Then We Came to the End

  That e-mail got forwarded around pretty quickly, and some of us felt vindicated. He was talking about having a beer with Benny, and how he regretted the awful thing he had said to Barb. Those weren’t the ravings of an imminently homicidal former employee seeking to even a score. Even Amber, though horrified by practically everything he had written, reluctantly agreed that it might have indicated a more stable person than the one she had imagined moving in and out of Tinley Park gun stores since the day he walked Spanish. One thing she couldn’t let go of, however, was wanting to know just exactly what Tom had done with his mother’s cats.

  “Did he just leave them behind when he went to pick her up?” she asked. “He didn’t just leave the cats in the apartment, did he?” She wanted Benny to e-mail him back to inquire about the fate of the abandoned animals, but nobody else thought that was a good idea. “But what happened to them?” she persisted.

  “Oh, will you just shut the fuck up about the goddamn cats, Amber?” said Larry.

  We knew there was some domestic tension between the two, owing to the ongoing abortion debate, but nothing on the order of that. Trouble in paradise, folks. Those of us in Amber’s office at the time departed it hastily.

  JOE WENT DOWN TO Jim’s cubicle to ask what he’d heard from Tom. “Building security asked us to relay to them any communications that we might get from Tom,” he told Jim.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Jim. “Nobody told me that.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Just be sure to forward the message to Mike Boroshansky.”

  “Why am I always the last person to know anything around here?” he asked Joe. Joe didn’t have an answer for him. Jim squared himself to his computer and opened Tom’s e-mail. “You really want me to read this to you?”

  “Please,” said Joe. “First tell me what the subject line says.”

  “The subject line,” said Jim. “It says, ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

  “I’m sorry. It says what?”

  “That’s what he wrote. ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

  “Is that some private thing between you and Tom?”

  “‘I Need a Wetter Mare’? No, I don’t know what the hell that means. What could that mean? How the hell should I know?”

  “Jim, relax. Go ahead and read me the e-mail,” said Joe.

  “‘Smalls — remember when we shot that laundry detergent commercial? I’m talking about the one of all the guys playing a game of football, and bringing home their grass-stained clothes to their loving wives? Well, they weren’t really landing on the grass when they were tackled, were they? They were actors. We laid mattresses down for them. They were landing on mattresses! Gotcha, TV America! But anyway, my question to YOU, JIMBO, is this: when Captain Murdoch throws his grenades at the BAD GUYS, and the BAD GUYS go leaping up, do those BAD GUYS have mattresses, too? Wouldn’t it hurt, JIMBO, to have a grenade explode and to be NOWHERE NEAR a mattress?’”

  When that got forwarded, we just thought Tom was having a good time with his old friend Smalls. Convincing Amber of that, of course, was impossible. It sent us right back to square one with her. She even pressed and pressed until we were forced to agree that at the very least, the variance in tone between the two e-mails indicated that Tom Mota had his bad hours along with his good.

  AFTER LEARNING OF THE CHANGE to the project, Genevieve stepped out of the office and walked down Michigan Avenue to the Borders near the Water Tower, where she purchased a few books. She came back to the office and started reading. Halfway through a breast cancer survivor’s memoir, she was interrupted by Joe. “Hey,” he said, knocking on her open door.

  “Oh, this stuff is just way too emotional,” she said. “Oh, I have to stop reading it.” She put the book down. She stretched her face out and ran her fingers under her eyes to dry them. “Oh,” she said. She took a deep breath and sighed.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m okay.”

  “I just stopped by to make sure you were clear on what we’re doing.”

  They were a team, Joe and Genevieve, copywriter and art director, and they worked together in greater harmony than the majority of other teams. “I guess so,” she said finally. “Although to be honest, I can’t imagine coming up with anything.”

  He moved inside and sat down across from her. “Why not?”

