In the heat of the night July 9, 2012

 

(found in another notebook from when I thought I was going to be fired)

  

The heat broke finally, but I still struggled to sleep – even with the air conditioner.

Each time I managed to slip into that doze that leads to sleep, a cat jumped on me or some panicked thought. So, I couldn’t quite tell where waking left off and sleeping began – if at all.

I feel beat up – and it’s nobody’s fault but my own.

Yet the mood swings are obvious, melancholy coming over me most often in mid to late afternoon, fought off to some degree by coffee. So, by the time night comes, I am so wired, I can’t get to sleep even with sleeping pills.

This is largely what happened last night as my head got filled with the horror of the next few days as the scandal of my life gets unveiled in the office – as the other two halves of this so called love triangle plot to get me fired, building their case on scraps of evidence they have gleaned from my web site, and my misread actions at work.

I have already started to pack up at work for my eventual loss of job – after which I will have to explain it all, an even worse situation, an affair that I should not have become involved in and did not enjoy when I was involved, but now must pay the price for because I have not been able to let go.

I’ve tried to keep my distance, taking out my frustrations in poetry and song, but even these will be used against me, as well as my desperation to leave auxiliary office, to escape this box of loneliness I face each day when I drive south to that office while in the north, the other reporters share a camaraderie I cannot share.

 

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Only the innocent October 12, 2012

   

He can’t even say her name he’s that upset, emailing me late Wednesday to tell me she’s resigned.

The news stunned me even though I had expected it and explained the intense bitterness she’d had during the Tuesday meeting, and the other owners solum tone.

I felt intensely guilty, thinking I had pushed things too far with her about RR, and began to second guess myself about what I had assumed had gone on since last March, when all this madness began.

At the same time, I felt a little roadkill, having been run over several times over the course of the summer and finally feeling as it would not happen again. Yet, I also felt even with her gone, there would never be peace for me again in the office.

He mentioned her replacement in his email, which clearly indicated that she had given noticed long enough ago for management to have sought out someone to fill in almost the moment she left.

When I followed up with a phone call, he was even less coherent, and clearly had not been included in the information loop, finding out about her leaving only when he got into the office.

Even she hadn’t warned him more than a bit of a shock since it is clear now just how much in love with her, he is, and how much her leaving hurt him.

It was worse than just a romantic break up.

She had made him feel important, even needed, in an office that otherwise used and abused him. She went to him for guidance, fulfilling a craving he’d had to play the role of mentor. With her leaving, he must feel an intense emptiness he won’t likely find a way to fill again, or at least, not in the same way.

Hearing his on the verge of tears, I realized just how sincere he had been in this otherwise dark world full of ambition and pain. He was indeed, the one pure thing in all of this, an innocent, who saw himself as worldly when in fact he was the most vulnerable of us all.

What I learned from him, however, is that she wouldn’t be leaving for another week, and so this will extend his pain and perhaps my paranoia, the fear of something else that might transpire before she is physically gone, one last trick of fate that might explode out of the either at the very last moment just when all else seemed resolved.

 

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A leap of faith? Oct. 11, 2012

   

This poem came about the same time as she submitted her resignation, almost an after thought after several weeks of speculation and several poems full of outrage and indignation.

This poem is none of that, only an intense sense of resignation, a sense of ending and moving on.

Her wings are open and ready for flight. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath before the inevitable leap – that moment when everything for once is still and calm, and her heart empty.

In some ways, this is a leap of faith, a hope that she will eventually land somewhere else without the emotional issues she leaves behind.

 Unlike some of her previous poems, the speaker is not offering advice, but rather is making an observation, describing that brief moment of peace before she takes flight, having clearly resigned herself to her fate. She has emptied herself of feeling. This is not about doing the right thing, so much as accepting the inevitable.

She is not looking back at the past with regret or even at the future with expectations. She has finally reached that point she had attempted to reach before being “in the moment,” where as in the past she always got distracted and could not.

She is on the brink of change, and ready to flap her wings and fly away.

The poem seems to be speaking to others beyond herself, less a statement of outrage as was the “Anything” poem earlier, than a statement about how she has emptied herself of feeling, and is numb, feeling neither affection nor revulsion, needing not to have to carry the emotional baggage that would hinder her flight – as she must fly away.

This poem details the very moment when she is about to take flight, perched no doubt on a high place, eyes closed before her leap, her wings spread, a moment of calm as she knows she will leave everything behind – as she has had to do before, and perhaps hopes she won’t have to do again.

