Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Case 5-C

  MENTAL BENDS & OTHER DISABILITIES

  11. MENTAL BENDS

  The well dressed intruder was Maurice Minton, Dane’s “team” account director, and he had a massive assignment for Dane.

  “Let me be as clear as Lake Baikal…that’s the world’s deepest fresh-water lake,” Maurice began, flaunting some erudition recently acquired from his young daughter’s latest issue of National Geographic for Kids. “This assignment is lava hot, with work to occupy an entire copy department. Dick tells me you are the copy supervisor. In a word, you are the man.”

  “With all due respect, ‘the man’ is two words,” Dane replied, although he did not know Maurice well enough to correct his grammar.

  “So they are!” Maurice laughed and clapped his hands. He beamed at Dane like he was the prodigal son. His eyes danced when he announced the importance and time-sensitivity of these jobs. The ten pieces, which included a patient brochure, a newsletter and several letters to managed care organizations, all fully annotated with a bibliography, were due yesterday.

  Due yesterday! Just when Dane resolved to live in the present, he had to work fast enough to reverse time. For Dane, “due yesterday” was a starting pistol firing in his head. It was a cocktail of agony and ecstasy, when a copywriter showed his creativity and speed and did what he was paid to do.

  “So when can I see something?” Maurice asked.

  “I’ll start now. You should have some pieces tomorrow.”

  “Excellent!” Maurice thundered. He pointed at Dane. “I’m counting on you, big guy.”

  As Dane raced back to his office and tried making sense of the wall of work rushing toward him, agony turned against ecstasy like a black widow murdering her mate. He recalled that along with ten new jobs for Maurice, he had to create and research memorable, meaningful acronyms for Dirk’s and Tiny’s corporation-naming assignment.

  It was noon but Dane was too nervous to eat. An unbearable pressure filled his guts and torched his skin. “Restless butt syndrome” caused him to fidget in his chair and he experienced a fizzing in his brain like carbonation. His jaws tingled as if super-heated saliva seeped from his gums while white spots sprinkled his vision like old film leader. All signs pointed to “mental bends,” a disease triggered by a rapid shift from normal to high pressure. In an instant he might scream and throw objects. When Maria, the turbulent traffic manager, dumped a heap of folders on his desk, Dane nearly hurled them back at her. Instead, he exercised supervisory restraint and walked to Dick’s office for moral support and professional assistance.

  What was he thinking?

  12. NO HELP FROM ELVES

  When Dane entered Dick Spilkus’s dark lair, the creative director was practicing his own brand of personal relief by rolling two rusteaten Chinese healthy balls in one hand while feeding his mouth cheese-flavored nachos with the other. Dick’s head vibrated as if sensors in his skin detected Dane’s presence and roused him from his “stand-by” trance.

  “What is it?” Spilkus demanded with vague irritation.

  Dane described the pile of work he had been given. Dick’s mouth made a smacking noise, his tongue absorbing tortilla salt from his palate. He managed one pithy word between nacho deposits.

  “Delegate.”

  Far from mollifying Dane, Dick’s message exacerbated his nervousness. It was a managerial trick. He subtracted from Dane’s burden by doubling it. Now the copy supervisor faced two challenges—to get the work done and to suborn someone else to do it. “Delegation” was the second managerial skill Dane would be tested on after “conflict resolution”—for which he had received an “Incomplete.”

  “Call Barbara,” Dick said. “She works under you. Now get her to work for you…and one more thing, Dane.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can you bring a pineapple cheesecake? I’ve been craving it since you brought in the plain one.”

  “I’ll look into it when I’ve finished writing the ten pieces by next week!” Dane replied as he bolted from Dick’s office.

  Dane phoned Barbara to recruit her but she had bad news for him. Dirk Ferguson, the president, had just handed her a major project—to write his son’s recommendation letter for a junior year abroad program in Patagonia—and Dirk Ferguson’s assignments took precedence over everything.

