The Asylum (8 page)

“SO, GET
THIS.
Last night I sneezed and my back popped out, so the doctor gave me a girdle. It's not funny, asshole! I'm wearing it now. Go ahead, feel it. Feel it! Don't be chickenshit. Feel my fuckin'
girdle
!”

I reached out and touched Morty. I ran my hand across the broad, rock-hard landscape of his freshly corseted torso. It felt dense and unyielding, like a bag of cement. And there were whalebones. Yes, there was no denying it. Morty was definitely wearing a girdle.

“Oh, and another fuckin' thing.” Morty opened a desk drawer and took out a small filthy plastic cup with an inch of pinkish liquid in the bottom. He thrust it under my nose.

“I've got blood in my urine.
Look
.”

I winced and recoiled, as one does from a forward-thrusted cup of someone else's blood-infused urine.

“So, can I go home, fer chrissakes?”

Welcome to my world.

Welcome to the glamorous world of high-fashion retail.

Morty was an ancient heterosexual window dresser and a truculent hypochondriac, a rare breed indeed. At the time, I was his boss, which was a surreal experience at best. Any attempts to give instruction or assign work to Morty were met with requests to examine recently emerged kidney stones or check out a bulging lymph node or a volcanic pustule. He was treading water until retirement. I had inherited Morty, with his girdles and neck braces and dusty cups of urine. He was grandfathered in.

Though window dressers tend to be male, our team was mostly female and often highly strung. At the top of the food chain was Monique. Though I was the official boss, Monique was definitely the éminence grise. Like a wardress in a 1950s women's-prison B movie, she clanked around with a large bunch of keys on her belt. She locked up the tool cabinet at night. She kept track of everyone's vacation days. She organized the Secret Santa. She would tip me off if one of the window dressers was thieving or copulating with another window dresser in the mannequin room when nobody was looking.

Nurturing, sarcastic and lethal if double-crossed, Monique was one tough dyke. Nothing seemed to faze her. She had worked in display for years, and she'd seen it all: the booze, the dope, the tinsel, the laughter, the glue-gun burns and the fairy-light electrocutions.

Monique loved deep-sea fishing. She spent her weekends throwing buckets of rotting chum into Long Island Sound. Angling was not Monique's only passion: she maintained a lively and academic interest in serial killers and spent her evenings glued to the Court TV coverage of the Jeffrey Dahmer trial. A portrait of John Wayne Gacy adorned her desk.

Monique had an assistant, a tall, regal black girl named Yana who dealt with invoices and phone answering. (This was eons before cell phones, and twelve of us shared a plastic nude-colored wall-mounted instrument which dangled next to Yana's desk.) She wore a massive pendant inscribed with a revealing message that read
I WAS BORN ENTITLED
. Yana was my first exposure to the phenomenon of the BAP, the Black American Princess. Her goal was to marry, as soon as possible, somebody rich so that she could hand in her notice and become a lady of leisure. She planned to come shopping at the store every day, pausing in front of the windows to mock her former coworkers.

Yana was extremely disturbed by the filth and the Chelsea Hotel–ish, anything-goes ethos of our sprawling basement studio. She particularly disliked the smelly menagerie which came to occupy some of the empty mannequin bins.

The no-pets policy which governed the rest of this particular retail establishment meant nothing to us. Two neo-punk-rock chicks called Sheree and Elise raised stick insects in a cracked aquarium. A boy called Priscilla—Monique gave all the boys girls' names—treated the display studio as a pet day-care facility for his cocker spaniel, hamster, and an aging parakeet.

And speaking of day care . . .

Tight as I was with Monique, she scared me somewhat. We maintained a certain distance. My closest pal was an intense young window dresser named Cynthia, Cynders to her coworkers.

Cynders had a problematic relationship with her boyfriend. When things were bad, she would work out her hostilities by calling a particular New Jersey gun store and conducting loud, mysterious conversations about firearms.

“I need a revolver. How quickly can I get one?” Cynders would ask the person on the other end of the line, waving a cup of coffee in her other hand.

