Chinatown Grant Street.True to my need for time alone during lunch break and to find an atmosphere as far removed from the office as possible, I walked from Montgomery Street up to St. Mary's Square, between Kearney and Grant in Chinatown, every day. I sat on an empty bench, ate my brown bag lunch, and read while mahjong tiles clicked, Chinese people chatted, and children played. One day, a man in a business suit sat next to me and unfolded his Wall Street Journal. As I got up to leave for work, he said, "I guess I'll see you tomorrow; you're here every day." I'd never seen him before.
St. Mary's Square Park.
Laurence worked for Charles Schwab, a stock brokerage on The Street. He had light brown hair which fell across his forehead and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He also had a beard, something unheard of in the early, pre-hippie sixties - - only Beatnicks grew beards. We started meeting for lunch where we talked about literature, movies and jazz. On our first date, he showed up in a Porsche. I asked him once what he thought of the possibility of the US getting involved in Vietnam. He said, "Whatever our government decides to do, I'll go along. It knows a lot more about what's going on over there than I do." I never mentioned it again. I was surprised by his answer; it seemed out of character. He told me that he'd lied about his age to join the navy and had been in Korea. He pulled up his sleeve and showed me a strange tattoo in the inside of his wrist, hinting that he'd been a prisoner, but refused to go into detail. One afternoon Harry saw us together outside the building. Back at work, he asked me who he was. “Laurence,” I said.
Laurence Fontes on Sansome St. 1964
"What? He looks exactly like D. H. Lawrence!” He showed me the author's picture on the back of his copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
"You're right, he does! But he spells his name with a 'u'."
On a break, Harry gestured to the women sitting at a nearby table and asked me why I never had coffee with them.
“They’re not very friendly,” I said.
“I know why,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
"They’re jealous.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m the invisible man to the women in my department,” he explained, “They talk about me as though I weren’t there. I hear them talk about you, too.”
“What do they say?"
“They can’t understand how a divorcée with three kids can be as happy as you seem to be all the time.” The one time I did take a break with Jane and the other women, Jane asked me about Laurence; how long I’d been seeing him. Before I could answer, she said,
“I won’t date until my daughter is on her own.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Nine - - I don’t trust men,” she said.
If the men she knew were anything like Carl, an engineering inspector, I couldn’t blame her. Carl was an obese, middle-age Italian, who, rumor had it, was married to a much younger woman and had a twelve year old daughter whom he doted on. He stared at me all the time with big, lugubrious eyes. I came to work one day wearing a brown velvet tailored mini dress and a beige picture hat a la Audrey Hepburn. As I passed the engineering department, I thought Carl's eyes would fall out of his head. He waylaid me later between banks of file cabinets. I tried to ignore him and turn around but he took my arm. I couldn't look at him. As he held me, he blurted that he wanted to rape me when he saw me come in. I felt saliva rush to my mouth. I wanted to spit in his face. Jerking my arm free, I hurried to the bathroom and washed my face, hands, and my sleeve, blotting if dry with paper towels and lifting the velvet nap that Carl's sweaty, fat fingers had mashed down. In those days, you tried to put these incidents out of your mind, sluffing them off with: Oh, well, men are like that. I wanted to tell someone. Instinctively, I knew if I told Jane or Sam, they would look me up and down and say, "Well?" So I told Harry, and whenever he saw Carl headed my way, he'd phone and give me a heads up. I'd hide in the bathroom till I was sure he was out of range.
Carl didn't show up for a few weeks. He came back noticably slimmer. I'd let my guard down and he stopped me again in the files. When I pushed past, not looking at him, he blurted out: "Wait, I have to tell you something." I stepped back and waited. Near tears, he told me he'd had a heart attack. He was a changed man, he said. His doctor told him if he didn't lose weight, he'd never see his daughter graduate from high school. So his wife put him on a crash diet and he lost fifty pounds. I said nothing. He moved aside, let me pass, but never apologized. Still, I began to see him as a vulnerable human being - - but kept my distance.
BOURBON & CHEESECAKE
Kjeld Storm - - groovy name for a guy who looked like Ichabod Crane - - and Frances sat in front of me. Frances was tall and stately; heavily made-up and perfumed. She always wore black; and piled her dyed, coal-black hair on her head. She never left her desk for coffee, but would announce in a rich baritone that she was taking her break. She would then mime closing a door and pulling curtains around her desk; she'd open a thermos of "coffee," and a heady fragrance of bourbon wafted over us. Everyone, including Dick and Jim, went along. Kjeld, who wore powder-blue business suits and wide ties, besides being darkly witty, shared with us an incredible cheesecake made from his Norwegian grandmother's recipe. He gave me the recipe and I made his cheesecake at home for dessert. Roark, my oldest son, got ahold of it and at age nine, became our chief cheesecake baker.
