Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [16]
One day Wine Man came back from a two-hour lunch in his full-length mink coat and asked me to move the tintype press to another part of the apartment. The machine weighed several hundred pounds and was difficult to grip. “How about on the other side of the room? Nah, how about behind the couch?” This went on for some time. It bothered me because I could tell he thought I was a hick, and I didn’t like the way he was getting off on having me muscle things around. Perhaps the laborer’s job looming as a dreaded option exacerbated my sensitivity to this circumstance. Perhaps I felt it was important that I distance myself from physical labor to prove that I was capable of better, more cerebral things. I was a writer, after all, not a moving man. Plus, the full-length mink coat, which he still had not taken off, wasn’t helping things.
Before the fifth move I asked if he was sure that was where he wanted it. “Yes, I’m quite sure.” During the sixth move, after I’d smashed my hand on a doorjamb, I calmly told him that if he didn’t make up his mind, I was going to throw him, his printing press, and his mink fucking coat out of the twenty-third-floor window.
My next job was with Dell Publishing. While I was with the wine magazine, I’d interviewed there for a job as an editorial assistant but didn’t get it. I wrote back to the HR person saying that I was shocked. I thought I’d killed in the interview (during which I didn’t utter one obscenity). This follow-up letter didn’t get me the editorial job, but it did lead to a position in the publicity department, and soon my first taste of advertising.
Five Things I Wrote Before Attempting My First Ad
Book-jacket copy for a romance novel about a woman who was “an accountant by day and Fatima, the exotic belly dancer, by night.”
The premature obituary for the former Boston Red Sox favorite Tony Conigliaro.*3
A script for a training film for New York City hospitals titled “Creating a Sterile Field for Basic Gall Bladder Surgery.”
Copy for Wacky Packages stickers for the Scholastic Book Club.
A halfhearted letter of apology to the publisher of a certain wine magazine, asking for forgiveness and (unsuccessfully) a second chance at employment.
Feh!
New York, New York, 1985
Turns out I wasn’t a very good publicist. I wrote a hell of a press release, but I wasn’t especially gifted at convincing, say, the producers at Good Morning America or Oprah (before she became “OPRAH!”) that I had the perfect author for them. So after a less-than-amazing go at booking tours for commercial authors such as Joan Rivers and Danielle Steel, I was assigned more literary authors, including Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Yates. Which was more than fine by me.
But still, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. For a while, I thought about going to law school to study environmental law. But my brother tried to talk me out of it. He said lawyers were soulless scum.*4 The same week I signed up for the LSATs, I also filled out an application for NYU’s MFA Creative Writing Program. As luck or fate would have it, NYU accepted me first, and I quickly abandoned any ideas of attending law school. There was no future in environmental law, anyway, right?
Soon my press-release-writing skills (combined with my subpar booking skills) led to a request by the head of advertising and promotion to compete with Dell’s outside ad agency to think up a campaign line for a book by a gonzo movie critic named Joe Bob Briggs.
My line was eventually chosen and used on everything from bumper stickers, ads, and brochures to the cover. The book would prove to be a flop, but by then I had been moved out of publicity to a better-paying job in the marketing department, churning out catalog copy and promotional brochures and occasionally rewriting trade and consumer print ads and radio spots submitted by Dell’s ad agency.
My boss at the time was a smart, tough woman who