  “So I’m reading this memoir, right?” she said, lifting the book off her desk and setting it down again. “And basically it’s all sadness. It’s panic, fear, anguish, a lot of bravery. There’s some crying. Everyone in the family is wonderful. The woman’s brother quits his job to take care of his sister. He’s a saint. The woman is a hero. Because there’s nothing but bad news for her, and then more bad news. But every once in a while there’s a little dollop of humor. Without it, trust me, you’d kill yourself reading it. Like the brother comes in, right. The woman has just found out like two pages earlier that her cancer’s not responding to the treatments. Then the brother comes in — he’s shaved his head so she won’t be the only one who’s bald. He comes in wearing a big, bushy blond wig, and the woman just dies laughing for how ridiculous he looks. And you die, too, it’s such a relief. But of course midway through laughing, she breaks down into tears for how much she loves him, how good he is to her — I mean, he’s just her brother, for god’s sake. He isn’t required to, to . . . oh, and here I go again,” said Genevieve, returning her fingers to just below her eyes. She let out a long sigh. “The point I’m trying to make,” she said, grabbing a tissue forcefully from a box on the desk, “is that there is really very little humor in a diagnosis of cancer. And what humor there is, is humorous only in the context of a whole lot of sadness. Now, how can we be expected to do that with a stock photo and a ten-word headline?”

  Joe sat back in the chair. “Yeah,” he said. “I agree.”

  “You do?”

  No one ever expected Joe Pope to say something was hard because, when it came to thinking up ads, the guy was something of a savant.

  “Make the cancer patient laugh,” he said, and his voice got quiet. “Isn’t this assignment a little screwy?”

  THE IMPORTANT THING was that it was our screwy assignment, and it was all we had. By late afternoon Genevieve had finished her memoir, while Hank Neary, combing carefully through Internet sites, could soon pass himself off as a practicing oncologist. Benny Shassburger took the opposite approach. He found a stock photo of a beautiful woman draping herself across the red felt of a pool table. He doctored it in Photoshop by covering her breasts with surgical masks. That, he thought, was a brilliant image. The cancer patient would really laugh once he had the right headline in place. Two hours went by before he condemned the brilliant image to the dustbin of bad ideas and moved himself down to the coffee bar for a late-afternoon latte.

  Jim Jackers got on the phone and started calling people. With no inspiration and frightened by the blank page, his only recourse was the imaginations of other people. He caught his mother, a librarian, at the checkout desk of the Woodridge Public Library.

  “Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he began.

  “Oh, Jim,” she whispered, “please let’s not even think about it.”

  She quickly changed subjects, asking him what he wanted for dinner. His mother was a sensitive and superstitious woman who believed even the most casual mention of disease was a morbid flirtation with death that conjured bad luck and evil spirits and should be avoided at all costs. He should have known better than to call her first.

  “Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he said next to his father. “What’s funny about it? How do you want to be cheered up?”

  His father gave it a second’s thought. “Call me up with a scenario where I have breast cancer and you ask what’s funny about it,” he replied. “That should do the trick.”

  “I’m serious, Dad,” Jim urged him. “What’s funny about breast cancer?”

  “What’s funny about it? Son,” he said. “Very little.”


  He tried to explain the assignment to his father but his description was a muddled briefing of the morphing project, and it ended with Jim saying he’d have to get back to him with certain details. “Sounds to me like you need to figure out what the hell’s going on over there,” said his father.

  “Well, it’s a confusing assignment.”

  “Talk to your great-uncle about this,” his father suggested. “I imagine he’d be a good resource.”

  Everyone knew that Jim’s creative coup d’état came from a suggestion from his great-uncle Max, who lived on a farm in Iowa. According to Jim, his uncle had Mexicans running the farm while his days were spent in the farmhouse basement reconstructing a real train car from scratch, which was the only thing he had shown any interest in since the passing of his wife. He traveled to old train yards collecting the parts. When someone asked him at a family function why he was doing it, his answer was so that no one could remove the train car from the basement after he died. When it was pointed out to him that the boxcar could be removed by dismantling it, reversing the process by which he had constructed it, Jim’s great-uncle replied that no Jackers alive was willing to work that hard at anything. Picturing this ornery farmer at his lunatic task, lost in the rural delusions of grief and old age, we probably laughed a little too hard, spurring Jim to defend his uncle’s singular hobby.

