In the spring of 2007, toward the end of a seven-year tenure at the Daily Herald, I was freelancing with a marketing agency run by a guy named Vince. My role was serving as a creative director of sorts, writing content in collaboration with the designers and some other staff. Vince was a ‘make it up as you go along’ type who had worked several years as a car salesman before moving into the marketing world with Pat O’Rahilly, a wunderkind type who sold his auto dealerships to start up a direct response marketing firm.

I worked for Vince for a couple years at that agency before getting dumped in a downsizing move to position the company for sale. But Vince always liked my work and I’d helped him win a ton of business at the prior agency before so he brought me in to help the agency he started once he got dumped as well.

I freelanced for Vince while working full-time at the Daily Herald. He paid me really well for the work I was doing with rates over $100 an hour. I received a check or two for $6000 over time and the bank where I kept my accounts sent a young investment kid after me once they saw those deposits. Money sniffers are everywhere in this world.

Sales Junkets

My boss at the Daily Herald didn’t care if I took a vacation day or two to go on sales junkets with Vince. Frankly, I think he hoped I’d up and leave the company because his only goal was limping along until retirement. He was sick of me because I was hard to manage and actually kept trying to make things happen rather than keeping our heads down hoping no one would notice the marketing department.

So I flew out East with Vince and some other agency team members to make a pitch for the business of a company that specialized in men’s suits. That company had just been sold by three Jewish businessmen that had built a chain of more than 100 stores across the east and southern portions of the United States. They were smart for selling, as the tide was about to turn on suit sales in the nation. Business casual was about to take over corporate America and I think those guys knew it. They sold their company for plenty of dough to a Wharton School graduate and some internal managers who took it over. They were cocky and sure of themselves, and my spidey sense told me that’s never a good thing.

We met their entire management and marketing staff and the mood of our pitch meeeting was not all that pretty. It was clear that the folks working there weren’t that convinced about the new management team. They mostly sat silent during our pitch or asked pointed questions trying to punch holes in us. I didn’t really blame them. But I’d led plenty of pitches over time and knew how to turn negative comments into positive points. That wound up being a good strategy. At one point the new President of the company pointed a finger at me across his chest and said, “It’s nice to have a really intelligent guy in the room.”

What I was actually doing was convincingly selling a thick and rich line of bullshit. Our agency didn’t know a damned thing about some of the things we’d be called to do if we won that account. I think their people knew it. Yet I knew just enough to talk about the work in a way that made it look like we knew what we were doing. To my relief, the new leadership was impressed. They became our in-meeting advocates. At that point, the internal team didn’t want to challenge their authority. I felt bad about that because my honesty was going tested but like so many things in business where there’s a job to do and money to be made, honesty takes a back seat. My rationale was that we’d figure it all out once we won the account.

Victory dance

We walked out of there having won the business and Vince was ecstatic. We climbed into the rented Cadillac and he honked the horn and drove around like a madman. That night he treated us all to dinner at a fine restaurant. “Surf and Turf!” he chortled, opening yet another bottle of wine. “We just won a million-dollar account!” He turned to me and said, “YOU fucking nailed it.”

Toward the end of the meal, Vince took a look at the gutted lobster and said, “Watch this!” He called the waiter over and began stroking the lobster’s back and making an indetectable squeaking sound with his lips. The waiter froze, thinking the damned lobster was still alive. Then another waiter came over and Vince played the trick again. A look of horror locked on both their faces. Then Vince began laughing and said, “I was just kidding ya! I can make that noise, see?” Then he did it without the lobster stroking for effect. I admit that I adored that side of Vince. He was a character with often good intentions that could make me laugh in many ways.

Yet that dead lobster routine would turn out to be a grand symbol of the coup we’d pulled off that day. The entire clothing business and all hundred-plus stores in the S&K chain would go bankrupt by 2009. Google shared this review: “What happened to S&K Menswear…” and says “S&K Famous Brands is the latest national retail chain to succumb to bankruptcy. The Virginia-based company will close all 105 of its S&K Menswear stores including three in Buffalo Niagara. In spite of our best efforts, the current economic climate left us with no choice but to close down the business.”

Bushwhacked

The “current economic” climate was due in major part to the Bush-induced recession. Yet that wasn’t the only (or real) reason S&K succumbed to economic forces beyond their control. The overall market for business suits was eroding fast. Men just weren’t buying as many suits as they once were.

While chains like Men’s Wearhouse have survived since then, far fewer suits were being sold by many suit-sellers. During the early 2000s, I’d regularly shopped at a store called 3-for-1 Suits Direct and loved their prices and styles. But by 2010, the call to wear suits to work was fading and that company eventually went under too. So did a few formally successful formal wear companies.

