Better Than This (3 page)

After we gained our degrees we both finished up in San Francisco working in the advertising business. Marcus in design. Me in account management. We were at separate agencies when we came up with the idea of starting up alone. We recognized that our individual strengths could suit a partnership. That is to say Marcus handled the creative side while I dealt with the clients. It worked well that way. Being likable is one thing, but our clients would never have entrusted their brands with somebody like Marcus. Even in the casual business environment of California he made them uncomfortable. They expected advertising people to be a little quirky but they were also entrusting us with a lot of money. They wanted reassurance. They didn’t expect us to wear a suit and tie and behave like bankers, but neither did they want to hire somebody who wore faded jeans and a Chilli Peppers “I-shirt and looked like he probably got high a lot, which is the impression Marcus managed to convey without trying. Even that could have been forgiven if he could talk the talk, but numbers and markets, demographic targets, reach percentages and all the other bullshit jargon that advertising is riddled with was all just so much cotton wool to Marcus. He couldn’t make sense of it. Had no feel for, or even the faintest interest in it.

Advertising, like any business, has its own language, and like any business it was invented for a reason. The reason is to make the mundane and pedestrian sound impressive. It is meant to exclude those who don’t speak the language, to make them part of the uninitiated, to imply they don’t understand the complex nature and rhythm, the subtleties of the science of advertising. Even the clients aren’t expected to understand. Nobody even wants them to. Not even themselves. People are impressed by the incomprehensible. It makes them feel they are in safe hands, that people who know more than they do are flying the plane.

And so we produce masses of documented research to define a target audience in such and such a demographic. People who read this magazine and watch that TV show and shop at a particular supermarket rather than the one along the street, and we talk about penetration and reach (with a straight face) and show the client a concept to sell their new formula shampoo which in the end boils down to this: We show some images of a gorgeous young woman with incredible hair and a terrific body who attracts good looking men like bees to honey. The message is: Buy my shampoo and this will be you. Period. And the more a client is able to spend, the more they will sell. And that’s pretty well what all advertising comes down to in the end, with slight variations, and the only thing you really have to do is find a way to make your ads shine out from the rest. And nobody believes it anyway, though secretly a part of all of us wants to, which is why it works. Rocket science it ain’t. But we make it sound as if it is, and the client wouldn’t have it any other way. It fits in with all the other stuff to do with revenues and cash flows, above and below the line costs, forecasts and projections, and all the things Marcus simply wasn’t good at.

He was an ideas man, a gifted conceptualist. He dreamed up wonderful, innovative and clever campaigns, but put him in front of a room full of people and give him a presentation to make and he would turn into a mumbling wreck. Words would lose their meaning, numbers would transform into hieroglyphics. He would lose his place, emphasize the wrong phrase, misquote a figure, and if asked a question would blink myopically behind his round Lennonesque glasses and freeze like a rabbit caught in headlights on a lonely highway. In short he was a disaster, and we both knew it, which was why that morning when we met with the bank I was going to be doing all the talking.

Traffic seemed to be sluggish. I checked the time. I was running late because of the argument I’d had with Sally. All being well it was a twenty five thirty minute run into town, on a bad day forty-five. It was seven thirty and though the meeting wasn’t until nine Marcus and I had arranged to meet at the office first for a quick cup of coffee and a final run through of the presentation, though as our entire future rested on this meeting I had made damn sure I knew every word by heart anyway.

The traffic began to slow, thickening through the lanes like a stodgy cake batter. I wondered what the hold-up was, and then to my dismay I found myself slowly coming to a halt. I sat in my car wondering what the hell was going on. Every lane was at a standstill stretching as far ahead as I could see, and it wasn’t until I turned on the radio that I learned a truck carrying yogurt had overturned on the freeway up ahead of me. There was no exit ramp between where I was stuck and the accident, so there was nothing to do but to sit it out. I checked the time again then I picked up my phone and called Marcus.

