I spoke about my second Michele yesterday neglecting to
mention that the boss was not the only person at the cosmetic warehouse to
abuse her.
Michele, who had come to work in the outlet section sometime
in 1977, was born and raised in primarily white neighborhood in Caldwell,
spoiled a bit by successful white parents. If she actually knew a black person
personally, it was someone from one of the more successful Essex County
families who were a white and white people.
Like many suburban girls, Michele had an imaginary
perception of other black people, either as villains or victims of society.
This did not alter much when she finally met “real” black
people when she attended William Paterson College – a school that had a
significant population of underprivileged students from places like Paterson.
Even then, the blacks she met were not the hard-core street
people, but those struggling to make their way up in the system, aided by
Affirmative Action, Pell and other grants geared towards providing blacks with
an equal opportunity.
As a dancer, however, she got a chance to work with dance
programs at Passaic County Community College, located in the heart of Paterson,
where she met blacks and Latinos alien to her hometown of Caldwell. But even
had this not been the case, she was part of the school’s artist community which
gravitated to the dying and discredited Marxist culture, spouting old social
justice slogans from the 1960s most students on campus didn’t want to hear –
although in New York’s Cooper Union recently, the Marxists plotted their
return, and I suspect she might well have leaped into the renewed movement with
both feet.
As school, she hung out with black students, dating black
men, and, in fact, was romantically involved with a black man when she came to
work in the outlet, something that did not sit well with many of the white
warehouse workers who grumbled about it, and not always out of earshot.
These same workers, knowing of my attraction to Michele,
mocked me for coming in second to a black man. And for the first time in many
years, I heard a number of horrible black jokes resurrected. I didn’t argue the
point. I wanted Michele to give up her boyfriend, not because he was black, but
because I wanted her, too.
She seemed as confused as I was, and during those times when
I drove her home, she seemed to linger on the edge of inviting me inside, where
I might take her into my arms.
I got to hold her only once, and this after a dispute over
my picking up lunch from a local eatery and her failing to call the order in,
so I got stuck waiting out my whole lunch break for the chef to make it up. I
yelled at her; and then saw how hurt she looked and immediately regretted it,
wrapping my arms around her small frame as I told her how sorry I was.
It occurred to me then just how easy it was for strong
people to abuse weak people, power over others that startled me, one of the
rare moments of enlightenment I would get again later when I worked for Two
Guys in Garfield.
This led directly to my trying to destroy the company since
what I had done to Michele was nothing compared to what the owner was doing to
her on a daily basis, keeping her cooped up in the computer room where he
verbally abused her to underperforming a task she’d not been hired to do in the
first place, which she did not want to do, but needed to do in order to keep
her job.
She became an emotional wreck.
Then one day, she called in sick, unable to take the abuse.
She didn’t come in that Friday or on the Saturday to deal with programming
orders.
The owner fired her. Later when she tried to collect
unemployment, he argued she had been a horrible employee, routinely coming in
late (which was not true). Unemployment initially rejected her claim. She was
unable to pay rent and got evicted.
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