After a year at the SF branch, I asked for a raise on the basis that the cost of living was higher in the City than in LA. Jim and the department head turned me down, insisting that there was no difference. The strategy for a woman to make more money and get a better position, if she had a least a year’s experience, was to quit and go work for another company. So I did.
Chapter 7, Part Four: Four Major Changes
First: I land a job in the commercial package department at Pacific Indemnity- cum-Chubb Group, then . . ? at a hundred dollars more than I'd been making. Second: I could afford to move. I bought a Sunday Examiner on Saturday night and scanned the ads: "No pets," "No children, infant okay." (What happens when the infant becomes a toddler?) "No divorcées." "Pets okay, no children." I found a flat on 20th Street, between Collingwood & Diamond in Eureka Valley (now "The Castro," although "Eureka Valley" is making a comeback). David Folb, the landlord, who looked like Rod Serling, rented me the place without too many questions. Heading him off, I told him my status and that I had kids. I also told him how much trouble I had finding rentals that allowed children and divorced women. He explained that his sister was in my position, so he knew what I was up against.
"But what's the deal about divorced women?" I asked him.
"Landlords say they cause problems when their exes and boyfriends get into fights. But I wouldn't know."
The flat had a refrigerator, but no stove. I had Sears deliver an apartment- size gas stove which Laurence installed, but didn't bother testing before he took off. The first time I lit a match to the stove, flames leaped from all the pipe joints and burners. I turned off the valve behind it to shut off the gas flow and called PG&E. A good-natured red-head came out and told me that PG&E didn't install appliances, but took pity on me when I asked him how was I supposed to cook for my kids unless I had a working stove? I watched him detach all the pipes, slather pipe-dope on them, and screw them back on. I gave him a cup of coffee while he waited for the dope to set; he then struck a spark, turned on the gas, saw that everything was okay, and left.
A WOMAN BEFORE HER TIME
My prospective boss, Nancy Rakestraw (yes, I know!), interviewed me at lunch at an upscale Chinese restaurant near Sansome. The waiter asked if we'd like to order drinks. I said no thanks. Nancy smiled at me. She was in her late 30s, never married; smart and funny. We walked back to her office and she told me I had the job. She confessed that she wouldn't have hired me if I'd ordered a drink; I found out later that she often joined the men at three martini lunches. The branch manager, Chet Zinn, was an old, smallish man who wore owlish glasses. Walking past the PBX (old telephone technology) operator's desk on my way to lunch one day, I heard her say, "Mr. Zinnzout." I cracked up. She asked me what was funny and I told her. From then on, she said she had to suppress a laugh whenever she said it.
Nancy was tall and willowy, and dressed expensively. She looked like a librarian - -receding chin, glasses with upswept plastic glitter frames, wispy, light brown hair, a large domed forehead, and pouty lips to which she constantly applied lipstick. Nancy was the first woman I ever heard say “fuck” on the phone to an agent (or to anyone, in fact) and no one batted an eye. She tutored me, appeared to know everything about coverages, made rate calculations in her head while I still clunked away on a massive calculator (See picture.), and was a mathematical wiz. My very East Coast co-workers fawned over her. They were young, blonde Harvard grads who spent all their money on clothes and lived in high rent Marina near the Palace of Fine Arts. Recently-married Evelyn had an under-slung jaw and wet blue eyes; Marilyn was overweight and engaged.
Co-worker Warren Killion leans on my huge calculator at my messy desk as we crack up over some inanity. I could never get to work on time, but was never more than ten minutes late. Bosses hate that. If your work day begins at 8:30, you're to be at your desk and working at 8:30. Most employees are just coming in through the door at 8:30. I got up at six, got my kids - -10, 8 and 6 - - out of bed, made breakfast, got them dressed. If the least thing went wrong, I’d be late. If one of my kids couldn't find his shoe, or threw a tantrum, I’d be late. We took the bus to Chinatown to Commodore Stockton on Clay between Powell and Stockton, where they went to school and day-care. And I walked about eight blocks down the hills to the Financial District in my high-heel shoes. Nancy wasn’t pleased. She’d say, "If I let you get away with it, everyone else will come in late." But after a while, she resorted to giving me dirty looks instead of a verbal trouncing or threaten to fire me.