Since she posts this poem at the same time that she is quitting the job, the tone is one of final acceptance after a week or more of struggling against it. Although it is unclear where she will go or what she will do, she only knows she has to leave.

After so many “loud” poems full of outrage, the quiet of this poem is deafening. Like the shock wave after a series of explosions, reverberating with echoes of the unsaid past. She does not need to say what she had said already. In fact, the poem suggest she had reached a place of tranquility, all decision made, all of the conflicts resolved, not even the need for a look back.

As short a poem as this is, it is also among her most powerful – that last deep breath before a leap she needs to take, not knowing what comes next, not caring either, no longer worried about how she got there, poised, ready, and in the next moment, off into some world beyond.

 

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Is this the 11th hour? Oct. 9, 2012

   

Again, I’m struck by the 11th hour, and how she feels it’s okay for her to come into a place of employment and trickle up to the top to eventually become boss, even when other people have been there before her and may have earned the right to be there instead of her.

Maybe I’m out of touch and this is really how the world works and I’ve simply been lucky to avoid it for most of my life.

I’ve always been the odd man out where ever I’ve worked, usually managing to position myself in a way that I’m not on the ladder of power and so there is no reason for an ambitious social climber to shove me out of the way.

Perhaps she thinks I’m a player, and that I want what she wants, and I have been playing a kind of chess with her, missing moves I ought to have taken, only accidentally stumbling into moves that have allowed me to survive.

I’m just smart enough to sense something was wrong here, and clever enough perhaps to avoid traps I should have fallen into and managed to make moves in this insane chess game nobody could have predicted.

I still don’t completely understand what exactly is going on, whether all this is part of some RR conspiracy or something personal that spun out of control, and somehow got intermingled with RR’s plans.

I don’t know how much of what she does here is conscious or is all that has happened really as she put it a product of her defensiveness against what she perceives as arrogance.

Her poetry seems to reflect an ongoing internal monologue, honest to a point, although perhaps self-deceiving. Her poetry does not reflect the stuff RR appears to be trying to pull, although her poem in February came at a crucial point when RR was again rejected for reinstatement to the police department. She wrote a long piece that possibly reflected him, and about him loving his wife, even though RR was on the verge of a break up and future divorce.

I might be reading a bit into this since her writing was a fictional account about a married man falling into the arms of a barfly who desired him, when he wandered into a bar he never intended to wander into.

It is difficult to know for sure what her motivation was in writing it, or if he was even the intended subject.

The hardest part of all of this is how little I actually know about any of it. I suspect things but can’t prove anything. But it is clear from several of her poems that she sees nothing wrong in any of it.

She clearly thinks she deserves what she’s clawed to get, despite the fact that in every case, she ends up failing.

 

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A moment of doubt Oct. 8, 2012

   

I got to the staff meeting late but in time to hear her giving her list of stories for the week, sputtering as I entered the room and took my place at the table, losing track of what she was saying so repeating herself when I settled in across from her.

Eventually, with a lot of help from the other owner (the male owner again was not around), she got back on track, at one point, spouting, “I don’t hate me, only some men,” staring right at me when she did.

What prompted this is beyond me since I never once accused her of hating men.

From all this I got the impression she may have changed her mind about quitting, perhaps refusing to allow other people to force her to quit.

It is actually a stupid move for her to quit since she already has gotten everything she wants, except maybe a livable wage. Frankly, she has too much to lose by quitting and has a number of allies in our office that would take her side if she chose to resist.

Yet, she and I both know if she stays the war between us will go on because she will always see me as a potential threat, even if I was to concede victory to her. Soon or later, she would need to come after me again. I’m already too vulnerable and easy prey.

I hate the idea of giving in. But I have no real option. To this point, I have kept a very low profile, making sure I left no visible trail, keeping my sources to myself. I can’t risk doing anything more. If she decides to brave it out, then ultimately, I’m doomed.

The keep thinking about the missing 11th hour in that poem she posted at the end of the summer, and how much she seems to live up to the Biblical version of it, how she always shows up at the 11th hour and expects to trickle quickly to the top of the totem pole, regardless of where she works.

So, is this talk about the meeting a bit of bravado? It is odd that the other owner isn’t here again, the man who read her the riot act, and asked her to “do the right thing.”

And if she quit, why is she still here?

