Chapter 1

I’m looking out over the North Avenue Bridge, the same view I’ve seen for the last thirty years. The sun shines through a light gauze of clouds. I look out over the city, the river, the traffic below. In the window’s reflection, I see people walking back and forth down the hall. I don’t know any of them. They were brought in when Frank O’Conner—the great Frank O’Conner: businessman, entrepreneur, advertising genius—sold the agency. Most of these people are young copywriters and art directors, the new recruits. They’re wondering what I’m still doing here. I’m wondering the same thing myself.

I should have been fired yesterday with Nick, Dewey, and Margot. They got their pink slips at the same time. I joined them in the bar later and we sat in a row, drinking and talking. I was the only one going back upstairs. I still had a bottle of whiskey in my desk. I wanted one more drink before I went home.

Nobody cares if I drink in my office anymore. They all know I’m going. Not even Frank O’Conner, the great man himself, can save me. That’s the way the deal was structured. As soon as the ink dried, the new agency, this big multinational, would take over, put their name up outside, and all of Frank’s people would get their pink slips.

What’s left but to drink, put my feet up on the desk, and look at my reflection in the window? It’s not much of a reflection, to tell you the truth. I’m an old man by advertising standards. I still have most of my hair but I guess that’s cold comfort at this stage. I think Frank’s been dyeing his. He came back from Los Angeles a few weeks ago looking all tanned, but the hair was darker, too. “That’s just because of my tan, you git,” he said, then went off to another meeting.

Everyone’s writing about Frank O’Conner in the trades these days. They all want to know why he put everything on the table: the accounts and the building itself. He owned the works, and everything had a price. I don’t know what he’s getting for it all. Frank isn’t saying anything yet. He can’t say anything until the New York office gives the okay. He’s been there all week, attending meetings and pressing the flesh. That’s why he wasn’t around when the others got their termination notices. Nick, Dewey, Margot—they’ve known Frank as long as I have. We started at the same time back in the seventies. I’m not saying he owes us anything, but he could have said thanks in person.

I never thought Frank would sell out. He always loved advertising. God knows he spent enough time at it over the years, building his little empire: his building, his image, his thoughts in every trade publication. When we started out, none of us knew anything about being an agency. I’d done a stint in radio as a copywriter. Nick and Dewey sold space for trade publications. Margot was Frank’s accountant. He was in insurance back then, and before that he repossessed cars.

We were a strange lot starting an agency (well, Frank started it; it was his money). But Frank knew one thing: it paid seventeen percent commission. Seventeen percent on media and seventeen percent on production. It was easy money, and Frank saw the future. Agencies were starting up all over Chicago and he wanted a piece of the action. He went after every client back then. Some of them came and went; others stayed for years. Frank loved them all, especially the prestige accounts. He was crazy about prestige accounts. If it got his name in the paper, he’d go naked on Illinois and Michigan, and almost did in the late eighties when business dropped off. But Frank got billings back up again, and we went into the nineties with more accounts than any other time in our history.

We spent a lot of time together, more than most people in this industry. Frank looked after us, giving time off for babies, sending flowers or notes of congratulation depending on the occasion. He never stopped being generous. Nick, Dewey and Margot got three years’ salary and one year medical when they left. It’s not a pension, but you don’t see a lot pensions in this business. They want you off the books. That’s what I told my wife. I held off saying anything until yesterday when the others got their pinks slips. I knew what she’d say. “What are we going to do, Sam? How are we going to live?” I wish I knew the answer to that. I’m fifty-eight with no prospects.

Dewey and Nick will make out okay, they’ve got all sorts of schemes going. Margot’s a different story. Money can’t be a problem. Margot has investments all over the place, some you don’t want to know about, others just slightly warped. Her only extravagance over the years was a Mynah named Joey, a rescue bird from a Great Lakes freighter. When he died, she bought him a lemon yellow casket with a red satin interior. Frank said it reminded him of his first Maserati.

At the funeral, Margot gave the eulogy, getting a laugh when she imitated Joey saying, “Gimme some tit action.”

Joey’s in the Saint Luke Cemetery out on North Pulaski.

I don’t know what made me think of it. I feel sorry for Margot, but I’ve got my own problems. Judy, my daughter, arrives on the eighteenth with her husband, Muller. They’re coming in from Seattle and Mary’s been posting the latest to-do list on the refrigerator, which includes painting all the rooms on the main floor. Our house is all main floor since it’s a ranch-style with a low center of gravity. I don’t know how I’ll get through it all, to tell you the truth. The whiskey helps.

In the office next to me is a young guy fresh out of university. We haven’t talked or introduced ourselves. I hear him typing away each day, clicking those keys, missing lunches and sometimes dinner. That was my life for thirty years—thirty, long years: hammering away each day, the deadlines, the production schedules.

Over the years it consumed me, eating up my life and all the people around me. Dewey and Nick, they always had hobbies, things to keep them occupied. I wasn’t interested in anything other than advertising. Fishing I can take or leave. I’ll do it with Nick and Dewey; I like their company, but generally I avoid anything I find boring.

Frank’s the same way. Our lives have run a parallel course over the years, but we’re different. Frank’s a visionary, I’m a plodder. I’m like the copywriter next door. We wait for the visionaries to tell us what to do.

I left the copywriter some whiskey earlier. I knocked on his door and put the paper cup on the rug. Then went back to my office. I ran into him later in the washroom. “Thanks for the whiskey,” he said, and walked out.

He’s clicking away now, music from his iPod deck tittering in the background. I sit at my desk and listen. There isn’t anything else to do. They took away my accounts last week: no warning, no apology. That’s the way it happens. The accounts go, then you follow. I’m sure my office is already being reassigned. They put two creatives in an office this size now. I heard a couple of art directors the other day, one of them saying, “He’s got that big office all to himself,” then the other one saying, “And he smokes.”

I keep staring out the window, watching the North Avenue Bridge. When they replaced the old pony trusses, Frank called it “spending tax money like drunken turds.” He likes the old span bridges, the way they cross the river like large straps holding the embankments in place. Chicago has a ton of them, all capable of yawning when the need arises. I’ve got a good view of the river and Goose Island. Some tourists got the shock of their lives when the Dave Matthews’ bus emptied its septic waste onto a tour boat. The bridges are a testament to a bygone industrial age. What people throw off them is wildly rural. I still regard lift bridges as steel nightmares, like braces you put on someone’s teeth, then realize they’re worse than the crooked teeth themselves.

On my walls are the usual things copywriters put on their walls. There’s a letter of commendation from The Boy Scouts of America above my couch. I did a campaign for them years ago when the delinquency rate was at an all-time high in Chicago. Next to it is a picture of me riding a mechanical bull at a mayoral convention. The bull proved to be more spastic than any of the mayoral candidates and I was thrown three tables over, landing on a senator’s after party. Frank called it “a pisser” and got me a clavicle brace.

The Boy Scouts letter can go next to my Electrolux awards hanging up in my den. The rest I’ll put down in the basement with the old appliances and folded construction paper. “Things will work out,” Frank used to say. But he’s a millionaire, and things work out for millionaires. His house is north of Lincoln Park, mine is a block away from an expressway. He’s got six bathrooms, I’ve got one.

As Bukowski said, “Sometimes you have to pee in the sink.”