  With a vengeance, Dane returned to Dick Spilkus’s dark office for more mentoring in the art of delegation. Dick was rolling a pen in his mouth like a cigar as he stared vacantly at his oversized monitor.

  “Barbara’s busy working for Dirk.”

  “Dirk is #1,” Dick muttered without moving his eyes from the monitor. “You’re #2. Do what you gotta do.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re the writer. You should know what it means.”

  “Are there other resources?” Dane asked, unabashedly stalling. He could not face the work until he exhausted every appeal.

  “Resources?” Dick asked vaguely as if trying to recall what the word meant. “You mean like elves?”

  Dane forced a laugh that crumbled into a hacking cough.

  “You are our resource. Make us proud,” Dick said, maintaining his monitor gaze.

  This inspirational charge convinced Dane of two things: not to linger long enough to distract Spilkus from the screen and not to expect help. He left his boss on mental stand-by and returned to his office, where job bags spilling bloated documents, contaminated with marginalia, doodles, circled passages, misleading arrows and stapled scraps, awaited his attention.

  Dane’s despair spiked. He urgently needed help or his skull would explode.

  At last Dane understood why movie characters in crisis often threw breakable objects. It was not action so much as procrastination before taking action. Dane had no glass but a mountain of paper was at hand. He lifted the stack and dropped it on his desk to produce a booming thud. Folders hit the floor and spilled their contents.

  “Damn!” Dane cursed.

  For his next act, Dane reviewed the contents of each folder to estimate which project would demand the least time and effort for the maximum sense of accomplishment. If Maurice asked about the job status tomorrow, Dane wanted to tell him three jobs were done. Maurice would be ecstatic and the pressure would be off. Manipulating perceptions in this way could provide illusory progress—and superb public relations.

  Dane soon realized the jobs were all unique in ways picayune and perverse. Some needed new copy—an easy fix—while others required extensive patchwork of copy from diverse sources, involving laborious puzzle-solving. Dane evaluated and prioritized for a half-hour, extracted three slim folders from the pile and dropped the others on a chair.

  Yet even triage did not lighten the load where it was heaviest—in Dane’s head. He pressed his hand against his brow like an eyeshade and supported his cranium like a piece of bulky equipment. He fumbled to organize the work until he fell into a rhythm. That afternoon he did three of the ten projects, and drove home relieved and confident that he would complete the rest on schedule.

  13. TIT FOR TAT

  When Dane returned to Mentos the next day, he saw what was left to do and freaked one more time.

  His feel-good, self-motivational tactic had backfired. The three completed pieces were eclipsed by the remaining seven, which were like epic serial-killer notes—layouts littered with cross-outs, arcane doodles and scribbled instructions to insert pages from other texts. This was not copywriting but code-breaking a puzzle with pieces picked out of a dumpster.

  Dane recognized now why he needed to manage. If he did not delegate work, he would have it all to himself, which was tantamount to digging a pit and shoveling dirt on himself. Dane had tried to delegate projects to Barbara but she was always busy and he stopped asking. When he had lunch with Ralph, he violated her trust and forfeited her cooperation—forever. But maybe she forgot about his lunch with Ralph or he would catch her at a hungry moment. If he asked her to lunch and she accept
ed, he could persuade her to help. He was dreaming! She would never have lunch with him—in her mind, he was contaminated by Ralph.

  After an hour of drudgery, Dane overcame his qualms and phoned Barbara for lunch. She agreed to meet him at one and they discussed where they would go.

  “I don’t feel like a supermarket salad bar,” she said.

  “What about Chinese?”

  She was lukewarm. Dane reassured her that it was open for discussion—but Dick stood in his doorway, so the discussion was over.

  “Gotta go,” he whispered.

  “We’ll take my car,” she said.

  “OK, right. One,” he said and hung up.

  For no apparent reason, Dick needed to talk to Dane about his Chinese healthy balls, how great they were and how he paid only two dollars for such an ancient and effective alternative Chinese therapy.

