Johnny Krackenstein is drifting down the hall, ducking into one office after another. He prides himself on “management by walking around,” and he walks around way more than he should, for my taste. I often wonder whether he ever does any “management by sitting his butt in a chair and working.”
Johnny owns Get Kracken Public Relations. He’s a “hiya, hiya” PR guy, and I’m not. But to be fair, Johnny is a hell of a rainmaker, which I’m also not. As he navigates the hall, he passes posters, photos, and tchotchkes he’s collected from our clients. Here’s a photo of a Power Pop bottle, and over there’s a poster of the Bonanza Burger Twins, Billy and Betty. “Thanks to Get Kracken, every kid in America wants to be Billy Bonanza or Betty Bonanza. Some even like the burgers,” Johnny brags to anyone who’ll listen.
I often wonder whether Johnny ever does any “management by sitting his butt in a chair and working.”
He’s built his firm into the nation’s fifth-largest public relations agency. No small feat, considering we’re headquartered in Cleveland, which isn’t exactly a media mecca. But as talented as he is, Johnny still needs people like me, who take satisfaction in a well-turned phrase.
Johnny sort of remembers me as the guy who led the team that made America salivate for Szechuan Soy Sauce. Remember “It’s soy. It’s saucy. It’s sexy.”? That’s my line, and we made it the talk of the nation using nothing but earned media. Our hilarious YouTube video series, 101 Bedroom Uses for Szechuan Soy Sauce and 101 More Bedroom Uses for Szechuan Soy Sauce, singlehandedly vaulted our client’s sauce into the top tier of American condiments. It didn’t hurt when YouTube banned seventeen of our videos for explicit content.
“Every home in America uses Szechuan Soy Sauce now,” Johnny brags to anyone who’ll listen. “Some even cook with it.”
Johnny knows he needs us word jockeys. His “you’re beautiful, you’re a cat, let’s do lunch” approach brings in a lot of business, but he knows he could never come up with “It’s soy. It’s saucy. It’s sexy” and the accompanying, slightly salacious videos. It’s the kind of campaign that lets Johnny send out outrageously high invoices, so he’s glad to pay us well. I appreciate the money, but I’d be happy if the only contact I had with him was his virtual signature on my virtual paycheck every couple of weeks.
Johnny continues his trek down the hallway, and the inevitable finally happens. He pokes his head into my office, where I sit in my usual business-casual getup — khakis; penny loafers; a button-down, gingham shirt; and a navy-blue, crew-neck sweater. I don’t have a good answer for the question I know is coming. It’s his general, all-purpose conversation starter with the people he calls his “creatives”: “Whatcha workin’ on, man?”
That question, along with “Whatcha workin’ on, woman?”, lets him not bother with learning most of our names. Which makes some sense, because most of us burn out and leave within a year. He knows the names of even the most junior people in our clients’ offices, but us, not so much. There’s only so much room on the hard drive, after all.
I just hit two years, so I’m a survivor. If I make it another year, Johnny may know my name for good. But it’s been a while since my home run with soy, and accounting is letting me know my billable hours are way down, which doesn’t bode well for my longevity.
“You need to ‘get kracken,’” the accounting guy tells me. “I mentioned you to Johnny the other day, and he seemed kind of vague about who you were. I had to remind him you’re the sultan of soy.”
Johnny’s a fiftyish, bantam rooster kind of guy, well-groomed and fit, and he knows how to strut his stuff. He’s a small mesomorph with a face right out of Nordic casting. I’m a head taller than he is, but I’m intimidated by him. Even so, when he walks into my office, after a day of dealing with surly reporters and know-it-all clients, I’m so tired I don’t even bother to get up as a show of respect. If I upset him, he doesn’t let on. I look up at Johnny, still not sure what I’m going to say when he confronts me with his inevitable “Whatcha workin’ on, man?”
