How To Find the Right Girl
(Caution: Requires Actual Work)
by mike develin
nov 2004
Chapter One.
Lying on the north beach of Lake Calhoun in October, the planes flying into MSP don’t fly exactly overhead, no matter how much you want them to for the sake of poetry. Two approach paths flank your guide rail, the one to the left more distant, swooping parallel to the shore before tantalizing you with a leftward turn only to disappear beneath the treeline, the one to the right closer but more assertive, on a path directly to the ground, no doubt in its mind about where it’s headed.
My name is Harold Gonzalez, and I got here by foot. Well, sort of. My full name is Corwin Harold Gonzalez, and I got here by generally following the path of least resistance, my personality and my name both flowing downhill until I ended up at lake level, just sort of turning things over in my mind.
When I was thirteen and entering high school, I dropped the Corwin and just went by Harold. Corwin never fit me – the name that no one could spell attached to me, fifth place in the national spelling bee. My friends didn’t bat an eyelash, relieved to drop the Corwin, gladly giving up years of routine nomenclature for the privilege of not looking like a fool on birthday party invitations. It was just simpler for everyone.
Corwin was my father’s name, not in the sense that it was what people called him, but in the sense that ever since he was young he wanted to have a child named Corwin. Infatuated with a dapper role model from some movie, my mother confided in me when I was sixteen. “I never liked the name. I’m glad you dropped it.” Later, in my one session of therapy, the jittery psychiatrist latched onto this conversation like a mongoose onto a cobra, the underdog having found an inroad into an apparently impenetrable foe.
The Gonzalez fits me even less, but somehow is harder to change. My father’s father’s father came to America from Spain, a hundred years ago. A man I have never met, who is one-eighth of me, gives me one-third of my name. Well, one-half nowadays, I suppose. My mother’s mother, non-practicing Navajo, gives me just enough exotic lines on my face that people believe it. Whatever works, I guess.
Lake Calhoun on a mid-October night is bereft of runners. Here in Minneapolis, half the year the men, women, children, and especially dogs take to the running trails around the lakes, through the parks, and into the wilderness, a reverse image of the Iditarod, rollerbladers pulling their shaggy canines through brown trails and black roads under construction. The other half, all living creatures consolidate their auras inside, their houses providing a surprisingly firm barrier between them and the outside world. Half the year, they incubate their independent streak; the other half, they take it to the streets to be tested against society. On Hennepin Avenue in August, there are more people out than in any of the so-called big cities, making up for lost seasons, the twenty-somethings performing a mating ritual in doubletime.
October 20th is the bridge between the two worlds. Construction crews hastily attempt to wrap up before the winter, their bluffs for more money called, trying to salvage their reputation. The erstwhile runners scramble to get in one last good jog or two before people start looking at them as maniacs hurtling across the frigid tundra. Lake Calhoun gets its last ripples out, before the inevitable freeze strips it of its life as the fickle populace deserts it to weather another winter alone.
My cell phone rings out, an absurd electronic trill against the placifying backdrop. I briefly contemplate hurling it into the lake before bowing to the yoke of technology. It is Janet, searching for meaning, with a “just driving home, baby, what’s up?” I don’t really want to talk to her. She was calling me “baby” before we were dating, while we were dating, and now afterwards, an appellation which doesn’t really become her. This wisp of a girl, confidently throwing around F-bombs and casual “baby”’s left and right, her verbiage a perfect example of the triumph of nurture over nature. Janet’s parents were hippies who encouraged her to be empowered, but it is not really her.
On this night Janet has decided to call me because I haven’t called her in two weeks even though it is my turn to renew our friendship. She has nothing particular to say, but the web of technology allows her to placate her inner voice, which chides her for not throwing her concern into people’s lives the way she ought to. The superficial veneer of concern belies her pragmatic, conformist nature.
Janet and I have a perfectly perfunctory conversation before smoothly wrapping things up with the polish that only two formerly attached, now detached people can have on the phone. I know her cues, she knows mine, and neither of us is too involved to get worked up over it. We hang up and I turn my attention back to the sky, where new shimmering black contrails have appeared behind a 747 carrying one hundred tired travelers into the middle of America.
Contrails are a remarkable thing. Half the time I think they’re man’s way of pissing on nature, and half the time I think they’re a beautiful graphic depiction of history, of technological prowess tracing its ephemeral but remarkable path through the sands of time. On this night, thinking about contrails makes me realize that I have no one to really share this no-doubt-profound thought with. I watch the lines disappear like a child forlornly watching their favorite relative depart after Christmas.
