The Deep Whatsis (4 page)

She still sits there and doesn’t move, or won’t. I want her out of my office. If I am being completely honest I would say her body language means she wants me to hold her and cuddle her and tell her everything is going to be fine. A week ago I might have entertained the thought of such things, cuddling or at least making out, but I feel nothing for HR Lady today,
not a shred of interest even as she crosses her legs and fails to readjust her skirt. They really are great legs, and it isn’t that she’s unattractive, as I have said, it’s just that for the past several days, whenever I catch a glimpse of a thigh or a breast the only thing I can think of is Intern’s fecund, glowing lips, her shining eyes, her breasts. It’s driving me nuts and I don’t know what to do about it but jerk off into the trash basket for the second time today, only I can’t do that at the moment without a certain degree of embarrassment because there’s someone in my office.

When she finally leaves (was that a backward angry jealous glance she gave me on the way out? yes) I check my stocks as a means of killing a few minutes and then I go up to eight.

The eighth floor
houses our production department. At any given time, the New York office of Tate Worldwide (New York being the largest of our fifty-six offices around the world) will be in the midst of producing eight or ten commercials for our various clients. The way advertising works is simple: we charge huge companies millions and millions of dollars a year to come up with the big ideas that will help them to grow their businesses, to define for themselves an expandable niche in their market, to give them something to stand on, a mission to purport, a flag to wave. Ad agencies exist for the same reason that mercenaries do. An oil company can’t be in the business of, say, executing the popular leader of a left-wing opposition group in some Central American democracy, that just isn’t a job description that they can put up on their LinkedIn page. So they have to hire a consultant who hires a global
risk-management firm who hires a mercenary unit who hires a local criminal gang to get the job done. It’s the same with what we do. XXX Pharmaceuticals wants to believe that it is in the business of making the world a better place, not of convincing people to take overpriced drugs they don’t need (and that can’t be proven to be much more effective than a placebo). So they outsource their lying to us. We then pretend to help them make the world a better place. All we really do is enable their fantasies about themselves by holding their hand through the difficult years-long process of bringing a drug to market. In the course of that, it’s our job to pretend to be coming up with ideas when really all we are doing is taking the ideas that they have already given us in their PowerPoint documents and making them look like they were ours in the first place and therefore worth the many millions they are paying us. It’s useless but in the end what human endeavor isn’t? We have meeting after meeting and write draft after draft of a single fifteen-second commercial, exposing these scripts to real people to get their feedback, in what is known as qualitative or “qual” testing, before gauging the spot’s real-world CPI—Consumer Persuasion Index—in quantitative or “quant” testing, in which each commercial is assigned a numerical value supposedly indicating its true effectiveness, the entire process meant to ultimately determine whether it would be more effective to frighten people into buying a drug because without it their children might die or frightening them into buying a drug because if they don’t their peers will ostracize them for being terrible parents. Once real moms and dads have signed off on our concept, we hand these
so-called ideas to a director and a production company and ask them to “add value,” which means, “Can you try to take this mind-numbingly boring piece of machine-made bullshit and force-fit a modicum of humanity into it?” Normally this is done via casting, trying to find human-looking people to stand in front of the camera and smile and give the thumbs-up to life. That usually works. Then when the commercial is finished, we celebrate ourselves and our achievements at an awards banquet from which we take home prizes in categories such as “Best Editing for a Fifteen-Second Unbranded Direct-to-Consumer Web-Based Pharmaceutical Campaign” and so on.

I always get confused on the eighth floor. When you get off the elevators you can go one of two ways: toward the bathrooms or toward the receptionist. Having made that decision you can then go either right or left, ultimately giving you the option of the four compass directions. I can never remember where anyone’s office is and so I always end up just walking around the perimeter of the building until I find who I am looking for. Today I get off the elevators and decide to go toward the receptionist, who is on her break apparently, as there’s a temp sitting in her spot and he looks like a young Paul Rudd with facial hair, obviously an actor who doesn’t have a trust fund; i.e., hopeless. From the receptionist’s desk I randomly choose left, and I walk toward the Twenty-ninth Street side of the building. When I get to the row of offices that rings the floor I randomly choose to turn right and I start walking. Everyone sees me and looks up from their desks and waves or grins; this isn’t something they would do for anyone who walked down the hall, but one of
the consequences of creating a dynamic of fear is a high degree of sycophancy resulting in a good deal of performative smiling. Our poor wannabe-actor temp thinks that by sitting there stone-faced and not participating in these corporate rituals he will save his soul; what he doesn’t understand is that all of the phoniness required of his soulless peers takes far more acting skill, courage, and devotion to craft than he will ever see on any not-for-profit stage in his entire life.