The truth is, I’m fighting brain fatigue, so I’ve spent the past hour mindlessly surfing the TMZ website, and I’m trying to find a way to turn time wasted into time billed. I saw one of the tabloid celebs chugging down a bottle of Power Pop, our client’s caffeinated, sugar-saturated elixir, so I decide to bill the hour as market research. Well, fifty minutes actually, but we tend to round up. I’d rather not spill these details to Johnny once I hear “Whatcha workin’ on, man?” But to my surprise, the question doesn’t come. Instead, Johnny wants to play trivia.
“Hey, Matt, do you know what Joyce James said was the most beautiful word in the English language?” Seeing as how he blows James Joyce’s name, he’s obviously not the kind of guy who spends his free time reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He sure as hell doesn’t use his Saturday nights to play literary trivia. He took a couple of seconds to get my name right by reading “Matt Henshaw” on the nameplate outside my office, so something is up.
I decide to play along.
Still seated, I offer, “Let me guess. Is it . . . Ulysses?” drawing out the word and sweeping my right hand with a motion worthy of a Price Is Right model. Johnny fails to appreciate just how game I am for taking a shot.
“No, she said the most beautiful word in the English language is ‘cuspidor,’” he tells me. I give him a pass on his confusion about Joyce’s name and sex. “And Matt, I’m gonna offer you the chance of a lifetime. I think you’re just the guy to bring back ‘cuspidor’ in the twenty-first century. You’re the soy guy, right? Well, work your magic again, and before long we’ll be able to say every home in America owns a Cuyahoga Cuspidor.” I can picture him bragging to anyone who will listen, but I can’t quite picture how I’m going to make this happen.
* * *
Joyce may have loved the word “cuspidor,” but if he had given it more thought, he might have chosen something equally worthy but less repulsive, like “sonorous,” “serendipity,” or “solitude.” “Cuspidor,” you see, is just a pleasant-sounding word for a most unpleasant object, a spittoon.
“Cuspidor,” you see, is just a pleasant-sounding word for a most unpleasant object, a spittoon.
The old-timers used cuspidors as receptacles to spit out chewing tobacco. In the late 1800s, the brass or porcelain bowls held places of honor in hotels, stores, banks, passenger trains, railroad stations, pubs, saloons, brothels — anywhere a man of style and taste had a need to dispose of his slimy, tar-colored chaw.
In the heyday of cuspidors — 1880 to 1918 — they were as common as sinks and toilets. In 1880, the Boston Fire Department alone counted two hundred and sixty cuspidors in its possession. (In other inventory of note, the BFD also owned thirty manure forks in 1880.) Cuspidors were so ubiquitous that they often were a seminar topic at annual conferences of the United States Public Health Service.
Eventually, cuspidors went the way of the dinosaur. (Not a bad-sounding word as I think about it. Rhymes with cuspidor.) At the 1915 Public Health Service Conference, doctors argued that exposing the public to uncovered containers of tobacco spit helped spread tuberculosis. That concern, and the increased use of cigarettes, meant cuspidors faded faster than fax machines.
So, why is Johnny suddenly so interested in resurrecting spittoons, which had been given up for dead? Two reasons. His lust, which is being satisfied nicely by a curvaceous, red-headed spitfire named Minerva Harrington, and his love of money, which is being satisfied by Minerva’s cut of her family’s fortune.
Three years ago, Johnny’s wife said “bye-ya, bye-ya” after noticing his “hiya, hiyas” were getting lobbed toward bimbos half her age. For all I know, Johnny always has had a roving eye. If so, his wife was smart enough to wait to call him on it until his bank account could support the post-divorce lifestyle she had in mind.
Since then, Johnny’s love life has provided plenty of fodder for Get Kracken water-cooler gossip. It’s not unusual for one of us to spot him on a Friday night meandering into Marble Room Steaks with a sleek blonde on his arm and the next night floating into Fire Food and Drink with a busty brunette. Lately, though, he seems to be exclusive with Ms. Harrington.
Minerva’s family is big in the bleach business. It’s akin to the bleach moms use for washing diapers, but Harrington Bleach is a little stronger, and it comes in tank trucks and rail cars, not jugs. Cities and towns throughout the eastern United States use it to disinfect drinking water and wastewater. A friend who works at Cleveland Water tells me Harrington sells hundreds of millions of gallons each year at eighty cents a gallon. It’s a low-margin product, but even so, the Harringtons are feeling no pain.
