Gil Bounsall, the man who named the Chicken Amigo Sandwich, was giving his opinion of Shula Kaplan’s Happy Playgrounds video.
“I’m closing my eyes and not seeing it,” Gil said. “You got a problem here.”
They were in the new business conference room - now officially called “war room” by the agency bosses - but the idea of a Happy Playgrounds war room wasn’t sticking happily in agency peoples’ heads. Some of them, like Shula, even thought it was defamatory. The Happy Playgrounds account wasn’t just an account to her. She loved it the way you’d love a kitten or a bunny; not a piece of business that boiled down to decimal points but something huggy and fuzzy with ears and fur.
HUGGY and FUZZY were the last words you’d use to describe the grim, pedantic shits who ruled Happy Playgrounds. They were like network execs the world over. They were at their happiest when they were kicking the agency around.
The new business conference room didn’t look like “war.” Strewn over the long table were press kit sheets of characters in scenes from the Happy Playgrounds’ lineup of fall shows. There were also a few old call reports, glossy photos of plush toys and other licensed merchandise based on Happy Playgrounds’ themes, plus some scrunched-up paper, ballpoint pens, magic markers, and a small container that looked like a cylinder of whiteout or the sticky stuff art departments still use, even in this age of cold, totally electronic page design.
There in support of Shula was her buddy Emmy Cooper, wincing right alongside her as Gil gave his pissy comments on the tape. Shula, the copywriter, had on one of her outfits that seemed to suggest she had just stepped off a horse-drawn wagon in Romany - by way of Club Monaco. Emmy, the account executive, was doing something more urban. It broadly hinted she had just jumped off a Vespa in Milan - by way of “Banana.”
Gil, the veteran creative director, had that Spielbergian look of the fifty-year-old boy. Today his baseball cap was on straight, brim pointing forwards. Shula bitterly wondered if this meant the director part of his title was running his brain today. Which would mean only the left side was operating.
“The soundtrack,” said Gil, “I’m not hugging it. I close my eyes and I think stiletto heels.”
“When you close your eyes don’t you always think stiletto heels,” said Emmy.
“Just joking.”
Shula said nothing. She knew the clicking Pygmy music was a master stroke. It said everything about the rhythm and energy in the pictures - the syncopated joy of little kids cutting loose all over the world. Running, jumping, rolling and tumbling. Gil was so not getting it. Shula stared morosely at Emmy. For the moment, she was too upset to even look at Gil.
“Do you want her to play it again?” asked Emmy.
“She doesn’t need to play it again. I get it. When I open my eyes I can love it.”
Shula turned dourly to the monitor and videotape player. She pressed the eject button and the tape popped out with a short, sad sound.
Gil put his arm on Shula’s shoulder. She moved out from under it and sat down at the table, leaving Gil’s arm in mid-air, looming over her like a medieval instrument of pain. She arched her back in a pouty position and pulled in her head - a turtle saving its neck by scooting into its shell.
“You’ve got to realize she’s been through a lot,” said Emmy. “This is the client from hell.”
“So Happy Playgrounds isn’t happy?”
Gil looked pleased with himself, as though he had said something witty. Emmy caught this and automatically beamed. She was outcome-oriented. In this playlet she was the defending attorney and Gil was the judge. Emmy wondered how far she’d be willing to go to get a favorable decision for Shula.
Shula, the moody defendant, reached idly into the pile of magic markers. She fidgeted with this and that while the opinions about her work flew back and forth above her. She didn’t even know what she was fidgeting with. She had been up all night piecing together the soundtrack and Happy Playgrounds expected the finished tape by three in the afternoon. She was tired and sweaty. That was all she could think about.
“So what are you saying, Gil,” asked Emmy. “Are you saying we shouldn’t present it?”
“That’s not what he’s saying,” muttered Shula, not even bothering to raise her gold-hooped, bandanna-topped head. She had been through this scenario before with Gil. She knew his passive-aggressive, wishy-washy M.O. It was crueler than anything.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” said Gil, trying to look biblical but only achieving pontifical. “I’d never tell you guys to not present something. It’s your call. I’m just giving you a little perspective from someone who’s been around. I mean do you really want this on your reel? Hey, but maybe you do.”
