The Merchant's War (20 page)

When I went to Taunton, Gatchweiler & Schocken to ask about getting my old job back I was afraid Val Dambois wouldn’t even see me. I was wrong about that. He saw me. He was glad to. He laughed all the way through the interview. “You poor fool,” he said, “you poor, shaking, demoralized wreck. What makes you think we need pedicab pushers bad enough to take you on?”

I said, “My tenure—”

“Your tenure, Tarb,” he said with pleasure, “ended with your dishonorable discharge. Terminated for cause. Get lost. Better still, kill yourself.” And, walking down forty-three flights of stairs to the back exit—Dambois hadn’t seen fit to give me an elevator pass—I wondered how long it would be before that seemed a logical option.

There was a body of opinion which said that was what I was doing already, for at my final separation physical from the service the medic had read her dials and gauges with an increasingly worried look until she punched up my discharge papers and saw I was a DD. “Ah, well,” she said then, “I guess it doesn’t matter. But I’d say you’re headed for total physical and mental collapse in the next six months.” And she scribed in great red letters across the long list of my deteriorating physical traits the legend
Not Service Connected
so that not even the Veterans Administration was likely to take an interest in what became of Tennison Tarb. Would Mitzi? Pride kept me from asking—for five days. Then I sent her a message, bright and positive, how about a drink for old time’s sake? She didn’t answer that. She also didn’t answer the less bright and far from positive messages of the tenth day, the twelfth, the fifteenth …

Tennison Tarb didn’t have any friends any more, it seemed.

Tennison Tarb didn’t have a whole lot of money any more, either. Dishonorable discharge included forfeiture of all pay and allowances, which meant, among other things, that all my bar bills from the officers’ lounge in Urumqi got passed on to a collection agency. The rest of the world had forgotten I was alive, but the knee-breakers had no trouble finding me and what remained of my bank account. By the time they went away with the amount due plus interest plus collection fees plus tax—plus tip!—because they explained that customers
always
tipped the collectors, swinging their hard-rubber batons as they explained—there wasn’t much more left of Tennison Tarb financially than in any other way.

And yet I still had my bright, original, creative mind! (Or had my mind so deteriorated with the rest of me that trivial insights and dumb ideas seemed brilliant?) I read
Advertising Age
every time I got a chance to pick an Omni-V channel, waiting in some hiring hall for interviews for jobs I never got. I nodded approvingly over some campaigns, frowned with disgust at others—I could have done them so much better!

But nobody would give me the chance. The word was out; I was blacklisted.

Even the cheapest shared-time rental was more than I could afford, so I took a futon with a consumer family in Bensonhurst. They’d advertised space to share and the price was right. I took the long subway ride, found the building, climbed down the steps to the third sublevel and knocked on the door. “Hello,” I said to the tired, worried-looking woman who answered, “I’m Tennison Tarb,” and at the end of the sentence I took a breath. Oh, wow! I had forgotten! I had forgotten how consumers lived, and most of all I had forgotten what a consumer diet turned into in the digestive system. It is true that textured vegetable protein does resemble meat—a little like meat— like the ReelMeet from the cell cultures, anyway—but even if the taste buds are deceived the intestinal flora are not. They know what to do with the stuff. Get rid of it—a lot of it as gas. The best way I can describe the atmosphere of that suburban consumer household is like when you’re caught short in a bottom-class neighborhood and have to use the communijohn, and it’s in the last half hour before the morning or evening flush. Only now I had to live in it.

They weren’t all that happy to see me, either, because my little shoulder bag of Moke containers added a new worry to the lines on the woman’s face. But they needed the money, and I needed the space to sleep. “You can have meals with us, too,” she said hospitably, “just eat right with the family, and it wouldn’t cost you much.”

“Maybe later,” I said. They’d already put the kids to sleep in their over-the-sink cribs. With their help I tugged the furniture around to make space to roll out my futon, and as I fell asleep, my bright, original, creative mind was finding inspiration even in adversity. A new product! Antigas deodorizers to put in the food. The chemists could cook something up in no time—whether it actually worked or not, of course, mattered very little, just so we had a strong theme campaign and a good brand name …

When I woke up in the morning the campaign was still clear in my mind, but something was wrong. Where was the pong? I didn’t smell it any more! And I realized that consumers don’t perceive their own stink.

