Waiting for the Man (11 page)

“Don’t start again,” I said.

“C’mon, Web 2.0, the conversation, it’s what we’re talking about,” he said. “Media buzz words. Engagement. I mean, you know that word.”

“Don’t get me started on that,” I said. I’d done a lot of thinking on the interactive web, back when I had a job, on its effects on the channels of communication and the changes it would bring. On return on engagement, on the metrics that might power the world forward and unleash new levels of money. The manner in which we could convince consumers we were selling the best thing ever.

“Everybody’s a somebody,” Dan said. “Imagine the popularity of a chat room even, something as old fashioned as a chat room, if you just showed up and held court.”

“The web is just another part of our cult of entitlement,” I said. “The web tells everyone that everything you say, every opinion you have, every action you take, has value. It’s the logical conclusion to the entitlement that everyone feels. It’s brought fifteen minutes down to one.”

“Such harsh words,” Dan mocked.

I reached for an apple. Sophie took one, too.

“So at least do the mail,” he said. “Answer them or don’t but even a photo of you looking over the mail will mean a lot, I’m guessing. We could run an entire page of your letters in the paper.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not right. These are private. I don’t know if I’ll ever answer them, but you’re not printing anything.”

The idea of sending an email terrified me in an odd way. Not because I’m a Luddite, but because the immediacy of email would render this exercise untenable. Dan was proposing something that would result in me drowning.

“If I answer these letters . . .” I said.

The Man sat next to me.
This is interesting
, he said.

“You’re going to answer the mail?” Dan asked.

“I can help,” Sophie said. “Because I can write in English, too.” She touched my arm and my insides warmed up.

“You can be an odd duck,” Dan said. “I’m wearing your PJs and you’re worried about privacy.” He returned inside.

I reached into the box and pulled out a handful of emails. Sophie did the same. There were letters mixed in, something I hadn’t noticed. Addressed to me. Stamps from England, South Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Thailand, Russia. Return addresses from across the country. Sophie held a letter from Liberia with a triangular stamp colored gold. “Aren’t they shooting people here?” she asked.

The letters and emails were mostly religious in nature, more confirmation that all religions are the result of a single man’s dream. My mother had once said that new religions were made impossible by the birth of psychiatry. How could we promote our visions if there were learned professionals willing to analyze our dreams for a few hundred bucks a session?

So what was I doing? I’m contradicting myself, I know. There’s good reason for this and it covers the surprising aspect of the letters. One, I’m not religious. At all. A belief in God is too easy. It’s necessary. I can understand that. But I also think the corruption of the idea of God with religion is all the proof any skeptic needs as to God’s existence. To me, God is a good idea, a universal idea and desire brought out of Africa as a firm belief and then demeaned by human stupidity. Nothing new in that. It’s what usually happens.

I also think psychiatry is a crutch for lonely people in a society that has forgotten the art of conversation. I argued about this with my father quite a bit. He was a believer in what he called “massaging the brain.” He spoke of touching the right parts of it, that there was nothing ever wrong in exploring something we didn’t understand. But we have replaced dialogue with nachos and
Monday Night Football
. The result is the water wall of noise that is talk radio. For example. Unless you’re really insane, or seriously damaged, there is no need for a therapist. This is a line of thinking that always leads to great trouble with my friends and coworkers. So be it. This is what I believe. Life is hard. It’s not meant to be easy. It is something we endure because we are born. My parents did not push their religion on me and my father wavered between bouts of skepticism and certainty. My mother did not suffer from doubt.

Sophie read an email from a rabbi in Australia who warned me against the lure of false prophets, bringing up Moses and the Golden Calf his followers had fashioned while he was hiking up Mount Sinai to pick up the commandments. I opened a letter from an Anglican minister in England. He also spoke of God’s “infinite wisdom” and his “boundless love” and the “mysterious and frankly frightening manner in which He is revealed to His flock.” The minister wrote that his congregation had been following my story closely and were prepared to send money so that I could “follow His word without fear, without reservation, and without the multitudinous headaches brought on by the mundane.” He prayed for me constantly, he wrote, and wondered if I could not hear his prayers. He invited me to his church and said that I would find “comfort and a warm bed” should my travels ever take me his way. He ended the letter with the strange declaration that Paul McCartney lived close by.

