Читать книгу The Deep Whatsis - Peter Mattei - Страница 7

I fire people. It’s my job.

But not only do I can them, in the process I help them, or should I say I wake them up, or I should say I take the time to write for them an honorable if not epic death, a death more dramatic and meaningful than the one they would otherwise be entitled to.

See, I was hired to “clean house” here at Tate, the ad agency in New York City where I am the Chief Idea Officer. I was brought in to create a culture of innovation and creativity, meaning get rid of the dead wood, shitcan the old and the slow and the weak, and that’s what I’m doing, because it’s my job.

At first it was something I dreaded. I knew I was being paid handsomely to be the one to blame, the one who does the Dirty Deed, but still, it was distinctly not cool. Then I grew up. I read on page 334 of The Fountainhead where Howard Roark, say, cuts his own testicles off with a fork in front of his cousin or something, I don’t remember, not that exactly, but he does some extremely fucked-up shit that is totally ridiculous but in the end is worth it. That hit me when I read it. So after firing a handful of pathetic art directors and copywriters in their forties and fifties my attitude changed. I realized that my problem with this aspect of my job was purely in my head and that if I were to be totally honest with myself I would admit that there was something heroic about it. The thrill of the hunt, I guess. I had my prey cornered, I had the HR Lady watching me (I call her Lady but she wasn’t much older than me; tall, half-Korean—she lives on Diet Coke, coffee, and wine), and I had my sentence to speak, which thankfully she had written and rehearsed with me: “I’m very sorry to say this but we’re going to have to let you go.” That sentence was like a quiet little knife in my hands, a hand-painted bespoke artisanal elephant gun loaded and cocked and all I had to do was open my mouth and speak it, destiny would take its course, there was nothing anyone could do. The aftermoment would hang there in the air like steam, and the HR Lady would look at my now-finished and cold-sweating prey with fake sympathy but really I knew what she was thinking, she was thinking she was in the presence of a hard-boiled killer and it turned her on.

Once I gave in to understanding the simple truth about human existence I began enjoying the primal beauty and manifest joy of the kill. I began to turn it into an elaborate ritual. The act wasn’t exactly the same thing as a hunt because the prey had no chance to escape, to run away and survive, as they do in the wild. A different metaphor comes to mind. Last year I was dating a woman, a model who lived in LA, and we went to Barcelona for a long weekend. On Sunday afternoon we went to the bullfight. She objected to this because sport bulls were on the PETA list and she spewed some line of rote nonsense about the cruelty of it and for the most part I bought into that. Of course I was also hoping to get blown one more time before we flew home.

“Think of it as anthropology,” I said. “Think of it as a window into another world.” And I suppose it was another world, in the way that, well, consider the care and patience that a serial killer will take with the body of his victims, or a medical examiner with a corpse, there is something horrific about it and honorable at the same time, like a sky burial. And the bullfight is not at all a sport, it is a dance, a performance art piece that originated on Spanish ranches and farms, or so I read online although I might be making that up. The bull is going to die regardless because it is going to be slaughtered for food, and so the matador honors his meal by risking his life in the ring, finally terminating it while leaping in midair, his groin exposed to the bull’s horns. The whole thing was pretty gay but at the same time also undeniably deep I thought.

So that’s how I began to think of my job. Sure, I could just follow my marching orders to the letter, call them into my office, shake my head, look at the floor, say my sentence, squeeze their hands, offer my help in finding them a new position somewhere, which we both knew was bullshit, let’s get a drink sometime, dude, we’ll miss you around here, the fucking bean counters up my ass we had no choice you’re not alone, and so on. I could kill them the way we kill chickens in slaughterhouses, in some kind of dehumanized way, and they have no idea what’s happening until the moment of their death, if at all, if a chicken even knows what death is, does she? Or I could send them out with the art and grace and dignity of a really good commedia, a good long bloody scene, replete with angels, demons, and clowns. They could be unwitting losers or they could be stars, and it was up to us, together, we were doing this as a team. But I was the one at the helm, with my year-long schedule of layoffs, my Outlook calendar entries, invites, and alerts. Outlook was my faena, my sword.

One of the hallmarks of Western industrial society is death segregation, the separating of the dying and the dead away from the masses and into so-called professional circles: medical practitioners, police, undertakers, military contractors. Some philosophers think this has resulted in neurosis if not psychosis; the exploits of Nazi Germany come to mind if not all of the pornography industry. Where am I going with this? I am bringing death back from the over-anesthetized margins, that’s my mission, my purpose, and it is bigger than right-sizing the creative department on behalf of the shareholders of the holding company that owns the holding company that owns the company that employs me. I am exaggerating and ritualizing the methods of corporate termination for all humankind, for posterity; I have created a new art form.

But mostly I’m just trying to get my bonus.

