On Nicknames

I’ve never really carried a nickname, save “faggot” or “queer” for any length of time, save Rickroy. My first week (in 1986) at Saks, there was an event, at the store, called “Riding High with SFA.” It was a Western themed, anniversary event. (Marking the fifth anniversary of Saks on the Plaza.) Our visual merchandising team, Michael, John and I instantly dubbed each other with nicknames for the week. There was Michael-Bob, John-Earl, and when we came to me, Michael said, “Rickroy.” We set all the mannequins in the store in Western-ish attire (there was a fashion spasm in that direction at the time). We set piles of televisions stacked on top of each other with mannequins sitting on top of the piles in the windows. There were speakers installed in the canopies over the windows on the sidewalk. The TVs were threaded together to a VCR where we had John Wayne in The Cowboys playing 24-7. I remember, when we went outside to look at the “finished product” we were out there at the exact time in the movie where (was it John Wayne? or maybe one of the cohort of lost boys he had cobbled together to make the cattle-run from someplace south to someplace north.) Whomever it was, the scene was “Say it, say it.” The poor stuttering member of the lost group said, “F-f-f-f-f-FUCK!” to cheers all ’round from his compadres.

I think I said to Michael, “You know this idn’t gon’ fly.” Michael shrugged. We let it stand. I don’t remember anyone complaining.

Rickroy, it came to be a nickname my later Boss, Dennis (god rest his soul) got wind of. He called me that ever after. Danny came along about that time. He picked up on it too. He may well be the only one who calls me by that name now. When he does, I’m flooded with memories. Sometimes I can hardly stand the flow.

 

Talmadge: Whistled home

There were evenings in summer, when we kids in the neighborhood, after supper, would gather in someone’s backyard to play kids’ games-Red Rover comes to mind. We stood in two teams, holding hands in a line opposite each other. In memory there must have been a dozen kids in each team facing. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send [someone called by name] right over!”

A war! The person called had to cross the distance between us and break the line of the other team holding hands. If the person called couldn’t, they became part of the team they tried to break. If they did break the line, the team holding had to surrender a team-member to the other side. It went back-and-forth, the calling, the holding. The break. Surrender sometimes. I could hold a hold even if it hurt.

As sun set and dusk ensued, there would come a loud thweet from our front porch, from Dad. An undeniable whistle piercing…what? The universe? My brother and I knew instantly we were called. We left the game where it stood. Going home with things unsettled, the war not won. Left to settle-up another day.

 

Christmas Memory: bb guns

One Christmas, my brother and I got Daisy bb guns. We wanted them bad. We couldn’t wait to shoot them, but it was mid-winter in Rockford. Daddy set us up a stack of boxes packed with newspaper in the basement with a target stapled to the side. It wasn’t long before we bored of straight shootin’ and opted up for tricks. We went upstairs, stole Mom’s hand-mirror off her vanity, and commenced fancy-shootin’ backwards Annie Oakley style. My brother’s first shot riccocheted off the blocks of the basement wall and hit my brother in the back of his head. Didn’t hurt him. Didn’t break the skin. But how he howled. It stung! We could have put an eye out!

 

Talmadge: You Are There

My brother and I spent our earliest years, for me, my first twelve years, on a dead-end street named Talmadge Avenue in North Park, a section of Rockford, Illinois–some eighty or ninety miles west of Chicago, some dozen miles south of Wisconsin’s border. Maybe a dozen houses were on the street. Maybe a couple-dozen kids in four or five families.

There were a couple of vacant lots across from our house and a little more toward the dead end of the street. Every summer these grew to prairie because no one cared for them. They grew waist-high in grass and wild-flowers, burrs and snakeweed.

All we kids in the neighborhood built elaborate forts in the grass by lying down and rolling out circular rooms of flattened grass. Over a course of days, we’d roll out a wild-west of circles, we flattened paths between them. We spent hours playing in this maze we created. We played “cowboys and indians” We were informed by the television shows we watched in the evenings with our families. We had a trading post. We would have great wars with murderous raids, then pretend-smoke the peace-pipe. When we sat “indian style” in our circles, the grass was higher than our heads.

I don’t recall how it came to be, whether everyone had been called to lunch by their Moms, or whether we had merely grown tired of each other and wandered off to do other things. I don’t know where my brother might have gotten off to, but occasionally I would find myself alone in the fort, lying on my back, encircled, the wall of grass gently moved by small breezes. Me, shading my face from a bright, warm sun with one of a series of books I had. “You Are There with Winston Churchill….with Thomas Alva Edison….with Charles Lindburgh,” reading outside, hidden in the high grass on a quiet summer afternoon, holding a book framed by a sky-blue sky.

 

On The Walk Home Tonight

I remembered a walk home years ago. I once worked on the Plaza at Saks Fifth Avenue as a visual merchandiser. I lived in and managed (for free rent!) a small apartment complex (12 units) about a mile north and a couple blocks east of Main Street–the main drag I walked down to the Plaza and back every day. I remembered one evening, cold, after Thanksgiving. The Plaza Lights were on. We were well into the season of “good cheer.” It was dusk, nearly dark.

