Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that. I would simply like to get a job in American industry. But not, frankly, any of the management trainee positions I’ve been offered in the last few weeks. They look very much like dead-end streets to me.”

“You’re right there,” he said at once. “There, you are one hundred per cent right. Tell me something, Harv? What do you think about advertising?”

“Advertising? I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought much about it at all,” I admitted, “except when a particularly horrendous singing commercial comes on the radio.”

“Sure,” he said. “But what about advertising men? You know, the scapegoats, the ones the people all the time make the funny remarks about. What about them?”

“What about them?” I asked him right back.

“Have you ever thought of being one?”

I hadn’t. I said so, adding, “Though now that you mention it, it sounds like a good idea. After all, an English major—”

He shook his head. “English majors,” he said somberly, “come to advertising agencies only long enough to soak up the atmosphere. Then they go write a nasty book. Either that, or they stay around forever and have guilt feelings, and they keep missing work and coming in the next day with a note from their psychiatrist. That’s the way it is with English majors in advertising.”

I considered the problem, wriggling my toes beneath the table, After due consideration, I said, “I don’t think I’d be that way.”

“Neither do I,” he said at once. “I think you’re the exception to the rule. There’s an exception to every rule, you know.”

“I’d heard rumors,” I admitted.

“The minute I looked at you,” he said, starting off on that again, “and saw you sitting there with your shoes off, I said to myself, ‘There’s an exception to the rule.’ And I think I was right. You want a job?”

There were a million possible things to say. I said, “What?”

There were a million possible things he could have said, too. He said, “A job.”

My keen analytical mind flashed hither and yon over our preceding conversation, correlating, comparing, combining implications, grouping subject matters, following the thin threads of cortical reasoning, and in less than a second I had the whole knotty problem doped out. “You mean,” I said, “a job in advertising.”

“You have,” he said indistinctly, “a keen analytical mind. A job in advertising is exactly what I mean.”

“Well,” I said. “Gosh. I hadn’t exactly thought much about it.”

“Harv,” he said with the disgusting familiarity that is so prevalent in certain otherwise-genteel sections of this city, “I’ll tell you who I am. Ever heard of MGSR&S?”

I allowed as how I hadn’t.

“Well,” he said, “I’m S sub-two.”

My keen analytical mind couldn’t quite analytic that one. Apparently my mental floundering showed on my face, because he returned to English. “MGSR&S,” he told me, “is Manning, Greenville, Silverstein, Rorschach and Stanton. Stanton is me.”

“Ah,” I said. “I see.”

He looked at his watch. “Coffee break’s over,” he said, and engulfed the liquid in the glass. He spared the ice cubes. “Come on over to the office,” he suggested, rising with surprising steadiness to his feet, “and we’ll talk it over “

“Why, thank you,” I said. I stood, and we started toward the door. We’d gone no more than five paces when he looked at me oddly, and said, “Don’t you want your shoes?”

“Oh, yes!” I exclaimed. “My shoes!”

I went back to the table, feeling like a fool, and fished around among the crumpled cigarette packages until I found my shoes. Shod, I returned to Stanton, S sub-two. He was surveying me somewhat oddly.

I felt called upon to defend myself, albeit timidly. “It’s the first time I ever forgot them,” I said. It was a weak defense.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Come along.” A bit of doubt had come into his voice. Perhaps he was growing more sober, and the prospect of hiring a man solely on the basis of him having his shoes off no longer seemed so enjoyable to him.

But I was twenty-two, and it was summer, and I was newly in New York, and the unreality of this man’s conversation and job offer was of such a high level that I wasn’t a bit confused or worried or nervous during the following employment interview, and I got the job.

And so I learned about advertising.

Do you know about advertising? When an otherwise-desirable young lady appears on your television screen and, to a Neanderthalic melody, sings, “Winky dinky hinky rink, Goolash beer is the beer to drink,” do you have the idea that it all came out of her own little head in just a second or two? Well, you’re wrong. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in less time than it took a whole staff of people at MGSR&S to write those eleven words. Of course, Shakespeare had the edge. He just used English; he didn’t have to make up exciting new words, like ‘winky.’

I won’t go into the entire hierarchy and nomenclature of an advertising agency, of the little bitsy contribution of every member of that crowd to the epic quoted above. I am not avoiding this naming of parts out of a fear of boring the reader, I am doing so out of a fear of boring me. Twelve years, let me tell you, can be a long long time.

I will tell you however, out of an obvious bid for sympathy, what my contribution to that Cro-Magnon couplet was. I made it rhyme. When it came to me, the meter had already been established — though the melody hadn’t yet surged out of our symphonic department — and the first line read (do you mind?), “Goulash beer is hotsy tots.” I changed ‘hotsy tots’ to ‘hinky dink.’ Someone else changed the first half of the line, and altered my contribution to hinky rink. Whether one man added winky and one man added dinky or one man doubted up and added both words I don’t know. Having contributed of my talents already, I slept through the rest of the conferences. And, at those rare conferential moments when I was awake, I wiled the time away drawing nonsensical pictures on my notepad.

Such was my job, but I didn’t begin at that exalted level. Oh, no, one doesn’t simply step into an important job like that. I began in the mailroom.

(I seem to be waking up. I’d much rather not wake up; if I do my head will explode. People are talking, I can hear the murmur of their conversation distantly, and I don’t imagine I want them to start talking to me. I must go back to sleep. Be twenty-two again, remember back, float back and down, back and down, find something on which to pin my floating psyche and avoid consciousness.)

Laura Gray.

Ah, yes, Laura Gray. Her first name wasn’t Laura, it was Natalie. And her last name wasn’t Gray, it was Gregenbaum. Why is it that depressed minorities invariably express agreement with the unflattering opinions of their depressors?

At any rate I know these horrible secrets about Laura Gray because I snuck into the Personnel offices and looked at her records. I’m not sure why I did that except that I was twenty-two. And I would dearly have loved to have Laura Gray as the replacement for Jodi, and because Laura invariably cut me dead every time she saw me.

She was a secretary, Laura was. She was from the secretarial pool (I always get a picture of a bunch of laughing nude girls at a round shallow swimming pool with a statue of Cupid in the middle when I hear that phrase, don’t you?) and she sat all day typing revelations granted her by a Dictaphone machine. My mailroom job consisted of distributing in-coming mail all morning and picking up outgoing mail all afternoon, so I saw Laura Gray rather often, and she always cut me dead. After all, I was just a nobody from the mailroom.