It was vintage Gil. Stick it, but never stick it out. He wins if Happy Playgrounds hates it. He wins if happy Playgrounds loves it. Gil’s leadership motto was said to be, “if I am weak, others will be strong.”
But when you come up with something like the Chicken Amigo Sandwich it forgives many sins. In the world that gives a shit about Ad Age and Brand Week, Gil had achieved coast-to-coast fame. But this was the cross Shula and a lot of Shula-like peons had to bear. In her anguish she twisted and twirled the cylinder of whiteout in her hands, until she realized she wasn’t holding whiteout at all.
“Holy fuck,” said Shula, dropping the container and jumping up from the conference table. She dropped it the way you’d drop the finger of a corpse.
Gil and Emmy, who were already standing, seemed to be blown back by the sheer force of Shula’s outburst. Suddenly they were twice the distance from the table as before, as though a wind had taken them or the earth had moved.
“Do you see what that says?” said Shula. She pointed at the label on the container. She pointed at it the way you point at a cockroach emerging from your salad.
Emmy moved forward, brows raised and bewildered - as though the defendant had suddenly spoken out of turn and torpedoed her attorney’s brilliant argument. Gil moved forward squinting. His neck suddenly seemed twice as long; it was craning and bobbing over the object on the table. He appeared to be frantically foraging for something, like an anteater zoning in on a juicy swarm.
“Nobody touch that,” shrieked Gil. “Keep your hands off.”
In an instant the precious videotape had become history. They were united by a common cause. To judge from their faces, Gil’s especially, there was a rattler in the room.
The label on the container had one line of large type, one line of medium-sized type and a block of type that was microscopically tiny - the kind of type meant only for paralegals and government drones.
The large type said ORA-SAN. The medium type said H.I.V. Oral Specimen.
“What the fuck,” said Emmy. “What is that?”
“I touched it,” said Shula. She giggled manically and her face flushed a funny color, more purple than red.
“You touched it?” demanded Gil. His face was losing blood by the nanosecond, turning a chalky yellow.
“Of course she touched it,” said Emmy. “Jesus, didn’t you see her touch it.”
“Go wash your hands,” screamed Gil. “Go wash them now.”
Shula stopped her insane giggling and froze, as though her face had been slapped. It was the most decisive thing Shula had ever heard Gil say. She wiped her hands on her gypsy skirt and raced out of the room.
Emmy, far more level-headed at this point than Gil, tried to collect the facts, analyzing them as she went along.
“It’s definitely not a whiteout tube,” she said. “We know that.”
Gil’s neck was still craning furiously. His hands, though, were out of range - in a knot behind his back.
“It has a little tip at the top,” said Emmy, “like a syringe.”
“A fucking syringe,” said Gil.
“And it has this little fluorescent green label that’s been broken.”
“A broken seal,” said Gil.
“Not a seal, really,” said Emmy. “More like one of those little labels pharmacies put on with those price-marking guns.”
“Pharmacies. Which goddamn pharmacy? And who the hell was using this stuff - right in this room?”
Gil and Emmy looked at each other, their eyes blinking as their brains scrolled through the two hundred and seventy one agency employees, trying to pinpoint the leper among them.
“H.I.V. in the Happy Playgrounds war room,” said Gil. “It sounds like a joke.”
“Maybe that’s all it is,” said Emmy. “It could be pure bullshit nonsense. H.I.V. oral specimen - what does that mean? Is it something they give you? Or something you give them?”
“Specimen means something very specific. A specimen is a specimen. You’re saying this came from a joke shop?”
“I thought that’s what you were saying.”
As soon as Gil thought Emmy wasn’t looking at him, he inspected his hands for cuts. He had a couple of definite skin breaks; raw, pink patches where he had chewed the skin near the cuticle of his right thumb.
