“We looked at it,” said Benny’s father.
That was it? All the two of them did was look at it?
“Well, then we put on our headdresses and prayed for corn. Is that what you’re looking for?”
No doubt we had the right man. That was a response that would have come from Benny Shassburger’s own mouth in the days before he clammed up and refused to say a word about why the totem pole had such a hold on him and drove us crazy with his secrecy. We asked Benny’s father if he was at all curious about why someone Jewish like Benny would become obsessed with a pagan artifact like a totem pole.
“If you’re asking me, does my son pray to it,” his father replied, with a change in tone, “I don’t think he prays to it. I just think he likes it.”
Yes, we said to Benny the next day, we had a conversation with his father. No, we never asked him if Benny prayed to it. We didn’t mean to offend anybody. We just want to know, we said to Benny, honestly, we just want to know why you go down there to look at the totem pole so often, and what you’re thinking about when you’re down there.
“I go down there,” he replied simply, “to think about Brizz.”
So it was funny. While Benny was thinking about Brizz, we were thinking about Benny. What could Benny be doing down there in Brizz’s backyard, what is he thinking about standing in front of the totem pole — that’s what we were wondering. And Benny, he was wondering — well, what, exactly? What was there to think about with respect to Brizz? His cigarettes, his sweater vest, his conversation with the building guy, and all the unmemorable days he spent in our company. That takes about ten seconds. Where do you go after that? What more was there to think about?
“Look,” said Benny, reaching the limits of his patience. “I didn’t purchase the thing. I didn’t put it in my backyard. I’m just visiting it. What would you have done to Brizz if you’d found out he had a totem pole in his backyard, and when you asked him why, he refused to tell you?”
Hound him, threaten him, torture him, kill him. Whatever it took.
But the point wasn’t Brizz. We weren’t going to get any answers from Brizz. Brizz was gone. Benny, on the other hand, was still alive. Benny could tell us what we wanted to know.
“I’ll never tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret I share with Brizz and you scumbags can’t know about it.”
“Has Benny gone insane?” Karen asked Jim.
Inexplicably Benny gave us all ten dollars. He went from office to office, cube to cube, handing out ten-dollar bills. What’s this for? we asked him.
“A refund,” he said. “I don’t want your blood money.”
Turns out he was returning the ten bucks he’d won from each of us when he put Brizz on his Celebrity Death Watch.
“He’s gone insane,” said Jim.
Bizarro Brizz finally put Brizz’s house on the market, and now the situation, we thought, had to change. There would be no backyard for Benny to visit anymore. There was no — what would you call it? — memorial site, or whatever, to spend time at, and to reflect upon the recently departed, and all the mysteries Brizz left behind, or whatever else Benny was chewing on down there. Naturally we thought he would give it up. He would either leave it for the future owners, or give it away, or have it appraised, or hire a stump-grinding company to dispose of it. Instead, he hired a moving company to transfer it out of the backyard into the largest unit available at the U-Stor-It facility at North and Clybourn, where he kept it in bubble wrap horizontally upon the cement floor, because it was too big to fit inside his apartment.
When we heard Benny was not getting rid of the totem pole but had chosen to keep it, even going so far as to store it at great personal expense, we kept asking him why. Why, Benny? Why? Benny, why? When he continued to refuse to tell us — or perhaps he just found himself unable to explain his reasons even to himself — we let the full force of our dissatisfaction be known. We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark. And we thought it was the height of hypocrisy for Benny, who was always telling everyone about everyone else, to try and keep a secret from us. So we took up squawking at him. We did mockeries of ceremonial dances in his doorway. The worst thing we did was take scissors to this old toupee Chris Yop had in his basement, and put the mangled thing on Benny’s desk, which Karen Woo doused with a bottle of fake blood she kept in her office, so that what lay on the desk looked like a fresh scalping. Someone suggested we find a yarmulke to put on top, but we all sort of agreed that to marry those two atrocities together would be stepping over a line.
In our defense, it was Chris Yop and Karen Woo’s idea, the fake scalping, and they were really the ones who went in and executed it. Hank Neary said it best when he said, “Yeah, that was really just a Yop and Woo production.” We picked up on that, and afterward, it became the name of the tribe Benny belonged to, the Yopanwoo tribe. We said, Hey, Benny, how do you and the Yopanwoo stay warm in the winter? Have you and the Yopanwoo received restitution from the U.S. government, Benny? Your fellow tribesmen, Benny, do they consume firewater to excess? Benny just smiled at these jibes and nodded his head amiably and returned to his desk, and without a word of explanation, continued to store Brizz’s totem pole for three hundred and nineteen dollars a month.
On the afternoon Lynn Mason should have been recovering from surgery, Benny discovered they were raising the price of his storage unit by thirty bucks. That in and of itself was not outrageous, but compounded with the rest, he was shelling out a preposterous monthly sum.
“It’s time I get rid of it,” he said to Jim. “It’s not doing anything except sitting in there.”