 

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Losing even when she wins Oct. 7, 2012

   

The rain that we expected over the last few days have finally arrived, and I sit in my car listening to the rain’s nervous fingers tapping on the hood as dawn’s pink fingers grip the still unsullied edges of the world as day hoists itself up out of the dark of night, and I wait out the remaining hours before taking the long drive north, back to the dog eat dog world I left to come here.

I’m still foggy about what has transpired over the last year; I only know it has transformed my life, bringing change I did not expect or perhaps did not desire either.

It has imposed on me a terrible vision of the world I can’t get out of my head.

I keep thinking back to the poem she wrote about me and my eye patch (a poem long since removed and perhaps forgotten), the sense of hope she had back then, with the one important caveat, “Don’t try to save me.”

She could not back then know how I would read and reread those pages, that poem, and those that came before and after, almost a religious experience, and how later, even during the worst of it, how our poems became a kind of conversation, often extremely painful, as re reading them remains to this day, part of a continuing struggle with some objective that still remains unclear.

Now as we come to the end of the conversation, there are bad feelings that won’t go away, the personal wrapped up in the political that sometimes becomes unbearable.

Her most recent poem is all about failure, and about trying to overcome it again, as she has had to do so many times before, her poem searching for a reason to this repetition, looking to assign blame – our arrogance forcing up her defenses, and perhaps to some degree it is true.

And she falls back into the same quagmire and has to start to drag herself out again, clawing her way back, the way she has every other time.

No writer is consistent in recollecting events that lead up to any given moment, and this is partly true with her, even though she has tried to document much of her life in poetry and sometimes prose, as if to make sense of something that makes no sense.

The most consistent thing about her is her writing – those stories and later poems – which show just how much she lives inside herself, how she needs to tell herself that she is “right and true” in doing all she needs to do to survive, and how the “you” and the “all of you,” in her latest poem have nothing for her, the deception being that she has already taken what she needs and wants from us, so that we have nothing left to offer.

For all of her amazing talents – singer, writer, teacher, actor – she still can’t put the pieces together to make her life work.

In some ways, she’s like a school kid who cheats on tests, not so much to get ahead scholastically, but for the desperate need for the hollow accolades, only to find out what she got in the end isn’t what she expected and doesn’t understand why, continuing to cheat even when it becomes clear she doesn’t have to, her talent more than enough to get what she wants and needs with real accolades for what she has honestly accomplished.

I don’t know if she intends to quit, or has already, or might continue on as she has been.

But it is clear, the game is ruined. And even if she manages to win, she loses, and nothing anybody can say – least of all me – will make a difference.

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The endless cycle Oct. 6, 2012

  

Down here in Cape May I’m cut off from what is transpiring up north, whether she had quit yet or not, or perhaps has changed her mind now that the scheme concocted by her boyfriend has gone awry.

The couple in the motel room next door woke me in the middle of the night, moaning and groaning in their love making so I drifted in and out of sleep, my consciousness filled with strange dreams including fears of the Cuban mob, searching people out, determined to get rid of anybody associated with the plot, including me, with a scene like the last one in The Godfather playing in my head, pop, pop, pop, pop.

I keep thinking of the first line in her last poem: “It’s the right thing to do.” Meaning what? To quit and maybe even to get out of town?

And how she blames herself for bringing bad on the whole thing as she has all those previous times.

And the vast silence from her corner of the table at the staff meeting last Tuesday when all the other writers talked about their stories, laughing and cajoling, part of a world she does not fit in with.

I can’t help thinking how much she has squandered, her immense talent gone to waste in petty plots, few or any of which ever came to fruition, as if her defense mechanism is actually something that brings on her self-destruction.

She seems trapped in the “endless cycle” with no apparent easy way out.

Maybe she saw RR as the key that unlocks a door to success finally, pumping her up with potential for serious attention from a serious media, only to have it all burst like an overfull balloon.

No wonder she’s bitter.

She blames me yet can’t possibly know everything I did behind the scenes, the people I’ve talked to in an attempt to ferret out what RR was all about.

Yet, she’s savvy enough to guess, yet not connected enough to know it all, which leaves her to see it all as bad luck or fate that brought doom down upon her, as well as a faithless owner of our company who would not stand behind her when it came to losing advertising dollars.

There are people in our office that legitimately love her, and will miss her immensely when she’s gone, and she is so self-centered she doesn’t see it.

 

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Rising above it all Oct. 5, 2012

  

 

When I first read her latest poem, I got confused by its shifting point of view and the irony of the self-deprecating passages, although the bitterness came shining through.

