That was my cover job. I wrote copy for several of the larger New York agencies.
I was pretty good, but because I never knew when the phone would ring I never had time for the office politics that can make all the difference between having a job and having a career in a field like that.
They drum into your head how you are supposed to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself. Be an anonymous working stiff and never let anyone know anything beyond what's written in your bio.
The problem with that is that for someone who looks like me it can be a little difficult to blend in. All I can figure is that someone screwed up when they assigned me to advertising.
I think they would have switched me out if I had turned out to have a knack for it. I mean a real knack.
And truth was, it was good for me. The best way to get a job out of my head was to focus on something else, something entirely different.
While I was on the Street, I worked on some pretty substantial campaigns. Names you would recognize. I planned the campaigns, worked with the clients and brought the different creatives to the table. Of course, they could never be my accounts. Wouldn't do to have the campaign to sell stockings planned by a spy. I would argue who better, but Briggs wouldn't budge.
I was never allowed to sign my work, but that bitch Cinnamon could have a very public career as a fashion model? What the fuck? It always amazed me that we would go to some 'stan or other and no one had ever seen a magazine?
Same goes for that prima donna Hand. "Man of a Thousand Faces...." We would do whole jobs with him out in the open, sometimes right across from theatres or night clubs where he had just done one of his legit shows and that was fine. Me, I gotta use a beard to sign off on the Fatima cigarette campaign.
I just didn't matter to them as much as the others. Wouldn't have mattered if I had an excellent singing voice, or was a skilled horseman, or could turn invisibile. The only thing that mattered was if I could pick up whatever piece of shit they came up with.
The ultimate shitty thing was when they cut me out. Not only did they put me on the street with the taste of that crap sheet cake in my mouth, they took my cover so I couldn't go back to advertising. I was forbidden from contacting sources and using covers that were active when I was inside.
I couldn't even start over in Chicago: too small a sandbox, someone might tumble to me.
So I was forced to become a tumbleweed. Like The Fugitive, I was on the road from then on. Town to town, job to job, looking for some place to fit in, some place to belong.
And there were some shitty jobs and shittier towns along that road. It wouldn't be so hard to stomach if I didn't see the others still living their lives as though nothing had happened. Why am I cleaning the vats at the chicken processing plant on the third shift for eight bucks an hour when that bitch Cinnamon is being featured on "America's Next Top Model"?
I guess that some of us are more equal than others and there was nothing about that in the recruiting flyer.
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