CHAPTER 11, Part 3, I offer a glimpse into some personal issues. I ponder giving Transamerica two weeks’ notice.

 I'd been with Transamerica less than a year.      The insurance agency, S & E, was a very small, four person office- five counting me if I decide to take the job.  The thought of making more money and getting off measly government food stamps felt right; I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was a catch to making such a move.

 

Back then, one’s food stamp allotment was not mailed to you, or, like today- loaded on to a debit card.  You had to go down to the AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) office to pick it up. The building housing the office was in the Tenderloin, a grimy neighborhood of SRO hotels and greasy spoon restaurants, where prostitutes, the poor, the alcoholics, addicts, and unemployed hung out on the sidewalks,  in front of grocery and liquor stores, and all-night cafeterias. 

People standing in line for AFDC allotment check.

Bureaucrats who ran the program kept changing the location from one cramped space in one Tenderloin building to another.  A uniformed person acted as a monitor whose job it was to rail at us and keep us lined up.  They cued you up single file in a long, long line that ran for a half-block in front of the building then snaked around the side into a narrow, dark passageway between buildings.  You could barely form two lines but didn’t want to because you’d brush against the seeping wet, brick walls on either side, taking care not to step in oily puddles.   People jostled one another; those that came late tried to cut in. Invariably, from in front, a monitor would shout out information- like, who was to go inside next- but those of us standing in the back often couldn’t hear because of the traffic noise and people talking, shouting, and laughing.  You were ignored if you asked that they repeat what was said.  Would they ever deign to walk down the line to deliver the message?   Never.  Once inside the office, an hour later, you’d line up according to your last name.  There were some folding chairs along the back wall for the infirm.  People brought their tired, bored preschoolers who, once inside, either endlessly cried and whined, or ran around yelling unless their mother kept them tightly reined in.   Still, we were relieved to be out of that narrow alley.  I usually brought the SF Chronicle with me to pass the time, about the only time I read it. 

I made up my mind to quit Transamerica so gave two weeks’ notice; I left on a Friday, started working for S & E the following Monday.  I couldn’t simply call AFDC to get off assistance, I had to go down to the government office and show my first paycheck stub and sign a bunch a papers.  Now, I no longer had to suffer the demoralizing, demeaning treatment meted out by self-important losers.    Mostly it was the monitors.     There were armed guards with badges on white shirts, wearing black ties and pants, who behaved toward us as though it were a crime for being poor and un- or underemployed.  Granted, there were some very warm, kind-hearted, caring case-workers at AFDC.  Still, Mr. E’s- Dave’s,-  secretary,  I’ll call her Irene, with her steely stare through her upswept, black framed glasses, came close to emulating the worst of them. She wore her coal-black hair in an extreme bee-hive.  Never a hair out of place.

The S & E agency was a few floors above TA’s.  My desk faced windows that looked out over a gorgeous view of the Northwestern section of San Francisco Bay.  Mr. S.’s office and his secretary were on my left; Dave and Irene on my right.   As I said, it was a small office, in fact, claustrophobic.   My boss was easy to work for.  He was funny; we often bantered and joked.  I glanced over at Irene once and you know that saying: if looks could kill . . .    Mr. S’s secretary, a woman in her fifties, came off totally out of it most of the time.  She wore thick-lensed, cat-eye glasses that magnified her watery grey eyes, her hair a poof of brown cloud.  She appeared to not care whether I was or was not there.  Where Dave was small and wiry, Mr. S. was shaped like a baked potato and wore his pants under his armpits.  He was soft-spoken and dour where Dave was witty and fast.  Each man had his own clients.  I never saw them get together in each other’s offices.  The place was eerily quiet except for the ringing phones, subdued conversations, and the clicking of our typewriters.

One morning my phone rang.  On the other end I heard the voice of an older woman. “Hello?  S & E.?” she asked.  I said yes and introduced myself.  She told me she called because of a change she wanted in her homeowner’s policy.  I asked her the name it was under and she said, “William and Polly Teas.”  The name rang a bell.  I said, “You wouldn’t happen to be a relative of the man who made that film, ‘The Immoral Mr. Teas,’ would you?”   “Yes,” she answered, “I’m his wife.  Do you know the film?”  I told her I knew of it having for years  seen the cartoon drawing of the ogling Mr. Teas depicted in the  poster outside an “Adult” movie house on Market Street.  But I'd never seen it.  In the film, Mr. Teas discovers that he can see women naked through their clothes.  He doesn’t want to; he can’t help it. (The picture at right does not represent the original poster I had seen on Market.)