“And some bullets. Yeah, lots of bullets,” emphasized Cynders, adding in a chirpy way, “By the way, how much are bullets?”

Thankfully, Cynders never morphed into Valerie Solanas. She was just a stressed-out single mother letting off steam. Yes, Cynders had a baby boy and, unbeknownst to Human Resources, she brought him to work every day. Who looked after the little fella? While she worked her display magic in the glamorous, twinkling, aboveground emporium of elegance and style, Cynders's mother tended to the needs of her grandchild in the lunchroom of our dank basement studio. This lady was no ordinary granny: she was a full-blown, saffron-robed, chanting, finger-cymbal-chinging Hare Krishna. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Krishnas were quite ubiquitous back then. Where did they all go? Let's not get sidetracked.

Granny Krishna, as we called her, quickly became absorbed into our little Warhol factory of marginalized freaks. We rather liked the idea of having our very own resident mystic.

Granny Krishna sat for hours next to the microwave, rocking her grandson in an improvised saffron-
schmatta
hammock. She would chant, and
om
and
hare, hare
, and when she got bored, she played cards with Morty.

On the morning Morty showed me the urine-filled cup and forced me to feel his girdle, neither he nor I had any idea that big changes were coming. The clock was ticking for Morty and his
malades imaginaires
—
and
for all of us.

•   •   •

LESBIANS ARE GREAT.
I count many among my friends and relatives, and am sympathetic to their struggles and familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. I also have a good working knowledge of their likes and dislikes. For example, I know that they loathe sweeping generalizations about lesbians. (Any lesbian reading this paragraph will already have blown her indignation gaskets.)

In addition to their antipathy toward sweeping generalizations, lesbians also loathe patriarchal organizations and corporations. They are—not without reason—wary of being taken advantage of by “the man.”

Gay men, on the other hand, rather like the idea of masculine dominance. They think big daddy is hot. Lesbians are jihadists against hetero male power. Their goal is to take down Mr. Big Stuff and they are quite prepared to slog through the fine print in order to do so. As a result, lesbians can be very nitpicky and litigious. If you work alongside a bunch of lesbians (I suggest that the collective noun for lesbians might be a “carpal tunnel” of lesbians), it is only a matter of time before a lesbian lawsuit comes through the door. They call this “taking back the night.”

The lesbian willingness to read the fine print and unearth hidden inequities and injustices can be annoying, but it can also be a force for good. Such was the case with the Morty debacle.

On the morning of the girdle and the blood-infused urine, Monique and her jangling keys came into my office and plonked a piece of paper on my desk. I winced slightly. Paperwork frightened me. My personal motto was taken from “Private Life,” a popular Grace Jones song at the time: “I am very superficial. I hate anything official.”

Monique hoisted herself onto the corner of my desk and gulped her cup of joe.

“This is our union contract. I took it home last night and read it.”

While contract reading was like crack cocaine to Monique, the same could not be said of me.

“Oh, God. Poor you. Quel bore!”

“I am assuming that you, being the big limp-wristed pansy that you are, have never bothered to read it.”

I went over to the interior window which looked out onto the studio floor and waved encouragement at my busy creative colleagues. They were a frenzy of papier-mâchéing, stapling, and glue gunning. In the near corner a window dresser was ratting an auburn B-52s wig, stabilizing it with can after can of superhold hairspray while another queen tried to attach a chicken-wire tiara onto the top.

“I am more interested in fluffing wigs and figuring out ways to make showgirl lashes out of ostrich feathers than reading contracts.”

“Let me give it to you in a nutshell,” said Monique, hooking her thumbs into her belt loops and puffing out her bound chest. “This contract details our pay-raise guidelines and pensions and medical. The works.”

She picked up a ratting comb which happened to be on my desk and tweaked an organic sesame seed out of her teeth using the point and then continued.

“It's a great contract, by which I mean it's a great contract if you happen to be over sixty, which none of us motherfucking are.”

“Except for one person . . .”

“Morty! Morty wrote this contract.”

