“Ken’s afraid to return,” Rupert told Dane. “He thinks you’ll hurt him.”
“Let’s get this straight. He bounced off of me! He was the bouncer. I was the bouncee!” Dane insisted.
Rupert, Juan and Jeremi had never heard this terminology on Law and Order and Dane doubted they believed him, so he did not plead his case. Any emotional display would confirm Ken’s version of the event.
The next day Ken phoned Dane.
“How are you holding up?” he asked Dane sympathetically as if they were best friends trapped in a bad situation. Ken’s friendly tone puzzled Dane. Ken had worked on detergent accounts but failed to see that some stains do not wash out. He was oblivious to the fact that he complicated Dane’s life by misrepresenting their argument as a fist fight. In two days Ken returned to his desk and he and Dane were looking at one another again like nothing had happened.
But the Georgian Shield East was too quiet and Dane suspected trouble. The following Tuesday started typically. In the DOA lobby, Dane announced himself to the camera, “I am Utu Mabootu, the world’s tallest albino pygmy.” The security guard looked away dyspeptically as she had done the previous 100 times he used this alias.
Nigel stopped by Dane’s office at 10 AM and asked him to come to the conference room. He offered Dane a seat and regarded him sternly.
“Dane, we have to let you go. I warned you that your behavior needed to improve, so you beat up Ken.”
“I didn’t beat him up. He ran into me.”
“Please sign this statement and you will receive a month’s severance.”
Dane’s first impulse was to ball up the document and shove it down Nigel’s throat but instinct told him this might be his last income for some time. Dane walked the hallway to his office. No one so much as cast a glance in his direction. They did not seem to know was happening to him, or if they knew, he was already absent to them, a departed figure.
Dane collected his stuff and phoned Becky. As he waited for her in front of DOA Worldwide, Ron approached. He noticed that Dane carried more than his usual paraphernalia so he asked if he had a doctor’s appointment. Dane told his ex-partner he had been fired. Ron bowed his head and said he was sorry, then extracted a card from his pocket and handed it to Dane.
“I think this might help you.”
It was a card for an ionizing water detox spa.
“Why, Ron?”
“Dane, you may be toxic.”
“I’m not toxic. This agency is toxic.”
“No argument there. But you can save yourself.”
AD NOMAD 7
NOMAD’S LAND
Case 7-A
FREELANCING: FUNCTION, FREEDOM & FAKING IT
1. FREELANCER
Dane could not sleep off his Georgian Shield nightmare. In a recurring dream, a voice whispered, “No billable hours…you didn’t move your bowels…” He sat up in a sweat. When he drifted back to sleep, Ron appeared in a dream wiggling his black toes, asking, “Why did you do it, Dane?”
“Not my feet! I’m not toxic!” Dane woke up screaming.
Becky cradled his head in her arms and cooed, “Everything’s going to be all right.” But Dane was not all right. He guzzled quarts of coffee to fight fatigue, yet remained a zombie.
“Return to your true calling!” Dane urged himself but the dark monitor mocked his uninspired eyes. Instead of writing, he watched cartoons, took long showers and derived fresh air, mental stimulation and a sense of accomplishment from grocery shopping with Becky.
Dane had been damaged by jobs before but at Georgian Shield he sank to new moral depths and was deeply ashamed. Advertising was a livelihood, not a license to ruin lives. His business cost was too high: he was evolving into a predatory life form he hated and barely knew.
Ron’s advice haunted Dane. He needed to renounce pharmaceutical advertising and find work that was simple and good, like serving coffee at Starbucks, helping folks find stuff at Home Depot, or selling orthopedic running shoes to people with bad feet.
However, after three idle weeks, a crashing wave of bills washed away Dane’s scruples and he relapsed into income addiction. He forgot how despicable drug advertising had made him and craved the paycheck. His job lust had become unbearable when the phone saved him. “The right person is needed right now!” a headhunter demanded.
