Cosmo (20 page)

You can take an excerpt from that. Rearrange it. Change or add. It doesn't matter. But just think – you could have a sensation, and overnight. That shit would go, as some might say, viral.

Let me know what's working, what isn't. Many thanks again for the voucher for unlimited subs in lieu of my first official cheque. It's allowed me to get into character, so to speak.

Sincerely,

L. Cohen

Date: February 20, 2005

To: Szychszczecin, Gary ‘[email protected]'

From: LNC ‘[email protected]'

Subject: Re: Advertising Arrangement

Dear Gary,

Before I make the following comments, I want to remind you that each and every time I limp through your doorway (for another freebie, granted), I feel blessed. Really – this isn't the character speaking. There have been so many betrayals, so many assassinations of character. They are trying to take my entire retirement – both Greenberg and Lynch now, as if entangled, venomous – as if to remind me to never trust a snake.

Last night the slush froze over and fresh snow fell. The SUBWAY sign shone through trillions of snowflakes, dazzling crystals, and for a beat I was moved, feeling the light millipedal dance of flakes on my face, waiting beneath that warm glow of neon before the scent of fresh bread and melting cheese again sharpened my focus, turning my thoughts to the task we have before us and of the generosity you have shown me. So I'm not complaining, is all. I care about what we have, the agreement we've forged. I care about you, too, though I've been a bastard to your father so many times over so many years. I give thanks to have a friend as generous, as forgiving, in the wake of Kelley's low betrayal – someone whom I thought was closer than a friend.

Nevertheless, I feel that in order to be your man – to send this thing viral, to blow it up – I have to believe in what I'm saying, if only for a second. The ancient cliché: a nugget of golden truth beneath every mountainous lie. I can imagine your labour as noble, can picture your fare as edible, even delicious, and I can definitely attest to its value, as Money and as a brand. I've never really seen SUBWAY as what it could be. I've never imagined its highest ideal, its striving for consumer happiness, for a kind of perfection – and knowing its (your) prouder aspirations, the Money returned to the happy pocket, I can now begin to see its real deformities, deformities like burnt, wrinkled flesh, requiring a smoothing, cooling hand.

Let me explain. Last night, while expecting the kind faces of your usual eunuchs to emerge from behind the ovens and welcome me as confidant, I was greeted by a new understudy: the short and soft shape bearing the name tag Dwayne. Dwayne did not make eye contact with the patrons in line before me; whether this is indifference to your customers or reverence for the toppings and tools, I cannot determine. But when I arrived to take my turn and redeem my voucher, Dwayne's reddish eyes locked with mine. Between us passed a current of palpable disgust: my frustration at the long line, missing a more familiar employee – perhaps only by mere moments – and what can only be described as a radiating terror from him (this was clearly not the recognition of a fan). As soon as eye contact was made, his gaze zapped toward the cutting board. I could barely hear his dully coughed How can I help you, uttered as if to the ignorant tomatoes.

It was obvious that Dwayne, understudy shape, did not relish my arrival, but I nevertheless proceeded to order my six-inch veggie sub (getting, once again, into character, and taking advantage of your generous gifts).

‘Uh,' Dwayne gurgled, ‘no more Nine-Grain or Whole Wheat …'

Predictable, yet frustrating – you see, this shouldn't happen at what (I've been told) is a flagship restaurant. I closed my mammalian eyes, rubbed taut fingers against my temples. ‘Very well,' I croaked. ‘I will take the … the Honey Oat.'

This request served to whip Dwayne into a tremor of activity, whacking open the oven door and coarsely grabbing a log of bread. Before I could choke out the words Slow down! he had gutted the loaf with all the delicacy of a marauder's broadsword swipe. The bread was cruelly butchered: an uneven sawing down its middle leaving an asymmetrical mess that meant certain sandwich collapse in my clawing hands (which had, of their own accord, inched up the sides of my face to intertwine in anxiety over my brow).

As soon as the bread hit the board, Dwayne's plasticky fingers went rifling through the stacks of triangular cheese. ‘No!' I cried, mouth hanging open and pathetic. The shape assumed that I wanted cheese! More depressingly, he assumed I wanted mozzarella cheese, and not Swiss or cheddar! He dropped the slice back onto its pile at a canted angle. The radio crackled with white noise and pop (was it? oh g-d, it was – a cover of ‘Hallelujah') as my heart thundered in my chest.