  “Did you know they’re good for arthritis, circulation and brain function?” Dick asked.

  Dane nervously consulted his timepiece. It was five minutes to one. Now that Barbara had agreed to meet him for lunch he could not be late or he would never be able to delegate a thing to her; he would be stuck mismanaging himself.

  “Yeah, Chinese apothecaries kick FDA ass,” Dane told Dick with awkward exuberance. “I wish we had them as pharma clients. I mean, tiger tooth, rhinoceros horn, they’re the best.”

  Dick blinked. His tongue licked cheese powder off his lips. “I want to see those acronyms before you leave,” he said.

  “Right, great,” Dane said.

  Dick took exception to Dane’s tone. His sensors detected dismissiveness but he needed to pee and his bladder always came before his ego.

  It was after one. “Damn!” Dane thought. “She’ll think I stood her up. I’m screwed.”

  He leaped down the stairway a landing at a time down to the garage and stood behind a pillar to escape the potential gossip of passing colleagues. He did not know how to explain his vigil. Ten minutes passed and Barbara did not appear. A woman in a leather jacket finally emerged. She tossed her hair and walked toward him. Was it Barbara? She looked more energetic and focused than he had seen her.

  “Are you sure we can’t just walk to lunch?” he asked.

  “Absolutely sure,” she said. “We’ll take my car.”

  Dane weighed this option cautiously. As her passenger, his supervisory stature would be diminished. Yet, this could be perceived favorably. If she drove, she was in charge. He could not be accused of abusing his power. Her driving also had a practical benefit. Barbara knew Winton better than he did. They climbed into her SUV, twice the size of his compact, and she accelerated from the garage.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  He suggested Chinese take-out and a picnic near the river—it was his standard lunch itinerary.

  “Is that what you did with him?”

  “I like Chinese food,” he confessed. “And I like the river.”

  After picking up the food, Dane thought Barbara would leave her jeep in the library lot and they would walk to the river. Instead, she took an emphatic right turn and drove in a new direction.

  “I won’t eat the same food in the same spot where you went with that drip. I’d puke.”

  She turned right at a sign for the beach. Goldfarb had urged Dane to see the beach where he took long meditative walks. Now was his chance.

  The bumpy one lane road twisted among dunes and brambles. The tang of salt water and organic decay permeated the air. Winton no longer seemed suburban, but wild, exotic and secluded.

  They sat on flat stones, eating from containers among the dunes and shrubs. Long Island Sound slapped the sand. Gulls coasted overhead and pecked in the muck.

  “Damn, the chopstick left a splinter in my lip,” Dane whined.

  He picked at the splinter with his fingertips but could not extract it.

  “I’ll get it, “Barbara said. Over his mild protests, she used tweezers from the Swiss Army Knife in her handbag to pry the sliver from Dane’s mouth. He was the boss but she had taken him on a field trip to the beach and was now playing school nurse.

  “I lost a tooth in the hot and sour soup last week,” Dane complained. “Now I’m stabbing myself with a chopstick. I don’t know why I go back to that place. It’s bad luck.”

  “Because the food is good,” she said. Her approval lifted his mood.

  When they paused from their meal, Dane turned to business.

  “I need your help with some assignments Maurice gave me.”

  “I’m overloaded with a job from Tiny,” Barbara replied. “I’ll do what I can.”

  A long rodent darted into the brambles behind the dunes.

  “Looks like a weasel. It’s probably a rat,” Barbara observed.

  “You’re good on animals,” Dane remarked.

  “I worked for a zoo newsletter,” she said. “Did you hear that in Hollywood certain major stars use weasels for sexual pleasure?”

  “No,” Dane said. “How does that work?”

  “They let it crawl up their butts.”

  “I should have known,” Dane said, trying to seem worldly as he spooned in some hot and sour soup. “It’s classic Freud. The Rat Man,” Dane remarked. “He fantasized about using an Asian torture device against his fiancée and his dead father.”

  She laughed. “Clearly, you were once a teacher.”

