Ms. Haiti

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_pageant# 

Magdala was nerve-wracking for me to be around, a feeling that was soon shared by the entire small family business that hired her. She's tall, smart, pretty, and cultured; in short, she is exactly like every other gainfully-employed woman working in Manhattan and its environs, which caused her an enormous amount of distress. In Queens, she was just another Haitian-American, but something happened to her during her long subway commute into the city. She began to have dreams and visions of her self that she could market and sell to us as her co-workers, which was the exact job description she had, as so many of the marketing/acquisitions/sales staff who function as our support personnel and in-house cheerleaders. She is, to be succinct, a fan of mine, without being a friend or even particularly friendly.

At the time of her hire, she was "engaged" (or "enfianced" in Magdala's irritating patois that was designed to be "exotic") to a short, bland, and rather unattractive French man who's also a single father, which was absurd. She was better-looking than him, and as pretentious as she could be, that tall black girl ain't never gonna be no damn Parisian white girl, knowwhatimsayin'? Too many big white teeth in that large head of hers. She's "bougie" as fuck, fellas, but to so many Euros who drank the waters deeply from our American import t.v. show that now reads like a prolonged tampon commercial about boring yentas living (and sexing) in the city, she was just the ticket he needed to take to New York and our lifestyle here, like a pretty tour guide on his payroll.

His daughter was disastrous for her, too. She was blond, petite, and Euro-pretty, which means she missed her French "maman" the way I miss really good baguettes and appropriately-named croissants livin' in the 'burbs. Oh, well. Ain't nuthin' but a thang, right? Whereas the little Chinese girl of our house bookkeeper spoke broken baby "Engwish" to me and wiggled onto my lap in a record-breaking couple of seconds the first time she ever met me, this carefully-dressed girl of eight or nine spoke haltingly and bristly to a very nervous, buck-toothed, skinny older girl of about 28-34, also over-dressed for her role as part of our sales staff.

She was obsessed with her looks, too, making sure she rushed into my office to tell me "the good news" about her lunchtime experience with a former model's outdoor staff working the line around the block for her t.v. talk show in the nearby studio, asking her to stand in line for hours to try-out for the star's main show about amateur "would-be" models. Again, I was nonplussed as a native New York girl. Well, yeah, sure. You're tall and skinny enough. I mean, that's where it starts nowadays, before attractiveness and beauty. Fit the tiny clothes, first. Them little rich kids in Hollywood diet all the time. Also, how good do you look in pictures? She went into a fretful paranoia right after her initial bout of giddiness, which is not a good sign for any industry, particularly the extra competitive ones. My queries to her were brief and direct, because any really good art director knows I just don't have time for it while I'm on the clock.

She was less sure about her photogenic qualities ("Well, take some pictures. You have a camera, right?"), and her "prominent mole" (honestly, I hadn't noticed) that she felt sure would make her fodder for the people on the show. Well, that and her age. "Oh, they'd just choose me to 'make fun' of me." Yeah, well, if that's your attitude, then modeling isn't for you, because if this little brush-up freaks you out (where it's all about how you look and what doesn't look right), then the actual business of modeling is out because of your sensitivity to perceived criticisms, so I guess publishing was a better choice for you. End of story. I mean, really, where could you go with it? Rehabs are filled with insecure girls waiting for their next big break. Be a scholar!

But, of course, she was massively problematic in our equally competitive book program, questioning her every decision with an infamous defensiveness that was even more offensive when spoken in her hackneyed "Franche" accent that she put on for show. She was a generic drama queen, which is the absolute kiss of death in a town filled with the real deals "trodding the boards" never-so-lightly each and every night. An egotistical diva who doesn't make art...what the fcuk is that? I had no idea what to do with her in our company, and soon my co-workers filed complaint after complaint about her attitude, too. She was snippy and disrespectful, even "on paper" in our in-house emails, and keeping track of the written word is what we do best. Poor thing. She was on a short clock with us.

Within fairly quick succession, she broke up with her "Fiancee" (we weren't impressed enough by her overt "bling", I guess), had a bad affair with an actual good-looking Frenchman with his own media company who soon got his other French (and white) girlfriend pregnant right before Magdala quit our outfit to go work for him in Paris, but she didn't care. She was going to be "a star", baby! With his over-priced "Breakfast at Tiffany" books that were Euro-friendly and arty enough for his snobby coffee-table audience? Yeah, right. 

