Magical Thinking (8 page)

Now if I had thick Italian hair, as opposed to this crappy, vague Nordic hair, I would probably just buzz it off like the rest of the fags. And I wouldn’t care, because then it would be by choice. So I’m thinking maybe I should just get my head tattooed to look like very short stubble. Nobody would know unless they got very close to me. And my intimacy issues prevent that.

“You okay?” Daphnia asked while she was brushing my neck and ears with her whisk broom.

“Yeah, I’m just annoyed by how fast I’m losing my hair.”

She laughed. “Is fact of life for the man.”

I scowled and looked at her breasts.

Then I went home to write terrible ad scripts for an awful new product. I was recently teamed up with an art director whom I privately refer to as Dim, as in “Look, Dim forgot to wear shoes today!” He’s the sweetest guy, and he has absolutely no annoying attitude. On the other hand, he’s difficult to work with because things like space distract him. The other day I caught him sitting in his chair looking up, then all around, as though for a fly. Then he fixed his gaze on the wall, cocking his head slightly to the right, a puzzled look on his face. I stood in the doorway to his office and stared hard at him, thinking he’d sense my attention and snap out of it. Finally I said, “Everything okay?” And he said, “Isn’t it weird how you can’t see air? But it’s there.”

So I’m working with him on a butterlike product called, beautifully, BenCol. It prevents your body from absorbing eighty percent of dietary cholesterol. Thus the name, a shortening of “beneficial to cholesterol.” Despite the fact that it sounds like an allergy medicine or a laxative, I must make it sound like a miraculous breakthrough, accidentally discovered on a farm in Denmark. Not a trick of science but a gift from Nature.

The strategy reads: “So pure, it’s odorless. Natural, because it’s derived from trees.”

So I’m trying to write something that’s spare and elegant and slightly magical. But really, I’m wasting my time. Because they don’t want elegant and magical. They want shit, in their own proprietary color. They want this, I’m sure of it:

V
IDEO
:

Amy Irving, star of
Yentl
, stands in a sun-drenched gourmet kitchen (brushed-steel appliances, cherry cabinets, an island with a granite countertop), waving her hand over dishes of prepared food items: eggs, steaks, lobster, fried chicken.

V
OICE-OVER
:

Hi. I’m Academy Award nominee Amy Irving. And I’ve got incredible news! Now, all the foods you know and love can actually lower your cholesterol by fifteen percent—guaranteed! Introducing BenCol. A revolutionary breakthrough, discovered in Nature. BenCol is a rich, creamy spread that’s sweet and delicious. Use it just like butter, and it lowers your cholesterol throughout the day. In two weeks, your cholesterol will be fifteen percent lower—or your money back.
    We called it BenCol because it’s beneficial to cholesterol. But you’ll just call it delicious.

V
IDEO
:

Amy bites into a drumstick, eyes wide with pleasure.

S
OUND
E
FFECT
:

Crunching chicken skin.

S
ILENT
S
UPER
:

BenCol—for deliciously lower cholesterol.

So that’s exactly what they want. In the old days—the eighties—this kind of advertising was referred to as “Two Cs in a K.” Which translates to: two cunts in a kitchen. Although this spot uses only one cunt, the formula is the same.

I can’t believe this is my career: mad-scientist fake butter. And I just wonder whether in five years the FDA will discover (oops!!!) that it causes some sort of untreatable cancer or additional limb growth.

I really wouldn’t have such a problem with it if a normal food company were the manufacturer. I could almost buy into the whole idea if it came from Kraft or General Foods. Except this stuff comes not from the kitchens of Sara Lee but from the labs of a leading drug manufacturer. It doesn’t take quantitative focus groups in shopping malls to know that people do not want an artificial butter from the makers of America’s favorite synthetic broad-spectrum antibiotic agent.

After Olestra (may cause anal leakage), people are a tad suspicious of products that do things that are too good to be true in the natural world.

I tell this to the account people, and they say, “But it comes from trees!”

To which I reply, “Yes, and so does napalm and rubber cement. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to spread them on my English muffin.”

And poor Dim doesn’t understand my resistance. He lumbers into my office like a child with a few canine chromosomes and says, “Hey. Wanna brainstorm? Maybe we can make it rain, he he.”

I tell him, “After my nose stops bleeding.”

This causes his face to fall. “Oh, wow, man. Sorry. Yeah, sure.” And he backs away.

Is it me? Have I finally rotted to the core? It’s like my passion for advertising is directly related to my hair. The more hair I lose, the more I detest my job. My life is going bald.

Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak
TV spots. I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled. One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.

So I wrote all about the
experience
of Amtrak. About how you can drink chardonnay ten feet from an alligator or cross the desert in your pajamas. The whole thing turned out to be very Zen, because I really got lost in the writing. When I read the scripts to my boss, who has a habit of shoving his fist through walls, he said, “That’s fucking great shit, man. Cowboy poetry.”

I liked this comment because it made me feel sensitive yet masculine, like a professional bodybuilder who collects porcelain figurines.

The client, however, didn’t agree. She was furious. “It’s not about the chardonnay or the crocodiles; it’s about the fare. It’s about $158.00 round-trip to Boston.”

And she was really bitchy about it, too. We had served excellent cookies and espresso in the meeting, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her cookie away. “Give that Mint Milano back, you bitch. If you can’t at least be polite, you don’t get a treat.”

