Deep Cuts

Comfy in Nautica

Comfy in Nautica

I arrived in the lobby of the denim company at 8:55 a.m., sweating in the only outfit I owned that checked both the hipster box and the corporate-hotshot box: a pair of high-waisted slacks, a cashmere shirt that was 75 percent off at Loehmann’s and still the most expensive thing I owned, and woven oxfords from Goodwill. It wasn’t technically uncomfortable, but I could never put it on without counting the minutes until I could return to my jeans and black T-shirt.

I hated pitching new clients in the best of circumstances, and this was the worst. It was September 2008 and the economy was in a free fall, though projections varied; nobody was sure if the entire fantasy of America was grinding to a halt or if it would just be a slow fourth quarter. All our pitches had been canceled except this one, and a third of the agency had been canned, including my beloved twenty-two-year-old employee. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. I had co-written a song for Meg Vee’s upcoming album, likely a single, but I knew better than to expect it to provide a livable income. I’d received two royalty checks for “Least Worst Night of the Century So Far,” one for songwriting and one for producing, and neither could buy me a bag of groceries. Even the “Bay Window” checks hadn’t covered rent. I needed this stupid job.

My boss was waiting for me in the lobby, all sharp angles as usual, blazer and flat-ironed bob and those permanently pursed neon-red lips. She was wincing at a TV screen mounted above the receptionist’s desk. Feds Seize Washington Mutual , read the ticker.

“Less than ideal pitch conditions?” I said, coming up beside her.

“This is a farce,” she said grimly. “I can hear research budgets going through the paper shredder as we speak.” There were dark moons under her eyes under a too-thin veil of cover-up. She shuddered like a dog shaking off the rain and turned to me brightly. “Shall we kill it anyway?”

I mimed violent stabbing. She called me a millennial and summoned the elevator.

“You know, they keep changing the cutoff year,” I said as we stepped in. “I think I’m Gen X now.”

She looked alarmed. “That never leaves this elevator.”

When the doors opened, a bald man stood waiting with his hand extended, and talked about the weather and the bailout package as he led us down a glass-walled hallway to a conference room.

We busied ourselves setting up the projector, fumbling over the inevitable Mac-to-PC transition. We were presenting an abridged version of our 2008 trends package, including a hastily developed slide about the trendsetters’ response to the economic doom (“Break It Down Again,” I’d titled it). It was all a teaser for the annual subscription that we were hoping they’d purchase, that we desperately needed them to purchase. The bald man provided introductions as the clients filed into the room, carrying plates of bagels and coffees—a breakfast meeting, ugh. I prepared myself mentally for the discomfort of watching twenty people chew. And then a girl sauntered in, a girl who was younger than me, and much cooler.

“This is Casey,” said the bald man. “Assistant brand manager.”

Casey had long dark hair in a hand-raked side part so aggressive it created greasy, individuated strands across her forehead. Smudgy eyeliner traveled well below her eyes, as if it had been applied the day before. She took a seat near the back of the long oval table.

As I started presenting, Casey’s presence became comical to me, helping me tolerate the symphony of chewing noises. She probably knew most of what I was saying! They could just ask this hungover kid! But she took notes through the first section on macro-trends. She nodded gravely during the “Break It Down Again” slide: trendsetters don’t see the economic collapse as a bad thing, necessarily, I said; they see it as an opportunity for our culture to reprioritize, start over. Casey’s elders grimaced.

During the segment on nightlife and socializing, I went to great pains to avoid looking at her. I was just about to move into fashion when a man interrupted.

“I have a question about sourcing.” He was in his thirties and wore a blazer over a hoodie, facial skin glistening with product. “I know you get this information from a panel of trendsetters, but how do you find them? Who decides what constitutes a trendsetter?”

We kept a slide hidden at the back of the deck for this question. My boss quickly navigated to it and gave him a quick rundown of my recruiting process.

“So it’s her, basically,” the man said, looking at me. “You’re the arbiter.”

“My mother is very proud,” I deadpanned, and they all laughed. I saw some of them sit up straighter, the women adjusting their blouses, the men smiling a little too hard. It always happened: they wanted to impress me. I was the arbiter.

But the shiny-faced man wasn’t smiling. His squint moved from me to the projected slide, where I had assembled snapshots and bios of a handful of trendsetters. Jesse Jams, DJ, Miami; Liv, writer and eBay reseller, NYC; Jorge, hairdresser and activist, SF. Jorge was my favorite, with his pink braids and intense gaze; he was a vocal opponent of Proposition 8, the anti-gay-marriage legislation that was on the verge of passing in California, and had cofounded a “No on 8” organization to which Zoe was currently devoting the majority of her free time.

