The glass wasn’t meant to stop anyone. It was decoration. It was status. The same way the Louvre puts the Mona Lisa behind glass to make sure you know she’s important. So important they made her bulletproof.
Gordon had been on that rooftop a thousand times before. Having drinks with clients, pitching ideas, and gazing out at the New York City skyline like the closing shot in a bank commercial. He’d gotten distracted by the little glass barrier that framed the rooftop deck one afternoon when they were workshopping taglines for an energy drink campaign.
“Chaos in every can,” Joel had pitched the client, and Gordon could feel himself nodding along. The suggestion of danger was important to connect with the client’s fratty college-kid demographic, and Gordon knew the creative direction had to be locked down by the end of the afternoon if they had any chance of invoicing that week and seeing the profit hit the P&L that month. The clients wrote down Joel’s tagline in their little black Moleskine notebooks. They always did, and it always had to be Moleskine, embossed on the front with their company logo.
This night was different.
Gordon stood on the wrong side of the glass barrier. His gray hair thrashed violently in updraft from the building. The street, sixteen stories below him, buzzed as it always did.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
He could hear them on the other side of the roof access door. The way they amped each other up, called each other ‘brother,’ then quickly pivoted to ‘pussy’ for not being able to break through the big steel door that led to the roof.
Somebody should really fix that stairwell door; it always stuck and it was always such a pain when they brought clients up here. Nobody ever would. There would be no point to it.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
* * *
The woman who lived across the street and spoke mostly to her three cats, Toby, Michael, and Chrysanthemum, watched the whole thing play out from her window. Gordon’s perfectly polished Santonis dropping into the night. His shins, his knees, his hips, his chest, his head. A series of body parts disappearing into the darkness, swallowing him like a food critic taking a big, expensive bite at the newest, hippest restaurant in the West Village.
Gordon didn’t scream. He had learned the advanced art of suppressing emotion in his first few years on the job. He could take any level of client criticism at any volume and would never crack. It was a skill worthy of a resume bullet point or at least a good LinkedIn recommendation.
Down on the ground, the lookie-loos had already started to gather. The Halloway was a boxy, older model that was parked in a perfect position to catch him. The truck’s cab had collapsed in, creating a perfect, clean, person-sized indentation. The windshield had shattered under his weight but held together in the corner where someone at the manufacturing plant had placed a sticker: “Built in Marion.”
Gordon had done the last thing he would be paid to do. At least he made an impression.
EVERYTHING IS ADVERTISING follows a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Tuesday, Everything is Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
If short stories and general musings are more your speed —
When is part 6 coming?
Love this babes.