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This surprised me a little so I asked him what he meant.

‘I’ve got a girl friend and I need the raise so that she can leave her apartment and move in with me. If she moves in with me she’ll wake me up in the morning because she isn’t afraid of the morning like I am and then I’ll be able to get in to work on time. I won’t oversleep.’

I said, ‘Herb, you need more money from me so that your girl friend can move in and then she can wake you up, right?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I said, ‘Herb, did you ever hear of an alarm clock?’

‘Did you ever try to fuck an alarm clock?’ he said.

Herb went from Delehanty to several agencies where he did good work and always got fired, and he’s someplace else now where he’s about to get fired. He’s been fired from some of the best agencies in town. One guy, at still another agency, fired him in the traditional Mafia method. He went out and bought a big fish and came back to the office and put it on Herb’s desk. That was this guy’s way of telling Herb he was through.

Many, many copywriters are paranoids. Herb felt that people and things were always rejecting him. One day he put a piece of paper into the Xerox machine at Delehanty to make a copy. Everybody was coming up to the Xerox machine and putting their pieces of paper in it and getting copies, but when Herb tried it there were some strange sounds and the original came out of the machine all ripped up. He picked it up, looked up, and said, ‘Even the Xerox machine rejects me.’

There are hundreds of these guys floating through New York. One of them, named Wilder, has worked for practically every agency in the city. You hire Wilder and the next day he comes running down the hall barefooted, screaming, and causing a lot of commotion. He shows up at strange hours, doing very strange things. He keeps getting jobs because he’s fairly good.

There’s another guy named Harry – nice guy, quiet, well-mannered, except that he has a thing about suing people. He usually was suing two or three people a day, so help me. It is a known fact in town that if you hire Harry you know he’s going to spend most of his time in court. He just loves to sue people and spend time with lawyers. What he does, for example, is walk down the street and wait at the bus stop for a bus. Let’s say the bus stops two feet from the curb and he has to walk through a puddle of water to get on the bus. The first thing he says to the driver is, ‘What is this, your stopping so far from the curb?’ Bus drivers, who deal with nuts all day long, usually tell him to move his ass to the rear of the bus, and naturally, the next day he knocks out a letter to the Transit Authority informing them they’re being sued for whatever crazy reason Harry thinks will work.

When he was working at Delehanty he once took on American Airlines. He had had a bad flight. He also is a racing driver, and he was on his way to a race. The flight was delayed and he missed the race. So he wrote American that he was suing. He got two beautiful vice-presidents from American as a result of that letter. They called him up and said, ‘How can we settle this problem?’ Harry said, ‘I think the only way you can settle it is in my office and why don’t you try to be here at nine-thirty in the morning?’

I didn’t know what was going on but that Monday morning I needed the conference room for a meeting. I look in there and I see Harry sitting and talking with two very WASPish guys who are very disturbed. He was sitting there dictating something and a secretary was also sitting there taking it down. I had no idea what was going on, so I spotted a secretary outside the conference room and told her I needed the room for a meeting with a client. She told me that Harry’s been in there for a long time and there’s no sign of the meeting breaking up.

I got a little mad, but I figured he’s in there with a client, although we didn’t have any clients at the time who looked so beautiful. I took my client into a tiny room.

Later on that morning I asked Harry which client