Chapter 37\ If you cannot beat them, join them

Massoud had his own set habits, which all at the agency seemed to accept and respect. He loved to eat fish, so his select fishmonger came to the Homsi building every Thursday, carrying in on his flat straw basket the catch of the previous night. The basket was kept with Razzouk, the owner of the building’s canteen, under the stairs by the ground-floor entrance, while Khodor carried his select fish up to Massoud’s office on newspaper via the back entrance to the traffic department. All seemed perfectly normal with this arrangement until one day, when Darwish was in a boardroom meeting with a visiting Rothmans client, the door was suddenly opened by Khodor, who walked in with his select fish spread over two hands, much to the shock of the client.

Having very recently become a married man and knowing that my wife loved eating fish, I quickly joined the exclusive fish-buying club of Darwish Massoud and began ordering the same type of fish that the connoisseur fancied. The cleaned fish that I bought were kept in Razzouk’s fridge until the end of the day, when I collected them on my way to Aley. At the beginning, Razzouk grudgingly accepted to store my fish parcel because he thought he would be doing Massoud a favor. However, after I had forgotten to pick up my parcel before leaving the building a couple of times, Razzouk realized that he could be a very happy man carrying fresh fish to his family every Thursday night. More important was the fact that, after the Cyprus experience, Massoud became my best supporter within the Intermarkets management team.

A second pillar of the original MEMAS team was the agency’s creative director, Gabriel Brenas. Brenas was a Frenchman who had come to Lebanon as station manager with Air France. His daughter, Vivian, married Erwin Guerrovich, and he ended up joining his son-in-law’s advertising agency. Gabriel Brenas was tall and bald and, at his age, looked more energetic and youthful than all the members of the agency team. His office was up the spiral staircase at the end of the long corridor, and he only came down whenever he was called to meet his father-in-law and agency boss. Brenas was married to a Lebanese woman and understood Arabic fully. However, at the office he pretended to understand and speak French only, which posed a major challenge for non-French speakers like me. My other concern with our new creative director was the fact that, after many years of our co-existence at the same office, he never seemed to remember my name.

Gabriel Brenas had a son who was also the agency’s in-house photographer. Alain had beaten my Cutty Sark “Moon Walk” ad for the top honor in Magazine’s “Best Advertising Photograph” competition, but we quickly became the closest of friends in the post-merger scenario. On weekends, Alain and I jointly toured the Lebanese mountains, taking close photography of flowers and insects. We also searched for old village houses to photograph before they were demolished.

Amongst the MEMAS account management team, we were introduced to Salim Sednaoui, the son of the Egyptian pasha. At the agency, Salim’s portfolio included Unilever, Gillette, and Beecham, all of which were brands distributed by KFF. As the client servicing people were sharing rooms, Salim’s office mate requested a move to a different room, as Salim brought along a pain-au-lait sandwich every morning, which he nibbled at from morning until the end of play. Every time he took a bite, he unwrapped the aluminum foil, which made such a disturbing noise in the calm room, and the same routine was repeated when the sandwich was wrapped. Although he was known to lose his temper and shout at his clients, Salim was a very pleasant team member, particularly when we all went out for a drink at the end of the working week.

Another Egyptian who had settled in Lebanon and worked at MEMAS was Raymond Accad, who was at least 15 years our senior in age. Raymond was the cigarettes expert as he handled the Rothmans account, but he also handled Dewar’s, Remy Martin and, funny enough, Johnson & Johnson.

Of the same Egyptian Lebanese background was Raymond Nader, MEMAS’s administrative manager, who was an expert at getting us licenses for clients’  promotions and suppliers for routine and odd jobs. Raymond, from the day we walked into the Homsi building office, had been in dialogue with the French Embassy trying to establish a legal link with an aunt of his who had emigrated to France and had acquired French citizenship. After many years, and at the peak of the Lebanese Civil War, Raymond and his family were granted French citizenship and moved to Nice, where they all settled.

A guided tour of the new office we had moved to would not be complete without an introduction to Razzouk, as his canteen supplied the entire building with coffee, tea, and refreshments. The man was short, chubby, and bald and was always dressed in a sky-blue loose Saharian-style jacket and white tennis shoes. When he was not doing his delivery rounds, he received his orders via the building’s intercom and had a computer in his head that recorded all the tenants’ orders and made sure that every penny was collected before the end of the week. As newcomers, we wondered how Razzouk managed to deliver every person their exact order. But one day, when a large group of us were meeting in the boardroom, Razzouk walked in carrying a tray that had a jumbo coffee pot and many cups.

We stopped our internal meeting to allow him to complete his delivery. Loudly, he asked who had ordered their Turkish coffee with no sugar, and he poured the coffee and served it. Then he asked in the same tone, who had ordered medium sweet coffee. He took the pot by its handle and swirled it, then he served. Finally, when he got to the sweet coffee order, he swirled and swirled the pot with the sugar, which had sunk to the bottom to dissolve amongst the liquid. Then he served it and swiftly vanished like Casper the Friendly Ghost.