I notice the old couple sitting on the swings and wonder how long they have been there, feeling guilty about my absurdly unnecessary conversation with Janet. They are smoking, fending off the oncoming winter, which each year kills hundreds of their cohort, with embers which each year kill hundreds of thousands. They seem happy, not talking to each other so much as enjoying their shared memories of fifty previous falls together, two warriors whose lives are so entwined that only death itself will part them, and even that is questionable; their lives are arcing with each other, rising and falling towards a common endpoint. Their obituaries -- “John and Mary lived together, and died together… heroic battle against lung cancer… Korean war veteran… needlepoint” – will leave out everything important.
My problems seem insignificant against this backdrop of history, but they are there. Like every red-blooded American male, I wonder where my next girl is going to come from. I worry about my sexual prowess. I worry about whether my local sports team will ever make the playoffs again. I worry about whether I can continue to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes at my job, about how long it will be before one of them finally realizes how perfectly I illustrate the Peter Principle. I’ve gotten the requisite promotion every two years, two of them since I graduated college; I am right on schedule to rise to vice president at thirty-five and be forced out in a power struggle at thirty-seven. The smart thing to do would be to spend the twelve intervening years boning up on my negotiating skills, so that I can bend the terms of the settlement enough in my favor to retire in style. The company timeline seems to be pretty rigid.
The dirty secret about Harvard graduates is that seventy-five percent of us take the easy way out. The pre-meds go to med school, the pre-laws go to law school, the ivory tower academics go to graduate school, and the rest of us get a job at some company owned by a friend of the family (or, in some cases, the family itself.) The Harvard diploma is enough to ward off accusations of nepotism, but the bottom line is that most of us simply take whatever upper-middle-class route is most convenient. We are, as a class, not out to change the world.
I am hardly changing the world at Villa and Friends. I sell toothpaste, I sell lawn fertilizer, I sell igloos; I sell whatever they tell me to sell. Charlie Villa being a friend of the family, it was my easiest path; I had always been interested in advertising, but not so interested that if Morgan Stanley had been a friend of the family I wouldn’t have gone into finance.
The main goal of an advertising firm is not to sell its clients’ products. The main goal of an advertising firm is to sell itself to its clients. Clients know that advertising firms are sleazy. A well-placed smile, a charmingly disarming intern, or, in Villa’s case, an “and Friends” at the end of the firm title, goes quite a ways towards achieving this goal, especially in the down-home anti-corporate environment of the Midwest. While no one ever mentioned it explicitly, at Villa and Friends our job was simple: sell ourselves without selling ourselves. The Harvard diploma hung at a two-degree angle on the wall helped: professionalism without perfection. The Gonzalez gave me an instant in with the Super Mercado who wanted to open more branches. It was an asset, although overall not as much as an Erikson would have been.
And we did good work, too. Minnesotans generally don’t realize that their anti-corporate attitude makes them even more receptive to advertising. All one needs to do to gain the hearts of well-meaning Scandinavians is to align oneself with them against the behemoths of corporate America. Gas with a smile. Groceries with a smile. Mis hermanos y hermanas. Run by Minnesotans, for Minnesotans. Expressing community values since 1920. The soundbites hardly require the liberal arts education which most of its practitioners possess, nor the concomitant $160,000 outlay which they overcharge to compensate for.
Not that I’m suggesting that our customers did not get their money’s worth. They did, and much more. At Villa, one of the first things we are told about advertising is: “Don’t sell the product; sell the company.” Little Caesar’s, seeing declining market share, hired us to promote their new Extra-Cheezy Stix. The Extra-Cheezy Stix were a colossal bust, but the company’s portion of the pie grew from five percent to eight percent in a year and a half. They fired us. I’m not so confident in Villa’s philosophy. It’s one of the things I plan to overhaul when I am vice president, in the year I have before the heat starts to mount due to a series of mishaps than can somehow be attributed to me by those a level higher. It’s the cost of a promotion: being blamed by someone higher up in the food chain, and therefore more unquestionable. At vice president, you are blamed by Charlie himself, and no one will fire him.
I came to Minneapolis four years ago with two things: a job and an apartment, arranged for me no doubt by the Friends. I’ve stuck around. The bustling streets of Minneapolis are quite a contrast to the bustling streets of New York, where I grew up. Villa has offices in Chicago – I’ve been once, for a pro forma company meeting which was so unproductive that the vice president who arranged it was fired even before his two-year window had elapsed – and I could put in for a transfer, which would have the added benefit of adding a couple of years to this phase of my life and thus indirectly to my tenure at Villa. But I’ve grown accustomed to the genial throngs in the Minneapolis streets.
