Party of One (15 page)

In the mid-'90s, Saatchi & Saatchi was an advertising agency right out of an '80s romantic comedy. The halls were filled with attractive and witty young people in stylish clothing. Each floor had a playroom with pinball machines and Nintendo and Pop-A-Shot, so that when you needed to take a break and refill the tank, you could go engage with your inner child. We took part in agency-wide brainstorming sessions, where no matter your position or department, you could weigh in on the new Fruit Roll-Up/Go-Gurt Squeezer crossover product. There were kegs in the atrium on Friday evenings and no such thing as “Friday evenings” until after Labor Day, because in the summertime you broke the hell out at 1:00 p.m., so the people who could afford it could make the Hampton Jitney.

And if I didn't know exactly what I was doing—and I didn't have one goddamn clue—it didn't exactly matter. The advertising industry runs on a certain amount of witty fecklessness, on charm, on talk. As an executive, you need to be fast enough on your feet to change a pitch halfway through if you sense that the client isn't feeling it, and you have to learn that agility somewhere. I learned it by being careless and making clerical errors both large and small nearly every day.
“What's that? This entire spreadsheet is based on the wrong budget numbers?
My bad
.
Where'd you get those shoes?”
If you can make people like you, your incompetence can come to be seen as a sweet little peccadillo. In this regard, I brought exactly the right skill set to the table.

Each year, Saatchi would hire a new crop of young recruits right out of college. The ones from Dartmouth and Brown would go right into the account management department, where they'd learn to be the liaisons between the creatives and the clients. The ones from the sub-Ivies would go into media planning, where we'd place the actual advertisements in magazines, on billboards, on prime-time television. My teammates were Scott, a handsome hockey player from Quinnipiac; Kathryn, a preppy young go-getter from Colgate; and Janet, a dramatic young woman from Sarah Lawrence. Out at lunch together on our first day at Toukie's, a restaurant on Hudson Street owned by Robert De Niro's girlfriend and season-five
227
star Toukie Smith, we got to know one another. Scott was into baseball and Soundgarden; Kathryn wanted to start her own agency someday; Janet liked
Beverly Hills, 90210.
No, but Janet
really
liked
Beverly Hills, 90210.
Her cubicle was like a high school locker plastered with pictures of Luke Perry, Jason Priestley, and Gabrielle Carteris. It was unseemly, but then I had a poster for
Threesome,
the Josh Charles/Lara Flynn Boyle/Stephen Baldwin bi-curiosity vehicle, pinned up over my Compaq desktop in a clumsy, coming-half-out maneuver, so I had no room to talk.

The advertising business, like all business, was flush in 1994. Brands, agencies, and media outlets had more money than they knew how to spend, but they displayed a real eagerness to learn. Mostly, this meant parties. Pretty much every weeknight, a different magazine would throw itself a bash to celebrate its new editorial direction, milestone issue, or youth-targeted offshoot. High-ceilinged spaces in the Meatpacking District or SoHo were festooned with banners saluting
Cosmopolitan
's “Fun Fearless Female” initiative or the debut issue of Time Inc.'s
InStyle.
There would be a twenty-minute performance from Del Amitri or Da Brat. There would be a signature cocktail whose primary ingredient was the party's cosponsor, which would require you to quickly acquire a taste for Alizé or Zima Gold. There were trays of hors d'oeuvres, which would invariably become our dinner, because on an entry-level advertising salary, one must choose between groceries and a social life, and the latter will always win. On the way out, you would get a gift bag with a compilation CD of Sony artists and some sample-size facial scrubs. It was an Olsen Twins TV adaptation of a Jay McInerney book.

These events were full of twenty-six-year-olds on the make, and as they seemed intimidatingly old and sophisticated, I mostly hung with Janet and talked
90210.
I got the full scoop on how she thought the gang was adjusting to life at California University, what she thought of Steve's involvement with the KEG house, and ultimately whether Mark David Espinoza's Jesse was really what Andrea needed in a partner. Janet really went there,
90210
-wise. She had theories and opinions, and she would back that shit up with facts and figures. “Dave, I think you're way off the mark when you talk about Donna's behavior at the prom. You
know
how she was raised and what's in her bloodline.” One night I met Janet's roommate Jennifer at an event for
Country Living
magazine—held at Kelley & Ping's Chinese restaurant on Sullivan Street, sponsored by Jack Daniels and Kraft's new Lem'N Berry Sippers lemonade powders—and said, “So Janet really likes
90210,
huh?”

She said, “Oh, you have no idea.”

I said, “Please give me an idea.”

“Well, on Wednesday nights at nine o'clock, she will call her father, and they'll discuss the issues that were raised in the episode they've just watched.”

“Even in the summer?”

“Even in reruns. They'll catch new things on the second watch.”

I asked, “Is there any way I can come by and eavesdrop on one of these conversations?”

She said, “I think I have an opening in five weeks.”

