Laurence Klavan

He turned the steering wheel hard to the right, changing lanes without having signaled. The driver of the car behind him, whom he had just cut off, blared his horn, then tail-gated him, bitterly, before moving left. The other man drove parallel for awhile, giving him the finger, before hitting the gas and whizzing away.

Get a life, Bill Chubbuck thought. Then, forgetting the other man immediately, he thought: I hate that expression. I wonder who made it up: probably some poor dumb bastard like me. Now, through no fault of his own, it’s become part of the language, polluting it, one more cancer degrading the English tongue until it destroys it completely. And you’ve got men like me and whoever invented that goddamn “Get a Life” to thank for it.

Bill had had a few drinks after spending a long Saturday at work. There he had been harangued, then pressured, and at last mildly praised. He had done his job for too long not to know that this mild praise—faint praise, that’s what the expression was—meant that he had done marvelously well, saved his job, that of his superiors, and even those of all above them. But giving him more than faint praise might mean he would want something in return—a raise or a promotion or even a better job—and that could not be. “Damned with faint praise,” he thought and liked the expression, sensing that it was invented at a time when people were still creative and not yoked, lashed like galley slaves, as all were now, no matter what age, race, or sex, to some kind of corporation.

The expression made sense: if you were damned with faint praise, well, you weren’t condescended to, exactly, but, anyway, it was worse than getting no praise at all, right? So even if the expression didn’t quite apply to him today—he had been under-praised, intentionally—he still approved of its clarity and wit, qualities which he associated with this earlier, freer age in America, and he knew that the separate parts of the sentence did in fact apply: “faint praise,” as he had already mentioned to himself, and, frankly, “damned.”

Bill cut right, again without signaling, but this time there was no need, no one was behind him. He was entering a narrow, two-lane highway that grew more dark and deserted as it moved more north from New York City. It was six o’clock, the sun had already set, and there wasn’t even the occasional weekday commuter to impede his speed, which was just about to reach seventy-five.

Bill wasn’t seventy-five, he was forty-two, but he thought he looked seventy-five, as he glanced in the rearview and saw the crow’s feet beneath his eyes, wrinkles which made other men look distinguished and only made him look ill and exhausted. “Crow’s feet”—he approved of the expression; its origin might even have been archaic: it was descriptive, precise, and unsparing, and he felt like cruelly sparing himself nothing today, on a day when he had succeeded, a day when other men might have felt exhilarated.

But these other men, he thought, his speed now at eighty, weren’t working for two corporations which were, in turn, working for two other corporations. Olly Olly Advertising, his employer, had recently been bought by—“merged with”—September, October, & Terwilliger Advertising, and was now handling the account of Cedar Ribbon Investments, which had recently been bought by—“folded into”—High Landing Financial Enterprises, which had been born during the depression as Pennywise, Inc.

Bill had survived the inevitable Olly Olly firings that came with the “merger”—
firings all employees had of course been assured would not happen—because he was a gifted copywriter, the best they had, though not one apparently deserving of the praise that might give him ideas of his own worth and so ambition to be elsewhere. (And where else could he go now, anyway? September October? Olly Olly was September October now—it was Olly-September, that was the new name!)

Even when he was given the Cedar account, it was bestowed on him with the veiled threat—“veiled”: cliché, he hated it!—that he had to deliver, because, remember, they weren’t just Cedar any more, they were Cedar-High Landing now, they were thirty-five per cent of the U.S. investment business now, wrapped up in one, demanding, ever- unsatisfied client. So don’t blow it, he was told, instead of, Do your best! We know you can nail it! You’re the best guy we’ve got!

A raccoon raced across the road, a few feet from being crushed by Bill’s car, just missing joining the ever-growing collection of roadkill (deer, coyote, woodchuck) that smeared the shoulder—there was no shoulder, the side of the road. “Roadkill,” “shoulder”—these expressions were…all right, Bill thought, there was nothing wrong with them. And in this strange, sudden calm moment in his over-excited mind, his foot eased off the accelerator as he neared ninety.

He passed a billboard on the darkened road. Annoyed by the presence of an ad in what should by all rights have been a wilderness, he tried to avoid it, looked only at the logo of the billboard company at the bottom, Modern Sign. Then, helplessly, tempted, he glanced back up.