  “What?” he said. “It’s like Legos, but for adults.”

  That only made us laugh harder.

  “The man lost his wife,” he said.

  Jim was so desperate one day to come up with inspiration for an ad, he exhausted his traditional list of people, broke down, and called his uncle Max. “You know how when you buy a new car,” he began — and immediately Max interrupted him.

  “I haven’t bought a new car in thirty-five years,” said Max.

  Jim suspected then that this was probably not a man with his finger on the pulse of the buying public. Patiently he tried explaining his assignment. When people buy a new car, he said, they usually have an image of themselves that corresponds to the car they buy. Jim wanted to know from Max how Max would want to perceive himself when purchasing a new ink cartridge.

  “Ink cartridge?”

  “Yeah,” said Jim. “You know, for your printer.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Max.

  We had a client at the time whose marketing objective was to make their customers feel like heroes when purchasing one of their ink cartridges. Our charge in every communication was to inspire the potential buyer with the heroic possibilities of man-using-ink-cartridge.

  “I want to see myself as Shakespeare,” Max said. “What’s this for, anyway?”

  Shakespeare, thought Jim. Shakespeare. That’s not bad.

  “It’s for a client of ours,” he said. “They make printers and ink cartridges and that sort of thing. I’m trying to come up with an ad that makes you want to buy our specific ink cartridge after you see our ad because it inspires you and makes you feel like a hero. Will you tell me more about wanting to feel like Shakespeare?”

  “So you’re trying to sell ink cartridges?”

  “That’s right.”

  Another long pause. “Do you have a pen?” his uncle asked. He began to quote: “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . .’”

  Finally Jim reached out for a pen. He tried to keep up with him. At a certain point, Max stopped quoting and told Jim the lines should start to fade out, gradually at first, eventually disappearing altogether. Then he suggested the headline: “A Great Writer Needs a Great Ink Cartridge.” The small print could explain how, if ink cartridges had been used throughout time, the history of literature might have been at stake using a cheap ink cartridge.

  Not only was Jim startled that his uncle could quote what he thought was Shakespeare seemingly off the top of his head; he was floored by the speed and ingenuity of his advertising abilities. Who was a greater hero than Shakespeare? And the person encountering the ad that his uncle had just pulled out of his ass could immediately put himself in Shakespeare’s shoes. Max had just made a million Americans feel exactly like Shakespeare. He told Max he’d missed his calling. “You should have been a creative,” he said.

  “A creative?” said Max.

  Jim explained that in the advertising industry, art directors and copywriters alike were called creatives.

  “That’s the stupidest use of an English word I ever encountered,” said Max.

  Jim also told him that the advertising product, whether it was a TV commercial, a print ad, a billboard, or a radio spot, was called the creative. Before he hung up Jim asked Max for two more examples of great pieces of literature, suspecting that an entire campaign could be generated from Max’s concept. He went down to Hank Neary’s office — Hank was just then engrossed in a printer manual. “‘The best of times, the worst of times,’” he said. “That’s Shakespeare, right?”

  “Dickens,” said Hank. “A Tale of Two Cities.”

  “And what about ‘To be or not to be’? Shakespeare?”

  “Shakespeare,” said Hank. “Hamlet.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jim.

  Sometime later that afternoon, Max Jackers surprised Jim by calling him back. “You folks over there,” said Max, “you say you call yourselves creatives, is that what you’re telling me? And the work you do, you call that the creative, is that what you said?” Jim said that was correct. “And I suppose you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet.”

  “I suppose so,” said Jim, wondering what Max was driving at.

  “And the work you do, you probably think that’s pretty creative work.”

