The Teflon Septum

Charles liked to brag to us, in between his flagrant bouts of work avoidance, that he was a complete burnout because of the 70s and the disco scene in New York City back then. Of course, it didn't hurt his existential angst that he was also a complete asshole to the entire company, but that didn't seem to deflate his overwrought sense of self at all. I'd never met someone so arrogant with so little skill before, because I never saw him actually design anything. Nothing. Not one book cover. It was fascinating to me. Not that it stopped him from taking credit for other people's designs made under his "direction", which was such a fucking joke compared to our grueling schedules and after-hours work that we began a more honest and realistic process of each designer claiming credit for his or her own work. 

He never talked to me about books, computers, design, technology, or publishing, except if it was to order me to help him through another horrible crise, in staged scenes with tons of sighing and nasty looks made from his inert position behind his desk. Oh, and he liked my handsome new boyfriend Dave, so he thought up a way to take pictures of him by using a potential book cover design about Jewish people with us as the romantic couple in some test shots, but after just one cursory glance, the design was immediately killed because Dave and I are so obviously goyim, even in profile, just like his dip-shit test Polaroid of us taken in the office one afternoon. Before his budget was completely cut-off, though, he made me take the train to some far-out Brooklyn photographer's fancy brick studio in the middle of a work day for yet another test shoot. I was just happy to get the fuck out of the office for a little while.

He was also one of the most grossly incompetent people in power I'd ever worked with, which naturally led us to question his position of authority at the company. How? How the fuck had this even happened? The "higher-ups" at the house gave us a string of excuses, like he had a lot of work experience, and that he'd been bounced from every single work department we have in publishing, which didn't make us feel any better about him, especially because we were all working class kids busting ass in a too-expensive city not designed for us. It was like the city had become a gay stage set for rich white out-of-towners, which we clung to as more favorable than the nightmarish 70s and crack-fueled 80s. Of course, Charles had loved that time period the best!

He'd sweep through the office with his air of superiority, stopping by our desks only to share more of his greatness with us, like his rank of Buddhist priest (get the fuck out!), or his splitting headache that required pills from the nurse's office, or his clogged sinuses that were the result of poor drainage because of his, ahem, compromised nasal passages. Okay...whatever. It didn't take with me as even a casual recreational drug reference, because during my supposedly "hippie" days at O-Town that were greatly exaggerated by my much more productively "high" group of friends (I worked too much, went to classes, and got tired in the evenings or nursed bad hangovers from too much drink in secret), I actually got a real education.

So, Charles, had to gear up for another wittily dropped bon mot that seemed cool and casual, le tres chic. The next time he had a diva fit of "the vapors" in the office during actual work hours, waving around a gauzy, thin, brightly-colored hankie while dancing around to George Michael (hint, HINT), he dramatically paused by my studio desk to declare the same poor nasal passages with the clear sign of a finger held against the side of his nose. OH! You were..in the mob? That's what it used to mean here in the city. Tsk! Nooo, Marie. Sigh...I was so dreadfully dull and uncool to talk to. "I have a 'Teflon' septum!" Okay, wait a minute, are you telling me that you have an artificial bridge in your nose? The conversation only became more baffling to me with his continued explanations that he thought were so subtle.

Finally, he gave it up to me in a normal voice that was his alone, and not the affected soprano he usually trilled around us airily. "No! I had a deviated septum that I 'burned through' completely that had to be replaced." Jesus! I didn't realize allergies could be that bad! That actually happens...huh. No! Marie! His shoulder sagged as the hot pompous air deflated right the fuck out of him, only to be squared again while he quipped at me that "children" today were soooo ignorant. "I did a lot of 'coke" during the seventies!" Oh! Aha! I had inadvertently caused one of the biggest douchebags ever to work in publishing to declare loudly, out in the open, that he was a washed-up addict, right in front of a bunch of rabid designers who hated him with the passion of a thousand burning suns. My day was finally done.

