The French Revolution (37 page)

Back on the floor, Marat pulled out a joint and puffed it until the smoke beat back the fire ants scrambling under his skin, until people started pointing and coughing and he offered a toke to a chubby purple-haired lady who obviously blazed. She dismissed him with a double-chinned grimace.

“Why not?” he asked. Suddenly he wanted to fuck her, to see if he could fuck her or fuck anything, find out how to fuck again.

“Smoking inside’s illegal,” she said.

“And disgusting,” somebody added.

“It’s weed. We’re at a concert.” The pot sheared off the edges, put the knives away. “You wanna dance?”

He put the blunt to his mouth again and took in the heat. When the smoke floated away, he was alone on the floor, a ten-foot bubble around him. He danced by himself, slow shambles and arm wiggles and the rhythmic ingestion of spine-melting marijuana steam. Werewolf’s voice was all jumpy though, singing new notes and swapping out words to songs Marat thought he knew, which fouled up his rhythm and betrayed the balance he was closing in on.

“Play some goddamn reggae!” he bellowed after his father wound down a Garth Brooks cover, filling a dead moment with a demand that was both unreasonably on point and heard by every last person in the auditorium. His father nodded a couple of
times, stomped his heel, licked his thumb and traced it over his shiny head, walked ponderously left to right across the stage.

By the time he hit the chorus the crowd owned the song. Arms hung over shoulders, illuminated cellphone screens flickering Rasta peace.

In the voices of millions. Marat sang clouds of smoke, wandering to the edge of his buffer zone and aiming to latch onto a comrade, the purple-haired chubby chick, any live human being. His good arm could not find purchase, each targeted cosinger slinking out of reach when he sidled in. What else to do but smoke and smoke until all he could hear or see were stars, the gold fragments glittering in his eyes, the spangled guards entering his private zone and lusciously asking him to come along. Played that game in high school, he laughed, got his arm smashed up for the pleasure. They smiled back with strong teeth and let him clutch onto their shoulders, towing him through heavy oak doors and columned foyers with tiered light fixtures, the fire in his blood devolving to chilled gas and the barest air as security ejected him into the cold.

Marat Van Twinkle’s first act of the day was to take an atomic dump. He had developed this routine in the army, when mornings on base were the only time all day he’d been near running water with sports magazines on hand. His bathroom stop was brief, just long enough to speed-read a single article before using a modicum of toilet paper for wiping, lighting a match, and moving to the shower.

In Iran there hadn’t been space for masturbation between the group showers, crowded latrines, days riding in Humvees taking potshots from Iranian civilians. This had resulted in a frothy temper, frazzled nerves. An urge to fire his weapon more frequently. So in the spacious shower in his Pacific Heights mansion, a dab of shampoo on his palm and two minutes later the violence was out for a few hours. His staff was aware of his friendlier disposition early in the day but had yet to figure out the reason.

Usually he played golf or tennis from 7:30 to 9:00. This depended on the size of his hangover. His biggest deals were conducted in this period, sucking down beers and spliffs, betting hundreds of dollars per point, his high-stakes partners appreciating his irascible edge. He was ineffective at golf and didn’t like it, his bad arm only in the way, the minimal physical exertion and posthole celebratory pot smoking not enough to ward off the sense of imminent terror creeping back in. Tennis was more active, his one-handed backhand deadly accurate, all the sprinting and squeaking pleasurable to his drug-heightened senses. Somewhat spent, he was at his most agreeable during his morning tennis match, most flexible on his terms. Some of his business partners found a way to like him then.