The door opened and a wave of crowd noise surged in, followed by an actual crowd. At the front of it was Shula, returning from her Gil-mandated trip to wash every millimeter of her hands. Once again, she was giggling manically, and that strange purple flush was all over her face and neck. Emmy greeted her with a concerned look. The look said Emmy was officially switching from defense attorney to nurse-therapist.
The instant Shula re-appeared Gil reacted by thrusting his hands in his pockets. With sly facial gestures he tried to disguise this thrust of terror as merely a casual hands-in-your-pockets attitude - “just us creative guys hanging out.” And it may have worked with the crowd of employees, who were newcomers to the situation. But it didn’t fool Emmy or Shula. To them it was plain as day what Gil was doing. He wasn’t just keeping his distance from the little ORA-SAN tube that lay there, like a tiny stick of dynamite, among the innocuous magic markers playfully cluttering the table - (did he think H.I.V. could jump through the air?). As if that behavior wasn’t crazy enough he was hanging back from Shula too, from her actual body - not going within three feet of her.
And Gil was known as a touchy-feely kind of guy. When he whined about something in your work that made him nervous he made you feel doubly bad, because he touched or even hugged you while delivering the news. Complaining and pleading; praising and nagging - all in the same mouthful. Mixed messages were Gil’s forte. There was no one better at it. When you think of it, even the Chicken Amigo Sandwich was a mixed message.
Whether you called the room “war” or “new business,” it was clearly buzzing with more energy than the Happy Playgrounds account had ever seen, certainly out of this agency. The curiosity seekers swirled about the table like hyenas around a kill - hyenas who happened to be dressed like fashionistas. There was even someone with a video camera - Carlos, the in-house editor from the broadcast production department. Mostly, the crowd was composed of lower level people. Clericals and junior account grunts, the strictly nine-to-fivers who were bored out of their minds with the daily rah-rah crap of agency life. They had spotted the crazed, purplish look on Shula’s face the moment she passed them en route to the ladies room, and it had been more than enough to rouse them from their cubes. They followed her down the corridor to the ORA-SAN site like rodents behind the Pied Piper, squealing questions before they even crossed the threshold.
“Did any spill out on the table?”
“Was there a needle? There could still be a needle.”
“What does all that small type say?”
“Why don’t you just pick it up and find out?”
“That is the real thing. I used to mark prices in Walgreen’s.”
Within two minutes after entering the room, each of the dozen or so employees performed the exact same action, like attendees at a funeral or a wake. One by one, they filed past the assorted art supplies and strewn paper, stopping at the ORA-SAN tube for a quick scan and some expression of surprise, shock or disbelief. While this was going on, Shula, for no reason in particular, grabbed a magic marker and pulled off the cap. Emmy, whose nurse-therapist role demanded she not take her eyes off Shula, tried to do her duty, but three women swooped across her line of vision and nailed her with a babbling burst of hypotheses about which employees were shoe-ins as H.I.V. suspects. Out of the corner of her eye Emmy could manage only a partial glimpse of Shula, who seemed to be backing off to a far window and working her hands furiously.
Gil had backed off too - he was over by the now-silent and dark TV monitor where Shula’s two minutes of tape had lived and died. He had his back to the crowd and his hands in his pockets. Apparently, this was his subtle-as-a-steamroller way of striking a philosophical pose. The message of his pose was that this was all silliness and hysteria. And everyone should just get back to work.
Eight seconds of this pose was about all Shula could take. She burst into the blur of people and came out flying at Gil like a screaming banshee, waving her hands in his face, touching his face. Her hands were an unearthly color - a brown glittery gold. It made her face and neck look even more purple. Shula even had streaks of brown glittery gold on her cheeks and forehead, bristling like war paint.
“Surprise - it’s magic marker,” she shrieked, as Gil jumped a foot in the air and bounced against the TV screen. Gil’s hands flew out of his pockets and batted at Shula - but they only batted at her clothes, not at any surfaces of exposed epidermis.
