we don’t. The meeting with him is scheduled for this time next week, so by then we have to have a presentation that will blow him away and land us the account. So we want you to get to work immediately trying to come up with some ideas. We don’t have much time, so we’ll screen the ideas that the copywriters come up with, pick one, and have them ready to present it to Mr. Pacino personally when he comes into the office.”
Dior’s head was spinning. What is the likelihood of this? she thought. What do I look like presenting business to this man after I lifted up my shirt and asked him to sign my chest in public? He’s going to laugh at me, then tell my boss how I acted a fool. Then he’s going to tell her no thanks and go over to the competition for a campaign proposal that was actually done by a professional. Then my boss is going to fire me on the spot because she can’t have such poor representation of her agency roaming the streets of New York. How do I get out of this?
“Like I said, normally we wouldn’t immediately throw you into the fire so quickly, but this is major, and we’re familiar with your work and we think you can handle it. And between you and me, in the next couple of years we’ll be looking for a new partner. Landing a major account like this in your first week at work will look very impressive.” Barbara folded her hands on her desk. “No pressure, of course.”
As she walked out of her new boss’s office, Dior quickly thought of things she could say to Al Pacino to excuse her raunchy behavior; then she figured the best thing to do would be simply to deny it. It wasn’t her. He must be mistaken. There were so many people there that day he couldn’t possibly remember just one face. That was it. That would be her defense. It wasn’t me, she thought.
“Uhhh!” Dior moaned as she pulled off her knee boots. She had just gotten in from work and her feet were killing her. She couldn’t figure out why, though. She had worn those boots a hundred times in Montreal and this was the third time she had worn them in New York. And the two times before that, she did lots of walking in them—her first day at the airport and her second day walking up and down Fifth Avenue. She wondered if her feet were growing from all the walking she had been doing lately. That was all New Yorkers did, walk.
She sat down on her pile-it and leaned her back against the wall. Suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her behind. It came and went so fast that she dismissed it and just repositioned herself. She started to pick through the mail, coming across her electric bill. As she opened it, the pain in her behind returned. It felt like something had stuck her, and she thought maybe she had gotten a splinter from the floor. She stood up and scanned the bill, directing her eyes straight to the balance and due date. She couldn’t figure out if the amount of the bill said $341 or if the pain in her butt was causing her to hallucinate. She figured she would take care of one problem at a time, and her ass came before the bill.
She put the mail up on the mantel and came out of her mink. Then she began to rub her butt as it was so sore. She started to feel around on her back pockets to see if there was something in them poking her. She felt nothing. Wanting to find out what was sticking her, she sat back down and sure enough the pain returned, this time causing her to jump to her feet as if she had gotten the Holy Ghost. She immediately unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them off. She went into the bathroom and tried looking at her butt in the mirror, but it was too high, and even sitting on the sink she couldn’t turn herself around enough to see her backside. She started to feel around on her bare butt, trying to locate a splinter or a cut or something. But there was nothing but a pimple. And that had been there for days and hadn’t given her any problems before, so she was sure it wasn’t the culprit.
Confused, Dior went back into the living room and picked up her jeans off the floor. She examined them. Then she decided to turn them upside own and shake them, thinking that if it was a splinter or a pin sticking her it had to be in her back pocket. After a few shakes, a tiny gold key fell out of her jeans and onto her hardwood floor.
“Ohhh!” Dior squealed. “This is where you were hiding!”
She picked up the key and kissed it. “I was looking all over for you!”
She crawled over to her Louis Vuitton luggage that had been sitting in her living room since she moved in and turned it on its back. She put the key in the lock and opened it. She then unzipped the suitcase. A rush came over her. You would have thought she was taking the lid off a pot of gold. Her eyes lit up and she was overwhelmed with joy, looking at all her clothes and purses. She felt like she had gone shopping all over again as most of the things were new items that she had bought just before she left Canada.
“Hum,” she huffed, closing the suitcase. Finding the key had almost made her forget the drama of the workday, but not quite. She decided to get online for a little while.
So how was your first day at work? was the one-line message Dior read from Mr. Good Black Man 2008 when she logged on to MySpace. Once again she saw that his online now icon was blinking.
It sucked, she typed back.
Sorry to hear that. What happened?
Dior sighed. Long story.
I guess we’ve all had those kind of days. Hope things get better.
You spend a lot of time on the computer, Dior typed. Must be nice to have all this free time.
I do most of my work on the computer. Believe me, I have very little free time. But what little time I do have I’ve already discovered I like spending with you.
Dior smiled. How can someone as sweet as you still be single?
His response was that he had a fiancée whom he was supposed to marry a year and a half ago, but she ended up cheating on him and so he called off their wedding. After that heartbreak, he wrote, he chose to be single for a while.
I’m so sorry to hear that, Dior typed.
That’s life, came the reply.
Dior and Mr. Good Black Man 2008 went back and forth sending each other messages for the whole of the night. In between ordering food, going to the bathroom, taking phone calls, and even running to the store, they wrote each other. They got to know a lot about one another and realized they had much in common, the funniest and most significant being they both were Al Pacino fans. She impressed him by telling him that she was working on a campaign for their idol’s new restaurant.
The two of them sent LOLs constantly as they both laughed aloud in their homes. They found out that they were both into zodiac signs and their signs were good together. They were in the same age bracket and they both liked jazz even though they were fairly young.
It was after midnight when Dior finally turned off her computer, clicked off her living room light, and retreated to her air mattress. She pulled back the quilt and the sheet and lay down, resting her head on her makeshift pillow. Good black men aren’t hard to find, she thought. Shit, they come with profiles and everything now. I like this.
She closed her eyes and immediately began imagining Mr. Good Black Man 2008 in bed with her, and found herself getting aroused. Damn, she thought, right before drifting herself to sleep. This online thing is nice, but I could use a noncyber man right about now.
“I’m Gordon Jacobs.”
Dior looked up from her desk and the presentation she was trying to prepare to see a short light-skinned man with freckles and spectacles standing in front of her, with one hand on his hip and the other holding a manila folder. It was Friday, and her presentation to Barbara and the other company bigwigs was scheduled for Monday, so she was mildly irritated by the interruption.
“Hi,