But, things had been going downhill for awhile. She began showing symptoms of our temperamental publisher's typical firing arc: too many sick days taken without advance notice, eating quickly through his 50/50 health insurance for her bad teeth and multiple gum surgeries brought on by anorexia and bulimia (that raises some red flags, even in New York, as a notorious food town), and then her too-gossipy friendship with our ferociously evil Jewish secretary sealed her fate at the business, forever, all of which I had warned her about during her first few months of employment.

At a company and a town as fucked up as Manhattan, not even a wanna-be media type like the kind who hides months without lunches, punctuated by the occasional fast food binge that's stuffed hurriedly into her mouth for publicity's sake in the company's kitchen (on recommend as a political tactic by the daft-idiot white-blond yenta aggressively manning the front desk) can sneak past us. Yeah, bitch. We know. It didn't work out the way you thought it would. Fantasies can be like that, though: brutal and cruel and quick, kind of the way I imagine most beauty pageants and their contestants are. In real life, I mean. Not theirs. Ours. The real thing. Living a real life is the only true thing we have on this earth, girl. Get some before it's gone.


For Mr. and Mrs. Jay, of "ANTM" fame: yeah, girl,  I saw you scoping me on the down-low while you was underground during my daily subway commute, wit ya reared-back head and "dah-yummmm, 'cuse me!" look on yo' face and your seven foot frame dressed in all black pretending to clutch at invisible pearls. I do know I look that good. And Mr. Jay, ain't nobody incognito at 6'5 with silver-blond hair gelled into spikes walking around Chelsea. That was an "off" day for me visually, BTW. I was on break from the office getting a lunchtime walk after too many years eating at my desk. Feel me? Yeah, you do. I know fellas too scared to approach a lady, even plush "shorties" like me :) Bahaha! Booyah!

Meet "The Daltons"

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

My ex-boyfriend from college was in way over his head with me and he knew it, because people told him that over and over again. His manic obsessions bounced around in his head, making him sometimes think that people are fucking with him when they aren't, like classically paranoid hippies think about "the government" (as in "We, the People"), and sometimes people really are fucking with him, because he can act like a total fucking dick. He made a series of rude racist comments that he thought he could get away with as a six foot tall ex-quarterback/bouncer, which didn't help out his rep with us at all.

A tall annoying Jewish kid pledging a Long Islander frat lived next door to him freshmen year, and because the kid was a spoiled skateboarder with a rich daddy, Bart decided to mock his prominent nose in front of us one afternoon, when we were just hanging out on their dorm floor. That's how it went down with him: we could be drunk and high and having fun boarding up-and-down the hallway badly giggling about it, then Bart would trip when someone pointed out that he sucked at something like boarding, which he didn't do as a kid in his tidy whitey Bay Ridge neighborhood, because he's a fancy prep school boy.

After that, their "Cold War" began in earnest. For years, Mike Z. told Bart (after he told me he wanted to "see other people" in Montreal, because he didn't want to marry the woman he lost his virginity to) that he swore he saw me walking around Benefit Hill in Providence while I was at R.I.S.D. with a "black" guy (which wasn't true), but Mike had landed a direct hit on his target, square in the chest. I dated a handsome architect/furniture designer in the M.F.A. program from New Jersey who was newly divorced from his bipolar ex-wife, and he was a blond Dutch boy. I went on one date with Beau Bernstein, a good-looking Jewish boy from Manhattan whose famous father produced "The Beatles" first American tour (seriously), and he is definitely not African, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I also dated a messed-up cute sculpture student playing weird games with my Jewish, pot-smoking, and possibly bisexual hippie friend Beth who was "slumming" it in worn clothes that screamed "bohemian" loudly, with requisite woven-knit African tam placed on her long, scraggly, and frequently unwashed dark hair. They were experimenting with naked friendship, when they both lied down on a bed without touching, and then she scribbled manic sayings about worms and penises on cardboard for me to see, which she hurriedly crumbled up when I asked her about it. "Is it an art project?" I don't know. I was just there to help them grow some pot in her attic with his help, funded by their growing trust funds for the raised electrical bill and the equipment ordered from "High Times", like grow lamps with special bulbs. 

