Thanks for nothing, Satan.

The new dishwasher.

There were twelve of them.  My eyes looked up and down the rows and picked out the ones I would kill first. 

“You disrespect Trump, you disrespect yourself?”

“If you like it, put a ring of missiles on it?”

“Minnesota, uber alles?”

If I was not holding the worst headlines of all time in my hands, I was holding some of the strangest.

“I did like you said,” offered the impossibly violet, impossibly large eyes belonging to the author of the above headlines.  “The pop song thing, I mean.  I don’t know if the Dead Kennedy’s are pop…”

“They’re not.”

“…but everyone has heard “California, Uber Alles”—even in Zagreb.” 

Earlier, I had told Miss Big Eyes that writing attention-getting headlines was dead simple. “If ever you get stuck,” I’d said,” just start tweaking lines from pop songs—it works every time.”

Now, I was eating my words.  They did not taste good.

“The first eight are the strongest, Marev,” I said. “Give them to Kat to lay out.” 

The girl flashed an impossibly white, eighteen-year-old smile and thanked me profusely.

I should have said, “Spell-check them first,” but the headlines were already out of my hand and being conveyed to the hostess desk where Kat, Smuggler’s Inn’s seating hostess and graphic designer, was cleaning coffee cup rings left by the last person to do dining room seating, which was me.  In the scheme of things, what did it matter that “Communist” was spelled with one M and “Clinton” was spelled “Clington”? I just needed this job out of the house. $850. My god.

Normally, I am not so lax in my duties as a guardian of Smugglers’ Inn’s creative product.  I honestly believe that advertising and jazz are the only important American art forms and that of the two, advertising is the harder to get right. I might have told Marev, the young woman with the eyes, that she shouldn’t expect to become a great copywriter overnight. I had originally hired the 18-year-old Croatian immigrant to wash dishes, but when she’d discovered that, in addition to being a struggling restaurant, Smugglers’ Inn is a struggling ad agency, Marev had pestered me relentlessly.

“I’m taking marketing at CR Junior (Coon Rapids Junior College) and it is my dream to become an artistic director of a major advertising agency,” I recall Marev telling me. I recall this because there is no such position as “artistic director” in an ad agency, but I didn’t want to correct her.  She might stop looking at me with those Keane-painting eyes.

As it happens, a local car dealer and Donald Trump supporter had come to Smugglers’ Inn about helping the billionaire developer carry the critical Spring Lake Park/Coon Rapids non-meth-using voting block. The dealer had a brilliant plan: take down all the Hillary and Bernie signs and replace them with signs for the Donald.

I forget why I didn’t just show him the door. OK, it was because of Marev and my promise to help her build a portfolio.

My thinking was that, for a modest fee, we could design a few posters, run them off on our new copier and paste them on the plywood barriers at the numerous construction sites in the area where the car dealer was bound to see them. Marev wasn’t the only one who needed to hone her copywriting skills. In this digital age, it had been a while since Smugglers’ Inn had done a poster campaign. I was wondering if we still had the juice. Anyway, this was political advertising.  Whatever we did that wasn’t just a slogan and a flag motif was guaranteed to stand out.

Our prospective client owned two dealerships that I knew about, so I felt comfortable asking him for $10,000, thinking that he would balk at this figure and we would end up with $5000 to 7,500. Our out-of-pocket would be limited to ink and paper, plus maybe a day for Kat to design the posters.  Jorge and his kitchen guys would post the things after hours for an extra $100.  They didn’t care if the messages were for a guy who wanted to send them back to Ciudad Juarez.  Money is apolitical.

As it turned out, the car dealer was expecting to spend $500, all in. I talked him up to $850.  Note to young people: when Satan calls wanting to buy your young soul, think twice before saying no.  If, years later, you should change your mind, Satan will not return your calls. You will then have to sell your hi-mileage soul on the open market for a price considerably less than world domination or marriage to the movie star of your choice. Like, maybe, eight-fifty, cash.

I was picturing how Marev might look with her giant eyes and devil horns and OK, a pointy tail, when a voice startled me from my reverie.

“Yo, Heisenberg!” Kat shouted. “Your bag man was here.”

“How come you’re not out front?” I asked our seating hostess. It was still 15 minutes until we were open, but I had to be a dick; I was the manager.

