Afternoon of Sales: LA
Stephanie Cutlass, one of Raytheon’s army of communications representatives, drank her Diet Coke with the probing concentration and hesitation of someone in serious maxiofacial pain. Her jaw looked swollen, but neither my boss Alice nor I dared to probe the specific nature of a recent “dental trauma,” to which Cutlass’ perky assistant Rossandra had referred obliquely in a scheduling email, “just to give you a heads up in case Ms. Cutlass is still numb!!”
“You have to hand it to assistants in Los Angeles,” Alice had said as we drove down the 405 toward El Segundo. I didn’t say anything. Maybe because I didn’t understand what she meant. Traffic wound south. I looked down at my BlackBerry and then out toward the San Gabriel Mountains. We got off at Sepulveda, one of LA’s more catastrophically desolate and despair-inducing boulevards, pockmarked with tire stores and the occasional oil well. Alice pulled the rental car into a smart-looking shopping center designed to look like an oasis—not so inappropriate considering the surroundings of mainly fried chicken joints and gas stations. There was a pond in the center and some bending palm trees scattered about the parking lot. People sat on benches in the green space around the pond while their small hairy dogs ran around. Alice parked and we walked to a kitschy Mexican restaurant that Cutlass had chosen. We asked to be seated on the patio and the hostess brought us to a table beneath a canvas awning that flapped in the breeze. October in LA meant Santa Ana winds. I quietly congratulated myself for knowing this.
Alice and I were fiddling with our BlackBerries when Cutlass arrived, ten minutes after our scheduled reservation. She launched into operatic apologies. Her puffy face strained under the effort of forcing an appropriately jovial smile for the greeting. The net effect or this combination was an expression of surprise (undoubtedly she hadn’t anticipated how much it was going to hurt to smile), and some sort of masochistic pleasure. I think I may have leaned back in horror.
Cutlass ordered the Diet Coke that she now stared into. She pinched her straw and winced as she sucked down a mouthful of cola at a time, trying to explain the intricacies of Raytheon’s multi-pronged coordinated advertising message. Something about preparedness for cyber-disasters, rockets, and community service programs.
“What Raytheon needs from you all is help getting rid of our whole merchant of death image,” she said.
A warm wind slid off the parking lot and got caught underneath the awning, causing the bus boys to grab their enormous straw sombreros with one hand and slow their rhythmic steps around the patio as they delivered water. They looked depressingly adept at this technique, and something about its subtle complexity made me think that they learned the maneuver the hard way.
I turned away from the busboys and looked back at the table. I was taking notes and wrote down Not Merchants of Death, underlining “NOT” twice.
I had Googled “Stephanie Cutlass Raytheon” to prepare for our meeting (the primary lesson of this repeated exercise over the course of six months in advertising being: fear the Internet). Prior to her promotion to what seemed to be a glass-ceilinged position in higher-than-middle-management at Raytheon, Cutlass had been at Lockheed Martin, where she must have established street cred among the merchant of death crowd.
But before that she held the Mrs. Texas crown—the over-35 category—and I thought it seemed curious that her readily available glamour shots had been used by a local dental practice as evidence of their “cutting-edge technology in cosmetic dental reconstruction.” Her teeth were pearly white, and clearly made of a non-human material, but like, what the hell was with the swelling? Further back in time, Cutlass had served as the Executive Director of Louisiana’s Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, a title which I imagine conferred a weird set of privileges at Mardi Gras parades, all of which would probably have required the perfectly porcelain and clearly agonizing smile that she plastered across her face whenever she wasn’t suffering through her salad or sipping her Coke (ie, at almost every point during this meal—she seemed downright lachanophobic with regard to her salad, which was essentially just lettuce anyway. Maybe she was launching a bid in the 45+ category, it if existed, and dental surgery provided an easy way to watch her figure).
All of which would have been much more interesting to ask her about than aeronautics. But Alice had gone into her own proverbial autopilot mode, setting about the work of convincing Cutlass that our magazine reached exactly the merchant-of-death-hating crowd in government that Raytheon needed to seduce in order to sell its missiles. Meanwhile, I tried to figure out a delicate way to eat my fajitas without getting salsa all over my suit. I stopped to take vigorous notes when it seemed that Cutlass was working up a brainstorm.
(A trick I learned early on by watching some of my colleagues. Listen and watch facial features. When a client starts to get excited, start writing. Use visible exclamation points. Draw arrows, smiley faces. Make the motions of your pen convey the [God, these fajitas are really freaking delicious] depth of your exuberance that you wish you could express vocally, but must for the sake of professional appearances keep stifled ‘neath cover of neck, tie, and a flatly affectless, serious-looking stare.)
We fanned the appropriate dessert-resistant gestures, the necessary promises of “doing it again soon,” and performed the requisite fight over the check. (We paid, obviously). Stephanie excused herself, leaving Alice and me at the table.
“How do you think it went?” she asked, staring down at her email.
“You were great, boss,” I said.
I looked out across the parking lot and watched the former Crawfish/Beauty queen try to glide toward her car, angling into the warm wind. She lifted her left hand to her cheek and seemed to pause for a moment, as if considering something. I looked away.
