In the weeks leading up to Tom Mota’s termination, in the spring of that year, Tom was found departing Janine Gorjanc’s office with great frequency. Hard to say what they were talking about. We loved nothing more than to lay waste to a half hour speculating about office romance, but we could not conceive of a stranger pair. The petulant, high-strung Napoleon exiled to an Elba of his own mind, and the acrid mother in mourning. Love worked in funny ways. We forgot they had things in common — lost children. They consoled each other, perhaps. They shared the long indefatigable nightmare of not knowing what to do with the burden of a materialized love that refused their private requests to wane, to break, to please just go away, and so they found themselves directing that love toward each other. But that was only how we killed time. In fact, there was no love affair. Tom just wanted the billboard to come down.
Our media buyers, like Jane Trimble and Tory Friedman, tended to be small, chipper, well-dressed women who wore strong perfume and had an easy knack for conversation. They kept bags of sweets in their desk drawers and never gained any weight. They spent most of their time on the phone talking with vendors, the deadening prospect of which made us gag, and for their services, they received random gifts and tickets to sporting events, the blatant unfairness of which angered us with a blind and murderous envy. Because they put the orders in and talked with friendly inflections in their voices, they were bribed with largesse, like dirty checkpoint guards, and we thought they deserved a special ring of hell, the ring devoted to corrupt mayors, lobbyists, and media buyers. That was how we felt, anyway, during our time in the system. When one of us walked Spanish and got out of the system, we thought back on those loquacious and smiling media buyers as just some of the nicest people.
Tom’s gripe was with Jane. “He’s got to take that goddamn billboard down,” he said to her after walking into her office without a knock or a greeting. Unfortunately Jane knew just what he was referring to: the vendor with whom she had placed the order. Flyers of the missing girl were not the only effort we had made to help Janine and Frank Gorjanc during the days of their short-lived search for their daughter. Using some of their money, supplemented by hastily raised funds, we had the same image of Jessica from the fourth grade with the word MISSING and a number to call placed on a billboard on I-88 facing westbound traffic. Long after the girl had been found, that billboard was still up there. Jane tried to explain that nobody wanted to see that billboard come down as much as she did, but that these things took time when there was no immediate turnover. “No immediate turnover?” cried Tom. “It’s been six months!” “He promises me he’s working on it,” Jane replied with the courtesy and patience expected of media buyers. “Well that’s not good enough,” Tom barked at her. “At least have him strip it.” “Stripping,” explained Jane sheepishly, knowing how crass she must have sounded, “unfortunately costs money, Tom.”
It was an unpopular space, that was the problem. Far out on I-88, west of the Fox River, metropolitan Chicago effectively came to an end, yielding its industrial parks and suburban tract housing to fields of alfalfa and small towns with single gas stations. Billboards in North Aurora were good for casino boat and cigarette ads, and maybe the occasional AIDS awareness campaign, but little else. The vendor might have taken a hit on the rental fee but to rent it at all was likely a great boon to him, and he probably never had a client complain about continued exposure after the lease expired. Free advertising — who could complain about that?
If there was an opportunity to complain, we complained. The creative team complained about the account team. The account team complained about the client. Everybody complained at one time or another about human resources, and human resources complained among themselves about each and every one of us. About the only people not complaining were the media buyers, because they were showered with bribes of tickets and gifts, but when Janine complained to Tom about the billboard, Tom Mota took that complaint to them. The billboard, he said, advertised Jessica as missing, when Jessica had not been missing for months. Jessica had been found. Jessica had been buried. He complained that Janine had to see that billboard on the side of I-88 every day on her way home from work, had to be reminded of the week she spent waiting in numb and desperate hope that that billboard might help in some way to bring her little girl back, and of her devastation when she learned that it would not. Now that billboard was nothing but a vicious reminder, broadcasting from a great height the girl’s cruel fate. Tom wouldn’t stand for it. He complained about the son-of-a-bitch vendor who moved unconscionably slowly, and about the bright, uncomplaining dispositions of media buyers like Jane Trimble — complained so much that Jane had to get on the phone with the vendor and complain. When she got off the phone with the vendor, Jane called Lynn Mason to complain about Tom Mota — just one more complaint that must have contributed to his eventual termination.
On the morning in May Lynn Mason was scheduled to be in surgery, the day after she let go of Chris Yop, Yop was back in the building, standing at a print station. Marcia Dwyer was startled to find him there. It was early morning. Marcia had come to photocopy the inspiring tale of a cancer survivor featured in an outdated issue of People magazine. When Yop turned and saw her, he gave a start like a cornered animal. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “I thought you were Lynn.”
“Lynn’s in surgery today,” she said, “remember?”
Marcia spoke with a hardcore South Side accent and wore the accompanying tall hair with bangs. Her black curls in back were held in place by some miraculous fixative. If we knew her at all, as she spoke with Yop she probably had one hand on her hip with her wrist turned inward.
“What are you doing back here, Chris?” she asked.
“Working on my resume,” Yop said defensively.