Kat smirked, but did not move. “Just tell me: are you blackmailing someone or selling leftover Vikaden from your shoulder surgery? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Kat, what the hell are you on about?”

“This skeever in sunglasses just asked for you and when Kenny (the bartender) told him we were closed, he dropped a bag of money on the bar and said to give it to you. Who are you blackmailing? Anyone we know?”

“What did the guy look like?”

Kat shrugged. “Like a guy. He had dark glasses.”

“My age? Older?”  The Car King was in his 60’s.

“Not THAT old. He was, maybe, 45. He was here, like, six seconds. Come on! Count the money.”

So I did, right there on the bar.   Kenny, Marev, Kat and Jorge, the cook, watched as I sorted the bills by denomination before adding them up.  They were all small bills, like what the car dealer probably had in petty cash.

“Eight hundred and fifty dollars,” I said. “All there.”

Jorge whistled appreciatively.

“More than I’ve seen in one place,” Kat said.

“We can close for the night,” said Kenny.  By now, I had explained the nature of the payment to everyone a couple of times. 

“Is there...always so much money in advertising?” said a tiny voice.

Marev’s big eyes had gotten even bigger. She might have been an exotic, nocturnal marsupial eyeing a juicy katydid as she gazed at the piles of singles, fives, tens and twenties. I felt instantly uncomfortable. $850 represents a month’s rent for any of these people. For Marev, a dishwasher, it was a month’s salary. And I had disparaged it as paltry.

“Marev!” I nearly shouted, “For crying out loud, you look like you’ve never seen drug money before. We cook meth in the back. How else do you think the lights on? Kenny, keep the machine gun ready. I’m not expecting a hit, but you know we’re always vulnerable after a drop.”

“We’re locked and loaded, boss.”

“And Kat, if you smell DEA, press the panic button and hold ‘em off for 15 seconds. That’s all we need to blow the lab.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n Heisenberg!”

“Hopefully, we’ll get through the week without losing any more guys,”  I said.  “Jorge?  It’s time Marev got a pistole.  Hook her up.”

“Sure ‘ting, boss! (to Marev) Girly, ‘cho wanna Glock 9 or a 44 Mag Clint Eastwood special?”

I scampered with the cash that would go toward addressing two of the two more egregious violations the last health inspector had cited us for. It was a dirty trick to play on the newbie, but I sensed Marev was screwing up her courage to ask for some of the $850. Her fellow employees would keep the gag running until we were open for business and by then,  Marev’s moment would have passed.

In the end, it was just simpler to create an elaborate farce involving a criminal enterprise than to explain why a creative need to work for free when the agency employing him or her was getting paid. Has ANYONE satisfactorily explained working on spec?

My mind recalled the weirdest of those headlines that I had just approved. “All you need is love.  And Mexico will pay for the wall!” I smiled. That one was going to drive the Car King right around the bend. Well, ya gets what ya pays for, pal. 

$850! What kind of a restaurant-advertising agency did he take us for?

 

Snowboarding on your hands is harder than it sounds.

“I am quite sure this is not a good idea,” I remember thinking as the last plastic cinch strap was clicked around my right elbow.  I had never put my arm in a vice and cranked to see how much force was required to break bones, but I am guessing these custom bindings were within 20 or so foot-pounds-per-inch of snapping my radius and ulna like breadsticks.

“If you’re going to run into anything or your arms get torqued, just bail,” said Jesse, the owner of this unusual bit of kit. “Your CG is super low--you can’t get hurt.”

 “Roger! Can’t get hurt. CG.”

 Normally, I speak in complete sentences, but we had spent the previous five hours shooting snowboarder, Jesse Hokanson, ripping up the half pipe at Buck Hill in 12-degree weather and my tongue and lips were functioning on reserve power.  Jesse was one of our featured athletes, one of our para-olympians.  The 19-year-old looked a bit like John Kennedy, Junior.  Except that he was alive.  And he had no legs.  He had lost them to cancer.  Or was he born without them?  It matters not. What does matter is that Jesse mistook my faked interest in his custom snowboard for real interest and now I was obliged to try the unnatural tool out.  Jesse had suggested I rest my knees on my elbows, apparently mistaking me for a troupe member of Cirque du Soleil.  I gripped the handholds that were inside the arm binders and raised my knees off of the deck so that I was essentially balancing on my knuckles, something I found more than a little painful.  This might be the shortest ride in history.

