The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei
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was homophobic in the extreme and could potentially be a violation of the firm’s HR policies, and then we laughed and I bought him a drink.
I learned all this, by the way, the night I took Henry to dinner and made him tell me his life story. He didn’t want to drink but I insisted he join me; I told him I thought we should be friends, and I think this came as a shock to him seeing as how he correctly was intuiting that he was on the chopping block.
Anyway, as his story goes, Henry found himself high and dry in LA, with no career, no money, and no friends. Then he met Victoria. Victoria was an ex-model and a nutritionist. She had been down the same road Henry was on and she knew where it led. She had become a junkie and ended up living with an abusive club owner in Miami, getting beaten up regularly, and finally she found the strength to get out. She went to the place where all abused junkie wannabe models go: LA. She got into some kind of all-kale-juice-and-codfish-oil diet thing and supposedly it saved her life. She was studying to become a licensed nutritionist at one of those schools on the second floor of a building on Melrose when she met Henry. She was working at a juice bar and he wandered in drunk, needing to use the bathroom because, after all, he was living in his car at this point. He fell asleep on the toilet and Victoria had to break the door down because they were all afraid that someone had died in there. She found him comatose and called an ambulance and accompanied Henry to the hospital. You can guess the rest. Henry moved in with Victoria to clean himself up and they became lovers. It’s a beautiful story, and it almost prompted me to fire him on the spot when I heard it.
Henry’s fourth life began when he and Victoria moved to New York so that Henry could pursue his true love, which was art. In New York, Henry and Victoria lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn; Victoria worked in a health food store and tried to set up her nutritionist practice only to discover that people in New York didn’t really give a flying fuck about nutritition. And Henry, not coming from a wealthy East Coast or European family with deep ties to people with tons and tons of money, didn’t stand a chance in the art world. So, digging down deep and finding a gallant streak he probably didn’t know he had, Henry decided to go back to school. He had a pretty good sense of design—his paintings aren’t bad, by the way, although they’re blurry, the ones I’ve seen on his website—so he enrolled in one of those graphic design programs at the School of Visual Arts. For two years he studied advertising and he hated it but he knew it was what he had to do.
So Henry miraculously gets a job as a junior art director here at Tate at the really-for-this-business advanced fucking age of thirty-four and he and Victoria start living like human beings. Fourteen years later he’s an associate creative director and he’s making decent coin, in fact he’s pulling in $184K as of the day he was let go. He was actually the go-to guy on the Allstate Insurance account—not thrilling advertising by any means, but he’s making the clients happy doing these crappy testimonials. The campaign is doing well in the marketplace, too, but that’s not really the point. The point is, Henry was old and he wore pleated Dockers, which I told him not to wear but he did anyway.
The first step in the dance would be to let Henry know in advance that he was in danger of being fired. This was pretty common practice for human resources professionals but I took it to another level. I mean you couldn’t exactly go to someone and say “You’re going to get the boot in three months no matter what you do” because they might cause all kinds of trouble around the office in the interim, possibly even take legal action against the company, not to mention spreading their negative energy around. And at the same time you don’t want to say to them “You’re doing a great job you don’t have to worry” because then they could claim wrongful termination based on age or something. What you want to do is be considerate, give them a hint that there’s a storm coming in, give them a chance to find another job (not likely, but one can always hope) and all at once, and without adieu, give them a swift, unforgiving exit from the shitshow.
So one day as I was standing outside the fish tank (what we called the open-plan creative floor) and was waiting for an elevator, Henry came up and gave me a vaguely Reaganesque nod and earnest smile. At that moment I knew it was time to begin. He said Morning, Eric! or something equally pointless. Normally I would ask him how things were going on Allstate, when was that client presentation again? I mean just to seem interested and to pretend that I was sober or knew or cared what the fuck was going on in my department. And the elevator would come and we would ride together and then when one of us got off I would say Keep me in the loop or something like that, and Henry would get off thinking he had had a worthwhile moment with Mr. Chief Idea Officer. He would probably mention it to the dolts he worked with, saying something like Well Eric and I were talking earlier this morning … to make it sound as if he has my ear, we’re close, we’re like this.
But I just stood there and ignored him. I didn’t look up, or rather, I looked up for an instant, enough to let him know that I had heard him but had no interest in replying or engaging with him in any way. He said Morning dude again and I just stared at the wall. I could tell without looking at him that he was momentarily freaked out but immediately pretended to himself that I hadn’t heard him even though he knew I had, I guess that’s called denial. Then the elevator came and we got on and just stood there like two people who once knew each other but were no longer speaking.
And that was the beginning.
After the elevator incident, Henry started acting predictably tense around me. He would, for example, be the first to arrive at a meeting. I usually tried to arrive fifteen or twenty minutes late for anything. Partly because that was the custom in advertising for the creative people to be late and partly because I was the boss and one way of being the boss was to make everyone wait around for you. So one afternoon as Henry stood lingering outside my office I asked him what he was doing there.
“Aren’t we having that Swiffer meeting?” he replied. To which I replied, without looking away from my computer screen, “Are you working on that?”
“Yes, you asked me to chip in on the campaign, you asked me to have some thoughts ready this morning and so I spent the weekend on it,” he said in a high-pitched squeal, not wanting to seem confrontational, the raising of one’s voice by half an octave or more meant to dissuade the more powerful from attack.
“Well I think there are better uses of one’s time than stuffing more shit into that particular shithole,” I said with a chummy laugh.
“So I shouldn’t stick around for the meeting?” he mumbled, and I said nothing, and I said it without looking at him, pretending to stare at my screen but out of the corner of my eye I could see him there, his body suddenly stiff, him staring at the bare floor with an expression of both confusion and panic.
Yes, I wanted to say to him, this is happening, it is, it’s happening now. But I couldn’t for legal reasons. And then as if he could read my thoughts, he just walked away.
Post incident I let a couple of weeks slide, to both allow his feelings of terror to stew in him for a while and also to lull him into thinking that the weirdness was maybe over. I had read on the internet that they raise the toros in perfect comfort so that when they are first stabbed with the banderilla and begin to bleed and the blood is running into their eyes and there are thousands of people around them screaming but they’ve never seen more than two or three humans in their lives, these bulls, it just adds to their inability to react appropriately and so they are less of a threat. I had my assistant call Henry in for a meeting. Ten minutes before the meeting was to take place I left the agency and went for a walk. I may have gotten something to eat, I don’t remember. When I got back three hours later my assistant informed me that Henry had been by and he thought we had a meeting and I said, Yeah, I know. The next day I called Henry into my office and this time I didn’t leave him hanging. I looked him in the eye and told him he was being taken off the Allstate account. He was stunned. He hadn’t seen this coming. Frankly, neither had I, it just came out. He finally asked me Why? and I said something about the client wanting some new blood and how actually I was pleased because this meant Henry was freed up to work on various other assignments.
“What kind of assignments?” he asked me. I said I wasn’t sure but that I would think about it and get back to him.
At that point