The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Eleven: A Brush With Confidence

Laura’s father worked for Nestle, which owned Juicy Juice, and he figured that I would be a perfect spokesman for Juicy Juice for whatever reason. They had designed an ad campaign around this ten year-old named Iggy, and the tagline was “Picky Iggy Only Drinks the Juiciest!” but Iggy was killed in a car wreck so they needed to find a new Iggy. They were really attached to the tagline, so they didn’t want to change it to Chris or anything like that. They explained all this to me in a meeting at Juicy Juice company headquarters in Stamford, and it was right then that I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

You see, they envisioned this huge nationwide campaign. My face would be on billboards and commercials and they wanted me to do a couple of radio spots and on and on and on until I felt queasy. I wasn’t ready to become Picky Iggy, and that’s pretty much what would happen as soon as the campaign started rolling. Imagine being recognized on the street as Picky Iggy. It made me sick. I thought I had to do something to get out of it, but I was coming up blank. They had already given us the check and my dad had already installed the pool in the backyard. The deal was done, and I was Picky Iggy.

I tried to find a way out of the contract, but it seemed pretty air-tight to me, and I was no legal professional anyway. The papers were signed, the airtime was bought, the whole thing had been planned out and I didn’t see any clauses that gave me any kind of leverage. I had missed my opportunity to get out of it, so I reverted to the last thing I could imagine might help, so I started sulking around the house not speaking to anyone, hoping my parents would notice and take pity on me and call the people up and tell them I couldn’t do the juice commercial. I knew they couldn’t do anything about it, of course, even if I fantasized that they would so anything within their power to call the whole thing off when they saw I didn’t want to do it, but I figured their pity would be refreshing, even if I didn’t get my escape. I got neither, of course, and I was forced to settle with the consolation of my mother’s constant nagging about my bad moods.

After two months of this, it was time to become an advertising star. My mother was at a conference in New York so my dad drove me to Stamford in silence but for the quiet sports radio that was playing through the car’s back speakers. I pretended to sleep, even though it was the afternoon. I briefly considered jumping out of the car somewhere out on the highway, and I probably would have done it if I had come up with a plan for what to do with myself after that. I couldn’t survive on my own even under the optimal conditions. It was the middle of the summer and it was one of the hottest weeks on record in Connecticut. Just two days earlier I had passed out on the front lawn from heat exhaustion on my way to the mailbox.

We pulled up in front of the office and my dad dropped me off at the curb. The understanding was that he was to drop me off and head home, and that Laura’s father was going to drive me home after the shoot, since he was working there that day. I stepped out of the car and looked back at my dad without closing the door with a pathetic look on my face. I think I was probably giving him one last chance to tell me to forget it and get back in the car so he could bring me home, but he knew better than to take the bait. Instead, he spoke.

“You’re better than this,” he said. “This would be degrading for anyone with the wrong attitude. But all you’ve got to do is remember that you’re better than this, take their money and never stop thinking ‘Fuck you, I’m better than you’ every time one of these clowns tries to look you in the eyes.” I smiled and closed the door and he drove off.

My dad was right, I thought. Take their money and run, that was the smart way to handle this. The first thing I was going to do, I decided, was take $10,000 of it and blow it on a wide assortment of Tropicana products. I couldn’t wait to see my face everywhere, pushing their shitty juice, so that I could laugh with everyone I knew about how I took these rubes for a ride and never looked back. Did I mention how much money they were paying me? Laura’s dad had been vague about it, but we negotiated the price up to two million dollars. Two million! What did I have to sulk about? I was laughing as I walked up to the receptionist and told her I was here to make some money. She directed me to the company’s makeshift studios on the sixth floor and I strutted away, feeling pretty damn good about myself.

The studio was only a couple of cameras (for photos and video) in front of a blue screen with some old lights held up by gray pipes. I was met at the door by the brilliant creative mind behind the spots, a chubby woman named Elizabeth Parker. Her day job was in human resources, but there had been a company-wide contest to pick the best campaign, ostensibly to tap into the creativity of Juicy Juice’s employees, but probably just to save some money on an ad firm. So they could spend it on me, apparently. I didn’t really understand the logic, and I still don’t. But anyway, she was very excited about this Picky Iggy nonsense, even though it made her a little sad because the original Iggy, now dead, had been her son.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” she said, shaking my hand without stopping. “I’ve heard so much about you,” and then she must have just remembered that she was holding my hand because she dropped it and tried to look a little embarrassed. “Come right in over here,” she said, and I could see from a mile away that I was a hundred times better than this woman could ever hope to be. I gave her a little smirk and asked her if I had a dressing room.

“No, I’m afraid we don’t have one set up for you,” she said. I shrugged, like I was too generous to let the lack of a dressing room at a complete zero of an institution like this get to me. “But this here is Heather,” she said, waving at a woman of twenty or twenty-five standing in the corner with a clipboard, who suddenly lit up and walked over when she heard her name, “and she’s here to get you anything you need.”

