Formerly Fingerman (2 page)

This was the vine.

It was three weeks before Brad got a response to his many job applications. Apparently, there was one single agency in town that was both hiring an associate creative director and hadn't heard the story of Brad's imposed hiatus from the business. Red Light District Advertising.

He was perfect for the Red Light job. Now he just had to get hired before someone over there talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to someone back at Overthink—which, considering how small the world of New York advertising agencies was, would probably be by about four thirty the following afternoon.

But his interview was the next morning. If he nailed that, he had a fighting chance. And fight Brad would. Red Light was a much better agency than Overthink, and the new position would include a paycheck that was a schload bigger than his old one.

In the meantime, Owen tried his best to keep Brad's spirits up.

“Hey man, you've got to see the bright side of the situation. You're a smart guy with a hot wife. You have an interview at your dream job tomorrow. And your hamburger commercial is going to run on
America's Biggest Hair
tonight.”

“Pizza commercial.”

“Even better! Brad, you've got to make the best of it. Look at me. I have my last test next week. And you've got your interview tomorrow. You never know what could happen. We'll both be moving on to bigger and better things before you know it.”

“Fingerson!”

A squat, stubby man wearing a short sleeve shirt and a nametag that read “Chuck—Ass. Manager” stood in the entrance of the restaurant scowling at the giant, schlumpy chickens in front of him.

“It's Fingerman.”

“You and Owen clock out early. It's too slow today. I'm losing money on you.”

“But what about our dinner?”

“You don't work a full shift, I don't feed you. You know the rules.”

Brad could see Owen deflate inside his chicken suit.

“Oh, man. I was counting on the money and the meal.”

“Clock out.”

Before the axe dropped at Overthink, Brad was pulling in a hundred and fifty grand a year. Not amazing by New York standards, but pretty good considering the effort he put in. Plus, he had a couple of marginally funny frozen pizza spots currently on the air.

Aside from that, there had been a series of minor victories in his career—a few impressive print ads, some strong web stuff, and a couple of spec commercials made with a friend's camera and a crew he paid with take-out Chinese, beer, and cigarettes. He had arrived at Overthink four years ago as an art director, and managed only to languish in relative obscurity. Brad presented plenty of good work to his boss, but, like ninety percent of the conceptual work in the industry, it never got produced for some reason or another—the account team changed the strategy, the storyboards didn't test well, the client thought the background color was poopy, whatever. There was always something keeping him from scratching the itch that only produced work created solely by him could reach. But really, that's why he was in this business in the first place.

Advertising tends to be the refuge of cowardly artists—the almost-were screenwriters, painters, photographers, sculptors, glassblowers, novelists, and playwrights—who didn't have the derring-do to try their craft without a comprehensive health plan and company-matching 401(k). Pussies.

Brad's chosen medium of unexploited talent was painting. He had always doodled, drawn, and even photographed, but his real love was painting. The thing that made him profoundly happy was capturing his unique vision on canvas. He just didn't ever do it.

Not anymore anyway. Once upon a time Brad spent late nights in the studio, alone with his brushes and paints and single-minded vision. He even had a few shows back in his hometown of San Antonio. Oh, big stuff.

All it took was one overly practical college mentor to point out that most painters died broke and usually with syphilis. It was suggested that Brad find a major that used his talent in a more pragmatic way.
How can you turn that wonderful vision of yours into a job? Advertising! Ah ha! Why make pretty pictures for free (if we're being honest here) when you can make them for big corporations that pay you a lot of money? Then you can paint on your own time. It really is the safe way.

And with that, Brad and his irrevocably cracked artistic foundation were ushered out of that sage advisor's office to make way for a girl who was torn between a career in nursing or maybe helping out at her mother's flower shop.

Since then, Brad had spent almost a decade pumping out his share of close-enough-to-creatively-satisfying advertising ideas. They had served to sate his ambition the way a Kate Hudson movie makes you
feel
like you were entertained even though you know you weren't. The effect is masturbatory, but short of taking an actual risk, there is little else.

