Kiki's Delivery Service

As far as experiences go, nothing quite beats a native New Yorker in business. Like I've written, we meet all kinds here, as every kind of human (and their artifacts) currently living on planet earth is within our bounds. We have the United Nations (diplomatic immunities gladly exploited, especially when it comes to free parking in the city: http://www.un.org/en/index.html), plus every type of scholar, and that's just the folks from the rest of the world. For most Americans, New York City represents the top tier of excellence for art and design, academics and scholarship, trade and big business. We are the world's capital, known here as "The Empire State" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_name_%22Empire_State%22): the thriving heart of culture and commerce as it intersects with humanity.

Quite a heady build-up, isn't it? More than a million people have passed through before giving up, seriously smitten and then bitten by the bite of the biggest apple society has to offer. Mick Jagger famously wrote about watching out for the maggots, because Central Park is dangerous, and so are the tranny hookers carrying sharp blades. I saw a cable t.v. show about Amish youth looking to break from their cultural isolation, with one girl's infamous statement that she felt she could die just trying to cross a street here, because it happens every single day in Gotham. It was a good vibe for her to pick up on right away.

I'm sometimes awed by the size of it, as almost inhuman in scale, until I feel the rhythm of it pulse through my veins, and I'm hooked once again on the jazz that it thrums to, with its subway rumbling that shakes the sidewalk above, and the passing bright yellow colors of the cabs as punctuation marks to the greatest city on earth. But then I feel it in my blood, and the quick patter of feet on the pavement reminds me that I walked these streets first, as I disappear underground to an entire netherworld of trains that you'd be lost within, behind a plume of steam that streams out of the potholes in wintertime.

So it was for me at work, too, as I endured the gross hipness of Americans from out-of-town who tried so hard to be "cool" like me that it hurt, and sometimes it physically did, like it did with one gay creative director and his infamously public fetishes. As a house, we had art directors who did their own mechanicals and production work, but not "Charles". He airily dropped a bunch of illustrations in pieces onto my desk when I was a production assistant, so I could do his work, which didn't wash with my boss at all. She ordered me to kick it back to him for proper mounting on a board with tissues and overlays and color values marked up, because we still did some hand-work in the 90s for printers, as digital layouts took over in a gradual process. 

I knew he'd use the opportunity to be a bitch to me, because of my underling status as an apprentice, so I craftily recruited my friend (a well-known and respected cover designer), to tell him the truth while I stood by. We avoided a typically nasty scene from him that day (he often denigrated you for not knowing how to do his job, because he was cripplingly insecure), as he customarily dropped it on his assistant's desk to finish, without giving her any credit. Back then, any art director or creative director could take all of your design work and get credit for it on the book's cover credits (if there even were any on it at all), or for any award shows your cover art might be submitted to. 

It was yet another layer of sublimation of our egos into the work itself, but for a lot of spoiled American kids, this diversion of attention from themselves took getting used to, and Charles "LaRue" was typical for his pampered Baby Boomer set. He told us a bunch of wildly gay stories that I think he mistakenly thought would shock a room full of city kids and art school attendees. Unfortunately for him, he was a few generations too late for us. Our editors took 3-5 martini lunches on the company's dime that they didn't return from, while their managing editors got high in the bathrooms occasionally, as we went to see movies mid-afternoon during the industry's summer slump. 

Production people were practically having their in-vitro lesbian babies right in front of us during our weekly meetings, while "out" grandpa's proudly sported their pink triangle buttons as later-in-life queers. Sorry, pops. Guess you got passed by? But Charles didn't stop there. When we ignored his airy comings-and-going as part of his bitchy ways, he upped the ante further with his showy antics, and that was in-between the rantings and ravings of the crazy butch design director who famously made out with her lesbian lover at the annual Christmas party we had the Toy Center, sporting a pair of bright red suspenders to go with her mustache and crew cut. Uh huh...well-played, sir.

So, Charles staged an ever-increasing series of events to get himself fired, because he was still contractually-obliged to show up to this dreadful job that included: a yearly clothing allowance, free car service rides to-and-from work whenever he wanted them, huge photography budgets for cover direction that he still blew because he isn't a real artist or designer (oops), and then there was his special little messenger service. By now, our publishing house was so queer that the gayest editor in town started an imprint called "Stonewall Books" to support the community's need for over-dramatics and hysteric storytelling, and this was "pre-Charles".

With him onboard, the growing gay contingent at our happily growing house went haywire. It was too much competition for us to openly support, and the hanging-on posers in the workflow didn't help. He had to go, and we all knew that, but girlfriend did throw some fireworks around first, like the delusional queen he is. One afternoon, I noticed a buff-looking Italian-type queer (think Freddy Mercury) walk out of his office, but I just figured he was there for Charles. Closed-doors didn't even work with us anymore either, because half of the design department kids had sex after hours on the couch in his office, like we assumed he did in the middle of the day. Eh?

