The Men Can't Be Saved

by Ben Purkert

“Men are really simple, Seth.” Her words, crisp with salt, cut clean off the tongue. After her nibble, she grabbed my arm again, her grip gentler this time. “You’re the simplest damn thing in the world.”

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

our work sucks dead donkey dick. No offense. Not your fault, not RazorBeat’s fault. All agencies are basically the same.

Moon, as everyone called him, possessed a single talent: infectious freneticism.

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. It was absurd that he’d risen so quickly up the ranks, but it couldn’t be helped. Every agency has its share of Moons.

Well-dressed businessmen passed with the smooth run of a new razor.

“Imagine you’re living in Uganda, and you’re married fifty years to some bastard, and he’s a blurry piece of shit. Then, for the first time, you really see him. Warts, wrinkles, all of it. But hey, you’d still love him anyway. You could deal, right? Then you see yourself in the mirror. Well, that’s murder! You dump the glasses in the ground and never look back.”

It was convenient that we were such a widely scattered people; thanks to diaspora, I was never too far from my own.

It was understood that we weren’t to eat them, that their mere visual presence was meant to satiate us fully.

The prostate meant more than some ordinary product. It wasn’t lost on me that I contained one myself.

“Prostate Cancer Research Group,” I declared, with a carnival barker’s rising inflection. “More Might for the Fight.”

Like all agencies, we pretended to push around our clients, but that’s all it was, pretend. We play-slapped them because they begged to be play-slapped.

like a hurricane punching the atrium roof off a mall. No, that’s not the right simile. A hurricane is hollow at its center, whereas Moon seemed of solider and sturdier composition.

“Ninety percent survival rate! You’re a grizzled fuck and the doctor says you’ve got prostate cancer—what do you say? Thank you, Lord Jesus, sweet holy Moses; praise be to Allah!

Moon, however, claimed his throne without compunction.

how I was employed at one of New York’s top branding agencies and was involved—if not directly—in a highly specialized area of cancer research, and it all was highly complex, highly technical, and what about them, whose lives were they saving?

“Because, after a while,” she said, “there’s no one left to blame. They’ve pushed everyone the fuck away.”

finding its Zionist propaganda campaign tiresome. I explained that I had nothing against propaganda, that in fact I was an expert in the business of propaganda myself, but its messaging was wearing on me. If Birthright hoped to be persuasive, I wrote, it’d be wise to tone it down. I offered to relay my feedback to its marketing team directly, via conference call if possible.

For me, being Jewish had only ever felt old.

The Jewish people were always shorthanded. There was never enough of us, and never would be.

“You’re always crying or puking or both.” * * *

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.

Israel, I told him. “I’ve always wanted to go. It’s on my list, right after Venice.” “Better go soon. It won’t be around much longer.” He paused. “Venice . . . or Israel?”

For that matter, how would the agency survive without me? Perhaps the whole place would crumble.

It wasn’t my intention to develop a drug habit. And, really, I didn’t think about what we did (or, I suppose, I did) in habitual terms.

all I wanted was to take the world between my two hands and look it straight in the eye like a petulant child and demand in no uncertain terms that it stop, stop right now!

I had no desire to live honestly. I deserved better than that.

“If you think about it, that’s our only purpose. Filling those gaps.”

Birthright, I said, was a failed marketing campaign. A pathetic attempt to promote a positive image of Israel, an image that bore no resemblance to reality. It was a violent nation, and I’d witnessed that violence firsthand!

“I can’t think of a single guy at RazorBeat who hasn’t sexually harassed me.”

could read the dark-blond calligraphy of chest hair underneath.

Visiting a strip club was like visiting Israel, I figured. Both were morally questionable places. Both would expose who I was or might become.

“Wait!” Moon’s eyes bulged as he leaned forward. He’d sprung back to his proper size. “That’s ancient history. That’s, like, forever ago in fuck-years.”

“Maybe you’re right. But here’s the reality. Our clients? They don’t create anything either!”

“Take our old friend Lexus. They don’t make shit! Everything is outsourced. Company A makes engines. Company B makes batteries. Company C makes tires. What does Lexus do? Simple addition. A + B + C. Then they slap their name on at the end and jack up the price.

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.

puerile

pertinacious

“Is that what you think I’m doing? Keeping busy?” “Aren’t we all?”

“Look after yourself.”

I couldn’t help wondering, had I made partner, what my apartment might’ve looked like.

“Bourbon?” he offered. “Probably shouldn’t.” I paused before adding, “I’m borrowing your car.” “Excellent point. A beer instead.”

All these random objects in the night sky, as if some massive shipping container had cracked open and spilled out its varied contents across the cosmos. I’d never stopped to consider the randomness of it all. I accepted it, and that was that.

“Excuse me . . . Jewish?” His beard reached all the way to his suit’s middle button. “Are you Jewish?” I was often stopped on the street by Hasidim in New York City, and it always unsettled me. How were they picking me out of the crowd? Maybe I didn’t look average; maybe some part of me screamed Jewish, and I couldn’t silence it if I tried.

I rarely talked openly about being Jewish with anyone. I wasn’t hiding it, of course, though sometimes it felt to me that concealing being Jewish was being Jewish; or, to put it another way, that I was less a Jew myself than someone quietly sheltering a Jew inside him. I wondered if the Orthodox ever felt like that too, that their Judaism was a secret they carried. Probably not—they wore their faith in plain sight.

I’d slink away through a vacant lot and head to either Lindy’s bar or Chabad. Both served liquor, at a cost. At one, I had to pay cash. At the other, I had to endure long conversations with Nadav.

If Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable. It can survive Judaism.’”

“You know what the Talmud says? About the hidden tzadikim? Every generation gets thirty-six righteous men. And these men, they’re so good, so honorable, each is worthy of being the Mashiach. And the thirty-six, they’re walking among us as we speak. Incognito. Hidden.”

I’d always been hesitant to get too involved in Judaism; it seemed prudent to remain at a distance, to stand somewhere along the far periphery and just observe it, as one might a bonfire. Though now I wondered what I’d really gained from this distance and what I was giving up.