And then there was the vodka job. As far as onanistic art went, that was a game changer. A sort of make-good for the indignity of spending his twenties void of creative integrity. Maybe the best and worst thing that ever happened to Brad.

The vodka job ended in disaster, of course, the proportions of which threatened to make a verb out of Brad's name industry-wide. But it also gave him a taste of the possible. He wanted back in. And he wanted back in at Red Light.

The position at Red Light would be a dream. The accounts were high-rolling, super visible, and inevitably award-winning. And it paid two twenty, which would be enough of a jump to quickly pay back all that he had borrowed from his savings to cover his lie to Gracie.

Not that she would care. Or notice. Brad's wife's job as a divorce attorney paid very well. She had started specializing in gay divorces about ten years ago. Her bosses at Hunter & Partners thought she was crazy, but she carved out a niche and kept making them money. Eventually, she started making the firm so much money that they couldn't pay her enough to stick around. Gracie pulled stakes and walked out to start her own firm. Gay divorce became all the rage and Gracie was in the pole position to take advantage of it.

Gay couples in Manhattan tend to land in a juicy financial demographic, often with the high net worth associated with ambitious professionals who don't have kids. Closets full of Jimmy Choos. Duplexes with views of the park. Vacation homes in the Hamptons. Money.

Legally married or not, these disentanglements always involved plenty to sort out, and by the time the rest of New York's tony law firms had figured it out, Gracie had firmly established herself as the lawyer of choice among the homoccenti. Now she set her own hours, worked from home a good deal of the time, and was making a boatload of money doing it.

Not that Gracie was driven by money. She wasn't. What she craved was success. Which meant the net effect of her gay divorce domination was that she wasn't exactly a stickler for financial details in her own life. She was too busy working to care. She could tell you precisely what the cheating cocksucker her client was suing had spent on Polish hookers and Cialis in the month of October two years ago, but ask her what her own cable bill was and she'd have to hazard a guess that it was somewhere between three and four hundred dollars. It was one fifty.

In her mind, if there was cash in the account, there was cash to spend. And there was always cash in the account. As far as she was concerned, Brad's salary was a cute addition to their bank statement. Hat money.

But still. As a point of pride, Brad wanted to contribute. Actually, he wanted to be the breadwinner, but that would mean doing something big. That would take nothing short of creating and selling a groundbreaking campaign comparable to the “No Means Yes” campaign for Brass Balls energy drink that recently swept the Cannes award show and had become overnight, to the dismay of N.O.W., the national let's-do-a-shot catchphrase of backward-hat-wearing meatheads. It was, incidentally, a campaign that was done at Red Light.

So maybe he was close.

Brad's walk home had taken him a good fifteen blocks out of his way. He wished it were more. These days there always seemed to be an excuse to stop by the grocery store or pick up the dry cleaning or sit by the river on the bench between the Latino fishermen and the crazy homeless guy and not talk about his day for forty-five minutes. Once he got home he would put on his Happy Brad™ face and dodge and parry and worry that he was a painfully transparent lout. But not yet. Just a few more seconds, please.

He certainly wasn't going to jump into the river, but it felt so good to sit and stare and pretend he was going to. He would hit the water and sink peacefully into the silt at the bottom without worrying that all the toxic waste and spent needles were ruining his Scotch & Soda blazer. Impossible on all levels, but satisfying to imagine.

One day he and Gracie would laugh about the whole Brad-got-fired-and-lied-about-it thing. At some point, years from now, Brad would have a hell of a dinner party story to tell as he and his fellow titans of industry sat amidst some perfect New York City elite social circle tableau. Probably on the Upper West Side. Brad would close his eyes and shake his head with an aw-shucks smile as he took a sip of his cabernet while his wife told him to go ahead and tell everyone. Gracie would laugh and maybe wink at him knowingly, although he honestly couldn't remember her ever winking before and would she really pick up a habit like that at this point in her life? Maybe. Maybe she would wink at him, now that things were all better. It helped to think that these things were possible.