If asked I will say I am looking for Tom Bridge, but I happen to know that Tom is in Prague shooting a series of spots for a tire company. I get to the corner of the building and turn right (the only way I can go unless I want to retrace my steps) and then I see Tom’s assistant, a hipster clown named Jake. I call him a clown because he is one; he works on weekends at a children’s hospital in Westchester. Apparently he was a drug addict and then he became a clown as a part of his recovery program; we even honored him with our Actually Good Person We Mean It of the Month Award.

Jake the Clown sees me walking toward him and says, “Are you looking for Tom?” I don’t know if I should lie and say yes since that is the ostensible reason I’ve come to this floor in the first place or if I should lie and say no since that’s the truth but it means I must have another reason for being here and that one I don’t want to divulge.

“Isn’t he in Prague?” I say, splitting the difference.

“He was supposed to leave last night but his flight got canceled can you believe that it was a nightmare he’s leaving in an hour do you want to see him I can maybe squeeze you in just
kidding.” I’m staring at Clown, who’s in full ’80s mode today, parachute pants and one of those Palestinian scarves and a Members Only warm-up jacket, and I’m wondering what his getup is, does he put on a big pink wig and a red nose and paint his face white, or does he know he already looks enough like a clown to make a sick child laugh? Just then Tom’s voice is heard from inside his office.

“Eric!” he is yelling. “Eric you douchebag come in here don’t go away I need to talk to you before my car comes!” I go into Tom’s office. He is sitting amid a pile of DVD reels that is almost as large as he is, which is considerable.

“Yo, asshole,” I greet him, closing the door, “why aren’t you getting your knob sucked by a Czech hooker right now?” This is how Tom and I talk to each other; the day I learned that I would have to terminate him in Q2 of the next fiscal I considered not being so buddy-buddy with him, then I changed my mind. “Close the door,” he says, even though I already have. He tosses a DVD of work from an animation company called Phawg into the trash basket and takes his earphones off. “Did you say something?”

“No,” I say. The sounds of a live Rush concert are coming from his iPhone. Rush is Tom’s favorite band; he turns off the trollish sounds and looks up at me.

“I can’t believe you fucked her,” he says.

“Fucked who, your wife?” I say. “Ha ha just kidding, in case you were wondering.”

“Funny,” he says. “I’m talking about that very hot girl we just hired.”

“First of all, she may be funny and smart and all but she’s insane,” I inform him, “so you might want to stay away from her entirely, or find a way to fire her before I do. And second of all, I didn’t have sex with her.”

“Which is not what she’s telling everyone.”

“Oh bullshit she’s a drug addict,” I say.

“So are you,” he says.

“Have a nice trip, dickhead,” I say to him as I open the door and head out, turning back to ask him what he’s doing with the DVD cases. He says he doesn’t know he just felt like saving them.

“See you in lala,” he is saying as I leave.

“What?”

“I’m flying directly from Prague to LA for the FreshIt thing. I’ll be there for callbacks.”

“Cool,” I say, “that’s awesome, but I’m not going to that shoot.”

“No?” he says. “I thought you were.”

“Why would I waste my time with that shit?” I say.

“Because the account is in trouble.”

“Not my problem,” I say. Then as I am closing his door he says, “By the way, she’s uploading some spots to the FTP, I’d try the dub room. I mean, assuming you want to find her.”

“I don’t, actually,” I lie. “I want her out of here by EOD.”

“Right,” he says. “Will do.”

I walk out of his office and down the hall I hadn’t walked down before, hoping for a random encounter rather than having to actually set foot in the dub room which would be too obvious. I end up circling the floor two times but I don’t see her.
I probably would have kept doing it all afternoon except my phone rings and it’s Seth Krallman, my old friend whom I hate.