The tone and content clearly said she was giving up and move on, although equally clearly, doing so not without resentment.

Also clear was the fact that someone had read her the riot act, and implied that Tom had done what he said he would do, getting word to the appropriate powers about RR using her, and those powers had talked to our owner – who instead of standing up for his writer, caved-in and decided to force her to surrender, telling her to “do the right thing” and resign.

Still, she deludes herself into believing her cause was right, as her previous poem claims.

Yet in some ways, she is boxed in, taking the blame for a scheme that wasn’t hers, and yet, she’s the one on whose shoulders the blame gets put, another victim of RR, who has tried and failed to convince other people to do this very thing – she alone was gullible enough to think his scheme as legitimate.

And she so wanted to prove herself, to show how she had the chops to do this job, a tough cookie uncovering corruption that is underneath other people’s noses.

RR played off her need, her ambition, her desire to prove herself in her newly chosen profession, feeding her news bits for almost a year and finally giving her what would have been the story of a career, she is moving on to some more prestigious publication, and he finally getting the revenge he so hungered for.

I feel incredibly guilty in all this, knowing she’s only the took he used, yet the one who must take the most blame, while he largely escapes scot-free, his plans ruined partly because she acted too openly, and people like Tom got wind of the whole scheme.

Perhaps it was enacted too soon, or because I stumbled into the middle of it and started asking all the wrong questions.

I do not know what transpired in the meeting between the owner and her, and whether or not “the little man” made an appearance or merely called the owner to complain, a meeting in which the owner asked the hard question as to whether or not she was involved with RR, who was the source of her story against the congressman, and she reluctantly admitting it, getting the “do the right thing,” line next, at which point she resigned.

On first reading the poem, she seems to be confessing, but on a closer observation it is clear she takes it all back, in a kind of angry irony, capped by the last few lines that basically tells all of us to go fuck ourselves.

Over the last few months, I have seen her at her most arrogant and ruthless, while at the same time, her most vulnerable, someone who thought she was prepared for the world, but soon discovered as her poem points out, a world she does not fit into, a world where corruption is second nature, and people use other people then throw the remains away.

There is no doubt that she will “rise above” all this, yet not without the scars of the conflict, and a general distrust of everybody, until, of course, the next time, when she falls for someone’s fast talking line again, and gets hurt again.

I actually feel sorry for her.

 

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Defeated but not undone Oct. 4, 2012

  

 

Of all the bitter poems she has posted over the last six months, today’s was the most bitter, worse than just a sour grapes poem, more a poem written by a wounded animal, snarling from the limited protection of its den, ready to bite the fingers of anyone foolish enough to reach out to offer her comfort or compassion.

This is a poem written by someone who has lost her game, striking out, not just at a single adversary, but at a whole society she has been forced to withdraw from, which she admits she did not fit in with in the first place.

At first glance, you might mistake this poem as contrition since she couches her message in a stack of seeming self-depreciating phases. But in truth, this poem is full of defiance, as if she is giving everybody the middle finger as she goes out the door.

There is not an ounce of contrition in this poem, no admission of wrong doing, only the semblance of it which is more like an iron fist in a velvet glove giving a sucker punch to those who have brought her to this point of defeat, a poem full of rage and outrage, full of righteous indignation, full of pain and a sense of betrayal.

This is not a Robert E Lee kind of gentleman’s surrender after a good fight, but a begrudging persistently unrepenting Napoleon kind, striking out even in defeat, condemning everybody but herself for what has happened to her.

Although made to sound like contrition, this poem as the same arrogance as her poem about forgiveness that she posted over the summer, though instead of being poised in a position of triumph, she write this one out of the ashes of downfall – an issue she herself raises in this poem when she wonders about rising above, and asks if this is really “a defense total arrogance.” But even in this, she refers likely to the arrogance of those who oppose her, rather than her own.

While the poem is primarily told in a first-person singular point of view, it opens and closes with “they” and “all of you,” as well as a singular “you” which I assume is aimed at me.

The opening suggests she is taking action under duress. “They” are telling her to do the right thing, even though there is another voice inside her telling her that she gave up, was too weak to make it, and what she wants is impossible to achieve.

She is asking a fundamental question: What makes her think she can rise above (recover from) this and whether rising above is really a defense against total arrogance – in other words, a reaction to others imposing their will on her.