I have no fucking idea what was going on between them (still don't), except that maybe identity/personality disorders, trust funds, drugs, and really difficult art and design schools do not mix together well. Oh, and there was also a nice boy I fooled around with during the beginning of art school over a summer session (my Mom really liked him, but I barely remember him), and that was it. Truly. For years, Mike Z. played games with Bart's head in revenge for his racist and anti-Semitic comments, and I can't say I blame him for it. Bart used to grill me about the penis sizes of my exes (not that I had many to compare with, at 17 years old), asking me how much bigger he was.

It was kinda gay, but the kid was a virgin, after all. He was so fucked up about it, that he couldn't perform on the night we designated for the act to take place in my dorm room (Karen went home for the weekend, which was rare for her to do), and of course, we had to talk about it for way longer than was necessary. Go to sleep, I finally told him. We'll have sex in the morning. Really? Really. He was 18, and that's how it was. He believed me after that, pretending I was like a prescient "witch" when really, I was healthier and more mature than him, but he would argue with that, too. He could become arrogant, self-defensive, and boastful in a heartbeat, looking to place blame on the people around him, like blaming me for his failure at science, which blew up his boyhood dreams of tending to hunky football players as a P.T. 

Uh...sorry, bro? He didn't help me with any of my schoolwork or art projects because he couldn't then, and he certainly can't now. It was reactionary in the extreme. "Dutch Boy" called him "Old Man" to his face for being choosy, fussy, or picky about fucking everything, and there was something really weird about his fears that he forced us to talk about at length (as therapy for him), because he never really solved any of his problems. He was abusive towards me, too, saying crazy shit about my mixed heritage that he disparaged as a "Bourbon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon) Quebecois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_%28word%29), a way of putting himself above me as an Original Métis because he was supposedly "whiter" than me, eerily similar to the color games African-Americans play with each other to disrespect each other as less colored or "too" colored, you feel me?

It was okay when he developed a red tan in the summer because he had eczema on his upper arms (don't we all?!), trotting out exotic stories about a French-Canadian Great Uncle with prominently full lips who could have been part Indian...what did I think? Uh, sure, bro....they didn't exactly keep records about indigenous squaws and their fur trappers back then, you know? Except for my line, they did. In fact, I have a copy of my ancestors' handwritten diary with names and dates. In this century, we even have a genetic database! Hard to fake or beat, but like any desperate "student of history", Bart searched for clues among the stacks to prove that he was better than anyone else, when we were just a bunch of working class New York kids trying to make it, you know? It was oddly striving for someone of his age, but he wouldn't be the first bad scholar who can't compete with the actual chops of an impassioned academic and we were that as a group, overall.

Because of my beauty, brains, drive, and work ethic, his comments never really bothered me as much as his questioning seemed to knock him off-kilter much quicker than anything I ever did to him. I felt bad for him, actually. He could be a sweet boy when he let his guard down. He reminded me of the chesty character "Gaston" from the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast" (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Gaston); an overblown cartoon character searching for himself by breaking apart other people into shards that he could examine at his leisure, except life didn't move at his pace. It got even weirder after I broke up with him. He dated and married a plain-looking teaching student who liked him from afar during college (typical, typical) with the "horrible" brown eyes that he supposedly was worried about mixing into his precious blood lines through me, because blue eyes are recessive genes to my stronger line, and perhaps domination by childbirth was his real fear with me, because it's true.

After we met up several years ago (he heard I was back in the Slope, and tracked me down via my phone number after a supposed random drive-by when he saw me walking Teddy down the block, because his boss just happened to live in the neighborhood), and he was still in love with me. He told me years ago when I broke up with him that he was upset because I was the best-looking woman he ever dated, which should have been a big clue, no matter how many times he heard it from me and other people. Yeah... major douche chills, right? So what?! He had aged poorly as I had aced aging, as we both predicted in our teens. I've always been younger looking than my actual age.

He didn't stop with the texts and emails, as I knew he wouldn't. When I was in a tough spot after my early morning accident with Teddy, I met up with him after work for a beer so he could carry me upstairs to my apartment on his back while I was still on crutches. He naturally disparaged my rent-stabilized historical apartment for looking "just like "college" because I was a rather recent move-in to the place, similar to my former "frenemy" Cheryl's comments about my aunt's "starter" apartment in Kensington, as cues to me that they were far ahead of me in life. It didn't work, obviously. He's reading me along with her right now, eh? But it did give me cues that I was 100% correct in dropping them from my life, not that I needed much verification. After that, he got weirder with his rapidly responding emails.