Alice said, “Let’s get some Pinkberry.”
**
My first trip out to Los Angeles with Alice had been a few months before. As far as bosses went, I always felt that I had struck gold. Her father lived in Malibu and on that first trip she drove me to his very tasteful house in the hills above the Getty Villa, just off Pacific Coast Highway. We sat on the backyard deck and checked emails and voicemails. The soft hum of a distant lawnmower drifted in and out of range, and the only other noise was the clicking of our fingers on our keypads.
I sent her an email that said, “It’s really f*cking nice out here,” and she laughed.
She asked if I wanted something to drink and I said yes. She sent me in the house for a glass of sauvignon blanc, and told me I could help myself to whatever. I raided the liquor cabinet and found a bottle of Maker’s Mark. When I finished pouring, I realized that I had taken about six servings worth. I checked to see if Alice was looking. She was sitting on the deck, looking down at her BlackBerry through enormous sunglasses that covered half of her face. The house was dark and cool, with stone floors accented with outsized fluffy rugs that seemed to invite you to roll around giggling. I swigged back half the glass and wiped my mouth with the back of my other hand. There was an open bottle of sauvignon blanc in the fridge that I uncorked and smelled. It seemed fine, so I poured a big glass for Alice and put the bottle back in the fridge. I took our drinks outside to the deck.
The waves noiselessly rolled in off of the Pacific. I sat down and watched them, knowing that I smelled like bourbon. My jaw began to feel lax.
“What are we doing back there?” Alice asked.
The suddenness of her question startled me.
“You mean, back East?”
“Sure.”
I looked at the ocean and considered what we were doing “back there.” I knew I was hoarding money for graduate school, running three miles every day, drinking the equivalent of 35 units of alcohol per week at work-funded happy hours or client dinners, and trying to write after I got home from the office. The weather was just starting to break in DC, but the mosquitoes still hung in clouds over our house. From a vantage point that offered a view of the Pacific, it seemed nice, and definitely better than Washington, but things were hardly going badly anyway. I said none of this.
What was she doing back there, anyway? The contours of the waves and borders of Santa Monica Pier were already blurry with marine and dust, with the wind coming offshore.
**
We went to Pinkberry, and I ordered a large original flavor with bananas and granola. I always order the original flavor with bananas and granola. Alice got strawberries, and we talked about how fresh all of the ingredients were at Pinkberry. We made a joke about Pinkberry and BlackBerries, and what if you could eat a BlackBerry covered in fruit. We ate in the car, sitting in traffic on the 405 going in the opposite direction from that morning. I emailed Cutlass, thanking her for joining us, and promised to follow up with more information on how Raytheon could be seen as more than just merchants of death.
Alice and I argued whether it was good to bring the joke back. I said it was. She said Cutlass was my client. I sent the email and we sat in traffic. I needed to get back to the hotel to change, so that my friend Mark could pick me up. We were going out to dinner that evening in West Hollywood, and I wanted to send some emails from the hotel and maybe take a swim.
“She was pretty weird, eh?” Alice asked after a few minutes. I was emailing Mark to let him know that I felt like having a bucket full of martini before dinner. That it had been “a long day in some difficult-to-put-my-finger-on way,” even though I was thinking it had all been way too easy. I planned on changing my Facebook status to “El Segundo is the most depressing neighborhood in LA,” just to see if I would get any comments
“Totally weird,” I said.
“What do you think happened to her mouth?”
“I have no idea.”
The rhythm of the traffic began to make me a bit nauseous. Stop-go. Stop-stay-go. Alice pulled off the Freeway abruptly and we went down a ramp onto La Cienaga Boulevard.
“Shortcut,” she said.
We flew underneath the Freeway and then alongside it, passing cars that stood still and watched us in a way that I thought could perhaps indicate incredulity—we were deft navigators, veterans. The sun hung high and warm. We drove with the windows up and the air conditioner on, just hard enough that I could hear it coming through the vents. Alice dropped me at the Luxe Hotel in Bel Air and told me to leave the hotel early in the morning, because she didn’t want me to inadvertently get stuck in traffic. We had an early flight. I thought of saying something when I got out of the car. But instead I said, “That was fun. See you in the morning.”
“Ciao,” she said, and I could hear her turn on the radio as I shut the door. I went up to my room and immediately opened the blinds and unlatched the balcony door. I walked outside and looked at the 405 below and felt the warm wind. I rubbed my hands over my face. When I went back inside, my eyes had to adjust again to the dark, and everything looked slightly green. I grabbed my swimsuit from my suitcase, went into the bathroom and changed into it. I picked a towel off the rack and found my BlackBerry in my suit pants and my iPod in a drawer, locked the balcony door, and went down the cool, dark hallway toward the pool. The room door slammed behind me with a thunk.
Outside, I squinted in the autumn sunlight. I spread the towel out on a deck chair and felt the warmth on my torso. I put in my iPod and lay down on the chair and thought about dinner and about merchants of death and whether Stephanie Cutlass had thought of something interesting in the parking lot.
