Two women named Michele had a huge influence on me in the
early days of 1978.
One was a regular patron of the band, Sleeper, and the Red
Baron club in Cedar Grove where the band played regularly.
Pauly had ill things to day about her, I was acutely
attracted, and could have gotten involved with her if she’d not scared the crap
out of me, especially during that party on New Year’s Eve when she came onto me
like a storm.
She had blond hair and always wore provocative clothing, on
that night, a silk blouse unbuttoned enough to show her cleavage, and thin
enough to show how little if anything she wore beneath it.
She usually had her pick of any of the musicians, but for
some reason, she picked me to seduce and I – in a fit of stupidity and panic –
rejected her and did so in a way that burned all future bridges between us,
slipping a somewhat judgmental poem into her purse as I fled the party.
A year and half later during the luxury of my unemployment,
a girl in a yellow Volkswagen frequently passed me during my jog along the
river in Garfield, beeping the horn at me and waving, with me finding out only
later it was her when she reappeared during a performance of the band I worked
for.
“You smiled at me,” she said. “You need to do more of that.
Not just at me, but at any girl.”
It was words of wisdom I’ll never forget.
The other Michele came about at my job in the Cosmetics
company, who equally attracted me but for totally different reasons, a dark
haired, small-boned girl who hoped to make her living as a professional dancer.
She became something symbolic, a focus of my dissatisfaction
with a job in which I felt trapped.
I should have quit the job, but privately stewed, hoping
some miracle would cause the company’s demise as the card company where I had
previously worked.
I actually planned for the company’s destruction in what the
owner would later call “Industrial Sabotage,” but I referred to as revenge over
how the owner had mistreated Michele.
I guess looking back it was a mixture of both.
I was still radical enough to believe in that phony 1960s
regurgitating of union propaganda about workers’ rights and power to the
people.
I disliked the fact that the job had become more mechanized
after moving into the new location, first with rolling conveyors and later
mechanical belts, a real scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie with me as a
hapless Charlie Chaplin.
This must have showed because the owner of the company
decided to offer the job as assistant warehouse manager to somebody else.
I was already primed when the boss started berating this
Michele, who he had hired as sales girl in his outlet, then graduated to
operate his brand-new computer, yelling at her over her inability to learn the
system fast enough or for the minor mistakes she made.
She put up with it because she figured she would sooner or
later move on to a career in dance and wouldn’t need the job.
Then, during one of the heavy floods noted for this neck of
the woods, Michele and her boyfriend got their car stranded in the parking lot
of Willowbook Mall and while pushing it to higher ground, she broke her ankle,
not a crippling injury, but one that destroyed any hope for her to become a
dancer.
Knowing she was trapped, the owner heaped on abuse,
eventually forcing her to quit, and then refusing to allow her to college unemployment
-- she getting it only because I testified at her hearing about the abuse that
had forced her to resign.
With her gone, I got angrier, and set about reporting on the
boss to all the companies he did business with, his business based on a
somewhat unethical practice of redistribution that most of the salesman turned
a blind eye to – but not their bosses. When my letters reached each company,
the sales people complained to my boss, and he fired me.
I never saw this Michele again.
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