The Glamour of Advertising

by David M. Howell ©2004
(From the collection of short stories: “Not In Your Life”)


Whenever I complain about my job, my friends are quick to tell me they don’t want to hear it. They insist I have a glamorous job. I suppose from the outside, working for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, handling one of the nation’s largest retail accounts would seem rather exciting. The travel. The celebrities. The whining of insecure co-workers. But it’s the production—shooting the actual commercials—that really makes my friends envious.

“Oh David, stop complaining. You have such a cool job,” they say as we catch up over beers.

“God, I’m a fucking librarian, for chriss-sake,” Steve says. He never really was very ambitious, but some how that was the groups fault. “The only travel I do is picking up the overdue books at the goddamn senior center. Jesus Christ, that place smells like disinfectant.”

Steve was hard to take in large doses. He complained about everything. His apartment, his job, his shoes…even his roommate, Beth.

As the mid-eighties crept to their inevitable conclusion, the closet was still the only refuge for gays. Though not unheard of to come out, it still was not the accepted or even expected practice it would become a decade later. We all knew Steve was gay. He occasionally dropped hints about his “other” friends. The people we never met but always seemed to be on hand when he went out.

It was the women in the group who’s highly tuned gay-dar picked up the intricacies of his behavior. Of course we all talked about it behind his back. But at that point in time, it was something you left alone. When he was ready to tell us. He would. For now, he was left to ridicule everything and everyone around him. There was little Steve was comfortable with. Including himself.

Calling his roommate, Beth always meant risking a Steve encounter. He could keep you on the phone for hours. Once Steve got on the phone his rants could explode in to a full scale siege on any given topic. He was also extreme hypochondriac. One evening while attempting to track down Beth for concert tickets I got Steve on the phone.

“Oh, hey…you’re in town. I figured you be out hob-knobbing with your LA friends,” Steve spit into the phone.

“Nope. I’m home this week. I was going to try to hookup with Beth…maybe hit the Green Mill…”

“Ah, I hate that place. Besides, I need my rest. I’m getting my hip replaced.”

“Holy shit, Steve. What…what happened?” I asked, shocked, he was only 32, most hips are warranted for life unless you abuse them for big sports money.

“Well, not right now. But eventually. My mom’s getting her’s done. I figured I may as well do it too. It’s only a matter of time. If I buy now, I can beat the cost of inflation and save a bundle. Geeze you’re always so fucking critical. Can’t someone just express a concern about saving money without being criticized for it?”

“Ahm, yeah. Hey, ask Beth to give me a call when she gets in. I’ve got to run…”

Admittedly, speeding so much time on the road had it’s perks. Like not having to deal with Steve on a consistent basis. But as quirking and insecure as some of my friends might be, nothing could compare to the demanding narcissism of the inflated spokesman.

For almost a decade I’d been writing radio and television commercials that featured a former guru in the home improvement industry as the presenter. Abrasive behavior was part and parcel for a minor celebrity aspiring to be treated like a major star. In advertising, egos often appear smaller on screen then they are in real life.

One such memorable event happened while we were shooting a spot for a new store opening in Columbus, Ohio. Life in Columbus could be compared to a pre-dawn Sunday in any other part of the country. Dimly lit and nothing to do. So it was that we spent a week and half traveling between the film location, Skyline Chili and the local go-cart track. Occasionally, we (my agency partner, producer and I) would be invited by our bored spokesman to show him off at some swank eatery. One evening, as we dined, a patron tentatively approached our table.

“Excuse me,” he said clearly not wishing to interrupt out dinner with his interruption. The man bent over like a humble servant to his do-it-yourself idol.

“Are you…” He left the sentence as unfinished as his meal. It was as if he was not good enough to even utter the name of his god.

“No! Why are you bothering me?” our minor celebrity said not looking at the man but instead seeking eye contact around the table for our approval of his joke.

The film director laughed uncomfortably as we all looked away from the victim turned sacrificial lamb.

Stunned, the man fidgeted in his foolishness. How could he have made such a blunder? Obviously the fault lay with his wife and friends who encouraged him to approach the god of his kind.

