• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

She raised a finger to make one last point. “Of course, you know that there’s no math whatsoever in advertising.”

Hey now!

This is the first time I had officially thought of advertising as a career. In fact, it’s the first time I’d thought of any career other than professional baseball player since I was eight. That was the year I had requested and submitted an application to Harvard. That was also the year in which someone from a technical institute knocked on our door one night during dinner to speak with Mr. James P. Othmer about his application (procured via a matchbook-cover ad) and pursuing a career in mechanical drawing. My father, who was not amused by this aspect of my precocious ambition, sent all fifty-three pounds of me out to apologize to the man, who had driven all the way from lower Westchester County to recruit me.

Back to advertising. It didn’t sound half-bad. It also didn’t hurt that Elizabeth Montgomery, Darrin’s on-screen witch-wife, was a serious hottie. I imagined (to a certain extent, correctly) that thinking up ads was probably a lot like signing yearbooks. And I absolutely was a gifted signer of yearbooks!

It was true. The odd, experimental, and occasionally obscene passages I’d been regularly churning out transcended the more pedestrian “Have a great summer,” or “Remember what happened in Mr. So-and-so’s class,” or the inside-cover-spread, cliché-ridden “Best friends/soul mates forever” offerings of my peers.

My passages were sought after by friends and strangers. Students and parents commented on my unique turns of phrase. My postmodern riffs on classic themes. My clever use of the eraser on teacher photos. Clearly. I had a special talent.

So, yeah. Shit, yeah! Advertising! Then it’s settled. Westchester Community College, here I come. Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Mother. Now, if you’ll please excuse me while I grab another Devil Dog and retire to my room to listen to Aqualung and contemplate the beautiful, multitalented Charo. No, make that Elizabeth Montgomery.

Academia and Asteroids

Valhalla, New York, 1978

Did I choose advertising, did advertising choose me, or did I simply stumble from job to job until I found something that I didn’t hate, that paid well, and that had medical?

After another summer of mixing mortar and laying block with my father at the mental institution, on my sister’s advice I went to community college. Since it didn’t have a two-year degree in advertising, I inexplicably thought the next-best move would be to enroll as an accounting major. I believe this is because one of my older sister’s friends was an accountant, and apparently he was doing well, meaning he wasn’t mowing lawns or flipping burgers or picking up trash in a neon orange vest on the side of the road, so that’s how that happened. One month later, beaten down by debits and credits, I switched out of accounting (or perhaps was asked to leave, the memory fails here) and thought that maybe English or journalism would be a better major.

Also, I decided I had to make a change because one month into my collegiate career, I wasn’t exactly thriving in any class. I’d been commuting thirty miles each way with two high school friends, and some days we never made it to campus. Some mornings we would park outside a White Plains liquor store, waiting for the owner to open the doors at nine. Some days we would skip out early to go bowling, or I would accompany my friend to various bars where, after getting high, he would play high-stakes ($500 and up) games of Asteroids against the area’s top gamers.

Once, after a morning visit to the liquor store, at my suggestion, we found Babe Ruth’s grave in the cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, where, after recounting his legendary on-and off-field career, I toasted the Sultan of Swat. Later that same day we were at a hilltop park overlooking the site of the Battle of White Plains. I grew excited as I described for my friend Washington’s maneuvers and the manner in which Howe and his Hessians had outflanked the American positions.