They’re not bad people. There are two guys who are almost exactly the same age as me, and each of them is married to a woman he met in high school, each raising one son and one daughter. One’s wife is a hardcore Catholic – “I love Christian chick lit!” she told me optimistically, after I told her that reading was pretty much all I’d been up to – and the other’s wife is a vegetarian who cannot stop bringing stray animals home. Both of these guys have extensive music collections. Then there’s a guy who is 10 years older, a world traveler who has managed bookstores and studied in Europe and is currently restoring yet another turn-of-the-century house. The woman who was our manager, until three of us got together and orchestrated her downfall, is great on paper, with her degrees, her stints at various newspapers, her travels to politically unstable countries. But in person she’s shockingly mundane, the type of person who likes to project herself as a progressive but who, with very little pressure, yields to convention each and every time. Though nearly fifty, it’s the breathy giggling and hair twirling you tend to remember.
We were joined by a former client, a guy who was a ‘senior comms manager’ at a huge corporation, which he left in the early 2000s to go into politics. He failed spectacularly, and so now he’s a ‘comms consultant.’ And, as fate would have it, one of the people at the table was a PR account woman, who is nice enough, I suppose, but who was very clearly enjoying the little bit of power she held that night. “It just kills me that I can’t keep all these guys busy with projects all the time,” she gushed. The former client, who is fantastically fat, would have leaned over at one point to say to her, in a conspiratorial tone, “Do you have a card?” but since he cannot lean, he sort of sagged instead. Which would have been fine, except for the fact that the guy who organized the get together, the one who’s married to the Catholic, relies on the PR account woman for lots of business, and so …
For the next hour we were regaled with one insider story after another about what it was like to be behind the scenes at this particular corporation, mapping out the strategy, dealing with the PR teams, ‘onboarding’ the journalists so that they could report accurately on the company’s new vision and so on and so forth. I drank one glass of lemonade after another and ate a chicken pot pie the size of a cupcake. I excused myself at one point to go to the men’s room and went outside for a ciggie.
And when I came back everything had shifted.
If you were to boil the first hour of the conversation down, it would go like this: when we spend millions on PR, look at what we can do, look at our influence, look at how good we are at getting others to convey our messaging. And yet, when I came back to the table, we were feeling quite betrayed by Barack Obama. “He just sold out,” said the former manager. “He sure did!” said another. “It’s complicated,” said the former client, in a tone that suggested he believes the authority he had over those of us at the table when he was a client is still in effect. “It sure is,” I said, “when you’re beholden to the banks, which are run by rich folks.” The former manager said she thought Obama had misled the country during his campaign. I said I think we love to be misled, that as far as I can see we wouldn’t have it any other way. “That’s horrible,” she said, and I laughed a bit, in a real, honest way, a way that I could never laugh when I was drunk.
I laughed because it was funny: sitting in a trendy, pricey restaurant with a group of people who make a fantastic living misleading people into believing that certain products and services will make their lives better, bitching about someone not turning out to be quite the engine of change he presented during his campaign speeches. If it were a plot synopsis for a screenplay, I thought, I’d be exiled from Hollywood, permanently. But I wasn’t in Hollywood: I was in Portland, with the eternally earnest and sincere, and so I said to my former manager, the woman who had written my performance reviews, who monitored my comings and goings, who came very close a few times to firing me, “You need to put the bong down, just for a minute.” God, that was fun, showing zero respect for someone who doesn’t deserve any and never really did, and it seemed a fitting way to celebrate the end of the year.