Not only was Morty a member of my display team, but he was also, as chance would have it, the head of the window dressers' union. Yes, I kid you not, there was
a
window dressers' union
. And we, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity who constituted the display department, along with the gals and gays at every other store-display studio in town, were all members of Morty's window-dressing union.

Monique proceeded to show me how the contract was only beneficial to a certain girdle wearer.

“What's to be done?”

“We need to decertify out of the union.”

Suddenly I saw Monique on the ramparts, like a reverse Norma Rae. I saw placards too.

WINDOW-DRESSER FREAKS LEAVE UNION.

STAPLE-GUN QUEENS AND GLUE-GUN DYKES GO ROGUE.

HEAD WINDOW DRESSER KNEECAPPED AFTER ATTEMPTING TO DEUNIONIZE.

“Grab your clutch-purse. We have a meeting in HR in five minutes.”

Monique threw all of her considerable weight behind this new cause. Over the next few days, she and I spent entire afternoons locked in meetings with union lawyers and store personnel. She banged the table a lot while I stared into the middle distance. I had no idea what they were talking about. I missed my wigs.

It was a tense time. Morty took off his girdle and replaced it with a foot cast. He walked around with a knowing smirk on his face, saying nothing, doing nothing.

Then, without any warning, he dropped a massive bombshell.

Morty announced that our display union was being swallowed up by the United Steelworkers. I had no idea what this meant. It sounded terrifying.

According to Morty, there was no way in hell we were going to be allowed to secede. And if we knew what was right for us, we would “not fuck with the big boys.”

“But what if the big boys want to fuck with us?” joked Priscilla.

Chuckles aside, we knew there was no denying the fact that Morty had played an ace. How could Monique, just a simple dyke with psycho-killer daydreams and a fishing rod, go up against the biggest union in the history of unions?

Monique and I repaired to the Greek diner across the street to strategize.

“Morty thinks he can intimidate me with the steelworkers' union. Hah!”

“I guess we use lots of pins and staples,” I posited, struggling to find some common ground between the screechingly nelly world of window display and the hairy, übermacho steelworkers.

“No disrespect, but you are an idiot,” snapped Monique, adding, “and the ‘fucking' part is silent.”

I called home to the UK and tried to explain the whole thing to my mother. Betty Doonan had been a union shop steward in a typing pool in the sixties. When her girls were underheated or overworked, she would blow her whistle and shriek, “Everybody OUT!” Given Betty's background, I thought she might have some helpful advice. On this occasion Mrs. D. was a little stumped. She found herself torn between loyalty to her staple-gun-wielding son and her natural inclination toward union solidarity.

After listening patiently and puffing her way through a couple of Woodbine cigarettes, Betty posed a simple question. Why were we not simply renegotiating the contract? Why were we quitting the union?

The next day I cornered Monique and asked her the exact same question. Why throw out the glue gun with the bathwater?

Monique exploded with lesbian rage.

“What kind of deal do you think those chauvinist pig fuckers will give us, a bunch of freaks and trannies and part-time hookers? They will take you and your wigs and your wrist pincushion to the cleaners. We need out!”

And so we went for it.

During the complex decertification negotiations, I had to rally the troops and obtain their signatures. This was not easy. Many of my display gypsies were less than interested. When they weren't working in the store, they were in a coma in the lunchroom recovering from last night's K-hole at the Area club or the Limelight.

A Human Resources chick with a frizzed-out Joan-Cusack-in-
Working-Girl
hairdo cornered us in the elevator. She warned us to be on the lookout for any intimidation.

Monique seemed to delight in the threat of hostility, especially any hostility which might be directed toward me.

“You better watch your back! After all, you might be a window nelly, but you are also the big boss.”

“But you are clearly the instigator. Why do
I
have to watch
my
back?”

“You know how these union types are. They would never hurt a lady.”

“Is that what you call yourself these days?”

“Fuck you!”

“All I wanted was to make wigs and lashes. Now I'm going to end up going for a swim in the East River wearing concrete flippers.”