‘Ve– … Veggies?' came the shape's next halting question. I licked my lips, exhaled. Perhaps not all was lost.

‘Everything,' I said, with sub-standard confidence, and was treated to the most frantic, careless and antagonizing sub assembly I have ever witnessed. Oozy tomatoes were tossed with something akin to hatred; lettuce was piled as if Dwayne were yanking and discarding clumps of pubic hair from a shower drain; olives rolled about the board like gasping, severed heads in an evil Chinese dynasty. I squealed loudly: something high-pitched, whiny, cat-like (and what would Roshi think of my display?). And while Dwayne massaged and beat my poor sub, I stared at his downturned face, studying his features: his thin hair without net or visor, left to fall over his pimply, oily forehead; face dusted with the barbed facial hair of a tarantula's rump; and lower lip (oh Gary, such lips!) hanging red and pendulous (as if bee-stung, albeit without such attractive, feminine connotations) over his frenzied work, a thick welt of flesh that hung preposterous and awful, immediately recalling nothing short of glans – yes, obscene penile glans – but glans afire with sunstroke or a burning herpes (and here I recall old Layton). My palm clamped over my mouth as dry heaves seized my stomach. He began yanking at the condiment tray. ‘Just mustard!' I squeaked from behind my fingers, and was certainly given mustard: an over-opulent belch of the stuff that drenched the bread and veggies and paper itself. And before I could stop him from proceeding, Dwayne squeezed the mess together and wrapped it hurriedly to-go, jamming it into a plastic bag assuming that I would be dining at home or away. I could see moisture and mustard seeping out the ends of the wrapped roll. I would most definitely encounter catastrophic sandwich collapse. I would have to reassemble, get my fingertips stained and greasy, get mustard on my pants.

‘Five dollars,' the shape whispered (the voice now a scuttling sow bug in some derelict laundromat), gesturing toward the electronic cost display. I handed him my voucher, my forever-coupon explaining that this would be on the house, which he took from me with another shudder. And before I could hook my fingers around the bag's carry hole, he held out a thin, glossy brochure that I stuffed into the pocket of my hay-smelling cashmere coat as I limped out the door, feet scuttling along the mud-puddly linoleum, in need of a mop.

Just to let you know, Gary, how things are. After all, you are the manager, an executive, and responsible for so much. I know you have to be out of the shop for countless important meetings, but it's hard to really relish the experience of being your spokesman if you've got people like Dwayne on your front line. Really. I want to embody this company without reservation, to enter into a financial situation – something I've always discredited as beneath my interests – with all my renewed respect for Money's dominion. Let us forge ahead without these stupid mistakes wrecking our endorsements.

Sincerely,

L. Cohen

Date: February 23, 2005

To: Szychszczecin, Gary ‘[email protected]'

From: LNC ‘[email protected]'

Subject: Re: Advertising Arrangement

Gary,

Let us be honest. Today is … hideous. It's something I think you can understand, or at least you did. I haven't had a drink or a line in months, but I woke up to a hangover: a wincing, raking heat behind my eyes, an inability to move (the Torah says we move in g-d, so I understood this to be a form of Gehenna). Is this an after-effect of daily subs? Am I being poisoned, slowly, into solidity? Anjani seems to think so: she claims I smell like mustards and oils, despite our baths and salts and incense. Like mayonnaise, despite my denials. She left last week for Israel, claiming to need a different air. How I must disgust her: sour in my poverty, my post-Moneyed geriatrics.

But I climbed from bed, missing her olive warmth, her whispers, slurping cool water to dull the heat of my headache. Bored, and with the blank day before me, I read your recent email.

Gary. Are we being serious?

So unexpected, it sent me out-of-doors. I needed to clear my head of your change of plans – your ‘announcement.' And do I have to describe the scenes I witnessed, sniffed, rubbed up against along le Plateau's grey February? Or do you still understand the basic plight, the fundamental diseases, of who we're dealing with here? I'm not entirely sure if you do, Gary. Let me remind you of your clientele.

The shapes had donned their dour commuting masks, and all at once there arose the hive-mind crackle of suicide and last-ditch gambles and vast religious brocades, precious things, precious missed sleep in each eye and yawning mouth dragging the dull metallic air into daymare. Hurt and angry shapes listened to their static earphone music so loudly that their artificial beats competed for control of the stale busmosphere, mirroring the centre of the insane universe and its endless pan-piping. A tiny shape screamed in tickle and radiator discomfort. A beaten, spider-grey shape gurgled, Don't trust anybody, again and again against the nape of my sensitive neck until I was aquiver with her delirium and demons.