Minerva, it turns out, gets a healthy cut of the family’s bleach profits, but she has no interest in making the world safer through disinfection. She wants to build a name for herself outside the family business. About a year ago, for an undisclosed sum, she bought the trademarks, inventory, and miscellaneous assets of Cleveland’s once-glorious Cuyahoga Cuspidor Company, and she’s on a mission to rekindle America’s love of spittoons.
“Great-granddaddy Harrington had cuspidors all around his house, and he could fire off a mouthful of chaw from ten feet away just as accurate as LeBron James shooting free throws. Those little pots are just so cute,” she said in a Cleveland Plain Dealer article when the sale closed. “I know America’s going to fall in love with them all over again. And besides, there’s a tie-in to the family business. There’s nothing like bleach to get a well-used cuspidor spit clean. Great-granddaddy taught me that.”
Johnny tells me Minerva has agreed to fork over a couple of million dollars to fuel the Get Kracken cuspidor campaign. It’s up to me to figure out how to spend it wisely. Do well, and he’ll brag about me to anyone who will listen, he says. Botch it, and . . . well, just don’t botch it, Mark, he says. Johnny’s memory for names can be so fleeting.
* * *
At Get Kracken, we kick off any new client assignment with a brainstorming session. As the newly appointed commodore of cuspidors, I get to invite anyone I think will put the best ideas on the table, so I turn to the agency’s primo talent:
· Harvey Winebox, the marketing brains behind the cream-free butter alternative, No Udder Butter.
· Stamatina Stanton, who elevated SatisFraction to the top of kids’ educational math game charts.
· Evangeline McCurry, who rescued the March of Dimes from hard times by rebranding it as the March of Quarters.
Stamatina gets the ball rolling. We need to polish the image of cuspidors, she says, make them family friendly.
Evangeline McCurry rescued the March of Dimes from hard times by rebranding it as the March of Quarters.
“Let’s do a ‘Spittin’ Image’ contest,” she suggests. Have moms and dads pose with their kids, send in the photos, and we’ll pick the finalists — five lucky families whose kid or kids look just like one of the parents. We can require the families to go to PhotoPro Portraits to get their official photos taken. (Full disclosure: PhotoPro is a Get Kracken client.) All the families get to keep a complimentary photo, and they’re entered in a drawing for a free cuspidor with a one-in-ten chance of winning.
“What do the finalists get?” I ask Stamatina.
“Easy,” she says. “An all-expense-paid trip to Arizona, where they get to spit over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. If anyone can hit a cuspidor placed fifty feet below on the Bright Angel Trail, the lucky spitter wins a round-the-world trip. It’s got YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook written all over it! We’ll be all over cable news and local TV. It sounds vile, but trust me, it’ll be viral.”
Yeah . . . what else we got? I ask, picturing in my head some kid flipping over the side of the Grand Canyon while trying to hock a lugie.
Harvey throws out something more mundane but safer. People aren’t into spitting much of anything these days, he says, unless they’re in a wine-sampling club. Let’s partner up with Total Inebriation to sell Cuyahoga Cuspidors to the wine aficionados in their customer base. That’s a no-brainer.
Then he says we could do really well with the plant-and-flower crowd. Cuspidors are ideal for potted plants. They’re portable, they don’t leak, and if you keep them polished, they’re kind of pretty. Let’s do product placements in gardening magazines, movies, and TV shows. We could pitch some PBS kids’ shows to have parents teaching kids how to put together a potted plant using a cuspidor. Good for nature, good for the environment, a good bonding activity with kids. And if the parents buy their cuspidors directly online, we can offer to engrave each kid’s name on a cuspidor for a few bucks more.
Dull, but maybe effective, I think to myself.
Evangeline, our nonprofit guru, has another idea.
“You ever hear of Severe Saliva Deficit Disorder? SSDD, the docs call it. ‘Sa-SED’ is how they say it. It’s a real thing. Some people’s bodies just don’t make enough saliva.