Urgency and immediacy were Dane’s best friends. He took a freelance gig fifty miles away. During a ninety minute drive staggered by traffic lights, he passed an endless tract of homes, condos and malls, and marveled at the wealth and stability in which he barely participated.
His first project was an overdue report on insomnia which needed swift completion. Due to the short deadline and long commute, Dane was allowed to write from home. To prove himself, Dane promised the first draft in a ridiculously short time. The job was so hot that he stayed up writing for 48 hours.
Dane applied the Stanislavski method to medical writing. By forgoing sleep, he entered the mind of an insomniac to make his content more authentic. But his sleepless binge triggered a facial twitch and scrambled syntax. On a night’s rest, his sleep-deprived prose read like gibberish key-stroked by a gorilla in the mist.
After a torrid week, Dane returned to the agency to revise his report. He took respite from the agency’s air conditioned tedium on the corporate campus grounds. It was an Elysian field for stellar think tanks, where cerebral people were meant to walk and talk intellectual trash and play games with the world’s fate.
The think tank market had crashed, leaving the splendid grounds to Dane, who took unworthy advantage. He padded on pebbled paths across a plush lawn hemmed by geometric hedges, imbibing the scent of blossoming gardens, while manmade geysers from nozzles between black stones, ejaculated refreshing mist at his skin. He traversed Romanesque foot-bridges over petal-strewn ponds, where fat mallards floated like popped corks. In this idyllic setting Dane’s mind started to mend. He had a revelation. “Work is good,” he whispered.
When the insomnia project was put to rest, the agency partners offered Dane a permanent position. He declined their offer because the commute was long and he could not commit to a full-time job.
However, this brief assignment produced in Dane a life-changing discovery.
Work was good. It was corporate life that was corrupt. To reconcile integrity with income, he must forswear full-time employment and the tainted aspirations of job ownership, stability and security, which all led to evil. When earning a day’s wage, Dane harmed no one. As a temporary employee, he would have no wobbly ladder to climb, no weak position to defend, no empty title to grab, no dubious promotion to covet and crave. It would be all work and no politics. A new career path opened before him.
Dane became a freelancer.
2. STEAMROLLER OF RELIEF
Like an endorsement from destiny, Dane received a call the next day from Pharmation, an agency in NJ owned by the same network as Mentos, where Dane had been fired for inappropriate shouting. He felt like a fugitive returning to the scene of an unsolved crime. To alter his appearance, he devised a limp and borrowed Becky’s eyebrow pencil to color in full eyebrows.
Toby Tutweiler, the imposing creative director who interviewed Dane, specialized in consumer advertising but inherited pharmaceutical accounts in a merger. She despised any drug that could not be smoked or snorted, and deemed medical advertising a wasteland in desperate need of creative salvation.
For some reason, Toby identified Dane as The Chosen One who would save drug advertising from borrowed interest, visual puns and boring headlines. Dane was flattered but baffled by Toby’s faith. Was she too zealous to know that no one would change drug advertising without first overhauling the drug industry, the FDA and molecules, themselves?
The next Monday, Dane was helping Becky identify ripe melons in a supermarket when Toby called his cell. A client had rejected the agency’s creative. Could Dane come in by noon?
At 11:59 AM Dane was in the office of a recently fired c
reative director, feverishly writing concepts and headlines for a slow-release opiate that provided steady relief.
It was a challenge. Opiates filled the marketplace and every gentle, airborne metaphor from butterflies to parachutes had been used to sell them. The only feature that distinguished this pain medication from others was its long, steady delivery of relief, which prevented breakthroughs.
At 5 o’clock Dane was beckoned to a room, where senior creatives, who identified him as Toby’s mole, reviewed his ten ideas. They gave grudging kudos to his zipper with missing teeth and liked the freshness of his mountain flattened by a steamroller.
At 8 PM, Toby strutted in like Patton in pumps, reviewed the team’s work and hated everything but Dane’s broken zipper, which she liked for its bite but discarded for its sexual innuendo.
