This is a second essay from a work-in-progress entitled “Dayjob”.
My cubicle had felt walls with precarious push-pins nudged into the fabric at an angle that made me uncomfortable. Every morning, I inspected the keypad of the desktop, my chair, the area underneath my station, searching for a stray. From time to time, I would lean to my left, multitasking, my free hand marking a page, my tongue pushing a phrase up against my palette, and I would be pricked by a runaway, a small push-pin hidden in the pages of the style guide. My constant companion.
It was supposed to have been a job to last me through the long and narrow corridor of my mid-twenties, but I only made it five and a half months. At first I loved the challenge- drafting 15 pages of a catalogue in a single workday, coming up with names for a new line of blue jeans; the “cosmopolitan”, “countrified”, “the 3 O’clock”, “the Emma”.
The girls were nice, if insipid. They were all girls. The boys were relegated to the wardrobe where we kept samples and swatches of upcoming collections. They liked camouflage. They liked zippers. They liked useless pockets.
I sat across from a girl who ate and drank incessantly; I never learned her name. In the mornings, she would swoop into her cubicle like a clumsy pelican, and deposit her belongings (gym bag, hangbag, jacket) into a supersized heap to the side of her chair. Next, she would bring forth (seemingly from somewhere inside a second jacket), a small container of milk, a plastic bag of cheerios, a banana, a take-out cup of coffee. Each morning, she would fix herself a bowl of cereal, and just as the last slice of banana was laid to rest inside of it, would find some pressing reason to be called away. The cheerios would sit there swelling in the bowl while the smell of the banana permeated the hallway. Thirty minutes later, she would return and regard the whole enterprise like some impossible and taxing document strewn upon her desk. She would send the entire outfit to the trashbin with several frantic gestures, and regain her chair with the puffed-up countenance of someone so important and manically busy, she couldn’t possibly find time to breakfast.
The girl who sat behind me was being conditioned. Although we were both freelancers at the time, I knew she was on a different track than I was because she never made fun of the clothing. The very first piece of copy I ever wrote for this catalogue (let’s call it Mimi’s Dream, d’accord?) depicted a pair of seven-inch platform sandals with crocheted leg wraps embellished with hundreds of circular mirrors the size of a lentil. Elvis never left the building, I thought to myself, as I flipped through the accompanying fact sheets and photos. That was my first week- I was being tested. I was given three items to write about; the offending felt-stilts they passed off as sandals, a skintight tuxedo blouse with Velcro, not buttons, and a push-up bathing suit drolly called “The Deep Plunge”. I would be offered the job if I could create copy for these artifacts that did not include the words “sexy”, “flashy” or “cheap”. Not an easy feat.
I was called into the office of the senior copywriter an hour after I submitted my passes. She handed me a photocopied version of the blurbs I had supplied, with her comments written in pencil. I’ve always been wary of professionals that write in pencil. The computer has rendered the pencil obsolete. I can’t imagine any appropriate use for it other than for executing one’s math homework and taking SAT’s.
Maud, the senior copywriter, (No, her name wasn’t Maud, but it really should have been), had fashioned a perfectly concentric circle around the word “tit”. “NO!!” She scribbled next to the circle, in red. I stared down at my copy. “A titillating take on the tux.” Genius! Maud folded one bone-white leg over the other (this was a young woman who wore hosiery, never tights), and clipped her pencil emphatically against her top knee.
“You can’t use words like that.”
I stared past her towards her workspace. She had a framed photograph of a man in a baseball uniform. The player looked familiar, but the photo had been taken by a non-professional. The frame was decorated with varnished, beige seashells.
I looked back at Maud. There were three different kinds of push-up bras floating above her head on a metal rack. One of them had a leopard print design with white rhinestones embedded in the fabric. I wondered how you could wear such a thing without ruining your shirt. The perky, pointy rhinestones made me feel anxious. I stared at Maud’s chest, curious to find out whether the path from freelance copywriter to junior copywriter involved padded bras. She had on a pink cashmere sweater with the slightest V-neck. Demure. Innocuous. Drab. I stared at her sternum and could only just make out two imprints of color, like the sweat from a coffee mug left upon a table. I thought I saw zebra. But it felt wrong to keep looking.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she continued. “But we can’t state the obvious. The women we write for, they want to be well-dressed. Classy. Here,” she reached behind her for a giant lookbook. “I’ll give you a statistic.”
She handed me the book with a nod, insinuating that the answer lied within.
“Bodysuits.” She said, with a shrug. “You wouldn’t think so, but they’re our bestsellers in career wear.”
I kept quiet. Did these women never pee?
“So we can’t call out the obvious, or try and be too clever. I like the alliteration though,” she aimed her pencil in the direction of my lap. “Alliteration is good.”
I closed the lookbook and awaited further comments.
“Three days a week? To start?”
I stood up. I said yes.
My days at Mimi’s Dream were filled with start and stop potato sack races towards the verbal zinger. It was exciting, at first, a challenge- to come up with sassy euphemisms for “get lucky” G-strings, edible body powders and faux-fur clip-on neckties. Three days a week for six months straight, I would leave my overheated house and walk down the hill towards the subway. Seven and a half minutes of not-so-fresh oxygen before I plunged into the stale cavern of the subway station where the geriatric F train would bring me- very slowly- into Times Square.
