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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl |
Not all art directors are created equally. I've worked with a lot of disordered people in my time, usually while smoking a cigarette with one of them outside, as they told me their similar tales of woe. But Lisa was different in a few key ways. She fit the template for being slightly arty without being too much so, talented without outshining anyone around her, and noticeable only in her prolonged absences when the work she did piled up. She hid behind conformity, nursing her work along in small, bite-sized chunks, preferring to hide behind typesetting for book interiors than the open warfare that typically marks cover design meetings. She simply didn't have enough personality to set the world on fire, which she knew about in rigorous detail.
One of the stories she liked to tell me over and over again was about her parents first meeting at a mental institution: he was the big orderly intern who helped her mother as a delicate new resident with the harder patients. Like a lot of fucked up rich kids from WASPy families, she took small pleasures in the shock value associated with her long term exposure to the psycho-therapeutic arts. It contrasted highly with my working class roots littered with empty beer bottles and full ashtrays. Didn't smell the same to me at all, nor did my telling it make her more comfortable with me. It's not a soothing space to be in.
She loved to tell me that she never received affection from her coldly intellectual parents, preferring the pleasures of one particular dog breed that she became attached to. It was "kooky" without crossing that sharp line between revealing the depths of her obviously medicated state and her robotic creaky movements around the office. Every interaction within our small studio area was lined with her disorders that she could only hint at in a professional business environment; a well-honed performance designed for her to slowly draw off a steady income from bland corporate environments that tolerated creativity in small bite-sized pieces. That was her real expertise.
One of her weirder stories about her life with mental dysfunction centered around her strange sense of self about having a beautiful daughter, something most mothers typically wish for. She was confused by it (of course), as she still struggled in her 60s to accept something that existed within the world whether she liked it or not. She could be that slow cognitively-speaking, which made her a great fit for the dysfunctional family business she landed at the end of her career.
I ignored her petty political ploys most of the time because they were that dull to me. She told me every other month or so that she wanted me fired, which never happened on her say-so. It was funny and heartbreaking to watch her slowly drown in her own ego and incompetence, clutching at old political devices for an office climate that no longer existed in modern New York City.
She loved that her blond Shiska-looking daughter (she's 1/2 Jewish and 1/2 WASP: people, do not try this blend at home without extreme caution) got her lots of attention, as much as she hated that it wasn't about her. And so, in retaliation for her own nature, she set up a series of passive-aggresive hurdles for her daughter to struggle with and then overcome at her command; as controlling and manipulative as her outdated office politics. It didn't work at all, but that's what pays the bills for a lot of inept psychotherapists: not solving the problem for their clients, just nursing it along minutely while they purposely sabotage their own healing process. She shot her foot publicly that often.
Her and her "younger" (and also deaf) husband riffled through her daughter's clothes after she moved out west, pillaging an old set of telltale shiny orange "booty shorts" for what she described as their Halloween costume: old "Hooters" workers entangled in a sexual discrimination lawsuit. It was so fucking weird, I had to know why she thought that was a good idea. Did anyone know what her outfit meant? No, she laughed, they thought it was funny that we wore those kind of outfits. Oh. I wondered what her poor daughter thought about their oddly dual-gendered approach to a business that remains heterosexual at its core, but like any of her answers, I didn't have the time or money to coax it out of her like her therapists did. Naturally, I already knew what fueled her envy and self-loathing.
You see, short of walking into the office with a shotgun under each arm, she was that invisible to us. In her desperate attempts to avoid becoming a target again, she managed to make herself completely unnoticeable whatsoever, in a PTSD-like response to the shifting sands of big time New York City publishing. She simply couldn't hack it, not with all the fake fairytales in the world, no matter how often she told them. She was a coward, and that was the real outfit she wore every single day of her life. Like any other really sick person, I wished her no harm, as much as I grieved for the children who were left in her care, no matter how temporary that was, because (and here's how I always "caught" her) she came from a wealthy family that had absolutely no need to push her daughter into a disrespectful job like a waitress job at a wing joint that bordered on being a strip club.
Instead of being shocked at her break from "vanilla" normality, I was merely aghast at her vicious nature. "Was your daughter ever hassled there?", I asked her. Oh, yeah, she said. Her job was right off of Columbus Circle during their big construction phase, and one time she was followed home all the way to Brooklyn on the subway, by one of her regulars from the construction site. I don't think there's enough Valium on her planet that would've covered up my genuinely horrified look. G-d, the horror of her....she continually set up her daughter for serious hurt and permanent damage, with obvious murderous intent. She had the decency to blush at my straightforward questions, while giggling nervously like a little girl. What a nightmare she is, I thought to myself. Thankfully, her daughter made it out of her horrible house alive (with or without the Halloween costume), because I see you, you bitch. I see right fucking through you.