He answered on the second ring. “Hey, it’s me,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Just hitting Bay Street,” he answered.

“Great.”

Marcus lived across the Bay in Sausalito and his journey took him over the Golden Gate Bridge every day. From Bay to the office in South Beach was a short drive. He was going to arrive early, as I should have.

“What’s the problem?” Marcus said suspiciously.

“I might be a little late.” I told him where I was and was met with silence.

“Dammit, Nick! How late?”

“I don’t know, nothing’s moving right now.” I had the radio tuned to a local news station which had a traffic helicopter on the scene from which a reporter was describing the mayhem below, conjuring images of fire department personnel and police officers spread all around the cordoned off accident. It sounded like a mess.

“Christ,” Marcus muttered. “Maybe I should call ahead. Tell the bank what’s happened and postpone the meeting.”

I didn’t think that was a good idea. In the bank’s view I’d already dicked them around for long enough by avoiding their calls and repeated demands for a meeting. I’d realized too late that I was pushing my luck and in the end when our accountant had told me the bank was going to cut us off cold, I’d had to practically plead for a chance to put our case. I hadn’t told Marcus things were this bad but I knew I’d used up all our chances at the bank and I needed whatever residue of goodwill might be left in their cold financiers’ hearts. Asking for a postponement now wasn’t going to wash, yogurt truck or no.

“No good,” I said. “Besides they’ll just want to start without me.”

“How can we start without you?” Marcus questioned, and then in the silence that followed, the answer dawned on him. The tone of his voice which until then had been laced with sullen resentment altered to one of panicked disbelief. “You mean they’ll want me to go along anyway?” He thought it through another step. “You’re not suggesting that I should do this presentation?”

“Maybe it would be a good idea to go over it.” I counted to three, waiting for his reaction.

“Are you serious? I can’t do it. You know I’d screw it up!

Damn it, Nick, this is what you do. There’s no way I can pull it off.”

If there had been another way I wouldn’t have even suggested the idea, but unless we could persuade the bank not to pull the rug from under us we were finished. At least if Marcus made our case we’d have a chance, however slim, and there was always the hope that I could still arrive late and take over. It came down to the lesser of two evils.

“Listen, you’re not used to this kind of thing that’s all. But you can do it as well as I can,” I said.

“That’s bullshit and we both know it.”

“All you have to do,” I said soothingly, ‘is go over the material now and get it fixed in your mind. I’ll probably be there anyway, this is only a precaution.”

He was quiet for a few seconds as he absorbed the knowledge that I was actually serious. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this.”

“I didn’t plan it this way, Marcus. I didn’t make that truck crash.”

“The way you see it, Nick, you never plan any of the shit that happens, but somehow it still does.”

I heard the echo of Sally’s recrimination in Marcus’s tone. A mixture of anger and disappointment. It was the disappointment that got to me. We were in trouble because at my insistence we’d decided to pitch for a new client. Spectrum was a software company that had just been taken over. The injection of capital meant they were a prize in their own right, but if we won the account we’d have a foot into the parent company too. It was a dream opportunity, one that could make us serious money. In fact it was a lot like Office Line Or at least that’s how Marcus had viewed it. But sometimes you have to run with your gut feel, and that’s what I did. Even when things started going wrong, and money became short I knew in my bones we were doing the right thing, so to make life easier I just didn’t tell Marcus what was going on. I thought we would get the account and everything would be okay, but then the bank stepped in, and finally I had no choice but to admit what was happening. I can still see him blinking in disbelief, then hurt clouding his eyes as he took off his glasses to polish the lenses.

And now Marcus thought I was letting him down again, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. If I didn’t make it he had to do the presentation to the bank or we were finished. “Look, I know how you feel, I got us into this situation and I should be the one to get us out, but I can’t do anything about this. I don’t know what else to say to you.”

“No,” he said heavily. “I don’t know either.”

