The Mere Future (17 page)
I
GOT TO THE
conference room, and there were all the other queers from work. There was that couple from Banking, George and George Henderson-Smith. And the pair from Graphics, Laurie and Laurie Nussbaum-Glukowski. Then there was Carolyn Steu-banville-Woodson-Von Moschisker. (By the time she’d divorced Suzette Woodson, they’d already had four children: Waldo, Cornelius, Theodora, and Lucille. So shifting to Steubanville-Von Moschisker would have been awkward.) It had been years now since gay people were allowed to get married, the only hitch being the Monogamy Pledge. That was the compromise that The Human Universal Morality Battalion (THUMB), the gay lobbying group, had won in Congress. They attributed it all to the name change from The Human Universal Division. Throwing in the military image was crucial to winning in the southeast. Philip Morris, of which they were a department, suggested mandatory military service for all married gay couples to prove their loyalty. If they could go through basic training without telling anyone that they were married, the trust of their fellow Americans would be well deserved. That’s progress.
Thank God for Democracy.
I had proposed to Nadine the minute gay marriage became legal, but she laughed. A few weeks later I asked her why.
“I’m old school,” she said. “I’d rather live in sin.”
Back at work we all knew that this queer beckoning from higher up had something to do with the trial. It was the center of the culture right now, and all resources had to be summoned. But how could the homos help them make money out of Claire Sanchez’s ashes? There had to be a way.
B
ACK IN THEIR
cell, Jeff, Dom, and Fred knew they were doomed. I suppose that in some other kind of novel, they would use this opportunity to realize how much they had actually hurt each other, and would find a way toward the love. They would practice my own personal fantasy of redemption:
1. communication
2. negotiation
3. reconciliation
4. healing
Unfortunately, this was real life, so they just sat there missing every opportunity as each of them always had. Jeff missed Claire so much his teeth sank into his wrist. The other two just stared.
I
WAS ANNOYED
that day to be summoned away from my ongoing project of placing poems on cigarette packs. Poems were not selling and someone had to do something about it. Originally, the plan had been to sell ad space in poems. If there was a Coke on the landscape, the writer got a little royalty. But that still didn’t solve the problem of no one wanting to buy the poem in the first place. So then we got the idea of slapping them on the packages right over the cancer warnings. Now, poems were part of daily life. All over the world, people sitting in bars were picking up their packs of Natural Slinkies or Big Bad Smokies and, in a moment of shyness or sudden quiet or any silence that revealed the profundity of human discomfort, any executive or logger or talent scout or drunk could look down on the table and see:
Daddy, daddy you bastard, I’m through
.
Market research had selected that line as the most universal piece of poetry ever written. One that would translate into any culture and, at the same time, appear to be private and tender and touch a vulnerable spot. I was annoyed to be summoned away from my task because I also had to solve the problem of reintroducing products that had been developed for the homeless, which now had no one to buy them. Like body-sized Wash-n-Dri.
This wasn’t the first time the gay subgroup had been beckoned by upstairs to solve a marketing dilemma. We had previously worked on the gay Gap campaign, developing two new divisions for virtual spinoff sites. There was
ACT UP
Gap and
GMHC
Gap. Each customer knew which one was for them. Then we came up with the “Audre Lorde Wore Khakis” campaign. But nothing was as successful as the “
AIDS
Is Over, So Live a Little” campaign for Brecht Pharmaceuticals. Riding on their notoriety for curing
AIDS
, the drug companies were now in the luxury vacation business, the beachwear business, and were running a national chain of No Fat restaurants and grocery stores. Of course, they still sold maintenance drugs to keep the formerly HIV positive in retroconversion. Sixteen pills, fourteen times a day, one hour after eating fat and two hours before eating sugar and two hours before eating no fat. If they ate fat when they weren’t supposed to, or didn’t eat fat when they were supposed to, they farted uncontrollably, which was a public recognition that they were Bad Boys, and didn’t do everything their doctors told them. This had become a status symbol of rebellion, and there was now a chain of gay dance clubs called Farters where the Bad Boys would go.