Walking around in New York, it becomes immediately clear that the man walking towards you bears a deep personal hatred of you and your lifestyle. He is your adversary: he is trying to get past you on the pavement, and you past him. Instantly he conjures up the ways in which you are a despicable person, to motivate him in his quest. You are a fan of the wrong sports team (Yankees or Mets; Rangers or Islanders; Giants or Jets.) You have the wrong politics. You over- or under-appreciate the value of money. You are from a different generation. As he gears himself up by placing you at the other end of any spectrum he can get his hands on, you do the same. You charge at each other like stags, searching for an opening to thrust your antlers into. You get past each other, and repeat the dance anew with other people.
While the sidewalks of downtown Minneapolis are no less dense than the sidewalks of New York, a different ethos prevails. The people of Minneapolis have fifteen-minute breaks instead of ten-minute breaks. They don’t view their time as currency. The currency of this town is, instead, the smile, and it is freely exchanged. You trade your smile, which you can generate an infinite supply of, for their smile. Minnesotans collect smiles the way children collect baseball cards. The dance on the sidewalk is not a contest; it is a trade show, with the attendant aura of niceness that is cloying if you don’t know the culture, just as the New York antipathy offends those who are not familiar with the city’s rituals.
Seventeen years of New York in my bones, I have not yet gotten used to the Minneapolis attitude in my four years here. Sometimes I still lower my head when walking on the streets, a bull gone rampant amidst the trade show executives. Unable to stop smiling, they scatter smoothly, never dropping their calm veneer, conducting business as usual, ignoring the pink elephant stomping over their terrain. Usually I dispense half-smiles, the autograph of the minor league baseball player who thinks he will become someone and thus is reluctant to dispense for free a legible autograph which will one day be worth millions. This is acceptable.
Just as the real animosity of New Yorkers is reserved for their private squabbles, the real kindness of Minnesotans is reserved for private gatherings. The smiles on the streets do not lead to friendship. The Minnesotan stopped on the street and engaged in an actual conversation is as confused as the New Yorker who is actually confronted for their rudeness. It’s the background, not the brush strokes. This is the number one thing which confuses newcomers to the area, the obvious leap of logic which took me seven months to remove from my brain. Their kindness does not indicate a willingness to be friends, any more than a seven-year-old child actually wants to be friends with Mickey Mantle. He would much rather the Mick continue to be a graceful idol, removed from his immediate surroundings, as opposed to a real person with foibles and needs.
My first seven months here, I didn’t make any real friends outside of my co-workers at Villa. It wasn’t the worst life in the world. I had hobbies, and I had friends from college to visit over our periods of downtime. Advertising in Minnesota is largely a seasonal operation, so during the winter, when people went into their shells, we were given copious amounts of vacation time, 2-for-1 incentives which, in effect, forced us to take our breaks then, when they needed us least. Not that I minded getting away from the Minnesota winter.
As the snow cover thawed in early April, I started getting to know people. At Villa it was customary to have end-of-winter departmental parties to celebrate the birth of new grass and new business. I started to interact with my co-workers outside of work. We visited the newly populated bars, getting in on the ground floor the social scene that re-formed every spring. Around this time Villa hired Harish, who I had gone to high school with. We never knew each other well, but had one thing in common: ethnic names which belied our American nature. Harish’s parents were Indian; unlike me, it showed in his appearance, but like me, he didn’t know a word of Urdu and didn’t care to. Harish and I, pseudo-foreigners in a homogeneous society, were drawn together by our bond that would have been tenuous in any other setting. But here in Minneapolis, with neither of us having stronger prior connections, we flourished. With the two of us each having our own semi-social hobbies – he played Ultimate and read depressing French novels, while I had picked up Scrabble in college and baked mediocre pastries (a remnant of a girl I had dated briefly over the summer; she was actually French and taught me to make all sorts of things.) – together we encountered enough people to sow the seeds of a social network, which took the melting snow and sunlight and photosynthesized into a part of the underculture of Minneapolis.
The underculture of Minneapolis was not exactly a counter-culture. It embraced the values which were incompatible with the trademark Midwestern lacquer of conformity, but it was hardly filled with agitators. We didn’t smoke. We went to punk rock shows. We had pretentious conversations. We read the New Yorker and edgy fiction. We didn’t care about sports or farming, preferring to sip coffee in eclectically decorated old houses on Hennepin with marvelously plush couches. The houses were the exact opposite of the typical Twin Cities enclave, drawing elements from the outside, from all over the world. None of us ever really figured out how they stayed open during the winter, but (I learned this from John, a gay history buff who specialized in an ironic take on Americana) every spring they would shake off the dusty and throw their doors open, welcoming our tendrils, as the sterile floors were covered by the vines of our youth.