All of this to give that email some distance. Hurtful, too, that the glossy brochure that Dwayne slipped me already trumpeted the same wrongful turn (and oh, how I wish I hadn't searched my pocket, rifling about for loose change or a crumpled bus transfer). I will not lie, saying that I kept my composure, seeing that the plans were already in effect and without a word of consultation. Performing a series of breathing exercises, I rode the bus past my usual stop, the seats around me swiftly vacated. I puffed, I wheezed. I needed to know more – I needed to know the grubby, corporate details, beyond what your email offered – and suffering from Anjani's absence, my own sad rooms, I rode to the public library to think.

Reaching that stone ruin, I scuttled through its pretentious double doorway. Crossing the grey sensor gateway, I endured the revolting recognition on the wrinkled face of the shape behind the desk when I asked to use a computer system, to log on. Around me, your clientele assembled: peanut-faced shapes drooling in detention corners, lost in headphone skull fog, or muttering to themselves in prisons of personal hiccups and rhythms. A clown shape wore mismatched patches of leather and denim, a flat hat and scarlet political pins. Someone screamed, warbled, tabarnac. A child shape fell down a flight of stairs. It smelled like a burning circus. I clutched my parka'd torso in the germy, grotty men's room, getting it together, as a small horde of autograph seekers hiked up their collective courage to ask me for a scrawl (these people, Gary – we're not dealing with angels).

So let's confront the matter head on, and forgive me my distempers and preambles. There's so much to deal with these days – days that should be spent in sun, in the thralls of epic, old-age naps. It wasn't long before I found what you and the brochure so gaily celebrated. SUBWAY CAFÉ, ‘an upscale upgrade to your local sandwich joint,' or so you declared. SUBWAY CAFÉ, ‘a cross between a coffee shop and a sandwich shop.' ‘SUBWAY CAFÉ, SUBWAY's yuppie, toolish stepbrother,' or so an observer wrote in a snide column online.

Say this isn't so, Gary. Say that you wouldn't stoop to assuming your regulars – the steady clientele who consume your subs, who respect the value of the exchange, if not the taste of the meat – require some sort of status upgrade, some sort of urbanite ego boost. That this class-based elevation necessitates a trade-in of your tried-and-true Formica and sturdy faux wood and shadow-destroying lighting. (For isn't SUBWAY's nighttime glow our best protest against the inevitable dark?). I cannot believe that the stolid drip coffee you've served for the last many years is now no longer good enough for your jaded shapes, whose cancerous and entitled tongues require a more piquant or citrusy or aromatic or ‘full' or ‘bold' flavour (or whatever the voguish adjectives may be, lisped from the menus of unnameable chains that pretend to deliver ‘culture,' that barren slut)? What new forms of halitosis to be breathed onto my neck, what mirroring of this morning's spider-grey mumbler? Why promise a hideous spread of overpriced, milk-watered lattes and mochas and macchiatos and americanos and cappuccinos, artificial candy water picked by tired migrants? An array of imported teas with their precious attempts to situate the sipper in some kind of Eastern paradise, branding their lucre with insulting names such as Zen, or Lotus, or Awake, or simply Calm? How insulting. What will become of my hard-backed, unbreakable seating, the kind that subtly encourages boorish shapes to eat their subs quickly and leave? Replaced by cushioned stools and chairs, mid-century modern, leather surfaces. You promise fake bricks, the illusion of an unfinished wall. You provide pictures of bookshelves – bookshelves! – as if any of your regular shapes wish to browse the hollow spines of literature (for what else could you offer them – science? Physics? History? Art?). Oh, Gary: a fireplace? Wi-Fi internet access? I imagine a nest of adolescent shapes plugged into plastic computers, filaments dangling from enormous ears, sipping the ‘best' coffee the ruins of Seattle have to offer. Hours of this crowding, this congregating. You throw your jewels before swine, Gary, if you move ahead with such a venture. You lose the heart of the restaurant by courting the café, the fetishists who pretend to philosophy while scrawling in their chain-store journals and notebooks, casting guilty eyes at other lonely monads picking away at work or their useless educations in the liberal arts.