The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘Here’s the other half. “Ten times more” anything is – speaking in erectile dysfunction terms – pretty limp. It went out of vogue around the same time as Two Cs in a K.’

He looks blank.

‘It’s how advertising guys used to refer to their TV ads on the soaps back in the fifties. Stands for two cunts in a kitchen.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘Nope. Now here’s something I’ve been playing with.’ I jot on a pad, and for a moment I think of all those notes scattered around the coffeemaker back in good old 5-B – why are they still there?

‘Can’t you just tell me?’ the kid asks from a thousand miles away.

‘No, because advertising isn’t an oral medium. Never trust an ad that’s spoken out loud. Write it down and show it to someone. Show it to your best friend. Or your … you know, your wife.’

‘Are you okay, Brad?’

‘Fine. Why?’

‘I don’t know, you just looked funny for a minute.’

‘Just as long as I don’t look funny when I present on Monday. Now – what does this say to you?’ I turn the pad around and show him what I’ve printed there: PO-TENS … FOR MEN WHO WANT TO DO IT THE HARD WAY.

‘It’s like a dirty joke!’ he objects.

‘You’ve got a point, but I’ve printed it in block caps. Imagine it in a soft italic type. Or maybe small, in parentheses. Like a secret.’ I add the parens, although they don’t work with the caps. But they will. It’s a thing I just know, because I can see it. ‘Now, playing off that, think of a photo showing a big burly guy. In low-slung jeans that show the top of his underwear. And a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, let’s say. See him with some grease and dirt on his guns.’

‘Guns?’

‘His biceps. And he’s standing beside a muscle car with the hood up. Now, is it still a dirty joke?’

‘I … I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I, not for sure, but my gut tells me it’ll pull the plow. But not yet. The cutline still doesn’t work, you’re right about that, and it’s got to, because it’ll be the basis of the TV and ’Net ads. So play with it. Make it work. Just remember the key word …’

Suddenly, just like that, I know where the rest of that damn dream came from. It snaps into place.

‘Brad?’

‘The key word is hard,’ I say. ‘Because a man … when something’s not working – his prick, his plan, his life – he takes it hard. He doesn’t want to give up. He remembers how it was, and he wants it that way again.’

Yes, I think. He sure does.

Billy smirks. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

I manage a smile. It feels godawful heavy, as if there are weights hanging from the corners of my mouth. All at once it’s like being in the bad dream again. Because there’s something close to me I don’t want to look at. Only this isn’t a lucid dream I can back out of.

This is lucid reality.

After Billy leaves, I go to the can. It’s ten o’clock, most of the guys in the shop have offloaded their morning coffee and are taking on more in our little break room, so I have the shithouse to myself. I drop my pants so if someone wanders in and happens to look under the door he won’t think I’m weird, but the only business I’ve come in here to do is thinking.

Four years after coming on board at Andrews-Slattery, the Fasprin Pain Reliever account landed on my desk. I’ve had some special ones over the years, some breakouts, and that was the first. It happened fast. I opened the sample box, took out the bottle, and the basis of the campaign – what admen sometimes call the heartwood – came to me in an instant. I ditzed around a little, of course – you don’t want to make it look too easy – then did some comps. Ellen helped. This was just after we found out she couldn’t have babies. It was something to do with a drug she’d been given when she had rheumatic fever as a kid. She was pretty depressed. Helping with the Fasprin comps took her mind off it, and she really threw herself into the thing.

Al Peterson was still running things back then, and he was the one I took the comps to. I remember sitting in front of his desk in the sweat seat with my heart in my mouth as he shuffled slowly through the comps we’d worked up. When he finally put them down and raised his shaggy old head to look at me, the pause seemed to go on for at least an hour. Then he said, ‘These are good, Bradley. More than good, terrific. We’ll meet with the client tomorrow afternoon. You do the prez.’

I did the prez, and when the Dugan Drug VP saw the picture of the young working woman with the bottle of Fasprin poking out of her rolled-up sleeve, he flipped for it. The campaign brought Fasprin right up there with the big boys – Bayer, Anacin, Bufferin – and by the end of the year we were handling the whole Dugan account. Billing? Seven figures. Not a low seven, either.

I used the bonus to take Ellen to Nassau for ten days. We left from Kennedy, on a morning that was pelting down rain, and I still remember how she laughed and cried ‘Kiss me, beautiful’ when the plane broke through the clouds and the cabin filled with sunlight. I did kiss her, and the couple on the other side of the aisle – we were flying in business class – applauded.