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. 

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.

GLUE, Chapter 11, Part 2: My "Robes"; A Warning; Sexual Harassment in the mid-1970s, and the spy from the 11th floor.

“Ah-hem,” my boss, Mr._________, began.   (I don’t remember his name.)

“Yes, what is it?”I asked, sitting in the hot seat in front of  his desk.

“That outfit you wore the other day-“

“What?  What ‘outfit’?”  I struggled to recall what I wore to work in the past few days and came up with nothing.  I couldn’t remember what I’d worn yesterday, let alone a couple of days ago.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Uh, those, those, uh – ROBES.”

“I’m sorry but I have no idea what you mean.”   Then it dawned on me.   “You mean the striped dress?-“

“-Yes,” he said, leaning forward, fluorescent lights glinting off his rimless glasses, “those ROBES.”

I almost burst out laughing.   Not long after the Big Pantsuit Brouhaha, I had come down with a cold, stayed home for a couple of days, then went back to work.  I still felt a chill so dressed warm:  lavender knit-cotton turtleneck and purple, cotton-knit pants underneath a long-sleeve, calf-length dress I had made from a lavender, purple, and white striped Indian cotton bedspread: surplice bodice, and self-belt.  A couple of days later, I’d been at my desk for an hour or so when my boss phoned me from about 20 feet away.  “I want to talk to you,” he said.  My “uh-oh” response kicked in.  I walked over to his desk wondering what in the hell was so important.  But he’s the boss.  When he told me, I was flummoxed.  So it was okay, I repeat, for us to traipse around in miniskirts. He and other male bosses never complained about them, not even when underwear or more showed if we bent over to open a file drawer.  But it was not okay to cover ourselves completely from ankle to chin.

 “Don’t ever wear those ROBES again, understand?”

I went to the bathroom and released my suppressed, hysterical laughter.   Linda (I think was her name) walked in,"What's so funny?"  When I told her, she said, “Did you ask him what would happen if you did wear those ROBES again?”

“No, I was afraid if I opened my mouth I’d laugh in his face."  
I needed this job.  I didn’t want to get fired.   But I came close- again.  Someone spied on me during my lunch break.  



1976 Bicentennial poster

Meanwhile, reports stated that by the end of 1975, 44% of married women were employed.  By 1976, Bicentennial celebrations were planned and, throughout the year, went on all over the country; Jimmy Carter was elected president. 

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn

At TA, Filipinas did the grunt work: filing, the mail; some were in the typing pool; they assembled policies and forms and stapled them, put them in folders to deliver to us, and generally ran errands.  They seemed always to be cheerful.  I'd had noticed a stocky, heavy-set woman underwriter in Inland Marin who looked like a girls’ PE instructor, following- stalking, in today's parlance- and teasing a petite, gamin-faced Filipina I’ll call Perla.  She had short, wiry brown hair, always wore white and spoke with a German accent.    One day, I was in a stall in the bathroom and heard giggling and a voice that sounded like Perla's saying, “Stop, stop, that tickles, stop,” and more giggling and more pleas to stop.  I heard a noise I knew came from an obese person sitting down hard on a toilet (which literally makes the commode in the adjoining stalls jump, which is weird); a door banged open, then the bathroom door opened and closed.  I left the stall and went to the sink to wash my hands.  In the mirror,  I could see looming up behind me Perla's tormentor; her face was flushed.  I got out of there fast.  I was appalled at what I felt sure was going on.  In those days, you didn't report what is now known as "sexual harassment." 

So, a little more than a month after the “Robe” warning, my boss again called me to his desk.   What th’ hell? I asked myself.  My work was caught up, I’d been getting to work on time, abiding by the  limits set for lunch and coffee breaks, I was dressing appropriately, was clean and neat; no hippie clothes, psychedelic colors,  or jewelry; beads, leathers, feathers and fringe.  What now?  

In the late sixties,  I had begun meditating and practicing yoga which I kept up pretty regularly.  Redwood Park is a beautiful little park right next to the Pyramid building; the landscaping includes a small grove of towering redwoods over sculpted lawns and fountains; little niches where you could be alone.

Redwood Park

Sometimes,  during lunch break, like on that particular day, I’d sit on the grass in a half-lotus and meditate.  I hung up the phone , ambled over to his desk, and sat down.  He leaned forward and whispered,

“What were you doing out there?”

“When?"  I looked around, "Out where?”  Again, flummoxed.

“In the park.  Yesterday.”

 I tried to think.   Could it be?-  “Oh, you mean meditating?”

“If that’s what you call it.”

“Uh, I'm sorry, but that's what it is" you jerk, I wanted to add,- "My understanding is, Mr._____,  lunch break is our own time.  Not the company’s.”

“Well, what you were doing”-

-“Meditating”-

-“doesn’t reflect well on the company.”  (Oh, f- - - , I didn't want to discuss it any further.)

“How would anyone know I worked for Transamerica?”

“That’s not the point.  One of our employees saw you from the window and complained.   Others saw you too.   It was disruptive.  They were, uh, laughing.”

“I’m sorry,  my time’s my own during lunch and I can do with it what I please.”