I was wearing my prized camel-hair Christian Dior coat–wide lapels, back-belted, double-breasted, the skirt of the coat hit me below my calves. I am tallish. It was a long coat. I was also wearing a black beret and black calf-skin gloves. Because it was slushy (we’d had a snow the week before that had not yet melted away) I was also wearing waterproof workboots, my pant-cuffs stuffed into the tops, “buck” in color, long-since scuffed and dirty. I’d been carrying these boots around, move-to-move with me since my days in college where they’d seen lots of wear in my stint working for the Physical Plant at Arkansas State University some years before. I couldn’t let them go, thinking I might need them again. In my walks at that time, they’d been resurrected. I carried my “day-shoes” in a “gift-with-purchase” Adolfo gym bag. Oh how I wander-on–so much, too much–about attire.

I crossed the Plaza, that evening, from the west, where Saks once sat, east to Main Street, then walked up the long, steep hill coming up from the Plaza (47th Street) north to 43rd street. There I turned the corner for the jog east to my street. As I turned north again on Magee, an old van (vintage: mid-sixties?) was stopped on the corner, the passenger side window, half rolled down. I rounded the corner as the van started on down the street from the stop. I distinctly heard a deep voice say “Faggot.” Not loud. Not threatening. A conversational tone. I did not look up from my walk, intent as I was on just completing the last two blocks of my walk to my “safe” apartment where I could divest myself of my attire and still be warm.

I like to think I’m nearly invisible in such situations. When I’m alone on my walk, as I was this evening, coming home from work, I like to think no one really sees me. God knows, when I’m on such a walk, my head is not about “what could happen?” I am lost in thought. Thoughts.

When I am noticed, as I was that evening, I realize I am not invisible. The possibility of happening onto danger lurks all around. But I want no part of it and I walk and live as if it isn’t there.

 

On Frogs

Three years ago, Danny and I went to the East Coast. Partly to visit friends, partly to celebrate my 50th, and partly for Danny’s work. (Philly, NYC, DC). In Philly, we stayed with a friends in the city but on the outskirts who had a place like a cross between a farm and the Garden of Eden. A couple acres, maybe? Chickens walked the lawn. Near the back of the property was an oval pool built decades ago as a swimming pool. It caught the water of a creek on one end and let it out at the other. It had “gone back to nature,” except for the concrete lip around the edge of it. I was sitting with coffee out on the second-story deck overlooking this misty garden the first morning. An enormous “Braaaaaawrupt-upt” erupted from the pond then repeated a few times. Practically rattled the windows. A little while later, Margot came out to join me on the deck. Once more, the eruption. I raised an eyebrow. “Ah,” she said. Called him by a name I don’t remember. “He’s a bullfrog who has probably lived down at the pond since the turn of the century.” I imagined a frog big enough to eat chihuahuas, with a bull-horn, squatting beneath a low-hanging leafy bough, calling for someone to join him.

 

On Ponds

We once built a dam at the foot of a giant culvert beneath a railroad track on a little creek maybe a quarter-mile beyond the back edge of our property in a little village on the Southeast edge of Rockford. My brother, our neighbor–a boy–and I. We were all in the neighborhood of fourteen years old. Can’t remember why we decided to build it. The thought just came to us and we did it by bringing brush from around the site, scooping up mud. We did it much like beavers might have done to build a dam and stop the flowing water to create a stillness and in the center of it to make a haven where we could be. The pond we created might have been thirty feet long by twelve feet wide, four or five feet at its deepest. Once it filled, a day or so later, we took off our all our clothes and swam–such as swimming might be accomplished in such a small space. We splashed mostly. Threw water up on each other, laughed and yelled. We brought an innertube with us. The neighbor, naked, just past puberty, centered himself in the innertube and floating said, “Here, sit on me.” I, not yet pubescent, straddled facing him, floated with him for some time. I don’t know where my brother went. Somewhere. Honestly, it was as innocent as puppies playing. Yet I felt a vague yearning. Had I had a name for that yearning then, I might have saved myself some pain in later life. All I knew at the time was it seemed like haven. Heaven. A place where I longed to be.

 

Rememberies Will Come

I don’t know if I can really do this, write about it I mean. Tonight, for the first time, Danny and I are staying overnight next door with our friend of just a few years, whose name also happens to be Dan. Dan is retired, moved here from Seattle, was diagnosed with lung cancer a couple of years ago. Did the radiation and chemo thing for the past couple of years. Last October, he decided to forego further chemo, made him feel too sick. Decided to live the rest of his days, what he had left, feeling better than the treatments made him feel. When he did it, he didn’t know if he had a month, two months or six. He asked us to cater a Christmas party for his family in December. Even if he wasn’t still around. We did and he was “around.” He’s still around, but it seems time may be short. But who could really say?