I looked over at our videographer for encouragement. He drew a gloved finger across his throat.  I reminded myself that he was our seating hostess’ cousin and I had to be nice to him since he wasn’t getting paid.

“Make it to the bottom and I’ll buy you a beer!” Jesse said.

“You’re not old enough,” I said.  But it came out, “Yieeeeeha!”  I was moving. 

  

  It is common, when facing imminent death, to be treated to the spectacle of seeing one’s entire life pass before one’s eyes.  I must have retained some hope of survival, because I was getting the Cliff Notes version of the last three months.  Here I was, mopping up barf in the men’s’ at Smugglers’ Inn and trying to recall when we were a busy branding agency in addition to a restaurant serving surf ‘n turf in Blaine, Minnesota. I watched myself saying farewell to Pongo, our ginger-haired former dishwasher turned marketing strategist.  Crying in the storeroom.  Now, a happy image—Carol, the day manager, and myself being briefed about a re-branding assignment from client The American Humane Society, a return client.  How we smiled!

“Y-a-a-a-r!”

  The sound of my own involuntary scream brought me out of my reverie.  I was moving over the snow at an impossible speed.  The rational part of me knew this was a misperception was owing to the fact that I was viewing my progress from almost ground level, but I instinctively leaned back on the board in an attempt to scrub off some speed.  Instead of digging my edge into groomed snow and traveling in a graceful backside arc, my knees and all the weight of my legs pitched forward, unbalancing me.  It was only through superhuman effort that I was able to keep from eating it then and there.

   Instead, I ate it two-and-a-half seconds later when I encountered a patch of ice and the tail of my board pulled even with the nose and suddenly the world was going by sideways.  I just had time to crank my neck to look downhill when I caught an edge and face-planted.  The crusty snow came up to meet the front of the helmet that I had been talked into wearing with a loud, “CRACK!” Normally, this might be the end of my run, but in my compact pose I somersaulted twice and continued hurtling down the hill--although now my right arm was forward and my left arm was back, in reverse of how I had begun.  “Fakie”, we used to call this in the ‘80’s.

   I was not worried about running into a tree.  All trees were behind me.  The only dangerous obstacle was the nozzle of a snowmaking machine and that was well to the left of me.  As I fixated on it, I headed straight for it. 

More flashback.  Jorge III, Smug’s exterior maintenance engineer, weeping as I cut him loose, supposedly for not shoveling our loading area, but secretly to save his 10 man-hours a week.  Now, Carol and I on a conference call, talking with our American Humane client, who is leaving and, subsequently, pulling the plug on our assignment.  “Sorry about that.”  (Us too, pal.)  “But hey, my wife is on the St. Paul City Council...”  We’re listening.

   I can make out icicles hanging from the nozzle of the snow maker.  I spy a single flaccid traffic cone marking the hazard.   Some ski or a snowboard has partially flattened it.   I won’t even be the first to snuff it here.

   Where was I?  Yes, flashbacks.  I am six and riding on a pony.  I am jumping out of an airplane.  I am moving to a trailer, all my worldly possessions fitting in Karmann Ghia.  First kiss.  Dropped ice cream cone.  Green ribbon for “participation”. Now, cleaning up that barf in the men’s again.  Catching a bullhead off a dock in my pajamas.  Saint Paul City council City Council is giving us a check.  Paralympics…2017 Winter Paralympics in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Agency of record:  Smugglers’ Inn! Back in the game!

   I realize that I want to live--I HAVE to live.  With superhuman effort, I look away from the rapidly approaching snowmaker.  My body follows my eyes and my back-to-front snowboard arcs left, missing the lethal obstacle.  The terrain shifts and I feel myself slowing down.  When I arrive at the edge of a patch of powder, I DELIBERATELY fall forward.

“Plop!”  

  

  I am cold, I am out of breath, but I am ALIVE.  The next sensation I have is of hands rudely pulling me to an upright position.  My near-death experience has shaken me to my core.  I look up in the fading light and make out the silhouette of a man with a camera.

  “You look like Kat’s cousin,” I say to the silhouette.

  “And you look like a dork,” says the silhouette, before taking my picture.  I see my legs splayed in front of me, but no snowboard.