“Oh, just kidding…you’re right,” our spokesman announced introducing himself as if he were opening his show.

“Oh, yeah…” the man sputtered out like a wounded Spitfire about to go down in flames. “Could I have your autograph?”

Humbly, the man waited while his autograph was made out to ‘Chauncey.’ Standing awkwardly, the intruder broke the long uncomfortable silence by thanking his mentor for his contributions to the world.

I choose this profession for the simple reason that it was easy to remain anonymous. Mustering the energy to be famous was just beyond me. I could put words in people’s mouths in commercials viewed by millions of people and yet, no one knew it was me. There’s an eerie sensation sitting in a bar with friends during a Saturday afternoon football game and suddenly, one of my spots would come on. Like a fly on the wall, I observed people watching my work. Though admittedly, most got up to go to the bathroom.

It was that sense of confidence one gets from plumbing that would put me in peril just a few weeks later.

After Columbus I flew to LA for a couple of weeks of shooting on a new paint campaign my partner and I had just developed to revive our client’s struggling house brand of paints. Several month earlier the account team had approached us with a “rare opportunity.”

“This will be a real feather in your caps,” our Group Creative Director said after the meeting. “Turn around this paint business and you boys will be legendary.”


Legendary my ass. We’d already taken an annoying nail bender from the shores of mediocrity and installed him as the know-it-all, do-it-yourselfer of the ages. The campaign was an instant success elevating our retail client to memorable heights. And ensuring that my partner and I would be labeled as retail hacks who couldn’t bring life to a hand puppet.

You see advertising was about grabbing attention. The current trend was to be a offensive as possible. Getting your spot pulled from a network meant paramount stardom. Agencies reached out to these bad boys with money and perks. There were two guys the agency brought in for a new business pitch—I called them Tubs & Crocket because they looked like a couple of migrant workers. They had been fired from their last agency for casting models for beer commercials. Except these women were hired solely to perform “off-camera” for them. Their work was as offensive as their attitudes.

They were eventually fired for selling strategy secrets to a competitive agency. But their obnoxious work lived on.

If clients only knew what the big agencies did, they’d drop them immediately. But the smoke and mirrors kept most clients at bay and created endless bragging rights on the golf course.

“Yes, my agency, did that spot where the tattooed poodle dry humps an armadillo,” boast one client big-wig with giant sweat rings under the golf shirt that was two sizes too small stretching like an aerobic leotard straining to cover his Theodore Taft-like shape.

“I don’t believe I saw that spot, Leonard,” his golf partner would say as he pulled at his golf shirt with the “weasel” mascot embroidered on the breast.

“Yes, well the goddamn network pulled it. Those clowns said it was “too offensive” for a children’s cereal. Fuckers.”

“Fuckers,” repeated the toady. “Oh, nice lay, Leonard. I’m going to add a stroke to my card, that was so sweet.”

Fortunately, these were not the clients I dealt with. The home improvements’ team was the exception to the rule. They were actually concerned about increasing sales and market share. They understood advertising and how to effectively use it and could tell when the agency was handing them a polished turd.

I have to admit the campaign my partner and I developed was brilliant. It hinged on the fact that people liked to talk about their accomplishments. For the most part, anyone living beyond a trailer park takes pride in their homes and enjoys talking about it as well as showing it off. We captured real people expressing real emotions about decorating, specifically painting their homes. Turned these interviews into scripts, hired actors and hit the road shooting. The campaign was an instant success. While the client cheered the results, the spots never made to the agency reel. Too pedestrian, we were told. Not the kind of creative we want to foster…yeah, we were after the kind that wasn’t effective.

I suggested setting a house on fire and filming the emotional sobs of the owners as they watched all their worldly possessions go up in smoke. This received raised eyebrows from the agency’s creative powerhouses.

Anyway, there we were, in LA, shooting the next series of non-burning houses—fortunately the agency’s mental bi-cep called account management researched the burning home idea and discovered that focus groups unanimously disapproved of the idea. So we were told to move ahead with “Burning Down The House” until account management discovered they couldn’t hide the escalating insurance costs.

