Three Hundred and Twelve Coils

by Ra Uru Hu, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I am going to tell you where the line came from, and I am not going to ask you to believe me. I mean that. Belief has nothing to do with it. I will give you what happened, in order, and you can do with it what the people in Peterborough did.

It was ten past four in the morning, the eleventh of December, 1975. I know the time because the radiator in my apartment on Côte-Saint-Luc Road knocked at four and at ten past, like a man with a hammer in the basement who did two rounds a night and then went home. I was awake for the second round. I was lying on my back, which is not how I sleep, and I had the line.

Not part of it. The whole thing, in order, with the full stops where they belonged.

Don't believe us. Sleep on it for a year. Your back will tell you.

I got up and there was nothing to write on but a Steinberg's receipt on the kitchen table. Milk, eggs, a box of Shreddies, sixty-nine cents for the Shreddies. I wrote the line across the back of it in ballpoint, and the pen skipped on the y of year, so I went over the y twice. Then I went back to bed and slept until eight like a man who has been paid.

You have to understand what I was then. I was a copywriter at Hollis Doane Advertising, fourth floor, Sherbrooke Street West, thirty-one years old, eleven thousand dollars a year. I wrote radio for car dealers and headlines for a frozen-pea company. I was good. I was very good. I could make a line land, and I knew how I did it, and I could tell you the rules, and none of that had anything to do with what happened at ten past four.

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The account was Laurentide Bedding, a family firm out of Saint-Jérôme, which had made mattresses in Quebec since 1931 and wanted to sell them in Ontario before Sealy and Simmons had eaten everything west of the Ottawa River. The agency had been working on it for three weeks. I had been working on it for three weeks. On my desk under the Selectric there was a yellow pad with forty-one lines on it and a pencil stroke through every one of them.

I want you to remember that pad. I am going to come back to it.

Bernie Stirmer was creative director. He was a big soft man who wore cardigans to client meetings on purpose, so the clients would think the agency did not need them. At nine-thirty I put the Steinberg's receipt on his blotter, face up, the milk and the eggs and the Shreddies down against the leather.

He read it. He read it again. He turned it over and read Shreddies .69 and turned it back.

"When'd you write this?"

"Four this morning."

"You were up at four working on Laurentide."

"I was up at four," I said. "I wasn't working on anything. I was asleep. Then I had it."

Bernie looked at me over his glasses. He had been in the business since radio serials, and he had heard every story a copywriter tells about himself.

"Nobody wakes up with a line, Norman. You wrote this at your desk on Tuesday and you don't remember."

"I didn't write it on Tuesday."

"Then you wrote it in your sleep, and your sleep works for Hollis Doane, and so do you." He put the receipt in his top drawer. "It's good. It's very good. It's also going to get us thrown out of Saint-Jérôme. You're telling the customer not to believe the client."

"I'm telling the customer not to believe anybody. That's why they'll believe it."

He opened the drawer, looked at the receipt again, and shut it.

"The year," he said. "What happens in the year?"

That was the question. That was the whole question, and I did not have the answer, because the line had not come with one. The line only said a year. It said it as if a year were already arranged.

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Armand Gauthier came in from Saint-Jérôme on the fifteenth, in a brown suit and a car coat with the snow still on the shoulders, and he did not take the coat off for the whole meeting. He was sixty or near it. His father had started the firm with a bench, two stitching machines and a coil-winder bought used from a plant in Lowell, Massachusetts. Gauthier had grown up in the factory. When he shook your hand you could feel where the wire had been.

We had the line on a board, hand-lettered, white on navy. Gordie Pearson, the account man, had wanted it on the last board, after four safe ones, so the client would be tired and grateful when it came. Bernie had put it first. Bernie was right.

Gauthier read it in English and then Gordie read him the French we had worked up: Ne nous croyez pas. Dormez dessus un an. Votre dos vous le dira. Gauthier sat without moving. Then he said, in English, "Who wrote this?"

Gordie looked at Bernie. Bernie looked at me.

"I did," I said. Then, because he was still looking at me, "It came to me at four in the morning. I wrote it on a grocery receipt."

I expected him to laugh. Clients like that story. It sounds like inspiration, and inspiration sounds expensive.

He did not laugh. He nodded, slowly, as if I had told him a coil gauge.

"Then it is not a promise from you," he said. "It is a promise from me. You can wake up at four with anything. I have to make it true." He tapped the board with one finger, on a year. "A man sleeps on it one year and his back says no. What then?"

