“Life was good. I was a tenured professor and a popular lecturer. Still, I was restless. I pined for the excitement of the laboratory. So when I was offered a chance to run clinical trials for a drug company, it was a wonderful new beginning and it led to UNIHEALTH. I’ve gone full circle. I even played my trombone last year at the agency picnic.”
There was clearly so much more to Dr. Mooney that Dane did not dare to ask questions for fear of a sequel. Dr. Mooney concluded his life story when he could remember no more and was called to a meeting.
However, Dr. Mooney’s greatest quality came to light on a dark, rainy day. Dane arrived at UNIHEALTH to find employees devouring jelly-filled cookies, strudel, poppy seed cakes and glistening Danishes.
It was a UNIHEALTH tradition. When it rained, Dr. Mooney brought in boxes of pastries and cakes to raise people’s moods. These offerings, which Dr. Mooney called rain bread, demonstrated his genius for behavioral therapy. Rain bread conditioned the UNIHEALTH staff to enjoy coming to work on a rainy morning.
Dr. Mooney’s generosity inspired Dane more than his life story. In his act of kindness, Dane saw it was possible to make people feel better in simple ways. He started bringing in cookies or cheesecakes on sunny days. By doing a small thing for people he barely knew, he felt more connected to them.
14. THE FEATS OF BACCHUS
Unfortunately, there were not enough rainy days to uplift Dane’s spirit. After his prostate protest speech he learned what it meant to own your job at UNIHEALTH.
Three weeks after his “Acorn concept” won approval, the book was printed and distributed. It was a hit. People at UNIHEALTH read it to their children and enjoyed the pictures. Soon it would be disseminated to drug companies all over the world. Dane was elated.
But when the hoopla abated, Dane returned to his team—the fundamental unit in advertising. Regardless of an agency’s size, the team you were on mattered most. It was critical to survival.
Dane never calculated the effect his early success would have on his teammates. Karen, his immediate supervisor, saw Dane’s appointment as an insult. Worse, she thought Dane was being groomed to supervise her. Bevaqua’s support of the “Acorn concept,” which she worked on but considered hopelessly irrelevant, confirmed her paranoia.
Dane stumbled into Karen’s life as the latest agent of her despicable fate. She had two sisters, both doctors. Karen attended Cooper Union to study art—a brilliant coup—but her adult life had been one long series of attempts to redeem this career choice. She fell into a pattern that started with her family. Just as her parents ignored her achievements in favor of her sisters’, Karen’s dedication, intelligence and talent were often underestimated as she progressed slowly through the UNIHEALTH ranks while toiling on others’ ideas.
Yet Karen’s dislike for Dane was more political than personal. She saw him as a vulnerable appendage of Bevaqua, to be amputated with impunity. Karen despised Bevaqua but was too shrewd to attack him directly. If she made Dane look bad, Bevaqua would look worse for hiring him.
Sylvia Befunkewicz, the account director, also despised Dane in an impersonal way. She despised the Contruro client. Since she could not tell him, she abused Dane as a surrogate. To Sylvia’s credit, hers was a “green” abuse system; abuse was conserved and recycled with no extraneous abuse discharged.
At every team meeting, Dane was treated like an inept and impotent delegate of the middle-aged and elderly male population of benign prostate hyperplasia patients.
“These guys can’t urinate or have sex. They’re always in pain,”
Sylvia said. “How does it feel, Dane?”
Dane squirmed. Posing as an expert on a disease of aging men made him indispensable. Even so, it was humiliating to his manhood to tell women that he could not urinate or have sex—especially since he could do both. But since he needed the money, he embellished the false impression.
“It hurts…more than I can say,” Dane said.
“What goes on in a man’s mind when you’re standing there trying to pee and can’t?” Sylvia asked with clinical curiosity, like she would use this insight in a marketing report.
“I try to visualize a garden hose,” Dane replied.
Sylvia brought out an anatomical model of the male urinary tract with a rubber, an inflatable penis and a removable bladder and rectum.
“I want to introduce you guys to a new gift from our client. It’s an anatomical model and it costs several hundred dollars.”
Sylvia had a sharp pencil in her hand. She poked a little dark organ just south of the bladder that looked like a chocolate donut.
“See this? What is this, Dane? Huh?” She asked, stabbing at the prostrate.
Dane felt a sharp pain in his lower urinary tract and squirmed.
“It’s a prostate.”
“Very good, Dane,” she said. “And what happens when men have BPH?”
She poked at the rubber penis with her pencil. Dane winced.
“They can’t have an erection.”
“Right.” Sylvia pressed a little bulb in her hand which was connected by a tube to the inflatable penis. The penis straightened and lengthened. Sylvia pressed the bulb in another way and deflated the penis. “Or…”
“They can’t maintain an erection.”
“Very good, Dane,” Sylvia said. “I think we should name our lower urinary tract model. Who has an idea?”
“Since Dane aced the quiz, let’s name it Little Dane,” Karen said.
“All in favor?” Sylvia asked.
Dane was the only dissenting vote. Within an hour—the normal news cycle at UNIHEALTH—everyone knew about Little Dane.
