Portrait of the Ad Exec as a Young Man (pt.1)

Specks of saliva shot from Collin’s face as he exclaimed excitement at his newest marketing idea for the Belfry paper Company’s new range of recyclable notepads. ‘Tits!’ he shouted, ‘Tits! Fucking big bloody tits!’ he gestured the desired shape with his menthol cigarette to the uninitiated, creating whisps of smoke like a child with a sparkler. ‘ just get her leaning over the…the…’

‘notepad,’ interjected Jenny.

‘Yea, whatever. Get her leaning over the notepad with her tits hanging way down here like this,’ he gestured again just in case his creative imaginings were too much for the members of staff to deal with.

‘For sure,’ agreed Stevie as he stuck a thumb up with one hand and subconsciously fondled his balls with the other. ‘it’s pretty simply man but it will turn heads no doubt. All you need to do is make ‘em look, that’s the trick’ he mused. Collin stood imperiously wide legged, arms folded, nodding ‘you got it Stevie’.

Collins trousers were too small for him and caused a bulge in his crotch. He caught a glimpse of this in Jenny’s chrome laptop lid but he did not move as he quite liked it and thought Jenny might too. ‘We probably want to stick her in a low cut office type thing with some glasses on, and she can be peering over them as if to say “paper doesn’t get sexier than this”’

‘Paper doesn’t get sexier than this’ Stevie wrote on his Macbook in bold, marvelling at the way Collin could generate these gems at such a rate of knots. He caught sight of the bulge and lingered on it for a few seconds whilst Collin looked out of the window at a pigeon letting out a pasty white shit.

There was a short silence and then Jenny said ‘it is possible,’ she hesitated ‘that that is maybe a little cheap, sort of’ she added the sort of so as not to come across as too empathetic fearing Collin might unzip his flies and swing his bollocks in her face like two fleshy wrecking balls.

Stevie let out an exaggerated exhalation to signal his support for Collin, ‘Cheap, Cheap, what exactly do you mean by cheap exactly Jen?!’

‘Well maybe slightly demeaning to…women’. Stevie looked up the word demeaning on his Macbook.

Jenny continued to probe Collin gently, knowing that despite his modern appearance his mind set was stuck somewhere in the tweed of an Edwardian gentleman’s club.

‘Just disrespectful’. The blood started to flow round Collin’s body faster, and the contours of his bulge grew larger. He hadn’t been questioned by Jenny for years, he only hired her to fill the legal quota. ‘What’s the LTG Jenny?’

‘Lawn Tennis…erm’ mumbled jenny.

‘No the LTG is at the very core of our PSO and has been for 19 business segments. You know the company motto “always LTG while the FFPR’s are ripe and never QSG when the boss is about.’

Stevies face wrinkled like a pensioners armpit.

‘And never PGM on a Wednesday!’ he shouted hopefully.

‘Exaclty right S Man!’ Jenny wanted to cut her own head off. She felt like a wrongly diagnosed patient in a mental asylum full of insane people who were also wankers.

‘the thing is Jen babe, this business is not really ‘bout moralising and that, I mean lets face it, I’m no Mother Tullisa’ he revealed, ‘its about selling, getting the product and ramming down it down your fucking throat until you have no will power left in you’. Stevies hand crept towards his balls again, and his errant subconscious briefly toyed with the image of Collin dressed as a Thunderbird. ‘if we don’t sell, we aren’t doing our job. We fall off the map, we don’t exist. Customers are idiots, they are fucking animals, humping monkeys in suits wielding iPhones. Think about it “Bunga Bunga Buggies”, “Quiz Stain Trivia”, “full frontal filing’, all big figure campaigns, and the secret ingredient?’

‘Jizz!’ shouted Stevie like the slow child who answers the rhetorical questions at school.

‘You are very close there Stevie’, indeed he was, ‘did we boost sales of Bunga Bunga Buggies by saturating the underground? Did we fuck! We did it by saturating underwear! Punters underwear, and that’s how we will tackle this. Remember you never get snaggled when you aim for the tackles.’ Disgust and resignation mingled on Jenny’s face in the usual fashion.

Collin paused for dramatic effect, then with a single sinuous movement unzipped his soft tote bag and whipped out a well thumbed copy of the mid Week Sport which he slid across the table with contemptuous ease. It landed in Jenny’s lap. With the ghost of a smile on his damp lips he declared ‘Now. Casting. Models we don’t need them, not conventional cat walk models at any rate.’ He fixed his eyes on Jenny, ‘Jen, flick through this,’ Stevie sniggered, ‘pick out one of the lesser known lovlies in there and get her in for an audition, that is your lunch assignment, enjoy.’

Stevie drew a cigarette from an unopened case and sucked absent-mindedly on its unlit form.  Collin stubbed out his own cigarette and stood proudly at the end of the table, satisfaction splashed across his face. ‘I think we can call this meeting to a close now, job done?’