Dashboard Elvis is Dead, page 21
My article – ‘The Low Expectations of The Bowery Bums’ – is printed in the Village Voice in early 1996. My encounter with Hennessey shifted its focus towards an aspect that those who have never experienced homelessness won’t be able to grasp. There may not be heating, or running water, or a front door that can be locked, but street people are part of a living community. They look out for each other, respecting the value of their meagre belongings or fortuitous finds. And they are as attached to the routines of their environment as those with a roof over their head. Hennessey, and Avery, and Ziggy Flatiron, and the rest of the Bowery Bums, don’t want sympathy. They don’t want disdain either. They simply want to be left alone in the courageous, characterful, complex, creative, mean streets they call home.
The piece, with its direct challenge to Rudy Giuliani to stop hammering the hot-dog vendors, the jaywalkers, and the homeless community, prompts conflict with the mayor’s office. Shortly afterwards, the decision is taken to switch the Voice to a free, alternative weekly after years of the paper carrying a cover price. It may unintentionally hasten the eviction of those who populate the 2B Art Space. Rents increase by 900% in the aftermath of publication.
But more significantly for me, this article leads to an approach from a Madison Avenue advertising agency. They are offering me a year’s contract. Where I lacked formal qualifications, I had the gallery-show reviews, Janet Delaney’s endorsement, and the controversy of the Voice article demonstrating that I ‘thought differently’; a key attribute at the Camel/De Souza agency. It is a real turning point for me. I initially feel embarrassed to have profited from Hennessey’s encounter, especially since it has left him even more homeless, so to speak. I also worry about the uncredited paraphrasing of lyrics from the ‘Independent State of Mind’ record that I used in the piece, but Andi urges me to accept the offer. So, I do.
I say a fond farewell to Bloomingdales – and all who sold in her – in the fall of ninety-six. I’m not yet thirty. I am salaried, and on a full-term contract for the first time in my working life. I am being paid $21,000 a year as a junior art director at the Camel/De Souza agency. Everyone who works here is a director of something, it seems.
My early work for them is sporadic. Stock photography aimed at high-profile campaigns for Ford and Coca-Cola. Sketch ideas and concepts for other stock exchange-listed companies that do little other than illustrate my inexperience. None of my work is used.
Andi and I move again. Once again, at her insistence. This time, to a rent-controlled basement apartment of a brownstone in the West Village. I find it ironic that the gay bohemian vibe of Christopher Street is more obviously gentrified – the after of Giuliani’s clean-up campaign – than the before of Bowery. But I do as I am told.
We move in on a night of city-wide celebration in late October. The New York Yankees have defeated the Atlanta Braves to win their first World Series in eighteen years. I head out late into spirited Greenwich Village streets that feel faintly reminiscent of the Times Square victory celebrations captured by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945. I pray for the happenstance of a Yankees fan embracing and kissing a total stranger, but I don’t encounter anything that memorable.
It’s July 1997. A regular job is a challenge. I don’t fit easily into the kind of incubator where the juniors burst to impress and jostle with each other to catch a senior eye. The corporate ‘we’ preaches collaboration but it’s rarely on show. And in any case, teamwork requires a level of discipline and compromise that is alien to my freelancing background. To compound this, my appearance, my southern twang, my unconventional route to this job, all mark me as an outlier, a social climber, one to be sidelined and, if necessary, devoured by the pack. It feels like I’m back in Humble High. Uncertain of myself and lacking the confidence to contribute. This claustrophobic office environment is like a strange laboratory melting pot where the Caucasians dominate. Survival of the fittest. Unsurprisingly, I say as little about outside interests as I can get away with.
Pick a side!
Monique’s challenge rattles around my aching skull. Perhaps this is what she meant. Maybe it wasn’t about personal attraction to a white woman, but the city’s bifurcation on grounds of race and class. Black or white, nothing in between.
Which side are you on, Jude?
