A Useful Human, Not an Ambulatory Cloud of Neuroses

Today I am meeting Pooch Labrador for lunch at an almost-Cuban place called Chez Bananas in Minneapolis. The restaurant has Etch A Sketches, crayons, and white butcher paper on every table. If all this stuff is a gimmick, as hipper souls insist, I love gimmicks. Other advertising people love gimmicks, too—we monetize gimmicks. Chez Bananas is only a few blocks from my old firm.

▴ ▴ ▴

Six months earlier, on July 12, 1993, I’d arrived jauntily at said firm—an advertising agency I had helped found—only to be called into my partner Brian’s office and told I was no longer needed. No longer needed at the agency I had built into a twenty-person shop; the place where my admittedly smallish soul had come alive as I filled whiteboards, sketched concepts, finessed type, and color corrected photographs; the place I would visit on Saturdays just to sit in the big-windowed space with its exposed brick and caramelized hardwood and breathe. I was informed by my partners that they would pay me to not work for them, or for anyone else, for one year.

Since then, little has happened but much has fermented. My relationship with my girlfriend, Franny, became strained. Franny was a farm girl turned social worker—which, in her case, meant she had a great deal of sympathy but little patience for bullshit. I swore her pert nose twitched when she sensed my sadness became self-indulgent. At her tactful insistence, I’d joined a therapy group, a concept I’d previously known entirely from the Bob Newhart Show. And I’d spent a great deal of time staring at the discolored gauze of my irrelevant days, a great deal of time lying in bed in a kind of quarter sleep.

I’ve developed a rule for life: if you consider taking a shower an accomplishment, something is wrong. If, while you are eating a bologna sandwich, you weep uncontrollably for your mother—who has been dead for ten years—something is wrong. Extra “something is wrong” points if you’re eating the sandwich in your underwear.

And if the prospect of driving on a freeway suddenly frightens you, something is perhaps even more wrong.

▴ ▴ ▴

I am months away from being able to work again and I’ve known Pooch since high school, but, an hour before I get into the car to head to Chez Bananas, I am still job-interview nervous. I know how things happen in this business: every interaction matters, sequences of events might be initiated or halted, conversations could be sparked or shaped. I want to return to what we both called “the business.” I’ve always wanted this. I want to make elegant things that help ideas become money and money become prosperity and prosperity become ideas and ideas become things.

By elegant, I mean both surprising and efficient.

By things, I mean ads and posters and billboards and television commercials.

By money, I mean money.

By prosperity, I mean the generosity my mother extended to me and which I have extended to no one. By prosperity I mean, I will always have food, I will always have shelter, I will always have art supplies. I will always be able to make things and thus feel like a useful human and not an ambulatory cloud of neuroses.

No, that is not quite honest. I also want—very, very much want—to glibly present my credit card as I pay for the brands I love a little too much. I want to buy Ralph Lauren crew socks and Brooks Brothers oxfords and tickets to a Cowboy Junkies show or a jaunt to Chicago for a weekend. Although my partners are paying me a generous settlement, I can see the end of that stream, so I’m shaving with Barbasol, which I tell myself is what my father used without a single complaint. And yet I visualize going to the Clinique counter at Dayton’s and buying tubes of glossy and luxurious shaving cream in the restrained gray tubes with sans serif type.

I am betting that Pooch will expense this lunch.

▴ ▴ ▴

I’ve grown used to the village pace of Saint Paul. As I approach Minneapolis, on the urgent swoop of I-94, the city strives and shines. It is a place of granite and glass skyscrapers—the skyline evokes wheat and water—and aggressively reclaimed warehouses. I park. I breathe, because I am in a state of mind where breathing is a strategy. Fortunately, when I enter the restaurant, a red brick place with big windows that connect it back to the city, I recognize Pooch and no one else.

With his pinpoint shirt and repp-stripe bow tie, his firm handshake and sincere smile, he counteracts my recent ethereal sadnesses. “Duane! Good to see you, sir,” he says, getting up from the table, and shaking my hand. Pooch is Monday as a person—the good parts of Monday, the parts that rinse away Sunday.

