Rite Of Passage

On a generic Monday night in New York—a night any rummy blues band can get a gig—I'm having dinner down in the Village with my boss. Given our normal take and give, which typically has all the warmth of two vampires facing down sunrise with only one coffin between them, the conversation takes on a life of its own, as predestined as a matador raising his espada for the kill. Eighteen months earlier—or a lifetime, if you're measuring in misery—I joined the storied Scali, McCabe, Sloves as part of "the next generation that would assume leadership" once Marvin Sloves and Sam Scali followed Ed McCabe out. But first I was to run their flagship Hertz business, and soon I was making commercials with Jamie Lee and O.J. (Curtis and Simpson—a killer babe and a babe killer, but that's another story). It was Keith Green—whose resignation a few years later would be greeted with "euphoria" by the Scali staff, according to the Wall Street Journal, and who "left the industry with the nickname 'the Darth Vader of advertising,' " according to Adweek—who had charmed me into leaving J. Walter Thompson and coming to work for him. Now, at dinner with him, I'm reminded that none of this was a good idea. Too late. Before I can drain my first drink, he fires me. At that point, I could hardly know it would be a great career move. "What's new?" I say, as we sit down. "Not much," he offers, which turns out to be a gross understatement. "But near as I can tell, you don't really want to be me these days." Shit, I never did. Not then, not anytime. "So when's the bomb going to drop?" I flirted. I always did have a death wish. "How 'bout right now?" At one time, Scali was a shining beacon of creativity and innovation, driven by another egocentric dervish. What Ed McCabe left behind was a great deal of creative arrogance and much less talent, and no one at the wheel. This should have been a match made in heaven. It was a marriage from hell. This was an agency on the precipice, and it was about to jump off: In the next year, they would be investigated by the Texas attorney general over the monster-truck incident, become the subject of several exposé trade articles and ultimately suffer the humiliation of having to resign the prestigious Volvo business. They would lose half their billings, see many of their key people leave before they could fire them, fail to win a single new account and slip further and further away from their dream of buying themselves back from Martin Sorrell's WPP. They've long since disappeared up the orifice of agency acquisitions and mergers. But this isn't about them. "Tim, you've got to go." Just like that. After 16 years in the fast lane, I get canned by a guy so controversial I can't even use him as a reference—and he wants me to. "Ten out of ten times, I'd hire you again," he's telling me. And somehow I like this guy. Like a moth to a flame. "Happens to everybody." Yeah, but this is me. "Nothing to do with ability or performance." Really? Now I feel much better. "Look at it as an opportunity, a chance to re-examine your priorities and decide what you really want to do with your life." OK, I'll foreclose on my apartment, sell everything we own and join the Peace Corps. "You got caught in a squeeze. It's just politics. After all, we did lose Hertz 'on your watch.' " Indeed, we did. And it occurs to me that bosses are often in a position to have somebody else take the fall. In an instant, instead of feeling like some kind of big-time ad guy pulling down six digits, I feel ... bald. My wife and I are living in a co-op in Manhattan with three dogs and a huge mortgage, a daughter in college and a son soon to start, and our checking account has already tapped into Checking Plus for the third time that month. Think I'm scared? Absolutely. Actually, I think I'm supposed to be scared. But I'm not sure I am, just yet. I'm cocksure I'll land a new job, a better job, in no time. And I did. Two years later. And the no time turned into know time—those two years gave me some of the richest experiences I've ever had. It just took me a while to realize it. The very next day, I go work out. Important to stay with it, take care of yourself, blah blah blah. On the subway home it occurs to me how smug we all must look, coming out of the Cardio-Fitness Center and the Pan Am Building with our pinstripes and our free apples. I promise myself then and there never to have that smirk on my face again—especially when I wear pinstripes. And then I quit wearing pinstripes. It reminds me of when I got divorced a decade earlier. I figured then that everyone could tell I was some kind of a pariah just by looking at me. It seemed like even the lady at the grocery store looked at me different, like stuff was hanging out of my nose or something. Same with getting fired. So the next day I decide to pretend I'm an actor—why else would an otherwise normal-looking guy be out on the streets in the middle of the day? In jeans? And a two-day-old beard? It works for a while. For me, I mean. Then I see some poor bastard pushing a stolen grocery cart up the street with his entire life wadded up in it. And he says out loud, to no one in particular, except everyone, "Shit ain't fair!"Shit ain't fair. I must have said that myself on occasion. But what a sobering difference.Except shit is fair, sometimes.The first two nights after the last supper I have meaningful experiences. Tuesday night I go down to the Beacon Theatre, two blocks from where I live, wedge myself into a crack in the stage door and listen to Bob Dylan with the homeless and the dopeheads. Incredible, especially for the price. Somebody passes around a joint. I buy a round of beers for everybody. It's beginning to sink in.Night two, my wife and I ride the 7 train out to Shea Stadium to see the Rolling Stones, with tickets we already had. Amazing. And they're all my age! As I'm writing this, I look back in the journal I kept, and I find this entry: "I already have a much stronger sense of myself than I did four or five years ago. I'm the most prepared I've ever been for a crisis. Not that I'm fully prepared—you never are—but I'm the most prepared." Yeah, sure, right. And didn't Stuart Smalley keep a journal, too?The details of those two years don't matter, but here they are: 398 letters, some 650 telephone calls, 79 interviews. That's 1,127 personal rejections, but who's counting? My timing was impeccable: I was fired on the eve of the worst market squeeze in the history of advertising. And it was a permanent downsizing, thousands of jobs deleted, never to be funded again.But I wouldn't trade the experience for a million dollars. Well, not for a hundred thousand. For the first six months, I actively looked for a job, beating my head against the wall of unemployment. In fact, unemployment was the only door open to me, so after a while you swallow your pride and take that, too. For six months, you could get $245 a week. Works out to something like a month back for each year in. Small compensation, you think. Except when it runs out you really start to consider drastic alternatives, like becoming a vegetarian or something. Then one day my wife Diane and I were sitting alone together at the dining-room table, and we looked at each other and said let's go for something as a team. We began a consulting partnership; we named ourselves The Arnold Group—hey, more than one is a group. Before it was all over, we worked for agencies large and small, primarily on new-business projects, many behind the scenes. We helped win more than $80 million in new billings and helped save millions more from leaving agencies.At one point we were being paid by four agencies simultaneously. Awesome! It's amazing how resourceful you can get when your back's to the wall. It's in there, somewhere. And you find it. In fact, what you find is why you got into this crazy business in the first place. You learn how to do it better because you have to. You also learn that the absolute worst thing that can happen to you is not so bad. The thing you fear the most turns out to be the fear itself, just like what's-his-name said. Nothing more. Losing a job doesn't mean losing yourself. In fact, it might mean discovering yourself. They can't take that away from you, and the ultimate joy may be in discovering just that. And then pretty soon things change again, and you realize how much you miss being on the inside of the business, and you get back in it. Back in the shit. Now I have the luxury of distance. And time. And a job I love. Today I can even look back with sadness, not bitterness, on the agency that fired me. They deserved better. Even the poor schmuck who fired me eventually got his. But he deserved it. Like the Stones sang that night out at Shea: "You can't always get what you want/And if you try sometimes, well you just might find/You get what you need." And you can't make this stuff up, either.

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Rite Of Passage

Tim Arnold

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Tim Arnold