We were working at a comfortable ranch home in Pasadena. I was making moves on Sophia, the crafts service woman who’d remembered to pick up my favorite coffee creamer, when the shark steak from the night before reminded me that it was part of the catch and release program.

Now, as production goes, glamour may be spelled with a “LA” but the association ends there. We were working on a limited budget for a conservative retailer. There were no perks like a separate trailer for the creatives. We shared the same production trailer as the rest of the crew. This meant that the men and women—everyone, all 30 of us—used the same small mobile home bathroom that was nothing more than a phone booth with a shower.

So it was that if we secured ourselves an actual home to shoot in, and the owner didn’t specify otherwise, we used the bathroom like a teenager discovering the Chicken Ranch on ‘All You Can Do Tuesdays.”

Sophia, with her uncombed red hair tamed into tiny Halloween cornstalk bundles held together with a rainbow of rubber bands and scattered randomly about her head, chopped chives for my feta and Canadian bacon omelet while I picked out the easy opening pistachios. Struggling to make conversation, an important ingredient to me when I’m angling for a weekend companion, I made the mistake of mentioning I was going to checkout the facilities in the back of the house. She just nodded valuing this information as highly as she valued my conversation.

I set down the Styrofoam cup and headed for the back of the house. Since the crew was setting up in the front of the house for the opening sequence of painting shots, everyone was busy. I had the bathroom to myself. No line. No waiting.

Another thing about being out on production is it often leaves me ah, irregular. This has more to do with the lack of comfortable toilet facilities than the butter-rich meals that seem to haunt our after hours existence. The term ‘hold-it’ would be an understatement. So when the opportunity to use a clean, normal bathroom arises, well I would leap at it. And that’s just what I did.

Closing the white door, I was greeted by the relaxing hunter green walls and white porcelain. I immediately set about my business, one doesn’t tarry when the gods smile and this morning the yawning porcelain god smiled on me in the form of a clean, quiet commode.

Dignity, which has been lacking to this point, should be called in at this moment. As poetically as possible, let me just say that the deposit was average and rather firm considering the ingredients. The entire transaction was completed quickly and, having Sophia and a feta omelet waiting, I was anxious to get back to the set. So, I flushed the toilet and turned to the sink. But the toilet barely flushed, the water trickled in creating only surface ripples. And even though the toilet paper and original water disappeared, my solid offering at this holy altar remained twisting slowly as the water silently settled.

After letting the tank refill, I flushed again. The second attempt to hide the evidence proved to me that this was no Niagara Falls of water pressure. Like a limbless child, the turd mocked me by doing gentle laps around the bowl. This bad boy was not going down.

Again, I waited for the tank to fill and then gave the handle a violent thrust thinking that if I could be more forceful, I could send this antagonistic turd to its final resting place. Again, the brown devil shuttered at the threshold of the afterlife, but like a tired guest, just wouldn’t leave. This was getting serious.

I knew this room needed to be prepped for a bathroom decorating scene later in the day. And since I’d made the mistake of announcing my intent to Sophia, I couldn’t leave the evidence of my visit slowly turning clockwise in the bowl. I looked around the room. Damn, if I’d only brought the cup of pistachios I could scoop the turd out and dispose of it out the window. But no cup and the turd continued to mock me by floating slowly around the toilet like Benjamin Braddock on his air mattress in “The Graduate.”

“Ben, I just want to say one word to you—just one word.”

Camera cuts to an extreme close-up of the turd as it slowly turns in anticipation.

“Are you listening?”

Again, the turd lazily rides the current.

“Flush. Goddamn you, flush!”

Time was running out. I had to think of something fast. I looked at the window. If I could just get the turd to the window…I looked out to see production cables running to the backyard. Damn, I couldn’t just drop a turd out where the crew was working. Besides, how could I get it from the toilet to the window?

I looked back at the offensive feces floating there. I knew how the plumbing worked, if I could just get the turd past the opening, the “S” curve of the pipe would hold it out of sight. I flushed again. It did no good. There wasn’t enough water pressure to carry it away. It had become a desperate situation.