It actually took the noticing of my art director friend for me to register more than shock, and that was only because he stopped by to talk to Charles, lingering around my desk for the wait while his door was closed in a private meeting. Divas...sigh...Out breezed past us a short tan man with the shortest pair of cut-off jeans I'd ever seen, tight enough to showcase his bulge. I thought he was just a boyfriend, but no. No, it was far weirder than that, because my designer friend had to finally break the truth to me: Charles didn't use our company messenger service in the mailroom that we had on staff for such purposes. No, girlfriend was so queer that he had to have his very own GAY MESSENGER SERVICE. "Yeah", Henry told me laughing, "last week the same gay guy walked by me wearing these tight red spandex hot pants, like the kind people wore in discos during the 70s!" Damn, son. I missed that one! Must have been at a meeting instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiki_%28gathering%29

Vanilla

The rather typical Jewish family I worked for years ago liked to embellish themselves with decorations, to make up for their obvious embodiment of average New York stereotypes: they were short, annoying, bland, and "artsy", without having any real drive or talent. They wanted to appear "interesting", except they weren't, at least not for the commonly-held ideas they sold around town to a gang comprised mostly of outsiders. I liked their native roots the best; he, as an athletic man who studied ballet with some of the greats back in the day, and she, as a Brooklynite growing up in a strong Eastern European neighborhood by the beach that remains so to this day.

They met in college. She was already a risqué "gay divorcee" who had to be talked into marriage by him, a pathologically shy orphan raised by his grandparents who learned to approach strangers by sitting on park benches to force interactions with pretty girls. They were odd eccentrics with typically neurotic mental problems, and that was more engaging to me than their "New Yorker" brand of popular intellectualism, sans the real intellect needed to sustain new ideas, or even slightly visionary ones sometimes. But, they were pretentious about literature and they had lots of money, which are both my bags.

Like many people who aspire to creativity, they decorated their office with kitschy types, the same way they hired an expensive gardener to create a balcony none of us regularly used, because it was in direct sunlight at lunchtime and done almost completely for show. You couldn't sit out there at comfortably in the bright noonday sun that high off the ground, and I was often way too busy to do so, working at my desk while eating lunch. If I did venture outside of my studio space during the workday, it caused a stir that rippled throughout the office for the rest of the day, so dull were they in comparison to me. It was a reflection of their poor character, made by flashing money around where it wasn't needed (like your average bourgeoisie), preferring to spend thousands of dollars on their bullshit "outdoor garden", in lieu of creating an investment plan for their employees to retire on. They were almost completely full of shit.

Same thing with their kids. They had a grand piano lugged up to the publishing offices, hiring another expensive gadget-maker to tune the thing every week, even though none of us had the time or inclination to play, because we aren't musicians-for-hire. Both of them bragged about drawing income from the company without really giving a full effort into making the company profitable. The son liked to say he was a musician (as a hobbyist not earning from his music), hiring a company to make CD's he could pass around the office, without being good enough to ever earn a recording contract with a major music company.

The daughter was even worse. The son could do some IT/computer work they needed as a smaller cheaper company (being dumped when we leveled-up to the majors), but the daughter was a total disaster. She wasted millions of dollars, freely spending Euros overseas in London, so she could pretend to be a "playwright" over there because she wasn't good enough to breakthrough into our native Broadway theater scene. She even bragged to me about it one time, while trying to force me to make color copies about some article done over her expensively decorated flat there, while we still didn't have a decent 401K plan.

In short, they were total cunts best ignored by the entire staff, which we flagrantly did, often with wild abandon, so arrogant and condescending were they to us, as the actual hard-working talent that the back of their family business stood on. They were desperately striving and achingly insecure, which was great fun to watch, because they had to continually escalate their "quirky factor" almost in direct proportion to our greater gifts earned through hard work. I designed the cover for a hot new best-seller? Okay...let's force our bad housewife photographer friend on her as a test, so she has to look at her book without insulting her (or us by extension), as the company benefactors. Done!

I learned a long time ago about lifting money out of the wallet of a rich buffoon without actually stealing from him, making our trade the most honest kind of business they'd ever done. They were actually paying me market value for my talent, a rarity then as it still is now. Did the other Art Director receive some sort of kudos publicly in a meeting, as the lesser of two designers working in-house? Hmm...let's call in that total bitch of a rich housewife we know (the one who did weird shit to the walls in her husband's spare time and called it "interior design") and make the real designers talk to her....and so it went. They'd hire one of their rich cronies' bored housewives to be a company admin, or put one of their nephews on the payroll to gossip, spy on us, and do boring database shit we didn't have time for.

Almost every week, they played a "one-upmanship" game only they knew about, so busy were we with the real business that made money, next to their arty side ventures that went nowhere and did nothing, like the old man's wife and her bad poetry. It only won obscure awards no one heard of because she had the time, money, and manpower to use the office and its staff to submit work for her, done in the 60s when she was at home with her kids. That must have been fun. I could practically see the old man pulling out his hair at the office, back when he worked for S&S, eager to push a distraction on her that fed her voracious ego. They were monstrous to behold during their worst fits, almost pure evil down to their rotten cores, such was the level of their incomprehensive unawareness and sheer ignorant naivety.