Months in and still finding my feet, I’m called into one of four internal teams to be briefed on a major assignment. Ten years prior, the agency lost the Apple Computer business account. Since then, Apple’s fortunes have suffered. Original founder Steve Jobs left to form NeXT. Last year, NeXT was bought by Apple Computer. Our bosses in Manhattan and Los Angeles view this as an opportunity for Jobs to make up for the agency getting screwed over in the past. The agency will be pitching against three competitors for a major Apple campaign, and Jobs is expected to be heavily involved.
This is massive news, Jude, says Herman.
Herman is another junior art director. There is an army of us here on Madison Avenue. He is a Stanford graduate and Ivy League-keen. He is bemused by my indifference.
Just another job … or Jobs, I say. Herman doesn’t laugh. He’s a serious fellow.
There’s no time to script a long, written-out strategy or to storyboard a detailed creative brief, says an impossibly exuberant account director who has flown in from Los Angeles.
We gotta figure out how to get Apple back on track, and fast. List the strengths and weaknesses in their market, he says, as the entire studio scribbles every word.
Look for uniqueness. Look for shock. Look for impact, we are told.
A room full of junior creatives simmers in anticipation of being the one that provides the spark. One potential strategy is outlined – simple monochrome photographs of revolutionary people and events. Black-and-white headshots are my milieu. For the first time since arriving at the agency, I’m in control of an output. Over the course of a week in which I barely leave the studio, we – me, Herman and five others who’ve rarely worked together before – sketch out ideas for ads involving a photograph I’ve sourced of Albert Einstein. Someone else has a photo of Gandhi. Rosa Parks features. Muhammad Ali. Another carries the famous photo of flowers placed in gun barrels during the protest against the Vietnam War. Our team has tacked photos, images, sketches, phrases to every wall surface in our corner of the room. The approaches taken by other teams are, to my mind, mediocre and forgettable. A management review of interim work is under way, and it is not progressing constructively. The pressure is getting to everyone in the agency.
Who the fuck’s this guy? an abrupt senior colleague asks, glancing at my snap of Hennessey from the Village Voice piece. He fingers an elastic band that’s holding his long, black, shiny hair in a preposterous ponytail. No-one answers. My colleagues turn to look at me. The sly stare of blame.
Was this you? he asks.
I don’t answer initially. He’s not letting it go.
Hey, Daisy Duke, I’m speaking to you.
It’s no-one, I say defensively.
Why the fuck’s he up here then?
It’s the style of the photograph, I stammer. I think it might be—
Well, don’t think! I’m interrupted. We don’t pay you to think. He’s a bum. Get it down from there. You think we’re gonna present Steve fucking Jobs with a campaign that features some hobo cunt who’s never even seen a computer before?
I stare, motionless.
Well? he says impatiently.
I am an example being made to the other juniors.
Get your thumb out your butt, sweetheart! he shouts.
I unpin Hennessey, removing him from the gallery of geniuses.
Hey, don’t worry about him, says Herman once the critics have moved on. He’s an asshole. Even some of the higher-ups think so. I’ve heard them.
It’s cool, I tell him.
But it isn’t. Affronted and close to tears, I take a sharpie and write THINK! in the wall space vacated by Hennessey’s portrait, above a scribbled representation of the Apple logo. I leave the studio aggrieved and exhausted. A jumper on the line closes the subway to my neighborhood. Rather than waiting, I walk home in the hope that it clears my head. It doesn’t. Back at our basement, Andi is entertaining.
Hey honey, she says.
She’s drunk. Her arms have a life of their own. They drape around me before I can get my jacket off. This is an uninhibited show for two equally drunk strangers. Empty bottles litter the floor.
Who’s this? I ask in a stressed, exasperated husband-from-the-sixties tone.
Well, she giggles, this is Bobbie, and over there … that’s Jackie.
The cuteness of their names is lost on me.
We met over at the auditions with R. Kelly. I love them, she slurs.
The door opens behind me. Another guest.
