The rest is ad history.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW SOME OF J.D. STEELRITTER'S
MOST POWERFUL AND LEGENDARY PUBLIC-RELATIONS
CREATIONS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN A SLIGHT
TRANSFIGURATION OF WHAT REALLY JUST GOES ON
AROUND HIS OWN ROSE FARM'S FARMHOUSE
One fine winter morning, years back, J.D. Steelritter was getting ready to go off to work at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex, just across the snowy, greenhouse-dotted fields and intersection from home. But anyway he's heading for the door, and little DeHaven, home from sixth grade (his second shot at it) with one of those mysterious feverless colds that just cry out to be nipped in the bud — he tells J.D., in complete innocence, the innocence of a child before a television, to have a nice day. The rest, as they say.
HOW, EVEN THOUGH J.D. STEELRITTER AND RONALD
MCDONALD ARE BEARING DOWN, FULLY INTENDING
SIMPLY TO MEET, GREET, FORGIVE ALL DISRUPTIONS OF
SCHEDULE, AND SHUTTLE THE AWAITED ALUMNI WESTWARD,
TOM STERNBERG THREATENS, TO THE IMMEASURABLE
CHAGRIN OF EVERYONE INVOLVED, TO DELAY EVEN
FURTHER AN AT-LAST DEPARTURE FROM THEIR AIRPORT
ARRIVAL AND A HOPEFULLY QUICK TRIP TO COLLISION,
ILLINOIS, AND THE STILL-ON-IMPATIENT-HOLD FULFILLMENT
OF THE PROMISE OF REUNION AND PAYOFF
Sternberg sees brown natives paddling against the final episode's tide of closing credits, listing all who've ever appeared. He sees Mark in deep conversation with a guy who looks a hell of a lot like Sternberg's personal idea of what Jesus Christ in real life probably looked like, while D.L. stands on one foot and then the other, green and diffident and unsmiling. Sternberg's crotch is still very wet, and now warm, and just not comfortable at all. He sees Mark's bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who'd voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It's like planting and watering a breadstick. It's perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what's clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn't taste all that hot, either. And there's still a piece stuck with the intransigence of the flimsy between two molars.
Except, after he'd washed the thing down with a Jolt and a grimace, he suddenly felt like he could go expel what he needed to expel. He was still afraid, but it was as if the level scale that had held his desire to evacuate and his fear of discovered embodiment in a mutual and paralytic suspension had been not so much tilted as just yanked out from under consideration. He was still very afraid; but, post-rose, the fear had seemed somehow very tangent to his desire to go. His need to have gone. He feels empty, better. And gets cocky, as the empty will sometimes get.
Basically what happens now is that he tries but utterly fucks up Mark's trick with the target arrow. He'd seen Mark do it a couple times, a nonchalant and perfect bar trick, the fucker. Sternberg, maybe barely even consciously, has always wanted to do a nonchalant bar trick, the kind involving spoons and eggs, glasses in pyramids, knives and spread hands, syringes and dip. And here's his fag and his cola and ashtray and the flowers, fried, and the arrow, extended over the table's edge. And before he even knows it the arrow's aloft. By his hand.
The thing is that the esoteric arrow-in-table trick requires that the overhung nock be knocked upward, from below, so that the arrow goes forward and up and down into the table before the nonchalant trickster. But however Sternberg, maybe out of ignorance, or pride, whacks the arrow's overhang from above: hence its parabolic transmission backward, over his shoulder and ass-over-teakettle into the air behind him, only to hit the thickly anomalous window of the indoor lounge, rebound, and land javelinlike in the pear compote of the effete, narrow-faced, corduroyed pesticide salesman who's wangled a tête-à-tête with the blonde orange-faced flight-attendant who served him on his commuter flight from Peoria and who'd let slip, en route, while making change from the coin-cartridge at her belt, that she had to stick around C.I. Airport after descent, waiting for a ride of some sort, and whom the pesticide salesman wants very much to ball, age- and face-color-considerations temporarily on hold, because things haven't been going well for the pesticide salesman, lately, at all, given that this year's generation of corn pests seems to have developed a genetic immunity to — worse, more like an epicurean taste for—his company's particular line of pesticides, cornfields soaked in this pesticide now sought out by the most discriminating-palated pests, who have been observed under research-laboratory magnification using their little legs and mandibles actually to spread the stuff with the even care of marmalade on a leaf or kernel before digging in, a horror, the pesticide company's best hope for salvaging the fiscal year now being to take a suggestion from their marketer at J.D. Steelritter Advertising and pitch the stuff as a pest-distractant, new brand name Pest-Aside, to be sprayed on unfilled or infertile fields as a red pickled herring to divert and so prevent entomological inroads into the more verdant and condiment-free cornfields; but it's a bit late in the game for this ploy to do more than cover some losses, and the pesticide salesman is angst-ridden and red-eyed and effetely low on self-esteem, and wants very much to ball this ageless but oddly sexy orange-faced stewardess, as further coverage against estimable losses. The stewardess is brittlely blond, her face orange, though stained port near the temple. She owns luggage that can be pulled instead of carried. Her name is Magda, with the g being silent and the a accordingly diphthongulated into something like the i in "child" or "lie."
And but so the narrow-faced pestidor, poised over his compote, reacts to the sudden and quivering and doubtless low-on-his-list-of-expected-appearances appearance of the big wicked Dexter target arrow with a shocked spasm that sends Magda the flight attendant's morning brandy straight into her lap.
"What the hell is that?" Sternberg hears the salesman cry behind him, and winces a why-him wince.
"Oh, gee," cries Magda, instantly up — trying, as the spilled-upon try, somehow to back away from her own clothes. Sternberg, who like most people of his generation tries to brush eye-averted and shoulder-first past whatever disorder he causes, and also not anxious to confront anybody right now, what with an ominously dark gabardine crotch — and seeing, right that very minute, a polka-dotted and loose-limbed Ronald McDonald come galumphing up to deposit a butt in the Avis ashtray and a golden-arched nametag to both D.L. and Mark Nechtr, the latter declining to be tagged and directing the attention of clown, Avis lady, guy who looks like Jesus, and holy shit J.D. Steelritter himself toward the lounge, toward him, Tom Sternberg — tries to brush shoulder-first past the little disorder Mark's arrow has caused. However, the understandably pissed-off pesticide man, compote punctured and love-object brandy-stained, arrests Sternberg's flight with a wedding-banded hand and aims an isoceles system of nose-pores at Tom's good eye.