Dane brought his grievance to Bevaqua.
“This is harassment!” he cried.
“What did she do?”
“She abused the male anatomical model. She poked at the prostate and penis with her pencil. It was psychological torture!”
“It’s plastic, Dane.”
“But she named it Little Dane! Isn’t that mental cruelty?”
“She likes you, Dane. You know how I know? She doesn’t poke plastic prostates with just anyone. She’s teasing you to see how you react.”
Dane had little time to react. His chagrin was replaced that afternoon with unadulterated despair. Sylvia called Dane into a telephone conference with the client, a Southerner, who described in detail how he grilled a hog head before he changed subject to the backgrounder and references. “Y’all got yaw fingers up yaw butts or what?” he asked. When the client ended the call to have his teeth cleaned, Sylvia told Karen she needed the background report Dane wrote, fully annotated with references—immediately. Karen asked him if he understood his assignment and dismissed him from the meeting. Dane had no idea which references he was supposed to use. He had written his backgrounder based on a 300-page clinical document Bevaqua handed him when he was hired. Now he learned that the seven-nation survey could not be a reference since it was never published—and was owned by the drug company. Karen gave him the number of a woman in medical education and told him to order the references but this contact had left the company months before. Ordering references was a complicated process. When Dane completed the order forms, Karen tossed them in the trash. Another firm had sent the documents.
Dane stared at the tower of articles and panicked. He needed to insert cogent quotations from as many references as he could read in a few hours. He paced, cursed and considered hurling himself from a window—but they were all sealed shut. He overcame his anxiety, read every article methodically and used quotations from seventeen of them. Three hours later, he handed the annotated version of his backgrounder, with highlighted references and a bibliography, to Karen.
His achievement was soon buried under a new hassle. Sylvia was dissatisfied with the patient PI so he rewrote it. Then she changed her mind and ordered him to type out client changes—unintelligible marks in the margins of thirty pages of single-spaced script—and insert new annotations. After Dane complete
d this, Sylvia rebuked him for omitting a reference. Dane offered to insert it but she said she would do it herself.
The next afternoon, the client gave his verdict on the improved patient PI. He hated it. “How many times we gonna play PI pingpong, people? Writer, you got your head up your proverbial ass, son? How’d you mix up the two damn categories of urination difficulty? You got obstructive and irritative symptoms cross-wired, man. Even a bitty child knows the difference, so what’s yaw problem? You put weak stream, insufficient voiding and straining in the irritative category when any fool can tell ya they’re obstructive. And then you listed urgency and frequency as obstructive when they’re irritative—not irritating. Damn, it would be funny if it wasn’t so damn pathetic. All BPH symptoms are irritating, y’all!”
When Dane pulled his head out of the client’s mouth, he was grateful his brain wasn’t put in a jar. To disprove the incompetence his teammates ascribed to him, Dane worked late every evening. Yet his efforts to redeem himself did not relieve the numb sensation in his genitals he was starting to notice with alarming frequency. He diagnosed it as a psychosomatic response to reading about enlarged prostates but this was a facile diagnosis. It was far more serious than that.
Even after his early skirmishes with The Prostate Team, Dane had started losing sexual urges, thoughts and longings. All he felt in his groin was a dull ache. It was a strange sensation. At first, he believed that slouching in a knock-off ergonomic chair cut circulation to his pelvis, pressed the sciatic nerve, or strained his lower back. Yet improved posture and analgesics did not stimulate his libido. His jobinduced castration was already in an advanced stage.
15. AN ANTIDOTE FOR JOB-INDUCED CASTRATION
Zach Trench, the youngest group copy supervisor in UNIHEALTH history, had the cubicle abutting Dane’s. He was one of the four associate creative directors who had interviewed Dane before his hire. Zach watched Dane suffer the testes-crushing criticism of the Prostate Team, and heard him quietly groaning across their shared partition. After initially enjoying the spectacle, Zach decided to be humane.
As they stood one morning at adjacent urinals, Zach Trench spoke to Dane, who was having a bout of “micturition inhibition” and could not void.
“So you’re working on Contruro.”
Dane nodded grimly.
“I worked on Contruro. Five writers have been on that account in six months.”
“Why is there so much turn-over on the account?” Dane asked.
“It’s a pisser,” Zach said, quoting the unofficial motto for the Prostate Team. He shrugged, waited for a laugh that never came, flushed, and slapped Dane on the back, which deviated Dane’s aim, causing backsplash.
As the two writers washed their hands and studied their faces in the mirror, Zach told Dane that of the five Contruro copywriters, two were fired and three were reassigned. The account was a disaster, the client was an animal and Sylvia was “certifiable.”
All of this reassured Dane. When he returned to his cubicle he found a sheet of paper with a Web link and a handwritten note. All of science teaches us nothing more than this.
Dane clicked on the link. FREE PORN. On the landing page he found women of all shapes and sizes. Instinctively, Dane knew this was no time for porn. He clicked the X on the corner of his screen but the computer froze on the page of naked women.