“Guess I don’t have to worry about buying that beer.”

  John Kennedy, Jr. is coming to help.  For some inexplicable reason, jon-jon is wading through snow up to his waist.  He propels himself on his hands quite athletically. 

  “I thought you were dead,” I say.  Right before, “Where are my arms?”

  Laughter.  John. F. Kennedy, Jr. frees my arms from the bindings and snowboard that are behind my back.  I can wiggle my fingers.  It is a good sign.

   In the lodge, they pour hot chocolate into me and slow-walk me until my brains un-scramble.  Jesse autographs a youngster’s helmet and talks to everyone.  People KNOW him. I learn that my run was 100 yards, total, and lasted less than a minute.  I was never in danger of hitting the snowmaker, which was on the blue run next to us.  There had been no obstacles on our slope because our slope was the bunny run.

   The stills and action footage of Jesse are “awesome” (not my word) and that’s all that matters.  We can now get started crafting materials to go out to potential sponsors.  My own wild ride was never documented.  (“No, really, I forgot to hit “record”).  I’ll believe this until I see it on YouTube.  New Year’s Eve was hell for our restaurant, but then,  the restaurant, but nearly always is.  Smuggler’s Inn, the ad agency, is off to a promising new year.  About time.

Happy 2016, all.

The Management

Smugglers’ Inn

Warning: Contains the word, "prostitute".

Because the photograph looked too much like me.

“Milord? You have to come see this.”

“I do, do I?”  I had seen a lot that Halloween evening.  Much of it, I would like to un-see.

“Yes, I rather think that you do.”

Erin was using “my lord” and “rather” like some fancy-pants English person.  This, despite the fact that Erin was from Ireland.  I suppose she was trying to stay in character; Smugglers’ Inn’s relief seating hostess had dressed up like Mary Poppins for Halloween.  It was a decent get-up, especially with her accompanying carpetbag and umbrella.  I may have been the only one who got the reference, though; some dope later asked if she was a Victorian prostitute.

“Be there in two minutes,” I said, not looking up from my phone.

“We shall await your company in the bar.” Erin held her button nose in the air and strode away from the tiny manager’s office and through the kitchen, swinging her hips like I’m pretty sure Julie Andrews never did.

I finished checking Facebook (hey, I’m the boss) and fortified myself with a glass of Diet Coke before striking out for the lounge area.  I knew the kind of trouble that awaited me.   Or, I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter.  Let me explain.

But before I explain, let me say that this whole Captain Morgan’s Halloween Bash 2015© thing was not my idea.  Until now, our nod to the holiday on the 31^st of October had consisted of strewing some fake cobwebs behind the bar and having a bag of fun-sized Snickers bars on hand for the eight or ten trick-or-treaters whose parents were so feckless as to take their little princesses and spidermen padding around the vast Northtown Shopping Center parking lot while nearby, kid-friendly suburban homes stood cheek to jowl extending to the horizon.  The odd Smug’s employee might show up for his or her shift sporting plastic fangs or a rubber fright mask, but they would never work in costume.  We weren’t Taco Bell.

We weren’t The French Laundry, either.  When someone from Captain Morgan’s marketing department called and said that they had seen Smuggler’s Inn on “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” and figured that our name made us a natural for hosting a Halloween party featuring their rum, we didn’t say no.  Selfishly, I thought we might be able to do a tie-in with athletes from the St. Paul Winter Paralympics, Smug’s latest branding client.  When I gave voice to this, I was informed that the Captain Morgan character whom attendees of the Captain Morgan’s Halloween Bash 2015© would be encouraged to dress up like did not have a peg leg. (What respectable pirate captain doesn’t have a peg leg?) Our turn on “Kitchen Nightmares” had ended with Mr. Gordon Ramsay and company fleeing the final taping with Pongo, our dishwasher, hurling missiles at the departing crew vehicles like an Elizabethan theater-goer chucking turnips at a particularly weak cast of Henry VI.  I didn’t know if I wanted to put the gang through that again.

“I already did a vote,” Carol, our socialist day manager, had informed me when I confided that I was thinking about calling the rum people and backing out.  “Everyone's down with it, even Los Illegals”.

