The Man Who Liked Men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man

I've worked with just about every type of human currently on planet Earth (twice, thrice, and more than nice), as part of the exclusive media elite of New York, and I studied alongside them, too, as part of the intellectual elite who attend the world's finest schools, rife with the wealth, power, and privileges the children of the richest families so often have. It's given me a wide range of deviant behaviors to observe (and fight) that even the most hard-bitten city detective would have a tough time beating me on, and that's also part of the point: working through the highly competitive and very selective environments that are so difficult to gain access to, they bring on a severe case of "the crazies" for people who are not mentally equipped to work at that level. It causes "freak outs" in the most showily aggressive and publicly hostile ways, which are necessary for us to take action against.

Underneath the cover of work, there's even wild accusations of corporate espionage among employees, ones that quickly followed on the heels of my official apprenticeship, and that's part of it, too: knock out the really gifted folks who threaten anyone in "the game" who can't perform well without using deceit. When I broached the supposedly large gap that existed between the worlds of manufacturing and art, they called me a "spy" on both sides of the fence for being brilliant enough to work technically as well as artistically, which was in direct conflict with company practices at the time, because I was the first classically trained artist to work in both the production and design departments at St. Martin's Press, and the harassment didn't end.

I "sucked" at design because I didn't know computers like the highly experienced graphic designers who couldn't draw expertly like me and my friends who'd studied many art forms could do. When that didn't work, the lead art director laughingly mocked me for not knowing computers like he did as an expert his 30s (I was in my early 20s at the time), by making all of us take some personality test that was rigged for assigning the name "Marie" as that of some stuffy old secretary, because I came into the department as a manager who could perform many job functions, unlike the diva designers who plead ignorance to anything they didn't want to do.

Like any old scam appearing daily at offices for the disordered worldwide, I actually came out ahead of the game through my proficiency and humility to absorb any type of task that was needed for the job at hand, and that was part of the point about my apprenticeship, too: I can do anything better than you, even when I'm robbed of your clear advantages in some sort of fix or "double-cross". When trifling co-workers couldn't hack at me though the work flow, they re-doubled their efforts to con me into social situations disguised as those mandatory horrors known as "the office party", in desperate efforts to get me drunk and spill the beans, which I always did, because more than one wise person told me repeatedly that if you never lie, you have nothing to hide, and that's the truth.

But, that didn't stop 'em from firing hard at me over the years. One of the best cons was a bitchy Eurasian gay girl in disguise, working her typical "art fag" hairdo and expensive designer clothes for all it was worth by sleeping her way through the office staff, girls and boys alike. Oh, I staved her off at arm's length like I know how to do in my sleep, which took 'em awhile to sort out amongst themselves. The industry types in the know rigged a mandatory job requirement for me, making me work oversees with her as their lead production editor (untrained in German, on foreign-language computers with European power sources), because the openly gay woman from the U.S. design team was openly sick, and she constantly threatened discrimination lawsuits that they told me they were afraid of behind closed doors, even though the company had other "out" gay people working there.

It put me in direct line of this editor's abuses overseas in English, which was a new one for me, working as I did alone in a supposedly German-language-only design studio that's a classic isolationist technique for the chronic abuser seeking to attack. It was desperately done, but I knew the deal ahead of time, because it took me six months to find work, a long time for someone as experienced as me, but that's an economic downturn for you. On my first day of work, I saw the gay designer and her manager savage each other in the hallways by violently cursing at each other, after which I immediately called my father to report obvious workplace abuse. He told me I "had to" work there because there were no other jobs out there, and since it took me "so long" to find a job, I had no choice. He told me to "keep my head down, and my mouth shut", which I dutifully transposed onto a small yellow post-it as the anagram "HDMD" in thick black pen, and taped it to my work monitor so as to remember his sage wisdom, which was noticed by the staff around me, though it oddly went unremarked on by the very same employees who seemed to be verbally abusive about any other thing, wherever I went.