Jim was chomping at the bit to tell Benny his news of riding the elevator with Lynn Mason when she should have been at the hospital. But he was surprised to hear that Benny was thinking of giving up the totem pole.
“You’ve always said that Brizz gave that totem pole to you for a reason,” he said. “Now you’re talking about giving it up?”
“What choice do I have?” Benny replied. “I can’t spend three hundred and fifty bucks a month on a totem pole. That’s insane.”
“It wasn’t insane at three-nineteen?”
“No, it was insane then, too,” said Benny. “By the way, you want to know how much it’s worth? I had an appraiser look at it. On the antiques market, this guy tells me, it could sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars.”
Jim’s jaw dropped. He let out a few choked grunts of disbelief.
“Oh, and here’s another thing,” said Benny. “Lynn Mason’s in the office today.”
Jim’s expression turned from incredulity over the worth of the totem pole to disappointment at hearing from Benny the very news he had been waiting patiently to reveal himself.
“Aw, man!” he cried. “I wanted to tell you that!”
Joe Pope suddenly appeared in Benny’s doorway carrying his leather day planner.
“Guys,” he said, “we’re meeting down at the couches in ten minutes.”
A TRIPLE MEETING was bad news. Especially if it came so quickly on the heels of a double meeting. The announcement of a triple meeting could only mean the project had been canceled or postponed, or changed. We had ten minutes to ruminate on which was the worst fate. If canceled or postponed, our only project went away, and with it, all hope of looking busy. Looking busy was essential to our feeling vital to the agency, to mention nothing of being perceived as such by the partners, who would conclude by our labors that it was impossible to lay us off. (No need to look too closely here at the underlying fact that our sole project was pro bono, and so something we weren’t getting paid for.) If the project was changed, the work we had put in so far on our concepts would all be for naught. That was always a pain in the ass. As much as we loved a double meeting, we always approached a triple meeting with trepidation and discomfort.
And for good reason this time. After detours to the restroom, to the coffee bar for a pick-me-up, to the cafeteria for a can of pop, we sh
uffled down to the couches to hear the bad news. We were no longer developing ads for a fund-raiser.
Joe sat on a sofa and tried to explain. “Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s not really an ad for anything anymore.” He immediately retracted that and said of course it was an ad for something. Or rather it was an ad for someone. But no, in the traditional sense of an ad, it wasn’t really an ad. Of course it was an ad, but more in the spirit of a public service announcement.
“I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this,” he said. “Let me start over. What the client wants from us now is an ad specifically targeted to the person diagnosed with breast cancer. We’re no longer reaching out to the potential donor with a request for money. We’re talking directly to the sick person. And our objective,” he said, “is to make them laugh.”
“Make them laugh?” said Benny. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” said Jim, from the floor.
“You come up with an ad,” said Joe, “that makes the cancer patient laugh. It’s that simple.”
“What are we selling?”
“We’re not selling anything.”
“So what’s the point?”
“Think of it — okay,” he said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “Think of it as an awareness campaign, okay? Only you’re not making the target audience aware of anything, you’re just making them laugh.” When that still made little sense, he added, “Okay, if we’re selling something, we’re selling comfort and hope to the cancer patient through the power of laughter. How’s that?”
“That’s an unusual product,” Genevieve remarked.
“It is an unusual product,” he agreed. “We have no product. We have no features or benefits, we have no call-to-action, we have no competition in the marketplace. We also have no guidelines on design, format, color, type styles, images, or copy.”
“What do we have?” she asked.
“We have a target audience — women suffering from breast cancer — and an objective — to make them laugh.”
“Why did the project change?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail with the changes and asked me to pass them on to you.”
“Who’s paying for the ad now that it’s no longer for a fund-raiser?” asked Dan Wisdom.
“Good question. Same people, I think. The Alliance Against Breast Cancer.”
“Joe,” said Karen, “how come I can’t find any presence for this ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer’ on the Internet?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Can’t you?”
Karen shook her head. “There are charities, institutes, research centers, and about a thousand alliances, but none with the name ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer.’”
Joe suggested that Alliance Against Breast Cancer might be some kind of umbrella group of regional organizations, each of which had their own website.
“So what are we supposed to do now with the fund-raiser concepts that we already have?”
“Shelve them.”
“Well, that blows,” said Karen.
“It’s not like we had anything good anyway,” said Larry.
“We did, too, Larry. We had ‘Loved Ones,’ okay? Joe, when did this change occur?”
“Like I said, Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail.”
“I thought Lynn was off today.”
“Change of plans, I guess.”
“So everybody knows that Lynn’s in today?” said Jim, looking around at us. “How come I was the last to know?”
“Because you’re an idiot,” said Marcia.
“Okay, guys,” said Joe. “Let’s get to work.”
HEADING BACK FROM the couches, knowing we had to toss out our ad concepts for the fund-raiser and start over again in the disagreeable hours of the afternoon — which tended to stretch on and on — we felt a little fatigued. All that work for nothing. And if we happened to cast back, in search of edification, to days past and jobs completed — oh, what a bad idea, for what had all that amounted to? And anticipating future work just made the present moment even more miserable. There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm’s length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.
