[Part 1 is viewable here. Edits done 2/22/13. More 2/27/13. More 3/7/13, especially after reviewing an early-1980s diary.]
[Note 1: I wasn’t sure if Mr. DeGrasse
was still alive when I wrote and posted the first Part of this series—darned
Internet, I don’t always think to troll it first thing, but it shows you can
research even something like if Mr. D’s still alive (I’d done this a few years
ago and didn’t find anything definitive then), and very recently it showed he
appeared to be still alive. He is about 80 now, apparently—and his wife, who
I’d forgotten is older than he, is also still alive. So I will delete a passage
below on the off-chance that people he knows, or maybe his congregation if he
is still working as a minister, might see these entries. I will explain more
why I do the edit when I come to where the passage was. Also, if you find an
Internet representation of Mr. D showing the g in his surname as lowercase, that confusion about whether it was
uppercase or lowercase existed in some paperwork even in the 1980s when I
worked with him, but it is indeed uppercase, as I found from a letter he sent
me in 1988.]
[Note 2: Another thing I might make a
prefatory note about is why, in the first Part, I identified the number of
homosexuals on the administrative staff as I did. Mr. Cotter is deceased, and I
don’t imagine he has survivors who would object; Zak Johnson I don’t think
would object; and as for Jim Becker,
whom I was least close to of these three, I am not sure as to whether he would
object, but the following may provide a basis for him not to object. This identification, done in a very cursory way,
helps show the culture of the MC workplace as it was then (which, as far as
sexual orientation went, was liberal enough), and which I and close associates there
(those of us who were/are straight and talked about it at all) didn’t object to.
How it is relevant will become evident when I turn in a late Part in this
series to my detailed, emotionally nuanced look at coworker Andy Cohen,
regarding whom a preposterous accusation by him of sexual harassment, colored
by certain 1980s assumptions, has stark relevance to some issues today. It also
fits in to a more complex story of his substance abuse. Andy, by the way, is
also deceased. His whole story is a major focus of these MC blog entries, and
will come in due time.]
Becoming a regular staffer, and occasional “reactions” to my regularly
filed reports
The nice thing about talking
about my job at the Marvin Center is that I started at more or less the
bottom—the game room—and ascended to the very junior “student manager” level in
January 1982—and worked my way up. There was no suddenly landing of a gig in a
heedlessly (if not recklessly) finessed way via a placement agency, and no
coming to a media job where you find that unusually subjective and benighted
perspectives by others often hold court, especially where some coworkers start
leaking insinuations/opinions as if you’re
not qualified to be there, despite what you know is your long, relevant past
experience, which is often decisively more substantial than theirs.
As a “student manager,” I
started out as any student manager did, learning the ropes. I did three
semesters—one in my sophomore year, and two in my junior year. Then in summer
1983, when I lived in the Washington,
D.C., area for a summer for the
first time, I worked at the MC then, and also worked a second job, with the
Charles E. Smith [property management company, whatever the rest of the name
was]. At the latter job I did low-level maintenance-related work at buildings
that housed parts of the Patent and Trademark Office in Crystal
City, in Arlington, Virginia.
That was a busy summer. There were two weeks, I think, where between both jobs I
worked about 80 hours each of the weeks, along with weeks of lesser hours (the
average that summer might have been 45 or 50 hours).
By my senior year in college,
fall 1983 and spring 1984, I had impressed senior staff at the MC enough that I
got a raise in pay (I think I asked for this one, as to its amount anyway;
previous, small raises might have come automatically); the amount I got in my
last two semesters or so was above what student managers usually got. (It was
$5 and change an hour, which may seem tiny today, but that was high for that
kind of work in those days. By the way, one of my first jobs [in Vernon
Township, N.J.], involving bussing tables, paid $2.01 an hour before tips; tips
usually brought the hourly pay above minimum wage, which I think in 1979-80 was
still less than $3 an hour.)