"Then he brings it back," I said.

Gordie closed his eyes.

"And I give him his money."

"Yes."

"All the money."

"Yes. Otherwise it's just a line."

Gauthier took a pen from his inside pocket, an old black Waterman, and turned the board's cover sheet over and began to write figures on the back of it. Nobody stopped him. That cover sheet had cost the studio forty minutes.

"The double is a hundred and forty-nine fifty at the store," he said while he wrote. "At the factory it costs me fifty-eight. The store takes its piece. If he brings it back, the store will not take it. The store gives him his money and sends me the bill and sends me the mattress, and I pay the truck both ways. And the mattress that comes back —" he looked up — "you know the law about bedding?"

We did not.

"A mattress someone has slept on, I cannot sell as new. Never. It must go out with a tag, used material, and nobody in Ontario or anywhere else buys a mattress with that tag. So it comes back and it is dead. I pull out the coils for scrap and the ticking goes in the furnace." He drew a line under his figures. "Every one that comes back is a hundred and forty-nine fifty and a truck, gone."

"How many would come back?" Bernie said.

"I don't know." Gauthier put the pen away. "Nobody knows. Nobody has asked the customer before. Everybody says, our mattress is the best, believe us. Your man says don't believe us. So now we have to find out."

He stood. He still had not taken the coat off.

"One city," he said. "Not all Ontario. One city first. If it kills me in one city, it only kills me a little."

---

The city was Peterborough. If you were in the business then, you know why. Peterborough was the test market of Canada, ninety miles north-east of Toronto, sixty thousand people, one daily paper, one television station, and demographics so close to the national average that half the new products in the country were tried there before anyone in Toronto saw them. Peterborough ate the new cereals first. Peterborough smoked the new cigarettes first. Peterborough had seen everything, and it was not impressed by anything, and that was exactly what made it useful.

We bought thirty-second spots on CHEX-TV and a quarter-page in the Examiner twice a week, from the first of March 1976 until the end of the following February. Two furniture stores on George Street took the line, and one on Lansdowne. Laurentide put a card in every mattress bag, printed in Saint-Jérôme on stiff buff stock: the date of sale, the store, the customer's name, and a space at the bottom headed If your back says no, tell us why.

That card was Gauthier's idea, not mine. I want to be clear about that. I only wrote the words. The card was where it would be tested.

The television spot was almost nothing. A man in pyjamas lies down on a bare mattress in an empty room. He lies there. You watch him lie there for twenty seconds, which on television is a very long time, long enough to feel embarrassed for him. Nobody says a word. Then he turns on his side. Then the super comes up, white on navy, and the announcer reads it once, flat, no music: Don't believe us. Sleep on it for a year. Your back will tell you. Laurentide. That was the spot. The man in the pyjamas was the director's brother-in-law, and he was paid union scale to lie down.

Bernie hated it for a week and then loved it for the rest of his life.

---

Now the yellow pad.

In June, when the first sales figures were in and the agency had begun to walk around me the way you walk around a man who has had luck, I cleared my desk for a new account. I found the pad under the Selectric where I had left it. Forty-one lines, forty-one pencil strokes. I read down the list to see what I had been thinking before the eleventh of December, and I stopped at the nineteenth.

Sleep on it.

That was all. Two words and a full stop, in my own hand, with the stroke through it and, in the margin, in the same pencil: too flat.

I sat there with the pad on my knees for a long time.

You see the difficulty. I'll give it to you straight, the way I would give it to a client. If I tell you the line was given to me, whole, at ten past four, I am telling you the truth as I lived it: I was asleep and then I had it, and I had not made it, I had received it, the way you receive a telephone call. And if I tell you that a copywriter who had spent three weeks on a mattress account, who had already written Sleep on it on a Tuesday and struck it out for being flat, went to bed with the job still turning in him and woke with the job finished, I am also telling you the truth. Both of them fit the evidence. There is exactly one witness, and it is me. And I was, professionally, a man who made things sound as if they had arrived by themselves. That was my trade. That was what they paid me eleven thousand dollars a year for.

So I am the only one who could know, and I am the last one you should ask.

I did not tear the page out. I did not show it to Bernie. I put the pad in my bottom drawer, under the Laurentide proofs, and I began on the new account, which was a brand of motor oil.

---

The cards came back all year.

Not many. That was the first thing. In Peterborough in the twelve months to the end of February 1977, the three stores sold six hundred and forty Laurentide mattresses, which was four times what they had sold the year before. By the middle of March, twenty-three had come back.

