I had met Linda at a party. She had just graduated with an MBA from Harvard and held an undergraduate degree in history of art. As I told her, it was a winning combination in advertising—she would be strong in creative ideas, while making sure the whole process made a profit. And I had been right. But her credentials alone would not have gotten Linda hired. I had to present her as more macho than any other guy we could hire. In helping Linda move into the top management of JWT, I had written a memo describing her as an “unforgiving high achiever.” I had shown the memo to Linda.
“Am I really that unforgiving?” Linda asked me, almost hurt.
“No, maybe not,” I said. “But as a female high achiever you have got to be perceived as tough as any male—especially in management. Probably tougher than you really are underneath. Macho number crunching, including crunching people, is the management style Martin really likes.”
I had helped Linda focus on the hard substance of the business: money, and an unforgiving attitude toward cutting “overhead”—which in advertising was always people. Now the overhead was me.
I smiled at her over the table. I wasn’t going to cry. Yet I felt like dying. My heart actually hurt. Was I having a heart attack? No, I just felt really, really sad. And angry with myself. Why hadn’t I seen the signs? Linda went forward and upward in her career at JWT; I stayed in place. Linda passed me flying. Martin liked Linda. In a polite, British way, it was clear Martin could not stand being in the same room with me. With my sparse white hair, I was an embarrassment to the kind of lean, mean, hard-charging, young company he wanted to run.
“Michael,” Linda said, “I have some bad news.” I fiddled with my muffin, willing myself to meet her eye.
The waiter came up to me to see if we needed anything else. Waiters still think that the old guys have the money and run the show.
I shook my head, and he backed off.
“Let me have it,” I said stoically. I wasn’t going to beg for mercy. I knew it would not do any good. I hoped that Linda had at least argued for me, for old times’ sake. But by the time you got to a breakfast meeting, outside the office, the deal was done. I knew I was history.
“We have to let you go, Michael.” She pronounced the words robotically. To her credit, she had a hard time getting them out, especially that phony corporate “we.”
“It’s not my decision,” she hastened to add, and a tear started down her cheek. She brushed it quickly away, embarrassed by her own emotion—particularly in front of a guy who had taught her to be so tough. I don’t think she was acting. I think she was genuinely unhappy that I had been fired, and that she had been chosen to do the dirty deed. From the bottom-line point of view, it was, as they said, a “no-brainer.” Plenty of young people could write and speak as quickly and well as me—for a quarter of the cost. If Linda had refused to fire me, then she could not be part of the management mafia. It was a test of where her loyalty lay: to an old creative guy who had helped her in the past, or to a young financial whiz who now ran the company? Linda had to prove to Martin that she was unforgiving. You had to kill to get in the mafia. Linda would make her bones this day.
I was brave as I could be. At least for those few minutes with Linda.
Linda told me that I would get paid a week of my current salary for every year I had spent at JWT. She was sorry it was not more, adding that she was sure I had saved something during all the good years.
Fat chance! I said to myself. I have a house full of kids to educate!
My mouth was dry. I couldn’t talk.
“Okay,” Linda said, rising. “It’s not necessary for you to go back to the office to pack up. We’ll handle that.”
The “we” again. Linda was ready for prime-time.
“I want to have a going away lunch for you, Michael, you’ve contributed so much,” Linda said, standing. “I will call you to set that up. And Jeffrey Tobin in Personnel will see you whenever you want to go over all the details of your severance package.”
The thought passed through my mind of suing JWT, or writing nasty letters to all the clients. But Martin and Linda had already thought of that. “You will probably want to become a creative consultant of some kind,” Linda continued, her tone more positive now, “and Martin and I would, of course, give you fabulous recommendations. I will personally help you in any way I can,” she added. I was dead at JWT, but she was willing to keep me on some kind of life support, if I was a good boy.
Being fired is not the best way to start a consulting company. Yet I knew I needed the goodwill of JWT to have any chance of getting business from my old clients, or anyone else. If I caused trouble, I was trouble, and I’d never get any work.
The pesky waiter came up again, and I waved him off again.
Linda gave me a squeeze on both arms, almost—but not quite—a hug. “Be sure and call Jeffrey, Michael. He likes you. He will help you as well.”
Then she turned quickly and strode out of the restaurant.
The waiter returned, one last time, and presented me with the bill.
Outside, the sun was shining. I suddenly, desperately realized I had nowhere to go. For the first time in twenty-five years, I had no clients waiting for me to make sense of a communications campaign. I started walking and found myself crying on the street. It was humiliating. Crying! Me! Yet at fifty-three I had just been given a professional death notice. I knew in my heart it was going to be a bad time to be old and on the street.
And so it turned out.
Yes, I’d like a job. I hadn’t said those words for thirty-five years. It had been thirty-five years since I had taken my entry-level job at JWT. And it had been ten years since I had been fired from my high-level position at JWT. I had set up my own consulting company, and I got a few good jobs right away from my old clients. Then, slowly but surely, fewer and fewer of my calls were returned. It had been months since my last project. Even a latte was becoming a luxury I could no longer afford.
Now, looking across my latte at this confident, smiling Starbucks employee, I felt sorry for myself. She seemed carefree to me, so young, so full of options. Later, I would learn that she had seen more hardship in her life than I could conceive of having seen in three lifetimes. Her mother, who died when she was just twelve, was a dope addict. She had never known a father. When her mother overdosed, she had been sent to live with an aunt, another single mother, who already had several of her own fatherless children to care for. Her aunt was an aunt from hell. She would later tell me of the horrifying time she had fallen down the cement stairs of the project in Brooklyn where she lived. Her hip was broken, but her harried aunt just screamed at her for being so clumsy and refused to send her to a hospital. The bone set, but in a terrible way that guaranteed constant pain. Despite the confidence that she projected to me that day, she was even then in pain, physical and emotional.
But at that moment I was still at the center of my own universe, and my own problems were all-consuming.
To me, this young woman had great power—the power to employ me. Yes, I would like a job. As soon as the words had come out of my mouth, I was horrified. What was I doing? Yet, at the same time, I knew I wanted a job. I needed a job. And, I presumed, I would easily get a job at this Starbucks store … or would I?
The Starbucks employee arranged the papers in front of her, her smile disappeared, and she gave me a hard look. “So, you really want a job?” she said incredulously, shaking her head. She had clearly become more ambivalent about me as we got into the real possibility that I might work for her.
It suddenly struck me: Her invitation to a job had been a kind of joke. Maybe she had just decided to pass a few minutes making fun of me, the boring, uptight