Magical Thinking: True Stories

  So I wrote all about the experience of Amtrak. About how you can drink chardonnay ten feet from an alligator or cross the desert in your pajamas. The whole thing turned out to be very Zen, because I really got lost in the writing. When I read the scripts to my boss, who has a habit of shoving his fist through walls, he said, “That’s fucking great shit, man. Cowboy poetry.”

  I liked this comment because it made me feel sensitive yet masculine, like a professional bodybuilder who collects porcelain figurines.

  The client, however, didn’t agree. She was furious. “It’s not about the chardonnay or the crocodiles; it’s about the fare. It’s about $158.00 round-trip to Boston.”

  And she was really bitchy about it, too. We had served excellent cookies and espresso in the meeting, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her cookie away. “Give that Mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can’t at least be polite, you don’t get a treat.”

  Here is a woman who is solely responsible for the brand image of Amtrak, our nation’s flagship railroad, and she’s wearing a tacky pantsuit from QVC and twelve-dollar shoes. She sat back in her chair like a trucker and complained, “Why the hell don’t you talk about the new engines we got? We got all new engines on most of our trains. Why can’t you say, ‘Come aboard and experience our new engines.’ Why can’t you talk about that if you don’t wanna talk about the price?”

  I smiled and very calmly said, “Because people don’t ride in the engine. They don’t care. All they care about is what they see out the window and will they get where they’re going on time.”

  She glared at me and said, “I don’t want you working on my business.”

  Likewise, bitch.

  And from now on I fly everywhere.

  I wasn’t always this bitter and gangrenous. I got my first job as an advertising copywriter when I was nineteen, four months after I moved to San Francisco. I had long, curly hair and wore sunglasses at all times, which in the mid-eighties felt totally rad. I was so thrilled to not be pumping gas at a Getty station that I arrived in the office at four-thirty in the morning and left at midnight.

  One of my first projects was to write a print ad for a potato.

  The National Potato Board needed to replace its current ad, which featured a potato covered in thick, green latex paint and the headline “What must we do to make you realize we’re a vegetable?” This was when they were trying to reverse the perception that potatoes were just junk food.

  The new strategy was all about speed. Microwave ovens were relatively new, so speed was exciting news. And potatoes were known to be slow. So I did an ad that featured a potato in a wind tunnel, like a car. The headline was “Aerodynamically designed for speed.”

  The potato people were very happy. They bought the ad, and then they needed me to write the actual body copy.

  For this, I would need a recipe. So I contacted the woman at the ad agency who was in charge of getting me a very fast recipe for a potato, and she kept telling me, “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”

  She was a very busy woman who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and understandably, my potato recipe was just not a top priority. So in place of a real recipe, I wrote my own temporary place-holder recipe. It read: “Just slice a potato, broil for ten minutes, then sprinkle liberally with parmesan or blue.” Which is exactly how the ad ran in magazines.

  It was one of those things that just slipped through the cracks. And nobody even noticed until Adweek magazine did a small article about my clever potato ad. They liked the visual. They liked the headline. They questioned the recipe. “We’ll have to try this curious recipe in our Adweek test kitchens,” they snidely remarked.

  I was thrilled to see my ad in Redbook. And I was especially proud of my fast and simple recipe. I liked to imagine extremely busy moms in Tennessee reading my recipe and thinking, Wow, I never realized you could make a potato so quick, and then serving it to guests. I liked to imagine the guests crunching into the rawish potato, gluey with melted cheese. The potato slices would surely have been scalding hot in some places, cool in others. They would have been starchy and caused cramps. “Gosh Phyllis, these potatoes are so . . . fresh.”

  This was great advertising.

  Maybe what I need to do is diversify. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years in traditional consumer advertising and now need to write commercials for prescription yeast-infection medications or make infomercials.

  As cheesy and downscale as infomercials are, they can be curiously persuasive. Last Saturday I spent the afternoon sitting on the curb in front of Dean & Deluca drinking one double espresso after another, like the alcoholic that I am. As a result, I was still charged at three in the morning. So I turned on the TV and started cycling through the channels, hoping to find either an incest movie or a conjoined-twin separation documentary. Instead, I found something equally compelling: an extreme close-up of a man’s forehead, with his fingers sliding back through the hair. And then, instantly, another image of another man, doing the same thing. Then a man rising up out of a pool, shaking the water from his head and smiling. The camera then zoomed in really tight so I could see a pimple just above his eyebrow and, yes, his hairline.

  I continued watching, and this compelling montage of mens’ foreheads turned out to be an infomercial for a doctor specializing in “hairline-rejuvenation surgery.” This phrase was repeated over and over, in every possible context. “Many of our patients resume their active lifestyles just two days after hairline-rejuvenation surgery,” and “even during intimate moments, Dr. Sisal’s hairlinerejuvenation surgery is completely undetectable.” I figured the reason they kept using this phrase was to distance this procedure from the dreaded “hair transplant,” which everybody knows results in a head that looks as though it belongs on a doll.

  Just as I was about to change the channel, having satiated my unexpected need to gorge on men’s foreheads, they showed a series of before-and-after images.