Most of their staff reflected their poor decisions, rampant egomania, and various mental illnesses, in one way or another, except for moi. I expected to be revealed soon, as is my level of exposure in society, and so I was prepared for it. They sicced sick person after deranged weirdo after secretive lesbian after me, and none of them penetrated me in the slightest degree, because I fed them whatever I wanted them to know, so I could set events into motion, like "The Maestro" I am famous for. After a certain point in one's career, playing office games with mental patients becomes a bloodsport. Sometimes I felt bad for them (okay, every single day), and I'd tell them the unvarnished truth about themselves and their respective conditions, which they pretended to be offended by, as I passed by their desks on my way back to the studio that made the books we sold for a healthy profit. 

I did it because it was my job, not because I wanted to shock the plain-looking Jewish girl from Long Island sitting at the front desk, with her "scandals" about sex she didn't understand or know how to have properly, within clear earshot of respectable business-types with keener minds than she'd ever met before. The slutty office girl sleeps around? Huh...well, I'll be a "monkey's uncle"! And then the joke wouldn't be understood, as I stood there with a copy of a book about evolutionary theory in my right hand, held up jauntily for anyone to see. Nice book, right? Am I right?! Nothing but the sound of crickets. 

She almost broke her back trying to shock me and the other older designer working in the studio who'd been cast off by the majors for a lack of ability, plus her plush expense account (typical middle management shite), by inventing one stupid story after another, like the married Nuyorican kid she commuted with on the L.I.R.R. Oh, what should I do? We'd sit there in our swiveled desk chairs, breathing at her in false sympathy, nary a spoken word shared between the two of us, because about her a soon as she left our work area, we turned right back to our work. Uh, who the fuck is she compared to the astronomy in our books, yo? Muthafuckin' nothin', y'all.

And on and on it went, one dull fetish after another. Oh, she liked being choked, because we took martial arts classes and she thought she could fold that in somehow. Uh huh, neat, sister. Get the fuck away from me. Usually it was sex-centered, like a teenager with ADHD going through puberty while on (or off) their Ritalin, except that one of us was likely to be designing chapter heads or openers for Lady Chatterley's Lover*, with a nude women on the cover proposed as the design that set our company (and the retailer), and, by extension, the entire industry, on fire with the real scandal of an exposed woman gracing the cover of every hardcover classics version we printed for their stores, to be distributed throughout the country and then the entire world. Kinda hard to beat, eh?

And that was finally the problem with them, and all of their dull characters: no matter how hard they tried to "top" someone at a typical Manhattan office engaged in making books, nothing could compare to the writers' lives and loves that we had our noses deeply buried in. Nothing. It made them finally realize, at the end (I think or, at least, I hope) how much it takes to become famous worldwide. You can't buy it, or strap it on, or paste it onto yourself for some necessary color; you have to be actually be it, that thing that makes you print-worthy all around the world. And here we are today, my dear readers. Better than some plain ole vanilla** flavor of ice cream, isn't it? I got all the flava I ever needed, and you ain't gone none, “hon”.


*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover
**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_sex

Footprints

It's no secret among creative communities that envy is the biggest obstacle in any of our workflows; in other words, our toughest problems are human. I can design anything I want to, for any type of budget, using any kind of tool, in any language you want, but how does that help you if you're uneducated, illiterate, learning-impaired, or brain disordered? It doesn't, does it? 

Hence, the literary world has almost always been comprised of top-tier intellectuals, because it isn't fun (or fair) to make us describe the same text, layout, or picture to you again, when our job is to make art that soars above the heads of those who come after us, sometimes by a millennium or two. We address special needs in the books designed for the people who tend to them, but books for the blind is a rare genre, indeed. When was the last time you met a Braille-reading typesetter? 

Audio books fare far better with the vision-impaired market anyway, because who has time to learn Braille, especially if you began life sighted? You see images in your head, and that's what creative content is really about: your imagination. No one else can do that for you. You have to supply that. I suppose that's why artists and designers are treated with such extreme prejudice and suspicion in any type of company: it must be threatening to talk with someone who knows (comparatively) all the answers, but that's the point. Our higher education is your knowledge base to tap into. Being angry at superior intelligence defeats the whole point behind hiring creative genius.

And so, it was no surprise to me that I worked with a quiet old Jewish man at the end of his career who still carried a huge chip on his shoulder from that big promotion he was denied many years ago by the major leagues. Why? He told us many times (when he wanted to scare or intimidate us into silence) that he didn't need anymore money. Okay....but we do. How does your point of view on the subject matter? It was totally irrelevant. Either keep the company going or don't. His employees would simply go to work elsewhere. It was a baffling bad strategy that highlighted his lack of abilities the big companies must have noted as quickly as I did the first harrowing week in his employ.

