The Men Can't Be Saved

by Ben Purkert

Hey, can I get your eyes on this? or I’d love to pick your brain! They’d only ever request use of my component parts—my eyes, my brain—as if they implicitly understood themselves unworthy of the whole.

A great tagline is more infestation than persuasion. It swarms the mind like a plague of locusts. It means and means and never stops.

I’m proud to say my approach was entirely self-taught. I maximized my output by minimizing distractions: market research, getting to know the client, blah blah blah. The less I absorbed, the better. Isn’t this true for all creative geniuses? Monet was half blind. Beethoven was mostly deaf. I was completely ignorant.

I’d keep a box of tissues on my corner-office desk. It would signal tolerance for vulnerability.

He had nothing to offer the agency, nothing of real value. He was simply adept at toggling back and forth between multiple accounts, and the speed of this toggling gave the false impression he was managing an overwhelming number of accounts at once, a bounty of unspeakable proportions.

McDonald’s left me with nothing but wilted roughage in my gut and a murmuring voice in my head: i’m lovin’ it. i’m lovin’ it.

(It was meant to boost the morale of our mentally spent workforce, but only HR went. The rest of us were, well, too spent.)

Account managers would talk your ear off for hours. They were desperate to maximize human interaction before having to slink back into the cells of their staffing spreadsheets.

While everyone at the agency complained about the quantity of email we received, it didn’t bother me. I liked a full inbox, in fact. It felt like having a full stomach or a full heart.

Freelancers—FreeBeaters, in our parlance—commanded no respect and lived on the cusp of poverty. To their faces, we’d express envy. How terrific, we’d exclaim, to enjoy such flexibility! In truth, we pitied them: lowly orphans of the agency world, pawing after table scraps. We urged them to partake liberally from our snacks drawer for fear they might otherwise turn rabid in our midst.

Odette was a born-again Christian who professed an appreciation for the Jewish people. She never elaborated, but it was implied: she’d ride out the rapture from a safe perch in the heavens, while I’d be left stewing in hell’s hottest cauldron, my tendons bubbling sweetly off the bone. The least she could do was employ me while I awaited an eternity of fire.

When I once asked what she intended to do after art school, she scoffed and said there was nothing to do with an art school diploma; in this way, it resembled a piece of art—aesthetic, not utilitarian. She had ambitions, of course, but I sensed she’d buried them deep.

Their discussion proceeded around me. I was a boulder that had rolled into their burbling stream—physically present, but not too great an obstacle to disrupt the flow.

Even up close, the roommates were indistinguishable. Varying ages, heights, races, genders, but their faces were tuned to the same frequency of disaffection. They were all desperate to stand out from the crowd, so nobody did.

Everything I knew about seeing I’d learned from my eyes—how narrowly they focused on what was immediate, what was right there.

Pitches were more exhausting than normal projects. As an agency, we worked harder for the clients we didn’t have than the ones we did.

I could relate to such familial tensions: when I decided to major in English, my engineer father nearly disowned me. His relief was palpable after I found employment as a copywriter. Perhaps not all writers were doomed.

My dad relied on archaic sayings as his mode of father-son communication. He preferred to recycle dialogue rather than invent his own.

My visits always devolved into squabbles. I’d come to accept that this was the only shape our love could take. We might try to mold it into something solid and whole, but it would always return to its natural state: a wash of weak bonds, loose as air.

He was doing that thing that killed me: watching a show with his thumb on the remote, preemptively turning the channel at the slightest hint of a commercial. For him, TV was a game to be outsmarted.

“You’re not a psychoanalyst. You’re a psycho narcissist.”

Truthfully, I’ve never liked the word ‘Jewish.’ It sounds indecisive. I’m a Jew. You and your father are Jews. There’s no point in hiding it.

“Most people think faith is about God and the afterlife. But if you’re truly faithful, you’re not focused on what comes after. You’re too busy believing in what is. You look at every moment of every day as a tangible gift, something to hold in your arms. So when you die,” I continued, “you die from exhaustion. It’s hard to carry every moment of every day. It begins to add up, all that weight. It’s much easier to be faithless. To carry nothing. To spend your days being carried along. But then, when it’s all over, you realize you’ve wasted your life. Because you never believed in it to begin with.

But it wasn’t the job that bothered me. What I couldn’t stand was the uniform: the dumb hat, the dumb apron. It all made me want to disappear. But then I realized that was the whole point of the uniform. You disappeared in it. When customers walked in, they didn’t see you. They saw the uniform, not who was in it.”

There’d been a protracted and ultimately fruitless search to replace him, so the head partners were finally considering promoting from within. This was RazorBeat’s typical thought process: look inward only as a last resort. The best creatives, like the best clients, were presumed elsewhere.

“All brands are lies,” she replied sharply. “Some just happen to be true.”

If I’d made the mistake of putting too much faith in him, that was on me. Next time I’d put faith in something larger.