He'd told me we could have an affair because he had Lupus from those poor recessive genes of his (we hadn't known that in college), and as a result of his diseases, he was sterile. Ha! He'd boasted so often about his virility and rugged good health that it was the greatest justice I'd ever heard of. Poor kid! What an ass! He'd forced his lower-earning wife to bear triplets in a hospital bed through many in-vitro sessions (poor thing!), which I accurately described to my family and friends as "dodging a bullet", true in every sense. The Loup Garou of our mythical pasts had returned (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loup-garou_%28homonymie%29)! After that, he sent me a series of emails under a series of weirder pseudonyms, as a prelude to an affair that never happened. I married an Indo-Euro, bro! No going back from that.

One of the last email account names he used was so weird, I just had to ask him about it. What the fuck does "Dalton" mean?! One email name was an easier trace to a certain "Star Trek" episode (we'd met in our dorm as he watched Star Trek alone in the common room smoking a cigarette that I bummed from him to make conversation, and our pretext to meeting him as our new college-age drug dealer who lived in the room right beneath us....ha! Nice one, Karen!), but this one was more obscure....WTF? His reply was just as bad as I feared for him. He wrote that he was tired of explaining and spelling out his obviously French-sounding name to the movie people he worked with out west, so he decided to "Anglicize" it for their comfort. WHA???!!!

This was the same kid who'd openly bragged about his roots to all of us in college over and over, about how much of a real "working class" champion he'd be for all those poor union people after graduating, but this? This shit....?! The "sell-out" moniker he'd always feared becoming had landed squarely on his shoulders, and not ours. His brother Quentin's girlfriend Shelley had been a "sell-out" for straightening her curly hair like girls sometimes do (I did it in the 90s, too), but not him! No, becoming an entertainment lawyer who watches show-biz types for contractual violations that he can sue over, well, that's just great. Not a sell-out at all! Except he was, and poorly so. 

I didn't respond to him after that, even after he pretended that we established some sort of yearly check-in pattern as old friends that didn't exist. He goaded me into responding to him by insulting my obviously Acadian last name through his description of a Toronto band with it, a name I am fiercely proud of. It was the first legal stipulation I made in the paperwork I filed at a Colorado courthouse for the no-fault divorce I paid for on my own, after a 1/2 hr. consult with a bitchy female attorney who insulted me for taking up her valuable time, as I scribbled away all the legal advice I could afford for the $75 it hurt to pay, because I felt I'd lost something I would never get back when I gave up my name. I was so relieved to have my last name back that I immediately knew on each and every level that I'd absolutely done the right thing, just as I'd done with every other bad boyfriend I had in the past. I'd kept my name and my identity, even when it wasn't convenient for me to do so, and people, it has never been convenient for me to do so, but I stayed true. I got to keep my soul. Hard to beat that.

Streetscapes

Building in afternoon light.

I've always enjoyed photographing industrial elements like piping and building ducts, so much so that one fellow art student remarked to me on a road trip, "Look, Marie! Trucks! Quick! Take a picture!", pointing derisively out the car window when I raised my lens to photograph a carrier loaded with cars the next lane over. But I love craftsmanship wherever I see it, in any form, and that point of view forms the basis of my design intellectualism to this day. I come from a working class background as many New Yorkers do, and I can't imagine our lives today without the massive industrial projects and undertakings of our forefathers. It's everywhere we look. After all, my great grandfather not only made metal work for bridges and buildings, he was skilled enough to render The Last Supper entirely out of copper, in a framed piece of art that still hangs in my mother's house. 

Fuse box.

You can't manufacture that kind of history and continuity on demand without passion and heart, not even at the best art school in the world; a place where craft still counts, even back when I attended it as a tower made almost entirely out of ivory. Snobbery is always out of date, no matter the era, because the future will always belong to those of us still willing to get our hands dirty, which includes the mistaken idea that using our hands is somehow a base affair. I hope my former classmate, where ever he wound up, somehow managed to rise above his class-based leanings. It couldn't have been easy to be a Van Zandt, no matter how old and privileged his family name is (was).

Stay classy, people