Some of the people who moved from HIMA, including Raymond Hanna, Nahi Ghorayeb, Melhem and Kamal Moussallem, as well as Hilda Jabbour, felt themselves to be a small minority in the MEMAS/SOLIP ocean. Raymond Hanna built a fence around himself, his PA and his two brothers-in-law, Melhem and Kamal, in his own section of the office, where he continued to scribble ad layouts for the clients he had always looked after. These he passed to Gabriel Brenas, who briefed the studio team to use the same formats he had been exposed to at the advertising college he had graduated from in the US. He even prepared his own media plans, which he passed to Sami Chlala, who bought the media and the specific pages he selected.
I leveraged my developing relationship with Nahi Ghorayeb and my recent Pan Am involvement to widen my circle and learn more. I also attempted to win new friends by participating in the other teams’ social gatherings, such as coffee and lunch breaks, as well as weekend gatherings.
The increased workload at Intermarkets necessitated the hiring of additional staff. The newcomers, as always, needed to make friends. I jumped on the opportunity and offered to become a guide to whoever felt lonely and helped them to assimilate into the new work environment. To my good fortune, one of the early recruits came from my hometown, Aley. Tony Aad was almost my age and lived close to my house. Tony joined the media department at Intermarkets as a TV media buyer, assisting Sami Chlala, for whom the additional workload and the unconventional work style proved to be a tiring challenge. Tony was jolly, loud, and quick at making friends, so he took the timid and extremely peaceful media department by storm.
Elie Jouaneh in the accounts department was suffering the same way as Sami Chlala, so a street-smart assistant was hired from one of the Muslim-Sunni families of Ras Beirut. Ziad Idriss rocked the homogeneous fabric of the agency. Quickly Tony and Ziad clicked and overnight they became the closest of friends. The silence of the MEMAS office was shattered many times every day by this duo’s jokes and laughter, particularly since they were operating at the two extreme ends of the office, so their jokes were shared across the long corridor.
Tony, like me, used to commute every day from Aley, passing through Kehaleh and Jamhour, where the Abou Khalil Brothers Butchery was located. The Aad family were regular patrons of this butchery and Tony was a very close friend of Pierre, the younger brother. So, it was not surprising that a couple of months after he started working at Intermarkets, Tony arrived at the agency with a mischievous look on his face and walked to Ziad’s desk, where the two of them engaged in a murmuring argument, which did not seem to end. The two then walked into my room and seemed to be happy when they discovered my roommate, Melhem Moussallem, was not at his desk. Tony was the first to speak excitedly. He said that while driving down to the office he had seen the Abou Khalil brothers raising the carcass of a lamb they had just slaughtered on the hooks at the entrance of the butchery. The sight was so appetizing, since the heart, liver and lungs seemed to still show signs of life, which was proof of their freshness. Tony stopped and paid for the whole innards and asked Pierre to cut it to grill size by the time he returned. Ziad then interjected, explaining that Tony was trying to convince him to skip the office and go back with him to Aley so they could enjoy a barbecue in the mountains. Ziad wanted my advice on the matter since I had a longer experience with the strict disciplines at Intermarkets. To everybody’s surprise, I immediately cleared my desk and turned to both, saying: “Let’s go!”
When we got to Kehaleh, we discovered that Pierre had arranged the cut cubes of each of the lamb’s organs, such as the heart, liver, spleen, and lungs, separately and had neatly wrapped them in nylon bags. The charcoal bag was there, too, as well as the grill, skewers, and fresh bread. Next to these was the icebox that contained cold bottles of water, ice cubes, mint leaves, onions, and small tomatoes. All of these were quickly loaded into Tony’s car and off we drove to the hilltop referred to as Peak 888, which overlooked Aley. By the time the charcoal had been lit and the meat put on skewers, a whole gang of Tony’s friends arrived, and the barbecue party was joyfully underway. Luckily all of this happened on a Friday, so by the time we returned to the office on Monday, Nahi Ghorayeb and Elie Jouaneh had forgotten about the absence of Ziad and me. Only Sami Chlala, whose interrogation of Tony was strictly reported to the HR manager and Erwin Guerrovich, was suspicious.
The Lebanese Civil War erupted in April 1975. The Intermarkets office was situated in an area that later became known as the “partition line” – the street that separated Christian East Beirut from the Muslim West. Many of the staff had to risk their lives crossing the partition line to get to the office because of a surge in the number of snipers who fired at anything that moved across Rue de Damas. Ramsay Najjar, one of the agency’s account directors, had his windshield shattered by a bullet while driving through Rue Monot. The windshield held together but he couldn’t see what was in front of his car. It was only Ramsay’s familiarity with the winding alleys that helped him miraculously drive to the office before he almost fainted. Another near casualty of the war around the Intermarkets office building was Mahmoud Nahas, a member of the agency’s traffic department, who lived in the Basta area of Beirut and had to make this dangerous crossing daily. One day Mahmoud stayed late, well after the exchange of fire between the two warring parties had reached an early crescendo. When Mahmoud felt the firing had slowed down, he tried to step outside the building and, just as he was getting ready to dash for the crossing, the bullets started flying like crazy again. Mahmoud threw himself onto the roof of the public toilet facing the entrance of the Homsi building and stayed there for the whole night.
Tony Aad had the habit of offering Christmas presents to all the juniors who worked with him, rushing advertising material to the various TV stations. That year, Tony gave each people on his Christmas list a Lebanese National Lottery ticket. The grand prize was 50,000 Lebanese pounds, which was a real fortune back then. On New Year’s Eve, the draw was conducted on Lebanon’s National TV and the winning number belonged to the ticket Tony had given Mahmoud Nahas. This changed the life of the dedicated employee, who had slipped under the radar of the entire agency, except that of Tony, who was a friend to all.
Many Lebanese were uprooted from their hometowns during the ugly civil war. Tony Aad left Aley and moved to a village called Kfour in the Christian heartland. Ziad Idriss, on the other hand, kept commuting across the partition line to Ras Beirut, where he had always lived. One day, the fighting was extremely bad, so Ziad decided to look for a hotel for the night near the agency. Ziad thought Tony could help him book a safe hotel and in his usual hospitable nature, Tony insisted on Ziad accompanying him and staying at his home in Kfour, claiming that this was the safest and most entertaining solution. After the expected resistance, Ziad accepted and joined Tony on the drive to Kfour. The journey was spent exchanging scary stories about the horrors of the civil war and the many people who had been tortured because they had been stopped by religious fighters.
Finally, Tony stopped in front of a four-story apartment building, where he started honking the horn of his car repeatedly, as if it was an emergency. When Tony’s neighbors dashed to their balconies to see the reason behind all this noise, Tony opened the sunroof of his Audi and started calling on parents to bring their kids down to see the Muslim creature.