▴ ▴ ▴

“What’s new in the ad biz?” I ask.

Pooch answers, “A lot.”

I’ve only been sidelined for six months.

“Should I start with email or the World Wide Web,” he asks. “Or the crazy new designs?"

“I know a little bit about email, so let’s start there,” I say. I don’t mention my knowledge comes from the new mom in my therapy group. Perhaps best not to mention group.

“Well, we can now all send each other messages through our computers. I haven’t seen a pink ‘While You Were Out’ slip in a month.”

“Okay,” I say. “That seems sensible.”

“Everyone’s so jazzed up about it, sensible is kind of beside the point. But, yeah, it is. But I find myself getting into fights unlike anything an old-fashioned memo ever provoked."

“That’s weird.”

“Tell me about it, but it happens. It has something to do with losing the human voice and, I think, the human face.”

“You’re not a guy who gets into fights.”

“I’m not normally a guy who thinks about the human voice.”

“True.”

“But, yeah, I’ve gotten into a few email fights, and they felt awful.”

The waitress appears.

Pooch says to her, “I have to say, the Etch A Sketch is kind of brilliant."

“Have you tried it yet?” she asks.

“This is who should try it,” he says and points to me. “Absolutely brilliant art director."

“Jesus.”

If this is an ur-pre-quasi-job interview, it is a fiendish one. I pick up the red plastic contraption and manipulate the knobs. Chaos. I shake the Etch A Sketch to clear it, perhaps a little too vigorously.

“You know, the whole point of being an art director is that you direct the art,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. “You don’t actually do anything."

“Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”

“Give me a second here,” I say. “I think I have an idea.”

“I knew you’d come up with something.”

“We’ll see about that,” I say. As I twist the knobs, I realize that it really is like riding a bike: a childhood skill that seems impossible to your mind but then feels familiar to your muscles.

Realizing a visual concept with two knobs and a gray-on-gray screen isn’t easy. You can’t lift the pen off the page. You can’t erase mistakes, except by starting over. I’ve evidently thought a lot about this particular technology.

Fortunately, the Chez Bananas logo can be rendered as a single line. I swear I stick my tongue out while I work. My diligence embarrasses me.

I turn the little machine toward Pooch.

“You drew their logo? Cool.”

“Everyone loves pictures of their kids. Everyone loves the sound of their own name. The reason why clients always want their logo bigger is because they love their company.”

“You believe that last bit?”

“I’ve decided to start giving clients the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s awfully grown-up of you.”

“I’ve had some time to think about things.”

“I bet,” he says. “You shouldn’t be sidelined like this. We need you in the business.” He looks like he is considering saying more, but then he flags down the waitress and says, “You have to see what my friend did.”

“That’s fantastic,” she says, with big eyes, as she starts toward the kitchen. Then she steps back toward our table and says, “Actually, it kinda is.”

The “actually” interests me more than the praise.

▴ ▴ ▴

“It’s a new world,” Pooch is saying. “Besides the web stuff, there’s this crazy new design.”

“That sounds okay. All that ‘80s stuff was starting to feel stale.” It’s nice to talk to someone who understands what I was talking about, the same big headlines and ironic stock photos over and over again. Even though Pooch wasn’t what we called a creative—a writer or art director—he is in advertising because he loves being close to the headlines and the layouts and the photo shoots.

“You wouldn’t recognize this stuff,” he says. There’s a tone I’ve never heard in his voice before: the kind of contempt you hear in small towns, fear that thinks it’s something better than fear, fear that thinks it’s common sense, fear that doesn’t know it’s hate. “It’s very punk rock.”

“Really,” I say, and can’t imagine what he’s talking about—I can’t imagine actual punk rock being applied to art direction. I suspect he isn’t using the term in the most rigorous possible way.

“Would they have it at the Walker?” I ask.

“The Walker is the mothership,” he says.