"LITTLE YELLOW NOTES"
We typed out memos and letters to agents; she eschewed handwritten anything. She checked all my work and was fast - - do her own stuff and check everyone else’s, too. Her way of telling you about your mistakes was to type out “Little Yellow Notes” and staple them on the files after hours (before Post-its). I’d come in and see my files stacked on my desk bristling with “Little Yellow Notes.” Being the newest hire, of course I got the most “Little Yellow Notes.” When Evelyn got them, she’d cry, softly so you’d hardly know. She’d pick up the file, plop herself down next to Nancy and whine. I was sick of seeing the notes so did my damndest to avoid them. I'd check and recheck my work. Soon the day came when I found my files clear of the pesky notes, while my co-workers' were papered with them.
2 GOOD LʘʘKING 2B TRU
The third change happened when I'd been at PI a little over a month. I came to work late to find all the women abuzz about a new guy that had just been hired; he was in his supervisor's office. I envisioned him looking like all the other men in shlubby brown suits and bad haircuts who ended up in insurance. I walked past his desk to the break room and thought: Oh, no! They must have made a mistake. This guy is just too good-looking and put together - - he had on an expensive, silk/wool black pintripe suit - - for an insurance company; he won't last. And, because of me, he didn't.
It was rumored he'd just gotten married; his father-in-law owned an agency and arranged to get him this job. Lynn English (even his name was too cool for insurance) took me to lunch. We walked up to North Beach to the Bohemian Café and came back two hours later. Over a glass of red and a shared roast beef on sourdough, he told me he wrote poetry and worked as a printer at the Chronicle, elevating him a couple more notches on my scale. His wife talked him into taking a leave of absence for this job. They lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the Marina and she'd set up the walk-in closet as his study and expected him to go in there every night and write, instead, he hit the bars. He told me that when they first met he'd asked her name and laughed, then repeated it: He showed me - - raised his eyebrows, leared, and said, "Ann Howe!" Needless to say, she got very angry, he said. We laughed, talked about writers, poets, ourselves and other things. A few days later the mail-guy dropped a hand written envelope in my "In box." I took it out and read it: "You look ravishing today, may I ravish you?" I glanced over at Lynn; my face felt red and hot; he looked at me and we both looked away fast. Somehow, when a great-looking guy with black hair and blue eyes uses a clever play on words to state his intentions towards me compared to being grabbed between file cabinets by fat, sweaty Carl blurting out a crudity, caused me to consider the possibility more favorably.
Some time later, Lynn and I went to lunch and he told me he and his wife had separated and he'd taken a room at the Press Club. He also said that the gossip around the office was that I'd broken up his marriage and that the women called me a Jezebel. They avoided me more than usual. Thing was, Lynn and I had never dated. His supervisor called him into his office one morning and fired him for "immoral behavior"! He went back to the Chronicle. Why they didn't fire me as well I have no idea.
Around that time, Laurence took me to the No-Name, a jazz bar in Sausalito. On the way home,he told me he'd found someone else, but we "could still be friends." The top was down in his Porsche and I sang, "Friends, lovers no more; friends, same as before," to the stars. I dated other men; Lynn's wife filed for divorce and he moved to a houseboat at Gate 5 in Sausalito and wrote in a little aerie on its roof. A few months later, he ended up renting a flat a couple blocks from our place. He was the only one I went out with who could tell my boys apart and remember their names.
Lynn and I, in front of my flat on 20th St. on our way to my father's funeral, 1968 (Dig that hat!).DEATH AND SEX
Nancy reported to Dick Sanguinetti, a swarthy Italian; he was a Marine Underwriter who trusted her and never interfered. He was as sharp as she insurance-wise; an easygoing, nice guy. I took some time off work when my father died - - the fourth major change - - and Dick came to the service to pay his respects. When Nancy handed me my bi-monthly check, I discovered I'd been docked for the time I took off. Shocked, I broke down crying at my desk. “How can they be so cruel to dock me for taking time off because my father died?" Raising three kids on my own was hard enough on full pay. I didn’t see how I was going to make it with this paycheck. Sanguinetti assured me he'd take care of it. Within a half-hour, he had accounting issue me a check for the difference.
Nancy bragged openly about her many lovers to anyone who’d listen and let it be known that she thought sex was incredible. She loved it. The more the better. Her eyes literally sparkled when she talked about it. To any one. Even the old grey-haired guys, old enough to be her father; they'd laugh and walk away, shaking their head. One day, she announced that her latest lover was coming to town. He was taking her to dinner and they'd end up at his hotel. He owned a car dealership; his hobby was sailing and he was quite good at it, Nancy not only told us, but also passed around a sailing magazine containing an article about him with his picture in it. I felt embarrassed for her. He called while she was out so I answered her phone. He had a very sexy voice.
Next up: Chapter 8, Part One: Both Nancy and Dick leave, replaced by Little Dickie Duncan; fear of firing keeps me mum, Phyllis from LA St. Paul shows up, whiplash and more.
