Formerly Fingerman (3 page)

Brad bent over to look a little deeper in the fridge.

“Grace, didn't I have some—”

“Hey, pisspants, you're out of beer!”

The voice came from the living room, but it wasn't hard to hear. It belonged to a person to whom talking loud enough to take over whatever space he was in came naturally. There was no mistaking its owner. Brad stood up and took a moment to let the situation sink in. He turned to find a somewhat apologetic Gracie, and then stated the obvious.

“Your dad is here.”

“For dinner.”

“And you forgot to tell me.”

“Oops.”

Brad nodded, accepting that his life sucked a lot right at that moment. He begged himself to think of the glorious potential that tomorrow held, but it couldn't quite outweigh the sheer gloom of what lay ahead in the next few hours. An evening with Champ Bailey.

Champ wasn't a big man, but his overabundance of alpha-male charisma made him seem ten feet tall. Loud, opinionated, and loaded with plenty of F.U. money. Champ had retired at the ripe age of fifty-two, thanks to the lung-out case.

Throughout his career, Champ had been a workaholic pit bull of a lawyer working as a plaintiff's attorney who shied away from no fight. He thrilled at competition. Champ lived to win, and the courtroom was the perfect arena for him. He had a reputation as a man who would sue his own mother if he found out she had mixed his formula with a little too much water when he was a baby. He worked long hours and took on way too many cases. It was exhausting, but it honed his skills to a razor-sharp edge. So when the lung-out case came along, he was, to say the least, ready.

The call came on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Champ was in his office reviewing files and planning to stay well into the night when his phone rang.

“Champ Bailey.”

“Do you handle lung-out cases?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you handle lung-out cases?”

“You're calling a law firm, sir. Do you realize that?”

“Yes. I need help with a lung-out case.”

“What the hell is a lung-out case?”

A lung-out case is a case in which an elderly, church-going, law abiding, African-American grandfather takes a particular brand of asthma medicine. He takes it as prescribed by a doctor like they tell you on the soothing commercials with the woman catching butterflies in a big field. The asthma medicine keeps his asthma in check and he lives a happy life. Until he starts wheezing. Then he goes to the doctor who sends him to a specialist who sends him to a renowned pulmonologist who sends him to the University of Pennsylvania pulmonary clinic because his right lung is failing and no one can figure out why. And then a bunch of people with the exact same wheezing all happen to be using the same asthma medicine. And they all have to have a lung removed. Lung out.

Champ dropped everything to represent this group of one-lunged victims, knowing immediately that this would be his Mona Lisa. He sunk his pit bull teeth into the lung-out case like it was a bacon-flavored memory foam pillow and didn't let go. He played the press like a cheap fiddle. He coached his clients like Bear Bryant. He wouldn't bargain. He wouldn't negotiate a settlement. He wouldn't entertain any offers to pay his clients off. Champ Bailey knew he had this category-dominating global corporation by the short hairs, and he kept yanking and yanking until a panel of sympathetic jurors found the Pulmax pharmaceutical company very, very guilty and informed them that they were on the hook for close to two billion dollars. Naturally, a good chunk of that check went to Champ. And then he retired. Seems you can compete at golf, too.

When he finally realized he was standing in front of an open refrigerator that held zero beers, Brad snapped himself back to the real world and closed the door. Might as well dive on in to the deep end and see what happens. He called into the living room.

“Hey, Champ. How's the hockey game?”

“These fairies couldn't outskate a peg leg.”

That sounded about right. Brad now had a small, albeit brief, reprieve. Yes, dinner and the inevitably overbearing conversation that accompanied it would blow, but at least for the next twelve minutes Brad had something to do. A concrete task in which he could take pride and know that, when complete, he had accomplished something meaningful. Something real.

“I'll go get more beer.”

Dinner was as painful as Brad had anticipated. Gracie talked and Brad prayed the conversation wouldn't turn his way. But Champ smelled weakness and zeroed in on him.

“So, Brad. How's the ballet?”

“I work at an advertising agency.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I always get women's jobs confused.”