We hear a crash. Then, a voice I recognize as our waitress’s. “Oh no, oh no,” she says as the quieter sounds of dishes being picked up replace the gawking silence.

▴ ▴ ▴

After lunch, I drive down Hennepin Avenue, pivoting where the city opens up into green spaces, Loring Park on one side, the sculpture garden brightened by the cherry spoon on the other. I head south to the squat, brick-and-glass modern building that houses the Walker and the Guthrie Theater. The Guthrie side is elegant with glass, but the Walker side strikes me as more piled than built, a heap of blocks. Or maybe I’m just a little too aware of the essential childishness of the creative mind.

No, not childish, childlike. Whatever.

Inside, I understand the purpose of those blocks: containment and definition.

Impossibly white walls, boring and bright as heaven, provide the most vigorous frames. Ever since I first stepped into this place, as an eighteen-year-old, shaken by driving the city freeways for the first time, these galleries were what possibility looked like. This is why humans invented cleaning, millennia before they understood hygiene: to achieve this purity, to allow things to become suns.

On that first visit to the Walker—a three-hour drive to a place I did not yet know, my first lone visit to a city of any kind—lost, rattled by traffic, honked at and yelled at by a man with the fat face and violent eyes of a Quinn Martin police commissioner, speeding away from the encounter, not knowing if I was in the right neighborhood, stopping at a Burger King somewhere (where?) and asking for directions, speaking for the first time to Black people, so I could stand next to artwork even my beloved art teacher Mr. Gould dismissed with a complacent smirk, I stepped inside and saw someone I knew: the older brother of our class president. He was someone who had spoken softly, who was better friends with the girls than with the boys, and who had gone to Harvard, in part to escape the silence of the Minnisapa nice guys and the cruelties of the not-so-nice Minnisapa guys. He was spending the summer in Minneapolis, interning somewhere, and, on that particular afternoon, attending a play at the Guthrie, which shared a lobby with the Walker. We’d greeted each other warmly, two small-town strays, and, before he disappeared into a Restoration comedy, we’d had the easy conversation that the striving accomplished young have.

▴ ▴ ▴

On this winter day more than fifteen years later, I find the magazines Pooch mentioned in the Walker’s bookstore.

He wasn’t kidding about the new style. It is punk as applied to graphic design: neon green type, gap-toothed kerning, “R AYGU N,” (a comma in the masthead), line spacing that harasses the line beneath it, hipster musicians with their eyes covered by sunglasses and their midriffs exposed, broth-colored light; no, urine-colored light. Then there is émigré. A dark red cover, possibly mocking the term “full bleed,” a black mass of ink in the shape of what looks like a fedora or an anvil with a caliper dangling from it, the word Broad outlined in cartoony type and, below that, the word Cast in another outlined cartoony font filled in with pink. Even the dingbats—the typographic odds and ends that printers use to fill space look like they’ve just been to an S and M club and a therapy session.

God has given the world an assignment: tell Duane that every feeble assurance he’s grasped for in design, every escape from human messiness, every deceitful moment of purification and control that he’s ever indulged in has been ripped from him.

Well, fuck you, world. Kern this.

▴ ▴ ▴

I spend the rest of the afternoon at the gym, doing my best to transform the “fuck you” into something sweeter and more serene. The irritation that’s been cross hatching my brain lifts and, as I sit in my car in the parking lot, I think of my mother, and I think of the 60 percent of me that showed up to her funeral, which I viewed as one more thing to cross off a to-do list, because it interfered with the sweet shallow momentum of my career at that time. Yes, my stupid career. And I sob. Or at least I think that’s why I’m sobbing.

▴ ▴ ▴

On Wednesday, I wake to the petty introspection I’d grown accustomed to.

But at 9:30 I receive a call. It’s Pooch Labrador.

“Do you think you could come in and talk to our creative director between Christmas and New Year’s?"

“But I’ve got a non-compete,” I say, flustered.

“Those are always negotiable,” Pooch says.

“What can I do to make this happen,” I say, pivoting rapidly to my old can-do self.

