obvious satire. Nothing for a fine art gallery, but perfect for a college student to paint in a college dorm.
“I’m impressed,” I said.
Lola pointed at the open window. “I started at that end and finished over there by the stairs,” she said. “The better paintings are down there.”
True to Lola’s word, I found the most striking mural nearest the stairs. It was a simple scene: two cartoon squirrels at a picnic table, eating sandwiches and watching a bunch of tiny humans build a city in a gnarled oak tree. The landscape around them mirrored the campus outside the dorm. The painting itself mirrored my thoughts at the exact moment when Lola approached me earlier. I remembered Eric’s words: “If you study metaphysics, there are no coincidences.” I thought, nope. It’s too simple. If you believe in common human experience, that the campus occupied these grounds for more than a century and over the course of that time, surely hundreds of people sat at the picnic benches, eating sandwiches and watching squirrels. That’s what the picnic benches were for: to eat at. Sandwiches have long been the most popular American lunch food. And surely the squirrels had been around for as long as the acorns had. Nothing metaphysical was going on here.
“How’d you get the school to let you paint on the dorm walls?”
“I told them it was a celebration of my cultural heritage.”
“Are murals big in Puerto Rico?” I asked. Because I recalled this from my puddle of Folsom memories: that Lola was Puerto Rican.
Lola smiled, a sharp mouth on a round face. Trouble. “You think a bunch of white liberal arts professors know the difference between Mexican and PR?” Lola shook her head. “Hell, no.”
“Well, well done,” I said. “I’m impressed.”
“I’m better now,” Lola said. “I still paint. You should see my new stuff.” She looked at her watch. “Oops. I better scoot. One o’clock group.”
I followed Lola down the stairs to the first floor. She checked her watch again and looked up at me. “I’m really late,” she said. She reached out for my left hand, touched my wedding ring again, shot me with a dose of static electricity, and trotted off.
I stood in the hallway and watched her go. She turned into a silhouette in the doorway and vanished in the California sun.
7
I spent the morning before my lunch with Frank Walters in my office, doing research on the computer. I looked up everything I could find on Dickinson and Associates. I checked their company website, read all the easily available information on them from a quick web search, then dug deeper, reading about them in articles written for business journals, checking reports for stockholders—though, of course, I wasn’t a stockholder. I also did several searches for a Frank Walters, but the names were just too common and I couldn’t find anything that matched who I thought this Frank Walters was. No luck with Francis Walters, either. I slipped and tried Frank “Castor Oil” Walters. I actually typed it into a search engine and clicked “search” before it occurred to me that the “Castor Oil” part of his name only existed in my mind. I searched and read steadily from seven o’clock that morning until ten thirty. This is the long story short of what I found:
J. Reginald Dickinson, an Australian who’d cut his teeth interning in the upper echelons of a mass media corporation there, founded the firm. After the internship, he moved into advertising. His first big break came in a United Fruit campaign for which he developed the slogan “Life Is Good When You Have a Big Banana.” I found a series of ads featuring this cartoon monkey in some presumably Latin American jungle, happy as hell about the big banana in his hand. The ads were actually a bit more subtle than I expected, though they were not subtle. The United Fruit campaign catapulted Dickinson into the advertising big time. He moved his upstart company to New York City, actually landing an address on Madison Avenue (though apparently a bit south of the insiders’ stretch of Madison Avenue). From this location, he developed other projects that have surely burrowed into your subconscious: The Cattle Ranchers of America’s whole “You Can’t Beat Our Meat” campaign; Big Sugar’s “Even God Has a Sweet Tooth” push. His loosely veiled dick jokes and pseudo-religion moved the company up to a more fashionable address. From there, Dickinson created the two most controversial and short-lived Miller Beer campaigns: “Drink Her Pretty,” which featured 30-second TV spots with geeky, frumped-out women gradually losing their disguises and transforming into strippers while fat men who were way out of the women’s leagues got drunk, and “If Moms Made Miller, You’d Still Be Breastfeeding”—a series of billboards with sloppy, unshaven men in diapers tugging at giant apron strings, the apron barely covering a pair of dazzling legs in high heels. He was even the guy behind Taco Bell’s “Heaven in a Taco” campaign, the one with the striking Chicana’s face appearing in the lettuce of a fast food taco, apparently some reference to the Virgen de Guadalupe, only this lady says, “Eat me.” And so on.
He expanded the company into public relations with his specialty being the shadow campaign, in which he’d create a manufactured buzz surrounding a product or an idea through non-traditional means. For example, in the ’80s when a certain congressman from North Carolina was in hot water for some unethical practices with lobbyists and he was trailing dangerously behind in his re-election campaign, the congressman hired J. Reginald Dickinson to clear things up. Since even Dickinson couldn’t spit shine this congressman’s image, Dickinson attacked the congressman’s opponent. The opponent, among other things, was campaigning to dedicate more money to AIDS research. Dickinson and Associates created a team of writers to produce opinion pieces that promulgated one simple catch phrase: “AIDS is God’s Will.” For the more radical publications, the writers would argue that AIDS attacked a demographic that needed to be attacked. In publications that welcomed unambiguous brutality, writers would make assertions like, “I’ll worry about AIDS when it kills people I don’t hate.” Non-Dickinson writers started to pick up on the trend, attacking the new wave of writers and their hateful opinions. This created exactly the kind of buzz that the congressman needed to inspire his homophobic constituents to get to the voting booth that November. He won a narrow victory and was back to getting blowjobs from lobbyist-funded hookers in no time. As far as I can tell, none of those hookers had AIDS. There was no delicious irony here.
When word of the first Dickinson and Associates shadow campaign spread, the company really took off. They were able to employ radio and television personalities whose opinions were for hire. They worked on political campaigns large and small, from several different points on the political spectrum. They became masters of digging at the loose hangnail of America’s id. They also became more subtle because I couldn’t find much information on who they worked for or what they worked on. Dickinson and Associates clients clearly valued their privacy.
The last big campaign I could find that Dickinson and Associates had their fingers in was the re-imagining of School of the Americas. The School of the Americas was a facility on an army base in Georgia. Some of the alumni of this school included Chilean dictator General Augustus Pinochet and the men behind the brutal El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador. Congressional investigators had even unearthed SOA training manuals that taught the finer intricacies of torture. Every year, protestors gathered in huge numbers and rallied outside the gates of the SOA demanding its closure. After several years of protests, the US Army hired Dickinson and Associates to clear this mess up. Dickinson and Associates came up with a plan. They suggested that the army close the SOA, just as the protestors asked, but to start a new facility with the same teachers, classrooms, students, and curriculum. This new facility would be called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHISC. This way, no one could complain about the SOA, no one could remember the name of the new facility, and if they tried to use the new acronym, it would sound pleasant. WHISC. Like a breath