Dan returned, his head brimming with more bad ideas. Looking into his eyes, I could see the excitement, the possibilities blowing through his mind like sheets of paper caught in a fierce wind. “You are an icon. You mean something. Don’t you see it? People are going to start worshipping you! Literally.”

“The Indian reporter said the same thing,” I sighed.

“Should I call you Lord?” Sophie asked.

“No one’s going to worship me,” I said.

A woman from Sacramento wrote about her abortion. That’s it. One long run-on sentence describing the abortion in gruesome clinical detail. Another woman from Seattle wrote of the guilt she felt for bedding her boss to ensure a promotion. A boy from Texas admitted to stealing money from his sister’s piggy bank. A grandmother from Jamaica despaired over her grandson’s recent conviction for murder. A man from Dublin wrote that he had been sleeping with two women, sometimes on the same day, and neither one was his wife. A man from Hong Kong wrote that he had walked out of a fish market without paying for his purchase. A teenager from Wichita wrote to say I was a fake, just another reason to believe that God could not be trusted. I was becoming the world’s confessional. The individual isms that feed this world had found a release in me because, as one man from Holland put it, “You seem to have the ear of that which is mightier than we, which some will call God, but which I will call the cosmos.” I read about crimes, infidelities, heartaches. Transgressions. Alcoholics who had returned to the bottle, junkies who could not end their habits, overeaters, undereaters, smokers, ex-smokers, the greedy, the flinty, the venal, the morose.

And, of course, from the religious communities, from all the communities I thought there were and then some. I heard from Moonies in Korea and from their Washington office, from small Christian sects in Idaho that built their crosses out of discarded rifles and semi-automatic firearms, from Christians of all sorts who were convinced the Man was Jesus. From Muslims. From Hindus. From Jews. From Jews for Jesus. From Buddhists. From Taoists. From a priest who said he was Farsi. From an Aboriginal elder in northern Australia. From a twelve-year-old boy in Orlando who said he was God and I was pissing him off.

Forces at Work

The rain never comes as a surprise here. We can see the rain clouds forming over the mountains and then speeding toward the ranch. The majesty of the sky, the drama of it, acts as its own warning system.

Time to prepare.

The awnings come up over the dining patio, plastic sheets get pulled down, heaters come out if need be. The horses are brought in. Umbrellas are delivered to guests who have strayed too far from shelter. The Rainy Day Activity Plan is implemented. Guests are led to the indoor swimming pool or invited to the main salon for a lecture on “How to Create the Holistic Home.” There are tours of the stables. A movie is announced for the theater, a western usually,
Stagecoach
, say, or to impress the guests,
Rashomon
. And then, usually within fifteen minutes, the clouds part and the sun breaks through and the sky returns to its swimming-pool blue. The wet grass sparkles with a vivid kind of joy. The earth heats up. Guests are encouraged to enjoy the outdoors again if they are so inclined.

The rains have been falling now off and on the entire day. Cycles of fifteen minutes. From wet to brilliant sunshine to a somber gray blanket to sun to wet. The kitchen staff spends days like these indoors — either in the kitchen or in the mess hall preparing the room for the next meal. In slow motion. If the night is rainy, or cool, or both like it is tonight, parties break out in the trailers, the halls become tightly squeezed dance clubs and everyone is on the lookout for a nighttime pull and poke.

There’s a lot of sex here. For the workers, it’s the only thing to do; booze and grass can only be so entertaining. People here need sex to connect to the world, I think, to take their place in a world where being rich doesn’t matter, to feel the contact of skin, the feeling of being alive and wanted, where the size of the mountains doesn’t diminish you, where the wind can remind you that you’re nothing but dust. At least that’s what the wind makes me feel like.

I sit in the employees’ lounge, looking over the PR kit this place sends to media around the world. A small PR office in Los Angeles handles the account. There is one basic media kit for the entire world and it can be customized depending on the recipient.

Press clippings from sundry magazines and newspapers. A history of the property. The mission statement, which, like most mission statements, is banal, a generic mishmash of luxury and relaxation and empowerment. A dash of hokey western imagery, using a language that only PR people use. This language is arcane, empty, devoid of living. It speaks of nothing while promising everything. It is a hollow vessel, the air inside a crystal vase. No lies. Just omissions of truth. And always a smile, a breathlessness that manages to appeal to the reader, but only if they have already committed themselves to the idea of a vacation. This is not messaging for someone sitting down. It will only resonate with someone who has already stood up. And is thinking about planning something.