Of course, I told myself that only meant they had to be told about it. That’s the glory of advertising—not just to fill needs, but to
create
them.

I learned something that morning on my way to the next employment agency. I learned that brilliant ideas aren’t worth a snake’s sneeze if the wrong people get them. Back at T., G. & S., when I had easy access to the Old Man’s office and the planning committee, that brainstorm would have turned into a ten-megabuck account in ninety days. Hanging onto the subway car en route to a job interview, unemployed, nearly broke, all my network of associates and connections evaporated, it wasn’t a brainstorm. It was a fantasy, and the sooner I stopped fantasizing and reconciled myself to my new station in life the better, or anyway the less worse, it was going to be.

But, oh! Pride or no pride, how I missed my brassy lady, Mitzi Ku.

That night I made a decision. I didn’t go back to my consumer family for dinner. I didn’t eat dinner at all. I sat outside Nelson Rockwell’s shared-time condo, swigging Mokes and waiting for him to wake up. A tired old man with a tray of Kelpy-Krisp samples traded me snacks for Mokes; a nasty young Brinks beat cop moved me on twice; a thousand hurrying consumers scowled their way past, ignoring me even when they tripped over me—I had plenty of time to think, and not much pleasant to think about. I was a long way from Mitzi Ku.

When at last Rockwell came out and spotted me leaning against the garbage disposal his jaw dropped—not far, because it was wired shut. And his head was covered with bandages; as a matter of fact he looked like hell. “Tenny!” he cried. “Gee, it’s good to see you! But what’ve you been doing to yourself; you look like hell!” When I returned the compliment he gave an embarrassed shrug. “Aw, nothing serious, I just got a little behind in my payments. But what’re you doing out here? Why didn’t you come right in and wake me up?”

Well, actually the reason was I didn’t want to see whoever it was that had taken over my ten-to-six shift in the sleepy box. I passed the question by. “Nels,” I said, “I want to ask you another favor. Well, I mean the same favor over again. Would you take me to that ConsumAnon place again?”

He opened his mouth twice, and closed it twice without saying anything. He didn’t have to. The first thing he was going to say was that I could go by myself, but he’d already said that. The second thing, I was pretty sure, was that maybe I’d left it a little too late for ConsumAnon to do me any good; maybe a hospital was a better idea right then. On the third try the censor passed what he wanted to say: “Well, gee, Tenny, I don’t know. The group’s kind of fallen apart—there’s this new self-help franchise deal, see, and a lot of the members are into substitution instead of abstinence.” I kept my mouth closed and my face expressionless. “Still,” he said—and then, sunnily, “Well, hell, Tenny, what are friends for? Sure I’ll take you!” And, this time, he insisted on a tandem pedicab, and insisted on paying the pullers himself.

See, I hadn’t looked for that sort of kindness from Nelson Rockwell. All I wanted from him was one little favor, so little that he wouldn’t even know exactly what it was. Consideration, tact, generosity—they were more than I wanted, and more than I really cared to accept; if you take more kindness than the giver can afford there’s a debt that I didn’t want to repay. So I let him spend his tact on a blank wall—smiling, cordial, reserved, off-handed; and I turned away his generosity. No, thanks, I didn’t need twenty until I got myself straightened out. No, really, I’d just eaten, no sense stopping for a quick soyaburger anywhere. I gave polite but dismissive answers to his overtures, and all I volunteered was comments on how the neighborhoods we were passing through had run down, or how the off-puller was limping in her left leg as she struggled up a not very steep hill. (And wondering inside of me if she’d have to quit the job, and if so whom to apply to for the vacancy.)

The church was as dismal as before, and the congregation far more sparse; my little scheme had obviously cut into their membership. But my luck wasn’t entirely out. The one person I had hoped to find there was there. After ten minutes of exhortations from the pulpit and fevered vows of abstinence from the wimps, I excused myself for a moment, and when I came back I had what I needed.

All I wanted then was to get away. I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t voluntarily incurred the debt of courtesy to Nelson Rockwell. But there it was on the books.

