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He was a man . . . he heard the sound of no voice but his own. —Vivian Gornick If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative. —David Ogilvy
Her voice had an alluring elasticity that snapped my ears to attention.
A great tagline is more infestation than persuasion. It swarms the mind like a plague of locusts. It means and means and never stops.
Isn’t this true for all creative geniuses? Monet was half blind. Beethoven was mostly deaf. I was completely ignorant.
With her intensity, she seemed to me an extension of the agency itself. Talking with Josie was like talking with RazorBeat, kissing Josie was like kissing RazorBeat, fucking—well, you get the picture.
Though most corporate cultures weren’t like ours. We were in the habit of servicing multiple clients at once; it taught us to be promiscuous.
“If you bury something, you secretly want someone to find it.”
I stumbled only once, just for a fleeting moment, when Diego asked the most basic question of all: Why did I want to write taglines for a living? And I told him, to my surprise, the truth. Because they’re sticky. They can’t be forgotten. Even taglines that nobody likes, they’re still impossible to forget. And I loved the thought of that, of being unforgettable. I would be old and senile someday, and my words would still be lodged permanently in people’s heads, stuck there forever. Attachment. That’s what it was all about.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to hurt Josie but that I wanted to believe I could hurt her, that I was still capable of inflicting a wound.
And maybe, just maybe, I wanted her to pinch me for a change. I wanted pain to radiate deep and down and through. I wanted a literal train to run me over, so she might have to bend low and listen for the faint thud of my pulse.
“Jewishness,” he explained, “is a Jew with no faith.” I visualized a person with a gaping hole in the middle. Basically, a bagel.
“You think you understand everyone, and that makes you better than everyone. But you don’t, and it doesn’t.”
“That’s all a funeral is,” he said, loosening his grip on the wheel. “The world’s most boring ad.”
“All brands are lies,” she replied sharply. “Some just happen to be true.”
“I’ll tell anyone anything,” she said, “so long as they ask.”
“What do you think?” he said finally, his mouth at my ear. “Am I a writer?”
