No Relation (5 page)

And it worked. It worked very well.

Two other factors helped to consolidate the fortunes of The Hemmingwear Company. The first was EH1’s version of the more modern business axiom “Location, location, location.” In early
1916, at the age of twenty-five, EH1 bought cheap industrial land just outside of Chicago. Over the decades, he and his successors, true to his vision of mass production, expanded the Chicago operation rather than building smaller factories in other parts of the country. One giant factory is more efficient than five smaller operations, provided you can economically deliver your product to those more distant markets. Well, EH1 had thought it all through. Even in the early years of the twentieth century, Chicago was emerging as the largest and most important rail hub in North America. It was no coincidence that the land EH1 bought in 1916, and on which The Hemmingwear Company’s massive manufacturing operation still sits, was and remains immediately adjacent to the enormous Chicago rail yards. It was a good idea back then to locate close to the railroad. It’s still a good idea today. By building and expanding his manufacturing right next to the Chicago rail hub, EH1 maximized efficiency, minimized product costs, and secured continental distribution in one genius stroke. Smart.

The second and perhaps even more important factor, at least in the beginning, was winning the exclusive contract to supply the U.S. Army with underwear as they were mobilizing to enter the Great War in 1917. In business, as in most things in life, timing is everything. It was a massive contract that played right into EH1’s vision of a narrow product line, mass-produced for a specific audience, in this case, some four million soldiers. EH1 used the contract to lever investment in significantly expanding the Hemmingwear manufacturing operations to handle the
undertaking. Few companies in the history of business have benefited more from such a timely, lengthy, and sizable military contract. It carried EH1 right through the Depression when all around him factories were closing and workers were losing their jobs. Without the Army contract, who knows what might have happened to Hemmingwear. What I do know is that EH1 never squandered his opportunities. He dedicated his life to making the most of them.

Just after the Second World War, a cursed family tradition began when EH2 returned from Europe and joined EH1 in the family business. When he crossed the threshold at Hemmingwear, the die was cast. It was inevitable. Eventually, EH1 retired and EH2 took the reins. From that moment onward, it simply became accepted and expected that the first-born son, who carried the patriarch’s name, would assume the mantle of
CEO
. Thanks a lot, EH2. This is on your head. Though it’s hard to tell if my father, EH3, has ever really been happy, he is doing his duty to the family as
CEO
. In a very few years, I’ll be expected to do mine. The pressure has been building for years. Shit.

There’s a line my father likes to cite, too often, when he wants to remind me of the path in life I’m expected to follow. His father, EH2, introduced its overuse in our family but claimed it originally came from the patriarch himself, Earnest Hemmingway I. Quoting those who came before him, my father simply says, “This family tradition is paramount and sacrosanct.” Over the years, it’s been abbreviated to just “paramount and sacrosanct,”
and eventually to just two initials. Whenever my father wrote to me when I was away at summer camp, or later at college, he would always add “
PS
” below his signature. It did not signal that he wanted to add a few more lines. No, his postscript just sat there on the page, a final reminder of my future. No words were needed. His code was well understood.
Paramount and sacrosanct
. Those two heavy adjectives still hang around my neck.

While still honouring EH1’s founding business strategy, Hemmingwear remains strong and profitable. It’s given me financial security, though I’ve never touched my so-called trust fund, and it promises a steady job at the helm when EH3 is ready to leave. I won’t have to send in my resumé. I won’t have to go through a competition or interviews. I won’t need references. I just have to move my stuff back to Chicago.

It seems churlish to complain about my lot in life. I know, the world should have my problems, right? But I don’t want it, any of it. Yes, I am EH4, but running Hemmingwear will not be my fate. I will not fulfill my birthright. I do not ever want to occupy the corner office at Hemmingwear. I just want to write. Like Ernest Hemingway, no relation, spelled differently. I just want to write. Let someone else make the nation’s underwear.

It took me fifteen minutes to slide myself out of bed and assume an upright position. I hadn’t slept well at all. My tailbone was still killing me. Imagine a colonoscopy with a red-hot sickle, conducted
by a doctor with a severe tremor. Yeah, that’s about right. I popped more Advil, but not enough. I stood at the kitchen counter to eat a bowl of multigrain Cheerios. Then I fired up my laptop, carried it to the bookcase in the living room, and placed it on one of the higher shelves. In this way, I could work on it while standing, in the hopes that the red-hot sickle might not be quite so painful. I checked my email with one hand and held a glass of orange juice with the other. My Macdonald-Clark email address had already been disabled, which was fine with me, so I opened my personal Gmail account. I scrolled through the spam until I came upon an email from my younger sister, Sarah, that had arrived moments earlier. All it said in the subject line was
“WTF!”

I opened the email. The only content was a YouTube link. Without even hesitating to consider the implications, I clicked on it. Next time, I’ll hesitate a bit to consider the implications. There was something vaguely familiar about the scene that played out in the little rectangle on my laptop screen. It showed some crazed dude hollering at some kind of customer service rep and banging the glass behind which she was safely ensconced. It looked like the
DMV
. It
was
the
DMV
. It slowly came back to me. I’m kidding, I knew immediately what I was looking at. Shit.

Is nothing sacred? Can’t a guy have a public meltdown these days without the unholstering of half a dozen video-equipped smartphones? I remained completely calm. I didn’t even notice when the glass of orange juice slipped from my hands and headed for the hardwood. Luckily, it didn’t shatter when it hit.
The glass wasn’t broken, but my big toe might have been. I forgot about my tailbone for the ensuing ten minutes or so and gave thanks for my nearly deaf neighbour.