  These were truly remarkable. I put the remote control down, fluffed the pillows, and leaned back on the bed. Men who were once balder than me were now standing before a mirror and running a comb through their thick hair, smiling confidently at their own reflections. One man was shown blow-drying his hair and using a round vent brush.

  I nearly wept. I used to own a vent brush! I owned three different-sized vent brushes!

  This was the “get on all fours and get banged like a bitch!” porn equivalent for bald guys.

  The perfectly named Dr. Sisal explained that he used a magnifying glass during the procedure. I could relate to this. I used a magnifying glass myself at least once a month to monitor my Rogaine progress. The doctor then explained that the patient is given a local anesthetic, and “donor” hair is taken from the back of the head and placed in “micro grafts” to the front of the head. These micro grafts were the secret, Dr. Sisal said. Instead of transplanting clumps of hair to the front, creating an obvious rug, by implanting hairs individually he was able to achieve a “natural appearance that gives you the confidence to participate in any activity you wish.”

  The idea was thrilling, because the activity I wished to participate in was standing in front of the mirror and applying large gobs of hair gel.

  While I’d wasted my life writing misleading ads for potatoes and engineered butter substitutes, people with graduate degrees had cured baldness!

  I ordered the video: $9.95 plus shipping and handling. When it arrived a week later, I watched it immediately. And I was crushed. Unlike the infomercial, which featured upbeat, synthesized music and lots of shots of hairy-chested men leaping out of pools, the video had a more somber, homemade feel. It was an assembly of interviews between Dr. Sisal and some of his former “clients.”

  Here, there was no fancy, professional lighting, no music track, no busty blonde eager to run her fingers through any man’s hair.

  These men sat at their own kitchen tables, beneath overhead fluorescent lights. On the wall behind one guy was a red plastic cl
ock shaped like a cat. The eyes moved from side to side with the seconds. The men spoke in monotone of their experience at Dr. Sisal’s clinic and how “happy, yeah, really positive” they felt now, with full heads of hair.

  But the persuasion was gone.

  In this video, all the clients looked like what they were: middleaged bald guys who had chunks of hair cut out from the back of their head and sewn onto the front. They all shared the same uniform, half-circle hairline. And while their mouths said words like “happy,” “success,” and “thick,” their eyes were all flat with disappointment.

  These were the first men who’d been fooled by the infomercial, just like me. Only, they hadn’t had the chance to order the video for $9.95 plus shipping and handling because there was no video. Now these first men, they were the video. They probably got their hairline-rejuvenation surgery for free in exchange for appearing in this video. And they probably had to sign legal forms stating that even if they had regrets, they would publicly say they were happy, thrilled, overjoyed with the results of Dr. Sisal’s procedure. I knew how this shit worked. I did it all the time.

  So while my brief fantasy of ever being able to gel my hair into cool, sitcom spikes in the front was over, my interest in my career was suddenly rejuvenated. Maybe I could write these infomercials. And maybe I could write them better and more manipulative than anyone. Surely there was some manufacturer with a toxic facial mask, overheating electric blanket, or recycled aluminum life preserver who could use my services?

  THE RAT/THING

  T

  his morning at four-thirty I woke up and walked into the bathroom to take a leak. I am one of those people who must wake up at least six times during the night to either pee or eat refrigerated M&Ms. I am probably prediabetic as a result of my constant M&M consumption, thus the need to pee frequently at night.

  So I was standing there in the dark, half-asleep, trying to keep my burn-victim dream afloat, when I heard a vague, dry scratching noise coming from the bathtub.

  Definitely not a drip.

  I paused midstream to listen, but there was no sound. So I played the alcoholic’s wild card and pretended I never heard anything in the first place. But then as I was getting ready to flush, I heard it again. I turned on the light and peered into the tub, where I saw an actual rat/thing trying desperately to scratch/shuffle up and outside. It would make a run for the slanted rear of the tub, get halfway up, and then slide back down the smooth, white porcelain.

  I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.

  And like a campy cartoon housewife, I climbed on top of the sink, crouching under the ceiling and scorching my balding head on the light bulb of the vanity. I am over six feet tall, so this was a very sad sight.

  Knowing I couldn’t remain on top of the sink, I climbed down and made my way to my desk, where I sat at my computer. I lifted my feet off the floor and folded my legs up underneath me to think.

  Where did the rat/thing come from? Where? And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany.

  The rat/thing came from the faucet.

  How else? It certainly couldn’t have come from the floor and climbed straight up the side of the tub. Nor could it have come from mere air. It had to have come from the faucet. Which is really, when you think about it, nothing but a steel foyer for rodents to enter your home.

  The fact was: if a rat/thing managed to claw its way out of my tub and enter the main area of the studio apartment, I would never be able to locate it. Everywhere there were mounds of foreign magazines, month-old newspapers, a thousand or more empty sixteen-ounce beer cans. I happened to live in squalor that was more than four-feet deep throughout the apartment. If the rat/thing made it into my debris field, it could easily make a nest for itself under the bed in an old aluminum beef vindaloo container or it could simply die beneath an old copy of Italian Vogue. It could die and it could rot.

