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I am deeply ashamed of having worked SCI. At the time, of course, I told myself all kinds of lies to justify the decision. It was just one more; I had no choice; this time it would be different; I would run a model campaign, really force the company to change; and on and on—so much crap. If there were a way to hide the fact that I lost the resolve to quit my life of terrorism after just a few weeks, perhaps I would. That final campaign is a source of embarrassment every time it comes up. Each time, a look of disappointment comes over the face of my listener that no words can drive away. How can I explain why I did it? I cannot. So I have to live with that look. Worse, those last two hundred victims of mine haunt me more relentlessly than all the rest. I can see their faces, and I even know some of their names. I wish to God I had said no. But I did not. I said yes, and I confess it for one very personal and one very pragmatic reason.
The personal side is that as part of my recovery from alcohol addiction, I must confront all my misdeeds and stop the cycle of deception that kept me on the bottle for twenty years. I need to come clean.
Our first legal move, then, was to petition the National Labor Relations Board in Cleveland to expand the UMWA voting unit to include all Cravat workers. Leiken was an opaque, colorless personality, but when it came to forming legal arguments, he was a genius. The UMWA, although it used a seasoned attorney, was caught unprepared for the kind of sophisticated maneuver of which Leiken was capable. The attorneys sat through a daylong hearing before an NLRB officer, which was held in the city clerk's office in St. Clairsville, a town about fifteen miles south of Cadiz and only slightly larger. Witnesses for both sides spent much of the time sitting on benches outside the city building, eating pizza and waiting to be called. The lawyers then submitted their briefs to the NLRB regional director and a waited a decision. The beauty of such legal tactics is that they are effective in damaging the union effort no matter which side prevails. Our petition to expand the Cravat voting unit was filed two weeks into the campaign, and the case took at least three weeks to resolve. That kind of delay steals momentum from a union-organizing drive, which is greatly dependent on the emotional energy of its leaders and the sense of urgency among workers. By dragging a union through the plodding legal system, we showed workers that the labor organization was sluggish and inefficient, certainly not the quick fix they might have hoped it would be.
lol
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
idk what page, it's just the epigraph. from enormous changes at the last minute
He was forty-seven, married for twenty-five unfaithful years. He had two children—a daughter my age and a son two years older. His once ascending career as a social realist painter had stalled, and he now sold commercial serigraphs his younger self would have found appalling.
brutal
There is another omission in the text. I promised Arnold that I would not tell anyone about our kiss, but in fact I did. I told my mother as soon as I got home that night. I was two hours late. She had just gotten off the phone with Arnold’s wife to ask if there had been an end-of-the-year party. His wife had told my mother that she didn’t know, her husband hadn’t come home yet. I was furious with my mother for involving his wife. I told her that I was in love with him, that there was nothing she could say to stop me from seeing him again. She reminded me that he had a wife. I reminded her that she was seeing a married man, ten years younger than she, and (coincidentally) also named Arnold.
That scene isn’t in the memoir. It would have been a compelling scene. My mother and I shared a bed because I had sold mine in order to turn my bedroom into an art studio. My father, whose side of the bed I occupied, had moved out—been thrown out—the year before. What writer wouldn’t employ the irony of sleeping in your absent father’s bed after trying to seduce your father substitute?
crazy lol
I was the only sugar baby I knew who lived with a sugar daddy without sugar.
lol
A forty-seven-year-old art teacher mailing a love letter in the guise of an educational solicitation to his teenage student is creepy—more than creepy, sinister. Yet the memoir treats the episode comically, a missive between star-crossed lovers.
(Sinister or amusing? There are three Jills weighing in: the agonized teenager crying in frustration because she can’t decipher nuance in an adult’s letter; the forty-four-year-old memoirist, entertained by her younger self’s confusion and Arnold’s predicament; and me, the one who knows how the story ends.)
When I was not learning about fellatio from Arnold, I was sleeping on my father’s side of the bed. The memoir never mentions the unresolved Oedipus complex or any other daddy issues. To mention the Oedipus complex, I believed, would have been stating the obvious, an insult to the reader who might not have read Freud but who had certainly heard of the complex.
I no longer believe in withholding something just because it is obvious. Clichés become clichés because they are true.
He is old enough to be her father.
my god lol
[...] This is how the memoir describes our first vacation:
We traveled from motel to boggy motel, each a damp block or two from the gray Pacific. Most of the rooms had yellow blinds or yellow curtains, a trick to make the weary traveler believe every morning is filled with sunny skies and bright hopes. I cried mostly at dawn, shut in the bathroom, a nubby towel monogrammed with carmel holiday or jolly roger’s inn crushed against my eyes, while Arnold stood outside the locked door, on the cold linoleum, asking what was wrong. We both knew. I couldn’t bear his being married any longer.
Arnold was in psychoanalysis at the time, as were most of his comrades—lapsed communists with successful fur businesses, screenwriters who yearned to write novels, and admen who wished they were artists. These were the days before pharmacological fixes, so no one had any choice but to talk and talk and talk until the demons got bored and left on their own. Therapy, like communism, was an evangelical passion, and Arnold was no exception. Since I couldn’t afford psychoanalysis, he became my de facto therapist.
brutal