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