  Quite simply, if the rat/thing did manage to make it out of the tub, I would need to move. I would need to simply abandon the apartment. And because this would place me in default on a lease, I would also need to leave the state.

  A rat/thing with sinister red eyes and sharp little talons would be quite at home here in my little hovel.

  I had to kill it.

  I looked around my apartment, scanning for a vehicle of death. The Secret History by Donna Tartt? It was on the floor next to my bed. Surely, this would flatten it. But the problem was, there was no way I could flatten the rat with a hardcover book, especially not a first edition. Like strangulation, flattening-by-book was too intimate an act. If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class.

  Again, I heard the scratching. I got out of the chair and turned on every light in the apartment, making it as bright as an operating room. Somehow, the apartment needed to be extremely bright in order for me to think clearly.

  Then I saw the red can, Raid ant killer, on the floor next to the toilet bowl. I read the back about how contact with skin can cause damage: “If inhaled, remove victim to a source of fresh air or, if necessary, provide artificial respiration.”

  Very slightly, my mouth watered. It was worth a try.

  I stepped up to the tub. The rat/thing was cowering near the drain. But cowering? Perhaps planning, perhaps conserving strength. I could see the muscles beneath its dirty white fur. It absolutely looked at me, making eye contact. Its little whiskers twitched. Its tiny claws and feet tensed, ready to charge.

  I aimed the can at the rat/thing and pushed the button. Right away, it began to scurry toward the opposite end of the tub, and I followed, still pressing. A moist cloud of toxic, ozone-burning, nature killer filled the tub, and the air became slick with the scent.

  I sprayed the rat/thing until it was dripping.

  But instead of killing it, the Raid had only emboldened the rodent. Now, instead of merely trying to scamper up the impossible incline, it was charging furiously from the drain to the other end and making it higher up the incline. Because the tub was slick with Raid, it fell back. But had the tub not been slick with Raid, the rat/thing would have certainly escaped. Peering closer, I saw that its eyes were now clouded, the corneas burned away by the chemicals. Blindness had obviously empowered the rat/thing, made it bold and angry and determined.

  I held the button down until the brand-new can of Raid was sputtering a drizzle.

  And yet, there it was. The rat/thing, running an angry circle in the center of the tub, shaking its coat like a dog, and sending little Raid droplets flying everywhere.

  I tossed the empty can on the floor and looked at the beast for signs of impending death. I watched its little chest contract and expand with encouraging speed. Imminent respiratory failure? Tachycardia?

  And then I realized it did have a little chest, not a large chest. This wasn’t technically a rat/thing. It was, more specifically, a small white mouse.

  Still. Now was not the time to ponder semantics. I no more wanted a mouse under my bed than a rat. Both were heinous as far as I and any reasonable New Yorker were concerned.

  I was horrified. But also? A little thrilled. Because it was terribly exhilarating to find myself in a primal battle against another animal. It was me, at the top of the food chain, versus It. I was defending my territory. So in this way, the battle was slightly fun. It was slightly fucking fantastic!

  But the fumes had become overpowering, and my head was beginning to hurt in a way that suggested toxicity and a future lawsuit. So I left the bathroom and went over to the patio door. I opened this and peered outside at the trees. Then I lit a cigarette.

  I returned to the bathroom, waving the fumes away from my face as I walked through the doorway. The rat/thing was still alive. I had
to close my eyes and then reopen them again to make sure what I was seeing was fact. The rat/thing was not dead, not injured or impaired. I’d felt certain that once the Raid soaked through its coat and into its skin, the creature would be dead. But no. It was charging from the front of the tub to the back, furious and crazed.

  The little fucker.

  Then with hideous, calm precision, I locked the drain and turned the water on full blast and scalding hot. I did this automatically, dutifully, without a trace of emotion. I was simply a nurse administering pain medication to my comatose patient, an electrician changing a fuse. I was somebody from PETA handing out a brochure on the street.

  I was going to drown the rat/thing. And while I was at it, I would boil it, too.

  I watched as the tub filled with steaming water. “Calgon, take me away!” I joked. This was at approximately eight-thirty in the morning. At nine, it was still swimming. The Raid had made an oil slick on top of the water, and the rat/thing paddled through it like a furry little ice breaker. Even more alarming, the water level had brought the rat/thing closer to the top edge of the bathtub. Eventually, the rat/thing would be able to flip itself out onto the floor.

  It was simply unkillable.

  I needed to think fast.

  My Maglite flashlight was by the front door. I could see it if I learned forward and peered around the open bathroom door.

  Instinctively, I ran out and grabbed it, then came back into the bathroom and turned off the light. It was a crazy idea that came to me out of thin atmosphere. I didn’t question it; I only complied.

  I turned on the flashlight and made a dancing pattern on the water, disco tub. I turned the light on and off, on and off. I made the light zigzag across the water, and the rat/thing began to tremble. It began to seize.

  I choked a laugh out, surprised, thrilled. “Oh my God,” I said. “The light is doing something to it.”

  I began making vigorous, complex patterns on the water. I drew crosshatches made of light. I made figure eights. I shined the light into the rat/thing’s eyes, then flicked it off and on again like a strobe.