Free All These Condemned by John D. MacDonald

six-hundred drop it just wouldn’t add up. I couldn’t make it come out. And new clients don’t jump up out of the brush in the summer.
    But all the time I knew I was worried about more than the six-hundred drop. This is a rumor town. What the hell has happened to Steve? Hear he lost Hayes and Jonah and Ferris. Guess he wasn’t doing a job for them. Just the faintestsmell of failure and it would make it an awful lot tougher to plant a release and then maybe the remaining ones would get nervous, and then Steve would be really sunk. And there wasn’t a PR firm in town that would take me on. Not after the way I set myself up in business back there in ’48, walking out with the clients in my pocket. They’ve been waiting for me to fall on my face. Hell, a man has to take care of himself. They would have kept me on coolie wages until I was seventy, and then invited me to buy in—maybe a big two-hundredth part of the business.
    I sat there and I was really scared. I knew who would be the fourth one to go. Nancy, my Big Author. I’d run out of angles as far as she was concerned. It didn’t seem to occur to her that maybe she better get another book published. I’d even run out of panel shows I could get her on. All I had to do was mention her name and the columnists I laughingly call friends would groan.
    I sat there in the dying city and wished I’d been a little smarter. The cream is in the industrial accounts. A few of those and I’d be set. But my people are individuals, most of them in the arts or entertainment. I suppose that’s natural. That was my beat when I was on the paper. Clubs and galleries and theatres, radio stations, concert halls.
    I sat there and I began to feel artificial. Something that had been made up. Packaging is everything. They don’t seem to give much of a damn about the contents any more. Make the outside pretty. Give it that glamour look. The hell with the product. The public will buy. And that was what I was in. The packaging business. Dressing up personalities.
    I went into the small bathroom off my office and turnedon the fluorescent lights on either side of the mirror. It is not a kind light. If I squinted a little, blurring my image, I was still Steve Winsan, that fabricated product, that All-American tailback type, bluff and hearty and confident as all getout. The man to see. But with my eyes wide open, my face under the naked lights looked like the face of a tired character actor. That was it, maybe. I’d been playing the part of Steve Winsan so damn long it was going stale on me. I was sick of Steve Winsan and of a world full of things that didn’t work quite right any more because they weren’t making good products any more. They were fudging. Filling the armpit salve with air bubbles. Making nail polish guaranteed to flake off in twenty-four hours. Publishing books guaranteed to stand only two readings before the pages started to fall out. Putting fenders on cars you could dent with the heel of your hand. Make them stand still for the upkeep. Put crumby steel in their razors, weak thread on their buttons, waterbase paint on their walls. Keep them coming back. Hooray for enterprise. Hooray for Stephan Winsan Associates, which vends a product nobody ever heard of thirty years ago, and practically anybody can do without right now. There was nothing wrong with me that a double orchidectomy couldn’t cure.
    So I went home and changed clothes and went out on the town and I was gay as hell and got home earlier than usual and quite alone and set the alarm, and by eleven o’clock I was being a Fancy Dan in the parkway traffic, tooling the MG in and out of the lanes and wondering why the hell I owned a car when I used it not more than three times a month and why I had three suits ordered and why I’d given Dotty a raise, and why Jennifer couldn’t fall off one of thoseNew Mexican cliffs, and what the hell I was going to say to Wilma that would make her pat me on the head and call me