Theory IX

Bud came home well after dark to find his brother sitting on the couch. Implements of dinner were scattered around him on the floor and he looked asleep, a china teacup balanced delicately on his stomach. He tried to sneak past.

“Oh, girl....”
The plaintive refrain from a Beatles’ song rose out of the dark shape. Nate had a beautiful voice when he chose to share it.
“Doof, you scared the shit out of me.” Bud went to turn on the sole light, a battered Eames floor model they’d rescued from a dumpster. Someone had pasted Scooby-Doo stickers on the shade.
“Hey, Bud.” Nate sounded tired.
“Any dinner left?” Bud was pulling at his valet bowtie. It seemed to be getting tighter every day and Nate teased him it was because of the weights he was lifting in the garage. ‘Soon, I’m going to be calling you Bulldog.’
“Vermicelli in vodka sauce with Bella mushrooms.”

The two brothers separated, as was their custom, for the night. A thin ribbon of light from the kitchen door provided the only illumination after Nate had heaved himself out of the depths of the couch and shut down the lamp.
“Oh, gir,rl…..” he began again. The replying dishes clamored and pots crashed easing his troubles and turning his attention to sleep, which he did, toes up on the sofa, cup and saucer cradled in his arms.

************************************

On Monday Sara got a call from Circle Me, with a job for the week. They needed an illustrator for a toy concept meeting at a downtown advertising agency. Sara had been working less and less lately and she took to wondering if it had anything to do with her dislike of the head recruiter. But then she was careful to hide her feelings.

Still, work was dwindling and it might be time to find another placement agency. It couldn’t be the quality of her work - she’d always gotten good reviews from clients. And she was a quick study, picking up the style and pace of the assignment without complaint. But the bigger advertising agencies had stopped calling for repeat work and she was being sent out now for increasingly smaller outfits, with commensurate drops in her hourly rate.


This client was in a loft on John Street and she’d been in the same location when it had been occupied by others. A succession of start-ups with the same fresh faces and eager energy that had gradually dwindled into oblivion. She introduced herself to the smartly dressed woman at the reception (wasn’t it the same curved plywood desk?) only to be directed back into a bullpen of sorts where a dozen or more art-school students (for they looked that age) were busily sketching at a railroad flat of tables. They barely looked up when a woman with flaming red hair and thigh-high boots materialized out of a warren of wavy-glass cubicles.

There was that look again. Too nice. The others scribbled furiously, not a familiar face in the bunch.
“You must be…..” she searched her memory. Not very bright, thought Sara.
“Oh, yes!” she cried and arched her eyebrows to indicate that she had, in fact, remembered, and then fairly pushed her to an empty seat next to a boy-child with multiple piercings and a faux Mohawk.
His striped sweater sleeves were longer than the ends of his fingers but it hadn’t slowed him down any. He was making fashion work for him.

Sara edged away on the stool, it screeched on the concrete floor and he gave her an unflattering look.
The red-headed woman had disappeared.
What was she supposed to do?
Looking around surreptitiously she bided her time by then digging through her large drawstring bag for the box of pantones and drawing pencils.
The boy looked up and sighed.
“Honey…..”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped.
“You idiot, that’s the name of the studio manager!”
“Sorry.” She needed this person, this pierced, stuck-up brat.
“Anyway, Honey has assigned everyone on this block to do working drawings of one of 12 SKUs. And you,” he finished with a flourish, “have number 12.” He then pointed to the bottom of the rubbish heap of choice, a badly drawn concept sketch, no doubt by the untalented product manager, of a hideous thigamajig with seven arms and some kind of squawk box attached to its bulbous head. No doubt it came with a clever name dreamed up by the creative director who came with the team. The sketch had been fingered by everyone before being abandoned, alone, in the middle of the table.

Mercifully the boy left her alone after that and Sara, after glancing at the other work in progress, set about to do her part.

Behind her Honey, resplendent in a fake fur vest as she prepared to take an early lunch, whispered to a co-worker as they peered around the bookend cubicle.
“Look at her,” she said, jabbing a red fingernail.
The man saw a woman hunched over the table, a dove amongst a flock of peacocks, her baggy grey sweater loosening woolen threads of silver to float upwards where they threatened to take hold in the unruly brown hair.

Honey shuddered.
The man shrugged.
“She’s working hard. Isn’t that all that matters?”
The studio manager looked up over the sea of glass anxiously. Her bosses expected miracles in the three days they had to get this presentation together.
She’d take a brown mouse.
She’d take a dead body if it would produce for her.

…..but the pinched face, the owlish glasses from another era. The agency had told her she was young, OCA trained.
Where had they found her?