Of course, the old man's very first employees were rejects who never really worked for the big league companies, as a skeleton crew comprised of typical industry cast-offs, and a bigger bunch of pompously pretentious art fag "wanna-be's" I've never met. One of his "lifers" (Hi, "Scooter"!) was a glorified salesman/paralegal who worked boring contracts for us, and the other some lazy idiot fired almost immediately by a bigger brand-name publisher, not that I thought higher of larger publishing companies, anyway. I was better than the nut-cases working for abusive bosses who practically tossed people out the window by ignoring their pathologies for mere profit, because compulsive crazies do the grunt labor better left to machines than humans with fully-functioning brains.

His oldest "hires" were those two nut cases strange enough to work out of his home with him, as his nut-job family wandered in-and-out all day long. What kind of legitimate person does that? No one with a reputation to protect or their good name, like, say, me. By the time I came on-board his company, he realized that he needed real talent to work with B&N; not the crazy hangers-on from his daughter's bullshit screenwriting class for tacky no-talents at the local "Learning Annex" location. The two biggest douchebags who gave me the most condescending attitude right away were the exact same two dicks who were so desperate for validation, that they worked for almost no salary in some crazy old Jewish guy's apartment.

I'm not talking about building computers in your parents garage, or publishing original works through the public library's Internet access, either. Those two douches couldn't pen a novel if their lives depended on it, but they could be immoral enough to profit from the works of others. It made them constantly irate, especially when heavy-hitters like me and my production manager created a profit-producing workflow without their input. Ever hear the sound of teeth grinding? That's it. They did the mental version of gnashing teeth every single day. 

Most of the staff avoided them. They were windbags who preferred sucking each other off, in meetings rife with odd head-games over the making of any real art, which suited us just fine. They were nobodies, and they acted like they knew that already. They were "easy come, easy go". And they did: first, one was fired for physically assaulting the old man in a meeting, then the next for a lack of available funds, because they siphoned cash to various family members before their "seniority" that was bragged about. Without constantly sucking the talent from their betters, they became snarling vicious losers in our absence, bringing the company down brick-by-brick from the crazy old man's final incompetence, and that was this: his inability to see through his overly emotion connections to the friends and family who were the sickness that tore his businesses apart.

The very first month that I did a favor for their production manger of a dead classics series (feeding off the souls of writers they would never be) told me everything about them that I needed to know, besides their widely telegraphed disdain that existed around every office corner I turned. That big douchebag for their classics series threw down an easy layout his incompetent designer couldn't do on the ground of his office floor, to walk over it on the way back to his desk, thus leaving a big dirty footprint on the piece of paper that I would easily see, because he thought it would get to me somehow, except for this very prurient fact that the demented always seem to miss: that old layout can turn to dust, because the books I made are still for sale throughout the country, not to mention on the shelves of the book-buying American public printed with my name on them, and not his.

How's that for a "make it pretty" housewife decorator of a designer, Mark? Those were his actual words to me, as an already-famous art director and book designer that they didn't know because of their industry irrelevance, after flipping some minor layout from his dead imprint disdainfully across my desk for me to correct, because his designer was too stupid to keep up with a single female rock star like me. Besides, right after they "hit it" big with their classics series, B&N simply pillaged their idea in-house, creating an award-winning Classics series of their very own, thus cutting out the middle men forever. Thanks, Jo. Nice one!

One night I dreamed I was walking

Along the beach with the Lord

Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints

Other times there was one set of footprints

This bothered me because I noticed that

During the low periods of my life when I was

Suffering from anguish, sorrow , or defeat

I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord. "You promised me

Lord, that if I followed You,

You would walk with me always.

But I noticed that during the most trying periods

of my life there have only been

One set of prints in the sand.

"Why, when I have needed You most,

You have not been there for me?"

The Lord replied.

"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints

Is when I carried you."

http://h2ofootprints.wikia.com/wiki/Footprints_%28Poem%29 

The One-Armed Bandit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

The first day on my new job years ago came with a directive to take down one of the weird black-and-white "head-shots" from the company wall, for scanning into some brochure that expensively advertised their version of classics from English literature. They were ridiculously pompous about a rather simple business model, which was disseminated by my old work mentor who I ran into at an industry function, into one neatly condescending sentence: "Oh, right. They do domain-free stuff." It was so right-on, I instantly remembered why I found myself grateful years later for her stewardship as an apprentice.

Yeah! Basically, they had some compulsive low-paid editorial assistants work the annuls of public domain in the NYPL for previously-printed material that lapsed from its original legal copyright protection to become free for public usage. Of course, we still have to pull the material into something as beautifully cohesive as a finished bound book in this century using our technology, but that's essentially it: reprinting old works that they paid nothing for, as a company. 

The only real investment was upfront in the manufacturing process and labor costs associated with the edition's making, which means that they sold the book to B&N at a profit already, and yet, when I began with them, they had absolutely no profit-sharing programs available to their employees. They didn't even have a decent 401K for the employees to roll-over any of their older plan monies from other businesses into a retirement fund, but as their resident "Art Star", I guess they thought I wasn't supposed to know the business at all, even though their VP of Production and Design had already verified and tested my bona fides in New York City media, and they are real.

