Читать книгу Madhouse Fog - Sean Carswell - Страница 13

7

I spent the morning before my lunch with Frank Walters in my office, doing research on the computer. I looked up everything I could find on Dickinson and Associates. I checked their company website, read all the easily available information on them from a quick web search, then dug deeper, reading about them in articles written for business journals, checking reports for stockholders—though, of course, I wasn’t a stockholder. I also did several searches for a Frank Walters, but the names were just too common and I couldn’t find anything that matched who I thought this Frank Walters was. No luck with Francis Walters, either. I slipped and tried Frank “Castor Oil” Walters. I actually typed it into a search engine and clicked “search” before it occurred to me that the “Castor Oil” part of his name only existed in my mind. I searched and read steadily from seven o’clock that morning until ten thirty. This is the long story short of what I found:

J. Reginald Dickinson, an Australian who’d cut his teeth interning in the upper echelons of a mass media corporation there, founded the firm. After the internship, he moved into advertising. His first big break came in a United Fruit campaign for which he developed the slogan “Life Is Good When You Have a Big Banana.” I found a series of ads featuring this cartoon monkey in some presumably Latin American jungle, happy as hell about the big banana in his hand. The ads were actually a bit more subtle than I expected, though they were not subtle. The United Fruit campaign catapulted Dickinson into the advertising big time. He moved his upstart company to New York City, actually landing an address on Madison Avenue (though apparently a bit south of the insiders’ stretch of Madison Avenue). From this location, he developed other projects that have surely burrowed into your subconscious: The Cattle Ranchers of America’s whole “You Can’t Beat Our Meat” campaign; Big Sugar’s “Even God Has a Sweet Tooth” push. His loosely veiled dick jokes and pseudo-religion moved the company up to a more fashionable address. From there, Dickinson created the two most controversial and short-lived Miller Beer campaigns: “Drink Her Pretty,” which featured 30-second TV spots with geeky, frumped-out women gradually losing their disguises and transforming into strippers while fat men who were way out of the women’s leagues got drunk, and “If Moms Made Miller, You’d Still Be Breastfeeding”—a series of billboards with sloppy, unshaven men in diapers tugging at giant apron strings, the apron barely covering a pair of dazzling legs in high heels. He was even the guy behind Taco Bell’s “Heaven in a Taco” campaign, the one with the striking Chicana’s face appearing in the lettuce of a fast food taco, apparently some reference to the Virgen de Guadalupe, only this lady says, “Eat me.” And so on.

He expanded the company into public relations with his specialty being the shadow campaign, in which he’d create a manufactured buzz surrounding a product or an idea through non-traditional means. For example, in the ’80s when a certain congressman from North Carolina was in hot water for some unethical practices with lobbyists and he was trailing dangerously behind in his re-election campaign, the congressman hired J. Reginald Dickinson to clear things up. Since even Dickinson couldn’t spit shine this congressman’s image, Dickinson attacked the congressman’s opponent. The opponent, among other things, was campaigning to dedicate more money to AIDS research. Dickinson and Associates created a team of writers to produce opinion pieces that promulgated one simple catch phrase: “AIDS is God’s Will.” For the more radical publications, the writers would argue that AIDS attacked a demographic that needed to be attacked. In publications that welcomed unambiguous brutality, writers would make assertions like, “I’ll worry about AIDS when it kills people I don’t hate.” Non-Dickinson writers started to pick up on the trend, attacking the new wave of writers and their hateful opinions. This created exactly the kind of buzz that the congressman needed to inspire his homophobic constituents to get to the voting booth that November. He won a narrow victory and was back to getting blowjobs from lobbyist-funded hookers in no time. As far as I can tell, none of those hookers had AIDS. There was no delicious irony here.

When word of the first Dickinson and Associates shadow campaign spread, the company really took off. They were able to employ radio and television personalities whose opinions were for hire. They worked on political campaigns large and small, from several different points on the political spectrum. They became masters of digging at the loose hangnail of America’s id. They also became more subtle because I couldn’t find much information on who they worked for or what they worked on. Dickinson and Associates clients clearly valued their privacy.