Marcia told us about this encounter a half hour later, when the day officially began. We had congregated by the couches for a double meeting. The day after a meeting with Lynn we usually had a postmeeting meeting conducted by Joe, where the finer points of the project were hammered out without wasting any more of Lynn’s time. Of late, Lynn spent her days in meetings with her fellow partners in an effort to keep us solvent. Not wasting her time had become an imperative.
It was just like us to have two meetings for one project. No one ever wondered if the existence of double meetings might have some bearing on Lynn’s need to have solvency meetings — or if they did, they kept their mouths shut. After all, we liked double meetings. Only in a double meeting could you ask the questions you were reluctant to ask in the first meeting for fear of looking stupid in front of Lynn. We wanted to die looking stupid in front of Lynn, but we didn’t mind it in front of Joe.
One agency we knew about, out in San Francisco, had architects come in to design a floor plan that included live trees, dartboards, flagstones, sun panels, coffee kiosks, and a half-court big enough for a game of three-on-three. Those lucky bastards knew no such thing as a conference room or a frosted-glass door. We had to suffer such insults, but in recompense, we were given mismatching recreational furniture intended to inspire the creative impulse and upon which we were encouraged to lounge. Located in open spaces where the windows lengthened and allowed sunlight to pour in, these little hot spots were a nice break from corridors and cubicles, and where we always went to double meet. Marcia was perched on the edge of one of the recliners, and her hair was particularly tall and sculptural that morning.
She told us Yop seemed offended when she asked him what he was doing at the print station. “It was like he expected me to be a major bitch about it and start hollering for security,” she said, “but I was just asking what he was doing. I mean, just yesterday the guy was laid off, right — and this morning he’s back in the building? What’s that about?”
We couldn’t believe Yop was back in the building.
“I asked him, I says, ‘You shouldn’t be here, right?’ And he says to me, ‘No, I shouldn’t be here.’ So I says, ‘So what happens if somebody catches you?
’ and he says, ‘Well, then I’m fucked.’ ‘What’s that mean, you’re fucked?’ I says, and he says, ‘Trespassing!’”
We couldn’t believe that. Trespassing? Would he be arrested?
“Yeah, can you believe that?” Yop asked Marcia. “That’s what I was told right after the input yesterday when Lynn called me back into her office, remember? My presence in the building will be construed as criminal action. I was like, ‘Lynn, you have to be kidding me, right? After all I’ve done for this place, you’re going to have me arrested for trespassing?’ She stops drawing the blinds — she wasn’t even looking at me when she said it! But anyway, she sits down, and you know that look she can give you, where it’s almost like she’s burning your brain out with her laser eyes? She pulls her chair in and she gives me that look and she says, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t still be here, Chris. You’ve been terminated.’ So I say to her, ‘Yeah, I know that, Lynn, but when we were having our conversation earlier and I couldn’t keep it together, remember? and I had to leave your office? I didn’t think I would have to leave leave until we had a chance to finish our conversation, like how we’re doing now. Because I still have one important thing to say before I go.’ So she says to me, ‘Chris, tell me whatever it is you have to tell me, but then you need to leave. Understand? I can’t take any chances with you in the building.’ What the fuck, right? She can’t take any chances with me in the building? What am I going to do, steal Ernie’s chair? Maybe I could get down the hall with it into the freight elevator. I’d still have to walk it past security. How am I going to get out of the building with Ernie’s chair? ‘So go ahead,’ Lynn says to me. ‘What do you have to say?’ ‘Okay, I just want to know one thing,’ I tell her. ‘Do you know or have you ever known anything about serial numbers?’ This is what I ask her. ‘Does the phrase serial numbers mean anything to you personally?’ How does she respond? She says, ‘Serial numbers?’ Yeah, she looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chris,’ she says to me, ‘serial numbers.’ You see — I KNEW IT!” Yop howled in a frantic whisper, flinging a furtive glance in the direction of the print-station doorway. And in a softer voice, “I fucking knew it! That office coordinator made the whole thing up! It’s her own personal system. There’s nothing official whatsoever about the serial numbers! She has a punch gun. You know what I’m talking about, with the wheel? That’s where they come from! The serial numbers! Lynn didn’t even know about them! She was like, ‘Serial numbers?’ So I tell her everything about the serial numbers, about how the office coordinator made them up, keeping tabs on everything like Big Brother or something. But so anyway, she listens, very politely, but then she says, ‘Is that it?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, yeah, but —’ I thought at the very least she would call the office coordinator back in and we’d start over and this time I’d get a fair shake. But it was obvious there was no chance she was going to give me my job back. So that’s when she tells me that if she finds me in the building again, she’s going to have to report me to security, who will call the police, who will arrest me for trespassing. Can you believe that?” Yop’s tumid, rheumy eyes bulged out at Marcia. He really wasn’t in the best of health. “After all my time here,” he continued. “So that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, watch me come back here tomorrow and print out my resume using your machines. You know what they charge at Kinko’s for printing like this? No way I’m spending my last paycheck at Kinko’s. I’ve given a lot to this place, and I think I should be allowed to save a few bucks on printing. By the way,” he said. “Would you proofread it for me?”