I sized Heather up. She gave me a wide smile that suggested that she was sincerely excited to be on the set of a real commercial, so I realized that I was much better than her in that respect, but she was also pretty stunning, so I thought I might be able to work a little magic on her and turn her into someone worth my time by the end of the day. I thought of her as a little project. I asked her for a Coke, and after Elizabeth handed her a couple dollar bills, she sped off to go to the machine down the hall.

The director, whose credentials included ads for Newington Electric and Crazy Bruce’s Liquor (both pretty big deals in the local advertising scene), told me to stand on the X on the floor so they could take some pictures for print publications first. I took off my windbreaker and sauntered over to the mark, picked up a big jug of the stuff we were selling (which, for some reason, isn’t sold in plastic containers like other juices, but in a giant tin can) and gave the guy my best shit-eating, “I’m better than you,” grin.

The guy snapped one picture and then looked up from the camera like he had just noticed something, which he had. The shirt I was wearing was exactly the same bright blue as the backdrop. He explained that when he went in later to the digital imaging program he would use to make the ad, he would replace that color with a tranquil outdoor autumn scene, but if my shirt was that color, then it would look like I was a floating head with a couple of disembodied arms. I thought this might look kind of cool, but they didn’t go for it and told me I would have to find something else to wear. The windbreaker wouldn’t do, they told me, because, well, it was ugly. I wore the thing because I was pretty superstitious and I had believed for a while that it had been giving me good luck ever since I found my headphones in the windbreaker’s front pocket, even though I don’t remember ever putting them in there and I don’t think I ever even used that front pocket. So anyway, Elizabeth sent someone out to try to find something else for me to wear. She looked worried because she didn’t think there were any adults that wore children’s clothes. She didn’t say this, but I could tell she was thinking it. I reminded myself that I was better than everyone here.

Heather came back with my Coke, which I just then realized that I had ordered despite the fact that I didn’t really like Coke. At the time, Sprite was pretty much the only thing I drank. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I just figured Sprite was very childish, and Coke was halfway between Sprite and coffee, which I didn’t drink. Anyway, she brought the Coke up to me and asked me if there was anything else I wanted her to get for me, and I said “why don’t you take off those pants of yours.”

Everyone was shocked, naturally, because I had said it very loud, so that everyone in the room could hear. The look on her face was something else. I saw it and immediately I was sorry. You do some pretty stupid things when you have more confidence than you know what to do with. First, everything just drained out of her face—the color, but the muscles too, like they just melted into the skin. Then she opened her mouth. She looked like someone had just told her that her mother had died. I felt so sorry. Then she hit me right in the stomach and I crumpled onto the floor. This made me pretty angry, later, when the shame went away. Because who hits someone in the stomach? A slap in the face, that’s what you expect. That I can deal with. This was something much worse, because she didn’t want to embarrass me, but she really wanted to hurt me, and she knew she could do it, too.

Before I could stand under my own power, Elizabeth was pushing me out of the room. Heather was crying with her hands over her face and the director was comforting her. He was stroking her back, the hypocritical fuck. I mean, I’m not going to argue that what I did was terrible, but this guy probably got into her pants. Or at least he was taking a shot and who the hell knows, it might have worked. But I could gather from Elizabeth’s yammering that I had lost my job just then. She left me in the lobby. She was crying, I guess because now she had lost two Iggys. Or maybe what I did was just that bad, and it was, so who knows why she was crying.

Going back upstairs and asking Laura’s dad for a ride back to Burlington was clearly out of the question, so I just started walking away from the building. Bunch of idiots, I told myself, but I didn’t believe it anymore, so I fell back into the comfortable routine of self-hatred that I had been developing my whole life. I pretty much had it down by this point. By the early stages of adolescence, I could self-hate with the best of them.

I remembered passing a bus station somewhere just off the highway, so I looked for that for a while. I asked a couple people for directions, but nobody seemed to know. I finally found the place at 6:30. By now I would have been home. The closest stop to my place was in Hartford, so I bought a ticket and hopped on the bus that had just pulled in to the station. Finally, a little luck, I thought. It wasn’t until we were driving through Danbury that I remembered I would have to figure out a way to get home from Hartford.

We pulled into the capitol and debussed just as the sun was setting. I tried my house with the pay phone at the station, but nobody answered. I left a message and listened to my last quarter clank onto a pile of change in the bottom of the phone. I had bills, but I never thought that I could get more change. All I would have done was try the same number over and over again anyway. I got on a bench under the shady, dusty patio and I was just angry. Not at myself, anymore, and not at anyone else, but I was just angry. There was an apple on the ground. It had rolled off of a fruit stand that was inside the bus station, for some reason. “Fresh Connecticut Fruit,” the sign said, and I couldn’t imagine the place made much of a profit, since there were only two or three other people in the station who weren’t either me or vagrants. The guy was making a go of it, though, so I shouldn’t make fun of him.