“I was hoping it was a kids’ problem, for the tug on the old heartstrings,” she says, “but it usually happens in people over forty. Even so, nobody else has claimed to be the champion of saliva disorder patients, so the field is wide open. We could really hype the problem into a big deal, like it leads to rotten teeth and tongue cancer and lisps and cracked lips, stuff like that. You know, the way they did with low testosterone and all the non-bedroom problems it causes. Then we pledge to donate a dollar to the Severe Saliva Deficit Disorder Foundation for every Cuyahoga Cuspidor sold. If there isn’t such a thing, we can create one. Lots of media hits for this, I guarantee!”
I tell Evangeline her idea could get to be expensive at a buck a throw, but she has a workaround.
“In the fine print, we say we’re capping donations at whatever figure Minerva is comfortable with. Five thousand, fifty thousand, whatever. We can limit our charitable impulses however she wants. People never read the fine print. Just make sure it doesn’t come out of our fees.”
Stamatina has another idea. There’s history museums all over the country, she says. Cities, counties, states all have them. Let’s assemble a collection of old-time cuspidors from the 1800s and 1900s and take them on a tour of history museums. Load the collection with historic Cuyahoga Cuspidors, and we’ll have lecturers talk about the role cuspidors played in public health a hundred years ago. A guaranteed factory of media clips, she says.
Really boring, I think.
I thank them all for their ideas and tell them I’ll put a program together.
* * *
I like my own idea better: a “Cuspidors Make Drool Cool” campaign accompanied by a hilarious YouTube video series, 101 Bedroom Uses for Cuyahoga Cuspidors. We upload videos like Salacious Saliva, A Mouthful of Bliss; Cuspidor, or Sex Toy? It’s Up to You; and Cuyahoga Cuspidors, All-In Storage for Lotions, Creams, and Lubricants.
I like my own idea better: a “Cuspidors Make Drool Cool” campaign accompanied by a hilarious YouTube video series, 101 Bedroom Uses for Cuyahoga Cuspidors.
The videos really take off when YouTube bans twenty-four of them. We let people know we’ve uploaded the banned videos to CuyahogaCuspidor.com, and when they come to look, we offer a spittoon discount they can’t refuse.
In a bit of product placement and subliminal advertising, we make sure every nightstand in the videos has a plant potted in a Cuyahoga Cuspidor. Riffing on Evangeline’s idea, we pledge a penny for each video view to go to the Severe Saliva Deficit Disorder Foundation. Up to fifteen thousand, we bury in the fine print (and pending federal approval of the SSDDF charter). We hit the fifteen-thousand cap in two days, but of course, most of America thinks we’re still throwing money into the virtual saliva pot.
A couple of months later, Johnny is walking the halls of Get Kracken arm in arm with Minerva, who’s sporting a rock the size of Gibraltar on her left ring finger. I’m heading toward them. I’d just as soon disappear before our paths cross, but no such luck.
“Minerva, this is Matt Henshaw,” Johnny says, now knowing my name forevermore. “I’ve told you about him, and I brag about him to anyone who will listen. Thanks to him, every home in America owns a Cuyahoga Cuspidor, and some people even spit in them!”
They both have a good laugh, and I shake Minerva’s hand.
“Thanks, Matt!” Minerva wiggles with excitement. “I love your videos! You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to have a limited-edition line of cuspidors named after you. The Henshaw. We’ll make a few dozen and engrave your name on the bottom. You can give them to your family and friends. I’ll sell them to you at cost. Someday, they’ll be collectors’ items.”
You take whatever recognition you can get, I suppose, but having my name on the bottom of a spittoon? Who could have guessed?
As Johnny and Minerva walk away, I taste a little throw-up in my mouth, wondering exactly which of the 101 bedroom uses they’ve found for Cuyahoga Cuspidors. I take satisfaction, though, in knowing one thing: if he were alive, James Joyce would brag about me to anyone who would listen. And who knows? I might even give him a limited-edition, Henshaw-branded, Cuyahoga Cuspidor.