Well, there was only one thing to do. I reached into the cold water, grab the solid stool and, like drowning a rat, I pulled it under the water. The turd struggled like Randle McMurphy under the weight of Chief Bromden in “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.”

Oh no you don’t, I thought, you’re goin’ down. It was harder than I thought keeping the buoyant turd from leaping back into the bowl. But with persuasion, I got it past the opening and out of sight. I quickly washed my hands in the hottest water I could stand and looked back at the empty bowl. I thought about flushing again, but was afraid it might just bring the turd back. As long as it was out of sight, it was someone else’s problem. I washed again and left the bathroom.

Yes, I tell my friends, I have an exciting and glamorous job…very glamorous.

Easter Hymn

By David M. Howell
(From the collection of short stories: “Not In Your Life”) ©1999

The rectangular yellow clock above the kitchen sink was in code. It was a code that I was soon to break, but for now I was at a loss to understand its subtle hand gestures. Despite the clock’s secrecy, I knew it was early, very early. The eastern sky beyond the three maple trees in the yard was only a paler shade of night.

The day had actually begun even earlier when my father walked into the bedroom my brother and I shared.

“Come on, get up,” he said hoarsely having only recently gotten up himself. “You have to go to church.”

The phrase, ‘you have to go to church,’ was delivered as a command as if church held some special meaning. Whatever the necessity of church, it was lost on me that morning. I thought to myself, even at that young age, what god in his right mind would be up this early just to hear the redundant prayers of seemingly needy people? People, vainly seeking the same answers to unanswerable questions. If god intended us to get up at dawn he would have made it come later in the day.

Before walking out of our sleep, my father pulled the string turning on the closet light. There was no avoiding it now, I had to get up.

The floor was cold and I quickly got my feet on the area rug in the middle of the room. My older brother, who aged me by two years, was already out of bed. He was much better at taking orders than me. Even in my pre-school years, I questioned authority. Of course my method of questioning—confused abstinence—usually brought a flat hand or belt to my behind. It’s amazing to me how that defiance shaped the core of who I would become.

I dressed in the clothes my mother wanted me to be seen in. A dark green pattern shirt with beige fleur-de-lis and a stitched-in-place brown vest. My brother wore a crisp pale blue shirt with a unicorn on the breast pocket. We wore the same clothes my parents had dressed us in a few days earlier for a group photo. With my new sister in the middle, we sat for the first spring picture I can remember. 38 years later that photograph would stand vigil on the mantle of my fireplace. The innocence captured in those eyes still look out with playful wonder. Oh, if I could, the things I would share with the boy that would become me.

The house was cold as I walked into the kitchen, my too-big-for-my-feet, hand-me-down black dress shoes that had been my brother’s last year, clicked across the linoleum floor. Casper, our black dog was indifferent to our early rising and curled before the heating grate absorbing what little warmth escaped.

I learned later Casper was a stray that wandered onto my parents farm. She adopted us and carved a niche in our lives. It would be three years before we got a new dog. Sam, a collie/shepherd mix, would be the dog my brothers and sisters would come to remember most. But that was a long way from this morning.

My mother wore an aqua blue apron over her Sunday best as she prepared breakfast. Her hair, short as was the style, was further tamed by bobby bins. The breakfast she labored over could not be enjoyed until after church. Fasting was the slow approach to denying yourself something you craved. In the corner, the coffee percolated sending its acidic Colombian scent into the room. I would remember the smell of percolating coffee for the rest of my life and always associate it with chilly childhood mornings when life was simple and fresh.

Outside, my father was warming the Pontiac. A tan 4-door sedan with the classic fins on the back. I looked out the picture window in the living room, there was frost on the grass. Frost made the grass crackle when walked on but touch a blade of grass and the frost instantly and mysteriously disappeared. The world I was discovering was filled with wonder.

My father ushered us to the car parked just beyond the white wooden gate. Built by caring hands in a day and age when craftsmanship was the key to success. It would be five years later when the last 4x4 white posts were pulled from the ground and a Sears chain-link fence put in their place. The cold steel of the chain-link better contained Sam, the collie/shepard, as she grew. But it never had the same feeling of space as the wooden fence posts and gate. I miss them to this day.