An’ this is—
Barbie? I say, interrupting her.
She now knows I’m furious. Three identikit white models toss their backcombed hair and raise melodramatic eyebrows at the row that’s brewing.
Well, no, sugar … not Barbie. This is, em, Mindy.
Hi, I say. Sullen and uncooperative and I know I’m at fault but it’s a runaway train and there’s no brakeman. I pull away from Andi’s uncoordinated arms.
Look, everybody, I’m sorry, but I’ve had a real shit day at work. I’m beat. Another time, yeah?
That’s the signal for them to leave. But they don’t. They double down. Another bottle gets opened. It’s them or me. But I have no place else to go.
Yeah, we’ve all been there, girlfriend, says Bobbie or Jackie.
The attempt at sisterhood solidarity falls on its ass. My irritation increases. I’m uncomfortable around people, is the way Andi will explain my behavior to them tomorrow. And, in a sense, she’ll be right. Photography offers engagement but at a distance. I have few friends. Andi, Hennessey and, when he can be bothered, Alessandro. That’s about it. There’s no-one from my past. Only the present. There’s no-one from work. But I’ve carefully cultivated this isolation. I take lunch at my desk, or out in Central Park photographing people. When I get too exhausted to continue, I go home. My co-workers hit the bars. They stopped inviting me months ago.
Been where, exactly? I ask.
My arms are folded and I’m suddenly aware of the tension rising up my body. The one called Mindy makes the mistake of putting her hands on my shoulders. There’s a head-tilt. Condescension alert.
Girl, kick off those sneakers and chill, she says.
You know how you reach for hurtful sentences that you don’t really mean? But you do it to start an argument, or end one? No? You don’t do that? Really? Well, I do.
I’m fucking sick of being talked down to by talentless, privileged white people! I scream.
The air goes out of the room. I see the three guest backing singers look at me closely. Studying me intently. My recessive white genes. My blue eyes. My short blonde hair. My ever so slightly non-Caucasoid nose. Andi’s hands cover her face.
What the fuck, Jude? she utters from behind them.
You know I’m Black, right? No? You weren’t aware? Fuck, that’s a pity. We could’ve had a party game. Guess what race she is. I bet you’d never get it.
Jude, that’s enough, shouts Andi.
Tears are welling in her eyes and her mascara is running. She still looks pretty, but we’re past the point of no return.
But … Black people don’t have freckles, says Mindy, and it’s almost funny the naive way she says it. It’s the kind of thing close friends laugh at years later: Remember when Mindy first met Jude, and she said… as we’re preparing to be each other’s bridesmaids.
We should go, whispers Bobbie or Jackie.
Probably best, I say firmly.
They shimmy past and kiss their hostess. I hear one offering to call later. Probably concerned that the Black woman will resort to type and murder the white one.
The fight, when it comes, is a relief for both of us.
You’ve been absolutely fucking intolerable since you’ve been with that agency, she says.
That agency that you persuaded me to join, I counter.
I can’t do this anymore, she says. She’s spinning out. Clothes are being thrust into a holdall.
Do what, exactly? Swan about the apartment getting loaded with the white Supremes.
Well, it’s more fun than being with you, these days, she yells.
Okay, why not spend all your time with them then? I’m sure R. Kelly’s got a few spare bedrooms up in Long Island.
Fuck off, Jude! she screams.
You’re quite happy when my job, which you hate, pays the rent, and buys alcohol for you and your friends, I scream back.
This is unfair. My earnings are regular, hers have been sporadic. But she’s been doing profitable session work of late. And now there’s this R. Kelly American tour in the offing. Things should be great for us. Both working, both contributing. But we reach for words that will harm most when we are upset, and often, the trigger for it masks a bigger underlying issue.
It’s not your job that I hate, she says, before leaving.
A slammed door is a full stop.