 

As it had been explained to me, Smugglers' Inn was to be one of 11 bars across the country hosting a Captain Morgan’s Halloween party the Friday before Halloween.  The whole purpose of the event was to generate content featuring happy, rum-soaked party-goers that would stream on the Captain Morgan's website.  Carol was saying that even those employees who had hid in the storeroom during the taping of “Kitchen Nightmares” now wanted to be seen by tens of thousands of online voyeurs who didn’t have a real Halloween party to go to.

“Media whores!”  I said.  Out loud.

“Smile and don’t be an arse.”  Erin had dropped her Mary Poppins persona when she had grabbed me by the elbow and marched me out to face the music in the lounge.   She and I were now facing a jumbo screen that was flipping randomly between groups of costumed drunks and MC’s dressed like characters from a swashbuckling movie.   The sound was off, or maybe the music in our lounge was too loud, but I read supers that said Honolulu, New Orleans, San Antonio and Plymouth. 

“Where is the sea witch?” I asked Erin.

“And here he be!” shouted an amplified voice right behind me.  “Here be your captain!”

I turned around and was dazzled by a bright light.  Our lounge was dark, but there was no reason the videographer needed to blind people to tape them, I thought.  No wonder people had complained.

“Happy Halloween!” I said to the silhouette of the MC.   I smiled.  I tried not to squint.

“’Happy ‘alloween, mistah boss mon!” said the Captain Morgan’s Halloween Bash 2015© MC.  There had been some debate when this woman had shown up about whether she’d been in something—a TV show?  Movie? Hip-hop video?  No one could say for sure.  She was early 30’s with honey blonde dreads and sporting a gold tooth that glinted in the light.  I think the tooth was real, but her Jamaican patois was every bit as bad as Erin’s British.  She was kitted out in a loose blouse with tights and a giant belt buckle and knee-high boots--more Three Musketeers than Pirates of the Caribbean, but as Halloween costumes go, it was miles ahead of what the locals were wearing.  I spied the gorilla with a Hillary Clinton mask that I’d been asked to rule on (acceptable) plus the guy in fatigues and greasepaint who had agreed to put his realistic rubber AR-15 rifle back in the trunk of his car after first telling me the story of the heroic army sniper whom he was honoring by getting pissy drunk on $2 rum drinks.  I also spied several all-too familiar faces.  

“Hildy!” I shouted at our cook, “Don’t you have food to get out?”

“All out,” Hildy said.  Like that gave him an excuse to be out of his kitchen wearing a bloodstained apron.

Two of our wait staff stepped into the lounge and walked up to Erin, who was hovering just outside the cone of light that bouncing off the thin spot on the top of my head.  They were smiling—always a bad sign.

“Now, BOSS MON,” the MC went on.  “Yah people tell me dat you been a-working all week on your costume for ‘dis par-tay.”

“Liars!”  I said.  I had a hunch where this was going and it was not a good place.

“Now, where is dis great cos-TUME?”

“Here de cos-TUME be, mi’lady!”  Erin answered.  She was now Mary Poppins from Kingston, apparently.

With my co-workers applauding, Erin walked up to me with blue visor and an ancient hands-free headset that I think I used in the 90’s.  I couldn’t believe that they were actually doing this too me.

“Put it on and be quick about it, mon!  De natives is restless.”  The MC put her hand on her hip and pantomimed lashing me with a whip.  This elicited whoops and hollers from the patrons, who had stopped trying to shout above the music and were all turning their attention to the sweaty guy in the navy blazer fumbling with a visor with a video camera hovering twelve inches from his face.  With a little more effort, I got the hands-free headset on over the goofy visor-thing.  I looked like…

“Mike McCoy! As I lives and breathes, ‘tis Mike McCoy, de coach of de world famous San Diego Chargers!” 

My co-workers all took out cell phones, so that they could record my discomfort.

I shrugged my shoulders and parted my hands in a “Whadda ya gonna do?” gesture. 

I’m sure the MC was asking herself right then how she had come to this place in her life where her job was pretending to know the coach of a mediocre football team on Halloween night.  I mean, I am all for middle aged white guys, but we do all kind of look alike.  Yes, a couple of people had told me that I bore a passing resemblance to the head coach of the Chargers, but I don’t follow the game and if I did, the Chargers? I mean, they are currently two and seven…

“Yaiiii...”