Through early 1984, I wasn’t
rolling in dough; I had college to pay for. I didn’t live high on the hog; for
one thing, I was still in the dorm system. For work in summer 1982 in New
Jersey, I’d bought what turned out to be a quite-crappy 1975 VW Dasher; I’d brought
this to D.C. in fall semester 1982, but this turned out to be a big mistake,
given all the mechanical problems it had. By, I think, the end of spring
semester 1983, I took it home (in N.J.) and permanently parked it in my
driveway at home. Thus, if not in summer 1983, certainly by spring 1984, I
didn’t have a car in D.C. I walked and used the Metro—all I needed.
And eventually, starting in later
1984, I would have student loans to pay off that would ultimately take nine
years (until 1993) to finish with (of course, I’d moved back to New Jersey in
1986). But as “poor, working student” lives went in 1984, my deal wasn’t too
bad. When I hear about student lives today, for those who get student loans—in
terms of their financial load after graduating, even accounting for inflation—their
deal often sounds distinctly worse than what I faced (though I think each
generation’s members who have to work to pay for part of college feel they are
earnestly pursuing a tough enough [if not worse] uphill climb that is
peculiarly their own).
Incidentally, a note should be
made on what being a “student manager” or even a staff “assistant manager”
meant. I never saw this as especially “managerial.” It was surprising how even
people you worked with rather closely never understood this. I remember one
fellow worker at the Info Desk, with whom I chatted a lot, commented late in my
many-months dealings with her that my experience as a (student) MC manager set
me up for later, more big-time managerial work. I never thought of it that way,
nor did I want the job to prepare me that way. The MC work was very much side
work you did when attending college, but I am also equally quick to say it
wasn’t simple, frivolous student work like serving ice cream or waiting tables
(which themselves could be substantial enough). There were many duties that
fell under the umbrella of being a student manager, especially if you made an
effort to really increase your realm of what you looked out for and did.
As we will see in certain
anecdotes, a lot of the job entailed, or devolved from, keeping your eyes open for unusual problems. (If people wonder why I
keep so alert to the host of unusual things that can go on even in editorial
offices, there are two reasons: my personal proclivities; and the fact that my
most significant jobs have more or less required this.) The MC was largely
about serving student needs, and being a hospitable environment for them. Yet,
because the facility was on city streets, and had a fairly high profile within
the campus, it was subject to a wide array of possible problems, some of which
involved borderline, or completely, illegal behavior conducted by people who didn’t
belong on the premises. We student (or staff assistant) managers were often on
the front lines of catching some of this, and often could refer it to GW
workers (or to outside help, like the police or fire department) whose jobs
were more suited to these issues (e.g., the Security department could be called
to tend to the more serious issues).
When I think of how much was
expected of me (and fellow student managers) as a student worker in the
early-to-mid 1980s to deal with some of the problems there, including but by no
means limited to a possible phoned-in bomb threat or 15+ people getting stuck
in an elevator, requiring the fire department to come in, or potential violence
or threats to health posed by people who didn’t belong in the MC, it boggles the
mind how trivializing people can be with me, in much more recent years, at
media firms, as if I wasn’t someone
who has spent about two-thirds of his life in a work history that has been
studded by situations that made demands that, I think, some younger coworkers
today would barely be able to field even a fraction of.
Nightly reports—less humdrum than it may
sound
One plumb part of working as a
manager—especially if you were the senior person working a given shift—is that
you wrote the report on how the night went that was submitted to Mr. Cotter
(and was copied to others) for that shift. I was doing that by my senior year
(not every night I worked—often a more senior manager did it). It certainly
would be a regular duty of mine when I started working as a staffer in May
1984.
The Roland Curry anecdote.
One funny episode is, I think, from my senior year. I was working along with,
supposedly, a senior student manager named Roland Curry, who was a big Black
guy, friendly (and capable enough as a student manager), but a definite frat
boy. He could have his irresponsible times.
