Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Now here we were. More than a decade later, I was still propping her up. I put the picture down, smiled, and came to bed, the sleet outside slicing at the window. Marie-Anne was facing the other way in bed. I tucked myself into the depression around her body, wedging my nose and eyes between the bed and her fleshy back. I liked having my face covered. It kept nightmares from getting into the mouth.

Plutus was a full-service public relations company. We made and then kept things famous. We did this for our clients because they believed that fame translated into sales. Although this wasn’t empirically true, or even verifiable, we didn’t challenge their belief. Marketing was a religion that paid well and we would have been foolish to cast doubt upon our deity. Once a client sat down in our conference room overlooking the newly refurbished city hall — gleaming white from having been cleansed of its ashen scales — we promised them that their brands, their art, their accomplishments, their whatever, would make its way down to every lobbyist, governmental figure, reporter, blogger, product reviewer, critic, radio personality, local TV producer, bar, club, lounge, restaurant, and even the self-styled celebrities. “Your name will be known,” we promised everyone. Communicators. That’s what we were.

When I first got into the job, the snappy press release had been our most important tool. We would send the press release out and then go around to conventions, industry events, trade journals, business parties, and approach people of influence and hold conversations that were prefabricated and premeditated in every way. Using psychological cues, we would drill the name of the chosen product into the target’s psyche.

The Internet changed the course of our work. Every mastodon on the street started thinking she could stamp around on the virtual highways and swing her tusks and pin people down long enough to tell them about a product or two. And for a while, yes, the firm teetered and tottered. In fact, that was when Richard Konigsberg had gotten pushed out. Ultimately we recovered, however, because in the end the Internet became too crowded, too chaotic, and there was a need for nodes, for guardians, gatekeepers. With our long list of contacts and friends we were perfectly poised to take that role. Individuals couldn’t compete against an institution. We brought order to the savage web. It was like taming the Wild West, an act of enlightened imperialism.

I had gotten my start in boring industries. My first clients were a group of small wood-laminates manufacturers. They taught me about resin and bonding and adhesive and how school desks were made. Most of the big hitters in their industry had been based in the Deep South and looked at me funny when we first met. But after I told them my backstory and invoked SEC football and mentioned Marie-Anne, they seemed to open up.

Later I worked with the milk industry; horseshoe manufacturers; and a woman who built wood blocks for children. All these people were afflicted with the perennial inability to translate desire into persuasion. I bridged that gap for them.

Plutus used to have a good bit of competition in Philadelphia; but the other companies couldn’t keep up with us. Yet recently we were confronted by a guerrilla marketer by the name of Ken Lulu who used to work for the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, but had decided to branch out and bring art into marketing. He had moved to Philadelphia from Montreal, where he already had an operation going. His approach to marketing was very different from our institutional sort. He bypassed everyone and went straight to the consumer, using the walls, roofs, cupolas of public places and buildings. His most recent caper had been to have the sad logo of a bicycle manufacturer appear on the Comcast Tower, with the bicycle taking a trip up the building to the sound of “Clair de Lune” by Debussy. I wasn’t very fond of the anarchy that Ken Lulu represented. He was like a fish in a pond, whispering and nipping at the other guppies. To me, the only ones worthy of respect were those who swooped down from on high, like eagles. Still, I liked to keep tabs on him and did that through Candace who had some mutual friends with Ken.

Over time I moved on from industrial work and came to the department headed by Dinesh. This was the most sought-after team because of the mix of work it did, involving museums, local celebrities such as columnists and politicians, leading law firms, insurance companies, cable companies, and the foundations. There was always an event to go to, and nearly every event had glamorous or ostentatious presentation, food, and the associated gravitas. I had been into the homes and offices of all those who lorded over this stretch of the Atlantic. Not quite the rapacious lords of finance in New York and not quite the lords of war produced by Washington, DC. Ours had a less aggressive view toward the world. Where New York and Washington conquered, the lords of Philadelphia went to explore and categorize, to discuss in magazines related to crafts, to show off in museums, to have academic symposiums about, and all under the cover of the Quaker liberalism that allowed Philadelphia to sustain a posture of purity, of innocence. New York and Washington were Zeus and Hades, the dominant and the destructive. Philadelphia was Poseidon, the beautiful moderate. It was no surprise that his statue sat in one of the ovals near Center City.

My progress came to an end when I got shoved into Special Projects. I was atomized. Any team that had a project they didn’t want to do pushed it toward me. My first order of business had been to create a database of all the wholesale perfume sellers in the Mid-Atlantic. I had to follow this with creating a database for the entirety of North America. It was a lot of sitting around with industry newsletters.

I probably would have continued on the database forever had it not been for a contract that came in via Tony Blanchard and the wife of a general who sat in the Pentagon. The job required taking military wives and their children, and finding positive stories among them and blasting these to media. It involved getting military wives onto TV shows to get makeovers, both personal and for their houses. It involved finding home footage that cast soldiers in a positive light. A dog greeting his owner after he came back from Iraq. A family surprising a mom after she came back from Germany. The feather in the cap was that wife or mother whose husband or son had gotten killed in combat but who, rather than giving in to stultifying depression, had transmogrified her misery into doing positive things for society, whether it involved sending care packages to others, or providing for abandoned pets.

Even though it was just a contract, I hoped to do good work and potentially turn it into my niche. Perhaps one day I could find a military wife, ideally with children, who upon learning of her husband’s death would announce that she was going to join the military as a form of revenge against the enemies of America. Her I would make huge. I wouldn’t just get her on every major TV show; for her I could get big-time agents, a movie, a book, a national campaign. She just needed to be found.

* * *

I came to work on Tuesday. I had taken the Monday off to spend a little time with Marie-Anne. The atmosphere at the firm felt like the inner sanctum of some criminal conspiracy. Those who had been invited to my party walked past each other evading me and giving sideways smiles. It was quite something to have entertained in my home, fed and intoxicated, lurched from laughter and hilarity with all these people who otherwise were strangers to me, with many who otherwise thought me subservient. Now we had a quiet equality. I was sure of it.