“Listen, dear, you’re one of our best underwriters, I wouldn’t want to lose you,” he subtly warned me.  He looked sad.   I found another area in the park out of range of the 11th floor windows.    Later, Perla told me she’d seen me at my boss’s desk, guessed what it was about and said that it was her stalker who'd ratted on me.  "She bothers my friends, too," she said.  So, the spy turned out to be this warped woman.  I figured she had to get something on me because I'd heard what went on in the bathroom and had seen her.  She wants me gone.  "Try to stay away from her, Perla."

Of the many rules in the handbook was no fraternizing.  I rarely make friends with co-workers, but Linda, in the casualty department, and I had similar likes and dislikes.  She was tall, willowy, with jet-black hair worn in a chignon.  She reminded me of Geraldine Chaplin: a thin face with great cheekbones.  She wore glasses with thick black rims which only added to her mystique; fitted jackets and pencil-thin skirts, and medium, high-heels.  I had planned a party for Hallowe’en and to introduce my friends to CH, my new man  (Seems every time I changed jobs, I changed men), and invited Linda.  She surprised me by showing up with a guy from work.  I knew nothing about this though I saw them every day.  They were totally discreet.  No one knew.   I don’t recall his name.  I didn’t like him much.  I could see him in profile over a bank of waist-high file cabinets.  He looked like a thin Drew Cary, chewed gum constantly with his mouth hanging open, and seemed always to be on the phone.  I never asked Linda what she saw in him.   That night she asked me not to tell a soul about their relationship.  I told her I felt bad that she didn’t trust me.  She said, “You can’t be too careful.” In any case, they appeared to have a great time and I liked him more when I saw him in a new light- dancing in his hippie denim outfit with Linda in her spot-on Pocahontas costume.

It started pouring rain one morning just as I reached the building.  Not wanting to lock my bike outside, I wheeled it into the spacious lobby and secured it to a brass railing in an area no one used.  When I left work that night, it was gone.  I’d had several bikes stolen over the years, so I wasn’t as angry and upset as I had been in the past.   Still, my heart sank.  I’d just have to save up to buy another.  I was a regular customer at Paul’s Valencia Cyclery shop and whenever I’d walk in sans a bike, he’d say, “What?  Not another one ripped off.”  The next morning, an older, balding man with a Poirot mustache, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a clipboard, approached me in the lobby as I entered the building.

“Miss, I know where your bike is,” he said, “It’s in the utility room in the basement.”

“What?  How did it get there?  Who?-“

 -“The security guard cut the lock and took it down there-“

-“He stole my bike!  This is bizarre.”  I was pissed.  “Why?”

“Look,” he said, “I know you’re angry.  I’m the building manager, here’s my card.”  I looked at it, he had a Spanish or Latin American name.  “The guard,” he went on, “removed it because it was a safety hazard.”

“But it wasn’t in anyone’s way,"  I protested.  "How the hell was I supposed to know where it was if you hadn’t told me!  He could have talked to me, told me not to ever lock it up inside again.”  The more I thought about the audacity of that guy to just take my bike, the madder I got.  It was just too much.

“Meet me by the service elevator when you get off work.  What time?”

“Four forty-five.”

“Okay.  Meet me and  I’ll take you down there and you can get it.”

That evening, he was waiting for me by the service elevator.  I’d never been in the lower depths of the Pyramid.  We got off the elevator at the lowest basement level and he lead me down a labyrinth of corridors bordered by windowless, unmarked steel doors.  He stopped at one, took a ring of about a thousand keys from his belt, unlocked, and opened the door on mops, buckets, containers, and drums marked with the Hazardous sign.   There was my precious bike, leaning against a pile of ropes.  One wall was snaked with wires, and lights blinked on steel cabinets,  He carefully wheeled out my bike  and we rode up to main floor.  He said a few words to the guard at the podium, then held the heavy glass door for me as I pushed my bike through.  I thanked him again, and pedaled off, not before he asked me if he could take me to dinner sometime.

Brokers and agents walked in with new and old business, talked to the bosses about clients, and problems.  One broker in particular would pass my desk a couple of times a month, say hello and smile.  He was a small, wiry man, not much taller than me,  with wavy grey/blond hair.    Sometimes he’d stop and chat; we’d end up laughing.  He had an appealing, witty, black sense of humor;    One day he asked me if I’d ever worked in an agency.  I told him I had.  His name was D. E.  He was the E in the S&E agency, a small firm that handled mostly personal insurance and a few small commercial risks, in a building up the street from TA.  The next time D_______ came in, he asked if I’d like to work for them and he’d pay me a hundred bucks more than I made at TA.  I did a swift, mental calculation.  

"Look, I'm on food stamps.  If I take your offer, I’d make too much to qualify, but not enough to cover our monthly food bill."  Without missing a beat, he quickly named a figure a couple hundred dollars more than his original offer. 

                “Will that take care of it?” he said.

                “Yes.”

                “When can you start?”

Chapter 11, Part 3:   I ponder giving two weeks’ notice.  I'd been with TA less than a year.  S & E, was a very small, four person office- 5, counting me if I decide to take the job.