“It's fine. We're doing great work. Good stuff.”

“Son, why don't you get a real job? Maybe go see my friend Jerry down at his dealership. He could put you to work tomorrow. Everybody loves Camaros.”

“Yeah. I know. But I'm not really good with cars.”

“You're better with flower arranging?”

“I'm not a florist. I'm an art director.”

Brad began to sweat the tiniest bit. If only they were eating something spicy he could blame it on. They weren't. He thought about baseball to calm himself down. If only he knew anything about baseball.

Gracie squeezed his forearm and smiled.

“Senior art director.”

Champ grunted. “What's the difference?”

“It's just that it takes time to climb the corporate ladder, Daddy. Brad, tell him about the interview.”

Ah, well. That he could do. Brad paused briefly to both enjoy the moment and re-acclimate himself to the idea of telling the truth.

“Well, Champ, I have a job interview tomorrow.”

“To be what? A midwife?”

He winked at Grace, proud of that one.

“No, it's for an associate creative director position in a better agency downtown.”

Champ rolled his eyes. “Why the hell would you go from one Mary job to another one just like it?”

Champ was not the kind of guy you could explain a situation of Brad's type to. Not the vodka job, anyway.

You see, Brad was the breed of cagey art director who bucked the strategy handed out by the Overthink Advertising account team. Their thinking had been to create campaigns for the big Molotov Vodka pitch with the theme
Made from Russia's finest potatoes
. Research had shown that their target market of men aged 29–46, income over one hundred thousand, who considered themselves metrosexual but not gay, would respond to this notion. Research had proven it. And the client was expecting it. But Brad zigged when they zagged. Ho ho! They never saw this rogue thinker coming.

Okay, maybe Brad wasn't actually rogue. Or cagey. A better term would be lazy, or perhaps petulant. Attention deficit disorder could certainly be invoked if push came to shove, but honestly, if you looked close enough, it was clear to see that Brad had simply forgotten that the vodka ideas were due on the fifteenth. Until Phil Brenner's assistant had called on that very day and asked if Brad wouldn't mind sharing his ideas with Phil. At the time Brad and his copywriter partner Matt had been lounging in their shared office heatedly debating Madden cheat codes. Matt had forgotten as well.

They panicked briefly and then did what any responsible creative team would do after dicking away two weeks of company time under the guise of making advertising. They made advertising.

Any experienced creative worth the sack God gave him knows there are a few go-to formulas you use in a pinch. Tried and true chestnuts to get you through a famine of ideas: The frantic customer meets the super-confident sales guy, a phony competitor complaining that the product you're advertising is putting him out of business (
This vacuum cleaner is just too good!
), a celebrity spokesperson, animals acting like humans, the hapless husband/savvy wife combo (also see dumb neighbor/smart neighbor), a cross-country road trip involving some contrived use of the product, the slo-mo montage over a chest-beating musical anthem, the old “We're giving to charity with every purchase.” There were a million of them. If all else fails, throw a puppy in somewhere. You see these hackneyed, polished-up turds interrupting your sitcoms every day. They come from guys like Brad and Matt.

In under half an hour they cobbled together a campaign featuring a series of images stolen off Flickr involving people who'd had too much to drink along with the tag line “Maybe too good”—a variation of the complaining competitor scenario. On the way to present the idea to Phil, they spitballed an intro that included words like “gritty” and “organic” and “visceral” to rationalize the low rent art direction that held the ideas together. Naturally, the ordained strategy was nowhere to be found in the lot. They had forgotten that as well.

Phil had been a tough read since his divorce, but like most creative directors under the gun to find the one shining gold nugget in a field of dung piles, he was willing to overlook laziness and shitty attitudes if the work was good enough. Plus he loved dick jokes.

Brad and Matt sold the campaign like their lives depended on it.

“You see this girl is holding her friend's hair back while she vomits.”

“And the copy reads, ‘Regret is for the weak. Molotov Vodka. Maybe too good.'”

“Mmm hmmm. Go on.”