“What about the steamroller?” Dane blurted. “We can sell steamroller toys…errr…like Hess trucks…The concept has legs…I mean, wheels…No! Tracks.”
Toby’s look swiftly demoted Dane from savior to stooge.
“The target audience is in constant pain,” Toby countered. “Do you really think they’ll be motivated by toy steamrollers?”
“What if they have children or grandchildren?” Dane pleaded.
The creative brain trust snickered.
“Miraculously, I still have an appetite after seeing this crap,” Toby said. “I’m getting dinner. When I return, I’d better not be nauseous.”
“That’s setting the bar pretty high, don’t you think?” a writer cracked as Toby walked out.
When the scent of Toby’s hair product was a whisper in their noses, the white-haired elder of the creative cadre, who misidentified Dane as “Dean,” warned, “You realize, we’re not leaving this room till she’s happy.”
The brain trust nodded with collective gloom. What were the odds of that happening? As if condemned to a circle of hell even Dante could not have imagined, the men slumped at the table in stupefied resignation. Occasionally someone expectorated an idea that hung like smoke before dissolving in silence. These hardened creatives were at ease with drudgery and discomfort, like pit-masters slow cooking their own brains.
It was nine o’clock on a Monday evening and Dane was in a familiar place—despair. In his dull neighborhood, everyone turned in early and parking would be impossible to find. He earned a per diem rate so technically he could leave and be paid. The only snag was being hired back. To be exempted from this torture chamber gracefully he needed an exit strategy. Fortunately, he had one in reserve—his finely-crafted limp. He stood up and shuffled about the room, dragging his leg ostentatiously. No one noticed. He hobbled some more and suggested with a soft voice wavering with pain that he should probably leave on account of his leg.
“Do you think with your leg, Dean?” the white-haired elder asked irascibly.
Dane admitted that he did not.
“Then would you take a seat?”
Apparently, the only way to escape this room with impunity was to think his way out. Dane disseminated ideas like his mind was a conceptual yard sale.
“Ball-peen hammer!” he shouted.
“Too painful, Dean,” the white-haired elder said.
“A feather with the drug’s logo!”
“Too light for a strong narcotic,” another writer opined.
“A vacuum cleaner sweeping a carpet of nerve-endings!” Dane shouted as if struck by divine revelation.
“That sucks,” an art director yawned.
“We did it three months ago,” another writer piped in.
Pressure thinking and metabolizing large bodies raised the room temperature to perspiration drip point. Dane wiped wet beads from his forehead, prompting the white-haired creative leader to stare at him.
“Dean, what’s that on your face?”
Dane thought the group leader was mocking him or posing a trick question.
“What? You mean my eyes, nose and mouth?” Dane asked peevishly.
“There’s a brown streak over your eyes.”
After a confused moment, Dane recalled the fake eyebrows of his disguise, which he had scribbled on frantically that morning. How could he explain it? He had to think fast—again—and it was becoming harder to do after a day of thinking about a slow-acting opiate.
“It must be the organic brown soap my wife made me use,” Dane said.
“Glad to hear it. I thought it was shoe polish, only you missed your shoes,” the white-haired elder said. Raucous laughter filled the room. The creative thinkers kept it going like a fire on a cold night, until they forgot what they were laughing about.
Hours passed. Toby arrived.
“So what do you have for me?”
She rolled a toothpick with her tongue while the men displayed the finery of their minds: a steamroller, a steam iron, a locomotive engine with a smiley face, a lace curtain, a fire extinguisher, a lawn mower, hedge-clippers, a meat tenderizer, a ball-peen hammer with a fur handle…
Toby glowered but it was unclear whether her reaction was due to aesthetics or indigestion. She burped.
“You can do better,” she said as she left for the lady’s room.
Giggles and monosyllables festooned the silence. Some creatives expressed concepts with their fingers. Dane gave the limp another chance. In his earlier demonstration, he had dragged the leg, whereas this time he swung it from the hip like a sickle severing weeds. The white haired supervisor stared at him. “That’s not the same leg you were dragging before,” he said.