The last big campaign I could find that Dickinson and Associates had their fingers in was the re-imagining of School of the Americas. The School of the Americas was a facility on an army base in Georgia. Some of the alumni of this school included Chilean dictator General Augustus Pinochet and the men behind the brutal El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador. Congressional investigators had even unearthed SOA training manuals that taught the finer intricacies of torture. Every year, protestors gathered in huge numbers and rallied outside the gates of the SOA demanding its closure. After several years of protests, the US Army hired Dickinson and Associates to clear this mess up. Dickinson and Associates came up with a plan. They suggested that the army close the SOA, just as the protestors asked, but to start a new facility with the same teachers, classrooms, students, and curriculum. This new facility would be called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHISC. This way, no one could complain about the SOA, no one could remember the name of the new facility, and if they tried to use the new acronym, it would sound pleasant. WHISC. Like a breath of fresh air.

The army changed the signs. This fractured all the sound bites around the protests. Everyone was happy. Well, except the protestors and the people who were tortured by WHISC alumni. But now they sounded like whiners because what more did they want? The SOA was closed. WHISC didn’t have that horrible history. Et cetera.

At ten-thirty that morning, I’d had enough of my internet searches. I wasn’t sure what to believe and I didn’t really want to believe any of it. I wanted to shrink the world back down to my little office in the maze of the Williams Building, to federal grants and psych hospital patients and January California breezes. I wanted to think about my shallow pool of Folsom memories, afternoons whiling away in the Diaz family’s formal living room, sitting on an embroidered couch under wrought iron candleholders and a painting of San Juan city streets, watching Lola slide a Cure record into its sleeve, careful to touch only the edges of the record. Lola would spray all her records with rubbing alcohol and gently brush the grooves before putting them on the turntable. She would sit on the wooden living room floor, stare at the zigzag patterns of the area rug, and sing all the sad words of her favorite British pop stars. I had come to love music I would’ve otherwise hated, if only because each familiar wail made me feel like Lola was in the room.

Piggy-backed on that memory, of course, was the old living room grandfather clock striking five-thirty, the harried look of Lola saying, “My dad will be home soon,” the rush of sweeping me out and clearing away any sign of my presence before her father’s six o’clock return time.

I cracked open my office window to feel a little January breeze. A psych tech and The Professor strolled along the walkway that stretched between the Williams Building and the dual diagnosis dorm. I tried to imagine what The Professor might say about Dickinson and Associates. Would he tell me to question the sources, ask how reliable the websites of corporations, protestors, and business magazines really were? Would he take the larger road and ask me what it meant to develop a view of the world beyond my own, based upon the ephemeral words I read off a glowing screen? Would he chastise me for developing opinions about places I’d never go and people I’d never meet when all the while I couldn’t prove to him that my hands were really mine or that I was more than just a butterfly dreaming I was a grant writer?

I needed to talk to people so I called an old bandmate of mine, a guy named Brandon Burch. Two things about Brandon Burch: 1. We’d been friends a long time ago, and as years stretched away from the original point of the friendship, I spent a lot of time questioning why we’d ever been friends; and 2. He worked down in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, where a bunch of advertising agencies are gathered. The area is known as the Miracle Mile, though there is no miracle about that stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, and it’s not a mile long.

Brandon was in his office and picked up on the second ring. First things first, we dealt with small talk. “What’s up with you?” Brandon asked. “Still trying to save the world?”

“Nope,” I said. In a way, even answering the question was a confession that I had once been trying to save the world. I did not intend to make such a confession. I didn’t believe it to be true. I never lived through a period so idealistic that I thought I—the wannabe Ramone from Folsom—could save the world.

“So you’re not at the nonprofit anymore?”

“Nope.”

“What was it again? A hippie commune?”

And, see, this was exactly why I wondered how I’d ever become friends with a guy like Brandon Burch. He knew that I’d worked at a community space, that there was nothing hippie about it, and that we weren’t trying to save the world. We held free resume-writing workshops for blue-collar people, provided lunch for the homeless, hosted art exhibits and poetry readings for the Fresno State students. That kind of thing. I was the only employee of the space, and I only got a salary because I wrote the grant that gave me the salary. And, truth be told, I wrote all the grants that kept that place up and running. I knew that in the next minute, Brandon would make fun of my very modest salary. Which he did.

He said, “Still paying yourself Cup-O-Noodles wages?”

“Those days are over,” I said. “I’m working as a grant writer at a psych hospital now. It’s pays a good salary, benefits, you name it. I have a tie around my neck as we speak.” Which was true. I had put on a tie that morning.

“I’ll be damned.” A few seconds of silence filled the line. An intentional pause. Brandon ended it with, “How’s your wife? You still married?”