Twenty-three. Gordie had them on a chart in the boardroom in red, and he talked about the twenty-three the way a general talks about casualties he could live with. Twenty-three times a hundred and forty-nine fifty and a truck, against six hundred and forty. The line had paid for itself in four months. By the spring of '77 it was running in Toronto and Hamilton and London, and in Quebec in the French, and I was a creative group head with my name on the door and a secretary called Denise, who kept my phone messages on a spike.

Gauthier asked me to come up to Saint-Jérôme and see the returns. He did not ask Gordie or Bernie. He asked me. I drove up the Laurentian Autoroute on a Saturday in March with the snow going grey along the shoulders and the heater in the Dart blowing on my feet only.

The factory was a long brick building by the Rivière du Nord, with a newer steel shed behind it. It smelled of hot glue and sisal and the oil on the machines. Saturday, so the line was down: the big coil-winder standing still with a half-finished unit on its bed, three hundred and twelve coils in a grid, each one a steel spring the height of my hand. Gauthier put his palm flat on it and pushed and let it come back.

"Three hundred and twelve," he said. "The big companies use fewer in the same size, and charge more. People think it is a matter of opinion, a mattress. It is not opinion. It is three hundred and twelve coils of thirteen-gauge wire, tempered, and the border rod, and the padding. You can count it."

"Then why did twenty-three come back?"

"That," he said, "is why you are here."

The returns were in the steel shed, against the back wall, still in their plastic, standing on edge like playing cards. Each one had its buff card stapled to the bag. Réjean, the foreman, had come in to unlock for us, and he stood by the door with his hands in his parka and did not come further, as if the twenty-three were something that had died.

Gauthier went along the row and pulled the cards off one at a time and handed them to me. He had read them all already. He wanted me to read them.

Too soft for me. Wife likes it.

My back said no. That was all, in capitals, from a man on Aylmer Street.

Too hard. Maybe I am just used to the old one. Sorry.

We moved to an apartment and it doesn't fit up the stairs. That one wasn't the back at all, and Laurentide had paid it anyway.

It was good for the first three months, then my shoulder.

My husband passed in October. I can't sleep on it now. Gauthier had paid that one too. He had written on the corner of the card in the Waterman: payé, 12 nov.

I read all twenty-three. Gauthier waited. When I had finished I gave him the cards back and he squared them against his thigh like a deck.

"You see?" he said.

I didn't. I said so.

"Six hundred and seventeen people, so far their back says yes. Twenty-three, their back said no. Nobody believed me. Nobody believed you. They lay down." He put the cards in his coat pocket. "Before, I tell them, three hundred and twelve coils, the best in Canada. It is true, and it means nothing to them. It is my number. Now it is their back. I am out of it. You are out of it. That is why it works."

"Monsieur Gauthier," I said. "About the line."

He waited.

"I'm not sure I wrote it."

I had not told anyone that. Not Bernie. Not my wife, who was not yet my wife then, who knew only about the Steinberg's receipt, which was framed by now and hung in the boardroom at Hollis Doane, milk and eggs and Shreddies behind glass, for the clients to look at.

Gauthier looked at me for a while in the cold of the shed. Then he shrugged, a very small shrug, the one Quebecers use for weather.

"I am not sure I make the mattresses," he said. "My father made the machine. The wire comes from Hamilton. The men make the mattresses. I sign the cheques." He nodded at the row of twenty-three. "And the backs decide. So."

He took out a Stanley knife and slit the plastic on the nearest of the returns, the one from Aylmer Street, MY BACK SAID NO, and peeled the bag down off it. It was a good mattress, blue-and-white ticking, the Laurentide label sewn on the border, not a mark on it. He tipped it down flat onto the concrete floor with a slap that echoed off the steel.

Then Armand Gauthier, sixty-one years old, in his car coat and his brown suit and his galoshes, lay down on it on his back, and folded his hands on his chest, and closed his eyes.

Réjean looked at me from the door. I looked at Réjean.

I did not say anything. There was nothing for me to say. I stood there in the shed with my hands in my pockets and the smell of glue and cold concrete, and I watched the man who counted his coils lie on the returned mattress and wait for his back to tell him, and it went on long enough that the heater in the office next door cut in, and ticked, and cut out again, and he still had not moved.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem nōnum Kalendās Octōbrēs (23 September 2026), ā Rā Uru Hū per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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