  It surprised Dane that Barbara was so current on weasel sex and Hollywood gossip. He had pegged her as a small-town recluse in lumberjack clothes, who lived with her pets in a dilapidated house and was oblivious to the world. Clearly, there was more to her. When they drove back to town, she pulled into the garage and kept the motor running.

  “Thanks for showing me around,” Dane said. “I would never have gone to the beach on my own.”

  “I like showing you around,” Barbara said. “Thanks for asking me to lunch. But why did you do it?”

  Dane was taken aback. Did their pleasant time not answer the question? He believed his intentions were clear. Since they were not, he felt the pressure to explain.

  “You’re a colleague. We had business to discuss,” he said.

  Barbara’s face stiffened and her eyes went cold.

  “You took me out to lunch because you did it with Ralph. You wanted to be fair.”

  That was correct and Dane would have readily admitted it if Barbara had not been staring at him so unhappily.

  “I already told you how that happened. Ralph found my gloves and I showed my thanks,” Dane said uneasily. “I always meant to have lunch with you first.”

  “Yeah, but you went with him first,” Barbara replied.

  Her grudge worked like a time machine. It nullified the pleasant hour they had spent and reverted to the conflict Dane believed they resolved. He wished to treat Barbara and Ralph as equals but parity with Ralph was unacceptable to her.

  Barbara smoothed her hair in the rear view mirror, then placed her hands on both sides of his face and pulled him toward her, submerging his head in her flannel shirt and pressing it between her breasts. She held him tightly there and rocked her torso sideways to envelop him in their fullness and heat. Dane struggled to break free but her arms were wrapped around his head and neck and her fingers gripped his hair. In urgent need of air, he put his hands on her shoulders and peeled away from her.

  “Why did you do that?” he gasped.

  “It’s one thing you didn’t do with Ralph,” she said flatly.

  She turned off the engine and smoothed her hair in the rear-view. Dane’s impulse was to bolt from her car and to run across the garage—to convey that he was an unwilling party to inappropriate contact. His second thought advised against such a conspicuous response. It might raise questions unlikely to be answered in a manner likely to be believed. Despite his confusion, he knew composure was critical. He also knew his professional relationship with Barbara had changed, though he wished it had not.

  As minutes, then hours, separated Dane from the event, it loomed
larger in his mind, and he needed to pretend it never happened. Toward this end, he phoned her later that afternoon.

  “Thanks for having lunch with me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I think we made progress.”

  “Yes.”

  Rather than clearing the air, this conversation circulated it like an old fan. By not referring to the incident, he extended its awkwardness.

  “So we’re okay, right?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “That’s great,” he said, gulping air since had been holding his breath. “I want us to be able to work together, right?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Relax.”

  Barbara seemed willing to pretend nothing happened. Dane’s fear was assuaged for the moment. However, over-the-phone pain relief was never more than temporary. Dane’s long drive home provided fertile time for his anxiety to grow.

  “I’m not managing very well,” he thought.

  14. STRESS TEST

  A few days later, on a Sunday morning, a phone call from Philadelphia broke the Bacchus family’s one long slumber of the week. Becky’s ailing mother was in a hospital in critical condition with high fever and breathing difficulties. The family was told to come at once.

  Within an hour, Dane, Becky and Iris were southward bound. When they arrived at the hospital, two young residents told Becky that her mother might not survive. They handed her a clipboard with a form permitting the hospital staff not to resuscitate.

  Becky and her sister insisted that their mother would recover. She had weathered health crises before.

  Becky’s mother did not die on schedule. She had double-pneumonia. With oxygen and an antibiotic drip, her condition stabilized. Becky needed to stay on so Dane and Iris headed home without her. Along with Dane’s long-distance job he would be Iris’s sole caregiver for at least a week. Working 41 miles away, he would also need to arrange her after-school pick-up. Between family, job and commute, Dane had believed he was overwhelmed but he was now well beyond that familiar extreme.