Here is a woman who is solely responsible for the brand image of Amtrak, our nation’s flagship railroad, and she’s wearing a tacky pantsuit from QVC and twelve-dollar shoes. She sat back in her chair like a trucker and complained, “Why the hell don’t you talk about the new engines we got? We got all new engines on most of our trains. Why can’t you say, ‘Come aboard and experience our new engines.’ Why can’t you talk about that if you don’t wanna talk about the price?”

I smiled and very calmly said, “Because people don’t ride in the engine. They don’t care. All they care about is what they see out the window and will they get where they’re going on time.”

She glared at me and said, “I don’t want you working on my business.”

Likewise, bitch.

And from now on I fly everywhere.

I wasn’t always this bitter and gangrenous. I got my first job as an advertising copywriter when I was nineteen, four months after I moved to San Francisco. I had long, curly hair and wore sunglasses at all times, which in the mid-eighties felt totally rad. I was so thrilled to not be pumping gas at a Getty station that I arrived in the office at four-thirty in the morning and left at midnight.

One of my first projects was to write a print ad for a potato.

The National Potato Board needed to replace its current ad, which featured a potato covered in thick, green latex paint and the headline “What must we do to make you realize we’re a vegetable?” This was when they were trying to reverse the perception that potatoes were just junk food.

The new strategy was all about speed. Microwave ovens were relatively new, so speed was exciting news. And potatoes were known to be slow. So I did an ad that featured a potato in a wind tunnel, like a car. The headline was “Aerodynamically designed for speed.”

The potato people were very happy. They bought the ad, and then they needed me to write the actual body copy.

For this, I would need a recipe. So I contacted the woman at the ad agency who was in charge of getting me a very fast recipe for a potato, and she kept telling me, “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”

She was a very busy woman who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and understandably, my potato recipe was just not a top priority. So in place of a real recipe, I wrote my own temporary place-holder recipe. It read: “Just slice a potato, broil for ten minutes, then sprinkle liberally with parmesan or blue.” Which is exactly how the ad ran in magazines.

It was one of those things that just slipped through the cracks. And nobody even noticed until
Adweek
magazine did a
small article about my clever potato ad. They liked the visual. They liked the headline. They questioned the recipe. “We’ll have to try this curious recipe in our
Adweek
test kitchens,” they snidely remarked.

I was thrilled to see my ad in
Redbook
. And I was especially proud of my fast and simple recipe. I liked to imagine extremely busy moms in Tennessee reading my recipe and thinking,
Wow, I never realized you could make a potato so quick
, and then serving it to guests. I liked to imagine the guests crunching into the rawish potato, gluey with melted cheese. The potato slices would surely have been scalding hot in some places, cool in others. They would have been starchy and caused cramps. “Gosh Phyllis, these potatoes are so . . . fresh.”

This was great advertising.

Maybe what I need to do is diversify. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years in traditional consumer advertising and now need to write commercials for prescription yeast-infection medications or make infomercials.

As cheesy and downscale as infomercials are, they can be curiously persuasive. Last Saturday I spent the afternoon sitting on the curb in front of Dean & Deluca drinking one double espresso after another, like the alcoholic that I am. As a result, I was still charged at three in the morning. So I turned on the TV and started cycling through the channels, hoping to find either an incest movie or a conjoined-twin separation documentary. Instead, I found something equally compelling: an extreme close-up of a man’s forehead, with his fingers sliding back through the hair. And then, instantly, another image of another man, doing the same thing. Then a man rising up out of a pool, shaking the water from his head and smiling. The camera then zoomed in really tight so I could see a pimple just above his eyebrow and, yes, his hairline.

I continued watching, and this compelling montage of mens’ foreheads turned out to be an infomercial for a doctor specializing in “hairline-rejuvenation surgery.” This phrase was repeated over and over, in every possible context. “Many of our patients resume their active lifestyles just two days after hairline-rejuvenation surgery,” and “even during intimate moments, Dr. Sisal’s hairlinerejuvenation surgery is completely undetectable.” I figured the reason they kept using this phrase was to distance this procedure from the dreaded “hair transplant,” which everybody knows results in a head that looks as though it belongs on a doll.

Just as I was about to change the channel, having satiated my unexpected need to gorge on men’s foreheads, they showed a series of before-and-after images.

These were truly remarkable. I put the remote control down, fluffed the pillows, and leaned back on the bed. Men who were once balder than me were now standing before a mirror and running a comb through their thick hair, smiling confidently at their own reflections. One man was shown blow-drying his hair and using a round vent brush.

I nearly wept. I used to own a vent brush! I owned three different-sized vent brushes!

This was the “get on all fours and get banged like a bitch!” porn equivalent for bald guys.

The perfectly named Dr. Sisal explained that he used a magnifying glass during the procedure. I could relate to this. I used a magnifying glass myself at least once a month to monitor my Rogaine progress. The doctor then explained that the patient is given a local anesthetic, and “donor” hair is taken from the back of the head and placed in “micro grafts” to the front of the head. These micro grafts were the secret, Dr. Sisal said. Instead of transplanting clumps of hair to the front, creating an obvious rug, by implanting hairs individually he was able to achieve a “natural appearance that gives you the confidence to participate in any activity you wish.”

The idea was thrilling, because the activity I wished to participate in was standing in front of the mirror and applying large gobs of hair gel.

While I’d wasted my life writing misleading ads for potatoes and engineered butter substitutes, people with graduate degrees had cured baldness!