That summer, Fox announced that Shannen Doherty would not be returning to the cast of
Beverly Hills, 90210,
and I got the news, as we all did, via the purple section of
USA Today.
The revelation came completely out of the blue, because there was no such thing as an entertainment-gossip website, only your own gut to tell you what a pain in the ass Shannen Doherty was to work with. Scott came to my desk, then Kathryn. We all had one thing on our minds, and we didn't even have to say it out loud: who's going to tell Janet? We decided it would be best if we were all there, because we were a family of a sort, and also because nobody wanted to miss her reaction. I brought the Life section with me as we visited Janet's cubicle, sensing that she would need to see it in writing, but when we got there it was clear that her father had already called. She was crying. She took a personal day. It was for the best. And although the news ruined her month and she would leave meetings right in the middle because she was too upset to go on, I respected her passion.

Saatchi's goal was to shape us all up into well-rounded young advertising people. For the first year, we'd all be moved around from department to department, spending a few weeks with the gang at Kids' Cereals, a month or so at Sauza Tequila and Little Caesar's. At the end of the year, one of the places we'd visited would claim us, and that's where we'd work. It was a company-wide fraternity rush. Our jobs were purely administrative: we'd type up presentations, make charts, and distribute memos, which we had to do by hand because there was no such thing as e-mail yet. (The future reached us in early 1995, but it was only an interoffice e-mail program and you couldn't attach documents, so if you wanted someone to look at a spreadsheet, you had to print it out onto paper and put it in front of their face like some kind of toothless lackey in a historical drama.) And because we were recent college graduates, we were doing these jobs on a maximum of three hours of sleep, cheap draft beer emanating from every pore.

In October, I was working in the sports media department with the guys—and they were all
guys
—who placed the Citizen watch ads around the court in the US Open and the beer ads in NFL games. Personality-wise, I got along with my bosses beautifully, and if the department's specialty bumped up the difficulty setting of a job I was already struggling to understand, at least I was picking up a new skill, which was pretending to talk about sports. (Here's my strategy: I would look for an opportunity to say “Where was the D?” and then create a distraction.)

A couple Fridays into my tenure as a sports media guy, my boss Bob swung by my desk. Bob told me that his boss, Mike, and Rick, the guy whose position I was currently filling, had won last year's annual Inter-Agency 3-on-3 Basketball Tournament in a squeaker over Young & Rubicam. Now that Rick was at another agency, they were down a man. “Oh, no,” I said, and before I had an opportunity to ask him where the D was, he said, “It starts next Thursday. Do you play?”

I did not play. I had never played. I did not want to play. But I was desperate to please my new superiors, I was learning new things about myself every day, and I was still very much holding on to the feeling that sports were a thing I was supposed to do. So I said yes. Yes, I will play basketball for the first time in my life in front of my new bosses and coworkers and any number of people in my industry at New York City's annual Inter-Agency 3-on-3 Basketball Tournament. This was going to be great.

The reality of my situation set in before the scent of Bob's CK One left my cubicle. I had six days to learn everything there was to know about basketball, up to and beyond how the scoring works. I called my college friend Chris, whom I had seen play and decided was therefore an expert, and explained my predicament. “Could we,” I asked, “have a little crash course over the weekend?” He laughed and agreed. And then he kept laughing, and I hung up.

Saturday morning came, and Chris met me at the courts in Gracie Park. “Okay, Dave,” he said. “Show me what you got.” He chest-passed me the ball, and I caught it, which was honestly a bit of a surprise even though he was three feet away. I ran around the court a little bit, and I shot in the direction of the basket a few times. I actually got it onto the backboard once, and my level of confidence shot up a couple of notches. I started running faster, shifting my weight foot-to-foot, pivoting like I'd seen people do. Running. Feeling strong, free. Feeling more and more like the baller I had secretly always been. I took another shot. I made it. I had
game.
I looked at Chris, raised my eyebrows, and chest-passed the ball back to him.
How ya like me now?
my face said.

“Okay, that was good. One thing, though: in basketball, when you're moving, you have to
dribble the ball,
” he said, maintaining eye contact and nodding as he spoke, the way you do when you're giving directions to foreigners. “You have to dribble it
all of the time.
” Shit. I
knew that.

Chris showed me some of the basics, and then saw in my face what “the basics” were going to mean in this context, and then showed me
those
basics. Slowly, we started to actually play. I felt myself getting stronger, less self-conscious. Chris was patient, and I was an eager learner. I felt as though I was living a sports-movie training montage in real time. We went on this way for a good hour or so, until we were both sweating and panting. We were
playing basketball.
We were
doing this.
And then Chris put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, looked me in the eye, and said, “Dave, you have to stop this basketball tournament from happening.”

We agreed that I would borrow an ankle splint and crutches that Chris had around from an old injury, and that I would hobble into work on Monday and tell them the bad news. Which I did. So they asked another dude in the kids' cereals department, who said yes, and they won the whole thing again. Their D was on point, probably.

After the decline of my basketball career, I continued to work my way through the whole agency in my fraternity rush year, hoping to find a match. While I made a lot of friends and went to a lot of parties, I didn't really fit anywhere, due in large part to my incompetence vastly outweighing my charm. A few months later, I got a call from a headhunter who was trying to fill an opening at Grey in Midtown. It was for a junior account-executive position on a Procter & Gamble account. A move up. A raise. I put in a résumé, got an interview, and then got myself an offer. I accepted, because although I had already bitten off more than I could chew, I didn't know that you're allowed to stop biting.