Danny and I are staying over because we live next door.We’ve offered to stay Sunday through Thursday nights. It really isn’t that different to stay here. We’ll only sleep here, we can trot next door to get ready for work. We’ll be around if Dan needs something. We’ll help give his family a little break so they’ll have strength to stand when the graying days grow darker. Dan is still able to move about. He is frail however.

What rememberies will come for me, if we find ourselves staying until the bitter end, will be memories of the few days and nights over a length of time when I stayed with my good friend Dennis, who, if you’ve read previous posts here, you might remember him as my mentor at Saks. Danny stayed many more days and nights with Dennis than I over that course, Danny’s story, though not less loving, is different from mine.

 

Saks I

I started this post back in October ’07, I just revisited it. I feel the need to post it, now, not that now is a better time than it might have been nearly a year ago. It cries for editing, for changes, but it is a Remembery. Editing be damned, read it for what it is, friends–a blog entry–A Remembery by all the rules I put on such:

Eighteen years ago I went to Minneapolis to help open a brand new Saks Fifth Avenue. It was the anchor for Gaviidae Common Mall sitting at the base of the fantastic Cesar Pelli designed Wells Fargo Center (formerly Norwest Tower). This particular Saks was a showcase, the first full-line out-of-town store the company had built in several years. (Any Saks that isn’t the 5th Avenue store is known as an OTS.)

I had come to the company right on the tail-end of an era in visual merchandising where folks knowledgible and skilled in the techniques of display were disappearing. Though I can’t necessarily point the finger directly to it, this was the era of full-blown AIDS, and the visual merchandising field was decimated by it. (All arts felt the dire effect of it.) Can the epidemic be blamed for the change that retail has gone through in the last nearly 20 years? Visual merchandising is also an expensive proposition, at least in the way it was practiced at that time.

When I went to Minneapolis for the store opening, we unpacked some 80 mannequins, 40 for the various departments of the store interior, and another 40 or so–a duplicate contingent–for use in the windows (the Minneapolis store had nine street level windows, four on the Nicollet side, five on the Seventh Street side). At the time, depending on the manufacturer, mannequins ranged from $800 to $1200 each.

Sometime shortly after the opening of the Minneapolis store, attitudes toward visual merchandising shifted toward this more “merchandisey” slant. At some point in the last 20 years, visual merchandising moved from a highly stylized art form to a rote and ruley exercise: Placing merchandise on the sales floor, then changing clothes on headless forms to match the rack immediately to its side. Extracting nearly all creativity, for the customer and visual merchandiser alike. As new stores opened , custom mannequins were developed for Saks and there was a marked departure from “realistic” mannequins to a stylized form. Where a hair style was molded into the sculpture of the head, and where on occasion you’d find molded shoes instead of feet. Now, I see reasons for these changes.

AIDS had taken its toll on the “old boys” who knew what they were doing with wigs and styling. Then, in the case of the shoes, mannequins tended to ruin them, the feet unable to accomodate the miriad heel-heights. Flats and low-heeled shoes were almost always ruined by the need to prop the heel of the shoe up to meet the heel of the mannequin. Pumps fared a bit better since they usually didn’t need to be bent, still the shape of the mannequins foot might stretch the body of the shoe in some unnatural way. At the end of any given season, we’d often have a box of ruined shoes totalling several thousand dollars at retail.

What it boiled down to was this, fewer and fewer retailers were willing to “take” the loss, and less and less knowledge and skill was needed to “manage” the visual aspect of visual merchandising. As time passed, and the skills were no longer required, it soon came to pass that no one, or at the most very few, had the knowledge to share with those who came to the biz with a “burning desire” to “be creative.” (Newcomers would say, “It looks like y’all have so much fun!”) They’d soon became disenchanted–uninterested in carrying a ten-foot ladder around the aisles of the selling floor to hang sale signs from the ceiling. They’d quit and leave with no idea of the style and wit that once was central to visual merchandising.

If I sound bitter, I’m not really. Just sadly noting the passing of something that once lived in me. The Minneapolis Saks, as well as the entire Mall, underperformed. As my visual merchandising mentor and good friend, Dennis Richards (God rest his soul), used to say. “The Ladies who lunch in Detroit, lunch in Bill Blass, the Ladies who lunch in Minneapolis, lunch in Carole Little.” If I may be so bold to say, it seems Minneapolitans had little use for the really good stuff.

Now the beautiful space that was a showplace of a Saks Fifth Avenue, is an Off Fifth outlet that’s doing quite well. It offers “final” markdown merchandise from other Saks’ OTS, as well as overruns from manufacturers of high end designer goods. I imagine the most valuable artwork has been moved out of the store, but honestly there’s still some good stuff hanging on the walls of this now discount house. The fine finishes and surfaces are still there. Fine wall coverings. Groovy furniture. It all seems wrong and at odds in this land of discounted value.

Suddenly I’m feeling sad. It almost feels like grief.

 

Drive-In (Incidents from the Life of Ryan)

At the drive-in Sheila Ryan:

(1) Gained her first knowledge of the Holocaust.

(2) Proposed a fun activity she has yet to enact.

Separate incidents.