Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [55]
KRISTINA AND I WORKED briefly for NYPIRG (New York Public Interest Research Group), canvassing Park Slope on environmental issues. We would knock on a few doors in the November cold and then, despite being paid on commission, decide to hide out at her house, where she would make her Tuna Peewiggle (fusilli pasta, capers, tuna and olive oil) and we’d smoke a billion cigarettes and talk about how much NYPIRG sucked and what we really should be doing. Kristina had studied filmmaking at NYU briefly, before dropping out because of some kind of pressure to live up to the work of her great-uncle, Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
“I would stand on the corner of University and Tenth trying to set up a shot with other students and my teachers would stop by to watch what I was doing. Luis is obviously this legendary figure at the film school. I, uh, what do they say in baseball?”
Kristina started to giggle and her eyes were tearing up. I start laughing maniacally also.
“Choked. I choked.”
“You’ll get it back,” I said.
“No, I won’t. I’m a half-artist. I’m smart and talented but I’m not tough enough to go the distance. It’s a curse being a half-artist, caught between being a normal person and a real creative person. I’m nuts like a good artist, but I don’t have anything to show for it.”
I wasn’t exactly going the distance with anything. Carmen and I smoked a lot of pot and talked about doing another two-woman show. I was a quarter-artist at best.
KRISTINA AND I GOT the idea to start a housecleaning business together, one with some pizzazz. Around this time, Leona Helmsley was sentenced to jail for tax evasion and Zsa Zsa Gabor had been sent to the slammer for slapping a cop. So Kristina and I decided to call our new business “Leona and Zsa Zsa’s Big House Cleaning Service,” and we made a flyer with images of diamond baubles, tiaras and prison pantsuits. We lasted for two houses—a giant old cluttered dungeon of a brownstone in Park Slope and a pity job on Thirty-first Street from Kristina’s friend—before we realized we weren’t cut out for housework. It was back to regular jobs for us. During all this, Kristina and I had become good friends.
Our luck turned when I landed a job as an office manager for a company that made signs where I could wear my running shorts to work. Kristina, even less fashiony than I, got a job as the secretary to the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Anthony Mazzola.
One day we were on the phone at our new jobs and Kristina mentioned that she had spent the morning opening RSVPs to some big gala Mr. Mazzola was throwing and that she had just left a message for Lauren Hutton asking whether she would be attending.
“Kristina, I gotta go. I’m getting a fax.”
A handwritten fax from my boss (sitting four feet away in his office) came through, addressed to me and his wife, Lois, who was the chief financial officer of the company. It read: YOU TWO ARE GOING TO BE LOOKING FOR WORK SOON IF YOU DON’T GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND START DOING THINGS MY WAY, THE HIGH WAY, THE RIGHT WAY, THE ONLY WAY. SHAPE UP, MORONS.—YOUR BOSS.
Marty sent out these threatening faxes a couple times a week, but I thought it was strange that he included his wife. Couldn’t he yell at her in private, apart from the twenty-twoyear-old