What snake? J.D.’d cabled back. What yore? Relax, he’d cabled. Cool off. Unwind. Read some of that Stoic shit you like. Have a Lite. Dip into some of the roses I sent sub rosa for you alone, friend. Reflect. Think over the totality of everybody’s investment in the thing so far. Of time, money, money, time, spirit. Don’t do anything hasty. Trust me, who’s earned your trust. Cold feet are natural, as the day draws near.
The super-sized ego of an arrogant pussy, is what J.D. had really thought. Of course you need it. Spare me chumpness about this. Criticism is response. Which is good. If J.D. lays out a campaign strategy nobody criticizes, then J.D. right away knows the idea’s a dink, a bad marriage of jingle and image, one that won’t produce, just lays there, no copulation of engaging gears, no spin inside the market’s spin. You need it. Eat it up. It’s attention. It engages imaginations. It sells. It works off desire, and sells. It sold books, it’ll sell mirrored discotheque franchises. The criticism’ll be what fills the seats with fannies. J.D.’d bet his life.
Standing there, past weary, his whole fine face, which tended to rush toward its own center anyhow, centered around a cigar he waits to crunch and spit the tip of, a fried-flower taste hanging like fog on his palate, standing at a window of the bunting-bedecked (WELCOME MCDONALD’S ALUMNI WELCOME JACK LORD WELCOME PLEASE SEE NEAREST STEELRITTER ALUMNI ASSISTANCE REPRESENTATIVE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND DIRECTIONS WELCOME!) and redecorated (in Mrs. Steelritter’s favorite muted grays and dusty plum) Central Illinois Airport, waiting for sunrise and the LordAloft 5:10 A.M. shuttle from O’Hare to descend with the very last couple of alumni kids, J.D.’d bet his life. Admen do this. Bet their life on criticism, attention, desire, fear, love, marriage of concession and market. Retention of image. Loyalty to brand. Empathy with client. Sales. On life. Life!
Life goes on. You’re empty, sad, probably the least appreciated creative virtuoso in the industry; well and but life just goes on, emptily, sadly, with always direction but never center. The hubless wheel spins ever faster, no? Yes. Admen approach challenges thus: concede what’s hopelessly true, what you can’t make folks ever want to not be so; concede; then take your creative arm and hammer a big soaked wedge, hard as can be, into whatever’s open to interpretation. Interpret, argue, sing, whisper, work the wedge down into the pulp, where the real red juices be, where folks feel alone, fear their genitals, embrace their own shadows, want so badly it’s a great subsonic groan, a lambent static only the trained adman’s sticky ear can trap, retain, digest. Interpretation, he’s fond of telling DeHaven, is persuasion’s driveway. Persuasion is desire. Desire is the monstrous pulse, the trillion-hearted river that is the care and feeding of J.D. and Mrs. J.D. Steelritter and their clown of a son DeHaven. Meat on a table already groaning under meat, festooned with homegrown food. This is J.D.’s way since the Lucky Strike campaign, the first, in ’45. Then McDonald’s, through Ray, in ’53. Coca-Cola. Arm & Hammer. Kellogg’s. The Funhouse. LordAloft Shuttles. The American daydream, what made Us great: make a concession, take a stand.