Shula’s maniacal giggling hit an operatic crescendo as Emmy raced over, like a human ambulance, and took a position between Shula and Gil. She then put a combination neck and armhold on Shula that looked quite professional, the kind a real psychiatric nurse might employ.
“Okay guys, party’s over,” Emmy shouted to the group. “Some of us have work to do.”
The hyenas stopped yelping and began to skulk and slink.
“No way,” shouted Carlos, “the party hasn’t even started - but it will now. We’re doing a chocolate video. I’m not here for this stupid Aids shit.”
Carlos was nicknamed “Noir” because of the way his obsessively whitened teeth contrasted with his huge nest of jet black hair. People joked that he took his hair off at night, walked it and fed it ferret pellets.
Flashing his 1000-watt teeth he cranked up the videocam and gave the high sign to anorexic Lissa, the account assistant on the Geneve Chocolates pitch. Lissa produced a tote bag, raised it over the table and tipped it. Out came a barrage of gaily wrapped balls, about the same size as the giant bubblegum balls in the vending machines you see at every mall. The balls were wrapped in various colors of glittery tin foil. There were reds, pinks, blues, greens - and a few were a glittery brown-gold fairly close to the color Shula had smeared on her hands and face. The balls flew out of Lissa’s tote bag and bounced all over the conference table, landing randomly among the papers, the magic markers and the menacing ORA-SAN tube. A single ball came to rest actually touching it - and this was the ball Carlos reached for.
“Let’s eat chocolate,” he said. “I want comments from everyone. Tell me how much you love Geneve.”
Carlos tore off the tin foil, threw the brown ball in his mouth and devoured it.
“Yum,” he said. “This is good shit. Come on, guys, try one.”
From the look on Gil’s face, Carlos might just as well have popped an infected testicle in his mouth. Emmy was still restraining Shula, and still very immersed in her nurse-therapist persona. She mentally reviewed what action she would take if Gil were to wipe out.
“This is a new business video about us ,” piped Lissa. “We want to show Geneve how much this agency adores its chocolates. So everybody eat and adore, adore.”
The one and only ball that had had contact with the ORA-SAN tube was gone forever. It was melting inside Carlos. But the vast multitude of Geneve balls hadn’t even come close. All around the table hands flew, scooping up the free chocolate. Geneve was a premium brand. Swiss and dark, with divinely sinful centers. Within thirty seconds the secretaries were munching and cooing. What could be better - a surprise chocolate party on a Thursday morning.
Carlos and Lissa were ecstatic. They worked the room like TV journalists at a political convention or the Oscars, thrusting the camera into the munching faces and recording the slurps and inane comments.
“We’ll cut later,” Carlos told Lissa. “Let’s just shoot all we can now. And we need Mr. Big too.”
Mr. Big was cowering in a corner. He, Shula and Emmy hadn’t moved from the TV monitor. They stood there in panic mode, frowning and glowering at each other, although Emmy had ceased holding Shula under physical restraint. Her arms swung freely as the mood changed - as the party atmosphere overpowered the ORA-SAN crisis. It picked up steam by the moment, a funky human steam. Soon a boombox went on at full blast, blaring something raunchy. Shula’s hips started to swivel. Her eyes seemed to catch fire. With her magic marker war paint she looked like a gypsy girl who had migrated to Polynesia.
In a few moments Emmy caught the bug too - at least enough so her head began to nod. Soon she was jiggling and swaying and making little uhhh noises, doing her best to keep up with Shula.
The force that turned the tide totally was Lissa, who came out of the crowd and barged up to Gil, Shula and Emmy with two big handfuls of chocolate balls.
“Let’s go, guys,” she demanded. “Indulge.”
Lissa held her palms out as Shula and Emmy pawed at the chocolate balls. But Gil’s hands were out of sight. They were back in his pockets.
“Come on, big guy,” said Lissa. “You’re the star of this.”
“She’s right,” said Emmy, now bouncing to the boombox. “You’re the face the client wants to see.”