Suddenly, I was drowning.  In a glacier.

“…iiii!” I continued.  I spluttered a few choice expletives, which amused the people holding cell phones to no end.  With the videographer’s light dazzling my eyes, I had not seen the full, 30-gallon Gatorade Barrel as it was raised and its entire contents dumped on my head by whom, I know not.  I saw the big screen.  On it was another bar, another party.  All of the costumed patrons were laughing and pointing and holding each other up because they had just seen the funniest thing IN THE WORLD, otherwise known as an unsuspecting man getting doused with a massive quantity of ice water.   The location supered on screen, I noted, said “San Diego”.

So, here it is, a week and change later.  I am in Macy’s, trying on suits to replace a navy blazer that I owned and that is now ruined and I begin thinking of what kind of devious, hopelessly weird employees that I have and I start to laugh.  And I can’t stop.  I get hold of myself and the salesman who was helping me asks what I think of the suit and I manage to say, “The goddamn thing makes me look like Mike McCoy,” and he says, “Who?” but I can’t answer; I am laughing again.  I leave and I go to Mens Warehouse where I manage to buy a wool blazer without embarrassing myself and this is my life. 

Smugglers’ Inn named agency of record for the 2016 Olympics!

"Luge?  Yeah, we got one of them."

Incredible, isn’t it?  Our humble little shop from Blaine, Minnesota assigned the entire marketing, advertising and social media for this important international sporting contest?

To clarify, we are talking the winter Olympics and not the somewhat sexier summer Olympics.  To clarify further, our Olympic committee is not the same one that has worry about building a world-class speed skating pavilion out of environmentally friendly materials and then has to worry if terrorists will blow it up, even the restrooms with toilets that flush with grey water that the athletes have previously showered in.  This is the Para-Olympics. The 2016 Winter Paralympics in St. Paul, Minnesota to be exact. 

    

OK, the Paralympics isn’t as big a piece of business as Coors Light or some of the other accounts that we’ve gone after recently.  But it is a genuine win.  Have you, friends of this blog, noticed that it’s been an extra-special long time since Smugglers’ Inn announced a new business win?  You think the reason for this is some sort of Midwestern modesty?  Have you ever heard of a modest ad agency? The sad truth is that it has been ages since Smugglers’ Inn won a pitch--28 months, if you’re counting.  (We certainly were).  It’s a good thing that we retire half the contents of our salad bar each evening otherwise, we might have had to boil our shoes.   Sure, we  had some fun pro-bono assignments during that time.  Strewing bullet casings stuffed with message across London to promote action movies at the Raindance Film Festival comes to mind.    But “pro bono” is a lot of “bone” and not much “pro”, if you catch my drift. But I bitch.  We’ve got a new client who pays.  Happy we are, Smugglers’ Inn.

Predictably, the timing is challenging.  Our best marketing mind, Pongo, has gone back to his native Sumatra.  His English was rudimentary, but the man (?) had incredible powers of empathy and his minimalist briefs—“Don’t say fun, have fun,” (Cliff’s Amusement Park), “Kid beat-up nobody care; dog beat-up everybody care,”(Park Nicollet Clinic), “It just a boob,” (Femara post-mastectomy drugs), invariably led to work that was both effective and much talked about.  Kat, our seating hostess and the person who  misses Pongo more than any of us, has clearly been trying to channel our hairy Yoda, but naïve genius is hard to fake.  “How skate with one foot?  Check it out!” was her suggestion in today's brainstorming session.  Needing some work, this one is. 

We have a month.  Meanwhile, I’ve organized a recce to Afton Alps for later in the week.  St. Paul, like most of the prairie, is topographically challenged and the four-lift Afton Alps is the closest thing the area has to a mountain resort, if one can call 200 vertical feet a mountain.  (We can, of course—and will.)  Kat has invited her cousin to come along with his camera.  The guy assures me that with the right lens, he can make Afton look like Chamonix without snow.  If he can’t, maybe we’ll swipe some pictures of the real Chamonix, 1924 Olympic village and all.  Heck, who's gonna sue the Paralympics? 

There are upsides to being an ad agency with a liquor license.  Tonight, after closing, we will lock our doors and celebrate our long-overdue victory with several bottles of good wine and a keg of Coors Lite beer.  

Which is terrible.