“What are you working on?” Karen asked. He could feel her coming up behind him. Either she had an instinct for catching him with porn, had been tipped off, or even planted the note with the hyperlink on his desk, herself. It was feeling like a set up and she was ready to pounce. Dane threw his body over the monitor and ripped hard at the ganglion of electric cords in the back of the motherboard to make the monitor go dark.
“What are you doing?” Karen demanded.
“I was stretching and lost my balance.”
“Your computer is off.”
“It crashed,” Dane said.
“It didn’t crash. It’s unplugged!”
“Well look at that.” Dane feigned amazement at the dangling prongs and wires. “I’ll have to reattach them.”
Karen looked at Dane disdainfully. He set new lows for masculine ineptitude in her mind.
His computer had crashed and was making strange test patterns like early morning TV. An IT guy came by to remove corrupted programs and install new ones. He was a downtrodden sort who loped from one job order to the next. It was conceivable, even probable, that he neither knew nor cared why Dane’s computer crashed. Dane asked the IT guy questions to test the depth of his apathy.
“What makes a computer crash?
“Mostly opening email attachments that contain viruses.”
“Can it happen when you open a website dealing with urinary problems?”
“You mean porn? No. Not unless you downloaded it. And the IT manual prohibits that,” the IT man said accusatorily.
Dane nodded and bit his dry lower lip. He hoped these facial tics would cut off the flow of blood to his embarrassed face. In an office populated predominantly by women, Dane’s image would never survive the rumor that he was a sex-obsessed, porn-loving maniac.
16. HOW CONTRURO!
At the end of the week, Dane found a dark, little plastic donut on his desk with a post-it. “It’s a complimentary prostate from our client: for inspiration.”
That afternoon, Sylvia and Karen called Dane to the fishbowl.
“I have an assignment you’ll like,” Sylvia said.
“It’s a game,” Karen added.
“Our client wrote a short sentence to describe what the drug does but it’s too dry and he’s not happy with it,” Sylvia said. “He wants the words to pop and sizzle.”
“That’s what we pay you for,” Karen said.
“So your job is to take the same three ideas and six words and write at least twenty more variations without changing the words.”
The tagline read as follows:
Contruro—an effective uroselective alpha blocker with a favorable sexual and cardiovascular side effect profile
Dane stared at the words in murderous stupefaction. Should he try to know what they meant before rearranging them, or would understanding get in the way? He could view himself as a moving man who puts chairs and coffee tables where the customer demands or as a designer who sees the relationship of the furniture. At 3 PM, Friday, Dane was in moving man mode. He asked Sylvia by email if the taglines needed to be done by end of day. “Yes,” she replied curtly. “That was our agreement.”
It was another one of Sylvia’s phantom agreements. Hoping one success would redeem him in her mind, Dane worked with alacrity. It was an assignment scripted for his skill set. With his penchant for syntax and redundancy, Dane could move words around a sentence with effortless finesse, devising a verbal array of cadences and nuances. And for dessert, he could create compound adjectives with the word “prostate,” which had never been seen or spoken anywhere in the world.
Contruro, the effective prostate-targeted alpha 1 blocker, treats BPH without compromising sexual function or blood pressure.
Contruro, the prostate-preferential alpha blocker, provides effective relief of BPH symptoms without disrupting sexual performance or affecting blood pressure.
Contruro, the effective prostate-selective alpha blocker, is proven to treat BPH with fewer sexual and cardiovascular side effects.
And many etcetera’s.
Even Dane, as supple as any verbal contortionist, with a weakness for saying the same thing a hundred ways, could twist the same few words no more.
When he was stuck, tired or uninspired, Dane revived himself with internet porn instead of fresh air. Pictures of naked women were a sexual double espresso when his energy ran low. This attraction to nude photographs exceeded sexual stimulation. He reviewed the thumbnail pictures of naked women in part to make his workcastrated self feel manly, but his palpitations came from transgression and the risk of exposure. If caught, he would lose his job and never be hired ag
ain. How would he explain this outcome to Becky and Iris, or live with himself if he failed to provide for them? Yet scopophilia was an occupational illness for a man writing about chemical castration, like black lung in a coal miner.
This site featured an impressive array of women of all ages, races and body types. Dane was surprised to find even white-haired women spread-eagled on the page. He surmised that Dr. Mooney must have secretly provided the link since the women were more mature than those in the usual porn magazines and websites.
Dane felt a luxurious privacy alone at UNIHEALTH that Friday evening. After minutes of naked-gazing, he returned to work refreshed. However, his porn exposure produced symptoms of benign prostate hyperplasia—painful erection, difficulty achieving orgasm, and lower urinary tract discomfort. Dane might have relieved these symptoms if a highly selective morality had not prevented him from doing so. He had no qualms about gawking at nude women on a company computer but had scruples about masturbating in public. These eclectic ethics left him with aching testes.
After three hours on the Contruro messages, Dane muttered, “First class verbiage.” Verbiage was a term account people used that made writing sound like effluent discharge. Dane hated it but he had no better word for thirty arrangements of six words. He printed out the three pages of taglines with the same pride he once derived from the amount of leaves he bagged for his in-laws. He looked for Sylvia, his taskmaster, but she had already gone for the weekend.
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