Mat Johnson - Drop

Four P.M. the next day. Sweating, disheveled and sour, I held the finished product in my hands: a portfolio filled with the print ads, packaging design, and market analysis that would start a dietary revolution. I couldn’t stop looking at the photos of my creation. Didn’t my orange look so utterly marketable in its clear plastic wrapper? Didn’t you know that if you reached for it on a store shelf it would crinkle in your hand, calling to you in treble whispers, Take me with you, devour me, there is no greater pleasure than the life inside ?

In one photo I caught an image that showed that this creation was living, on fire, urgent. Two female hands (thank God for undergrads who sit in libraries eager for any odd excuse to walk away from books too big to be carried with them), fingers long and brown ripping through the fleshes: peel, encasing, pulp. Oh the mist, nearly invisible in real time and noticed more in the snapping away of her head as eyes squint, sweet acid like sun-borne pepper spray. The frozen image revealed an orange ball exploding away from itself, shaped like an orchid beginning its bloom, with skinny hands as orgasmic midwives bearing witness to the wet scream of citric love.

When I took the final work, my images, my impromptu creations, to the post office (4:50 P.M., please let me in the door), I was thinking, This is it; I won. This was the product. They would make me the Prince of Florida; even my offspring would be destined to reign.

Slapping it with the spit side of the stamps, I was already planning the first prize, five thousand bucks and a guaranteed position at one of three Madison Avenue firms. All I wondered was, Which one? Because it had to happen. Broad Street and Market could no longer stand as my east-west, north-south. I was going somewhere, my game was starting. I included my picture in the package as well, as the application had asked for. It was me smiling into the digital camera at five A.M., Friday morning. Yes, slightly disheveled, naps ablaze, but staring into the camera with that kill-stink of victory. At the postal box I pulled the door open and let my message be swallowed into its benevolent blue gut. And then it was patience time. Glory be to me for I am the creator.

Sure, it was nearly three months later and my original elation had slowly evaporated like water in a dead cat’s bowl, been replaced by flashes of despair (I might as well have sent in nothing, what ignorance, pathetic futility, just a punk-ass Philly boy trying to pretend he could be something of worth in this world) that stumbled into pockets of certainty (wouldn’t New York be nice, it looks nice on TV, and in Spike Lee movies, how could any controlled attempt at product enhancement put together by someone nearly six years my junior hope to reach the blessed brilliance of my vision), but damn, how could they give me fourth place? How can anyone who could recognize the validity of the work at all not bear witness to the divine inspiration? Or maybe it was crap and I was a fraud, but shit, I needed it so bad. A letter that says ‘Congratulations, you have been selected as the Fourth-Place Winner’ is a smug thief.

On page fifty-six of the magazine enclosed in my ‘victory’ packet there was a picture of me, my face looking smiley and hopeful and honest among four other faces doing the same. My shot last, the only one in the bunch not melanin-deficient, my image looking as out of place as Bill Russell on the 1963 Celtics. So is that it? Is that what it’s all about? And did it matter? Regardless of origin, wasn’t there still going to be a big-ass number four on my chest? Four, all lanky and dumb, staring over its shoulder like Sankofa but without the wings. The mythic number of losers, where no one even knows you played the game. I recognized then that fourth was not simply a statement about my entry in this competition, it was a message from the universe about my place within it. Fourth-rate me, with my pathetic hopes and aspirations, my hunger for greatness when I couldn’t even find success in third-rate Philly town.

Or maybe it was the oranges. Maybe that’s where I failed. They could have been tasteless, cottonmouth dry. Maybe that was it. Something went wrong, must have, because even though I got my picture and the photos of my proposal in the magazine, all I had on my kitchen table was a seventy-five-dollar check from a bank I never heard of and a thick piece of cotton paper with words forming a message I didn’t care to hear.

The letter went into the trash, and then was pulled out and ripped into small pieces and taken to the upstairs the toilet. My advisor called with a congratulations and that message was erased. The check sat on the dresser alone, dejected, until the light bill came and I had no choice but to cash the insult.

In the months that followed, I got other responses from the world as well. From the sixty-seven blind mailings I sent out to advertising agencies nationwide, each complete with a résumé, mini portfolio, and personalized cover letter, I received: nine form-letter rejections, four equally impersonal brochures for summer internships showing pictures of smiling kids nearly half my age, and one actual request for an interview. The letter, from an agriculturally focused firm in Dallas, said that the successful candidate must to be willing to locate to Philadelphia, Mississippi, which, from my research, seemed an even scarier place than the real Philly itself. I got one nice letter from a man in Portland, sent on his own stationery, saying that he liked my work and thought I had ‘promise,’ but that they didn’t recruit unproven talent straight from college, particularly from out of state, something he advised would probably be the norm at other agencies as well. His last line was, ‘But don’t worry, you’re young so there’s no rush.’ The date of my thirty-second birthday was now closer than my thirty-first was.

Of the seven graduate schools whose advertising programs I applied to the previous fall, I was accepted to five, two of which were both very good and very expensive. Neither one offered me enough cash to make accepting realistic or wise since I’d already blown the money from my mom’s policy trying to become middle class (undergraduate tuition and fees). Two of the other schools I was accepted to offered me partial tuition reimbursement, and one program in Ohio even offered me tuition and a stipend, but all three of the schools were just like the one I was already at. Those paths were not inclines, they were plains; at the end of each I would be no higher, just further along.

So, with fantasies extinguished, I walked down that same hall, listening to the sound of my feet beating a track on something that was already dead, moving towards the opportunity to prostrate myself before an advisor in the slight chance that he could help me compensate for the time I didn’t have. Staggering and injured, I stopped in the mailroom to check my box and clean out whatever memos had accumulated.

I saw it before I even got close. It barely fit into my slender slot, this envelope, grocery bag brown, so tightly shoved into the cubby hole that I nearly took down the whole structure pulling it out. Its far right corner was covered in odd stamps, different in sizes and colors but all with the profile of the same plain woman, caught watching something dull. The package couldn’t be mine. It said my name, but Chris Jones was common; there were two others even on that campus. I wasn’t even given that distinction: the sole ownership of my name.

Slipped quickly into my jacket, I held it under my coat by my armpit all the way to the deserted men’s room and into a stall. With my teeth, I ripped the envelope’s top free, my fingers plucking its contents like a mugger with a pocketbook. What I found: another envelope inside. This one was gray, with ‘Chris Jones’ typed in large letters on the center. From its corner, a loose string hung, bright orange and as thick as a shoelace, from a small hole. Typed below it was a note that said, ‘To Begin, Pull.’ I yanked on that thing like it was a parachute cord.