But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.
YET SOMETHING HAPPENED that afternoon that made it hard to concentrate. Benny Shassburger called Joe into his office to inform him he had received an e-mail from Tom Mota. The subject line read, “Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad.”
“So he’s been in touch with Jim, too?” asked Joe, taking a seat across the desk.
“Apparently. Like I said, I only got this a few minutes ago.”
“Read it to me.”
Benny turned to his computer. “It’s kinda long.”
“That’s okay. Read it.”
“Okay. He starts off, ‘So Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad over there. YEEE-HOOO! I’m free!!! But as you aren’t, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d tell you the story of my mother’s cancer, and you can use it if you want. My mother was one mean bitch. When she wasn’t being a mean bitch, she was being deaf and mute. And when she wasn’t being deaf and mute, she was crying in the bathtub. And when she wasn’t crying in the bathtub, she was sharing a bottle with Mr. Hughes. Let me tell you, that there was one slimy glass-eyed fuck, Mr. Hughes. Anyway, those are my four memories of my mom. She looked like Rosie the Riveter — you know the woman I’m talking about, who wears the bandana and says “We Can Do It!”? It was the unsmiling face they shared. But that’s where the similarity stopped because my mom couldn’t do anything and she had Xs over her eyes like in a cartoon of someone dead. I never bought her a Mother’s Day card but I’m sure they never wrote one for her either. Can you imagine? “Happy Depressive’s Day, Ma. Love, Tommy.” But then she started to die. None of us wanted a THING to do with her. I got one brother on a ranch in Omaha, he didn’t want her. I got another brother in Newport Beach in Orange County, California — they only want their red convertibles and their yachts out that way, rich fucks. Anyway, my sister, she was doing my mom one better in the Tenderloin. That’s a little piece of paradise full of whores and drunks in San Francisco. No way SHE could have taken the old lady in. (My sister’s a whole different story. I’ll tell you about her sometime.) So anyway, my mom was still in the same apartment we grew up in — imagine living your whole goddamn life in the same two rooms in Romeoville. Me being about six miles from there, I had to be the one to go pick her up and bring her over to the house. BUT NOT THOSE FUCKING CATS! NO WAY. NO CATS. Barb couldn’t believe that my mom was on her deathbed and I didn’t want a thing to do with her. But that’s because she never knew the woman when she was throwing dishes at the wall in her goddamn robe. The point I’m trying to make here is that it was Barb who convinced me to go over there and get her, and man, just between you and me, Benny, I REALLY, REALLY fucked things up, to be honest with you. With Barb, I mean. Don’t you think you and I should
get together and have a beer? I miss her and I’d like to talk about it. Anyway, we put my mom up in the attic until she died and eventually she did die and it was even painful to watch. She absolutely refused to go to the hospital and then she refused to sit up for the home nurse we hired. But then, I couldn’t believe THIS. She asked for a priest. I had no idea she had a religious bone in her body. So we brought in a priest and if I could only tell you what it was like to watch my mom hold a priest’s hand. She was pretty out of it by then, without her dentures and looking like HELL. I felt sorry for whatever Higher Power was about to receive her but I also have to admit that I felt some envy for how God or whatever could convince her to hold the hand of His servant when I couldn’t even recall the last time she’d held MY hand, if ever. And that’s because she was a mean bitch, but also because her father was a drunk and an abusive son-of-a-bitch and all of THAT daytime talk-show psychology. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, because before she asked for the priest, between the time I picked her up in Romeoville (WITHOUT CATS) and the time she lay dying in the attic, I sat with her after I got home from work and we would watch Wheel of Fortune together. And while we were silent and just watching TV, it was more than I remember us ever doing together when I was a kid. We’d watch Wheel of Fortune while Barb made dinner downstairs, and over four or five months I saw how no matter what kind of a mean bitch you have for a mother, it’s tough to watch her die, because ovarian cancer is a much meaner bitch than any bitch it ever consumes. It just WASTED her, Benny. I did not even recognize her. She looked more like the skeleton in your office than my mom. Man did I cry when she died. I kept asking Barbara WHY, WHY was I crying? And she kept saying, of course you’re crying, she’s your mom. But WHY? I hadn’t talked to her in ten years. And I didn’t give one fuck about her. But then you see someone just WASTE like that. And if there is ONE THING I wish I could take back, ONE THING in my entire life I wish I could do differently, it would be when we were going through all that shit during the divorce when I REALLY lost it one time and I just screamed at Barb, I HOPE OVARIAN CANCER EATS YOUR CUNT! I didn’t mean it. I’m ashamed of it now. No, that doesn’t even half describe it. You’re the only one I’ve told that to. Can you tell me WHAT THE FUCK I WAS THINKING? Man oh man oh man. Anyway. Use any of this in your ads if you want, and hello to all those fucks. Tom.’”