The Merchants' War
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.
There certainly was nothing inspiring about the grommet works. The job was dull, and the industry appeared to be dying. We never saw the finished product. We turned out the grommets and they were shipped to places like Calcutta and Kampuchea to be used in whatever they were used in—it was cheaper for the Indians and Kampucheans to buy from us than to make them locally, but not much cheaper, so business was not thriving. My first week there they closed down the wire-plastic division, though extruded-aluminum and enamel-brass were still going well enough. There was lots of unused space on the upper floors of the plant, and when things were slow I went poking around. You could see the history of industry written in the stratigraphy of the old plant. Bolt holes in the floor where once the individual punch presses had stood … overlaid by the scars of the high-speed extrusion lines … buried under the marks of the microprocessor-controlled customized machines … and now again outmoded by the individual punch presses. And covered all by dust, rust and must. There were lights on the upper floor, but when I pressed the switch only a handful came on, old fluorescents, most of them flickering wildly. A regiment of stair-sleepers could have found homes here, but Mr. Semmelweiss was pursuing the fantasy of “more desirable” tenants … or the even more fantastic hope that somehow grommets would boom again and all the old space would be bustling.
Fantasies, I sneered—enviously, for the little green pills had not only taken away my Moke-hunger, they had punctured my own fantasies as well. It is a terrible thing to wake up in the morning and realize that the day just dawned will be no better than the last.
II
What changed things? I don’t know. Nothing changed things. I made no resolve, settled no unanswerable questions. But one morning I got up early, changed trains at a different station, got out where I had not been in a long, long time and presented myself at Mitzi’s apartment building.
The doorthing opened its jaw to sniff my fingertips and read my palm print. Medium success. It didn’t admit me, but it didn’t clamp down to hold me until the cops came either. In a minute Mitzi’s sleepy face appeared on the screen. “It really is you,” she said, thought for a minute and then added, “You might as well come on up.”
The door opened long enough for me to squeeze through, and all the way up on the hang-on lift I was trying to figure out what had been odd about the way she looked. Hair tousled? Sure, but obviously I’d got her right out of bed. Expression peculiar? Maybe. It was clearly not the look of someone glad to see me.
I pushed that question to the corner of my mind where the growing mountain of unanswered questions and unresolved doubts was locked away. By the time she let me in to her own place she’d washed her face and thrown a kerchief over her hair. The only expression she wore was polite curiosity. Polite distant curiosity. “I don’t know why I’m here,” I said —“except that, really, I’ve got nowhere else to go.” I hadn’t planned to say that. I hadn’t planned anything, really, but as the words came out of my mouth and I heard them I recognized them as true.
She looked at my empty hands and unbulging pockets. “I don’t have any Mokes here, Tenny.”
I brushed it aside. “I’m not drinking Mokes any more. No. I haven’t kicked them; I’m just on replacements.”
She looked shocked. “Pills, Tenny? No wonder you look like hell.”
I said steadily, “Mitzi, I’m not mad and I don’t think you owe me anything, but I thought you’d listen to me. I need a job. A job that’ll use my skills, because what I’m doing now is so close to being dead that one morning I just won’t wake up because I won’t be able to tell the difference. I’m blacklisted, you know. It’s not your fault; I’m not saying that. But you’re my only hope.”
“Aw, Tenny,” she said. The polite curiosity face broke, and for a minute I thought she was going to cry. “Aw, hell, Tenny,” she said. “Come on in the kitchen and have some breakfast.”
Even when the world is all gray, even when the circumstances are so wildly unlike anything you’ve ever done before that part of your mind is chasing its tail in baffled circles, your habits and training carry you through. I watched Mitzi squeeze oranges (real fruit oranges! Squeezed them!) for juice, and grind coffee beans (real coffee beans!) to make coffee, and all the while I was pitching her as confidently and strongly as ever I’d done for the Old Man. “Product, Mitzi,” I said. “That’s what I’m good at, and I’ve worked out major new product campaigns. Try this: Did it ever occur to you that it’s a lot of trouble to be using disposable pocket tissues, razors, combs, toothbrushes? You have to keep a supply on hand. Whereas if you had permanent ones—” She wrinkled her brow, the frown lines very deep and very conspicuous. “I don’t see what you’re getting at, Tenny.”
“A permanent replacement for, say, pocket tissues. I’ve researched it; they used to be called handkerchiefs. A luxury item, don’t you see? Priced for prestige.”
She said dubiously, “There’s no repeat business, though, is there? I mean if they’re permanent—”
I shook my head. “Permanent’s only as long as the consumer wants to keep it. The key is fashion. First year we sell square ones. Next year triangular, maybe—then with different designs, prints, colors, maybe embroidery; the numbers say there’s bigger grosses in that than in disposables.”
“Not bad, Tenny,” she conceded, putting a cup of this peculiar coffee in front of me. Actually it didn’t taste bad.
“That’s only one little one,” I said, swallowing my first sip. “I’ve got big ones. Very big ones. Val Dambois tried to steal my self-help substitution groups from me, but he only got part of it.”
“There’s more?” she asked, glancing at her watch.
“You bet there’s more! They just never let me work it all out. See, after the groups are formed, each member goes out and digs up other members. He gets a commission on the new ones. You get ten new members at fifty dollars a year each, and you get a ten percent commission on each one—that pays your dues.”.
She pursed her lips. “I suppose it’s a good way to expand.”
“Not just expand! How do you recruit these new members? You have a party in your condo. Invite your friends. Give them food and drinks and party favors—and we sell them the favors. And then—” I took a deep breath—“the beauty part, the member that signs up new members gets promoted. He becomes a Fellow of the group, and that means his dues go up to seventy-five a year. Twenty members, he becomes a Councilor—dues, a hundred. Thirty he’s a, I don’t know, Grand Exalted Theta-Class Selectman or something. See, we always stay ahead of them, so no matter how many memberships he peddles he pays half of it back—and we go on selling him the merchandise.”
I sat back with my coffee, watching
the expression on her face. Whatever that expression was. I had thought it might be admiration, but I could not really tell. “Tenny,” she sighed, “you are one hell of a true-blue huckster.”
And that broke through the well-trained reflexes. I set the coffee cup down so hard that some of the coffee spilled into the saucer. Once more I listened to the words coming out of my mouth and, although I had not planned to say them, I recognized they were true. “No,” I said, “I’m not. As far as I can tell I’m not a true-blue anything. The reason I want to get back into the ad business is that I have a notion I ought to want it. What I really want is only—”
And I stopped there, because I was afraid to finish the sentence with the word “you” … and because the other thing I noticed was that my voice was shaking.
“I wish,” I said despairingly, and thought for a minute before going on: “I wish this was a different world.”
Now, what do you suppose I meant by that?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I didn’t know the answer to it then and don’t now; my heart was saying something my head hadn’t considered at all. I guess the meaning of the question isn’t that important. The feeling was what counted, and I could see that it reached Mitzi. “Oh, hell, Tenny,” she said, and her eyes dropped.
When she raised them again she stared at me searchingly for a moment before she spoke. “Do you know,” she said—funny, but as much to herself, I thought, as to me, “that you keep me awake at night?”
Shocked, I began, “I had no idea—” But she pressed on.
“It’s foolish,” she mused. “You’re a huck. True, you’re down right now, and you’re thinking things you wouldn’t have let yourself think a few weeks ago. But you’re a huck.”
I said—not quarrelsomely, just making my point, “I’m an adman, yes, Mitzi.” It wasn’t like her to use that kind of language.