Marat was kingfish at Lumpkin’s associated offices, running the ad agency, the bagel shop, most of the real estate projects. They’d landed in Iran together courtesy of the SFPD and a mutually despised anonymous tipster, felony drug and assault charges dropped for the pleasure, and a couple of targeted bribes pushed
them into the same unit for the duration of their prescribed five-year tours. Lumpkin hit sleaze bottom with his spying and extortion scheme, but he’d paid Marat extremely well for his help scouting and deflecting suspicion, managing the surveillance film library, building up his blackmail. And as with pot, Marat’s life-style grew to require it. When they returned to San Francisco—Marat with his blown arm, Lumpkin with his boxes of video—Joel came through as promised: a mind-boggling salary, a choice job, an immaculate résumé that made Marat one of the most hirable executives in his age bracket. He’d thought he’d get out when there was a good opportunity, but when offers to run flashy startups and established powers came in, he turned them down. His work wasn’t boring, he rationalized, he did a lot of critical thinking, mostly he was the boss, no complaints whatsoever on money, and when he didn’t talk to Joel for a while he got to feeling OK.

It was only at night, enjoying the opulent view from his wrap-around deck and absorbing Buju Banton playlists through a green fog, when the true state of the world sponged him. A family he couldn’t trust, his only friends the ex-security guards from high school, a career that failed to improve the universe in any way, the gnawing certainty that everything he ever did was tainted. Fallout pulsated with the music’s juicy bass lines: the death of his untreated grandmother, ruined soldiers, end runs around pot laws and supporting Colombian drug cartels and propelling the biggest asshole he’d ever met into unimaginable wealth. The humiliating attacks on his staff, just because he could. This was the world he’d made.

Upon arriving at work he showered again. The desert dust was always on him. The ad agency senior staff meeting was at 10:30, account directors and star creatives selling him their crap to sell crap, the irony seemingly lost on everyone but him. He listened as long as he could take it, asking clipped questions, ragging on his staff’s cheap clothes, curtailing discussion with a gravelly throat clearing, answering his cellphone with exaggerated volume.

The morning after Robespierre’s mayoral kick-off bash in February 2019, Marat endured a nine-hole ass-whupping at the hands of his real estate broker, his head shattered with alcohol. Getting outbid for Marie Antoinette and Cake rumbled in his stomach, along with four bong hits, two jelly donuts, and a quart of black coffee poached from the kitchen.

By the time the senior staff meeting rolled around, he was percolating.

“Levi’s brand strength has always been tied to American roots and a sense of authenticity,” Garrett began. He was lean and wore a Hawaiian shirt with teal sharks eating palm trees, Dickies painter pants, a straw hat with a beer logo, argyle socks with red sneakers, unflinchingly overcreative.

“Historically,” Garrett continued, “Levi’s has emphasized frontier, rural settings and urban America in their advertising. The cowboy. The hipster. Rough ’n’ ready heterosexual icons. The American Dream.”

A heavy gong shook in his skull; twists of stomach bile spouted up to his mouth. “Enough with the God-bless-America bull,” he raged, “there’s too much jingoist crap out there already.”

“You’re right.” Garrett’s green stoplight eyes bored in on him across the conference table. Marat hesitated. This reaction was precisely why he’d hired Garrett in the first place.

“Consumers are tired of the old stereotypes. We want to take this in a new direction. Suburbia.” A row of identical aluminum-sided homes flashed onto a projection screen, mirrored yards and lawn equipment, the same forgettable cars in the driveways.

“Suburbs get a bad rap,” said Maureen, the new creative director, tall and muscular with a wide round nose like a doorknob. “Boring, sterile, lots of driving. But people move to the suburbs for a sense of community. Family. To own a yard and deck and garage, paid for with the money they earned. It’s the new authentic America.”

“Bullshit,” Marat declared, hating himself for saying it but feeling justified, something overly simplistic and goading about
this presentation, the only hope that it was misdirection for a whiz-bang finale. Which he doubted.

