My career as a marketer (1 day)

Yesterday, I went to some marketing lunch. I guess I was technically hosting it. I don’t work for this company and really don’t know what they do but I said I would as a favor to certain people and I showed up to the Denver Tech Center with a smile and hair gel and slacks that gave me both a gunt and man-toe. I was the only man. Most of the women were old and their faces looked like avalanches. Some of the girls were sexy in that DECA-still-shopping-at-Forever 21 way. I tried to be charming and smart and I think I did okay.

I only messed up the name of the company I was representing once.

During my little speech, I was doing fine, but then the waiter brought this French bread into the little banquet room, and for some reason, I completely stopped what I was saying. I said, Yo, that bread looks good.

People laughed.

I’m not usually one to say yo and this for sure wasn’t the crowd to break it out on, but I did better after that, loosened the fuck up.

We sat at three tables of ten. I was next to a pregnant woman who kept burping into her napkin. On my other side was a doctor with a Russian accent that I completely ignored because I couldn’t understand what the fuck she was saying. A redhead sat across from me and I felt a certain solidarity in our matching rings of armpit sweat. I ate salad and salmon. I skipped dessert.

Everybody seemed so nervous. Everybody had something to sell and it was scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-suck-your-cock and it was uncomfortable. I didn’t really give a fuck because I had no real dog in the fight. This seemed to work well. I asked questions and made jokes and was a different person than I normally in, if only because I wasn’t trying to get something from these people.

Maybe there’s something to that.

Maybe there’s some life lesson that everybody has learned years ago, but like most of those things, this little nugget passed me by. Maybe people can feel desperation. Maybe people can feel neediness. Maybe they know when they are being pitched at and demanded to pay attention and expected to give something in return. And maybe this sensing of neediness and desperation is as repellent as two-girls-one-cup (to the general population, that is) and maybe the key to any successful “marketing” or “networking” is not giving a fuck about what you are selling or being sold.

Easier said than done.

I’m a slobbery mess at AWP.

And I guess it boils down to what almost everything in life boils down to: the fear of loosing something you have or not getting what you want. For the burping pregnant girl, it was not getting business for her company. For me, it’s not having magazines accept my work or at least recognize my name. It’s failure. It’s not getting what we want. And that creates the neediness. The desire to please and be accepted and deemed worthy to be part of whatever small circle we constantly feel on the outskirts of.

So if my single day as a marketer taught me anything, it’s to realize that the little literary world I put on a pedestal is just as silly as the field these women are in, at least seen from an outsider. It’s to not take it all so goddamn seriously. That I’ll do just fine being nice to people, being real, treating others like actual motherfucking humans, saying yo.