The shiny face looked around the table, then back at me. “But your trendsetters don’t seem cool to me. They seem more…granola.”

“That’s why you hire us, though,” I said. “Because you don’t know what cool is.”

My boss inhaled sharply and I felt myself pale, like she had sucked out my soul. The man didn’t try to hide his shock.

“Excuse me,” he said. “We’re on the cusp of an actual depression. This time next year, you think anyone’s going to care what these hippies think about anything? Shouldn’t we be asking the people with money what they think? People can be cool and still have money, you know.”

Casey raised her hand, then used it to flip her aggressive side part to the far opposite side. “Coolness is having courage,” she said.

“Right!” I said desperately, pointing at her with both forefingers. “Panda Bear!”

The man got over his shock and began to look enraged. “Panda Bear?”

My boss was staring at me icily, but I kept going. “It’s a song lyric, but I think what Casey’s getting at is that the leaders of today’s youth culture might not conform to your white-collar idea of what’s aspirational,” I said to the shiny man. Casey shrank in her seat. “Trendsetters tend to reject the ‘comfy’ path, and that takes courage.” Color had rushed too swiftly back to my face after its earlier departure; my lips throbbed with heat.

“Hey,” said the guy, fingering the drawstring at the neck of his hoodie. “Watch who you’re calling white collar.” The man next to him laughed.

I had the perfect comeback. It would be dropping a grenade, but that Panda Bear quote had flipped a switch in my brain. I wanted out. So I said it: “A hoodie under a blazer is the worst collar of all.”

His eyes widened into white-hot circles.

“Let’s move on!” my boss chirped. “Percy, shall I take over?”

—

My boss drove me home in dead silence. When I could stand it no longer I said, “I think you finally just met the real me.”

“Were you trying to get me to fire you so you can claim unemployment?” she said. “If so, congratulations. You’re fired.”

I felt both panic and relief. My mind spun with numbers: rent, loans, the moderate total in my savings account. Nobody was hiring. “This job has always been bad for me,” I said.

“Everything is bad for you. I just read that walnuts are bad foryou.”

I wanted to explain myself in a way that would make sense to her. “When I was presenting the ‘Break It Down Again’ slide, all I could think was man, if society is really collapsing, I don’t want to be on the side with these jerks. I want to be on the side with the granola kids. You know?”

She didn’t know. She merged into the Broadway Tunnel.

“I’m sorry.”

She accepted my apology with a nod. “I did enjoy the look on his face when you started talking about Grizzly Bear,” she said, with the crack of a smile.

The image returned to me: a patchy redness blooming through his moisturizer. “Panda Bear, but yeah. How dare I humiliate him with my hippie rock ’n’ roll! Do you want to hear the song that girl was talking about?”

She nodded, barely, and I plugged in my iPod. The militaristic rhythm of “Comfy in Nautica” filled her SUV, followed by the glorious contrast of layered vocals. When Panda Bear sang about courage, he meant the opposite of how the shiny-faced man would define the word. He meant being softer inside. He meant remembering to have a good time—to resist the lockstep, percussive world that pulsed behind his singing. To resist the percussive world that maybe pulsed inside yourself.

She pulled up at my building just as the song ended. “Are you under the impression that you just communicated something significant to me through that song?” she asked. “Because I couldn’t understand a word that boy was singing.”

I smiled. “I won’t leave until you find my replacement.”

“Hah,” she said bitterly. “Replacement, that’s funny. No, you’ll leave immediately—after you do one more thing for me.”

She told me she was finalizing a deal with the alcohol company in New York to sell them our trendsetter panel. They wanted to call them “influencers” now, a subtle but important shift that meant less research, more marketing. For our trendsetters to survive in this economy, my boss explained, they had to evolve downstream, closer to the sale.

“Gross,” I said. “But okay. What do you need me to do?”

“One last recruiting tour. I promised them a round of fresh blood. But none of your intellectuals this time. Give me bloggers, big Facebookers. Kids with clear ROI.”

The fact that she didn’t realize I could find these people online was probably one of the reasons her company was about to fold, but I wasn’t going to turn down my last paid loop around the country. “On it,” I said, and added, sincerely, “Thank you.” Then I clamored out of her car, my legs shaking slightly under me as I looked up at my building, its windows screaming at me in block letters: Hope, Hope, Hope .