It was an ad for a local bar, with a sleazy joke—“Get a Margarita. And she’ll go down easy”—next to a picture of a pliant, Spanish-seeming woman suggestively sucking on a straw. It was a double-entendre about getting a Latina girl drunk and getting oral sex—right out in the open where kids could see it, was there no decency anywhere, what the hell was happening?!

Bill’s foot slowly started to push down again. The ad was probably done by some small upstate agency. There was no money for a New York firm at Coco’s or whatever the hell the bar was called—it wasn’t part of any chain—maybe an employee had come up with it—maybe there had been a contest, and the bartender won!

Still, Coco’s played by the same rules as Olly-September did now, as everyone did: cut through the clutter, grab the attention and, whatever you do, don’t get caught advertising! People are too sophisticated to be sold to, so blur the lines between other kinds of expression and an ad: sneak the ad into (in the case of Coco’s) a dirty joke or a beautiful image or a heartfelt notion. Further pollute the language with ads hidden like terrorist cells inside words that make you laugh or cry or consider an idea; then just put the product logo at the bottom, subtly and insidiously. Nothing was safe from it—everything was imperiled!

Bill took a turn now at a treacherously high speed. Cedar—sorry, Cedar-High Landing—hadn’t wanted an ad, they had wanted (and here someone in the office, Bill didn’t remember who, he had blocked it out, had actually touched his heart before saying) “truth.” Not “you can trust our investment counselors” or “please invest your money with us,” but feel something when you think of Cedar-High Landing, believe. Your money isn’t a commodity, it’s an emotion; we don’t want your wallets, put those wallets away, we want your tears, your hopes, your souls.

Make it “profound,” Bill was told—and implicitly threatened instead of encouraged, because they were all scared, everyone at Olly-September was scared of Cedar-High Landing, one corporation was scared of displeasing another, as if they were robots with insecurity installed. Make it—and here the growing meaninglessness of all words made Bill blink, dizzily, as his car flew up the empty highway as if acting on its own volition—“real.”

And what had been Bill’s response? Revulsion? Indignation? Even a small, appropriate amount of anger? No, he had obeyed, because not only was he good (oh, don’t ruin that word, too, he thought, he wasn’t good, he was glib: glibness was both his gift and his downfall, it allowed him to make a living and buy a house ninety miles north of New York City and it had ruined his serious writing career and it had driven his wife away, for he excelled at a facile, talented imitation of truth, the kind of thing that ruins novels and ends marriages but makes one an—albeit underpraised—star in advertising) not only was he good (glib) but he was scared. His superiors always succeeded in scaring him, even though he knew better: he always feared for his future even as he knew they were faking; he was the best, he had nothing—or as close to nothing as anyone working for two (no, four) corporations could have—to fear.

He was scared because he wanted their approval because he was weak and so he obeyed and so he was glib and so he did brilliantly, even as he hated himself for being scared and weak and glib and doing brilliantly and thereby saving a job that wasn’t in jeopardy in the first place and then feeling—for a fleeting, disgraceful moment, before he got in his car to go home—proud of how he’d done!

The world on his right, off the road, was pitch-black now—“pitch”: cliché!—and he knew this was where it all fell away, where the highway began to climb a mountain; he could feel his ears pop. For a second, deafened—before he mimed a yawn and cleared his head—Bill heard only the scream of his own thoughts, which were the words of the campaign that he had written.

They had wanted truth, profundity, reality, and he had given them those things. On a white background, the ad said, “You only get out of it what you put into it.” Then, in a different, lighter, ghostly type-face, three words, “Save,” “Your,” and “Life,” floated, as if at once disconnected and connected to each other, at once self-sufficient and dependent on each other for meaning. Finally, in the lower corner, centered, minding its own business, merely playing host to these words but not, of course, benefiting from them (if letters could say, “Who, me?” that was how he conceived it), the logo for Cedar-High Landing was placed: CHL.