“Show up and don’t say anything stupid,” he says.

“Awesome.” Easier said than done.

“I do want you to know that you’ll be coming in at one level below where you were. You’d be a senior art director, not a creative director, and you’d report to Greg Bryant.” Bryant had been at MegaMeta—the agency where I worked before founding what I still call my agency—before I got there. I didn’t know him but I knew him: He is, vaguely, "one of us" in that he views a good headline and a smart layout as a moral achievement. He is neither a sellout nor a prima donna. Family man. Suburban. B+ talent, A+ personality. He is strategically bland.

“That still sounds awesome,” I say, with too much adamance.

“Cool,” he says.

With that, a feeling of exhilaration and fear enters me with such vehemence I check to see if the windows are open. They aren’t.

▴ ▴ ▴

That next Sunday, feeling the need to resolve the sad afternoon light, I search for a piece of poetry by Patricia Hampl, who lives around here, that Franny had read me when I was first without work. The poem still resonates, shows me how even when everything around me feels deeply imperfect—as it does—the light falling on it is still a kind of perfection. I set the text, about light falling on imperfection, in 12-point Garamond in a single line on a horizontal white card. The moment I begin working on the card my hands and my eyes feel better, like dogs allowed to fetch. I spec’d some nice but not fussy card stock on a Post-it note and stuck it on the layout.

As I drive the keyline to the printer, passing the diners and bars and storefront churches and indifferent steak houses of University Avenue, I think about the designs I’d seen at the Walker. I can’t quite bring myself to like them—liking needs to be effortless, what you feel for Sports Center or Neapolitan ice cream. Or what I feel for Franny, the woman who, despite her better instincts, has stuck with me through all this.

But I do feel the beginning of admiration. Admiration can be negotiated and achieved. Especially as I consider émigré a little more, there is something in its incisions and muddinesses and asymmetries and dissonances that feels like the designer has included parts of himself that had been edited out of more streamlined designs. Not quite grief—but something. After feeling the shock of the new, I sense something both comic and classic in the layouts; with a little more time, I will perceive the grids the designs carefully transgress.

The dude at the print shop lifts the flap, checks to see if everything is in order, reads the text, silently, to himself, smiles wistfully, and says, “True enough, brother.” But the design itself now feels a little too perfect.

▴ ▴ ▴

It’s the day after a perfunctory Christmas at my sister’s (presents, meal, church), and I’ve driven through nearly-empty gleaming downtown Minneapolis to meet with the creative director at Pooch’s firm. I park on the street and wipe the sweat off my hands. The mirrored walls of the building giddily reconstitute me.

My nervousness can’t cancel the love I have always felt for places where things are created; for lit, populated, industrious spaces. I shoulder through a revolving door. I have unnecessarily complicated feelings about revolving doors. I like them, because they are all big city and technicolor movies, but I also question whether they ask more of us than a door should. There is all that timing and committing and then that odd enclosed dance and then being spat back out.

I set down my portfolio to sign the guest book; my life’s work leans against my leg. I wipe my hands on my chinos and sign with a self-conscious flurry. I’m art directing my signature now. The security guard shrugs at the ink on the page, the elevator opens, accepts me, closes and breathily ascends several floors, and reopens on a glass-fronted office. A few employees move through, oblivious and earnest. They might as well be in an aquarium. I assume they are project managers; they have the look of people quietly fending off chaos with to-do lists. On the window beside the door are three names in a discrete sans serif font with an ampersand which, according to what passes for legend around here, changes color every year, like a corporate mood ring. Their logo is now a snooty green. Swomebody wants to be a conswultancy.

The receptionist sits behind a wall of Christmas cards from photographers and printers and color separators and clients. Rather than thinking about the sentiments, if any, that the cards contain, I ask myself why printers’ holiday cards invariably suck. The receptionist brightly asks, “How can I help you?”

I’m tempted to be glib or to make the question “how can I help you?” seem more profound than it was ever intended to be. But I resist temptation and say, “I’m here to meet Greg Bryant."

