Invited to the civil ceremony are twelve guests, among them D.L.'s psychic and Mark's old Trinitarian archery coach. Mark's Dad gives them a Visa card with no limit, in the Dad's name, to help establish credit. Her psychic gives D.L. a quartz crystal way too big and phallic to be taken seriously. The proselytizing coach gives Mark a Dexter Aluminum target arrow with a nock of Port Orford cedar. Top of the line. The BMW of target arrows. Though D.L. makes no secret of her distaste for BMWs, the Dexter Aluminum's the best arrow Mark's ever had, and (sadly?) the main reason why the ceremony was, for him, the high point of a not at all promising marriage, so far.
OK true, that was all both too quick and too slow, for background — both intrusive and sketchy. But please, whether your imagination's engaged or not, please just acknowledge the propositions, is all. Because time is severely limited, and whatever might be important lies ahead. So, as we say in the nation's flat green gut, Hibbego, without further hemming or ado, in an uncompromisingly terse flash-foward, straight and without grace or delay to
THE DAY OF THE MOMENT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR
For lovers, the Funhouse is fun.
For phonies, the Funhouse is love.
But for whom, the proles grouse,
Is the Funhouse a house?
Who lives there, when push comes to shove?
was the piece of anti-Ambrose doggerel the poor sensitive birth-marked guy walked into the seminar room for his MF 3–5 to find drawn onto the slateboard with the kind of chalk you almost got to wash off. He was devastated, said the long letter Ambrose had sent Steelritter to threaten about why he was maybe as a client and entrepreneur pulling out of the whole Funouse franchise idea. Kids and students are a shitty and shifty bunch, in J.D. Steelritter's opinion. Like dogs, that you have to worry about getting bit when you hold out the meat they whine for. Ambrose said he'd been devastated: there it was, he'd said — when you rendered all the nourishes and allusions and general crap out of his letter — there it was, criticism, right there, even where you ought to be able to least expect it. Criticism: it never left him alone. It lowered his quality of lifestyle. So why go ahead and try to build a Funhouse in every major market, for people to criticize, he'd realized, he said. Who needed the grief? Ambrose needed not grief, he'd written, any more than brave Philoctetes of yore had needed that snakebite.
What snake? J.D.'d cabled back. What yore? Relax, he'd cabled. Cool off. Unwind. Read some of that Stoic shit you like. Have a Lite. Dip into some of the roses I sent sub rosa for you alone, friend. Reflect. Think over the totality of everybody's investment in the thing so far. Of time, money, money, time, spirit. Don't do anything hasty. Trust me, who's earned your trust. Cold feet are natural, as the day draws near.
The super-sized ego of an arrogant pussy, is what J.D. had really thought. Of course you need it. Spare me chumpness about this.
Criticism is response. Which is good. If J.D. lays out a campaign strategy nobody criticizes, then J.D. right away knows the idea's a dink, a bad marriage of jingle and image, one that won't produce, just lays there, no copulation of engaging gears, no spin inside the market's spin. You need it. Eat it up. It's attention. It engages imaginations. It sells. It works off desire, and sells. It sold books, it'll sell mirrored discotheque franchises. The criticism'll be what fills the seats with fannies. J.D.'d bet his life.
Standing there, past weary, his whole fine face, which tended to rush toward its own center anyhow, centered around a cigar he waits to crunch and spit the tip of, a fried-flower taste hanging like fog on his palate, standing at a window of the bunting-bedecked (WELCOME MCDONALD'S ALUMNI WELCOME JACK LORD WELCOME PLEASE SEE NEAREST STEELRITTER ALUMNI ASSISTANCE REPRESENTATIVE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND DIRECTIONS WELCOME!) and redecorated (in Mrs. Steelritter's favorite muted grays and dusty plum) Central Illinois Airport, waiting for sunrise and the LordAloft 5:10 A.M. shuttle from O'Hare to descend with the very last couple of alumni kids, J.D.'d bet his life. Admen do this. Bet their life on criticism, attention, desire, fear, love, marriage of concession and market. Retention of image. Loyalty to brand. Empathy with client. Sales. On life. Life!