So I stayed with him to the grisly, tedious end, and even let him buy the soyaburgers when it was over. I guess that was a mistake. It emboldened him to offer help all over again. “No, honestly, Nels, I don’t want to borrow any money,” I said, and then something made me add, “especially since I don’t know when I could pay it back.”

“Yeah,” he said gravely, licking burger juice off his fingers. “Good jobs are hard to get, I guess.” I shrugged as though the problem was in making up my mind which offer to accept. There’d been only one. Attendant in a custodial-care institution for the brain-burned, and I hadn’t had any problem turning
that
down—who wants to change the diapers of a forty-year-old contract-breach criminal? “Listen,” he said, “I maybe could get you in at the grommet works. Of course, it’s not such good pay, I mean, for somebody with your background—”

I smiled in a forgiving fashion. He looked abashed. “I guess you’ve got Agency prospects, hey, Tenny? That girl friend of yours. I hear she’s got her own Agency now. I guess now that you’re into CA and getting that problem under control, pretty soon you’ll be right up there again.”

“Of course,” I said, watching him dunk the last crust of his soyaburger roll into his Coffiest. “But for now—what kind of money, exactly, do they pay in grommets?”

And so by the time I was in the subway on my way back to Bensonhurst I had the promise of a job. Not a good job. Not even a passable job. But the only job in sight.

In the dim light from the flickering subway tunnel lamps, I pulled out the flat plastic box I’d bought from the weasel-faced man outside the church. The wind was streaming through my hair, and I opened it carefully. The contents had cost too much to let them blow away.

With them, I probably did have that problem under control, I thought. At least for a while.

I looked at the little green tablet for a long time. They said in six months you went psycho, in a year you’d be dead.

I took a deep breath and popped it down.

I don’t know what I expected. A rush. A feeling of liberation. A sense of well-being.

What I got was very little. As best I can describe it, it was like novocaine all over my body. Faint tingle, then a total absence of feeling. Although I was three hours past my last Moke, I didn’t want one.

But, oh, the world was gray!

“We make grommets
cheap,”
said Mr. Semmelweiss. “That means
no rejects.
That means we can’t take chances on stumblebums in this industry, there’s too much at stake.” He glared disapprovingly at my personnel record. I couldn’t see the screen from where I stood, but I knew what it said. “On the other hand,” he conceded, “Rockwell’s one of my best men, and if he says you’re all right—”

So I had the job. For that reason, and for two others. Reason 1: The pay was lousy. I would have done better with the brainburned, financially speaking, although in the grommet plant of course I didn’t have to risk my fingertips spoon-feeding the patients. Reason 2: It gave Semmelweiss a thrill to point out his adman employee to visitors. I’d be lugging away full boxes and sliding empties into place, and I’d see him inside his glass-enclosed cubicle at the end of the floor pointing toward me. And laughing. And the people with him, customers or stockholders or whatever, grinning incredulously at what he said.

I didn’t care.

No, untrue, I did care, cared a lot. But not as much as I cared about holding onto the job, any job, until I could figure out how to get back to my life. The little green pills were maybe a first step. Maybe. True, I didn’t swig Mokes any more. That was all you could say. I didn’t gain back any weight, didn’t get rid of that hair-trigger tension that made my fingers want to twitch and kept me tossing and turning on my futon until, sometimes, I woke one of the kids and the parents glowered and muttered to themselves. But most of that was inside, where it didn’t show, and my mind was busier, quicker than ever. I dreamed up great slogans, campaigns, product categories, promotions. One by one I went down the list of Agencies, printing up resumes, begging for interviews, calling on personnel managers. The resumes drew no answers. The phone calls were hung up. The visits ended when they threw me out. I tried them all, the big and the little. All but one.

I came close. I got as far as the sidewalk outside the rather undistinguished little building near the old Lincoln Center that held the brand-new Agency of Haseldyne & Ku …

But I didn’t go in.

I’m not sure what kept me going, because it certainly wasn’t ambition and it was positively not the rewarding quality of my life. The gray numbness kept pain and want out, but it was just as good against pleasure and joy. I slept. I ate. I worked on my resumes and sample books. I pulled my trick at the grommet works. One day followed another.