I slump on the beanbag. Staring out my basement window high up into the night sky. A full moon illuminates the edge of the room, catching me in the narrow field of its spotlight. I’ve never reached for the racial epithets before. It’s the first time I’ve felt a pressure to establish racial clarity. I still don’t know if I identify with being Black or white, one more than the other. Or why it’s even important to do that. But suddenly, it’s consuming me. I’m exhausted but I can’t sleep. Starving, but I can’t eat. And a realization emerges as dawn breaks. The naive positivity that I carried with me from Humble has morphed into something different.
I’m saying YES! but only to other people’s desires for me:
Moving to Lakeview: Brandy
Moving in with Hennessey: Hennessey*
Sex with Hennessey: Hennessey*
Moving out of the Brooklyn loft: Monique
Lesbianism: Andi*
Moving to the Lower East Side: Andi
Accepting the agency job offer: Andi
Moving to the West Village: Andi
*I shouldn’t imply that these were coercive. I was a willing participant, if not the instigator.
I return to the agency early the next morning. I still don’t know where Andi has gone, and my stupid pride prevents me from trying to find out. The realization that I may be incapable of love, that I sabotage happiness, hits me hard. I catch sight of myself in the glass of the reception’s doors. It’s unlikely that my disheveled state will be noticed. Many of the younger creatives and interns do all-nighters when a big campaign deadline is coming up. When I reach the board room, there is a buzz of activity and it’s all focused on my team’s corner. One of the L.A. directors is pontificating over a clipboard. His manner makes it hard to determine whether he’s pleased or angry.
This…! This is brilliant, I hear him say.
Pleased it is, then. Through gaps in the suits, I see him pointing at the place where Hennessey’s photograph was pinned. At my sketch of the Apple logo. At the word THINK!
It’s so different. This is genius. Who is the author of this piece? He asks, and before Herman can speak, the pony-tailed asshole puts his hand up and tells everyone it was him.
The Think Different campaign is in full swing. Different has been added in L.A. Think Different is interesting. It may be grammatically clumsy but attaching those words to some of the world’s most different-thinking people is simplistic genius, the essence of every successful advertising campaign in history.
The campaign focus shifts to the West Coast, to Palo Alto and to the office of Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. The computer mastermind is taking a central role in the development of the ads. He was previously unconvinced about television as the right medium. The pony-tailed asshole is no longer with the agency. He moved on. He’s the type that moves on every six months or so. He’s the type with an eye constantly on other opportunities. He’s the type who times the jump before an internal appraisal finds him out. He’s the type of asshole that prospers in the advertising fraternity. Male, white, slimy used-car-salesman style, and no fucking substance whatsoever. I write Fuck You Asshole! in his leaving card and depart the building before he opens it.
I’m less involved in the Apple campaign now, but my remaining contribution is to compile a list of potential music tracks to reinforce the message. It’s a slim reward for my earlier input being attributed to the ponytailed asshole, but I suck it up. I hear a song on the radio one morning. It has a chorus that goes:
Come on, come on, come on little rabbit,
Show me where you got it ’cause I know you got a habit.
It strikes an immediate chord with me, but I’d struggle to explain the relevance to my colleagues. So, naturally, I suggest ‘Independent State of Mind’ as an early choice. I argue that it reinforces a unique way of thinking, an independence. A celebration of the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
I scan copies of David F. Ross’s ‘Ballad of the Band’ article and send a memo to everyone in the promo team, with ‘It Doesn’t Get Much Crazier Than This’ underlined as its subject heading. I conceal my own involvement in the final craziness and the notion takes root, over predictable alternatives from the standard MTV star roster. I promote the notion that the music should support the idea of different or independent thinking, but without the track being so well known that it competes with the associated twelve geniuses. After all, John Lennon and Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix are among the chosen ones. Wouldn’t it be odd, I successfully assert, for a Michael Jackson or a Madonna track to play underneath them? The Hyptones record gets promoted to the next round. And I am instructed to pursue rights for its potential use. I start with the writer David F. Ross, and the contact details listed in The Face magazine. Calls are made.
