Chapter 12, Part One: Fireman's Fund, Patton Helen, Nazi Norma, and I am blamed for a devastating accident.

GLUE, Chapter 12, Part One

Fireman’s Fund:  I deal with female bosses. Helen, intractable, unreasonable, racist, gets both legs broken in a car accident on New Year’s Eve, and is off for six month; another, Nazi Norma (I think was her name sans Nazi), kept track of our time by the minute on her desk calendar.  And a man, unforgettable Wes Schultz, with whom I’d work with again years later, and who died of AIDS in 1987.

Fireman’s Fund was located on top of a hill in the Laurel Hill neighborhood below Pacific Heights, on California and Presidio, across the city from the Financial District and downtown.  My 45 minute bike ride (after pushing my bike up steep Bronte Street in Bernal Heights to Yarbo which was flat) took me down Yarbo where I made a right to Cortland, down Cortland to Mission, segued on to Valencia, Valencia to Market, cross Market to McAllister, then to Fillmore (or Webster), to Pine, up Pine (pushing up the final hill) to Presidio, left on California to the Fireman Fund parking lot where I locked up my bike.  Since I hadn’t had an insurance job in months, I was relegated to the position of rater/coder in the automobile insurance department.  The underwriters sat across the expansive room from us.  They brought us sheets and sheets of commercial vehicle fleet listings; we then wrote in the codes for each vehicle, everything from 18-wheel semis to a company president’s Mercedes.

Our desks were lined up three-deep, and four across.  Helen, a tall, short-haired, middle-age blonde, sat at the opposite end of my row.  She wore slacks and cotton sport shirts or sweaters with smarmy designs- kittens, puppies, hearts- on the front.  She chain-smoked, reeked of nicotine, and, was a nitpicker.  She seemed always to be on my case for the simplest thing, like using white-out to correct a code instead of erasing it.  I used a pen, where everyone else, a pencil.  When I used a pencil, she complained it wasn’t’ dark enough.  She ragged on everyone, mostly women, until they were in tears.  One co-worker, I’ll call her Rosa, had gorgeous, thick black hair.  She’d comb it out at her desk, first thing, which took maybe a minute.  This infuriated Helen.  One day, Helen was at my desk, emanating nicotine fumes while pointing out a minor issue when she looked up and saw Rosa combing out her hair.  She said,

               “I’m going to can her slutty ass for grooming herself on company time.  All that filthy hair.  She should do that in the john before coming on to the floor.  But all the women of her race comb out their lice in public.”  Rosa heard her, got up from her desk, grabbed her purse, and walked out.  I figured she’d quit, but the next morning, there she was, combing her gorgeous hair.  I wondered if Helen could feel the daggers Rosa’s eyes were throwing into her.  Norma sat in the back row.  We could feel her eyes drilling into our skull.   Short and frumpy, she was probably as old as Helen, wore cotton smocks, calf-length skirts, flats, and Supp-hose.  She was Helen’s silent enforcer until Helen's accident.

Across the aisle were Wes, an easy-going guy in his late 20s.  Wes had thinning light-brown hair, was tall and lanky, and looked sort of like William Hurt; and a beautiful young Asian woman (who could pass for Lucy Liu).   They entered the codes we gave them into primitive (compared to today’s), dedicated computers, pre-loaded with software programs, which then computed the rates and premiums from these codes and spat out the finished product on noisy dot-matrix printers, producing endless streams of paper that folded automatically on the floor.     One morning on one of my first days there I heard “Lucy” shout “Fuck!” and slam down the phone.  Wes said, “Go down again?”  Accessing a program required calling the server on a phone attached to a modem: dial-up.   Wes and Lucy had to be rapid keystrokers as the connection kept dropping, the screens went blank after maybe five minutes, and they’d have to start over.  It seemed they were constantly on the phone. The computers took ages to reboot.  While waiting, Lucy would pick up her desk phone and dial.  I could tell it was a private call.   Her boyfriend lived in Honolulu.  The company realized this only when a bean-counter scrutinized the abnormally high phone bill.  Lucy was warned.    Helen and Norma, not really understanding exactly what they did with the computers except for the end results, left them alone.

One day, Wes came over to my desk, a cigarette between his fingers.  He took a drag, exhaled into my face as he asked me about a code on a schedule I’d given him. “Wes,” I said, waving away the smoke, “I’d appreciate it if you’d get rid of that cigarette and, please, from now on please don’t smoke when you’re talking to me.”   He looked startled, his face red, he went back to his desk, put out his smoke, came back and said,

      “I am so, so sorry.  It’ll never happen again. Now, can I show you what I think you did wrong?”  From then on, we were friends.