My first day was a complete set-up, because no sooner had I taken down the photo to scan, than I was immediately beset by the old publisher's crazy old wife, because their rabid Israeli-born receptionist played games with people all day long, and I guess she thought I was an easy mark for her. Uh uh. After she had her bitchy way with me over some uncommonly douchey photos fashioned after the portfolios of professional actors and most definitely not publishers, I ratted her out to the program manager who asked me to do it. He was a dick, too, so I watched their power struggle from the sidelines of yet another business I would pick apart to put back together properly. 

Another day at the office. Ho hum. But, the crazy old man's wife played a key part in their inabilities to handle their business well, because their family pockets always came first, and they married into their family those employees that they thought they could bait on the hook with a guaranteed steady income in uncertain times. It's the same old economic ruse that pulls the chain of every starving would-be artiste who gets their ass kicked by the city. They had a lot of out-of-towners and spoiled suburbanites in their small office, which culturally signified to me that their world was mine for the taking, and their overtly nasty behavior proved to me that they already knew it. 

After a few more exceptionally douchey encounters those first days, I got the message quickly. We don't like you: we need you. Okay, fine! I don't really care for any of you headcases, either. This is just a job to me, in your rented office space. My content belongs to me and my brain, and after the old man's bitch got her head ripped off that very first day, she stayed away from me on purpose. I'd hear her jabbering away to their crazy bitch of a receptionist (before she made her move as a false "frenemy" that I played to the hilt) about how to do it, too.

So, they gave me a lot of room for the practiced tactical strategy that I needed to clean up their imprint and own it through their insanely orthodox marketing bitch at B&N, a woman infamous in the industry for being a cold hard bitch. But, she wasn't me, so I played her, too. Eventually, they all figure it out. My program=my rules. No? You want more fucking money? Do it, bitch! It kept me hands-free for the first few years, until the wheels came off their secretary who dared to infiltrate my world by elbowing into it unbidden. People get hurt around warriors, know what I'm sayin', and she most certainly did. I wrecked her for anything else but rehab and a psych hospital forever.

The wife thought she was safe from me because of her husband's money, but I knew too well from my family that money comes and just as easily goes. She played evasive tight-lipped games with me when she was forced to be near me in physical proximity, thinking she was avoiding my careful scrutiny, and she was somewhat right. She's not really important enough as person (or a pampered Jewish housewife) for me to be outright concerned with her deviant behavior. She knew from her husband that messing with me carried a stiff price. Messing with me messed with their money, and they loved money really badly.

It bought them coveted committee seats on prestigious theater boards, so they could press their dip-shit daughter's work on people as some phoney "playwright", and she was a total bitch, too. She treated me like a copy machine once (ONCE), which landed her in her father's office for the next "hands off" speech. I also got their very own son put-out to pasture as bogus IT support who couldn't hack it in the real world of professional publishing, because I introduced our more sophisticated machines into their work-flow properly, and not as some fancy wonky sideline to entertain arrogant art fags with. He blew his lid after a a few months under my tenure, as I reoriented their work queue to be at my scheduling through my production manager, by dividing the workflow equitably between the two imprints. Done! Next!

She'd make scared small talk with me when she had to in the company kitchen or the bathroom, places where her obvious ignoring didn't work because it was too obvious a slight to me. I knew the crazy old man fired a lot of employees on the spot for no good reason because they are a family with serious mental problems, but as rich pseudo-intellectuals, their pomposity suited my purposes fine. The old man outlaid the cash I needed to perform and then out-perform them, which is the poser amateurs greatest fear: discovery.

Marlene would only speak to me in vague little mutterings made to simulate a doddering old lady, until the one day when her act actually took hold for real, because old age catches up with everyone. We had a brief exchange in front of her office, because I showed her how to attach a file for submission to some poetry contest for nobodies, and it wasn't even fresh: it was old stuff from the 60s, after her very first ejection from career life to mommyhood, which she must have chafed against as a pompous Baby Boomer Art Fag. She was the very last person I'd want for a parent, and you've read about my crew.

Turns out, I hadn't noticed the stiff arm of hers that she never used, and she was proud to show that off to me, as recognition of some sort of prowess on her part: "Oh, that's because I compensate so well that you don't realize it!", in a fake sing-song voice that marks a poor teacher who condescends to the very children who sit in front of them. Ah, that was her first ousting from real New York business, then. Okay. Over the next few years, she'd elaborate in small bits that she hoped I couldn't digest into a whole, but I did so anyway.

She told me a good bon mot after I helped her use the paper-clip thingy on her computer's PC-based email software to attach a file to an email (basic, bitch) so I could see that she could type well, too! Wasn't I impressed? Huh, so, yeah, how did you lose use of your arm? She knew by now that I grew up with a handicapped mother, and her MS trumps anything this poor old rich bitch has. Trust on that, peeps. She began speaking to me with her usual vaguely flute-voiced routine "Oh, you know....." No, I don't, and I looked right at her, which their disordered staff hated. More scrutiny, you see. "Well, I had a bout with breast cancer years ago...."