“So I says to him, ‘Proofread what?’” Marcia said to us just before the double meeting began. “He wanted me to proofread his resume! I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Chris, I’m an art director. You’re the copywriter. You do the proofing, remember?’ I mean, honestly, I spell like a person in an institution. But still he says, ‘Yeah, I know, but I really need another pair of eyes on it.’ And then he stands there holding out a pen. A red pen! He wants me to do it right there in the print station!”
So Marcia stood at the copier proofreading Yop’s resume, stealing glances at the door now and again because she didn’t want to be seen with somebody who could be arrested for trespassing. As she worked, he engaged her in conversation. He asked if she wanted to know the twisted thing about being terminated. “The really sick and twisted thing,” he said. “You wanna know what it is?”
“I was trying to concentrate on his resume,” she said to us, “and I was also watching the door because I didn’t want anyone to walk in and see me with the guy. I already knew the sick and twisted thing: that sorry drip was back in the building. But I didn’t say that, because I was trying to be nice.”
“The sick and twisted thing,” Yop confessed, “is that I want to work. Can you believe that? I want to work. Isn’t that sick? You understand what I’m saying here, Karen? I’ve just been terminated, and inside my head I’m still working!”
“Oh my god,” said Marcia, looking up from his resume. “My name is Marcia.”
“At that point,” Marcia said to us, “I was through. He doesn’t even know my name?”
“What did I say?” said Yop.
“You just called me Karen,” replied Marcia.
“Karen?” Yop looked away and shook his head. “Did I? I said Karen? I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re not Karen, you’re Marcia, I know that. You and me worked together a long time, I know who you are. You’re Marcia, you’re from Berwyn.”
“Bridgeport.”
“I know who you are,” said Yop. “Karen’s someone else. Karen’s the Chinese girl.”
“Korean.”
“My mind is just totally fried this morning, that’s all,” he said. “I hope you forgive me. Anyway, the point I was trying to make . . .”
“WHAT?” Marcia cried at us from her perch on the recliner. “WHAT is the point you’re trying to make, you stuttering jackass? Berwyn? I could not believe that the guy got my name wrong.”
“The point I was trying to make,” Yop continued, “is that I find myself thinking about the fund-raiser. Can you believe that?”
“What fund-raiser?” asked Marcia.
“The fund-raiser,” Yop replied. “The fund-raiser we have to come up with ads for.”
“Oh, for breast cancer,” said Marcia, nodding. “The pro bono project.” She was reminded that in a few minutes she had a double meeting to attend.
“But then I thought, he doesn’t!” cried Marcia. “I just wanted to say to him, ‘Oh my god, Chris — you don’t work here anymore. Give the fund-raiser ads up. Leave the building. Proofread your own frickin’ resume! But my god,” she said, “he wouldn’t stop talking. He says to me, ‘Can you believe I can’t stop working in my head? I keep working and working and working — isn’t that sick and twisted?’ Well, yeah. Yeah it’s sick and twisted. You don’t work here anymore! But I didn’t say that. I was trying to be nice. I do try to be nice sometimes. So even though he didn’t know my name I went on proofreading his stupid resume, which had so many mistakes. How did we ever hire that guy to be a copywriter? I’m pointing them out to him, all these misspellings and typos and things, when he says, totally out of the blue — I mean, I have no idea where this comes from. I know something’s wrong, though, because he’s not talking talking talking, he’s just looking at me, so I look up from his resume and I says, ‘What?’ and he says, ‘It’ll happen to you, too, you know. Don’t think it won’t.’ And I says, ‘What will happen to me?’ ‘Getting fired,’ he says. ‘It’ll happen to you just like it’s happened to everyone else, and then you won’t be above everybody like how you act now.’ I could not believe what I was hearing,” she said to us. “I was proofreading the fucking guy’s resume — me! — making improvements on the thing, and he tells me that I’m going to get laid off? And not just that, but also that I hold myself above everybody else? Just because I hold myself above that sorry drip doesn’t mean I hold mys
elf above everybody. I was trying to help him get a new job, for god’s sake! Wasn’t that nice of me? I mean, what an ass crack! Isn’t he a total ass crack,” she asked us, “to say to me, ‘Oh, and by the way, this bad thing that just happened to me? It’s going to happen to you, too.’ What if Brizz had done that? What if Brizz had said, ‘Thanks for visiting me in the hospital, guys, but just so you know, one day you’ll all be dying, too, and when that day comes, you won’t be able to breathe, either, you’ll be in such pain and misery, and then you’ll die. So good luck, you jerks.’ So I ripped his resume up into little pieces and threw them in his face, and one little piece stuck on his forehead, he was sweating so much. And I said something really mean to him. I couldn’t help it, I says, ‘You sweat so gross it makes me sick.’ I shouldn’t have said that. But I loved saying it, because it is gross when he sweats. What a fucking jerk! Telling me I’m going to get laid off. You guys have to remember,” she said. “You have to understand. I’ve been on eggshells since the input yesterday.”
We asked Marcia why she should be on eggshells. She looked around conspiratorially, unusual for her, because she typically didn’t give a damn who heard her say what. Marcia was never on eggshells. She was born and raised in Bridgeport, she changed her own oil, she listened to Mötley Crüe.