As for everyone else with
AIDS
? Like who? I mean, the drugs were counter-indicated for methadone, birth control pills, and melanin.
Actually, that idea originated in my hub. It was thought of by Jay Friedman-Friedman, who’d died, suddenly, of a mysterious cause only a few months before. I wondered if it was suicide. He seemed so pale and skinny. He’d been depressed and had talked about quitting the business. But everyone tries to give up. There just is nothing else to do. People who can’t make it in software become doctors. It’s the lay of the land. That, or global investment. Go to Mexico and buy a duty-free family. I like copywriting. Replace words with words. An eye for an eye. That’s competition on a level plane.
I sat and looked at the other gay marrieds, recalling the romance of visibility. It was so long ago, it couldn’t be conveyed. Like nostalgia for Dacron or Dayton. Inexpressible. It was hot because you saw it. But what good is passion for its own sake? It haunts, internally. But Reputation goes on and on. So watch out.
The emotion of visibility was Corporate Downfall. Like what happened to Starbucks. Suddenly, there was a Starbucks where everything else used to be. It was too obvious. There was a Starbucks where the refrigerator store used to be, where the butcher, the florist, the Ukrainian/Italian restaurant, the wholesale grocer, the pierogi shop, the pawn shop, the stationary store, the hardware store, the thrift shop, the old bar, the prison, and three theaters used to be. The Korean delis were starting to seem eccentric and quaint. People resented the replacements and blamed all their problems on that fact. Visibility backfired.
Now that the franchises are gone, we don’t have to see the Corporations bragging all over the streets. It’s subtler. We only get it at home. Go outside if you want some privacy. It’s public space, it belongs to you. Marketing only happens in the house.
“I’ve got it,” Nadine said for the fourth time that day. “That’s why everyone has to have a home. It’s the law of the land. Homeless people don’t make good consumers.”
There she had it.
And for the first time I wondered if I shouldn’t be going along with it all. Doing my job. Were other people thinking the same thoughts?
I’d gone out into public space that morning, on my way to work. I’d looked around to see if anyone else was worried.
Outside was so attractive. Bright orange, cheesy park benches like the old shag carpets of yore. The legendary plastic orange of motel chains, of Howard Johnson’s. All kitsch classics, collectibles, and all for us. That’s the color they painted the subway last week. Orange. Orange equals public space.
Orange = Public Space.
“Nadine,” I’d asked, “from a design point of view, what does Orange mean?”
“Well,” she sighed. “McDonald’s discovered that orange makes people not want to stay too long. It keeps the public in circulation.”
On the subway I saw a female scholar studying. Big hair, white jeans, legs akimbo. An all-important book. Good. They’re back. It was an old-fashioned kind of tome. Some dead German. I saw two mothers on the subway. What were they discussing? Oh, yeah, how great their children are. An old man. An Albanian? He whispered to his daughter. Her skin was yellow with henna, just like the bleach job on the Italian lady across the aisle, the blonde black woman on the corner, and the Puerto Rican guy with a yellow watch that matched his hair. All blondes. In the orange. And it was all fine. Life went on.
“N
OW YOU ALL
know why you’re here,” the Big Cheese told us breezily. Smiling, sexy, lite. “I know that you are all familiar with the murder trial coming up this Tuesday at nine p.m. Eastern Standard Time. You’ve all seen the preview interview shows, the magazine exposés, the Internet ads, and the Pre-Pre-Pay Views. However, we need a tie-in slogan through which to market the trial accessories.” He was trim, white.
“As every American knows, there are two teams to choose from. The public is being introduced to the new Freedom of Choice Legal System, where they can choose between competing defendants, as though they were shopping. It’s more familiar that way.”
His shoes were made of Sphinx™.
“Under the former system, choosing between innocent and guilty was a negative choice. It was like going shopping or not going shopping. We want people to go shopping no matter what, so we have devised a new system whereby choosing between defendants is like buying Tide or buying All. In the end, something is paid for. I mean, someone has to pay.”