“I might still get there,” I said, though ahead of me the traffic wasn’t moving. “But if I don’t, stall as long as you can, take your time. Don’t rush it. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”

He hung up, and in that moment I felt our friendship had slid a little further in its inexorable momentum downwards. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t looking good. I was sitting motionless with the roof down, breathing in clouds of pollution with the sun beginning to bake the top of my head.

On the radio the woman reporter in the helicopter was still talking. I listened with growing impatience. I don’t know how she did it. The facts were that the overturned truck had blocked every city-bound lane on the freeway and that emergency services were trying to clear a route through. Somehow she managed to transform what was pretty simple information into something approximating a Hollywood epic. With increasing melodrama she related the scene below, describing overworked police trying to hold back the crowd of onlookers who’d abandoned their cars while desperate firefighters tried to contain the spread of the spilled load, which she made sound like a hazardous explosive chemical instead of raspberry yogurt.

“I think there’s a real concern by the authorities that we could have a pollution issue here.” Her tone was deeply serious, fraught with tension.

“I guess that could cause real problems,” the studio guy pronounced solemnly.

“Well, I guess it could…”

We were left wondering what kind of problems? A bad smell perhaps?

She kept piling information I didn’t need. All I wanted to know was how long I was going to be stuck there. Every time I glanced at the time another few minutes had dragged by bringing me ever closer to the most important meeting of my life which it seemed I would not be attending.

“It’s just like a parking lot down there,” the reporter said cheerfully. “Nothing’s moving at all,” she added in case we had missed the point.

I prayed for God to intervene. She announced that a lane might be cleared for traffic soon but ten minutes later nothing had changed. I kept thinking about Marcus arriving at the bank. He would stammer and hesitate as he tried to make sense of the presentation I’d prepared. Everything I’d worked for so far in my life was in danger of disappearing down the toilet. As the minutes continued to tick past and nothing moved I felt trapped and helpless. Every fifteen seconds I glanced at the time. My heart was racing and my palms were sweating. I tapped my hands on the wheel and wished that I still smoked. I couldn’t understand how it could take so long to clear at least one lousy lane. To focus on something constructive I started planning my route once I finally got off the damn freeway. I knew a parking building near the bank which I traced a mental route to, figuring if I went there instead of to the office which was maybe a fifteen-block walk from the bank I could save time. Of course if this had been any other city but San Francisco I could have caught a cab, but I didn’t even bother thinking about the impossible.

“So far there hasn’t been any progress on moving that truck,” the reporter said. “The tailback is getting longer by the minute. This is a real logjam we have here.” Then, sounding almost cheerful she said, “A lot of people are going to be getting very frustrated.”

I rolled my eyes. Give the woman a prize for her penetrating insight! Still nothing was moving. At eight-fifteen I began to wonder about fate and the meaning of it all, at the insignificance and pointless stupidity of life when it can be so profoundly affected by something as dumb as an overturned yogurt truck. I’d heard everything the reporter had to say a dozen times already. The sound of her voice began to piss me off. I imagined some doe eyed vacuous blonde with a bland smile who probably got paid too much for doing this crap, but I kept listening, frequently looking at my watch while I alternately cursed God who I knew didn’t exist anyway and the reporter with the irritating voice who I hoped went down with her chopper in a flaming pyre because she was driving me FUCKING CRAZY.

But finally she announced that at long last a lane had been cleared, and then another. Incredibly the traffic started to move. As I began to crawl forward I decided guiltily that maybe she wasn’t so bad after all and checking the time I nurtured a faint hope that I might make it on time. It was eight twenty-seven. The lanes ahead started merging, and then traffic was moving faster. I thanked God who I now believed in again, just to be on the safe side.

It took ten minutes to pass the truck, which was still on its side surrounded by fire service crew and police cars with flashing lights. The reporter said a crane was being brought in to lift it but I didn’t need to know any more so I turned off the radio. As I drove I picked up the phone and called Marcus.