“Wonderful. He’ll be right with you.”

I sit in an oversized olive chair daubed with teal and mauve and embellished with doodles. I’ve looked at the magazines and wondered at the fashion ads— seemingly concept-free, unless pouting is a concept—and I’m wiping my nervous hands on my pants when Greg emerges. He also looks cheerful. He’s wearing loafers, khakis, and a navy Ralph Lauren polo. I’m wearing Timberlands, chinos, and a Brooks Brothers oxford. Close enough.

“Good to see you, Duane,” he says, as we walk toward his office. “I don’t think we’ve met but we have mutual friends.”

“Exactly,” I say. As I mentioned earlier, I know his brand. That, unfortunately, means he knows mine.

“Of course, Mr. Labrador has great things to say about you,” he says, with perhaps just a trace of irony. “And I’ve seen some of your work from the past several years."

I’m trying to read his tone—or rather, the strategy behind his tone—and I can’t.

He has achieved a large corner cube, filled with Pantone markers and layouts and pictures of his wife and children. There’s none of the forced wackiness which is the sign of lesser creatives in lesser agencies. A Macintosh sits grumpily in one corner, next to his drafting board.

A subordinate approaches, realizes Greg is with me, and shoots him a can I talk with you soon? look. Greg knows the small, strong satisfaction of having your opinion matter.

“Let’s see what you have,” he says, turning toward me, away from his drawing board. I rest my open portfolio on my knees.

“Nice,” he says, and I explain and flip the pages.

“Nice.”

“Yes.”

“Very good.”

“I remember that,” he says when he see the print ads associated with a TV campaign. “Nice seeing these. You know I always have loved print. More disciplined.” We both know people who have built their portfolios on TV commercials salvaged by sound men and directors and editors and special effects people and sheer money. Print is just you, a writer, and a blank page.

I agree with Greg, both because I actually agree and because agreeing is what I am going to do today. Even with the agency at half strength during the holiday week, there is work going on around me, people adjusting keylines and brainstorming ideas in conference rooms and discussing schedules and routing color separations. The fact that the office is half empty just highlights the beloved particulars more: the flap of proofs, the hiss of adhesives, the collision of voices intersecting at a concept, the shish and clack of an account executive’s strides, the flutter of gossip, and the lilt of war stories. I know these sounds.

When my mother was in the hospital, she was oddly happy, and I’d at first thought it was because she was at peace with dying. But then I realized something else was going on: she’d been a nurse. She loved the familiar sounds of her workplace.

▴ ▴ ▴

We finish my portfolio and the creative director says, “The work’s great. Let’s talk about the last months."

Jesus. There will be an accounting, after all.

“The past months have been tough,” I say.

I add, “I love this business.” It feels like the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever said.

“I know,” he says. “What happened to you happens to so many people. You get to a place where you’re doing well, but you’re just a little too cocky, you don’t quite know what you’ve got, you think you’re untouchable.

And the next thing you know you’re the first to get laid off because you’re single and too ‘f-you’ by half and then you realize how lucky you are when you are working and you realize that attitude that felt so smart and righteous really was just immaturity. Or maybe you just get tired of drinking scotch in your underwear."

This was, let’s just say, a little too spot on.

Except it isn’t. (There was no actual liquor.)

Except it is. (The swamp and stain of the self can be 100 proof.)

I look at the pictures of the wife and the children, and the smart, slightly conservative layouts, and the Pantone markers he has not quite given up for the Mac. Those layouts are maybe too conservative. The 1980s hangs on them like a smell. If I were to put my thumb over the logo, I wouldn’t know who the client was.

“Exactly,” I say. He has described my last months with more sympathy than I ever expected.

“Good,” he says. “I just want to confirm that what we have open is a senior art director position.”

“Cool,” I say.

“A step down,” he says, “from where you were.”

“I understand, and I’m eager to get back to work.”

“Good, I just didn’t want there to be any ambiguity.”