A little aside: I was never a
frat person, but the frats were conspicuous enough on campus, and some were
rowdier than others. It’s a testament to how exploratory I could be that I was
once at a party at Roland’s frat [no; from my early-1980s diary, I find that the location was some young woman's (rented) house--she was a worker at the MC game room, I believe--and it was on or just before 5/28/83, shortly after the end of my junior year. Several of us there were people who were associated with the MC or, in the case of a Jessica, would be in the future; on Jessica, see my first entry on the MC, toward the end], while I was not the type to really take to
that sort of thing [this was generally true from a "preference"/personality standpoint, even though my early-1980s diary shows that I drank a fair amount that night]. I remember being in his frat’s rather seedy rowhouse (or
townhouse, however you want to dignify it per what it used to be) [this was true of Sigma Chi's house, but that isn't where I was on/about 5/28/83], and Roland,
who had seemed to have such a reputation as a party animal, was sitting on a
couch, quietly drawing some girl and/or others who were there, with others
doing the more expected drinking of beer and chatting [true, according to the 5/28/83 diary entry]. I think the frat house
in question was that of Sigma Chi (the Greek letters looked sort of like “EX”),
which I think was populated mainly by engineering students [true in general, but not where I was ~5/28/83]. Another one of them
was a student manager at the MC for a time, and he was a distinctly more
noticeable party animal, though he looked rather nerdy. It always seemed
paradoxical to me that engineering students, who typically could be such
grinds, could have one of the most notorious partying frats on campus.
Anyway, during the MC worknight under
discussion, the two managers on duty were supposed to be Roland and me—and he
left the premises and was away at a party most of the night, or the whole shift.
This was atypical of him. By the shift’s end, I closed things out as normally
would be done—there even were some anomalous things that happened during the
shift to deal with, and later write about in the report—and I dealt with the
anomalies (not a problem) and wrote the entire report for the night (though, as
manager with seniority, Roland would
have been expected to).
The funny thing was, he came in I
think early the next morning, and before the regular daytime staffers showed
up, took my (typed) report and hand-wrote it all over as if he was the one who
had done it. And he used all the characteristic wordings or attention to detail
that I had used—I believe he copied it word for word. He did this because he
had been expected to be the senior student manager there that night, but it was
remarkable—him copying me word-for-word while his reports were
characteristically very sketchy and truncated. None of the senior staffers
seemed to pick up on this, even though the report didn’t sound like him. And I
wasn’t particularly offended by this ruse myself. I believe when I later told
about it to my friend Andy Cohen (more on him in another, late entry, as I said),
he was quite amused. Roland Curry, I think, left the job that year, because he
was graduating. (I don’t know if he was an engineering major, by the way.)
Another student manager who,
like Roland, represented the “older generation” who were slowly leaving (due to
graduation or other reasons) was a Marlon Jahnke (I believe that’s the
spelling; he was Jewish, and his surname was pronounced YON-kee). He belonged
to the same frat that Roland did, I believe, but he was a little more
responsible. I mention him because he’ll come up in a more social-observation
connection in a later entry.
The “tone of reports” issue.
As may not surprise some people who have known me in more recent years, though
my personality as a worker was different in the 1980s than now, I approached my
reports in a sort of serious-minded way in which I hashed out—didn’t shy from
being frank about—issues that often meant that some daytime staffer had left us
night workers in the lurch. Another type of problem was where some unforeseen
bizarre stuff happened (that wasn’t necessarily the fault of daytime managers) and
we night managers had an uphill climb to field it. Mind you, I wasn’t one apt
to shy from fielding crises—never have been—but, in the reports, where we had
to tell of unusual developments anyway, I always expressed being angered or
flustered. Over the longer term, I don’t merely make “complaints that can’t be
acted on”: I always try to think of my complaints as about something there
should be little or no excuse for not fixing, though what some of the MC
reports’ recipients seemed to get a hair across their ass about was the tone I
used in discussing the problems.
Further, the key thing here was
that I usually retyped my reports, toning them down in the process. (Even with
that, I was an editor.) Still, I got occasional feedback from higher-ups (mainly,
or maybe only, Mr. Cotter) to the effect that I should “tone down my reports.”
This happened both before and after I became a staffer in May 1984. My usual
response, even if I didn’t say it to the higher-up opining, was that “My
reports already are toned down. (You
should have seen the original draft.)”