The YouTube clip had been uploaded the previous evening under the title:

Very funny. It had been posted just about twelve hours ago so there were only about 309,000 hits so far. I clicked over to the YouTube home page and confirmed my worst fears. The clip was one of YouTube’s featured videos. I’d gone viral.

I clicked back and played the four-minute video in its entirety. I was impressed with the cinematography of the shooter. He’d done a very nice job. And the audio was outstanding. You could hear every word I uttered perfectly clearly. As luck would have it, the guy’s smartphone was also equipped with a digital zoom and he knew how to use it. So not only was the sound great, but on the tight shots toward the end, at the height of my tirade, you could actually see the spittle flying off my mouth and hitting the glass. Powerful stuff.

Then the scene shifted as I exited, stage left. The shooter stayed abreast of the three security guards who were carrying me out. There was none of the grainy, hand-held, home-movie feel of the Zapruder film in Dealey Plaza. It was as if this guy just happened to be holding a Hollywood high-def Steadicam. Then he
perfectly framed my brief flight, my tailbone touchdown, and my final breathless exchange with the security guard. The video then faded to black as I lay on the sidewalk. Very nice.

My mind drifted to what soundtrack music might underlie the sequence – perhaps something from
Les Misérables
, or even
Camelot
. Then I felt sick. So to help ease my pain, I scrolled down to see if any comments had been left. Yes, there were a few. Well, relative to the 309,000 views, 234 comments constitute “a few.” The first twenty comments could all be categorized as negative, with subheadings like insulting, hostile, ridiculing, and unstable. But the twenty-first read as follows:

J. Stalin? You’re kidding. I kept scrolling through another twenty-six negative comments before reaching this one:

I know a pattern when I see one. I tracked through all of the comments. Of the 234, there were only nine positive ones.
Beyond our friends J. Stalin and good old Anne, supportive messages were also left by an F. Sinatra, Gerald Ford, S. Holmes, D. Beckham, Margaret Thatcher, and two other names that I didn’t recognize as famous at all, but I suppose could have been. Interesting.

The ringing phone brought me back.

“Hello.”

“Holy shit! What the hell was that? Were you on something?”

“Sarah?”

“No, it’s Beyoncé,” my sister Sarah replied. “Who did you think it was?”

“Sorry, but I’m more accustomed to the standard telephone opening. You know, the one that goes ‘Hi, Hem, it’s Sarah.’ Something like th – ”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” she cut me off. “Anyway, Hem, you were amazing! It was quite strange and disturbing, but you were still amazing. Oh, and I’m really sorry about your job and about Jenn.”

“How did you find out about that? Did she call you?”

“Hello! Is this thing on?” she mocked tapping her phone. “I found out about your job and Jenn the same way 312,000 other people around the world just did. You’ve gone viral.”

“Shit. Right.”

“Hem, are you all right? What happened, I mean before the
DMV?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I have a bruised ass and ego, and I may never sit down again, but I’m fine. I just had the day to end all days.
The video sums it up quite nicely. I got laid off and escorted out of the agency I’ve been with for fifteen years. Then I came home and found Jenn and her suitcases in the hallway, with her brother driving the getaway car. And, oh yeah, I lost my wallet the day before. So to comfort myself, I thought, ‘Well, there’s always the
DMV
.’ So I went uptown. It was kind of a bad news/good news scenario. I did not get my new driver’s licence, but I’m now on the YouTube home page. Other than that, things are great.”

“Shit, that is one bad day,” she said. “Look, I want to hear everything but have to bail now. I’m coming to New York tomorrow to see you. I should be at your place by eleven.”

“Whoa, um, I’m kind of tied up tomorrow, um, like all day. Rain check?”

“Hem, tomorrow is Saturday. You just lost your job. Your girlfriend just bolted. You have no driver’s licence. And you can’t drive anyway because you broke your ass.” Sarah was now using her most patient voice. “You’ve got all the time in the world. I’m sure you could use the company. And we need to talk. See you tomorrow, and I’m sorry about your day from hell.”

Sarah hung up. Shit. At least I didn’t need to clean the apartment.

My sister and I don’t really get along that well, except Sarah doesn’t seem to know that. Thirteen years my junior, she arrived long after my parents decided one son was sufficient. Sarah dubbed herself “the afterthought.” I left home for college when she was just turning five, and just turning interesting. Since
then, we’d never lived under the same roof, except for a day at Thanksgiving and a couple more over Christmas. To strip it right down to the wood, I really didn’t know my sister very well. But she scared me a little.

If my father had noticed, Sarah was actually the first-born son he never really had. She took to business like a morning
DJ
to coffee. She sailed through a business degree at the University of Chicago before finishing at the top of her
MBA
class at Northwestern. I was so proud of her. Mom was so proud of her. My father didn’t really seem to notice. He went to her convocation a couple years ago but spent most of the time haranguing me about doing an
MBA
and “taking my place” in the company. If this upset Sarah, she just channelled any frustration into her career.

Even before graduation, she was courted by all the investment houses and management consulting firms in New York. They offered her more to start than I’d ever make in the ad agency world. But she said no. Turned her back on them all to work at, yes, The Hemmingwear Company. The most single-minded, driven, aggressive, diligent, and pugnacious woman I’ve ever known was trying to climb up the corporate ladder in a men’s underwear company. My father did nothing to help her up. In fact, he sometimes seemed to be greasing the rungs. Our mother lived long enough to see Sarah join the family business, before the cancer finally took her. It was a slow and pain-ridden decline that was hard on everyone. Afterwards, our father, or using the
more appropriate appellation, EH3, threw himself into the company to the exclusion of all else. But that wasn’t really much of a change.