“I understand. And thank you.” But I don’t quite want to thank him.

“Don’t thank me yet. The decision isn’t final.”

“Of course.”

“That said, we hope to make the decision sooner rather than later.”

“Thanks for considering me,” I say.

“Thanks for coming in,” he says in the purposely clipped tone of someone who remembers he is conducting a job interview. I sense he wants to say more about what we share—the love of ideas flurrying onto paper, the love of concepts buffed by revision, the love of commerce as a soft spiritual exercise which gets you off your couch and into the world. But instead he beckons to the subordinate who needed to speak with him earlier. The junior bounds up, holding a layout. I nod and let myself out.

▴ ▴ ▴

As I’m coming out, walking through the acre of light-filled lobby, so glossy and swirled with marble that I want to skate on it, I see my old partner Brian half obscured by the revolving door. He has his portfolio.

We can’t avoid each other. I step toward him and extend my hand. “Good to see you,” I say.

He looks up sluggishly. “Oh, yes, Duane. Good to see you.”

Neither of us is supposed to be here. I am not supposed to be working at all. Partners such as Brian do not interview with other firms.

“Interview upstairs?” I ask, deciding to lean into the awkwardness.

He winces. He looks tired. “Yes.”

“Well, good luck with it,” I say.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’ll knock ‘em dead,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, not at all convincingly. He wants to say more.

I wait.

“Don’t tell anybody. Even my wife doesn’t know.”

“Of course, I won’t. Of course.”

“We gave it a hell of a try, didn’t we,” he says.

“Yes, we did,” I say. At first, I think this is an acknowledgement of my departure. But it is something deeper: the firm is failing.

He begins to weep. I give him room.

When he is done, he says. “I’m sorry. It was a tough Christmas.” His face is raw and wet.

“I bet,” I say.

He composes himself. “How do I look?”

“Let’s see if we can’t get the security guard to let you use the bathroom on this floor to clean up.”

“Thanks, man,” he says. “We were partners.” He says it joyously, and sadly, like a boxer in a black-and-white movie, reflecting on past glories.

“Yes, we were,” I say.

When I ask the security guard if Brian can use the bathroom, he says, “You got it, brother.” He says it like a man who knows a job interview can save your life. I think of the waitress at Chez Bananas, the dishes crashing around her.

▴ ▴ ▴

New Year’s passes and I hear nothing. I stay at Franny’s, so I can whine at her in person. I give the agency her number.

The morning of January 2 the weather is very cold—below zero. The sky is comically blue; the sun, cartoonish yellow. Franny is in the kitchen, which smells of coffee and toast.

I drink coffee and look out the window at the backyard. It is pure white snow surrounded by a high fence, backed by the random planes of garage and house and the fuss of winter trees.

There is a concept in design called negative space. Negative space is the part of the page you do not fill. Its blankness allows the element on the page to stand out more vividly. It is typically hard to convince clients of the value of this space. They want to fill it up with coupons or “sell copy” or another product photograph. This is not unreasonable; they bought the space. But when you succeed in keeping the page uncluttered and clean, what is left on the page ignites.

▴ ▴ ▴

I think of this because I am staring at Franny’s snow-covered backyard. A bird on a wire wobbles and catches himself.

I ask, “Are there supposed to be birds in Minnesota in January?”

She answers, “Yes, there are some. Not many, but some.”

“This guy looks like he missed the bus.”

“What?”

“Well, when he landed he kind of slipped and righted himself. It looked like he didn’t want anybody to see.”

“That didn’t work out so well.”

“He looks awkward. Can birds be awkward?”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re in nature and isn’t nature elegant?”

“He’s a guy trying to do the right thing and not quite nailing the landing,” she says.

At that point, the phone rings. It is Pooch’s firm. As the head of Human Resources introduces herself, and I hold the abyss that is a phone to my ear, I see Franny look out the window and smile. The bird is apparently singing.

I, on the other hand, fear he might be singing the ancient song of my people, “I could screw this up. I could screw this up. I could screw this up.”