Extra Absorbent

Models: Consecutive Substack Story 1137

Photo by Harsh Gupta on Unsplash

The slide of the Dexins Towel campaign was on the large monitor behind Zumflem’s desk.

Ted Zumflem looked up and said “Is that an umlaut on the model’s pectoral, Jackie?”

Jackie Erland had considered sitting down in one of the chairs in her boss’s office.

She opted to stand.

“Yes Ted, that’s an umlaut and, for clarity, it’s not a human model, it’s a PeepGrip 3.9 rendering of what a male human torso looks like.”

“With an umlaut on the pectoral? I don’t need to remind you that Image Portal 5 is strictly for transferring finished campaign files. I mean, basic protocol, first week stuff. No one authorized an umlaut.”

Jackie smiled, though it might have sold as a grimace because she was holding back a sardonic laugh. Also her butt itched, but she thought relieving the itch with her hand might give Zumflem a cheap thrill and she would rather sublimate the itch.

“I roto’ed out the umlaut and PeepGrip 3.9 ran with the command as clearing the entire torso. Nipples, hair, the whole works. So our towel model, image, rendering, whatever looked more like a Ken doll than what would pass for a human.”

Zumflem tossed a ping pong ball Jackie hadn’t seen in his hand at a small brass sculpture of a wakeboarder that sprayed cool mist on Zumflem during creative team meetings.

He had spent an entire meeting once explaining how his masseuse found it for him in Berlin.

Zumflem tried to clear his throat, a maneuver that always felt awkward, like he hadn’t yet settled on a smooth way to stall for time.

“Okay, yeah, PG three niner can be a bit presumptuous, but what is the umlaut doing there in the first place?”

Zumflem bent and picked up the ping pong ball.

Jackie scratched her butt while he was distracted and sat down in chairs that were designed to look like bean bag chairs but weren’t.

“Vorömstein is the parent company of Dexins,” Jackie said, and Zumflems’ eyes flared with fury. Of course he knew that.

“As they are predominantly known for shirts and jackets with the “röm” logo on the breast pocket, Klaus Vorömstein mandated that umlauts always appear because he was tired of the brand being anglicized. He thinks anything American is tacky, and frankly–”

Zumflem stood, holding up his hand like a crossing guard, but a crossing guard that also wanted a bag of meth.

“Ok, right, yeah, branding, I get it, know it, it’s my life. Why the fuck does it appear in a PeepGrip 3.9 program for a different MMMMM…”

Zumflem was gonna say motherfucking and Jackie felt her pulse quicken. There was an office pool to get Zumflem to say motherfucking, because it always hilariously came out muckerfothing, then he corrected himself to a smooth,Queens English version of the maternal profanity. It was pure guerilla office theater.

“....MMMMMeeerlot slurping product!!??!!”

Merlot slurping? That was new, and frankly disappointing.

“ULTRALARgE, the parent company of GenGenGen that created PeepGrip,” Jackie explained, “ is owned by Henrik, the 24 year-old tech-prodigy lover of Klaus Vorömstein.” Jackie’s butt itched again.

Zumflem ran his hand over his hair plugs all the way back to his capybara hair ponytail extension.

“A 24 year old owns ULTRALARgE?” Zumflem blubbered.”How do I get that gig?”

“Well Ted,” Jackie said, slightly squirming, “ the obvious answer is that you have passionate, deeply committed sex with a 92 year old German textile billionaire, but that’s conjecture. The couple might belong to Ziggy Winestadt’s Abstention Cold Plunge cult for all I know.”

Zumflem started to put his ping pong ball in his mouth, stopped, put it in the breast pocket of his röm velour pullover, pulled out a drawer from his desk and snorted a line of freeze-dried nicotine gum. He offered the straw to Jackie, who declined.

“PeepGrip does this to all torsos?”

Jackie nodded.

“Male and Female?”

“You mean with protruding breasts and without?” Jackie asked.

“Yes,” Zumflem said.

“Yes. If it has nipples it gets umlauts. The program won’t deviate.”

“So,” Zumflem said, a bit of a drain gag clouding his speech, “how do we rid ourselves of the umlaut on the pectoral without violating our contract with PeepGrip?”

“I have a synapse stretcher, Ted. You can suspend me for it, but please don’t terminate me. How about I walk into Central Park and find three unemployed models bumming Venmo donations for Bichon Frisé grooming and take pictures of them shirtless. Then we let PeepGrip 3.9 add the new Dexins Towel?”

Zumflem’s eyes widened and his lower lip quivered. As if on cue his brass wakeboarder sent out a puff of cool mist. He did a mini bask for a second or two before returning to his disgust.

“A human model? The engineers at GenGenGen will be so disappointed their hard work has been reduced to digital terrycloth.”

Jackie stood. Without permission she pulled open Ted Zumflem’s freeze-dried nicotine gum drawer. She snorted a line and realized she had only seen Central Park on a website.

***