Thinking back about Carmela Feb. 5, 1986

  

Carmela was a stumpy woman straight out of a 1930s situation comedy, who looked and acted old, but was not old, that supporting utterly dependable character the rich people in such flicks always depended on to make things run smoothly.

She wore old lady’s dresses and old lady’s perfume, and during the first years that I worked for Cosmetics Plus, she sat outside Donald’s office like a guard dog. She fiercely defended his privacy, if only in the nicest way.

She drove a Baracuta, the envy of all the workers in the warehouse complex, who grumbled about such a fine machine being wasted on such a character such as she. As with everything else, she drove it like an old lady might, and only to get to work or to drive her sister somewhere.

While Donald boasted about being a self-made man, it was Carmela he depended on, until later, when he expanded and bolstered his image as a modern businessman by bringing on younger, more modern women to as part of the secretarial staff, leaving Carmela as something of an outdated model, dependable yes, but hardly hip.

She was moody even back in the old warehouse, a condition some claimed was the result of “that time of month.”

Most assumed she was still a virgin, an old maid from birth, and later when the warehouse expanded, some cruel members of the staff offered $100 to any guy brave enough to take her virginity.

There were no takers, even among the well-meaning, because she had a put-off air that would only let a person get so close, but no closer.

She reminded me of a petrified aunt, a large nose, deep set back black eyes, a dark complexion. She was short and perched like a bird behind her desk, utterly efficient, but not someone to inspire even the most remote sense of tenderness.

Jokingly, people said she walked like a duck and talked like a goose, and quacked when upset, her head and shoulders moving side to side.

Sometimes, when I came upon her unawares, I found her starting off into space, her expression filled with intense loneliness, which vanished the moment she became aware of me.

She lived with her sister somewhere in West Caldwell in a garden apartment, and constantly complained about her mostly male neighbors who constantly parked in her parking spot, especially in winter after a snow storm.

She and her sister were twins; I never met her sister.

Carmela spoke of her sister as if an echo, a mirror image of herself. She spoke of her often, but it was as if she kept her sister in a drawer, putting her back when not needed.

Nobody seemed to know much about Carmela’s parents, or what made these two sisters cling to each other the way they did. I always got the feeling she felt as if her parents were always looking over her shoulder.

Donald didn’t seem to care much about where she came from, only glad he had her when he did, and always jumped when she asked him for something.

When she complained later at the new office about the increased work load, Donald went and hired an army of young women to help her.

None of them ever met with Carmela’s approve, and eventually, she became more and more isolated as they flocked together, often ignoring her.

 

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Bad habits die hard Jan. 12, 1986

When Donald fired me in May 1978, I walked out of his office in utter shock, drove down Route 46, only to realize I still had the keys to the warehouse and had to go back, marching back into the reception area with a much dignity as I could muster, dumping them on Carmela’s desk, then in a huff, turned around and walked right back out.

I was then still under the illusion I was in the right, though I also feared Donald would have the police show up at my house to recover the keys or to accuse me of ripping him off in the middle of the night.

Now, all these years later, I do not believe any such event would have occurred.

But I remember riding away from the office the second time how empty and lost I felt.

I had worked for Donald for four years and this for good or bad gave me some sense of purpose. Without the job, I had only an apartment, but no real identity. I had become so focused on hating Donald; I had had no thought of anything else.

Fortunately, my meeting with John Telson earlier had set up my new job at Wine Imports, which turned out to be a whole different experience entirely, and a whole new set of characters that included Louie the Bottle Man, Cowboy the Truck Loader, Cosmos the Drug addict, John Telson the alcoholic, Dan the Supervisor, and, not least, Roger the owner’s son, and many others whose names escape me.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and by the end of that year, I managed to get myself fired from that job, too, and largely for doing the same thing I had done with Donald.

Roger apparently had paid off the shop steward to allow the company to violate some of the union rules, and while most of the others were too scared to do anything but bitch, I wrote a letter to the head of the union, Tony Pro, the man most famous for authorizing the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.