“What up, gangsta?” I say into my phone as I head toward the elevator. “Why’d you stand me up the other night, dog?” One of the reasons I hate Seth Krallman is because he talks like he’s from the ghetto when actually he is from Greenwich, Connecticut, and I tend to talk that way when I’m with him just to mask the fact I dislike him so intensely. I’ve hated Seth Krallman ever since he got clean and became a yoga teacher and changed his name to Hanuman or Ganesh or something. No, the truth is I always hated him; we shared a big house together at Brown and he thinks this means we have some kind of Special Bond. He’s a pretentious idiot, a so-called avant garde playwright who had twelve or thirteen seconds of notoriety in the East Village in the late ’90s when he chained himself to the stage of a tiny theater for a month as some kind of protest slash performance, peeing in a crystal bowl and mixing it with champagne and drinking it every night at precisely midnight, while reciting some poetry. I avoided him for years but he friended me recently and keeps wanting us to hang out, I’m pretty sure that he’s gearing up to ask me for a job. He comes from a rich family, as I alluded, but his father invested badly and lost most everything in ’08 so Seth’s monthly automatic deposit has dwindled away—he has to work now to pay his rent and his medical bills, because he is bipolar, and without his meds and his therapy the man is useless. So he wants to invite me to this really cool opening and after-party in the ’wick and maybe, I’m guessing, that’s when he’ll ask me if I can help him get into advertising. I have
nothing to do tonight and need to take my mind off myself and maybe talk to people so I say yes. Then I immediately regret it but he doesn’t know that yet. So he starts to ask me how work is going and I pretend that the elevator is killing my reception even though I am not in the elevator.

I get to the opening
before Seth does. It’s at a storefront gallery on an industrial section of Johnson Avenue; the space used to be a skateboard shop and now it’s rented out by the three guys who started
Rodney
magazine, and they show art in it.
Rodney
is considered the epicenter of cool in Bushwick right now and since Bushwick is the epicenter of cool in New York that makes
Rodney
the most boring thing on the planet. Normally the thought of the Fucking
Rodney
Scene would send me into an uncontrollable rage and thus I would avoid it entirely, but I am here to see the hateful ex-junkie yoga master and hang out with him and listen to him go on about how avant garde theater is dead, seriously, it’s a tragedy, I mean Heiner Müller wouldn’t even get his work seen today. His shtick is really one of the saddest things ever and maybe that’s why he cheers me up so easily.

The art space is packed and the kids are spreading out into the street like a fungus. Never before have I seen so many people in one place who are exactly the same: the same age, the same race, the same wardrobe, the same facial hair, the same taste in music, socioeconomic background, college experience, shoes, political beliefs, and hair; but I suppose what really unites them is the shared fantasy that they are rebels, subversively unique individuals creating their own style for themselves.

I make a quick spin through the crowd and can’t find Vishnu. He’s always late anyway, it’s one of the many things I can’t stand about him. I squeeze inside the storefront past a girl wearing a Shepard Fairey Obama Hope T-shirt in which she’s sliced his eyes out, showing her nipples through his empty eye sockets, and I can’t tell if she means this ironically or if she means anything by it at all, maybe her nipples doubling as the POTUS’s eyes is just a coincidence. I then get it, I make a connection to the concept behind the art show, which is called “Show Us Your Tits!” and it features lots of photos (taken, it seems, by anyone who can push the button on a camera) of girls flashing their breasts in bars, at parties, on the street, and so on, the pinnacle of art world cool reappropriating bad TV from over a decade ago, and with unicorns.

All in all it’s a pretty good show. A lot of the pictures are so lo-res they look like they were screen-grabbed off YouTube or at best shot on old phones. The whole thing must have taken at least an entire Saturday to curate and hang, affixed to the wall as it all is with duct tape; perhaps it took the whole weekend if there was any marijuana in play. The truth is I’ve never liked art
very much, and I can’t decide if I like this show because it’s not really art at all, it’s just stupid, or if maybe I hate this shit because it’s trying so hard not to be art and there’s nothing more arty than that. I try to think of another profession in which people do something all the while claiming they aren’t. Would a doctor do that? Anyway, I begin to feel sick to my stomach so I go to the one makeshift bathroom at the back of the space but there’s a long line of drunk girls and so I head back outside for some so-called air.

That’s when I see Gandhi talking to two black guys in the middle of the street, and not the kind of white black guys you normally see at these sorts of things, the kind of white black guys who can stomach us like the white black guys in the band TV on the Radio seem to be able to. No, these were actual black guys, they really stood out, they did not even have semi-ironic Afro picks in semi-ironic ’fros and they did not call each other “Negro” or wear bow ties or read James Baldwin on the subway. Seth introduces them to me as P-Mouse and Grain or something like that, it’s hard for me to hear because a faux–hair metal band is playing out of the back of a Budget rental truck parked on the street.