And? What? Bad surgery left you with no arm? That's a libel suit! Well, no....Okay, still no answer. Cough it up, bitch, I have work to do. She had very small time windows with me, by then. What happened? She thought she staved off discovery until today, when I write to you that the crazy old bitch didn't lose the use of her arm from a badly-done surgery years ago. No, that crazy old bitch had paralysis brought on by the "trauma" that must come from successfully surviving breast cancer, just like my mom and her two sisters did, sans limp arms. She had to back-off from me then, because her big winning story about survival was just that: bogus as any day-school business model I could've written in my old black-and-white notebook, back in the day. Booyah, bitch.

When you see disease in one limb, just look to the source. In this case, it was their very own family tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_disorder

How they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content

Where's your non-disclosure now, huh? Yeah, just as thought. Silence.

Spy vs. Spy

Genius isn't something people enjoy, like real beauty that frightens without airbrushing or makeup applied. You can't fake it, and for people who lie their way through life, authenticity is very scary. I never understood the weird tactic behind pretending to know more than you do, because it's a viciously anti-scholarly mindset to have about life and the world. Curiosity is the driving force behind intellectualism, so someone who hides out daily from reality represents crass ignorance to an openly inquiring mind. And so, with no surprise, I wasn't welcomed into the arms of the publishing industry by anyone besides my mentor and her supervising V.P.

Even though we were transparent in our agenda to have me apprentice first in Production Management before I moved upstairs to the Art Department, it was considered such a huge intellectual leap to make at the time, that we were greeted with suspicion from the very start of my employment. Just like the limited scholarship that represented a typical S.U.N.Y student in the 80s, destined to spend a lifetime working in a series of barren offices, R.I.S.D. students were often functionally illiterate, unable to write even the simplest of essays in their native English language, so I'd seen limited brain function before I hit the big hallways of Academia.

Still, it was shocking. Some departments, like Production Editorial, hired English Lit majors from the Ivy League, drawing heavily from the pools of Brown, Yale, and Harvard, and those were just the folks who managed copy-editing and proofreading within the workflow. From someone like me, it was downright revolutionary. I did business like a non-artist, drew like a professional, and thought with any side of my brain I could tap into to get the job done, which was in direct contrast to the big bestselling "Left Brain/Right Brain" publishing hype.

People felt comfortable with the darkly brooding hipster stereotype who preferred sitting alone in a corner doing highly repetitive layouts, but that's not an Art Director, which is what I aspired to back in the day. Conversely, the short bespeckled editorial assistant with the flood pants, thickly rimmed glasses, and bad dandruff fit easily into their preconceived expectations about what "intelligence" looks like, like bad casting for every cliched Hollywood movie you've ever seen: beautiful blond bombshell with the charmingly absent-minded but kind-hearted nutty professor. Where did I fit in? Mostly, they hated me.

And so began my real office career involving staving off covert attacks done on the sly, to delay the inevitable firing that marks the deeply insecure incompetent working in an office of actual American scholars. We spoke and wrote in an English that was frightening to the uneducated and unknowns in our very own houses. It was shockingly ignorant to behold, because we made the stuff we sold, which is one of the clearest, direct lines to any serious business transaction. More days were spent clearing houses of the weak than in pursuit of the labor behind making books, which is one of the most complex commercial manufacturing processes in the worlds of art and design.

People whispered in the wide stairwells of the Flatiron Building (a historical landmark) that I was a "spy", which made me laugh. For who, exactly? Production? Why would the VP and the Senior Production Manager want me to ask questions for them? That's what they did every day. For the book cover designers?! They couldn't even attend weekly production meetings without a liaison like me involved, living in some constant pretend fear about book manufacturing schedules and deadlines, which is like an accountant who's afraid of balancing his or her checkbook. Why that? It was utterly bizarre in its limitations to me, but that was the vacuum I filled that was so badly needed during the technological shift to desktop publishing.

One of the quickest managerial stints at SMP was a certain penguin-identifying Design Manager with poor book design skills but a fussily meticulous eye for administration, efficiency, and bureaucracy, which again, was something only businesspeople could apparently perform without having a nervous breakdown like any true designer would. Oh, the pressure to file! So hard! It was pure bullshit to me, but that's how they angled their way as a department out of "boring office work" to stick it onto me, because I "didn't know computers" or design according to the rigid New York school kids who were trained to be one-trick ponies, again, about as far from a scientifically-informed scholar like a da Vinci-based RISDoid as possible, but that's exactly why I excelled so far ahead of my class.

She rode me temporarily as a target to do dull shit she called "organizing" the enfants terrible of the art department, who were (and still are) a group of learning-disordered people who can only handle so much mentally, but that didn't stop their fearful marginalization of me anyway. It was nothing new. Within weeks of that crazy skinny bitch writing me up for (get this) READING on the job, a big art/design department "no-no" apparently, she quickly went downhill into psychosomatic back pain so bad, the company had a crane lift a couch into her special office so she could lie down between bouts of her pain. That's who they chose to be their "manager". She flew back to her old imprint within months after I quit for less crazy-filled pastures (which worked!), and she's stayed there ever since.