Life goes on. You're empty, sad, probably the least appreciated creative virtuoso in the industry; well and but life just goes on, emptily, sadly, with always direction but never center. The hubless wheel spins ever faster, no? Yes. Admen approach challenges thus: concede what's hopelessly true, what you can't make folks ever want to not be so; concede; then take your creative arm and hammer a big soaked wedge, hard as can be, into whatever's open to interpretation. Interpret, argue, sing, whisper, work the wedge down into the pulp, where the real red juices be, where folks feel alone, fear their genitals, embrace their own shadows, want so badly it's a great subsonic groan, a lambent static only the trained adman's sticky ear can trap, retain, digest. Interpretation, he's fond of telling DeHaven, is persuasion's driveway. Persuasion is desire. Desire is the monstrous pulse, the trillion-hearted river that is the care and feeding of J.D. and Mrs. J.D. Steelritter and their clown of a son DeHaven. Meat on a table already groaning under meat, festooned with homegrown food. This is J.D.'s way since the Lucky Strike campaign, the first, in '45. Then McDonald's, through Ray, in '53. Coca-Cola. Arm & Hammer. Kellogg's. The Funhouse. LordAloft Shuttles. The American daydream, what made Us great: make a concession, take a stand.
So then why waste time even thinking cold artistic feet and Funhouses? There's a Reunion coming, and it will cap things, put them right, for J.D.'s forever. He can hardly wait. Behind him, in the terminal, DeHaven, his spawn, is greeting the second-to-last bunch of alums, just off a Dallas Delta, he's checking off names of every creed, passing out Reunion nametags: two little gold-filled arches, to pin on, a peel-off sticker printed Hi! MY NAME IS and then with room for a name and year of appearance. DeHaven sleep-deprived too, but stoned, too — on reefers, doobers, whatever they called it now — eyes red as his yarn wig and violently rouged mouth slack and dry and a smell off his clown suit like oily ropes way below deck. Why the waste of time, the feeling like worry stands just to J.D.'s left? Because For Whom, the little bastard has kept repeating, intoning, for two solid days and nights, while he and a J.D. who believes in the personal touch have driven back and forth, outlasting their cars, shuttling folks to the revel site, finally reduced to DeHaven's own souped-up hoodlummy car, the clown who loves to drive, drives with just one wrist hooked over the wheel in that way J.D. hates, that look-how-little-I-care way, back and forth, father and son, personally touching, meeting, greeting, orienting, shuttling impressed and eager alumni to Collision, Ill., a decent little hike, on roads rural and dangerous, plus ugly; and the shit-speck, for reasons J.D. cares about even less than he understands, he kept repeating it, For Whom, over and over, West and then back East, useless to scream at the kid to shut up, today J.D. needs a sullen Ronald like a kidney stone. For Whom, intoned, toneless, zom-bily stoned; and the little For Whom jingle — J.D. Steelritter has an ear nonpareil for jingles — has stuck and sunk through that sleep-deprived ear and is there, rattling, unfindable~penny-in-drier-like, in the head of J.D. Steelritter, a head that is fine, perfectly round, freckled of brow, scimitarred of nose, generous and wet of lower lip, quick to center on anything oral. DeHaven, who knows zero from any plans or big pictures, has worked the jingled line in there, an angry bee in J.D.'s bonnet; it's now detached from his harlequin son and plays without cease in a held, high-C idiot note, the note of a test pattern, a test of Emergency Broadcast Systems, the whine of no real sleep for maybe five days, a whiny question, from an ego in tweeds, a question the smug old avant-gardist had clearly asked just so he could right away answer it, the most irritating-type question, self-conscious, rhetorical, a waste of resources and time.. and J.D. tells most folks don't waste his time, just start the fucking show.