In fact, I'm so good at keeping my cool, I became famous for it. Christina, the arty in-over-her-head provincial with the ready strategy of promiscuous office sex, made me her friend by force, which is a common enough technique when the work thing doesn't quite pan out. Her and her friends from Boston put the heavy hand on for inviting me out, so much so that I knew it was a corporate strategy for getting the personal goods on me, so as to use by attacking my psyche through office attacks that would be hard for me to prove, which it was, and which I won at anyway, but that's a story for another day. She tried to set me up one weekend with her guy friend who had trouble dating, and who was also working the online dating scene hard, just like I so happened to be doing at the same time. Huh...what a coincidence.

We had a day at the beach outside of the office that went bad, because my obvious female sex organs in my sexy, black, halter-top bathing suit freaked out their friend, which Christina explained away as the current "skinny fetish" that was all the rage in ads. He even told her she should work out those thighs of hers to sculpt away ugly body fat (she was a size two), because anything over a size four was "fat" (duh, Marie), as she eyeballed me derisively over crepes in some trendy Village hotspot. Oh. Poor me....I wonder if I can cut weight as an athlete? Huh. I did it to blend into their social structure, strict as their group's rules were about appearances back then. It all came apart at their very next party during a holiday Fourth of July weekend, when I innocently inquired about whether their friend liked me or not. Uh, no. They squirmed around me for awhile, until I overheard their skinny blond (and very tan) friend say that he didn't "like anyone over 'a buck seventeen'", in a thinly veiled reference to their group-sanctioned anorexia that has never been my real scene.

The jig was finally up at work when the gay female designer gossiped with us during one of our production meetings (we were all seeing each other socially outside of work by then: I even went to Diana's lesbian-friendly birthday party at a tech-themed bar!), by huffing over this same editor's revelation that the very same guy she tried to set me up with had met a short-haired blond woman online, and that they were dating. It was going really well! Oh, yeah? "So....she's dating men again?!" Diana seemed a bit taken aback by her reveal about her male friend's new girl. "That's funny", she remarked in an offended way, "because the last time I saw her, she was performing as a man in drag shows on the lesbian circuit." 

You could hear a pin drop as the wanna-be, art-fag-with-no-talent from Virginia froze in our little circle of female-only media employees discussing million dollar licensing for a German publishing company on a low-paying teacher's salary. "Haha!" Christina turned bright red, "Oh, really?"  Within months, she'd be back at work overseas (I broke the scam open on that already, because they couldn't prove it was worth the money for me to go there to work), but as an editorial lead (she'd forced out by then the woman who hired me by using all of us to "gang up" on her, though in truth the poor woman was simply incompetent, plus I already knew the group of girls would turn on me, too), Christina felt she had all the power in the world to abuse me until I left for a book publisher, figuring she had won. Whaddya think, New Yorkers? C'mon. Give it to me straight. I think can handle it.

Office Cow

Much like Ricky Gervais and other really successful people, I always knew office life wasn't for me, from the very beginning of my post-college career. I adapted as much as I could to the guy who twitched all day long with no ramifications because he did the repetitive grunt work no one else wanted to do before they dumped him, or the violently aggressive secretary who's almost always desperately promiscuous because someone along the way encouraged this rather plain girl to use her looks to get ahead, putting a young woman in a seat of responsibility that even very beautiful women have trouble handling. How do you become a beauty on a typical office worker's salary? You don't, which is why most of the "office girls" go for men that they think have economic power to "liberate" them from the horrors of their own labors; an insanely fantastic proposition, if ever there was.

Why would most "suits" care what a woman wants, anyway? They're often as disposable as next year's younger, blonder, bustier model, leading to the next societal craze we're in right now called "reality t.v.", for the next generation of office bimbo turned alcoholic housewife. Ugh...shudder. She's the woman I've fought hard my entire life to never become, not that I could have done it easily. I love home economics and child rearing, since I've been running other people's households (and offices) for all of my life thus far, which has given me enough time to be here with you while at home, too. I've become the way to have it all that reveals how we, as women, can really do it without sacrificing our bodies and our sanity, though there's always some compromises to be made in any real life.