I picked up the fruit and I sort of dug into it with my nails. I stood up and I got a good grip around the thing and I whipped it as hard as I could down the terminal, with an odd kind of sidearm motion. It went a lot farther than I expected and it splattered on the back of some old guy’s head. It had been pretty soft, and the explosion was something else. There was juice and seeds and apple flesh everywhere. I almost ran, but then I figured I didn’t care what this old guy would do to me, so I just stood there. He shook the cobwebs out of his head—I’m a little surprised he wasn’t unconscious, actually—and he started stalking down the platform to yell at me, I guess. I sat down because whatever he would do to me, I decided, I would deserve.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asked. He was kind of wheezing. I wondered if he had grandkids. Even though I hadn’t really injured him, it was still kind of a shitty thing to do to hit a grandfather in the head with an apple. I apologized, and I really meant it. I almost started crying, from everything, but I held it in. But this only seemed to make the old guy angrier. “What do you think it says about your personality that you say you’re sorry more than anyone else you know?” he asked me. And then he turned around without waiting for an answer and sat down where he had been sitting before.

I guess the guy just took an educated guess and figured the kind of kid who goes around whipping apples at people outside of bus stations would be the kind of kid who did all kinds of other stupid things that necessitated apologies as well. And boy, I guess he was right. I couldn’t believe how right he was, there at the bus stop. I thought of all the times I’d had to apologize, to other people and to myself, as far back as my memory would allow. It was quite a list. I won’t go over the whole list again. I could go on all night, though.

Anyway, a man walked over to me and told me to follow him into the station, and I figured whoever this guy was and whatever he was planning on doing to me, I would deserve it. So I followed him in and he told me he had seen my form and he was impressed. I asked him what he meant and he told me he was talking about my pitching arm.

“What high school do you play for, kid?” I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Baseball, baseball,” so I told him that I hadn’t played Little League in years. He was kind of stunned, I could tell. “You’ve got some talent. I’ve seen a lot of things—” and then he trailed off and ran over to the fruit stand. He bought every apple they had, and even threw in another $20 for the basket. The fruit-seller, you could tell it was the best day of his life. He probably hadn’t sold that much fruit in a year.

The guy introduced himself as Bertrand, which turned out to be his last name. He said he was a pro scout and he thought I had some potential. “Here’s the rubber” he said, marking a mark on the cement with a rock. “You stand here and pitch these apples to me,” as he took his position at the other end of the station. He got down into a catcher’s crouch and made a little target of himself. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

I took a couple deep breaths and concentrated real hard, then threw the thing as hard as I could. I didn’t make it all the way to the guy. “Don’t throw it overhand,” he told me. “You were throwing sidearm before, do you remember that?” I nodded. I could already picture myself on the mound at a real Major League ballpark. I kicked at the line that signified the rubber like I was digging into the dirt. I must have looked like a real tool. I threw one at him sidearm, and the thing exploded on his hand, up into his face. But he was clearly very happy about it, brushing the juice and the seeds off his glasses and cheeks. “Again,” he said. And we went on like this for a while until I had throw every apple in the basket at him. He told me to put a little pressure on one side with my pointer finger and suddenly I was throwing a slider. The thing had a ridiculous break; the guy was practically falling down out of his crouch trying to catch up to the fruit. He couldn’t stop laughing, which made me laugh, and all of sudden I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Should we do it again?” I asked. I loved it. But he shook his head and said that was enough for one day; he didn’t want to wear my arm out. We trotted out to one another and met halfway between my fake rubber and his fake plate and he patted my arm, softly, like the kind of thing someone would do to their old comfortable recliner.

“That sinker of yours,” he said, shaking his head. I hadn’t even known that I had been throwing a sinker, but apparently I had and it was incredible.

“I’m not tired,” I told him. The way he looked at me, I could tell he didn’t want to do it. He had a dynamite pitching prospect here in this Hartford bus station, and if I had blown my arm out in there, he never would have been able to forgive himself. But he must have been thinking about the way the apples whizzed through the air, and the way they dived and slashed through the air right before they got to where the batter would have been standing. When a person spends his whole life examining one thing, and then when he finds someone who does it exactly as it should be done, with all the beauty and perfection he has missed in everyone else who’s done it before, it’s hard to deprive yourself of that. So we collected all the apples that hadn’t been destroyed and put them all back in the basket and I took my spot and we started over again.

Meanwhile, my mother had finally gotten my message at about ten that night and found me and Bertrand in the bus station, playing catch with apples under a couple old yellow streetlights. I signed a minor league contract the next day.