Reluctantly, Gil picked up one green-wrapped ball and stared at it.
“Unwrap it,” said Lissa. “You have to eat it. You won’t die.”
The gyrating Shula quickly downed two Geneve balls and was ripping open a third. She had a new color smeared on her fingers. A dark chocolaty brown.
Noir as ever, Carlos surged in and out of the feeding frenzy, attacking gluttonous faces and mouths with his camera, spinning around and aiming a shot whenever he heard a new cry or comment. Hearing Lissa yell over to him he broke away from the pack and walked backwards, executing a long, shaky swoosh pan. Then he turned and moved in on the foursome by the TV monitor, doing a quick zoom on Shula’s hips.
From the hips he panned slowly upwards, capturing undulations of Shula he knew he’d never use on the client video, but who could resist this? By the time the camera got to Shula’s mouth she was sucking the smears of chocolate off her fingertips and licking her lips, rolling her tongue like a porn pro.
“Don’t just dance,” yelled Lissa, “say something.”
“Mmm,” said Shula, “Geneve chocolates. Melts in your mouth, melts in your hands, melts …everything.”
“All right,” said Lissa, nudging Carlos towards Emmy, who had just bared her third ball and was in mid- bite.
“Quote, quote,” urged Lissa.
Emmy polished off the rest of the ball. “One moment on your lips,” she said brightly, ” a lifetime on your hips.” With that she did a pelvic thrust worthy of Shula and shouted at Carlos, “did you get it?”
“Got it,” replied Carlos, raising the camera and panning over to Gil, who froze in the shot like a deer in the headlights.
“This is the big moment,” said Carlos. “You’re the man. Hey, he doesn’t even have one.”
As far as chocolates were concerned, Gil did not have one. He had gotten rid of the green-wrapped ball from Lissa, and his hands were back in his pockets.
“You eat it?” demanded Carlos. “Then eat another one.”
But Gil’s green-wrapped ball was sitting on the TV monitor. “Mother,” said Carlos as he discovered it.
Lissa pushed a blue-wrapped ball in Gil’s face. He looked at it the way a dog looks at a slice of cucumber. Finally, he extracted a hand from his pocket and took the ball between thumb and forefinger. The gesture seemed strange for someone in a baseball cap. He could have been an old lady picking up a teacup.
“What are you, a diabetic?” said Carlos. “This is the money shot, babe. They want the boss man.”
“I’m thinking,” said Gil. By “thinking” he meant trying to come up with a killer line. His eyes darted back and forth - the firing squad look. Carlos’ camera might as well have been an M1.
“Don’t just think, ” said Lissa. “Unwrap. Eat.”
But Gil didn’t eat. And the fact was, he couldn’t even think. His darting eyes kept finding spaces in the crowd and searching for the ORA-SAN tube. Monitoring its whereabouts among the magic markers. In the end he just held the little round unwrapped chocolate up to the camera and said something lame like, “Geneve. Because life’s a ball.”
While he stood there in his baseball cap, not daring to eat and looking so pathetic, Emmy thought of the Happy Playgrounds tape and how Shula had stayed up all night sweating to make the Pygmy music just right. She thought of this paranoid bag of nerves, Gil, having absolute power over Shula’s work. If he chose to, he could nag her to the point where she was as crazy as he was.
Several weeks ago at a departmental money meeting, the managing director had stood up with a fat smile and made a big announcement;
The Chicken Amigo Sandwich had already netted the agency thirty million dollars.
“That’s a lot of champagne corks,” the managing director told the group.
Emmy remembered this and wanted to do something violent. Unwrap a chocolate ball and stuff it in Gil’s mouth. Slam it right in his face.
It was one of those revenge thoughts you never really carry out. Instead, Emmy pushed her way through the swaying crowd to get more Geneve balls for herself. Because her mouth was salivating for it.
A new tune came on and Emmy took a big scrumptious bite. The room steamed with music and sweat. She swallowed the chocolate, did a little shimmy and threw her arms above her head. Shula’s hips, they were coming at her again.