by Mat Johnson
DROP
MAT JOHNSON
BLOOMSBURY
For Pauline K. Johnson and the people
who’ve helped me up when I’ve fallen.
Contents
I
A Hungry Man
Contact
Conversations
F Philly
Landing
Drop
Home
Love
Days
The Fourth
Crack
Crawl Space
Left
Reality
II
Fall
Home
Broke
Training
The Piper and the Pope
Outcall
Dancing
Sick
III
Running
Under the Bridge
Independence Day
Love Park
My Sign
Point
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
I
A Hungry Man
Me: poor and broke, alone, thirty-one-years-old and only just finishing as an undergrad at a third-rate Pennsylvania state college, no work experience except comforting my mom before she passed. A man with no connections, and even if I did have contacts they’d be back in Philly, and I’d be stuck going up and down Lincoln Drive to 176 for the remainder of my life, East River Drive or West, cursed to pass the same buildings (windows, façades, steps), the same people (skin, breath, voices), the same damn trees (spruce, poplar, pine) and streets to match (Spruce, Poplar, fucking Pine) over and again and more, stuck in a city that was a tidal pool, never swimming down the Schuylkill past that net by the Art Museum or floating serenely along the Delaware into oceans beyond. And this meant pain and anger and fear because me was also: ambition and the desperation dreams create.
So there, within despair, six months from graduation and my impending fall back into the Delaware Valley, I was walking under the dusty fluorescent lights of the marketing department of the university that had promised, but was not providing, my career in advertising. I listened to the slow methodical thump of my soles on the gray linoleum, and that sound as it died against the cinder block walls. I was going to see my advisor, to plead with the small balding man who chewed the backs of ten-cent pens with such ferocity that while you tried to pump him for information on internships, job opportunities, or recommendations, your voice was given a background of spittle, slurp, and crunch. So I was walking down a public school hall knowing: this is not a place that provides futures. I was walking towards nothing really at all. It was there where I happened to glance at the cheerily colored Job Board, giving myself a moment’s reprieve from frustration by looking at the sea of glossy ads for military enrollment, ghetto schoolteaching, up to $400 a week envelope stuffing, federally auctioned used cars (starting at just $1) and bulk-rate spring break vacations. I was just about to pull away a brochure for the chance to win a new motorcycle when, at the bottom of the scarred corkboard, I saw it. Below the multitude of glossy false hopes, a strikingly plain white sheet of paper was flapping around in the wind provided by the correctional facility fan blowing down the hall, dancing for me at the bottom of an otherwise still wall. A white sprite of light into my ever darkening abyss.
I got on my knees to see it, pulling it straight from its folded, envelope-fitting form to see what secret it was trying to conceal. There was a picture on it, black and white, blurred. It could have been me: the back of an upturned head, of a shirt collar showing as a white band above a gray suit and beyond, in the gaze of its unseen face, towers of skyscraper glass. It looked as if he could reach out to them, palm their tops like pre-dunked balls. Over his shoulder, hanging like an urban palm tree, was a street sign. The way it was turned, one of the streets was indiscernible, but the other shined back at me in big letters that said it all: Madison Ave. Can you make it here? read the caption. Create a new and invigorating advertising campaign for an existing product, and you could find yourself working at one of the nation’s top advertising firms.
The contest, where pauper and prince were on equal footing. The only way that the pauper got to be king. And I knew, as I ripped the notice from the wall, staple included, that I could be Arthur in this story. So clearly sent to me, this challenge, my trumpeted escape. I wasn’t even discouraged when I saw that the postmark due date was the following day, because I understood that miracles worked that way.
I spent nearly four hours in the CostSaver behind campus, breathing too loud, staring at shelves on top of shelves on top of shelves as if I had lost something there (on the packaging, on the labels, between the words), dodging prime Middle American consumers as they awkwardly pushed their gluttonous carts. A security guard, female, Caucasian, approximately 5′4″, followed me for a while, stared down from the top of the aisle as I tried to ignore her blue form in my vision’s periphery, making me nervous the way cops can. But then she got bored, approached me slowly, and asked me what I was up to, then left me alone with all those products and the realization that I didn’t know what I should be doing and that staring at poorly packaged detergents and cosmetic aids, bland potato chips and inedible jerky treats, wasn’t helping. I had gained nothing and lost time.
I retreated to the fruit and vegetable section, away from the barrage of packaging and merchandise. Trying to slow my breath and concentrate on something besides failure, I watched artificial rainforest showers cover the produce with transparent beads every twelve minutes, knowing that I didn’t have time to flounder. It was already night, going on late night, and then it would be morning, and then the day would be gone and so would my life, my chance at an exit from the empire of mediocrity. Or maybe my destiny was never to break free at all. But I knew that was wrong, that I could do this, because it was the only thing I could do. For all the assets I lacked (work experience, money, a family, decent clothes, athletic skills, charm, self-confidence, a background that was middle class), I knew that I had been given one great power: the ability to see things the way others couldn’t, or more specifically, as others did but were unable to articulate, identify. I had the power to infect others with my own desire. Nostalgia for outdated fantasies, bottled guest-passes to oblivion or the idea of Pure Fun, I could sell it to you and make you like it, make you think you’d been begging for it all the time. All I had to do to make you want something was fall in love with it first. Then, surrounded by the purity of the products of nature, love came to me. I saw the essence of perfection. And I realized, in a blur of Philly logic, what better to pimp then perfection itself?
