Big Trouble (3 page)

So Puggy went looking for another place. He discovered that, if you walked just a short way in Coconut Grove, you could be in a whole different kind of neighborhood, a rich people's neighborhood, with big houses that had walls around them and driveway gates that opened by a motor. There were strange trees everywhere, big, complicated trees with roots going every which way and vines all over them and branches that hung way out over the street. Puggy thought it looked like a jungle.

He found a perfect tree to live in. It was just inside a rich person's wall, but across a big, densely vegetated yard from the house, so it was private. Puggy got into the tree by climbing the wall; he was a natural climber, even after many beers. About twenty feet up in the tree, where three massive limbs branched off from the trunk, there was a rickety, mossy wooden platform, a kids' treehouse from years before. Puggy fixed it up with some cardboard on the platform and a piece of plastic, from a construction site, that he could drape over the top when it rained. Sometimes he heard people talking in the house, but whoever they were, they never came back to this end of the yard.

Late at night, there was always music coming from one end of the house. It was some kind of music with a flute, soft, coming through the jungle to Puggy. He liked to lie there and listen to it. He was very happy the way things were going, both with his career and with his tree. It was the most secure, most structured, least turbulent existence he had ever known. It lasted for almost three weeks.

“I look at this ad,” the Big Fat Stupid Client From Hell was saying, “and it doesn't say to me, ‘Hammerhead Beer.'”

Eliot Arnold, of Eliot Arnold Advertising and Public Relations (which consisted entirely of Eliot Arnold), nodded thoughtfully, as though he thought the Client From Hell was making a valid point. In fact, Eliot was thinking it was a good thing that he was one of the maybe fifteen people in Miami who did not carry a loaded firearm, because he would definitely shoot the Client From Hell in his fat, glistening forehead.

At times like these—and there were many times like these—Eliot wondered if maybe he'd been a bit hasty, quitting the newspaper. Especially the way he'd done it, putting his foot through the managing editor's computer. He'd definitely burned a bridge there.

Eliot had spent twenty-one years in the newspaper business. His plan, coming out of college, had been to fight for Justice by using his English-major skills to root out and expose corruption. He got a job at a small daily newspaper, where he wrote obituaries and covered municipal meetings in which local elected officials and engineering consultants droned on for hours over what diameter pipe they needed for the new sewer line. Eliot, listening to this, slumped over a spiral reporter's notebook covered with doodles, figured there was probably some corruption going on there somewhere, but he had no idea how even to begin looking for it.

By the time he'd moved up to the big-time city newspaper, he'd given up on trying to root things out and settled into the comfortable niche of writing features, which it turned out he was good at. For years he wrote about pretty much whatever he wanted. Mostly he wrote what the higher honchos in the newsroom referred to, often condescendingly, as “offbeat” stories. They preferred
issues
stories, which were dense wads of facts, written by committees, running in five or six parts under some title that usually had the word “crisis” in it, like “Families in Crisis,” “Crisis in Our Schools,” “The Coming Water Crisis,” et cetera. These series, which were heavily promoted and often won journalism contests, were commonly referred to in the newsroom as “megaturds.” But the honchos loved them. Advocacy journalism, it was called. It was the hot trend in the newspaper business. Making a difference! Connecting with the readers!

Eliot thought that the readership of most of these series consisted almost entirely of contest judges. But more and more, he found himself getting ordered to work on mega-turds, leaving less and less time for him to work on stories he thought somebody might actually want to read.

The end came on the day when he was summoned to the office of the managing editor, Ken Deeber, who was seven years younger than Eliot. Eliot remembered when Deeber was a general-assignment reporter, just out of Princeton. He was articulate and personable, and he could be absolutely relied on to get at least one important fact wrong in every story, no matter how short. But Deeber did not write many stories; he was too busy networking. He rose through the ranks like a Polaris missile, becoming the youngest managing editor in the paper's history. He was big on issues stories. That's why he summoned Eliot to his office.

“How's it going, Eliot?” Deeber had said, starting things off. “Everything OK with you?”

“Well,” said Eliot, “I'm kind of . . .”

“The reason I ask,” said Deeber, who was not the least bit interested in whether or not everything was OK with Eliot, “is that John Croton tells me you haven't turned in a thing on the day-care project.”

The day-care project was the current megaturd. It was going to explain to the readers, in five parts with fourteen color charts, that there was a crisis in day care.

“Listen, Ken,” said Eliot, “There are already five people working on the . . .”

“Eliot,” said Deeber, the way a parent talks to a naughty child, “you were
given an assignment
.”

Eliot's assignment was to write a sidebar about the Haitian community's perspective on the day-care crisis. Deeber believed that every story had to have the perspective of every ethnic group. When he went through the newspaper, he didn't actually read the stories; he counted ethnic groups. He was always sending out memos like:
While the story on the increase in alligator attacks on golfers was timely and informative, I think more of an effort could have been made to include the Hispanic viewpoint
. The main reason why Deeber's car ignition had never been wired to a bomb is that reporters have poor do-it-yourself skills.

“I know I had an assignment,” said Eliot. “But I've been working on this story about . . .”

“The pelican story?” sneered Deeber. Eliot thought Princeton must have a course in sneering, because Deeber was good at it.

“Ken,” said Eliot, “it's an incredible story, and nobody else has it. There's this guy, this old Cuban guy in Key West, and he trains pelicans to . . .”