Bill was a clever boots, all right! It had a little bit of mystery and, above all, meaning. The ad was a truism both for living and investing: “Save Your Life” referred both to putting your money where it would grow and remaining existent, pulling yourself back from the brink. Remember, it said—he, Bill, said, for he was responsible—without your contribution nothing can occur, whether you’re living in the world or putting your money in a high-yield IRA or secure government bond or whatever the hell Cedar-High Landing (CHL) was offering.

This was what he had written and he knew from the minute he wrote it that it would succeed, that it would be exactly the new kind of non-ad they desired, that it would fulfill every shallow, underhanded need four corporations had to insinuate themselves completely into people’s lives, to co-opt and befoul their language in the process, to replace their art, their philosophy, even their religion. Bill had been their handmaiden, their henchman in this, and for it he was both rewarded (with a hearty handshake and the implied promise that he would not be fired—for now—though the look of sweaty sweet relief on his frightened superior’s face was transparent) and damned.

At the highest point of the highway, his headlights the only illumination, he started his descent in the direction of the exit that would lead to his home. Then his eyelids began to droop. The drinks fogging his mind, Bill turned his wheel toward the flimsy guard rail that would be insufficiently strong to keep him from bursting through and crashing to his death down miles of mountain onto the black earth below.

*

Suddenly, he opened his eyes and turned the wheel the other way. Right before it hit the rail, he brought the car back from the edge, back onto the deserted road. Shaking, sweat streaming from his face, pits and back, he managed to keep the vehicle steady and stay in lane. Soon his breath slowed, his heart rate eased; he even hit the brights to see his way ahead. Then, fearful of falling asleep again, he turned on the radio to keep him alert through the rest of the ride.

It had been nuts to drink so much after work—he had never done it before. But then Tony Hooker had never been laid off before, left high and dry by a liquor store that was being replaced by a chain store, Drugall’s. If a man couldn’t get a little tight then, well, when could he? Still, look what had happened—or almost happened. Had he even wished it to happen? That was crazy, wasn’t it?

It was worse than crazy—cowardly. What would Connie and the kids have done without him? Still, strange to say, he wasn’t slowly being revived now by thoughts of them. It was something else that was sobering him up.

As he climbed the highway—the fastest, most familiar, and at night most death-defying way home—Tony passed the same old billboard he always did. Only this time, it wasn’t that hot Spanish chick from Coco’s who had been there for so many months. (He doubted any girl who looked like that would ever go to that crappy dump, and he’d long since grown tired of that dumb joke once his boy, Baylor, 12, had explained it to him.)

No, tonight, there was a new sign.

The sign was white, which got his attention right away. Pure white, as white as—well, as the driven snow, what else, he was no wordsmith! And it said, “You only get out of it what you put into it.” Then he saw the words “Save Your Life.” They weren’t put together, they were set apart; he had to be clever to connect them, and he had been.

It was no ad. It was a message, it had meaning, one that he understood. It was all up to him, this life, and without his effort, there would be nothing. Though Tony knew someone must have written those words, they seemed to just—exist—without having been invented by anyone, to have been formed naturally, like a rock face or a river, and he saw something in them the way people see meaning in those shapes in nature and never forget.

Die? Those words made him want to live! As he got closer to home, now driving at a normal speed, Tony felt empowered by them, as if the future—no matter what he had hopelessly thought an hour before—was not out of his control.

He was strong, he was himself; he felt it physically now as his big hands gripped
the wheel: it was what the sign made him feel. He couldn’t blame his store now; blame was for weaklings. He was sure they had their reasons, and they had to make money—if he was at their level, maybe he would have done the same thing. If? He would be at their level one day—he was going to be past it, goddamit! That was what the sign made him feel, too.

Tony took the exit that led him home. He remembered one more thing from the billboard, right at the bottom: the logo CHL. He knew it represented the people responsible for those words. As he pulled into his driveway, with a deep sense of gratitude and relief, he vowed that, the first chance he got, he would find out what it meant, who they were, and what else they might be able to do for him.

LAURENCE KLAVAN wrote the novels, “The Cutting Room” and “The Shooting Script” (Ballantine) and the libretto to “Bed and Sofa” (Vineyard Theater, NY). His graphic novels, “City of Spies” and “The Fielding Course,” co-written with Susan Kim, will soon be published by First Second Books at Macmillan. His books can be ordered on www.laurenceklavan.com.