I started this story 23 July 2001, finished it shortly thereafter, and sent it to Esquire. I figured, since the story was trivial and sort of stupid, that it would be right up their alley. A few short weeks later, I got the story back with a note that said that they, whoever "they" are, thought the title was pretty funny, but that they were taking a pass. That note is one of the most fucked up rejection letters I've ever gotten. Apparently, on that story, I did my best work on the first ten words that I wrote; it was all downhill from there.

    

"At some point, you just have to take a stand against Oxy-10," Mike declared to his wife, Katie, while looking in the mirror at the tiny pimples that had sprung up on only the left side of his face. He said this to Katie after he had complained about being thirty and still getting the occasional pimple and she responded, sitting in bed and reading student essays on "Whitman and Democracy" for the American Lit class she taught at the junior college, that he should pick up some astringent and Oxy-10 on the way home from work. Mike straightened his tie, looked sadly at his balding head, went to the bed and kissed his wife, spent five minutes looking for his keys before finding them under another stack of student essays, these for a class on Contemporary American Film Comedy.
    He drove his light-blue Celica to work, wondering why only the left side of his face. Maybe it was because that side was exposed to the sun as he drove to work each morning. This seemed reasonable, so he tried to lean away a little bit from the driver's-side window so his entire face would be in shadow. Mike didn't know, but this made the woman in the Camry behind him nervous. She thought he was fiddling with his CD player or reaching into his glove compartment, or doing something else. It didn't matter what. What mattered to her was that he was distracted and, thus, an unsafe driver. She gave him a few seconds to straighten up, and, when he didn't, she lightly tapped her horn once. When this got no results, she tapped it again.
    Mike was starting to wonder if all this leaning would eventually be bad for his spine and he'd have to eventually see a chiropractor or a back specialist. Now he wondered if his health insurance would cover this type of self-induced "spine trauma" and how much would his deductible be and would he have to make some type of co-payment every time he went to see his doctor, who he was imagining now as being around sixty and kind and understanding, if a bit on the heavy side. But, what could you expect of a dedicated doctor who worked long hours because he cared? When would he have time to lift weights or run? But, what if his "back guy," as Mike now thought of him, was his age or younger? That, he couldn't take. He'd rather be "a side-leaning cripple" all his life than suffer that embarrassment.
    This time, the woman put all her weight on her horn. Mike looked around him to see who was being honked at and why. Distracted now, he nearly drove his car through an intersection before he stomped on his brakes and came to a skidding halt, the back end sliding out toward the left. Ha! the woman thought, He is an unsafe driver! Thus validated, she would go through her day at the Madison Housing Authority telling everybody, making more of a nuisance of herself than usual, the story of the Unsafe Driver and how she had seen him almost kill a "bunch of people" when he sped through an intersection against a red light.

    Almost at work, he thought that maybe he was sleeping on his left side too much and the skin on the left side of his face was not breathing enough because it was against the pillow all night, or the pillow was abrading and irritating his skin. He would try to sleep on his right side tonight, but that would mean having to sleep facing Katie, and she was a crowder in bed, sliding over a little bit at a time until she was spooning him and he was nearly falling off of the bed. They would end up breathing steam into each other's faces, and that would be both uncomfortable—affecting both of their sleeps adversely—and probably not too good for the skin either. Or was steam healthy for the skin? Didn't they do "facial steaming" at your finer beauty parlors?
    No, he decided, they'd have to switch sides. Sure, at first there might be some physical awkwardness in bed and nights of fitful sleep as they acclimated to their new nighttime positions. He decided that they might have to "do it" every night for a while so that they'll both be good and tired and more able to sleep. He realized this might strain his endurance, as they were long past the seven-nights-a-week part of their relationship, which had lasted approximately a week-and-a-half, but, hey, they were both writing twenty-page seminar papers and teaching expository writing for the first time. They had just started grad school when Mike, coming to class late, sat down next to Katie in their creative writing workshop. After three weeks of sitting next to her, he, to his own amazement, asked her if she "wanted to get pizza, or something" after class, and, to his further amazement, she had said yes. They married at the end of following summer. At the ceremony, her mother said to his mother, "They're going to end up living in either your basement or mine." He would have to look back a few years to remember more than once a week. When was the last time we'd done it during the day? Mike wondered, pulling into a parking space at work.

    Mike worked in advertising at Kuka & Kercheval, the only job his Master's Degree in English had been able to get him. He felt that he had been betrayed by literature somehow, that he had given himself to it for "nearly eight goddamn years," and all it did for him, besides filling him with an existential dread that never quite went away, was leave him "over-educated, under-skilled, nearly unemployable, and having to figure out how to market motherfucking cat food with '10 percent more horse meat.'" Mike was pretty sure that his soul was leaking out of him a little bit at a time, but how to stop the leaking?
    Katie, who graduated at the same time and with the same degree, had managed to at least find part-time work teaching two sections of junior college basic composition right out of school. Mike had also applied for part-time work at that same junior college, but he couldn't even get an interview. She had done such a good job that first semester that the dean had called her into his office and offered her a tenure-track position for the following academic year. When Katie told Mike the news that evening, he burst out crying, but not for the reason that Katie believed, because of his boundless joy for her, but because this news made him feel like more of a loser than usual.
    Katie, though, was supportive of Mike in that way that people are when they know you've train-wrecked your life. Every time he complained about having to come up with new ways to make universal remote controls seem essential to living a complete and healthy and modern life, she held his hands in her lap and nodded sympathetically. Every time he said he was being stripped of all that made him "good" and "whole" and "human" and being built up as "this asshole stooge" of capitalism, she took him out for ice cream.