The car was warm almost warmer than the house when my brother and I climbed into the back seat. It wasn’t really a back seat, my father was a master builder preferring to create from his mind than settle for something that wasn’t quite right.

I remember failing miserably at taping the handlebars of my ten speed bike when I was in high school. My father sensed my frustration and spent an hour in the garage undoing the damage I’d done. He carefully retaped the handlebars flawlessly. I know I thanked him then, but I never expressed how impressed I was with his patience. He taught me a lesson that evening that I carry to this day. Patience in every situation. It has saved me many, many times.

For the car, he built a platform for the back seat of our old Pontiac. I couldn’t begin to explain how this half inch thick sheet of plywood worked or even fit into the car. I can only say that it provided a flat surface which, covered by a gray quilt, created an arena for my brother and me to play in.

This was the last freedom I would ever have in a car. Eventually we would get a white Pontiac station wagon and assigned seats. My father would add a hitch to pull the trailer my parents allowed themselves for our family camping adventures. White with a black strip down the middle and with an overhanging bunk, we traveled the country sheltered from the wilderness we explored. The trailer and station wagon were a dream that morning that would not materialize for another four years.

The gravel driveway crunched like dry cereal under the car as we backed away from our house. A house that seemed so huge at the time. Nine years from now it would be a memory substituted by a much bigger house my parents would build two miles down the road. But that morning, our house, with its huge picture window that gave the façade a grin, was my nest, my security. Twenty years from now, my sister, who curled in my mother’s arms that spring morning, would move into that old house with her husband. Together they changed its old design to better fit their needs. Change is good and what they did certainly improved that old house. But there’s a certain pang for your first shelter out of the womb and this was mine. If granted three wishes, nostalgia would momentarily suggest I go back and visit it before common sense asked for money, power and a universal remote.

We lived on the edge of an old river valley. From the driveway, guarded by two white gates built with the same care as the gate in front of our house, the road swept down as it curved north across the narrow Galien River. The road was lined with massive trees that, even naked in their winter sleep shadowed our path.

Several turns and a couple of miles put us on a brisk two lane road that headed north to the church we went to for special occasions. Like Easter.

Easter, I had long thought this unusual celebration of torture and death was created to offset the Jewish holiday of Passover. This was just a coincidence as I would learn some thirty-five years later while researching a book.

Eostre was the Scandinavian Goddess of dawn. Her name meaning east, the direction of the sunrise. This special festival occurred at the spring equinox to honor her arrival. According to pagan tradition a “Year King” was chosen from the clan. He was ritualistically sacrificed as a tribute to Eostre and the coming growing season. The sacrificed King was then buried in the fields where his body was said to magically come back to life again with the rising grains. Everyone then shared in this miracle by eating the bread made from the “Year King’s” body.

As we silently drove north I watched as Eostre rose on the horizon. Her glimmering gown of orange slowly filled the edges of my childhood. From her zenith she would cast shadows of doubts on accepted thoughts and superstitions. The world was bigger than I ever could have imagined that morning. So big, that even a goddess could only see half of it at a time. The AM radio station my father had tuned in played a classical piece. Wagner or Strauss filled the car as I watched the sunrise on my awaking childhood.
It was the single most memorable moment of my life. Riding that day to Easter Mass with my older brother and younger sister. Listening to the symphony and watching the beginning of a new day unfold.

My childhood would see many things. Two more brothers and two more sisters would arrive over the next decade. Their personalities and very beings woven across the tapestry of my childhood like the pattern of a warm, secure blanket. Today, they just seem to have always been there. Yet on this morning in 1961 the closest of them, my brother Steven, was still over a year away with my youngest sister nine years and nearly as many months from becoming the person I would know and cherish.

I could not imagine all that would become memories of my childhood and who would play roles in acts yet to be written. It was just a morning, earlier than most for me, with the symphony balancing the cacophony of my overwhelming curiosity. I had no idea how early that morning really was. But, oh those precious moments of childhood, they disappear as quickly as the frost on morning grass.