Poster for "The Immoral Mr. Teas."

Polly lived in a tract home in north Sausalito.  We got to be friends over the phone and whenever I’d bike ride to Marin, I’d stop by to visit.  We’d sit at her dining room table, drink coffee and talk.  She told me that the filmmaker, Russ Meyers, who directed her husband’s film, had bought the rights to it in a bad deal where Mr. Teas (Bill) got only a small percentage of the initial sale with no royalties.  No royalties?  That blew my mind.  It seemed to me that the film played in San Francisco on Market Street for a long as I could remember.  It was made in 1959.  While I visited Polly, I’d see her husband in the hallway, just outside the dining room.  He never spoke and seemed really shy.  I told Polly that it seemed like they shared an autonomous life.   She opened up to me and explained that because of the deal with Meyers, he not only lost control of his film, but also his mind.  Polly said that he had been diagnosed with a mental illness bordering on schizophrenia.  “The Immoral Mr. Teas” ended up being Meyers’s first hit and laid the foundation for his nudie film enterprise.

It got to the point where I could no longer ignore the negative tension in the office.  I’d walk in smiling after a brisk bike ride, smile and say, “Hello!”   Neither of the women responded in any way.  They simply never spoke to me.  Also both were extremely protective and possessive of their accounts and their bosses.  I dreaded having to ask Irene anything about protocol or a client.  The atmosphere was stifling and I said as much to Dave.   He brushed it off.  “She’s just jealous,” he said, “because you’re young and pretty.  She’ll like you, give her a chance.” 

 

One morning, in the copy room, a cubicle outside of Mr. S’s office,  Dave came up behind me and put his arms around me.   I stepped forward quickly, out of his grasp, went to my desk and sat down.  I didn’t say a word.  I glanced at Irene; she grinned with the evil of a Cheshire cat.  I felt weird.  I didn’t know how to act around him after that.  I was all business.  He tried the same thing another time and when I resisted, he whispered, “I understand.  It’s Irene, the office.  Why don’t you come to my place when my wife is out.  I’ll let you know.”  That night I told CH.   He said, “Quit!  Don’t put up with that shit.”  So I did.  My excuse was that my kids were older and I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could before they went off on their own.  I didn’t tell Dave or Mr. S. that I was tired, tired of the whole business, the misogyny, the ol’ boy banter, Dave’s sexual behavior, and that I felt that their secretaries wanted me dead. 

 I stayed home- for a while- baking bread, sewing, writing, reading, biking all over.  I was back on unemployment again even though I’d quit.  I wasn’t laid off or fired.  I don’t remember what I told the caseworker, but he okayed my application.  He noted that I was a single mom with three children. 

Unemployment caseworkers interviewing clients

 Still, after a few months of trying to ignore that feeling of being dependent on someone else, I went out looking for work and landed a junior underwriter position at Fireman’s Fund on Laurel Hill, west of Pacific Heights.  My ride to work would take longer, though.  About that time, we moved from the Western Addition to stucco house on a steep hill in Bernal Heights, way across town in the mid-Mission, bordering Potrero Hill.  The house had  a foyer, a garage, a backyard with a lawn (I could garden!), a utility/slash downstairs bedroom, and two bedrooms upstairs; two tile bathrooms, and gold, w-2- w, shag carpeting, which I hated. 

I dug up half the lawn for a vegetable garden and the landlord flipped.  And he didn’t like that we parked our bikes in the foyer, leaning them against a cheap, balsa wood, cherry-wood stained cabinet they had left there.   We lasted less than a year.  CH and I split up.  One day I walked up the hill and found a vacant, A-frame house.  I called the number on the For Rent sign, met the owners who ran a plumbing shop on 30^th and Church Sts, paid first and last months’ rent.  The kids and I moved up the hill; CH stayed in the other place until he went to live with his son on Valencia. 

I took the attic room in our new place and let my kids- the youngest, now 17, who joined the army with my permission; 18, recently graduated from high school and working for the CCC in Calaveras County; and the oldest, 20, ready to be on his own, now at San Francisco State-  have the main floor bedrooms.  To reach mine, I went out the back door and climbed a flight of steps, built into the side of the house, up to my door.  It was fun, especially in the rain.

Coming up: CHAPTER 12, Part One:  Fireman’s Fund; female bosses: Helen, hit by a car, breaking both legs;  and Nazi Norma keeping track of our time to the second, stopping only when I embarrased her in front of our whole department.  I meet unforgettable Wes Schultz, who I’d later end up working for from 1984 until he contracted AIDS in 1986.