The Quarter-Life Priest, and Other Crises
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The Quarter-Life Priest, and Other Crises: Stories by Billy Hallal Table Of Contents 1. Ignition, or The Great American Four Loko 2. The Quarter-Life Priest 3. Catch Them All 4. The Sexual History of Mother Theresa 5. Harram Ignition, or The Great American Four Loko Novella When I was eighteen and still deciding about college, my cousin Madison imparted wisdom that proved more concise or potent than anything I’d learn the in next four years of studying marketing: “Everything,” he told me, “is an ad.” This was late in 2003, when Madison and his father had returned to Ohio for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and our conversation came at the end of a day when Madison, my cool cousin, older by six years, had been sneaking me rum and cokes—or maybe it was spiked eggnog—since five PM. It was one of those drunk conversations you have in abundance when you are eighteen and stupid, and yet they seem to stick with you. Despite the triple threat of war in Iraq, terrorism, and torture, I remember the early 2000s as one of the best times of my life, probably because I never watched the news. “Advertising’s a two-in-one,” Madison went on. Once he started on a monologue like this, he couldn’t be stopped. He’d gone to work for a New York ad agency almost as soon as he got out of college on a connection, I’m sure now, from his dad, my Uncle Jerry. “It’s the ultimate two-in-one.” It’s hard to imagine now, but just about all you needed to get a good job then was a bachelor’s degree. That was in a time before Recessionomics, when we still thought the worst thing that could happen to the markets was the dot-com bust-9/11 double team. Of course, the makings for the coming crisis had already been set in motion—houses bought with bad credit, foolish investments rated as secure—but the economy would kindly wait to go to shit until the month after I graduated college. He went on: “You make a hole—hey, my life is incomplete—and then you offer your product to fill up the whole. It’s the disease and the cure wrapped together.” He grinned, as he often did, at his own cleverness. “And all in thirty seconds or less.” Up until that point, at my mother’s urgings, I had quietly been considering going to Kenyon or Otterbein or one of the other liberal arts schools we had visited at the urgings of my mother, an English professor at local Capitol, “just in case.” But that night Madison was able to convince me, as was his gift, to follow in his footsteps. Not long after that night, I decided, to my mother’s ill-disguised disappointment, to attend that temple of football and debauchery, Ohio State. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be like Madison (though that was almost always part of it). It was that he had opened my eyes to the world of ads around me. It was as though I had been unplugged from the Matrix and, for the first time, could read the code, like I could see all my strings and how they were pulled. But I didn’t want to join the resistance. I wanted to become part of the machinery. That’s how I ended up graduating in 2008 with a major in marketing and, as Mom said with no little resentment, “a minor in drinking.” Had economic events gone differently that year, I may never have had to go to my cousin for a job, and I may never have helped Madison make a name for the most infamous drink of the decade. That year I graduated with an internship, unpaid, but promising, with advertising giant McCann- Erikson in New York City. My internship lasted through the summer, and then ran into the economic shitstorm that was the financial collapse of 2008. I remember sitting in the corner cubicle I hoped would someday become my office when the collapse in motion for years, finally became impossible to ignore. I was looking at sports statistics insteadof the marketing research I should have been doing when Trevor Bender, one of my fellow interns, rushed in. “Miles, did you hear about this shit?” he said. “Fannie Mae is about to go under.” I gave the response any well-educated student of marketing would have: “Who the fuck is Frannie Mae?” “Not who, what.” Trevor was bent over my keyboard, pushing up his glasses and bringing up news sites on my screen. There were five of us interns that summer, and he was easily the odd man out. He was a finance major among marketing majors, and he regarded what the rest of us thought as a fun summer job with unnatural seriousness. “They’re a bond safeties firm, and they have billions of dollars of government securities tied in.” “So that’s bad for the government then,” I said, not coming close to understanding the gravity of the situation. “It’s bad for everyone,” he said. “More banks than just Bear-Stearns will collapse. People will get dicked over. We could get dicked over.” “Relax, man,” I said. “We’ve got another few weeks here. We’re going to be fine.” I was under the impression that if we put in the bare minimum amount of effort, we were all but guaranteed job placement. How wrong I was. How naive. The following morning I picked up a copy of the Post getting on the subway and realized that Trevor had, if anything, downplayed the significance of events. The headlines all but predicted a financial apocalypse. I arrived at our office in midtown Manhattan and commiserated with my fellow interns. “We’re screwed,” Trevor kept saying, “completely screwed. No way they hire us now.” “Why not?” asked Bryan Reznik. Bryan had a wrestler’s build that made most people reluctant to disagree with him. But he could be funny, and he was my favorite among the interns. We had been talking about co-signing for an apartment in Brooklyn as soon as we were hired. “It’s not our fault everything went to shit.” “Yeah, it was Bush’s fault,” said Brent Radnor, a kid with a dyed-blond hair and douchey manner that complemented his name. “Sure, if you read the New York Times,” said Bryan, getting heated. “Clinton signed off on sub- prime mortgages and now we’re in this mess.” I was amused by Bryan’s heartland conservatism, how if he saw anything in the country’s most widely-read newspaper, it would only convince him further it was untrue. With a build like his, it was hard to argue with him. “Guys,” I said, “we’re getting distracted here.” Being a libertarian—which I viewed as a nice political cover for apathy—I didn’t have a dog in the fight, though I had always had grudging respect for Clinton’s college-kid cockiness. When I voted, it was Republican, but not for the family values or anything like that—it was more to piss my parents off than anything else. “We’re going to be fine,” I told them. “We’ve got our feet in the door. We already work here.” “We don’t get paid for what we do,” said Trevor. “We’re basically slave labor. They use us the rest of the summer and just kick us out.” “I think you’re overreacting,” I said. “The internship lasts what, one more week? They’ll talk to us about job placement before the week is over. You’ll see.” I thought I was being the voice of reason, but no one at McCann had spoken to me about a job when the last Friday in August, the last scheduled day of the internship, arrived. In fact, the real McCann employees had been speaking to us less and less, giving more directives through e-mail, and I was pretty sure I’d seen a couple of them glancing towards our corner of the office and laughing. I should have taken it as a bad sign, but I ignored it. That last Friday, though, a burly man from HR with the syntax of a robot came carrying five cardboard boxes. He placed the boxes down in our section. “Thank you for your service to McCann,” he said. “We have no current job openings, but you’re welcome to stay on unpaid until a position is available.” No one said anything. “How long might that be?” asked Trevor. “We will be suspending all hirings for an indefinite period of time.” The five of us packed, barely saying a word to each other. We all felt we’d received a too-early taste of the bitter disappointments of adulthood. It wasn’t even in the right order: we got fired before we got hired. I didn’t know what else to do but return to Bexley, where my parents were making all kinds of discoveries about the new state of their 401K and retirement plans. I returned home to a kitchen table constantly covered in bank statements, my father squinting at them through his reading glasses. “How much have we lost today, Kate?” he’d ask. Dad was only acting as financial figurehead in this time of crisis—we all knew Mom was in charge. Dad, called the Absentminded Professor at our house, was too scatterbrained to pay his credit card bill on time, let alone run the house financially.