Companies like S&K did great business for many years when suits were required business attire across corporate America. So while my business acumen wasn’t always the greatest, I witnessed people supposedly far smarter than me making huge business miscalculations, including running a multi-million dollar company into the ground. Over the years I saw plenty of “behind-the-scenes” activity that was not so pretty either. I’ve never liked how some “business” is consummated in the dark world behind the deals.

Making it happen

As for our role as an agency, to the credit of the people with whom I worked on the account, they figured out how to manage the expected marketing tactics and make it all happen. But I was forced off the S&K work by an aggressive account manager eager to protect her own job. I didn’t have the will or competitive spirit by then to fend her off. The condition of my wife’s cancer and the stress it placed on me made it difficult to play any sort of leadership role at that time. I was hollowed out and could feel my star fading at the agency even though I’d originally won the business. I did some copywriting and collaborated with the S&K marketing manager, but even he seemed to sense that nothing good was going to come from the enterprise.

By November of 2007, it was clear that things would come to an end for me at the agency. I wrote in my journal, “I’m just so tired of my heart beating through my chest. Wonder if this is how my dad always felt.” My father had his own problems keeping jobs over the years.

Brainwise

By the age of 50, I recognized that my brain had some symptomatic problems. What they were exactly was hard to define. I wrote in my journal and called it “impatience” for lack of a better description. “I just can’t shake some old habits that bring me down,” I wrote. “I’ve noticed my impatience with everyone.”

What that really meant was a lack of ability to pay attention when I got bored, distracted, or felt that the ideas being put forward were somehow wrong.” I had zero patience for that.

I did not yet realize these were symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a condition I’d had my entire life, but had not yet put a label on it. “There’s something wrong there,” I noted. “Anyway, go for a run and roll up to work late morning. Meet with Vince and move on in life.”

That fall I met with a psychologist who… I noted in my journal “seized on my work situation as the most serious and difficult part of my fear matrix.” She recommended I try to get back with the agency where Vince and I had both worked before. That was good advice. I tried a few channels yet in my hurried, worried, distracted ADHD state with all that caregiving burden and financial issues I actually missed an invitation to follow up on that opportunity. A possible cure for my worst problems had escaped me.

Ultimately, I stumbled on an online article and made a note about it in my journal: “Generalized Anxiety Disorder.” I wrote: “At least this feeling has a name. This quivering, low-grade fear that escalates into near panic. That debilitates my well-being. That interrupts my functions.”

I was essentially struggling with the gutted lobster of my full-time employment but couldn’t whistle away the reality that my attention and abilities were being undercut by stress and the distraction of worry. Vince once told me, “I like you better when you smile.” Then one day in November, he called me in and said, “You’re done. You can turn in your computer today.”

I said, “Fuck that. I’m keeping the computer. I’ve earned that.” He didn’t argue. I packed up my stuff and drove thirty miles home, relieved that the conflicted situation at the agency was over. I couldn’t honestly say that I “tried my best” because my best wasn’t really available that summer and fall. All I’d done is survive for a while.

A salvation that suited me

At the same time my work on a book I was writing neared completion in 2007. That book, titled“The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith In the Modern Age” was a project I’d worked steadily on from the early 2000s. It addressed the “Effects of biblical literalism on politics, culture, and the environment.” It was my response to the insanity of conservative religiosity corrupting American politics. I wrote, “Jesus was legitimately worried that people were taking the word of God too literally. The priests he chastised used a literal interpretation of scripture to dictate the conduct and faith of others. it was a common problem then and remains so today that religious leaders focus too heavily on the law and letter of God and lose sight of the meaning behind the words. What Jesus represented was a new form of truth, strikingly rich in symbolism at its core. The religious leaders of his day were largely unable to free themselves of legalistic restraints to accept the methods and ministry of Jesus. ”

I designed the cover using a photograph taken of the metal industrial dock at the Daily Herald a few months before. For a few years, I’d advance pitched it to publishers and some said “the idea’s great and necessary…” but informed me that since I wasn’t a pastor or professor or a famous person, the likelihood of getting a book deal was nil. So I self-published.

Because you know what? Sometimes the definition of being a winner is to do something in spite of everyone else telling you it can’t be done. Finishing that book and holding it in my hands despite all the caregiving responsibilities and work challenges was a great satisfaction in life. Despite all the political bullshit I’d been through at work, I’d made this one pure thing happen in life. I’d written a book. No one could take that away from me, and that’s worth something because it means that you’re still competing in life and determined to speak some manner of truth no matter what else the world throws at you. That’s one of the tarsnakes of life. Sometimes you gotta do whatever suits you.

This content is a continuing contribution to a book I’ll be completing titled Competition’s Son.