Dane paused with unease. Someone was paying more attention to his mischief than he was. Should he say the pain traveled or that the inflammation was symmetrical like rheumatoid arthritis? It was too risky. These medical writers would know he lied or would factcheck it.
“No, it’s the same leg,” Dane bluffed. “You must have seen me limp in the other direction.”
“Dean, if it bothers you, sit down,” the leader suggested.
Dane was getting used to the idea of circling his neighborhood all night or sleeping in his car, when Toby returned at midnight. She stared at the doodles on the wall and settled on Dane’s steamroller flattening a hill.
The next day, everyone took credit for the steamroller concept and conveniently forgot that Dane created it. Toby summoned Dane to her office.
“It’s slow so you don’t need to come back.”
“Did I screw up?”
“You tell me! I hired you to remove cheesy metaphors from drug advertising,” Toby said. “So you gave me a steamroller and a toothless zipper.”
“I thought you liked them.” Dane replied, lowering his mortified eyes.
“I hated them. The client loves them!” she cried.
“That’s great! I saved your business!” Dane replied.
“But at what cost? Because of your shitty creative, we’ll have to live with a steamroller flattening a hill for years! I’d rather lose the client than produce this drek!”
She peered at Dane as if his soul were a bad clam she needed to pry open regardless. “Don’t you want more than success?”
“I’ll tell you when I have some,” Dane replied honestly.
During the long drive home, Dane felt used and abused. It was a familiar sensation but not one a freelancer was supposed to feel—in particular, when working on a pain medication. Belittlement and inadequacy went with a staff job; freelance was supposed to be different. Dane had never been fired faster—and for doing what he was told. As he drove, he composted his anguish. “It’s the way of the freelancer,” he told himself. “You did the assignment. You were paid. You are successful.”
3. REVIVAL
That night the phone rang.
“Hello there!”
The buoyant voice belonged to Paula, Dane’s born-again Christian, high-fashion, art director friend with whom Dane had briefly collaborated at Integrimedicom.
“We’re partners again!”
Paula and Dane were teamed on a secret pitch for a groundbreaking drug—at Phar
mation—of all places. It was a second coming for Dane but with a major difference. Once again, Dane occupied the office of a recently fired creative director but this time Paula was in the office across the hall, distracting him with her Mary Magdalene evangelism. She wore stiletto heels and a short skirt that exposed the full length of her brown, sleek legs. Spaghetti straps held her silken top over her firm breasts. Bangles jangled around her neck, wrists and ankles. She played angelic synthesizer music on her computer while she and Dane explored concepts for a pitch so preliminary that nobody knew what it was for.
“So, tell me about this pulmonary hypertension,” Paula said.
“The vessels in the lungs are constricted so blood doesn’t flow through them,” Dane explained.
“So it’s a big bad disease and our drug is the good guy that’s fighting it,” Paula summarized.
“Something like that,” Dane replied.
“Just keep it simple, Sugar, and tell a story,” Paula advised.
She propped her legs on the desk, stroked her thighs and scowled at her feet.
“I’m not sure about these toenails. I like ‘em brighter,” Paula mused. “Ya know, Jesus loved feet.”
“I thought he washed them.”
“Well, he wouldn’t wash ‘em if he didn’t love ‘em.” She wiggled her toes and laughed.
While Dane struggled for a headline, Paula searched the internet for pictures.
“Check this out,” Paula said.
Dane thought she found an evocative image for a new concept. Instead, she was browsing a Christian singles website for eligible men. Her mouse rested on one with a long face and bad hair, who could have been Dane’s double.
“What about this guy? He’s a single dad with two teenage kids.”
“Contact him instantly,” Dane advised. Paula was less sure.
“He snorkels. I don’t trust the piety of a man who is always underwater. I want a fisher of men, not a fish.” Later, as they brainstormed for ideas no one was asking for, Paula broke the silence.
“So Dane, why do you hate Jesus?”
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