There are bios of the owners, of Athena, of Tomas. Beautiful shots of the rooms, the horses, a shot of the entire property with the mountains in the background. Probably taken from a barely hovering helicopter. The restaurant menu, the various offerings from the spa, a checklist of outdoor activities. Dominant words include “active” and “stunning” and “holistic” and “pamper.” The kit is done up in a white binder with silver, embossed lettering. It could be for any hotel from any city in the world. Or it could be for a bar of soap. Or a new brand of vodka.

But nowhere is the real quality of the ranch made obvious. Because it is impossible to understand the isolation of this place, the effect nature has on anyone who comes here, the quality of the sunlight, the bigness of the sky. All of that is primordial. It is what makes Tomas’s food taste the way it does. It affects the quality of the sleep as much as the mattress or the elevated thread count of the Egyptian cotton sheets. It is what makes riding a horse here different from riding one anywhere else. It affects your mood and your sense of self. It changes you. This is the ultimate promise of any destination.

There is no admission of winter.

During the winter, half the staff is let go. Many head south, to Mexico. And live off their earnings. And then return in the spring.

There is no admission of winter because there is no plan for it. Like a lot of things around here.

Advertising, PR, whatever, has a way of rendering you inhuman. A transfusion of toxic blood. Or worse. Like having lite beer coursing through your veins. But it’s also a way of telling the world you exist. It proves that you are. Advertising is the engine of our economy, of our way of life. It keeps everyone working. Because it’s there to get us to consume. And without consumption, we have nothing. It is so central to our way of life that it is almost impossible to imagine a life devoid of it, of the message. How would we know what to buy or wear or eat or watch on TV without advertising? How would we know who to cheer for without advertising or marketing or PR? How would we consume the world’s stories? How would we get out of bed?

I believe all of this even if the methods of getting the message out leave me cold. And unsatisfied.

But I believe it.

I also believe that when done properly, there is no more creative force in the world. And that belief, really, at its core, is what makes me sad. Not that I was good at it. But that our most creative endeavor is built around making you want stuff.

And I have thought that perhaps this whole thing came about as a form of apology.

I was a copywriter for an agency.

I often think about the power of the word. Or I used to. My job was to manipulate words in a way that would in turn manipulate someone else. To action. To modify behavior.

This is the true power of the word, or at least, this is the power of those who can assemble words in a manner that is at once understandable but not. I wrote words in which were embedded symbols and meanings that were easily accessible to the surface intellect of the listener or reader but that also penetrated the deeper neurons of the consumer. Meaning everyone. The danger of these words was the easy manipulation, the font of the delivery that could easily allow me to imagine a fellow human being as nothing more than a wallet with choices that needed limiting.

I was about limiting choices. People don’t understand this. Advertisers aren’t about choice at all. Advertisers are opposed to the principle that choice is the height of power and freedom. They don’t want people to hear about or even want that power. They want to take that responsibility away. They want to make consumers children. They want to take care of consumers, nurture them, make their decisions for them, train away their instinct.

This is the story my boss told me: imagine a bird that simply knows where it must fly every autumn. One day, for no other reason than some deep-rooted itch, a bird will take off and fly thousands of miles just to avoid the cold. And then one day, it will do the same, only in reverse, just to lay eggs. And it will continue to embark on these journeys, year after year, until it is shot by a hunter or infected by a bug carrying some sort of imported trauma or it simply becomes old. It won’t think about it. That bird will go about its business and never have to wonder if it did the wrong thing or not. This is what advertisers want for their public. Replace the bird’s flight with the purchase of soap and you have something. Instinct. The freedom of not having to choose. The freedom to be.

And when I accepted this story as something true and beautiful, I knew I had become an ad guy. Which was a realization that didn’t shame me as much as I thought it would. It still doesn’t. I can defend all this even while I find it utterly distasteful. My father called it “being an adult.” Perhaps.

But it is also an art, a black one surely, a kind of carnival magic that has a science behind it, that is taught in schools, that can be vastly rewarding if done properly.

And so this is what Athena has asked of me. To assess. To see if the words are correct. If they match the feelings this place wishes you to feel. To see if what has been manufactured builds a brand, tells a story. The right story. She wants this place to tell a story to the right people. To touch them. To touch them so deeply that they will reach into their pockets and pay impressive sums for the privilege of that touch. She needs someone to tell it.