So then why waste time even thinking cold artistic feet and Funhouse? There’s a Reunion coming, and it will cap things, put them right, for J.D.’s forever. He can hardly wait. Behind him, in the terminal, DeHaven, his spawn, is greeting the second-to-last bunch of alums, just off a Dallas Delta, he’s checking off names of every creed, passing out Reunion nametags: two little gold-filled arches, to pin on, a peel-off sticker printed HI! MY NAME IS and then with room for a name and year of appearance. DeHaven sleep-deprived too, but stoned, too—on reefers, doobers, whatever they called it now—eyes red as his yarn wig and violently rouged mouth slack and dry and a smell off his clown suit like oily ropes way below deck. Why the waste of time, the feeling like worry stands just to J.D.’s left? Because For Whom, the little bastard has kept repeating, intoning, for two solid days and nights, while he and a J.D. who believes in the personal touch have driven back and forth, outlasting their cars, shuttling folks to the revel site, finally reduced to DeHaven’s own souped-up hoodlummy car, the clown who loves to drive, drives with just one wrist hooked over the wheel in that way J.D. hates, that look-how-little-I-care way, back and forth, father and son, personally touching, meeting, greeting, orienting, shuttling impressed and eager alumni to Collision, Ill., a decent little hike, on roads rural and dangerous, plus ugly; and the shit-speck, for reasons J.D. cares about even less than he understands, he kept repeating it, For Whom, over and over, West and then back East, useless to scream at the kid to shut up, today J.D. needs a sullen Ronald like a kidney stone. For Whom, intoned, toneless, zombily stoned; and the little For Whom jingle—J.D. Steelritter has an ear nonpareil for jingles—has stuck and sunk through that sleep-deprived ear and is there, rattling, unfindable-penny-in-drier-like, in the head of J.D. Steelritter, a head that is fine, perfectly round, freckled of brow, scimitarred of nose, generous and wet of lower lip, quick to center on anything oral. DeHaven, who knows zero from any plans or big pictures, has worked the jingled line in there, an angry bee in J.D.’s bonnet; it’s now detached from his harlequin son and plays without cease in a held, high-C idiot note, the note of a test pattern, a test of Emergency Broadcast Systems, the whine of no real sleep for maybe five days, a whiny question, from an ego in tweeds, a question the smug old avant-gardist had clearly asked just so he could right away answer it, the most irritating-type question, self-conscious, rhetorical, a waste of resources and time… and J.D. tells most folks don’t waste his time, just start the fucking show.
OK but in that malicious little prodigal spiteful ungrateful jab at his delicate client, who he’d finally soothed and signed but couldn’t induce to appear, today—was there not maybe a something there? Something true and sad and hubless, that goes on? Does a Funhouse need to be more than Fun? More than New and Improved Fun? Are actual house-considerations at work in this campaign, unseen? For whom is the Funhouse an enclosure, maybe? Does he, J.D., live in anything like a Funhouse? J.D. lives at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex in Collision, Ill.; J.D. lives on and manages the few-acre rose farm his own itinerant father had stuck in the lapel of a corn-green state and then plowed himself into; J.D. lives deep inside J.D., marrying images and jingles, poking his sword of a nose out at isolated and alone moments to sniff the winds of fashion, fear, desire—the Trade Winds that blow overhead, moving between Coasts. J.D. has built the second-largest advertising agency in American history from the fringe that is the country’s center, from a piss-poor little accidental town, smashed and stuck deep, corn-surrounded, in a flat blanket of soil so verdant and black it is one of only two things he truly fears. J.D. is of Central Illinois. Central Illinois is, by no imaginer’s stretch, a Funhouse.
But neither is it enclosed. Enclosed? It’s the most disclosed, open place you could ever fear to see.
He remembers the historical graphics Ambrose’s agents had produced when they first, ’76, ran the franchise idea up J.D.’s pole. Ocean City, off Baltimore, with laureates and tides and fish-stink—one of the last great true undeodorable stinks—the Amusement Park little Ambrose had mooned around in Depression-time and then bronzed in that infuckingsufferable story J.D.’s tried hard to read, to understand the client—that Ocean City Park was enclosed, though. The park was enclosed, and not by mirrors or ticket windows or dj booths. So then well.
But where was his head? The Park had burnt down, he’d traveled to personally research and found it down. Everything, turns out, fried crisp and hollow before the big-deal story even changed hands, back in the ’60s, just when J.D. was building Ray Kroc into myth. How must it feel for Ambrose now, looking at it, burnt? Sad. J.D.’s never seen a no-shit fire. J.D.’s never been in a house that is not still a house, as far as he knows. Even his father’s farmhouse and greenhouse, his mother’s incorporating car, still stand and sit, intact. So is there a whispered worrisome something behind that rattling whined For Whom? Say you’re standing by the gutted skeleton of a former Funhouse, with the door’s grinning face a ruin, the
plastic Fat Lady melted and then frozen lopsided, a blob, maybe supine, her drippy frozen laughing eyes now upward at a dead-white crab-meat sky, the House itself gutted, open, a bunch of black beams crossed and curved and supporting nothing, no roof, say there you are, and say maybe you say, I was in that, once, pointing; were you? If the that’s down, burnt open, disclosed, Fat May’s legs of plastic hilarity twisted and apart, yes the whole enclosure disclosed, kind of naked? No wonder the poor bastard tried to write the roof back on, put the whole thing erect. But J.D. almost smiles around the wet shaft of a cigar he cannot taste: the Tidewater boy will have his House back, in the West, a thousandfold. All he wants. Every wish come true. Big time.