    When Mike got to work, there was a pink Post-it stuck in the middle of his monitor, telling him to go see Aaron, the creative director at Kuka & Kercheval, when he got in. Mike walked to Aaron's office, trying to remember if he'd missed a deadline or said something inappropriate during a creative meeting.

    Mike recalled a meeting from a few months before. That time, the Post-it had been blue. Mike had walked into Aaron's office and stood, waiting to be told to sit. "Look," Aaron said, not telling Mike to sit, pushing a file across to him, "you need to punch this up, to make it exciting, to make people want to replace their air-conditioning pads at least once a year like they're supposed to. Nobody gets this line. This line won't move shit."
    Mike's line had been, "So you won't be all sweaty," and it had pleased no one. He changed it to a rhetorical question, "Really, who wants to sweat?" but that had only made Aaron frown. Finally, he handed in, "Super AirCool Filters: for a longer-lasting and better-working air-conditioning unit," and, finally, Aaron smiled and Mike wondered what would happen if he banged his head repeatedly against Aaron's desk.

    Mike thought of stopping to get a Pepsi, but decided that, if he was in trouble, it was impossible to look responsible and hardworking with a can of soda in your hand. When he knocked on Aaron's open door, Aaron, a phone pressed to his ear, looked up at him and said, "This line isn't gonna work."
    "What's wrong with the line?" Mike asked, walking toward a chair, "I think it's pretty funny." Mike waited to be told to sit down. Aaron kept him standing before barely pointing his chin at a chair. Mike sat down, hiding his feet.
    Aaron hung up the phone and took his time looking at the ad that was going to run eventually—if they could get the copy right, which was Mike's job—in lawn and garden and women's magazines. There was a photograph of a rolling, unbelievably green yard with a white, nondescript, contemporary-style mansion in the upper right fifth, and, in the lower third a new type of sprinkler head that used two-thirds the water of a regular sprinkler head but covered a third more area, or that was "twice as efficient as other sprinklers," as the proud president of SuperSprinkler Incorporated had said—fondling a prototype in such a way as to make the less worldly people in the room blush—during their introductory meeting two months ago. Next to the polished brass sprinkler was Mike's tag line, "It Wets Grass."
    "It Wets Grass?" Aaron asked, shaking his head emphatically no. "What the hell is that? How is that going to sell sprinklers, and, specifically, this sprinkler, which we are being paid a lot of money to sell?" Mike doubted seriously that anything having to do with selling sprinklers would ever involve "a lot of money," but he wisely kept that to himself.
    "See, we're copping to the fact that it's just a sprinkler, not a cure for Ebola", Mike said, leaning forward in his chair, hoping that that leaning forward would convey his belief in and commitment to that line.
    "Ebola? What?"
    Mike squeezed his eyes tight. "How about: It beats standing out there with a hose?"
    Aaron closed his eyes for a second and took a deep "control breath"—as he'd been trained to do in a "Communicating With Your Employees" workshop for middle-managers that Kuka, of Kuka & Kercheval, had sent him to, even though Aaron had thought I'm more like Upper-Middle-Management—but it didn't help. "That's the same thing! Damn it, Mike, c'mon!" he nearly shouted, but successfully stopped himself from throwing the ad at Mike.
    "Okay, Aaron, how about," Mike said, rubbing his forehead, thinking there's less hair today than yesterday, "Sprinklers: nobody really gives a fuck, but these are pretty good?"
    Aaron leaned back in his chair and smirked. "You really are worthless. How can anybody suck so badly at this? It's so fucking easy."
    Mike was humiliated, but not by what Aaron had said. He tried not to, but it was happening now, how people sometimes look back at their lives and see how empty and "fucking pathetic" they've been, see where things could have been changed, with a little more effort or luck, see where opportunities had been wasted or not even seen. I published a story in a pretty good journal once, he thought, even though nobody, and especially not any agents, had seemed to notice or care, and now I'm trying to make buying a goddamn sprinkler head the goddamn highlight of somebody's goddamn week. I have let myself down. I have dishonored myself. He recognized the last part as his having read too much Russian fiction, but it was true.
    Mike stood up and thought of dramatically flipping over Aaron's desk and walking out, but he decided that that would be too dramatic. Mike thought he could walk to his desk and, quietly and with great dignity, put all of his stuff in a box while Aaron followed and asked what he was doing, got no response, slowly realized what Mike intended, and then pleaded for him to stay, Mike continuing to be quiet and dignified until, with profound gravitas, he walked to his car. But Mike knew Aaron wouldn't even care if he spontaneously-combusted while sitting in that uncomfortable chair; Aaron would just order a new uncomfortable chair. Mike just left everything behind and walked to his car before realizing that his keys were back on his desk. He walked in then quickly out again, this time for good.