Of course, the bitch that replaced him was even more insufferable, but at least we had our jobs and cover designs back. And one less "former" manager of "The Village People", but only during their really early days on the club scene, like wayyyy before their peak Studio 54 days, so if you look him up, you won't find him in the liner notes credited as their manager because he worked for free back then, just for the love of music. Sigh...he was so naive back then. Uh huh, of course not. Why would there be an actual documented work history for him to have that we could verify and see? We had all the ammo against him that we needed for his ousting, and that was before the hot pants-wearing gay boy messenger service became a regular thing for him. Thanks, Charles! You finally did me a real "solid". 

for Orlando, Florida - June 2016

The New Black

Way before Orange is the New Black, my punk rock cousin Susan had already "been there and done that" while wearing the standard prison-issue jumpsuit. She was a model in the city during the CBGB music scene of the 70s, and DeeDee Ramone's girlfriend. She was beautiful, glamorous, and a drug addict. After her fling with the “sex, drugs, and rock n' roll” lifestyle, she rallied back from the hard bite it took out of her to work as an office girl in the city, while dating the "nice" safe Italian boy from her neighborhood. 

Unfortunately for Susie, the damage was done. No amount of shiny polyester shirts, tight pants, and Travolta-style pompadours could help her stay out of Studio 54, with all that free coke. What could compete with her troubled working class roots, with its' generic Queens row house, and her excruciatingly boring 9-5 job? Not much, and the allure of the forbidden was too much for her to resist. 

When I lived in Brooklyn, she used to call me loaded to chew my ear off, chain-smoking and enjoying the high. I asked her to write down some of her experiences from those days, but like everything else with my family, I'd have to do all the work, and there was no way I could take her on with all of her diseases. But, she told me enough of it for me to recreate a timeline in my head that's reliable.

After her Queens boyfriend broke up with her because she couldn't buckle down into their engagement and a normal, family-based routine, she went back to using hard again. When she was a model, another girl on the circuit taught her how to shoot up without leaving behind any visible track marks, because this was way before Photoshop could airbrush out any sins you may have committed. When I asked her how she did it, she spread her toes apart to show me how she injected heroin in between her big toe and second toe.

And that was the beginning of the end of the road for her. She was caught in a raid on a crack house that had become the center of a huge drug trafficking ring, and like most addicts, she sold to get high. From what I heard back then, it was a typical dirty-bare-mattresses-on-a-floor-with-scary-graffiti-covered-walls kind of joint. Old school New Yorkers will get it. It's the kind of place brokers try to sell as condos in Bushwick nowadays to stupid rich white kids who are priced out of Williamsburg, by selling it as an "up-and-coming" neighborhood, but I always knew better.

From there, she was shipped off to Rikers to do a stretch of hard time. It was unbelievable. Me and my brothers were working "The American Dream" hardcore in the country 'burbs of early 80s Rockland by studying and working part-time jobs. After she was raped in Rikers, they sent her to a prison in Pennsylvania to do the rest of her time. She told me about her affairs with other female inmates, the crescendo of her time rounded out by an affair with a male prison guard.

When she got pregnant by him in the joint, my father flew out there to give her away in a shotgun wedding after her release. I saw the pictures of her with a flower garland askew on her head during the ceremony, bleary-eyed and out of it. And that's how years before you all cashed in on a gang of girls gone mad, my cousin Suzy gave birth to a low-weight baby boy she named after Bob Dylan, her one and only child, not long after her Corrections Officer died of a heart attack.


(From Wikipedia) The writing and structure are both somewhat more sophisticated than the songs on their previous record. Guitarist Johnny Ramone relates: "We recorded them in the order they were written; we wanted to show a slight progression in song structure."^[3] Most of the songs were written in the band member's homes, rather than at a studio; "Suzy Is a Headbanger" was written in drummer Tommy Ramone's loft apartment.^[4]

"I wrote most of the stuff I contributed at my apartment in Forest Hills, before I left and moved back to a place in the city. I had no amp at home, just an electric guitar. I recorded it onto a cassette and played that back at rehearsal. We had better production, we were playing a little faster, and we had a lot of songs accumulated. We were in really good shape for that album."