Chapter 10 #2
Ben opens his mouth to tell her in no uncertain terms what he thinks of that idea, but before he can, a sentence comes out of Pete’s mouth.
It is an utterly unrepeatable sentence, a sentence featuring so many swear words that, if anyone did try to use the footage, they’d have to replace the entire thing with one long, unbroken bleep.
As Pete says it, Jaelyn sucks in a breath, and Ben’s eyebrows climb up into his hairline, and the courier, after what seems to be a long, careful moment of thought, crosses himself, hands Pete an envelope, and walks back out of the office.
The envelope, Ben notes with trepidation, is branded with the official Formica Media logo, under which Pete’s name is printed in a bold hand. It’s a card envelope, of the size and type one might see on a gift—who bothers to have those printed up with the official company logo?
“Well,” Jaelyn says brightly, dropping the camera off her shoulder and hitting the switch that cuts the red light blessedly off, “great news, I’ll just tell them my memory card melted.
” Glancing at the envelope in Pete’s hand, she adds, “Are you going to open that, though? Because, listen, I don’t know what this is about, either, and I’m dying of curiosity. ”
Pete glances at Ben, who shrugs, eying the envelope as though it might explode, but saying, “I’d rather we didn’t find out what’s in there, honestly, but the sooner we do, the sooner we can deal with it, so. I say go for it.”
“Rip the Band-Aid off,” Pete mutters to himself, which makes Ben smile slightly in spite of his dread anticipation. “Yeah, all right.”
Pete rips the envelope open, pulls out the card, and stares at it.
And stares at it.
And stares at it.
“Ben?” he says eventually.
Ben swallows. “Yes?”
“I would like you to look at this, please,” Pete says. He passes the card over to Ben with one hand and pinches the bridge of his nose with the other, closing his eyes. “Because maybe, you know, maybe this is some kind of—of—stress break, right—and it doesn’t say what I think it says?”
Noticing the card is trembling slightly in Pete’s fingers, Ben hastily plucks it from his hand, opens it, and reads:
Dear Pete,
Congratulations! Viewership on your little show has been high enough to attract a few sponsors.
Christmas is a big season for all of them, so for your upcoming Christmas videos, please only use the cookware that’s been delivered today.
I’ll be emailing you a list of sponsor names, and of the specific sentences they’d like you to make sure to work in, later today.
You’ll need to include sponsor shout-outs in each video, but make it feel natural.
That should be no problem for you, right?
I hope not; there are other paths we could use to drive traffic, but I’d hate to have to resort to those.
This is an exciting opportunity for you and Gastronome! If these videos move the sales needle far enough in the right direction, there is interest in ordering a longer run of your show. Don’t mess it up!
Best,
Miranda Culter
Executive Director of Creative Strategy
Formica Media
“Good Lord, who takes the time to handwrite their email signature onto the bottom of a card?” Ben mutters, too overwhelmed by the content of the letter to focus on anything but granular, irrelevant detail.
Attempting to move past this, he instead finds himself in the somewhat worse territory of telling frantic, ill-conceived jokes, as though they will somehow bleed the tension building within him.
“I think that’s the sort of thing where if you do it, a therapist should appear before you?
Like a fairy godmother? And start casting spells for the betterment of your human experience.
Bibbidi-bobbidi-basic-perspective. Abracadabra-work-life-balance—”
“Oh my God, would you give me that,” Jaelyn snaps, apparently at the end of her patience, and snatches the card out of Ben’s hand.
“Useless, the both of you—” She falls silent, reading, and then, when she’s finished, glances at Pete and whistles softly.
“Woof. Sorry, man. I know that’s probably going to be rough.
” When Pete doesn’t say anything, just stares off into the middle distance, she jerks her thumb awkwardly over her shoulder and adds, “Do you know, I remembered that I promised to meet, uh, Emma, from—marketing, we need to, uh… market? I’ll be—back.
” Pete doesn’t even seem to hear her, but when Ben quirks his eyebrows at the obvious lie, she mouths, “Good luck,” and flees without another word to either of them.
“Ben?” Pete’s voice is small.
Ben bites back a scream of wordless hatred at a pile of still-sealed boxes full of free, brand-new cooking equipment, which is not a situation he ever expected to find himself in. Instead of mentioning this, he says, “Yeah?”
“You know I can’t do this.” It’s not a question; there’s brittleness to the statement, but Pete doesn’t sound uncertain.
“You know I can’t. I mean, I can barely hold it together with my own equipment, that I’m used to.
They want me to say specific sentences? I can barely say specific words, man! How the f—”
“Hey,” Ben says, holding up a hand to pause the flow.
“Look—it’s all going to be okay, you’ll see.
We can still do the Christmas videos all in one shoot, like we did for Thanksgiving, and if you need a couple of extra takes, or a couple dozen, then whatever!
That’s fine. Worst-case scenario, there is a reason so many people live and die by the phrase, ‘We can fix it in post,’ although I will say, as a video editor, that phrase is responsible for a lot of sins, and people should have to be issued a license before they’re allowed to say it, but that’s a topic for another time. ”
Pete doesn’t look at all reassured by this, which is fair enough, so Ben lets go of caution for a moment and reaches out, allows himself two light pats on Pete’s arm before pulling away.
This, at least, makes Pete meet his eyes, and Ben holds his panicked hazel gaze as he says, “Pete, listen. It’s just three more videos, and then we’re at the end of the contract; whatever happens next, the whole company is always shut down between Christmas and New Year’s, so it’ll be next year before we have to worry about this again.
This is the home stretch, and you’re better than you were at the beginning, and I’ll help you, I promise. How badly could it go?”
As it turns out, the answer to this question is “quite badly indeed.” To say the next two weeks are grueling would be putting it mildly; they are some of the most difficult professional weeks of Ben’s life.
It would be a gross understatement to say that Pete’s progress in terms of on-camera work regresses.
Ben wishes it was just a regression, that he was dealing with Pete as he was in the first handful of videos they worked on together.
Christ, he would even take the Pete in the pilot footage over the Pete of mid-November, who has progressed past comical panic and into something more classically tragic.
If, for example, a fifteen-pound ham had slipped out of Pete’s hands and gone careening towards the floor few weeks ago, there would have been a slapstick attempt to catch it, and then a series of creative swear words, and then probably Pete would have tried to cut the part of the ham that had not touched the floor off of the larger chunk of meat for a minute before saying, “Wait, what am I doing?” Ben could have made good content out of that.
Instead, when a fifteen-pound ham does slip out of Pete’s hand and go careening towards the floor, he doesn’t even bother reaching for it, just watches it fall with a defeated, resigned energy. When, with a resounding splat, it lands on the tile, he stares at it for a second, saying nothing at all.
Then, despairingly, he looks into the camera and says, “Floor ham! Brought to you by our sponsors!” Finally, he sits down next to the unfortunate entree, puts his head in his hands, and won’t speak to anyone for fifteen minutes, except to say, “I’m done for today; that’s it. I’m done.”
They do not, as Ben had hoped, get through all the Christmas videos in one day.
They do not even get through all the Christmas videos in one week; it takes them two and a half days to get enough workable footage for Ben to scrape together the first video, which he’s editing frantically on set as they film the second one, which takes them four days to shoot.
That puts them at Tuesday morning of the third week of November, and the final video, a Christmas dessert spectacular, Ben honestly thinks might kill Pete.
He’s supposed to be making a Yule log, and he spends the back half of Tuesday and all of Wednesday being tormented by the cake, Thursday swearing up and down that he’ll never make buttercream frosting again, and Friday cursing all meringues, of all shapes and sizes and flavors and purposes.