J.D. stands brooding at the terminal glass. Jesus, Ocean City, in the past: gull sounds, rotty kelp waving like a big head’s just underwater, a drowned giant with sluggish hair; and the homes: wharf-colored, pale gray and off-white. Rich dead salt smell. Slow.
Vs. Illinois, in the present, the here and now, looking: black sky; then licorice sky; maybe a crow’s caw: dawn. Very little time wasted about dawn in Illinois. It’s because it’s always been so open. J.D. looks out the terminal window over the tarmac at the LordAloft landing pad, the underwater blue of landing lights in a circle under a by-now licorice sky pricked with fading stars, trillions of them, the corn tallishly black and still, even with wind, and wet with precipitate dew. Facing Eastward like this it’s almost hard to even look: flat right to the earth’s curve, East: never a hill, no western skyline of Collision’s silos and arches and neon; the East from here is one broad sweep—there’s nothing to hold your eye, you have to pan back and forth, like a big No, your eyes so relaxed and without object they almost roll. It can be scary.
But this moment, now: he holds, stabs his cigar into an ashtray’s fine sand, no For Whom’s for now, this one moment. This one instant, no more, each eastern rise: there’s a certain pre-dawn fire about everything. The distant commuter planes and refueling trucks, the stars fluttering to stay seen, the shuddering corn, the very oxygen of Illinois seems, in this one moment, to shiver as on the point of combustion. Just one daily moment, like that, the flat East drenched in deregulated gas and somehow… waiting.
And the fragile pre-ignition shimmer is gone. With nothing vertical between you and the horizon, the sun’s just suddenly up. No rosy fingers, just an abrupt red palm; the Reunion day’s ignition is spasmically brief: the sun seems to get all of a sudden just sneezed up into the faded sky, the eastern horizon shuddering at what it’s expelled. A helicopter appears, one of Jack Lord’s slope-head pilots, riding out of the instant sunrise.
J.D. should turn his broad back. To business. The kids are on that thing; they’d promised. The LordAloft 5:10 from O’Hare settles like a great gentle hand, a blur of bubble and blades, and its tornadic wind throws chaff and odd crap and shakes the corn—green, now, dusky, food for animals—and dew glitters, the corn one ocean, check that J.D. one cornfield, one hand passed over, producing one wave. Not sluggish and dead, but gentle and—
—but this landing and de-ignition gets to him, too, this change in the rate of the blades’ spin. J.D. stares, rapt. You stare into a spinning thing, stare hard: you can see something inside the spin sputter, catch, and seem to spin backwards inside the spin, against the spin. Sometimes. Sometimes maybe four different spins, each opposite its own outside. Watching what spins: it’s a hobby, but J.D. knows it has to do with desire, so the time spent’s not shot. Even though he loves it. Anything with a circular spin and clearly marked axes, speeding or slowing: spoked wheels, helicopter blades (the real reason he’s put so much time into LordAloft, admiration for Jack Lord and recognition of a void in the market aside), windmills, fans’ spiraled petals. Any wheel without hub or constance. The best was a liveried carriage’s right front wheel, once: a blur of delicately stretched spokes, then a perfect backwards spin, inside the spin, as trot became canter and the thing clopped away on a London street, spinning. On leave from the War. The big one. It was J.D.’s first spin.
By the way, not too much of this is important, either. But it’s true, and J.D. is here at the broad smeared C.I. Airport window, not helping DeHaven greet the next-to-last, so he can scan for the final alumni children: Eberhardt ’70, Sternberg ’70. They’re supposed to be among these folks now de-coptering, bent low under blades, hands to headwear against a swirl of chaff and dawn-fog. But no kids. Everyone coming off the tarmac and into the lei-strewn gate’s entrance looks far too adult, purposeful, neither shifty nor shitty.