In a few months, the benches would be too cold for anyone but the filthy gentleman sitting ten feet downwind. Then what? Brad would kill time walking the streets in the bitter cold? Camping out at a coffee shop? Oy. Running an errand in the late afternoon could be explained away with relative ease. But sitting blankly in front of an untouched latte on the tail end of a work day? Risky business. Something had to change before then.

Gracie stood at the stove in the kitchen cooking dinner. She was a strict vegan, so the safe bet was that it was some form of tofu. Tofu-shaped chicken cutlets. Tofu cut to look like steak. Tofu flavored to smell like barbecue. But probably tofu. That was the thing about vegans. They're happy to wax poetic about how good the lifestyle is for you and deliver smug lectures about the wide variety of food options you can have when you're a vegan. Usually though, things boiled down to one question: What shape would you like your tofu?

Gracie being a militant vegan made Brad a vegan. Sort of. He was vegan when Gracie was around. Mainly because she did all the cooking, ordered all the food from Fresh Direct, and spent her Saturday mornings at the Union Square farmers' market. Outside of the apartment and left to his own devices, though, Brad was perfectly fine with a slice or a cheese steak or a stick of mystery meat from the guys with the carts who called him
my friend
. Didn't matter. We're all going to die soon enough.

At restaurants with Gracie, Brad stuck with the rice dishes. It was easier than listening to a mini-lecture on exactly how the steak he was savoring was killed and hung by a hook through its ribs in a meat locker until it could be served as a rotting corpse. Gracie always claimed she could smell the rage of the dead cow seeping through his pores for days afterward. It wasn't worth it and he liked risotto.

So really, he wasn't a vegan. More of a vague-an. A very strict diet of organic, pesticide-free, sustainable, biodynamic, hormone-free, non-GMO, locally grown, free-trade products. Unless he was eating a bacon cheeseburger at the deli next to his office. Somehow Gracie never smelled any rage from the stuff she didn't actually see him eat.

Her attitude toward consuming meat was another reason to keep the whole Chicken Shack thing on the DL. As if wearing the chicken costume/sweat box weren't enough. Handing out coupons for rotting corpses of rage would definitely set her off. Being underemployed was complicated.

Brad remained in the doorway of the kitchen. He wanted a beer badly, but not quite badly enough to disturb the serenity of Gracie not noticing him. She was beautiful. And successful. And focused. He should have stayed out longer. Pretended he was working late.

Did she suspect? She was so smart, so sharp, it was hard for him to imagine that she hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Some of the subconscious tells he must be showing. A disturbance in his psyche. The whimpering nightmares that started out of nowhere. Something. Or was her shrewd lawyer mind willfully overlooking what must be at least a tiny bit apparent to her? Did she love him that much? If that was the case, Brad had no choice but to consider himself a lucky man. His wife cared enough about him to let him act like a jackass. No judgments. Just unmolested jackassery. Would he do that for her? He would now. Brad decided then and there that if she ever got herself into a situation like this, he would totally overlook any crazy machinations and bad acting she might employ. But he really, really hoped it would never happen to Gracie.

Finally she looked over.

“Dude, you smell like shit.”

Gracie was never one to mince words. It was something Brad had come to accept. He wasn't sure if her cut-to-the-chase word choices were a result of her chosen profession or if that was the way she was wired and accordingly had become successful as a no bullshit attorney.
Dude
was what she called him when she was happy to see him.
You smell like shit
was what she said when he didn't smell good.

“I went to the gym.”

Change the subject, you idiot. Make up some work gossip.

“Hey, looks like they might go with my taste test campaign. If Garbarini doesn't screw it up. Did I tell you he's cheating on his boyfriend?”

“Does he need a lawyer? Have him call me.”

“Oh, uhh . . . I . . .”

Dammit. Should have thought that one out more.