But growing up, we had precious few role models. I was lucky to have a classy, ethical mentor my first job out in the real world, though she does not have the traditional husband and kids, but a very long-term partnership with a man that has outlasted many marriages. There's a lot of good in it, but she realizes that if she changed one component of her very successful life, another would have to go out the window, and that was too much to sacrifice. The other model for older women in the workforce was the unfortunate 80s stereotype of the square-shouldered "power lesbian", a woman who mimicked the mannerisms of men to blend into the boy's club: definitely not the right choice for women who live openly with their beloved male counterparts, like I do. What would a masculine energy from me do for a hetero man? Not much, and I certainly don't want to be the man in my relationship.

And so I did what many healthy women in business have done before me, with their fingers crossed: I've worked hard daily to be the best, while relying on my naturally long-lived fertility that I was blessed to inherit while I jettisoned the many "Mr. Wrongs" who can't hold up their end of my relationships. And then I waited. And waited some more. And then, some more, working all the while. It takes faith, stamina, confidence, and an amazing amount of experience to master the art of patience, something my very dear maternal grandmother told me wisely more than once that I needed to learn, and her seeds of wisdom have never failed to blossom within me. She was that good, ya'll. But along the way, I've seen some really ugly stuff, tropes of broken women that I hope we successfully breed out forever.

Top of my list is the woman who picks a man to co-dependently enable by stroking his ego and feeding into his vanity, while spending his money as fast as she can, because that's the business arrangement they made. It's a form of prostitution to sell yourself short like that, one deeply rooted in a woman's insecurity and fear. Where would you be without your man? Dead?! How can that be, when we were made to live? It doesn't make any sense, and I've heard every type of justification from that type of woman that exists, shallow and dumb as they are. It's a deeply disturbing thing to do with one's life; throwing it away on the promise of a man-made freedom through money. Whatcho gonna do with all that money, any how? Sleep with it? 

That's what my people told me all my life: money doesn't keep you warm at night. People do. Not that skipping through beds and partners should be a full-time thing. Every grown woman I know gravely looks forward to a good night's sleep free of night terrors (just look at her dark under-eye circles, man), be they from yo' man or yo' kids, right? If it ain't that, then it's the dog throwing up all night seeking comfort. Amen to a nice night at a hotel somewhere and just let me sleep! Lack of sleep makes a person desperate for relief, and that was a lot of the hurt that I saw playing itself out in offices throughout the world; women just trying to stay afloat, treading water and looking for help when none was given to them without some sort of price tag attached to it. Doesn't sound Christian or hetero to me at all. Does that sound normal to you?

So, I learned to live around other people's sexualities, preferences, and/or mental disorders, because during my entire time in other people's offices, the one common message I always got was this: you don't belong there, and that's actually true. I belong here, with all of you. Like, take this one typical dyed blond booby from Long Island; she stuffed every dopey cliche about receptionists into one horrible package, like a nightmare thing from someone else's fictional story, because I sure don't play that way. She was aggressive, gossipy, bitchy, stupid, angry, openly hostile and derisive, and when that didn't work, she tried sleeping with everyone in the office (I mean everyone, male or female) under the guise of her many storied disorders which were, of course, much more important than the good work that I did daily to pay her stupid bills, which were many, too. 

Her "body image issues" were everyone else's fucking problems too, as were the gory details of her stupid sex life which, shocking and active as it was, sucked badly, because she couldn't figure out how to even do that right, even after all of her practice. She was a "poor lay" as they say, and that was the worst secret of them all, outside of her bisexual, daddy-molestation tales, told salaciously in the light of noon in a generic publishing office that was anything but the blandly raunchy bar she wanted it to be, which leads me to her classification as a day-to-day type that you all should not only run from, but fire immediately upon realization, and that is this: she was the perfect "Office Cow", a rightly demeaning term dubbed by my excellently clever ex-boyfriend from Colorado, bless his funny British/Scottish ass. You got me on that one, lad!