He laughed, jingled his change.
“Now, according to our polls…”
I looked at the Big Cheese carefully. I had never seen him in person before. He had a strange glow, like he was on TV. Then I realized that he was wearing pancake makeup. I looked up and saw that a tiny spotlight had been placed strategically over my shoulder so that it could help him glow. Whenever he made eye contact with any of us, a little light would shine our way. It made each of us feel special, one at a time.
“Sixty-five percent of New Yorkers feel that the new legal system gives them more
flexibility
in their decision making. They feel more
secure
knowing that someone will be punished, and we know it creates double opportunities for product endorsement. Now, I think we’re all clear that the bright young literary star from a good family with a gym body will be acquitted, and that the drug-abusing sociopaths will be convicted. So, given the odds, we’ve decided to prepare a book/movie/TV/digital/web/Teach-shirt tie-in on Bond that can be in homes from coast to coast fifteen seconds after the verdict is announced. However, we know that the post-Bond market will be flooded, principally by Bond himself. That’s the problem with these artist types. They want to
express
themselves. So we need our end to have a unique focus.”
Laurie Nussbaum-Glukowski raised her hand. She had long hair and pretended to be sexy. She pushed her breasts up so that her hook-word was
stacked
. She wore sexy midnight-blue silk pants. She flirted with all the men. Her clothes were more sexy than she was. I hated her instantly. But there is that thing about hate. If the hated would act a little bit differently, I would love them. It’s a personality pattern. Therefore I sit panting with the expectation of the slight shift in behavior that will make everything new again. In this case, if she had been personal with me and had a private talk, instead of running away every time a man left the room, then I would have been her friend. I longed, at that moment, for the old days of the Secret Society when Nadine and I first fell in love, when gay girls sussed each other out right away and always found private moments to talk about what was really on their minds. The things that no one else could ever guess.
“Well, I think a homosexual angle on a case with no homosexual content would be fascinating,” Laurie said sweetly. Ass-kisser.
“Just what I was thinking,” Cheese smiled.
“A breakthrough that will call attention to the campaign itself, providing extra hyper-opportunities,” Laurie offered.
“Well,” coughed George Henderson-Smith, one of the hundred Harvard-educated black men working for the company. He was always sick from overwork, being in the Ivy League, black, upwardly-mobile, of middle-class origins, gay, married, HIV-positive, child of proud parents, collector of slave memorabilia, and member of country music niche study groups. “Fear and homosexuality go together like love and heterosexual marriage. According to yesterday’s Home Poll, when forty-three percent of readers think of homosexuality, the first word they think of is “rich,” and the second is “fear.” Would it be too retro to recycle the homo-horror mode?”
That was it, the race was on. I started furiously keying in, but Nussbaum-Glukowski beat me to it, of course.
“I won!” she screamed, hitting the red bell. “
Het Cemetery.”
Of course.
When heterosexuals kill each other, all the rest of them feel threatened. But to point out that they are heterosexuals—that was really threatening. They felt neutral, but now we said who they really are. It was a daring advertising tactic. Now they would be truly terrified to be targeted that way. Each of them would feel that they too, like Claire Sanchez, would have their organs sliced. And all because they’re straight, straight, straight. Like Claire.
WOW
!
There was silence that came over the room. It was the kind of involuntary silence that accompanies the recognition of brilliance. A gift so profound that all petty competition is removed and you just gaze upon the other’s work with awe and gratitude. Even though I had never read Stephen King and I hated Laurie Nussbaum-Glukowski, I couldn’t hold back my admiration. And this would resonate broadly with our “
AIDS
Is Over, So Live a Little” campaign. Gay = Life. Straight = Death.
“
Het Cemetery
,” she repeated, glowing. “Now, it’s
your
turn
.”
I
WATCHED THE
trial on my watch.
What was at stake? Our entire class system.
Nadine had seen through Sophinisba from the start. It didn’t keep her from working for the mayor, but at least she knew what was right, even if she didn’t do it. That put her ahead of most of the population.