Free Robert B. Parker by Love, Glory

chief? Will I be satisfied as copy chief?”
    I nodded.
    He was still looking at my file. “Didn’t finish college,” he said.
    “No, I felt my military responsibility …”
    “Doesn’t matter, it’s the wrong college anyway. We only employ men from Princeton or Yale.”
    “Oh.”
    He smiled, stood up, and put out his hand. “Good to have talked with you, Boone. Let me know how you make out. Be sure to get that chart worked out and get yourself goal-oriented. Advertising is not a job, it’s a career.”
    We shook hands. I went out.
    At the Discretionary Mutual Insurance Company of America they gave me a writing test. In an interview cubicle in the personnel office they put me at a table, gave me a typewriter and a timer, and asked me to write a story based on the proposition that at noontime tomorrow everyone would lose the power of speech. It was my fifty-second job interview. I had twenty minutes. I wrote a thing called “Winterbaum for President” in which an out-of-work Jewish mime of that name found himself suddenly the great communicator in a speechless world, and became president of the U.S.A. Everyone told me it was a really creative piece and they hired me at three hundred and ninety dollars a month to be the editor of their house organ.
    My boss was the Manager comma Advertising and Sales Promotion. The comma and the inversion mattered, I discovered. Advertising and Sales Promotion Manager was a lower rank. Only a Manager comma got a chair with arms and a plastic water carafe and a shoulder-highglass-partitioned office. A Director comma got a partition more than head-high and a rug in addition to all the rest. As sales promotion editor I had a desk and a file cabinet and a chair without arms in the pit with all the other groundlings.
    “Remember,” my boss told me on my first full day, “this magazine is a management tool. It is a sales promotion device, a means of communicating management’s point of view to the men in the field.”
    I nodded. I was sitting in his office in his conference chair. The conference chair had no arms. Directors got conference chairs with arms.
    “The field men, the agents are encouraged to view the magazine as theirs, and that’s good. It builds a sense of community. But it is not, I say again,
not
, their magazine. It is ours. All copy is approved upstairs by the general sales manager or his designee. Right?”
    I said, “Right.”
    “You’re in on the ground floor here, Boone,” he said. “You’re getting the chance to start a brand-new company pub. You’re not taking over something someone else devised. This is new.”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s a real creative opportunity, and the fact that you proved, with that splendid short story, that you’re one hell of a creative guy, you got hired.” He laughed. “Winterbaum for President, goddamn. What was that stain he had on his tie?”
    “Beet soup,” I said.
    “Yes. Good job.” My boss’s name was Walt Waters. He was a tall, crisp, horsey-looking product of AmherstCollege and the Discretionary Mutual Executive Training Program.
    “Thanks, Mr. Waters,” I said.
    “Walt, remember, call me Walt. Everyone’s first-name here, even Lee.”
    Lee was the president. When Walt said Lee his voice hushed a bit.
    “Okay, Walt.”
    “Now, let me give you a couple of tips. Being creative isn’t enough. You’ve got to be savvy as well. About the job. About people. About your appearance. Get a sunlamp, first thing, and keep yourself tanned. Don’t overdo it, but a nice understated tan makes a difference.”
    I nodded.
    “And,” he said with a swell friendly smile, “get some clothes. Look around. See how some of us are dressed, get the sense of the look, and then go out and open a charge at Brooks Brothers. It’s part of the game. Maybe it seems conformist to you. But it makes sense. A good product sells better in a good package. Right?”
    “Right.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    I was sitting with the general sales