Shitty? Adult? J.D. Steelritter’s own DeHaven Steelritter is a professional trademark. A clown. The clown. Been the campaign’s Ronald a year now, ever since that last Ronald’s indiscretion with that Malay girl (Oh Lord though skin like cream-shot coffee, and eyes?) in the Enchanted French-Fry Forest forced J.D. to see to it that that particular clown would never work in the industry again. Ever. The smears of lurid lipstick on that child’s au-lait belly! The red nose clapped, with the obscenity of adult force, over her own! The goose-bruises—though thank God no poke-bruises, so no concessions needed, whole thing explainable to Malay stage mother as Stage Fright as she led the little thing away, the girl’s legs shaky like a new foal’s. Sweet Jesus never again one of those grizzled circus clowns, any man you can get twelve of in a Honda Civic you don’t trust them, no? No.
But so DeHaven Steelritter? adult? putative son? possible heir? usurper? Who could love this DeHaven K. Steelritter—age: needs a shave; height: slouches, with intent; weight: who could know under either leather or this big-hipped dot-pocked outfit and swim-fin shoes; education: as school is not a hundred percent easy and pleasurable it’s “bogus”; aspiration: atonal composer (alleged), to accept prime wages for doing the bare minimal and spending the rest of his time fucking off (apparent)? He represents the Product. Is Ronald McDonald. Professionally. This son, this sty on the cosmic eyelid, this SHRDLU in the cosmic ad copy, represents the world’s community restaurant.
And but gratitude? This job is a plum, clown-wise—veteran clowns would have given left nuts for even a giggled audition. But the fix was in, after the Stage Fright snafu. J.D. Steelritter controls, and since the one-Collision-Illinois-Ray-Kroc-burger-stand beginning has controlled, the image and perception of McDonald’s franchise empire.
No alumni on this LordAloft. They missed it. Children. The fly in every fucking machine’s perfect lubricant. DeHaven is looking over at J.D. and shrugging, checking his fat clipboard, shrugging with that what-are-you-gonna-do apathy he directs at every impediment. J.D. ponders. What is his son? Those Jews have a word for it, no? Schlemiel is the clumsy waiter who spills the scalding soup? Schlamazl is the totally innocent hapless guy who gets spilled on? Then J.D. Steelritter’s son is the customer who ordered that soup (on credit), and now wants his goddamn soup, and wants quiet from that screaming scalded guy over there so he can eat his soup with all the peaceful quiet enjoyment he hasn’t earned. A child who exited a womb inconvenienced.
To avoid misunderstanding or prejudice, J.D. is sad, but not usually this bitter. Most of all this is sleep-deprivation, anxiety, an almost Christmas-Eve-like anticipation, plus extended proximity to a son, which let’s face it taxes even the most richly patient parent. DeHaven’s not a bad kid, J.D. knows. He’s good with the commercial children. Brings out a gentleness that would have surprised a lesser adman. The kid’ll sure never give anybody Stage Fright.
But he’s an apprentice clown who gets to be the third Ronald McDonald in American franchise history, and yet it’s clear he doesn’t appreciate it, he doesn’t like the job—and, worse, doesn’t like the job like a sleeping person dislikes things, with a torpid whimper and an infant’s total frown—the latter he’s doing now, and the frown disturbs J.D., rattles him, his son’s skin’s frown under a manic painted grin… it looks grotesque, a kind of crude circle of lip and lipstick, so your impression, that you should never get from a mouth that represents a restaurant, is just of a hole, a blank dime, an empty entrance yo
u’d only want to exit.
Sternberg ’70 and Eberhardt ’70 are late. They missed the LordAloft 5:10. There’s another at 7:10. J.D.’s idea to have them run regular as trains. So wait and hope for the next LordAloft? Fuck around with O’Hare’s Kafkan bureaucracy and have them looked for and/or maybe paged? But everyone else is here, on the way into Collision and Funhouse 1 and McDonald’s 1 to await the high-noon appearance of LordAloft 1, and the revels until then have been carefully structured. And J.D.’s got this obsession that everything like this he structures has got to be tidy, complete, fulfilled, enclosed. Not a single no-show except for two late kids who promised 5:10, in the contract. What’s to do?
J.D. jumps a bit as DeHaven’s voice appears next to his sensitive ear.
“Done,” the big clown says, popping off the costume’s red plastic battery-lit nose with a kind of fuck-you-in-Italian gesture he likes. “Couple no-shows, though, Pop.”
J.D. snaps at him to put his nose on, in public, for Christ’s sake, still looking squinted at what the East’s expelled. That little worrisome sleep-deprived For Whom rattles, still, at that high-static idiot pitch.
Girl With Curious Hair Page 24
