If you take all the things that happened to you and all the things that happened to me and so on and so on, there is a very good chance that one of us would be bored and one of us would be horrified.
This explains why parents never give their offspring the true and unfiltered benefit of their collective wisdom.
For example:
During the last autumn John Belushi was alive, I was one of two female police officers in Bal Harbour Village, Florida. The other was a lovely and perhaps talented Syrian several years my senior. Lynn was noteworthy for flawless makeup, two-inch polished fingernails and a glossy raven ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ coiffure. As a Sergeant she was exempt from foot patrol along Collins Avenue. This meant we were deprived of the sight of her Highway Patrolman hat toggling precariously atop all that hair. It would have looked like someone attempting to balance stacked plates of different sizes on a replica of Zippy the Pinhead.
It was a mystery to us all that she was able to pass the annual firearms proficiency test with those nails.
It was a mystery to some of us how she managed some of the baser functions of personal hygiene.
We were not friends.
One night during a voluntary overtime shift, I was locked into Martha.
Calm down. This isn’t that kind of story.
Martha is, or was, a very exclusive women’s clothing store in the Bal Harbour Shoppes. Exclusivity was conveyed through a suffocating design palette of soft pink and muted gold, floor to ceiling mirrors, scented cool air floating through the perpetually open slabs of glass door and a battalion of dusky handmaidens padding through thick carpets to attend to Milady’s needs for this dress, that camisole, another Nebuchadnezzar of champagne or a cut crystal glass of sparkling mineral water- very cold- with two sprigs of crushed mint and please make sure there are no fingerprints on the glass thank you so much. (Wine was not permitted at Martha because it would have stained the carpet and clothing.)
I enjoyed the hell out of my daytime security hours at Martha, listening to The Help glide past one another sharing ribald comments about customer manners or physiques. The ladies displayed a gifted ability to manufacture barbed insults delivered with flawless deadpan. I learned to recognize their lightning flashes of shared hilarity by a momentary raised eyebrow or wrinkled nose. And then a quick return to their occupational roles as stoic sartorial automatons.
Martha had two stores: one in Bal Harbour and the original in Manhattan. Yes, there was a Martha. Resembling nothing so much as a cuddly grandma happiest in the kitchen covered in flour and adoring relatives, Martha was nothing like that. She was a Businesswoman who remembered every article of inventory, the names, children, birthdays and anniversaries of regular clients and which new pieces would bring cupidity to such a climax that husbands could only stand aside and pray the tide wouldn’t completely submerge their credit limit.
But Martha had a secret shame.
A grandson who had no interest in the family business. A tall, lanky lad with unsettled black hair, Mark Twain eyebrows and thick black eyeglasses. A twitchy, earnest young man ill at ease with the hordes of women infesting the store. His heart’s desire was to run away and join the circus.
And so, he and Martha made a deal. She would pay for him to attend the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida.
The second part of the deal was the one forged in Hell.
After the Clown College, he must return to Bal Harbour to assume the mantle of High Street proxy proprietor and run the southern branch of Martha. He did as he was told, as was agreed, but I swear there were times when out of the mists of my psychic peripheral vision I could see him using the last of his fingernails to claw into memories covered in white greasepaint and sawdust. Wishing he was listening to heavenly choirs honking a Harpo Marx taxi horn.
Redo below
(Which is like saying Gucci sells shoes and Bulgari carries a nice line in jewelry.) The reason I was working overnight in Martha (oh, dear and thank heaven we’ve already established context for that statement) was because a haute couture furrier was in town for a trunk show.
No, they don’t sell trunks. The merchandise historically arrived in locked trunks. Or some such unimportant fact. The important fact is that I, a fairly adventurous 23-year-old, was locked inside a perfumed pink bower festooned with mirrors, insatiable carpets and the ghosts of with dozens of
Bluntedhedgehog 