It sat before me. A divine gift complete with heavenly packaging: shining Technicolor skin porous like an old drunk’s nose and perfectly formed around a product that you could rip apart with your hands to reveal the bite-size pouches of flavor within, the entire structure forming into one graceful orb. And I knew I could take this creation from the most accomplished product designer in the universe, God, and make even perfection greater than it was before. I, the vegetative alchemist, was to bear life (mine) from the common orange. A simple orange. A fucking orange.
That was the pitch, the vision: an ad campaign for the orange, presenting it in a light which the public would cry for, broadening its target consumer base beyond health freaks and concerned moms. This was the challenge. Despite all the orange’s attributes, the product was still neglected at the back of supermarkets, a forgotten hopeful of the impulse buy. It was not glorious fruit that the late-night drunks and insomniacs entering convenience stores reached for, but the imperfect creations of man. The fried, salted vulgarities, bubbled from oil and thick with its fat. The glucose-encrusted chocolate kibble treats, leaving fecal-like smudges across their mouths and brown caloric mud in the unbrushed c
revices of their rotting teeth. I understood (giddy and grabbing at the pile of oranges in a search of a perfectly round orb rich in the color that named it) what was missing as well: the calculated feeling of transgression modern products imply. The illicit excitement of biting something naughty, a prepackaged revolutionary freedom.
Four P.M. the next day. Sweating, disheveled and sour, I held the finished product in my hands: a portfolio filled with the print ads, packaging design, and market analysis that would start a dietary revolution. I couldn’t stop looking at the photos of my creation. Didn’t my orange look so utterly marketable in its clear plastic wrapper? Didn’t you know that if you reached for it on a store shelf it would crinkle in your hand, calling to you in treble whispers, Take me with you, devour me, there is no greater pleasure than the life inside?
In one photo I caught an image that showed that this creation was living, on fire, urgent. Two female hands (thank God for undergrads who sit in libraries eager for any odd excuse to walk away from books too big to be carried with them), fingers long and brown ripping through the fleshes: peel, encasing, pulp. Oh the mist, nearly invisible in real time and noticed more in the snapping away of her head as eyes squint, sweet acid like sun-borne pepper spray. The frozen image revealed an orange ball exploding away from itself, shaped like an orchid beginning its bloom, with skinny hands as orgasmic midwives bearing witness to the wet scream of citric love.
When I took the final work, my images, my impromptu creations, to the post office (4:50 P.M., please let me in the door), I was thinking, This is it; I won. This was the product. They would make me the Prince of Florida; even my offspring would be destined to reign.
Slapping it with the spit side of the stamps, I was already planning the first prize, five thousand bucks and a guaranteed position at one of three Madison Avenue firms. All I wondered was, Which one? Because it had to happen. Broad Street and Market could no longer stand as my east-west, north-south. I was going somewhere, my game was starting. I included my picture in the package as well, as the application had asked for. It was me smiling into the digital camera at five A.M., Friday morning. Yes, slightly disheveled, naps ablaze, but staring into the camera with that kill-stink of victory. At the postal box I pulled the door open and let my message be swallowed into its benevolent blue gut. And then it was patience time. Glory be to me for I am the creator.
Contact
Sure, it was nearly three months later and my original elation had slowly evaporated like water in a dead cat’s bowl, been replaced by flashes of despair (I might as well have sent in nothing, what ignorance, pathetic futility, just a punk-ass Philly boy trying to pretend he could be something of worth in this world) that stumbled into pockets of certainty (wouldn’t New York be nice, it looks nice on TV, and in Spike Lee movies, how could any controlled attempt at product enhancement put together by someone nearly six years my junior hope to reach the blessed brilliance of my vision), but damn, how could they give me fourth place? How can anyone who could recognize the validity of the work at all not bear witness to the divine inspiration? Or maybe it was crap and I was a fraud, but shit, I needed it so bad. A letter that says ‘Congratulations, you have been selected as the Fourth-Place Winner’ is a smug thief.
On page fifty-six of the magazine enclosed in my ‘victory’ packet there was a picture of me, my face looking smiley and hopeful and honest among four other faces doing the same. My shot last, the only one in the bunch not melanin-deficient, my image looking as out of place as Bill Russell on the 1963 Celtics. So is that it? Is that what it’s all about? And did it matter? Regardless of origin, wasn’t there still going to be a big-ass number four on my chest? Four, all lanky and dumb, staring over its shoulder like Sankofa but without the wings. The mythic number of losers, where no one even knows you played the game. I recognized then that fourth was not simply a statement about my entry in this competition, it was a message from the universe about my place within it. Fourth-rate me, with my pathetic hopes and aspirations, my hunger for greatness when I couldn’t even find success in third-rate Philly town.