During the months I was off work, inspired by an art-deco designed flyer I saw at the unemployment office, I started mime classes- not Marcel Marceau style, but Decroux.  And later, between other jobs, I promoted performances dealing with the history of mime at colleges and high schools in the Bay Area and Northern California.  I did all my own press work, developed and maintained useful contacts in the educational field for future shows.   This experience weighed heavily in my landing my final job in 1984 at an international commercial insurance and investment brokerage.  While at Fireman’s Fund I did street mime and presentations in my spare time.  A co-worker, Peter Gomez, assisted me and performed in one of my shows.  The Fund threw a Hallowe'en party.  Peter and I wore white-face.

Peter and I in white face.

Our petite, brusque Asian department head whose name I don't recall, wore lots of make up, her hair in a dark perm. At the party, she gamely posed with me for a shot.

Our Department Head and I in costume.

  One day, I heard her call Peter over to her desk.

      “Peter,” she said, “Look.  Don’t crumple your waste paper and toss it in the basket, leave the paper flat.  It leaves room for more.  Your basket doesn’t get full so fast.”

       “No, it won’t, Miss.  Watch,” Grinning gleefully, Peter noisily dragged over a basket, crumpled up several sheets of paper and tossed them in.  “You just do this.”  Standing on one leg, he stomped the paper down into the basket.  “See,” he said, “lots of room.”  Miss ______  tsked and looked away.  Others had stopped working to watch, snickering.  Peter, short, dark, with thick black hair, was gay.  His partner, who also worked at the Fund in the actuarial department, was about Peter’s height, fair-skinned, with curly, light brown hair and wore thick-lensed glasses.  They were careful not to be seen together.

Sitting in the front row meant that co-workers constantly crossed in front of me.  Engrossed in my work, I was startled one day to hear, “You’re a witch, aren’t you?”  I looked up and saw a big, blowsy woman with dyed, bright red hair, hand on thrust out hip.  This was Verna, from the property department.  She wore ankle-length, tight-fitting skirts and low-cut blouses and reminded me of a barmaid in a 19^th Century novel.

      “What make you say that?” I asked.

      “Oh, I just know.  I read people.”  From then on, she never failed to stop by my desk and give me knowing smirks and winks.  I didn't bother contesting her take on me. Let her have her fantasies.  Passing by one day, she looked down at a hand-written memo I was drafting. 

       “Hmmmm, you have a depressive personality.  Most”-

        “-Oh, my God, Verna, don’t you have work to do?”  She didn’t miss a beat.

       -“witches do.  I can tell because your handwriting slants down to the right.”  She laughed and flounced off, “Don’t be so defensive.”  

She intrigued me in the way that a scientist is intrigued by unusual specie that suddenly appears in a study.  She wasn’t the usual business career or homemaker type woman one sees in white collar jobs.  I commented on this to her once and she said, “Well, neither are you, being a witch and an artist.”  She confided in me that her former boss at a small peninsula agency had laid her off then touted her for a job at the Fund.   Unlike me, she was totally open about her personal life, too, telling me she lived in a pricey area on the peninsula, a gated community, with her Japanese husband, who, she complained, preferred prostitutes and porn over sex with her.  She was loud, and in-your-face, which made me and others uncomfortable.  As for my personal life, I had broken up with the boat builder and for the first time in my life, I had no man waiting in the wings so to speak.  I decided on an experiment to discover who I really was as an independent woman.  I would go a year not only without a man, but also, without music of any genre (unless I heard it in passing), as music triggers emotions and and memories.  My sons no longer lived at home so I didn't have restrict their music playing.   The experiment left me feel light and free.


Christmas and New Year’s holidays came and went, but Helen wasn’t at her desk when we returned to work.  She’s always came in at least a half-hour before anyone else and rarely took a day off.  Norma called us together. 

                “I’m sorry to bring you this bad news, but on New Year’s Eve, as Helen got out of her car, a drunk driver sideswiped her as she was standing next to the open door.  Both her legs were shattered.  She may be on disability for at least six months.” Instead of feeling sad or upset, I was relieved.  Later that day, Verna stopped by my desk.  
      “You did that, didn’t you?” she said.

       “What?”

       “Cast a spell.”

       “Yeah, sure.”

       “Don’t deny it.  Well, I don’t blame you for not wanting people to know,” she snickered and walked away.   I mean, I hated Helen for being persnickety and racist, but wouldn’t have wished an accident like the one she suffered on anyone.  I was just glad to have some relief from her overbearing attitude for a few months.  No temp was hired to replace her so all her work fell to Norma, which changed her from a kind of tyrannical house-mother into a gestapo.

Chapter 12, Part Two: Helen returns to the Fund, along with swine flu.  I discover Norma spying on me and cure her of it.  After a year  and some soul-searching, I start a new relationship.  My department is moves across town to Front Street on the Embarcadero.   Peter and Wes quit.  I don't see Wes for several years.