I stood in line. I ordered hot chocolate. I discovered early on that I needed something off-kilter and naughty to get me through the day. Coffee made me restless. Tea made me depressed. Pure, creamy hot chocolate made me feel a cut above the rest. I wasn’t watching calories. I didn’t have a gym. Not true, in fact- I did have one. I simply didn’t use it.
The receptionist knew my face and recognized my earmuffs, but I still had to sign in. Each morning, every time, every in and out. Name? Where are you going? It pained me a little to display such impermanence. Once in a while, one of the senior copywriters would stroll by, casually wagging their available fingers in my direction on their way to the elevator. Armed with multiple bags, their cell phones sandwiched between their shoulder and one ear, a hot beverage perched precariously on the shelf of one arm, weighed down but lighthearted, they started their way up.
I stayed in line behind the other temporaries, our ID cards ready, a smug “here we go again” look on our faces. I envied the others, but I pitied them as well. I waffled between a feeling of superiority (I put the free in freelance) and thinking how good it must feel to walk into the office on the 17th floor and offer a saccharine complement to the Spanish receptionist, to have a reserved place in the company refrigerator, to be automatically included in the lunchtime take-out orders. “Deborah! Spicy rolls again?”
No one ever offered to order something for me or stopped by, hand on hip, to include me in a coffee run. The role of a freelance copywriter is like ghost writing at its most basic. We are authors without names. Writers without faces. We wrote and brainstormed, the others took credit, and our readers felt moved by the “wow factor” of our writing without realizing that the thirty-five word sentence had been the stuff of long deliberation. Meetings and mass emails. Was “head turning” overused? Was “fierce” in, or out?
There wasn’t a lunchbreak room on our floor. Rumor had it that the corporate headquarters had one, six floors above us, and that we were free to use it if we liked, but anyone who has ever gone to high school and sat at the wrong cafeteria table will understand the preposterousness of such an endeavor. I had to go up to the corporate headquarters once, to retrieve a bra that was still under patent, and I left with the distinct impression that I had come this close to being reported to Homeland Security. My crime? Reminding the insulated members of the twenty-third floor that there were people- real people- behind the catalogues and the figures. I could only imagine what would have happened had I dared to sneak a burrito into their communal kitchen. Because there wasn’t any break room. I know, because I checked.
I would have shared this knowledge with some of the other freelancers if they didn’t work so hard. Without a break room, without even a water cooler, casual conversation was physically awkward. At best, girls would ask you about your weekend in line for the toilets, and you’d be left wondering whether or not to continue the conversation over the sound of your own pee. At worst, the senior copywriters would dump a twenty-pound box of fact sheets on your desk with a conciliatory “you doing well? Great shirt!”. Sometimes I would answer, which irked them to no end. I watched one senior copywriter turn positively purple when I asked her about her weekend. I could literally see the stress crawling up her neck. She clearly had the impression that one word, one utterance over the standard allotted six-syllable nicety would jeopardize not only her career, but the state of the planet.
These girls were serious. They arrived on time, they always left late. They lunched at their desks, they never dreamed of cigarettes. I heard whiffs of conversations regarding weekends on Fire Island, but I never saw the suntans to go along with these tales. The senior copywriters were gangly, they were terse, and they were nearly always panicked. They shopped at H & M and Forever 21 because they were right around the corner. They used their company discount to great advantage and they seemed to live in leggings. Every time a new J.Crew catalogue came out, they’d come in sighing, one by one, marching in rigid lines towards the meeting room where they’d hear, yet again, that this was the type of copy that moved product and made fans. That we needed to keep things “sophisticated” and “fresh”.
This might not be difficult when you’re pushing cashmere sweater sets in “Jitney Green”, but it becomes quite a challenge when you’re promoting crotchless panties. As time passed, the girl behind me proved herself far superior in the world of denim and push-up bras, while I excelled in handbags, shoes and resortwear. I may have been one of the only people in 2006 to have actually looked at and written about Jessica Simpson’s signature line of handbags and boots; cumbersome accessories with an overdose of faux-fur and fringe, that called to mind a snow bunny on crack.
I couldn’t help but wonder- would people keep buying this kind of stuff, forever? I became fascinated with our target audience and started looking for members of this species while I was out about town. With their lurex tops and cleavage, they were easy to find. They never drank beer or sat down at tables. Draped strategically by the counter of bars and tapas restaurants, always half on, half off of some stool, these were the kind of women that looked at a man’s ring finger before looking at his face. They drank cosmopolitans because they thought they were still fashionable. They had pedicures and manicures and clip on accessories for their professional hair dryers. They faked tanned and spray tanned and went daily to the gym. They fretted about things like arm cleavage and they carried low-sodium salt around with them in snack-pack sized Ziplocks. They liked giving blowjobs. They probably did it well.