(One reason that seems apparent
today, though I might not have thought much about it at the time, or even might
not have recognized it, is that GWU administrators who were, strictly speaking,
outside the MC and, pecking-order-wise, above the highest level at the MC
[which latter were Mr. Bell, whom I never had issues with, and Mr. Cotter just
below him] might have seen the reports as a routine or occasional part of their
job, and MC administrators [like Mr. Bell or Mr. Cotter] didn’t want to be
embarrassed—as set up by reactions from the higher-level outsiders—by some
suggestion that there were the types of objective troubles that I talked about
or the “soreheaded mouth” in me that was talking about them. I have long
thought that the source of the problem here was the actual problems that I [and
others more or less at my level] fielded at the MC, and this was regarding not so
much them in their anomaly but the fact that measures that could have been
taken to reduce or eliminate them seemed never to be opted for by higher
management. We’ll come to this issue again.)
I didn’t think I struck people
as a cranky or opinionated pain in the ass, but at a Christmas party we
staffers had in December 1984, out at a restaurant a few blocks away (a nice
affair, I remember), everyone was given gifts—I don’t know if there was a
system for picking what for whom—but what I got was a book that collected
some of Andy Rooney’s newspaper-column essays that was published that year. I
got the message—I sounded like a bit of an Andy Rooney in my reports. I was a
little surprised by this, but not offended.
I don’t know whether to say this
reflects that I am the same person capable of mouthing off today as I might
have been then, but I can tell you that my sense of my life circumstances in
1984—despite what frustrations and occasional depression I faced (all of which
arose in my personal life, and which were so “kept under wraps” that my novel The Folder Hunt was a way of showing how
much of a “quiet desperation” type I might have been considered)—was definitely
one of being in more of an “up and coming life” than I may be seen to have
lately. You could say that I knew I was in a luckier and more hard-work-based
place than I’d been some years before, but the whole situation looks more as I
describe it here only in long retrospect.
The cranky person you hear from today
is the model of me that’s had a lot of mileage put on him, and has every right
to give a squawk and some other sign of being a “beater of an old car,” though
I try to express humor too. In 1984, I had a sense of having worked hard and
long from about 1976 and the start of high school to graduation from college in
1984. If I seemed “going beyond what should have been my bounds” in grumping
then, well, I don’t know if I had much less right to do it then than I do
similar now. But I definitely was over 25 years younger then.
A profile of Mr. DeGrasse
One of the most memorable people
was Mr. Wilfred V. DeGrasse (yes, he capitalized the G). He was a short, stocky
Black man born in one of the Caribbean islands—maybe the Virgin
Islands. From what I heard, he had been a chief petty officer in the Navy--I couldn't remember (but a 10-year-old manuscript affirms this is correct). His somewhat loud voice was attributed by
at least one of my fellow student managers to his having been a sort of
military man, but I think that was just his style. (I’ve thought of it more as
an instance of a short person being more apt to be loud, which may sound
oversimplifying, but it’s interesting how often that sort of association gets
brought up to help “explain” someone, and not always by rather simple-minded
people.)
I originally said I wouldn’t be
surprised if he was deceased. He was about 50 in 1984, and had rather
troublingly high blood pressure. Well, as I said in the editorial note up top,
he seems to still be alive.
He was the night manager during
the week, Monday through Friday. Just about every student manager, if they got
a shot at working nights, shared time with him. He had been at the MC for maybe
10 years when I first started working as a student manager in 1982, and he had
his routine and preferences, and it was the nimble, energetic students who
fielded the could-be-anywhere, fluky, and spontaneous problems out in the
building, and Mr. D, as he was called, was more apt to not be out amid the
building rabble/activity, or only passed through on occasion. I remember him as
being more apt to be camped out at his desk in the administrative office, which
we student managers generally accepted readily enough.
Mr. D always wrote the reports
when he was on duty. He was methodical and, you could say, rather like a
military man with this. Sometimes, in a given night, he voiced concern that he
was late getting to his report (and for a lot of it, he took info fed to him
from us student managers regarding what we’d
dealt with during the night), as if it was a taller order than we students
would have seen such a task.