“Drop bombs,” sneered Deeber. “It's the most dumb-ass thing I ever heard.”

“Ken,” said Eliot. “This guy is
amazing
. He actually tried to use a trained pelican to
kill Castro
. Something went wrong, maybe the bomb malfunctioned, maybe the pelican got confused, but the thing apparently blew up outside a hotel in downtown Havana, sprayed pelican parts all over a bunch of French tourists, and the Cuban government claimed that it was some kind of atmospheric . . .”

“Eliot,” said Ken, “I don't think we're serving our readers with that kind of story.”

“But it's
true,
” said Eliot. He wanted to grab Deeber by his neck. “It's a
great
story. The guy
talked
to me, and he . . .”

“Eliot,” said Deeber, “Do you realize how
important
day care is to our readers? Do you realize how
many
of our readers have children in day care?”

There was a pause.

“Ken,” said Eliot, “do you realize how many of our readers have assholes?”

Deeber said, “I see no need to . . .”

“All of them!” shouted Eliot. “They all have assholes!”

Quite a few people in the newsroom heard that through the glass wall to Deeber's office. Heads were turning.

“Eliot,” said Deeber, “I'm
ordering
you right now to . . .”

“Let's do a series on it!” shouted Eliot. “RECTUMS IN CRISIS!” The entire newsroom heard that.

Deeber, aware that people were watching, put on his sternest expression.

“Eliot,” he said. “You work for me. You do what I tell you. I gave you an assignment. If you want to keep working at this newspaper, that assignment will be done, and it will be
in here
”—he pointed to his computer—“before you go home tonight.”

“Fine!” said Eliot. He stood up and crossed around to Deeber's side of the desk, which caused Deeber to scoot his chair backward into his credenza, knocking over several journalism contest awards.

Eliot said: “How about I put it in there RIGHT NOW?” Then he put his left foot through Deeber's computer screen. His foot got sort of stuck in there, so when he yanked it back out, Deeber's whole computer crashed to the floor. In the newsroom, there was a brief but hearty outbreak of applause.

Except for the time a drunk loading-dock employee drove a new $43,000 forklift into Biscayne Bay, nobody had ever been fired from the newspaper faster than Eliot. His coworkers expressed their sympathy and support; in fact, Eliot became a minor cult hero among reporters all over the country. But it was pretty clear he wasn't going to get another job in journalism, especially not in Miami, where he wanted to stay so he could be near his son, Matt, who lived with Eliot's ex-wife.

And so Eliot became Eliot Arnold Advertising and Public Relations, working out of a small office in Coconut Grove. At the beginning, he spent most of his time going around begging people to become his clients. But after a couple of years of hard work, he'd reached the point where he spent most of his time going around begging for his clients to pay the money they owed him. Either that, or he was listening to clients tell him why his work was not acceptable. This is what the Client From Hell was doing.

The Client From Hell's latest brainstorm was Hammerhead Beer, which tasted so awful that the first and only time Eliot put some in his mouth, he spat it out on his desk. Eliot thought Hammerhead Beer was an even worse idea than the Client From Hell's previous project, a theme park for senior citizens called Denture Adventure.

But the Client From Hell actually paid his bills some of the time, so Eliot had developed an advertising concept for the beer. The Client From Hell was looking at it, and offering his usual thoughtful brand of criticism.

“This sucks,” he said.

“Well, Bruce,” said Eliot, “I tried to . . .”

“Listen,” said the Client From Hell, who did not believe in letting other people finish their sentences as long as he had any kind of thought whatsoever floating around in his brain. “You know what my business philosophy is?”

I surely do, thought Eliot. Your business philosophy is to take money from your extremely wealthy father and piss it away on moronic ideas.

“No, Bruce,” he said, “what is your . . .”

“My business philosophy,” said the Client From Hell, “is that there's a lot of people in the world.”

To illustrate this point, the Client From Hell gestured toward the world. Several moments passed, during which Eliot waited hopefully for amplification.

“Well,” Eliot said, finally, “that's certainly . . .”

“And,” continued the Client From Hell, who had been waiting for Eliot to speak so he could interrupt him, “all those people WANT something. You know what they want?”

“No,” said Eliot. His plan was to go with short sentences.

“They want to
feel good
,” said the Client From Hell.

More moments passed.

“Ah,” said Eliot.

“Do you know what I mean?” said the Client From Hell. He stared at Eliot.

“Well,” said Eliot. “I . . .”

“NO YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!” shouted the Client From Hell, feeling better now that he was bullying a person who needed his money, which was his absolute favorite thing about being rich. “Because I gave you the
perfect concept
for Hammerhead Beer. The perfect concept! Which is
not
this piece of shit here.” He made a brushing-away gesture, the kind you make at flying insects, in the direction of Eliot's concept, which Eliot had stayed up late working on. It was a board on which Eliot had mounted a close-up photograph of a hammerhead shark, its mouth gaping between its two impossibly far-apart, alien eyeballs. Underneath the photograph, in large, black type, were these words:

 

 

“What the hell
is
this?” the Client From Hell demanded. “Why are you saying
ugly
here?”

“Well,” said Eliot, “I'm contrasting, in a kind of humorous . . .”

“Listen,” said the Client From Hell, whose idea of humor was—he had this on video, and watched it often—Joe Theisman getting the bottom half of his leg almost snapped off. “I don't want to see ugly. That is not the feeling I want. I
gave
you the concept already! I gave you the
perfect concept!
”