You might think I’m exaggerating but we had statistics on these things. We knew, for example, that they liked boyshorts for daytime and wide-side thongs for playtime. These were perfume wearers and purchasers of vanilla scented candles. And Maud wasn’t lying- these women loved bodysuits. They wore them to work, and found them figure flattering. They favored anything satin and red for the holidays, and they thought Santa Claus was sexy. This was a legitimate question on our website poll. You clicked “yes, for checkout” and a pop-up screen appeared with a present. “Girls! Is Santa Sexy?” Every single user said yes.
I had never been part of a world like that. That girly way of thinking, the time management skills required for such a life- I never saw the interest. Occasionally, I would have moments in the late afternoon when I would look deep into the computer screen with nuclear-burned eyes and see a version of my Mimi self materialize before me. It amazed me that there were women out there who owned different fragrances for different times of the day. I used L’eau d’Issey throughout college until I realized I smelled like every other comparative lit major my age. I put it on top of my thesaurus, next to the radiator, and it evaporated by the end of the year. An ill-conceived gift from a mistake of a boyfriend saw me wearing men’s cologne for a while during my junior year, but my follow-up mistake wore the same fragrance, and it just got to be a bit much. I tried an essential oil flavored like peach, but its scent struck me as pre-pubescent, and its name, “Fuzzy Navel”, was maddeningly coy. In my perfect world, my perfect fragrance is a mixture of rosemary and sage, but translated into perfume, it smells like pot. I tried to make it once. It’s the fault of the sage. It smells like body odor when it shrivels up.
Most of the Mimi girls ate lunch at a horrid soup and wrap place right beneath our building. The salads were composed of three to six ingredients, or for $12 you could sample the “Bountiful Buffet”, and pile your plastic bowl full of seasonless delights like kidney beans and jello. The shop was a chain store- let’s say we call it Sammy’s. As a copywriter, I couldn’t understand why the other writers went there. Sammy’s had 35 stores spread throughout Manhattan, and 137 outposts on the east coast. Nevertheless, at 1:35, the junior copywriters would come skipping out of the elevators with a tote bag and a smile, singing “Corn chowder today. Muy bueno!” to the comatose receptionist.
“Handcrafted”, “Just Made”, “Seasonal Ingredients”. It was amazing how you could work in advertising and yet remain susceptible to it. It was ludicrous to think that the General Manager of the Sammy’s on 42nd street somehow had access to fresh corn in December while the General Manager of Sammy’s in Union Square was whipping up some curry- because, hey! It was that kind of day! But I digress.
My point is that I think I didn’t survive at Mimi’s Dream, or in the corporate copywriting world in general, because I couldn’t disconnect myself from the urge to brand. How brave of those girls- how necessary it was to be able to switch off your computer and meet up with a friend for a round of Appletinis without being moved to hysterics.
The words- the words!- they were everywhere that year. I saw and heard alliteration everywhere I went. New ads for Dunkin Donuts kept me up at night. A massive plastic glass bursting forth with cubes of caramel, Caramel aaah, scrawled out in blue. Every time I saw that ad, I yearned to brush my teeth.
I began, slowly, to brand the people around me. The girl who sat behind me, working her way up. Earnest and available. My friend who cultivated a sense of mystery around him by suggesting that at any given moment he might live up to his potential; The Infinite Hedonist. My husband, unhappy in a city that was one size too big, provoked to smile by all things small and safe; Creativity Estranged.
When looking for what the Mimi Style Guide referred to as “the gem”, you knew right away whether you were on track or off track, getting hot, or getting cold. Sometimes you’d get it right off the bat- (I thought that I had had it, for instance, with “a titillating take on the tux”), only to find as you pressed on that your copy sounded snarky, it showed off or it expressed a private joke that no one else would get. They key was to dumb down your writing, to dumb everything down. To think without excitement, to write swiftly, without fun. Looking back now, I realize I went about the process incorrectly. Somehow I thought if I pushed on, if I wowed them, I would garner the favor and the admiration of the creative heads. So I continued with witty banter, when they really wanted witless. I incorporated word play, the occasional French wink (ooh la la luxe), and euphemistic references to a world beneath the sheets. I thought I was impressing them- showing that I had the energy and instincts to take the brand next-level, but in fact, I was exasperating them, wasting their time, using too much of their red ink. What I failed to understand was though Mimi’s Dream talked the talk on the 17th floor, six floors above us, no one walked the walk. In meetings, the creative directors droned on endlessly about the merits of J.Crew’s tone, but what they were really saying was that they wished that they worked there instead- not that they aimed to take Mimi’s Dream in a similar direction. Until women stopped being interested in “bottomless cleavage”, we would continue to fill our catalogues with deep plunge V-neck sweaters and thigh high wrap-up boots. This was a company that somehow found a way to trick its creative team into working very hard to keep things exactly the same.
The girls around me had ambition; some had political blogs, others were working on novels or a collection of short stories, others still were fit models, marathon runners, girls-group volunteers. But while they were encased in the seventeenth floor of that very tall building, they were flawless robots. And as they walked home, descending slowly into the 42nd street subway, they would look up at the poster of a bra that they had named, the secret of it burning in their stiffened hearts. That word came from me, they would think, standing in the middle of a mass of strangers. The anonymity kept them safe. But it also kept them quiet.