  “What are you asking me, Uncle Max?”

  “Well, if all that’s true,” said the old man, “that would make you creative creatives creating creative creative.” There was silence as Max allowed Jim to take this in. “And that right there,” he concluded, “is why I didn’t miss my calling. That’s a use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate.”

  With that, Max hung up.

  JIM TOOK HIS FATHER’S advice and called Max about the breast cancer ads. When Max picked up, Jim asked him to imagine that he was a woman recently diagnosed with the disease. As the words “breast cancer” escaped his mouth, Jim had the conviction once again that he’d called the wrong man. Max had come through for him in the past, but what did a man who’d spent his entire life working a farm in rural Iowa know about a predominantly female disease? Still Jim persevered while Max remained silent on the other end. He wanted to know what Max, as a woman with breast cancer, might find funny if he were, say, flipping through a magazine at a doctor’s office. Still more silence from Max, so Jim explained further that this woman was probably impatient for her name to be called, her mind was probably half on other things, but when she came across the ad, she stopped and read it and it made her laugh. “What we’re looking for is what’s funny about it,” he said. Then he stopped talking and put the ball in Max’s court.

  “What’s funny about what?” Max finally said.

  “What’s funny about breast cancer,” said Jim. “Not breast cancer per se, you know, but what’s funny to somebody with breast cancer flipping through a magazine.”

  Max cleared his throat. “Jim,” he said, “do you recall a sweet old gal, just the salt of the earth, probably the sweetest woman you ever met in your life, by the name of Edna?”

  “Edna,” said Jim. “Edna . . . Edna. . . . No, I don’t think so, Uncle Max.”

  “You don’t remember your aunt Edna?”

  “Oh, Aunt Edna. Of course I remember Aunt Edna, Uncle Max.”

  “Edna died of breast cancer,” said Max.

  “She did? Aunt Edna?”

  Now Jim realized why his dad had suggested he call Max. It wasn’t because of Max’s marketing wit. It was because Max’s wife had died of the diseas
e. Suddenly Jim realized he should have approached things differently. His phrasing might have been a little cavalier. “Uncle Max, I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I didn’t remember how Aunt Edna died.”

  “It sounds to me,” said Max, “that you don’t know much of anything on the subject.”

  “I remember the funeral,” said Jim. “I was seventeen.”

  “They don’t typically sit in the waiting room flipping through magazines,” said Max. “Their minds aren’t half on something else.”

  “You see, we’re . . . we’re doing this, uh, a pro bono campaign,” Jim stuttered.

  “But there ain’t nothing funny about it,” said Max, “that I ever saw.”

  “And what we’re trying to do is, we’re just trying to lift their spirits a little.”

  “And there ain’t nothing left to say in this conversation.”

  “WELL, I’M TAPPED,” said Jim, when he made it down to the coffee bar.

  “It’s an impossible assignment,” Benny agreed, pulling a stool out for him.

  “I got a few ideas,” said Marcia, taking possession of a chai latte from the barista. “Thanks,” she said, handing off a dollar. “But they’re all tired and stale.”

  “I have one thing that’s funny,” said Larry. “One thing. But I think it’s funny only if you’re already dead.”

  “There are two things you just can’t advertise,” said Hank matter-of-factly. “Fat people and dead people.”

  “Is that a quote, Hank?”

  “They’re not dead, Hank,” said Amber. “They’re just sick.”

  “Fat people and dying people, then.”

  “Suicides are tough,” added Larry.

  Chris Yop showed up looking furtive and unwell, vigilant despite familiar surroundings, carrying some rough layouts on sketch paper. Significant sweat blots under the arms of his Hawaiian shirt indicated a higher level of vascular dysfunction than we were accustomed to. He had evidently been hard at work. “I need someone to take these in to Lynn,” he announced, setting his layouts on the coffee bar. We asked him what they were. “My concepts for the fund-raiser ads,” he said. “I think they’re pretty good.”