Kent and I met at the Denver-area recording studio that I worked at out west, after my brief marriage to an unsuitable partner was naturally dissolved with "no-fault" tied to either side (he can't fulfill normal marriage obligations due to his illnesses), and we immediately became friends. He's one smart muthfucka! We met over his low-budget punk rock project that overflowed with quick-witted lyrics and song titles. It was genius, man, and I loved him right away. We took to each other like soldiers fighting in his crazy Christian army, with his beautiful, classically-rendered tattoo of G-d's Rapture from a famous tattooist prominently displayed on his big meaty forearm proudly. I immediately loved the art behind it, like we were two angels fighting the "End of Days", thrown together by circumstance. We got on that well, initially. Even though we were actually more friends than romantic partners, we got on well enough to share home and hounds for a time.

You see, he had the same war stories of me, as the "big man on campus" who made an electrical engineers salary in an area that made him seem extremely desirable, except that he isn't, really. Not for an average office girl. My big lad from back then was a high-paid electrician (with the apprentice, equipment, and annually-renewed state license to prove it), a one-time sponsored downhill bike racer (I saw his lift ticket of him in sponsored gear from back in the day to prove it, because as big as he was, he could be dodgy on some of the details to impress me deliberately, which I actually found rather charming from a man of his size), and he had played with some of the most prominent punk bands from back in the day (making him a bona fide rock star to boot, because I saw the road pics of him as a backup guitarist with "Agression", a southern Californian skater band), and he became a private pilot during my watch, too. Top that, son!

Needless, I didn't have all that much competition from the local ladies. He told me they did weird stuff like look at his weekly pay-stubs to form dating strategies within earshot, as he passed through the office. Because they were too dumb to perform well at their jobs, they went looking for "Mr. Paycheck" instead, without taking the time to get to know him or share his interests, like I did. He told me that they brazenly gossiped in front of him (as their company's top earner), making him feel like an awful piece of meat every time he passed through the office (I saw some of the girls on one of our first dates: 
a football-viewing Super Bowl party given at one of their homes. I wore my one and only Broncos jersey that's now long gone, New Yorkers), which was part of the point. To them, your participation is mandatory in their world, even though they practically live and die off of his salary and earning power. It was something that I immediately identified with, being a "big earner" myself.

Neither one of us wanted to be used for money, sensitive as we are to being seen as disposable by multiple-marriage families. His mum decided to just start a second family by adopting some junkie's kid on the cheap, as is so often the case with sick parents who create patterns of the same wrecked families, littered behind them as wreckage they see as acceptable to their selfish aims: the anti-thesis of family, if ever there was. I was reminded of him every time I encountered a disaster of a office gal. Each and every time I met one, I often laughed to myself as the sole sane witness to a highly repetitive calamity. It became no clearer to me than during one particularly ornery job, where I struggled to keep this family's guard dog on a leash tied to their front desk from tearing out my throat in blind envy, interspersed with her loudly vocalized eating disorder that was punctuated by "mm bitch" "mm" "bitch", every time some plain girl from the Midwest dared to bring in homemade baked goods into the office, because she (of course) did it to sabotage her on purpose.

Why else would she do it? What kind of sick person makes cookies at home to serve for family holidays, and then shares them with her co-workers by leaving a warm note on top of them in the company kitchen? The horror! It was just sick, man, the way this family allowed some sick bitch to foam at the mouth while gorging herself covertly on some young wife's attempt at domesticity in a city not of her choosing, and certainly not of her birth. I mean, how dare she? Who did she fucking think she was? Bitch! Ayelet was the lead girl, and we violated her corrupt controlling by freely eating the well-made baked goods of a Nebraskan farm girl who also liked to sew in her spare time, in over her head from both this high-stress job and her new marriage in our city of many lights. Go home! Go away! Get out! Who the fuck did you think you were anyway, Natasha? "Office Cow!"