“Hey, did you guys see the art? What do you think?” I ask. Titmouse and Plain are in the music business, Seth is telling me, and they don’t give a shit about art.

“We don’t give a shit about art,” D-Louse says. “It’s stupid.” He then says he doesn’t think this crap here is art anyway, it’s just some bad pictures of some like dumbass rich girls flashing some of their rich-ass skin. I start to say something
about the art being about a subversive, if not downright gangsta, appropriation by the highbrow culture establishment of a lowbrow pop icon, and Plane says “Who gives a fuck?” which kind of makes me want to hug him. Then Seth says these two guys wanted to meet me because they have just started a music production company, they’ve been producing some tracks out of the back blocks of Crown Heights, they are going to blow up any second, and, wait for it, they were thinking of getting into commercials. I could, see, get in on the ground floor, get a good deal on some demos before they were snatched up by the likes of Nike and Diesel.

Ten minutes later we are sitting at a rusty metal table in the back of a place called Midnight Drab on DeKalb Avenue. It has no sign and not even much of a door and nobody is even sure if Midnight Drab is really the name of it, it’s just what the place is called, at least by Seth. The blacks are ordering gin and juice and so I order one, too. I’d already had the better part of a bottle of red wine at my apartment before coming to the art show, and for a moment I fear the dangerous combination of grape and juniper, as it’s not something I’ve experimented with before, but we’ll see. An hour later the conversation turns to all these great commercials that people have been seeing on ESPN, the one where the guy runs up the side of a building and explodes, the one where the car comes out the guy’s ass, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But as I am thinking about excusing myself and going home to masturbate to the pictures in some French fashion rag, B-Louse, or is it Painboy, unfurls a one-hit bumper in his enormous hand. Alright, maybe I’ll stay
for another G&J, even if it does mean enduring the kings of alt-garage hip-hop pressing on me their sampler CDs. I grab the bumper and lean down under the table and pretend I dropped something and do a hit; when I arise the guys are chuckling while Ravi Shankar makes some kind of face.

“No worries, I bought it from the bartender,” says Louse, meaning it’s all good here. I do another hit, left nostril this time, without attempting to disguise it. Seth gives me a micro-look like, That’s cool, you do your thing, and I can be here with you, because I’m a superior being now, I’ve reached this higher yogic plane of sobriety, I am but a mute witness to the fog of human sadness here before me. I try to hand the vial to Seth as a joke and he waves it off, not getting me. But to my surprise, Louse and Jane wave it off, too.

“All you, dog.”

So now I’m drunk and high and sitting with three idiots, guys who finish sentences with “dog” or “yo” or “fag”; unfortunately this constitutes the most satisfying social event of my week, not including the sexual encounter of four-point-five days ago.

We decide to leave and go to the after-party for the opening, which is at a loft in Ridgewood. Seth still has the Range Rover that his parents bought him as a birthday present back when they were flush, and he hasn’t sold it yet even though he can’t afford the upkeep; I think he may have said something about the insurance having lapsed and what a pain in the ass alternate-side parking is. After we are at the loft party for a few minutes, which is packed with the same people who were at the
opening, and our hip-hop friends are still the only African-Americans in the crowd, some guy with a waxed mustache and an eye patch comes around holding a bucket collecting money to pay for the keg of Milwaukee’s Best that is already gone and that’s when I realize I made a mistake in coming out tonight at all. Seth and the guys are talking to a couple of young girls; Seth thinks he is getting somewhere with them because of how Street his friends are, and how this confers status on him, but really the girls are not paying attention to him, they’re just thinking about the possibility of hooking up with Louse or Pain for the tweet of it.

I take out my phone to call the car service to come pick me up when I see there’s a text I didn’t know I had.

Fuck.

I make a point of not looking around the room, I just stuff my phone back in my jacket pocket and watch Seth and the girls and black guys standing in a little circle. One of the girls is wearing a diagonal-striped Diane von Furstenberg dress from the ’80s. She has the wrong body type for it, but she doesn’t seem to care. In my mind I’m just getting into this heavy critique of her because I don’t want to look around and let Intern think I am looking for her. After a minute or two I realize I forgot to call the car service, but that will entail taking my phone out again, which Intern, if she is indeed watching me from somewhere in the big crumbling warehouse of poseurs, will interpret as my caring.

