Tales from the Ad Biz….
FORTUNA UNLEASHED
A short story, Part 4
Truth hyperbolized…(Names have been
changed to protect the incompetent)
Mary Ellen preferred not to know about Byron Altman's failure to play fair for she was in love with him, and that's reason enough not to want the dirt on a person.
Still, Mary Ellen kept her own desk drawers locked, not realizing that Byron--the Tower of Putty, as he was known by his group--had keys to everything, including the ladies' where he often hid out, and slept away the afternoon between the wall and the furthest booth. Women would come in and shriek, pointing to the male body curled up on the cold tile, and cautioning others to stay clear. But hardened senior lady writers, freshening their lipstick, would tell them to calm down. It was only Byron Altman; they could tell by his vomitus shoes, and that everyone should take care not to pee on him because the son-of-a-bitch liked it. Why didn't Byron use the men's room for his naps? Because he felt safer with the women, just like the rest of us.
The only cloud on the horizon was that Mary Ellen (the-box-Fortuna-came-in) was still in love with DeWitt Moore, the Mt. Ozzy clean-cut, who stayed behind and waved to her from the Terminal, nestled in front of the Really Big Rock. Mary Ellen could barely see DeWitt through the plane's tiny porthole, but she knew he was there until the last whine of the turbo jets faded in the sky. He was there for her. Afterward, he probably went home, and had a quiet dinner with his folks instead of hunching over a bar somewhere, feeling sorry for himself. That was her DeWitt, as best she could remember.
DeWitt Moore was not a slave to his emotions. He did not use hard liquor. He dealt with problems as they came up, and he slept eight hours a night on his back, like a baby, even when he knew undesirables were out in his cornfields, fucking them flat.
DeWitt and Mary Ellen had agreed that she was to have one full year in New York City before they would once again discuss their future as a couple. Begging DeWitt to permanently join her in New York was Mary Ellen's unspoken plan. But now the year was up, and it was time to broach the subject. And there was no way Mary Ellen was going back to Mt. Ozzy; she was well on her way to Fortunaland, already a full-fledged copywriter, installed in her own cubicle with a rippling glass privacy divider and a rubber plant.
She also had her own apartment, sans roommate; it was only a studio on the Westside, but it had a skylight that cleaned up nicely after a hard rain, and a parquet floor that was really only squares of photographic linoleum. But you had to practically get down on your hands and knees to see the difference. Plus Byron Altman was draped all over the place like designer sheets. God, but he was impossible. He was forever showing up with a new wine-in-a-box he had discovered, and drinking it, and pouring it on everything he cooked. He stood out in the kitchen, shooing Mary Ellen away, and made pasta, from-scratch pasta, which he dried on her lingerie rack. Mary Ellen bought him a cute little apron that read "This Side Up," but he preferred to cook in his shorts, with his sweet pubic hair peeking out of the gaping fly as he raced about the kitchen, turning down and firing up things.
He moved the dinner table out on her sooty fire escape and, one time, when he couldn't find candles, he propped up a flashlight on the table. God, but he was insane, and also cute. But the greatest thing Byron Altman ever did was this: He put up on honest-to-god kid's swing in the middle of the studio room. He put the big hooks in the ceiling, attached the ropes, adjusted the seat, and told Mary Ellen she could go first, he would push. But it had to turnsies. That's because Byron believed in sharing, and he was a registered Democrat.
They were sleeping together, of course. Byron kept his razor in the apartment, and whatever casual toiletries Mary Ellen picked up for him and, later on, his shoe trees. Often Byron would not go back to his own place before they went to work. They barely had time to make love in the morning for Byron trusted nobody. He feared that, in the wee hours, faceless No Talents, working alone or in pairs (copywriter/art director teams), would break into their desks looking for Mary Ellen's ideas, which he had first dibs on, or fish through his own papers, desperate for the latest product research that he kept carefully hidden from them.
When Mary Ellen insisted that other writers in the group, not just her privileged self, should have access to the sophisticated consumer research that she described as "terribly vital to an informed creative process," Byron would mumble, amiably enough, "Bugger them," or "They can suck wind," and continued to lace up his shoes. He told Mary Ellen that he wanted to keep his writers' work "fresh and unsullied by extraneous imput." Mary Ellen believed Byron's need to be one up on his own people was part and parcel of his terrible insecurity, something she hoped to change with love and constant reassurance.
10:44:38 AM 
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