That morning, after I called my building’s concierge service and had them clean up Intern’s puke and toss my eight-hundred-dollar Dalai Lama Edition Tibetan throw rug in the trash, the car service brings me to the office just before 8 AM. I sign the voucher and go inside, flashing my ID quickly as I pass the security cameras and monitors and the sign that says YOU ARE BEING VIDEOTAPED. I hadn’t slept that night more than thirty minutes but it doesn’t feel that way to me; I feel fine, in fact I feel great, of course I am still high as a kite. I know it will get uncomfortable at some point later in the day when I have to tell the editorial company where she works that we will be taking our business elsewhere because their work is “sub-standard,” but for the moment I don’t have to deal with it. I go into my office and shut the glass door and crank up my iTunes and listen to this Girl Talk remix of a Deadmau5 track produced by Pretty Lights and re-remixed by Devon Aoki: I’m lying but it’s something like that. I am sure my enjoyment of this so-called music comes from the fact that I know these tracks are bootlegs, sent to me by a music company (called Earwig) that is trying to get into business with us, and so I am one of a handful of people on the planet who have them, and that is flattering, it would be to anyone. Although this story about them being rare bootlegs is probably not true, it’s probably just the line of mierda the music house gave me to make me feel extremely good about myself, which would translate down the line into more money for them. Everything is seduction, everything is sexual in the end, even the passcode to an FTP download site. I put on my Beats-by-Dre headphones and listen to the track. It’s really boring.

All forms of entertainment product have at their roots a base reason for being, a simple consumer benefit. If you ladder up to it, you see that certain things exist to make you frightened, for example, so that you can vicariously experience primal terror and survive it in the (relative) safety of a mall, endorphin rush as much a part of the experience as the popcorn. For millions of years Man lived with constant fear, in the wild, there were real monsters in the dark, things that would tear your head off and eat it while your eyes were still functioning, and we still need those neurons to fire now and then or they atrophy; this is a multibillion-dollar industry called movies and not to be confused with that other fear-based industry called politics. Or in the case of music, gangsta rap, the ultimate benefit is that it makes you feel empowered sexually when you listen to it, although if you are white and grew up in the suburbs like me fear is also a factor: again, I can experience this in the safety of my home or car, not on the actual Streets. And so it is a testosterone inducer, it has the same effect as the patch that ball-less guys are supposed to stick under their arms. The other chief benefits of entertainment properties are wish fulfillment and stress release (also known as comedy).

My calendar isn’t particularly full today. A few boring meetings in which I will listen to some of our industry’s least-talented creatives attempt to impress me with their awful, so-called ideas, and I will nod, pretend to hate them all, and say things such as “Do you really think this is the best you can do?” or “Do you really believe that bringing me work like this is going to help you keep your job?” They will always answer the same way, hemming and hawing and finally agreeing that there must be a better idea out there somewhere, and then I will just stare at them with feigned contempt for their vain struggle toward greatness which, deep down, none of us really cares about.

“If this isn’t your very best work, why are you showing it to me?”

“If you were me, what would you say to you?”

There would never be a reply to that one. I don’t think they could tell that the contempt was there in me, really. And I don’t mean to say it was completely real, most of it was not, it was an act. I do have actual contempt for them but it has nothing to do with their advertising skills because I barely even registered what it was they were showing me. I couldn’t care less. I have contempt for them because I have contempt for this entire industry, myself included. Some business writers say that you don’t motivate people by putting them down but I wasn’t trying to motivate them, I was trying to de-motivate them. I was going to have to fire half of them anyway, so why would I want them to do a good job? Why would I want to meet their kids? On the other hand, if I were to motivate them and they did a better job and then I fired them, that would be even more confusing to them, which would provide some additional absurdity-enjoyment to me, and to the universe at large. I suppose I don’t bother to motivate them because I am just too lazy to care whether or not anyone’s pain or dramatic arc is fully maximized. After all, this isn’t about me, I’m not the center of the universe, I’m just a cog in a larger wheel.

Around 1 PM I go to lunch by myself at Faco, which is a Mediterranean seafood restaurant specializing in Aegean shellfish prepared in wood-fired ovens. It is not far from the office. I sit at the bar, get the pan-seared octopus and the baked spinach and a $124 bottle of Sancerre. I have my laptop with me and look over the opening of my screenplay. It sucks. I stare at the octopus, but I don’t touch it for some reason, possibly because of how irritated I get by the waiters swarming around me, creating a vortex of ingratiating fantasy: hey, look, we’re all billionaires. The wine, the lack of sleep, and my thoughts wandering back to the night before contribute to making me feel unfocused, I can’t get any work done. I get up and leave a 44 percent tip. As I walk out my iPhone buzzes and I see there is an SMS from a 347 number I don’t recognize.

hey you

don’t remember much un4tunatly

sorry about the !@#$!

u mad @ me?

How did she get my number? I delete the text. It’s possible she looked at my phone when she was at my house—I vaguely recall setting it on my Ligne Roset dining table where she could have perused it—but she seemed far too drunk to have memorized a ten-digit number. Why am I feeling twinges of desire all of a sudden? I dial my assistant and she puts me through to the head of our production department—his name is Tom Bridge—and I tell Tom to pull the plug on Intern’s edit house after the Viva gig and if they ask why tell them it’s because of This Goddam Fucking Economy.