Panic ensued at the wine company as the shot steward held an emergency meeting in the break room to find out which son of a bitch had written the letter. Since I wasn’t yet in the union, I stood outside staring in through the dirty glass as the sweating faces. Roger was in the room with them, and both he and the shop steward made each man sign a form saying he had not contacted Tony Pro.

The only one who refused to sign the form was John Telson, nor did he rat me out, knowing perfectly well that I had.

Later, he came out to the parking lot with me.

“I always thought you were a trouble maker,” he said. “Now I understand you’re what’s left of the 1960s.”

A few days later, Roger met me at the door to the warehouse and told me the company would not need my services any more. Roger had clearly spoken with Donald, and put two and two together about who wrote the letter to Tony Pro.

He looked scared. Apparently, the shop steward had disappeared aka Jimmy Hoffa.

This time I didn’t feel the same sense of shame as I eventually did with Donald, I knew I had done the right thing.

The next day I applied for unemployment.

A few years later, I ran into Cowboy in Allendale, who informed me Wine Imports had closed it doors for good, the whole gang scattered to the wind.

John Telson had taken off for California with his wife, only run into me on River Drive while I was jogging, telling me how his whole life had changed, but he still considered me his friend.

 

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Bringing down the business? Jan. 11, 1986

  

I said yesterday that Michele was my motivation for turning against my boss in 1978, which is only partly true.

She became an excuse to do so.

After four years working for the cosmetic company, the job had worn badly on me.

While our boss, Donald, was kind of employees at times, he was also an elitist, keeping himself distant from us, and encouraging Stanley is supervisor to do the same.

Donald seemed to like the idea of being rich. And like many people who earned their way to wealth (even though his father was a successful advertising man in the 1950s), Donald tended to hide more and more behind Stanley.

But it was largely office politics that ruined the place for me.

John Telson, who had come before the 1975 Christmas season, began to play spy and special envoy for Donald through most of 1977 and has – as he admitted later once while drunk – plotted to take my spot as supervisor, when Stanley finally got promoted.

Two important revelations came to mind. The first was the fact that competition for the higher-level jobs scared the shit out of me. The second revelation was that I didn’t really see the promotion as important, even though I was supposedly destined to take Stanley’s place behind the big window that overlooked the warehouse.

Stanley had very little power as was proven when I became the manager of the night shift during the 1977 Christmas season, and Stanley felt threatened by how well I did.

This suggested that once he rose up to the next level, Stanley would become even more controlling than Donald had been.

Much to my shame later, I felt threatened by John and harassed him until he quit his full-time position in May 1977 – although he came back part time during the 1977 Christmas season.

It is ironic when I knew my time with Donald was coming to an end, I arranged to have dinner with John on a Friday night in May 1978 and he arranged for me to get hired at his new place of employment.

The letters I had sent to all of the manufacturers were a ticking bomb which I knew would lead to me getting fired. I’d hoped to quit first.

The following Monday, Donald called me into his office, confronted me with one of these letters and asked who had written it, and when I said I didn’t know, he pulled out copies of my fictional stories and said the type face matched.

He fired me on the spot.

A month earlier, he had issued me a warning after he had overheard me talking to one of the other employees about their moving on – I did not see a future in the warehouse for any of us.

Donald suspected I might be trying to unionize the workers against him, an idea he absolutely hated. While he could do nothing about outside forces possibly trying to do something like this, he would not tolerate betrayal from someone like me who he basically had treated well over the years.

The fact that I had no such unionizing plans never came up on our conversation.

I guess he saw my letter writing as part of this effort, rather than simply an act of revenge for Michele and perhaps the whole spying by John.

Fortunately, my letters did not destroy his business because I later regrated the whole act and would have had to have lived with the guilt.

I vaguely wondered if I had succeeded, Donald might have reached out to some of his brother’s mafia friends, a brief if paranoid thought.

As it turns out, my actions appeared to have no effect, and later, Donald would expand his business even further.

Life went on inside the cosmetic warehouse as if I had not existed.

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More about the other Michele Jan. 10, 1986

  

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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Two women named Michele Jan. 9, 1986

  

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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