During her entirely panicked, whirlwind stewardship of a multi-billion dollar publishing company with strong international ties to Britain and now Germany (after a few carefully leveraged corporate buy-outs), not one higher-up ever thought to inquire whether or not one of our competitors would actually send over a genuine corporate spy over to us, for the real deal of sneaking around without getting caught, choosing instead to center their hysterical drama around one particular Acadian Métis girl who could give a fuck about their petty head games, because here I sit, and there you are in the exact same seat. Still. Spy, indeed.

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

P.S. - I just fucking looked up Jaye's suicide obit online, SMP'ers, another fucking "Design Manager" back then!!! You hateful humps. You owe me.

Neck

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Taboo_Tattoos

I met Jimmy at a bar down on Stone Street with the company receptionist from the small Jewish family business I worked for, during my last long-term office job. She was busy burning through the new people, places, and things that she could at this McDojo we signed with, which gave me the relative peace of having a training experience of my very own, without parenting her through it. She remains one of the most disturbed women I've ever met through other people's companies, following a typical pattern of hiring that's based on the myth that other mentally ill/disabled people make the odd family members stick out less, which never really works. Who builds businesses based on the backs of a bunch of sick people? Not really good ones, like the workflows I design as I was taught, through an impressive list of industry mentors.

So, chaining their rabid Israeli girl with the weird yellow hair to a front desk, watching her explode into deranged fireworks day after day, really didn't mean much to me. Who cares? I had the actual business of books to work on with my contacts and clients. I was an almost totally self-sufficient business within a business, which the best creative contractors can pull off in their sleep, under the false duress of other people's manias. I kept a strict schedule that would automatically cut out anyone who couldn't hack it, which meant most of their resident amateur weirdos ran out of the door in horror of our actual labors, and they were forced to hire real publishing executives with genuine credentials from big league New York publishing, like me.

Their fried dyed mess of a doggie was honing in on me gradually though, because she could feel me pull away as easily as if she was just another generically fucked-up Long Islander, and she was that. Most of her work friends were gone, like her supposed "best friend" who was fired and then group-texted a bunch of us while we were working that she might just off herself, which sent her high school buddy running back to see me. "Oh, Becky always does that." Huh...not in my world. What gives? I trained her not to interrupt my day with her trivial madness, seeing as we all drew a paycheck from my continued successful contact at Barnes & Noble, the largest book retailer in the country. No me + no work = no money. Even she could figure that out with her more corrupt cronies at the office who preferred email hacking over the small in-house network to actually working. Ew!

Spying on me occupied their free time, and even in that strange game, I had them hooked through my online comments on well-known media sites that caused a ruckus throughout the place. Haha! I LOVE corporate espionage! It's fun! After that, she had to step up her game at infiltrating my life with an ever more aggressive and open series of mind games that don't work on genius talents who create paychecks for them through their book sales. Sorryy....She awkwardly asked me to sign up for karate lessons at a cheap intro price one afternoon while I walked past the front desk, after I created another successful distance she could practically taste in her mouth, because she knew I quit smoking through their email readings and my Internet surfing; I was actively looking online for fitness programs, like fencing with an epee or foil (http://fencersclub.org/). Yuck!

Her brother was actively engaged in martial arts training, which cinched the deal for her as a coward. She couldn't walk down the block unless she was looped off secretive hits taken in the company bathroom from a big blue bottle of mouthwash. After an initial observation session with one of their instructors (I won that assessment, too, BTW. I know, I know...sigh...again), we signed up for the program and it was going great. She soon learned that I didn't need athletics to tame a raging case of violent bipolar addictive disorder with markedly psychotic features like she did, so she picked up on a lonely fat girl desperate for a friendly face in our aggressive fight training classes. She began sweeping into class at the last minute to avoid talking to me on the mat, and then developed a ridiculous crush on a kid who was 19 and a brown belt instructor at the time.

Once again, I had no problem backing away from her, which once again backfired on her evil machinations, because the good-looking Puerto Rican kid from Spanish Harlem promptly announced his crush on "women in their 30s" made loudly in front of the both of us that drove her mad with envy, though Lord knows why, except she also has OCD. She used me as a lure to attract him into conversation that failed miserably, because she had absolutely nothing to say. Frothing at the mouth in anger, she told me to stay away from him as she tried her hand at 21st Century "cougaring", a sport she was bested at by a better-looking Spanish girl with a design degree and a great job with a famous cosmetics manufacturer doing package design for major retailers. Ohhh...that must have hurt badly!

As she went down in flames, her very last draw for a high-status female friendship were post-workout drinks with me, just like the after-work soirees she first invited me to without much success either, because crazy bitch games don't mean shit to me. And that's when I met Jimmy, a short good-looking Irish-American kid from Brooklyn working FDNY/limo driving. As soon as I bit into one of my first hot wings at the bar, I could sense him working a circuit around the joint, circling the place, looking for attractive pickings, and as soon as I looked up from my hot wing, he looked right at me. Ooops. Uh, this should go over badly. I quickly told her discreetly that he was coming over to hit on me, as a warning to her fragile ego. She immediately perked up during his harmless flirtations, doing a bunch of weird moves that baffled him, until he and I finally turned to each other for a real honest talk, the kind that only genuine New York city kids have with one another.