“Friday morning, jeans day,” Maureen pushed on. A grainy amateur video appeared on the wall, junior staff members strolling out of a small stucco home. “A family’s leaving the house in Levi’s, mom and dad on the way to work, kids going to school,” Maureen narrated. “There’s a big traffic jam on their little street, everybody trying to get out at once. Meanwhile, the Levi’s family takes their time going into the garage, nice and easy. Suddenly dad roars out of the driveway on a motorcycle with a kid in the sidecar, zooming around traffic. Then mom and kid number two hit the street on horses, galloping around the snarled traffic and off to attack the day.” In the film two giggly copywriters hopped broomstick ponies out of the garage.

“Gap did jeans day last year,” Marat noted. “I guess they’re smarter than us.”

“Neighborhood kids are throwing around a football in the front yard,” Maureen flipped to the next clip, “a boy and a girl in Levi’s, everybody else in shorts. The boy hits the girl on a long bomb, she catches it, touchdown. A truck drives by.” An animated truck puttered across the wall. “Now it’s ten years later, and the guy’s playing football with a bunch of friends. He’s in Levi’s, friends are in sweats and athletic pants. The girl, now a beauty, walks down the street in Levi’s. He throws the ball up on a pass—and she runs onto the lawn to make the interception.”

Marat closed his eyes and listened to his brain palpitate. “Have you ever seen Levi’s do a sports commercial before?” he asked wearily. He waited while the table went dark, his staff braced for the predictable outburst he was doomed to deliver. “LeBron James doesn’t wear Levi’s when he’s on the court. I don’t wear Levi’s when I play tennis. Can somebody explain to me why Levi’s should try to be a sporting goods brand?”

The video on the wall sped through a high school basketball game and a street hockey shootout, settling on a shot of Garrett shoving a lawnmower. “A kid mowing lawns in Levi’s,” Maureen
picked up. “It’s tropically hot out, the kid’s sweating buckets. He peels off his shirt—and notices a pretty girl in Levi’s watching.” Maureen swayed on screen, not bad looking at all with a supportive bra and some postproduction work. A couple of creatives along the wall whistled. “He throws his shirt in front of the lawnmower. Boom, lawnmower eats it. He smiles, keeps walking. Then, bang, the girl’s right in front of him. She throws her blouse in front of the lawnmower.”

Marat snorted. “I presume this spot will run exclusively on the Hustler channel?”

“She’s wearing a tank top underneath.” The videotaped Maureen had one on, pink and form-fitting and made of sensual high-end creative-director-salary material. “And it’s more of a flannel shirt than a blouse. They lock eyes. He runs over the shirt.” A thousand cotton balls blasted from Garrett’s discharge pipe, and Marat felt the gathering steam of a midday erection.

Fine. Done. He stood, causing the rest of the room to rise too, a pseudo-respectful-sarcastic gesture they’d implemented over the past month. “Get me a script and budget by Tuesday. I’m meeting with Dirk on Thursday. Tomorrow’s Tide. Something colorful, guys, I’m sick of whites all the time and so is the rest of the universe.”

He sped back to his office and barricaded the door. He turned off the lights and sat down in his chair and took three blasts from the vaporizer he stored in a false compartment in the back of his filing cabinet. He stared at the ceiling, examined the holes punctured in the ceiling panels, wondered what they were there for, ventilation maybe, possibly to relieve structural pressure, exactly how he couldn’t say. He gauged the color of the atmosphere in the room, not all the way to pitch black but darker than gray or slate, the color of early afternoon shadows, undiffused static, a windowless bar for night-shift workers. Twenty minutes slogged by. When the octane chortling in his forehead reduced to a simmer, he asked Joan to set up the call.

“It’s Marat,” he said into the phone.

“You gotta see the film we made,” Joel Lumpkin said, female voices and clinking glassware in the background. “They turned out to be fucking dancers. San Francisco ballet, I shit you not.”

“I’m here,” said Ankra, Joel’s accountant.

“Good fucking morning!” Joel said. “Pun intended!”

“We’re working a Levi’s pitch,” Marat began. “A new angle of Americana. Playing the suburbs.”