The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei

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СКАЧАТЬ we figured out which ones would stay and which ones would get the sack in the coming fiscal. In order to get my bonus I had to trim the department by at least 50 percent. That’s forty-three people; I remember thinking I was glad we were starting with an even number, as it would have been difficult to fire half a person, although technically speaking anyone who worked in this business for very long was half a person already. Then we did a schedule and we figured if we let four people go every month we’d get there. We picked certain dates, trying hard to make it look random so we can say that the word came from on high, or peg it to some client’s decision to cut back spending, etc. We pretended with each other in big, long sighs that it was difficult work, very hard, and we would go out afterward and have a nice meal and get shitfaced and take limos home and expense it because of how difficult it was.

      Henry had had a pretty interesting life, you might say he had nine lives going until he met me and I guess I capped it at less. He was an actor in his teens, school plays and musicals and so on, and then he went out to Hollywood where he did OK for a while. You can IMDb him. He was in a bunch of films and TV shows and had a few scenes here and there with some name actors. James Spader, for example. But Henry had been born in a trailer park in Florida and so when he got a tiny bit of fame and some money he blew it all up his nose in his twenties. Yeah, he got laid a lot and had a good time but when he started showing up on set high his days were numbered. He just didn’t have the sort of juice that would let him behave like that for long, and he had refused one of the producers who had hired him in the hope of sexual dalliance and so his career went away. According to Henry, pretty much every straight male Hollywood star has had to submit to the gay mafia at some point if they wanted to work; I pointed out to him that this kind of talk was homophobic in the extreme and could potentially be a violation of the firm’s HR policies, and then we laughed and I bought him a drink.

      I learned all this, by the way, the night I took Henry to dinner and made him tell me his life story. He didn’t want to drink but I insisted he join me; I told him I thought we should be friends, and I think this came as a shock to him seeing as how he correctly was intuiting that he was on the chopping block.

      Anyway, as his story goes, Henry found himself high and dry in LA, with no career, no money, and no friends. Then he met Victoria. Victoria was an ex-model and a nutritionist. She had been down the same road Henry was on and she knew where it led. She had become a junkie and ended up living with an abusive club owner in Miami, getting beaten up regularly, and finally she found the strength to get out. She went to the place where all abused junkie wannabe models go: LA. She got into some kind of all-kale-juice-and-codfish-oil diet thing and supposedly it saved her life. She was studying to become a licensed nutritionist at one of those schools on the second floor of a building on Melrose when she met Henry. She was working at a juice bar and he wandered in drunk, needing to use the bathroom because, after all, he was living in his car at this point. He fell asleep on the toilet and Victoria had to break the door down because they were all afraid that someone had died in there. She found him comatose and called an ambulance and accompanied Henry to the hospital. You can guess the rest. Henry moved in with Victoria to clean himself up and they became lovers. It’s a beautiful story, and it almost prompted me to fire him on the spot when I heard it.

      Henry’s fourth life began when he and Victoria moved to New York so that Henry could pursue his true love, which was art. In New York, Henry and Victoria lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn; Victoria worked in a health food store and tried to set up her nutritionist practice only to discover that people in New York didn’t really give a flying fuck about nutritition. And Henry, not coming from a wealthy East Coast or European family with deep ties to people with tons and tons of money, didn’t stand a chance in the art world. So, digging down deep and finding a gallant streak he probably didn’t know he had, Henry decided to go back to school. He had a pretty good sense of design—his paintings aren’t bad, by the way, although they’re blurry, the ones I’ve seen on his website—so he enrolled in one of those graphic design programs at the School of Visual Arts. For two years he studied advertising and he hated it but he knew it was what he had to do.

      So Henry miraculously gets a job as a junior art director here at Tate at the really-for-this-business advanced fucking age of thirty-four and he and Victoria start living like human beings. Fourteen years later he’s an associate creative director and he’s making decent coin, in fact he’s pulling in $184K as of the day he was let go. He was actually the go-to guy on the Allstate Insurance account—not thrilling advertising by any means, but he’s making the clients happy doing these crappy testimonials. The campaign is doing well in the marketplace, too, but that’s not really the point. The point is, Henry was old and he wore pleated Dockers, which I told him not to wear but he did anyway.

      The first step in the dance would be to let Henry know in advance that he was in danger of being fired. This was pretty common practice for human resources professionals but I took it to another level. I mean you couldn’t exactly go to someone and say “You’re going to get the boot in three months no matter what you do” because they might cause all kinds of trouble around the office in the interim, possibly even take legal action against the company, not to mention spreading their negative energy around. And at the same time you don’t want to say to them “You’re doing a great job you don’t have to worry” because then they could claim wrongful termination based on age or something. What you want to do is be considerate, give them a hint that there’s a storm coming in, give them a chance to find another job (not likely, but one can always hope) and all at once, and without adieu, give them a swift, unforgiving exit from the shitshow.

      So one day as I was standing outside the fish tank (what we called the open-plan creative floor) and was waiting for an elevator, Henry came up and gave me a vaguely Reaganesque nod and earnest smile. At that moment I knew it was time to begin. He said Morning, Eric! or something equally pointless. Normally I would ask him how things were going on Allstate, when was that client presentation again? I mean just to seem interested and to pretend that I was sober or knew or cared what the fuck was going on in my department. And the elevator would come and we would ride together and then when one of us got off I would say Keep me in the loop or something like that, and Henry would get off thinking he had had a worthwhile moment with Mr. Chief Idea Officer. He would probably mention it to the dolts he worked with, saying something like Well Eric and I were talking earlier this morning … to make it sound as if he has my ear, we’re close, we’re like this.

      But I just stood there and ignored him. I didn’t look up, or rather, I looked up for an instant, enough to let him know that I had heard him but had no interest in replying or engaging with him in any way. He said Morning dude again and I just stared at the wall. I could tell without looking at him that he was momentarily freaked out but immediately pretended to himself that I hadn’t heard him even though he knew I had, I guess that’s called denial. Then the elevator came and we got on and just stood there like two people who once knew each other but were no longer speaking.

      And that was the beginning.

      After the elevator incident, Henry started acting predictably tense around me. He would, for example, be the first to arrive at a meeting. I usually tried to arrive fifteen or twenty minutes late for anything. Partly because that was the custom in advertising for the creative people to be late and partly because I was the boss and one way of being the boss was to make everyone wait around for you. So one afternoon as Henry stood lingering outside my office I asked him what he was doing there.

      “Aren’t we having that Swiffer meeting?” he replied. To which I replied, without looking away from my computer screen, “Are you working on that?”

      “Yes, you asked me to chip in on the campaign, you asked me to have some thoughts ready this morning and so I spent the weekend on it,” he said in a high-pitched squeal, not wanting to seem confrontational, the raising of one’s voice by half an octave or more meant to dissuade the more powerful from attack.

      “Well I think there are better uses of one’s time than СКАЧАТЬ