“In this one, it's a guy with his arms around two different hot girls. See, the blonde is passed out with her head in his lap.”

“And the copy reads, ‘What, you think threesomes just make themselves? Molotov Vodka. Maybe too good.'”

“Mmmm hmm.”

“This one has a guy right about to vomit on his sister's wedding cake.”

“The copy reads, ‘At the very least, years from now you'll have the best stories in the entire rehab. Molotov Vodka. Maybe too good.'”

Silence.

“I like it. Tell Krevolin to have his team retrofit the brief to cover this strategic direction.”

The key to advertising is knowing your audience. And in this case, the audience wasn't really the pretentious J.O.s referred to by the creative brief as the
target audience
. It was Phil, the overgrown frat boy of a creative director who was still staring at the threesome ad. In this case, the divorce might have tipped things for Brad and Matt. Phil had been on a bit of a tear. The threesome ad was particularly intriguing to him. He pointed to the blonde.

“She looks like she might be open to that kind of thing.”

Sold.

Of course these exact ideas would never run in
GQ
or the
New York Times
, but they were perfect for guerrilla postings, and the line “Maybe too good” would translate to all sorts of cleaner FCC-friendly and network-approvable incarnations. Brad and Matt were invited to present their ideas to the client. Quite an honor, indeed.

But none of this would even register as the English language to Champ, who was convinced that Brad's job was nothing more than coloring with crayons and adding the words “20% off” to soap packaging.

Champ's bloodcurdling peals of laughter and hernia-inducing guffaws would wait patiently through Brad's explanation of the Molotov Vodka pitch meeting. The magnificent presentation Brad made. The hilarious jokes and anecdotes he told throughout the meeting. The way the clients looked at him almost maternally as he guided them through his genius campaign for their product, and how it worked as a seamless three-sixty program—
Just look at that Facebook initiative!
Phil sat overwhelmed with pride as Brad finished presenting his brilliance. He had hit a home run. Stuck the landing. Killed it. But that's when Champ would be silent.

Champ had pegged Brad for a loser early on. Brad didn't hunt, couldn't golf, and had wet his pants at his own bachelor party thanks to the dozen or so boilermakers Champ and his uninvited hunting and golfing buddies had forced on him. So even if Brad were to tell the story of his spectacular performance, Champ would somehow know there was an epilogue where Brad blew it. Which there was.

Needless to say, after winning a plum account like Molotov, Brad was the cock of the walk. And he knew it. Everyone knew it. He became an instant star in the agency. And unlike Matt, who understood that when you got down to it, they were just pushing fermented potato juice on the American public and lucky to have their jobs, Brad ate it up. The week after the win, he promenaded down the hall like he was going to his own movie premiere, accepting the attendant attention as a matter of course.

“Bradley, well done!”

“What up, Mr. Molotov!”

“Hey Brad, maybe you and Matt can help us cast that bra commercial. We could use your eye.”

Oh, life was good. Brad and Matt went to work bringing the vodka campaign to life and taking their pick of the other choice assignments at the agency. Goodbye frozen pizzas and hot flash treatments. Hello lingerie and video game accounts. In fact, hello new agencies.

Brad called his headhunters. He and his partner had single-handedly landed a monster liquor account—the advertising world equivalent of having your dick spontaneously grow nine inches. Time to move on to the next level. Time to get paid.

Brad told his headhunters he made one hundred and seventy-five thousand. They in turn told the agencies that Brad was making two ten, but would make a lateral move if the accounts were right. Because he loved making advertising that much.

Every day when Gracie called to check in, Brad had fresh and exciting news about the interviews his headhunters were piling up. She was invariably happy for him, and half the thrill of landing the interview was savoring the bragging rights he exercised with his wife. Modern man's version of a caveman bringing home an elk he slayed with his bare hands to feed his family.

The interviews were with the best agencies in town. ChangBaby, Seaton/Dara, Dogfight. Everyone wanted a little bit of that Brad magic. Phil was no fool. He preemptively called Brad into his office and handed him new business cards.