Read an Excerpt
My Beautiful Idol
By Peter D. Gall Zondervan
Copyright © 2008
Peter D. Gall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-28310-2
Chapter One Lies for the Sake of Lies
I'm the fat blond guy on the corner in the African print shirt, squeezing himself into the yellow taxi.
"Burritoville on Addison near Wrigley," I direct.
It's 7:15, Wednesday night, August 3, 1994. I work late most nights because my ad agency buys cab rides and dinners for people who work past 7:00. Once a month my boss complains that as a man I'm taking politically incorrect advantage of a loophole in a politically correct policy intended to protect the safety of female employees. He says that I should be taking the bus and buying my own dinner. Maybe, but all I care about is that I get four giant chorizo burritos and four Mountain Dews a week for free, and I don't have to deal with the bus. And we both know that even my overtime, including dinners and cab rides, is cheaper than what any of the experienced employees would cost him.
"Long day at work?" the driver asks in a Russian accent.
"Yeah," I reply, sizing the man up. Lately I've been exploring the power and joy of lying to strangers. "I write for an advertising agency."
This part is true. The world's largest agency, in fact. And a fact of which I am quite proud. It wasn't easy getting into the industry, but somehow last year, with plenty of ego-stroking, I landed a great job with big-name clients.
"Anything I see?"
"Ever read your shampoo bottle?" I ask. "The directions on the back?"
"Yeah."
"I revolutionized the hair care industry with one word." This is the lie.
"How?"
"I added the word 'repeat' to the end of the directions. My client increased profits by 150 percent in a year." I make the number up at random.
"Interesting," he says, but he's clearly not all that impressed, and we return to silence as he weaves heart-stoppingly through traffic for a few blocks. Then he says, "Even if every person washed their hair twice, that would only be double. Why did profits go up even more?"
"Good insight," I say, practicing my client skill of congratulating people's intelligence when they show even the slightest mental effort. "At first our goal was just to increase sales - you know, get people to use more. And it worked. People quickly learned that they were supposed to shampoo twice. Then the shampoo makers realized that using twice as much shampoo was actually very hard on people's hair. So they diluted the stuff, which made it a lot less expensive to produce." I lean forward, locking his eyes in the rearview mirror to force him to listen, just to see how the trick will work. "And that's when things really took off. People who were only shampooing once needed conditioner because the shampoo wasn't working on its own, and people who were following the directions needed conditioner because the shampoo was frying their hair. All told, my client improved its profits by 150 percent, and the rest of the industry followed suit." I sit back in my seat. "Of course, that was just the first year - I've been working on other projects since then."
"This is what you do, write tricky words?"
"That's my job. We call it 'creating a need.' I write the songs that make the young girls sing. I write the songs of love and hair and shiny things," I sing. "I write the songs, I write the songs." It's Mr. Manilow to you. Most nights it takes a couple of hours and at least a couple of beers to slow the free association required to keep up the "talented young copywriter" role I play at work. And being so young, I feel like I have to be the one who makes the joke first, or who has the comeback ready, because the worst thing is to be seen as too young and too green - or gullible. It's exhausting to be driven by the sort of fear that tells me to "fake it 'til you make it"; but it was too hard to land this job to crash and burn now that I have it.
"What others?" he asks.
"You mean what other needs do I create?"
"Yeah."
"All of them, my friend," I say, practicing the trick of familiarity with a stranger to build power. "Needs are all made up, and there will always be new ones. Things you don't even know about today are things that I'll make sure you won't be able to live without tomorrow."
He scowls a little at the cliché and the dark truth behind it.
"Don't think of it as a bad thing, or at least don't think of me as the bad guy. It's the nature of man. We're all after something to tell us about ourselves. We all want to be on the right teams. And we don't care much where the things that identify us - in the sense that they give us our identity - come from. In fact, the easier they come, the better. Take Coke versus Pepsi, for example. Do I see myself as more of a loyal traditionalist with family values? If so, I buy Coke to remind myself about it. Or do I see myself as more of a hip fun member of the next generation, in which case Pepsi is my drink of choice? Exactly the same thing with McDonald's and Burger King, Ford and Honda, IBM and Apple. We build a whole world around that sort of stuff. We measure who we are and tell other people who we are by labels we slap on our lives. It's not new, either - it's how we've picked our religions for generations."
"Hmm." He doesn't care, but I think it's fascinating. Plus, if I speak with enough confidence he'll let me feel like maybe I'm right.
I do think I'm right, though. I'm not happy about the truth, but at least there's an ego stroke in feeling like I'm one of the rare people who's willing to face it. Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere. For example, the other day I picked up a gem from a program about the collector crab. Of the genus schizophroida, which is Greek for bearer of split likeness. The collector crab, or decorator crab, as it's also called, attaches to his shell bits of what it finds on the sea floor. According to the narrator with the British accent, the idea is to protect itself by becoming invisible to its natural enemy, the squid. Makes sense, I thought. People do the same thing. And like the collector crab, which sometimes chooses camouflage that actually makes the crab easier to spot, we can't ever be all that sure about the stuff we pick up and attach to our shells; all we can do is grab what looks good to us. That's where I come in. My job in advertising is to sell people, all bearers of the likeness of God, baubles to attach to their personal shells. Labels we slap on our lives, like products, ser vices, impressions, approaches, tones, movements, whatever - anything that can help build a consumer's "personal brand." Our god is our personal brand, our existential self, our chosen reflection or explanation or defense or excuse to the world. It's how we hide from the "squids" in our lives, which show up in the form of evil or fear or shame or a host of other things we work furiously to avoid.
And the squids are everywhere, looking to devour us. We're desperate to do what we can to camouflage ourselves - from fig leaves to 401(k)s, we're all about covering our nakedness. We scurry along through the dark corners of our worlds looking for hiding places we can take with us. And so long as we remain uneaten, it feels like it's working.
My job is to help my clients sell camouflage to frightened crabs. What's tough is that I'm a crab too. It's why I bluster in front of strangers, or tell lies for the sake of telling lies and getting away with it. Still, something inside of me resents this taxi driver for letting me get away with my sinister bravado. I don't want to be right about the world. I want him to disprove my cynicism, not just endure me. I want him to argue against me, to try to see me, to let me know if my camouflage is really working. Or better yet, I want him to show me a way to live that doesn't require the camouflage. The truth is that I'm so desperate to be myself - but still adequate and loved - that I'm willing to look for clues anywhere. Even from cab drivers. But he doesn't care. He has his own hiding places to worry about - and there's no way he'll risk his security by admitting I'm messing with it. Admitting you're hiding is too much like admitting you're vulnerable, and, like most people, he chooses not to talk about such things.
We drive the rest of the way to Burritoville in silence. I casually over-tip him, and ask for a receipt for my expense report.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Beautiful Idol by Peter D. Gall Copyright © 2008 by Peter D. Gall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