We knew the same Brooklyn neighborhoods, and sweet guy that he was, it was more than enough. He was like a lot of guys I grew up with, and he knew that. No harm, no foul. She made a quick plan to leave me alone with him as part of her punishment to me for turning away from her while she talked with his less-attractive friend, but as one co-worker had already observed in his email to me (hi Scooter!), my genetic attractions weren't my fault, nor his. She left me alone to whatever the fates had in store for me, which in this case meant hand-holding back to his parked SUV, and a nice drop-off at my Park Slope townhome with my little bag of drugstore products (like organic panti-liners) left in his truck by accident.

We made tentative plans for his returning them to me one evening after my work was done, ringing him on my cellphone from the Chelsea corner near my office, but it didn't work out. He was already out on a fare that wasn't near my subway stop in Manhattan. Oh, well. That was fine by me: the lad was far too young for me and besides, he'd never been to the real country of Ireland, just the commercial one he designed in his head that made for easy marketing in New York City, as part of the local color. Besides, as a master artist, taste means a lot to me and his quickly-rendered shamrock tat left much to be desired, as did it's placement in the middle of the back of his neck that he showed to me after shots. No thanks, mate. Sláinte to ya for the safe ride home, though. You were a sweet kid to me that night. Ta!

Death by Art Director

The Blood Vote: Anti-conscription handbill poem issued during anti-conscription campaign, 1917. Purportedly written by W.R. Winspear. Under Australian law this is now out of copyright and in the public domain.

Suffice to say, the disabled, disordered, demented, and delusional of the world are not sequestered together on one strange island by themselves, like ancient mythical lepers of Biblical days gone by. Besides, it doesn't work. Humans have mastered the art of moving around, sick or not. That means people with serious health problems are present in every sector of our daily lives, because no matter how weird of a shut-in that you style yourself to be, the world manages to seep in anyway. Life always finds a way, like Mother Nature itself.

In the work worlds of major media in New York City (and in "The Empire State", hint hint), we were (and are) not immune to smelly weirdos compulsively typing and muttering next to us at corporate-owned desktops everywhere. It's just that high performers like us don't have time to water the fucking company houseplants, and please shoot us if we ever do. Kidding. Don't do that, you fucking weirdo. We'd have lost all relevance in the human worlds by then if we're relegated to life's sidelines, which is highly unlikely as modern masters of this times' communication.

That doesn't stop resident nut-jobs from trying it anyway, dull as their unending mental problems are. Think I'm exaggerating? Imagine being sentenced to an eternity of "Dr. Phil" reruns, always with the exact same family of inbred hicks freaking out and living life as poorly as possible, in that ever-annoying regional twang they have, and you're not even close to the hell I'm describing at our work. Of course, transferring their homegrown pain onto as many healthy people as possible is part of the fun about having violently untreated psychoses, limited as those days now are, you blood-sucking freaks. 

Because the kicker is, for me to have received those plush newspaper union benefits of yore, I had to take a couple of piss tests at the drug-screening lab of their choice TWICE (paid by the union), so they would be reassured that their union-mandated income didn't fall into the hands of an addict who's so clearly fucked up, he/she couldn't even go two weeks without passing a urine sample cleanly. You dumb fuck. You don't deserve a job! And that wasn't all. 

I had to pass a psychological screening, too, further weeding out the crazies at other levels. That's right, jittery assholes: I had to fill out several multiple choice answer sheets, write out my handwritten answers to those essay questions that required it, and then mail it back to my potential employer in the time frame as requested in a sealed, time-stamped USPS package that was several pages long with clearly detailed instructions, and that was after I had two or three interviews appropriate to my level, which also included: answering the ad correctly with my relevant portfolio submissions included, meeting with the hiring creative and any of the other senior staff in the department, with yet another possible portfolio review that included other key members of my team, and that was before I even reached the Art Director's level. I actually had to pass (in my early 30s) a mental stability process that's more labor intensive than the process it takes for some Texan to walk into Wal-Mart to buy a handgun, just to design your special four-color newspaper inserts. Makes sense, right?

After my meteoric rise in any type of environment (set your internal clocks by it, grunts), the kooks come crawling out of the woodwork with full pockets and barely hidden agendas. Insult rock-star talent = handy firing with lazy benefits package included. In fact, it's become such an industry standard, we openly discuss it in offices as part of our managerial lives. At the end of my term in other people's offices, I "graduated" to the Maestro level, which means I am now the Grand Wizard of your fucking mental disorder, bitch. Get it? No more firings by pissing off that "pretty" girl in design who runs the show. Now, they just run in the opposite direction. That's what my former art school mentor meant when he said to me that "you are so made for this game, girl". Go get 'em! Ain't no one beatin' a working class New York kid. We work that fucking hard. See you in the funny pages.