol cap, purple sunglasses, white sneakers, no socks. He walked with a jittery hop, a familiar creak in his step. His lungs squeaking like overdrawn balloons.

  She was crying when he put his arms around her. She pushed her fingers through his knotted hair.

  “Ezzie,” Jasper said. “Hey.”

  She buried her face in his jacket and breathed in his soft wood chips smell. Felt his gnarled body, his thin, indestructible bones. He put his hand on the back of her neck while she held his lapels.

  The block bulged with people, curious about the crowd, the flashy suits, the memorable vocals. Jasper’s men cordoned off a patch of the sidewalk, dissuading intruders with hand claps. “I saw the show in Vegas,” Esmerelda said when the tears ran out.

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been seeing you around, helping Robespierre. Catching up with Marat. Hear you on the radio and see you on TV. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t need to say anything, Ezzie.”

  “Your singing’s real nice.”

  He chuckled quietly. “I got good inspiration.”

  Esmerelda’s chest cracked into fractions, small twitching shreds of meat cycloning in a swirl of color and lifting her off her feet and over the sidewalk to Jasper’s limousine.

  She saw Carlos accepting the day’s egg shipment as Jasper directed the driver to the hotel. Her last tether to earth. “My job,” she muttered.

  His mirrored sunglasses turned to her, reflected headlights winking miraculously. “Don’t mind that,” he said. “Unless you’d rather go.”

  She felt physically sick at the suggestion, her stomach rolling, a wooziness in her temples. She shook her head once.

  “Good.”

  He laid his head on her shoulder and she put her hand on his cheek and they sat together in electric silence while the limousine slithered up the tipsy streets home.

  Following Marat’s advice, the Van Twinkle mayoral campaign went negative after Joel Lumpkin’s first television ads aired. They put together an initiative based on the weirdest Joel Lu
mpkin photo they could dig up—on a farm spanking a goat in its pen, his lone venture into agriculture an uproarious bust—plus bullet points:

  • Registered Republican

  • Lives in San Francisco three months a year

  • No political experience

  • Made his fortune exploiting veterans

  • Only publicly announced position: moving poor people out of San Francisco

  The campaign rolled out on a dull July afternoon; within hours it was bursting through the blogosphere, radio talk show hosts screamed warfare, they even made the crawl on CNN. When Marat arrived at work the next morning, Joel Lumpkin was sitting in his chair, chewing on a bagel.

  “What is this?” Joel held up the Chronicle, LUMPKIN LAMBASTED stenciled across the front page.

  “Smart move,” Marat said. “Gotta hand it to them.”

  “Did you know about this?” Joel retorted.

  “No,” Marat replied automatically, slipping into his hard army face, facts and data only.

  Joel’s jaw reset, eyes jerking in circles, indicating that he was well past enraged and pushing psychotic. “I want to triple our media buy. And we’re going to do a new ad, something meaner.”

  “Hang on,” Marat cautioned. “Don’t stoop to her level.”

  Joel folded the newspaper into a taut rectangle and flung it at the window. “Tried that. Not working.”

  “It will,” Marat said, his voice cold, omniscient truth.

  Joel pounded Marat’s keyboard with both hands. “Then it’s on you, adman. Put together something that’ll work.” He tossed his bagel in the garbage. “Another thing: since your mom quit, something’s wrong with the bagels. They’re not New York; they’re shit.”