Free Body Copy by Michael Craven Page B

cabeem into became, and boedul into double. It took him another forty-five seconds to get the riddle. To turn mthdecmobe into combed them. What the hairdresser did when the rack of clothes went on sale. He “combed” them .
    Tremaine looked at the stopwatch. Pathetic. Almost four minutes. His worst time in years.
    Michael Craven
    Trapped in a hungover daydream, he was a little startled by his cell phone ringing. “Donald Tremaine,” he said, after hitting the “talk” button.
    “Hi. This is Heather, from Tyler Wilkes’s office.”
    “Sure. How’re you doing?”
    “Oh, fine. Sorry it’s taken a few days to get back to you.”
    “No problem.”
    “Tyler would like to schedule an appointment with you.”
    Tremaine thought, it’s about time. Then he thought, I’m actually glad he waited a few days. Sure, it gave him time to prepare, but it also gave me time to prepare.
    “Good,” Tremaine said. “When?”
    “How ’bout tomorrow morning at ten?”
    “I’ll be there.”
    The next day, at five till, Tremaine pulled the Cutlass into Think Big Advertising. Everybody’s right, he thought, place looks a little like Gale/Parker. But not quite as . . .
    cool. Tremaine got out of his car and found the reception area. There, too, he thought, Think Big’s aesthetic mirrored Gale/Parker’s. But just a little off.
    Tremaine sat in the reception area, waiting. On the coffee table, scattered about, were trade publications—
    ADWEEK, Ad Age, Electronic News , and the Hollywood Reporter . He noticed there were an abundance of ADWEEK s and only one copy of the others. Must be the most important one.
    So he picked it up. That’s when he realized why there 82
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    were more of this particular trade than the others. Tyler Wilkes was on the cover. Clad in black with blue-tinted glasses, even though in the photo he sat inside at a conference table. Above the vanity shot of Tyler there was a headline that said: Think Big Is Getting Bigger. Then underneath the headline, in much smaller type, it said: But do they get respect?
    Tremaine flipped through the magazine and found the article on Tyler Wilkes. It said Tyler Wilkes hadn’t come up through the ranks like most ad guys. Five years ago, it said, he was a mid-level copywriter at a tiny agency in San Diego when his cousin married Bob Means, the sixty-five-year-old founder and creative director of an L.A.–
    based ad agency called Think Big. Think Big, at the time, was in a twenty-five story building in Westwood and was sturdy and profitable, but far from glamorous. Health care accounts, insurance accounts, and car dealerships. Tyler Wilkes and Bob Means met at the wedding and hit it off.
    Wilkes was into his forties, but Means thought of him as the son he never had. Six months later, Means retired and announced the new creative director: Tyler Wilkes.
    Wilkes promptly moved the agency to an open-space warehouse in El Segundo and hired younger, “hipper”
    talent all in an attempt “to change the culture.” The article noted that the space Wilkes built was “clearly influenced”
    by nearby Gale/Parker and didn’t really fit with the work or the clients Think Big had. Most surprisingly, the article questioned both Tyler’s advertising history and his creative abilities, pointing out that he had a reputation for being arrogant, and that the recent growth of the agency was mostly the result of one of their insurance accounts merg-83
    Michael Craven
    ing with another company. The piece all but came out and called him a poseur.
    Tremaine wondered why Tyler would have this magazine on display. No such thing as bad publicity?
    He finished the article and was sort of half-reading the rest of the magazine when he heard, “Are you Mr. Tremaine?”
    Tremaine looked up to see what can only be described as an absolute vision of a young woman. Shockingly, dis-tractingly gorgeous. Playboy Bunny, but better, more sophisticated. Tremaine thought, how could one describe