In my intro to this series, I
said that Angela White, a student who worked at the Information Desk, called
him “Snake in DeGrasse” for certain flirtatious behaviors he did with young
women at the MC. I am opting not to say anything more about this. I’d
originally drafted a full paragraph here—not meaning to “achieve any justice”
or be “mean” or anything. The flirtation thing was enough of an issue to be
discussed to an extent by various people at the time, but today, given changes in
societal attitudes, specifically all the ways people are seeking to bring
former priests, coaches, and so on to account for past sexual indiscretions, I can
confidently say I don’t think Mr. D’s rose to this level, and I personally have
no beef with him on this.
Anyway, he was married, to his
wife of many years, and she couldn’t have children for whatever reason, which
fairly deeply disappointed him. Some might find this a little indiscreet to
tell, but I think it adds an important aspect to a fair picture of him—and I
offer this as a poignant fact without seeking to posit any excuse or
explanation for him on some other score. (When I aimed toward becoming a writer
more than 30 years ago, I never would have expected the minefield we seem to
have today of possible objections from different people in trying to do
balanced character studies. We’ve become a society of people who like to lie
about themselves and feel entitled to threaten litigation or something other
unpleasant “comeuppance” on those we accuse of “revealing what they shouldn’t,”
and we writers—especially who blog—seem to have to content ourselves with
having to reassess our careers and consider audience tastes more than ever
before.)
Mr. D was a minister, as I said
in my intro. I recall he sometimes prepared sermons, or such, when at work
(just as some of the rest of us occasionally did stuff “outside the realm of
normal work” when we were on duty and had free moments).
He was a decent enough man. In
spring 1984, I was in need of a means of non-auto transportation to get to and
from work, with my new home being a rented house in Arlington, Virginia,
which housed four of us tenants (three, not including me, being law students).
He sold me a 10-speed bicycle—which I had so long, eventually bringing it back
to New Jersey, that I only finally disposed of it in the mid- or later 1990s
maybe, after I stopped using it a lot in 1990 or 1991, when I started driving
so much, due to my New Jersey (and editorial-work) lifestyle. It eventually
just rusted up, unable to be fixed, after being housed unused in my cellar for
a long time. I took it apart and put its pieces out for the garbage. I
regretted that. Bicycling is good exercise.
After I moved back to New Jersey, there were
times in 1986 and 1987 I was desperate for help from former employers in the
form of letters of reference. On a specific request in early 1988, I eventually
got a letter promising such from Mr. D. He was very genial with the idea—he
wrote a letter saying he could serve as a reference. He humorously reminded me
of a time I threw (across the office) one of the fancy Motorola walkie-talkies
we typically used in our jobs there (while he added that new ones had been bought
that worked much better). Those radios were a mainstay of our work, and they required
fancy handling of batteries (in recharging them) and dealing with the quirks of
individual radios (there were always problems, like certain ones not receiving
or sending at certain times, or batteries not working right in one). We also
learned on-air protocol (such as using “10-4” for “yes” or “OK”; “Did you
copy?” for “Did you get that?”). I had thrown the radio, in the episode he
mentioned, because of some problem the thing perpetually had, which never
seemed able to be fixed. The funny thing was, those were very solid, analog-era
radios—I don’t know why there were so many problems with them (even when they
were sent out for repair, more than once).
On the positive side, I think
Mr. D referenced something else in his 1988 letter: my picking up slack for him
in a way, which happened more than once. The most important thing I remember
was not something I felt was in
especial need of recognition for. One night he was feeling especially bad with his
high blood pressure, and he lay down on the couch in Boris Bell (the
director)’s office. I think I said I would keep an eye out, meaning if any
people showed up who shouldn’t see him lying down, I would tip him off. What I
did do was check in on him midway through his rest to see if he was OK. He had
said he felt a sort of shifting (of liquid in his head, so to speak) when he
moved—he was having that bad an episode. He must have lain there for a couple
or more hours. I handled work matters without trouble. I think for practical
purposes I was the only manager functioning in the building that night, and it
usually needed at least two (with one typically a staffer, the other a
student). He was genuinely thankful for my watching out over things while he
rested. I felt it was no problem.