Then I see Titmouse offer a bump to the girls and they enthusiastically buy in. So the skinny young white chicks from the suburbs go off with the guys from Crown Heights, stepping on a radiator and climbing out a window and onto a roof where they will do the coke, with one of the girls giving an OMG look to a friend of hers standing by the refrigerator as she takes the enormous hand of T-Louse, and the friend is trying to take their picture with her phone but she is too late, she missed it, they are outside now.

I look back to Seth, and he’s staring at his phone as a means of avoiding the pain of rejection that is nonetheless etched into his face. Perhaps he’s thinking that if he still did drugs he would be getting some sex tonight, possibly in the front of his awesome Range Rover where he parked it around the corner on Onderdonk. Or perhaps he’s thinking what I would be thinking, which is that Pitmouse and Brain have betrayed him, left him hanging there, and even though they barely know each other, it was a pretty thoughtless move. But no, it wasn’t that, it was just a numbers thing, there were two cute girls, and three horny guys, and the girls had probably just moved here from college, from Bard or Reed or one of those other places where rich people send their kids so they can learn how to spot the latent sexism and racism inherent in contemporary culture, especially advertising, and now their degree qualifies them to make art about the latent sexism and racism inherent in contemporary culture, especially advertising, and for a few years they do this, until they realize how stupid it all is, and then they decide to go and actually work in advertising instead of critiquing it, to spend some time “in the
belly of the beast” as it were, and maybe one day make art or write a graphic novel about
that
, which they never do.

I am looking around for something to drink, not that I need it, and I haven’t eaten anything in almost five days which is only exacerbating my quasi-dystopic mood, but every red plastic cup is empty except for the ones with cigarette butts in them.

Seth finally looks up from his phone and scans the room. I assume he’s looking for me, or at least someone else he can glom on to. At the moment I turn away from him and squeeze out the four-foot-round punched-out hole in the drywall that leads to the back stairs, I can tell he saw me and that he could see that I saw him and pretended I did not.

I keep going and I don’t stop or look back until I am down at the street. If I heard his steps behind me or his voice calling out to me I would probably just tell him what an asshole he is, how I can’t stand his goddam month-long theater wanks, they are pure torture, go keep bees on your own time, don’t charge people to watch you learn Farsi, and he needs to wake up and sell his car because I am not going to get him a job.

Once out on Onderdonk I decide to walk past the projects to Marcy because sometimes you can get lucky and find a cab there. For a second I’m self-concious about walking past the PJs with my phone to my ear as I’ve heard that there’s been a lot of iPhone jackings recently, a slew of girls have been getting punched in the face while talking on their mobile devices at all hours of the day and night, it serves them right, in a way, it’s not even about the phone it’s about the obliviousness, there,
here’s your phone back, lady. I’m just trying to keep my mind occupied so that I’m not scared or don’t go nuts when I hear my name said aloud. I’m not being mugged, muggers don’t know my name and besides the voice is a girl’s.

I spin around and it’s her across the street, coming toward me. She’s wearing a skirt that hugs her thighs and those Hunter boots. Also a gray hoodie that I think says Tribecastan across the front and a floppy hat that I’m guessing was knitted by those French grandmothers on that website that was super cool a few years ago. It wasn’t really cold enough for such a hat but I could not deny that it framed her face well, with one of the earflaps slightly more askew than the other. As a rule I refuse to watch any film made after 1936 but occasionally I will make an exception for the French director Jean-Luc Godard, and Intern looks very much like a ’shopped version of Chantal Goya, she has the same bangs and the same kind of eyes and features, large lips and high cheekbones, and she has none of Goya’s sad, little-girl winsomeness, and she does not have Goya’s bright, brittle, optimistic smile, either, and she’s young, as I have said before, but exactly how young I don’t know. And her smile does have a kind of odd glaze, a rare color mixed from mischief, neediness, intimidating intelligence, ironic adolescent stupidness, beauty, and so on.

“Hey, Eric!” neo-Chantal is saying. I still don’t know her real name.

“Hey.”

She gets to my side of the street and just stands there waiting for me to do something like walk away. I would but even that would be a form of communication and I desperately do
not want to engage in any kind of dialog with her. She tilts her head to the side and there’s the smile and a little laugh as if to say, “We hooked up, sort of, you and I, and then you ignored me but I’m fiendish and fierce and I got a job at your company and now you have to be my friend, too bad for you, and we’ll hook up again one of these days, but probably not tonight?”

I hang on that thought for a beat too long and then she says, “What did you think of the party?”

I decide to pretend that I never got her text. “What party? This party? Were you there?”