“Yep. She’s doing good. We had to put Nietzsche down, though.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” He paused again, for a shorter moment this time. “What does the afterlife hold for a dog that believes God is dead?”

“Do you think Nietzsche the dog believed that?” I asked.

Brandon said, “We better get to the point. You didn’t call me to talk about dogs and philosophers. So what is this all about? Shoot.”

“You know a guy named Frank Walters? Works for Dickinson and Associates?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m asking.”

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to have lunch with him today.”

“Ouch,” Brandon said. The pain was clearly non-physical. “Be careful.”

“And why is that?”

“He’s a dangerous dude.”

“Dangerous how?”

“He’s a guy who wants something so bad he can taste it, and he’ll tear up anything between him and it.”

“And what does he want so badly?”

“Oh, the same thing everyone wants: more money, more power. He works on the fifteenth floor and wants to work on the nineteenth. He lives in Agoura Hills and wants to live in Malibu. That kind of thing.”

“Those floors and towns don’t mean anything to me,” I said. Of course, I gathered that the top brass worked on the nineteenth floor and people who wanted to be top brass were on the fifteenth. I knew what Malibu was. I’d have to look up Agoura Hills.

“Put it this way,” Brandon said. “Walters just turned fifty. In advertising years, he’s a hundred and sixty-seven. The guy’s like Fu Manchu hatching fiendish plots to take over the company before his expiration date.”

“What happens when you expire in advertising?”

“You spend the rest of your life as a mid-level executive in an office with a window overlooking a parking lot and a doorway with a view of smirking shits who get promoted over you because they know how to use urban slang to sell cleaning supplies.”

“Are you telling me my paper towels aren’t the shiznit?”

Brandon groaned. “What does Walters want with you anyway?”

“He says he wants to give money to the hospital.”

“No one gives money for free. What’s Walters trying to buy with his donation?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s just rich and generous.”

“He’s neither. The fucker tips fifteen percent and he isn’t half as rich as he looks. He’s got a lot of money; don’t get me wrong. He probably made more this month than you would in a year at your stupid little hippie commune but he doesn’t have big money to give you. Not run-a-hospital money. Though I guess he does have bribe-a-grant-writer money. And he definitely has put-a-grant-writer-in-the-hospital-if-he-doesn’t-do-what-he’s-told money.”

“Thanks for the heads up.” I took a second to process this last comment because in the world of my little desk in the maze of the Williams Building, with a window overlooking a dual diagnosis ward, advertisers who hired thugs didn’t seem to fit. I asked, “Does a guy who works in advertising really have access to hired muscle?”

“Strange things happen north of the fourteenth floor. And a dude like Walters has no sense of humor. Oh, which reminds me.” Brandon suddenly sounded animated. It was the first time in our conversation when his voice triggered those memories of our original friendship a decade and a half ago. “I have to tell you this. I was at an awards thing one time. An industry function, and I ended up standing next to Walters at the bar. I was all liquored up and knew I shouldn’t do it, but in my booze-addled mind, I’m like, when am I gonna get this opportunity again? And I was curious. So I just asked Walters.” Brandon paused.

I didn’t want to bite, but I bit. “What did you ask him?”

“‘How do blind people know when they’re done wiping their ass?’ And you know what he said?”

I blurted, “When the toilet paper doesn’t stink anymore?” I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to get sucked back into the early-20s Land of Dude that seemed to surround old friends like Brandon. I wanted to take higher ground. I just couldn’t resist.

“Nah,” Brandon said. “It’s one of those jokes that’s funnier without a punch line.”

A short silence lingered between us. I didn’t see any real need to rescue the conversation from the silence. I said, “Listen, I gotta go. I appreciate the info.”

“No sweat,” Brandon said. “And I know you’re not asking for my advice but I’ll give it anyway. Cancel your lunch with that fucking guy. No good can come from this.”

“I may do that,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t cancel that lunch. Because here it was, a voice in my head for the fourth time. It insisted I act against my nature and my better judgment. The same thing that held me here instead of going to Fresno on Nietzsche’s last day, the same thing that kept me from reading the release form I signed for Dr. Bishop. It was a little creepy how insistent it was, how strangely directed. Maybe something was slipping inside. I had to be aware of that possibility. It wasn’t enough to keep me from lunch with Frank Walters, though.

Brandon said, “Keep in touch.”

“You got it.” I pulled my appointment book closer. I underlined the words Be careful.