Or maybe it was the oranges. Maybe that’s where I failed. They could have been tasteless, cottonmouth dry. Maybe that was it. Something went wrong, must have, because even though I got my picture and the photos of my proposal in the magazine, all I had on my kitchen table was a seventy-five-dollar check from a bank I never heard of and a thick piece of cotton paper with words forming a message I didn’t care to hear.
The letter went into the trash, and then was pulled out and ripped into small pieces and taken to the upstairs the toilet. My advisor called with a congratulations and that message was erased. The check sat on the dresser alone, dejected, until the light bill came and I had no choice but to cash the insult.
In the months that followed, I got other responses from the world as well. From the sixty-seven blind mailings I sent out to advertising agencies nationwide, each complete with a résumé, mini portfolio, and personalized cover letter, I received: nine form-letter rejections, four equally impersonal brochures for summer internships showing pictures of smiling kids nearly half my age, and one actual request for an interview. The letter, from an agriculturally focused firm in Dallas, said that the successful candidate must to be willing to locate to Philadelphia, Mississippi, which, from my research, seemed an even scarier place than the real Philly itself. I got one nice letter from a man in Portland, sent on his own stationery, saying that he liked my work and thought I had ‘promise,’ but that they didn’t recruit unproven talent straight from college, particularly from out of state, something he advised would probably be the norm at other agencies as well. His last line was, ‘But don’t worry, you’re young so there’s no rush.’ The date of my thirty-second birthday was now closer than my thirty-first was.
Of the seven graduate schools whose advertising programs I applied to the previous fall, I was accepted to five, two of which were both very good and very expensive. Neither one offered me enough cash to make accepting realistic or wise since I’d already blown the money from my mom’s policy trying to become middle class (undergraduate tuition and fees). Two of the other schools I was accepted to offered me partial tuition reimbursement, and one program in Ohio even offered me tuition and a stipend, but all three of the schools were just like the one I was already at. Those paths were not inclines, they were plains; at the end of each I would be no higher, just further along.
So, with fantasies extinguished, I walked down that same hall, listening to the sound of my feet beating a track on something that was already dead, moving towards the opportunity to prostrate myself before an advisor in the slight chance that he could help me compensate for the time I didn’t have. Staggering and injured, I stopped in the mailroom to check my box and clean out whatever memos had accumulated.
I saw it before I even got close. It barely fit into my slender slot, this envelope, grocery bag brown, so tightly shoved into the cubby hole that I nearly took down the whole structure pulling it out. Its far right corner was covered in odd stamps, different in sizes and colors but all with the profile of the same plain woman, caught watching something dull. The package couldn’t be mine. It said my name, but Chris Jones was common; there were two others even on that campus. I wasn’t even given that distinction: the sole ownership of my name.
Slipped quickly into my jacket, I held it under my coat by my armpit all the way to the deserted men’s room and into a stall. With my teeth, I ripped the envelope’s top free, my fingers plucking its contents like a mugger with a pocketbook. What I found: another envelope inside. This one was gray, with ‘Chris Jones’ typed in large letters on the center. From its corner, a loose string hung, bright orange and as thick as a shoelace, from a small hole. Typed below it was a note that said, ‘To Begin, Pull.’ I yanked on that thing like it was a parachute cord.
Detonation. Blast. Silence into roar. Fleeting recognition of mortal inevitability as I dropped the package to protect myself, to shield my ears from the pai
n as noise exploded out from it, hit full speed against the glazed tile walls and then bounced back, making me trip over the toilet and fall back into the urine-stained wall. Even more startling than the sound, on the ground before me the envelope spun around like an insane top. Tangerine smoke rose out of the movement, pouring up into the ceiling in a thick stream and forming an orange cloud there. Everywhere around me the smell of burnt matches, and something like citrus. And then, it began to rain a heavy storm of confetti, gold and white, tiny squares upon me.
I didn’t move until most of it had landed. It was everywhere, on my shoulders, hands and hair, stuck to the mirrors over the sinks, in the toilet behind me. It lay on the floor like magic sand, covering something that had broken free of the envelope during the explosion.
It was a card. Plain white, decorated with a golden exclamation point. Careful of further surprise, I opened it. Inside, in bold orange lettering, it said: ‘I saw your work in Market Edge. The fruit thing. Stunning. Original. Call me for further conversation.’ Underneath that was stapled a black business card: David Crombie, Urgent Agency, Brixton, London SW2-4H6, (171)654–782.
Home I was skipping. Urgent. London. Job. Me.
Conversations
An odd double ring occurred when I dialed the number. Bring-bring. Bring-bring. Bring-bring me somewhere lovely where people are so alive you can hear their pulses bump-bumping as they pass you on the street. Take me somewhere like that and let me get going. Save me from Philly town.
‘Aw right’ was how the male voice answered the phone, very relaxed, hands on his balls, probably. I could hear the muted trebles of a television in the background.
‘Hello, I’m calling for David Crombie,’ I said. There was a pause. More television: an unintelligible sentence, and then laughter.