The poem is structured around four uneven stanzas, the first describing her conflict with authority figures who are telling her to do the right thing and her internal reaction seeing herself as a failure, not strong enough to achieve what may well be impossible dreams.

The second stanza pans out as if a camera to a slightly longer social aspect, of how she let down other people, she as the “bringer of bad luck,” “harbinger of closed downness.” She sees herself as embracing what’s old, done and over – repeating a pattern she has gone through before and now abandons yet one more venture.

The third stanza questions her own motives, and perhaps the life pattern itself, of rising above,” when perhaps her insecurity has caused her to be defensive when confronted with arrogance.

The last stanza pans out again, looking at the wider world she sees as “not right” because she can’t find a place in it.

Then, in a clear and perhaps mistaken self-evaluation, she claims her efforts are not recognized “because I don’t have what it takes.”

She understands that she is in an “endless cycle”, but it is because she has built this defense, barriers behind which she hides, “against myself, against you, and against all of you who think you should give me anything at all.”

This last line is among the most bitter in any of her angry poems, condemning those who would condemn her, yet more importantly, casting aside the so-called generosity of people she seems to see as hypocrites.

This rapid panning out from “myself,” to “you” to “all of you,” highlights her continued defiance. She may be wounded. She may be defeated. But she still putting up a fight. This is less a surrender than a forced retreat.

“They” are imposing their will on her, and if there is any sense of guilt in this poem it is for having brought bad luck on others who clearly, she feels she has let down.

 

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Does RR really work for the FBI? Oct. 3, 2012

   

The owner came to the axillary office to meet me before he went to the main office.

“Do you really think RR works with the FBI?” he asked me.

I told him what I’ve heard from numerous sources that RR is largely full of shit.

I relayed what the local assemblyman had told me about not trusting RR.

“I told her she needed to raise some of these concerns if she writes the story she intends to write,” I old the owner.

“I told her we cannot run the story without his real name being used,” the owner told me.

“Especially when it has the potential to bring down a congressman,” I said.

“Not just the big man but the little man, too,” the owner said.

“She’s naïve,” I said. “Last year, she ran a puff piece about him and never addressed any of these issues. If we don’t address them, we look like fools.”

“We’ll see what she comes up with,” the owner said. “We won’t run it before the election.”

The owner looked nervous, yet relieved. He apparently felt pressure about all of this. No doubt, he’s had conversations with her about this over the last two weeks. But he did not divulge what might have been said.

My conversation with our former temporary boss earlier in the day suggested she had not confided at all in him about some of the other aspects. She clearly did not want to divulge her close relationship with RR, which Tom had warned me about during the summer.

If the owner caught any of this from our conversation, I can’t say. I deliberately tried not to give any clue to it. Better he finds out from someone other than 

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Happy together? Oct. 1, 2012

   

It is hard to say exactly when she and RR became romantically involved, but it is clear that he latched on to her almost as soon as she started working for us in fall of 2011, as he had latched onto other female writers prior to her.

RR’s placement as one of the county’s most influential people showed this connection. Whether he pushed for this, or she thought of it herself, it’s hard to say. But she was clearly infatuated with him. She even wrote in glowing terms his somewhat fictional account of the 1994 sting which led to the arrest of more than 30 of his fellow police officers, and his false claim he had brought down the police chief as well.

“He has since turned his advocacy and accountability into a career,” she wrote. “He volunteers 30 hours a week as chairman of civil rights protection agency, runs a personal community advisory, and investigation and consulting group, and wors with the attorney general and county prosecutors to deal with complaints about police.”

Her account did not mention the “secret missions” he took part in that required him to go away for sometimes weeks at a time, regular I Spy stuff he had fed to several of the previous female employees – off doing undercover work that rivaled what he supposedly did in 1994, but without apparently the arm twisting of a previous arrest by the feds.

A Jersey City police lieutenant said his wife, a lawyer, has used RR from time to time as “an expert witness,” but described RR has as “a glorified ambulance chaser,”

“He runs around after cops carrying a video camera trying to catch them doing wrong doing,” this cop said.

No doubt, RR was trying to recapture former glory.

She in her story about him in late 2011 made it clear RR was determined to get his job back as a cop.

This is largely the reason RR apparently supported the election of the current mayor in 2011, although when the mayor came afoul of the law, RR quickly turned this in an opportunity to advance his cause by feeding inside information to her, using his relationship with the feds and the criminal lawyer the mayor had hired – the same lawyer who had represented RR during the scandal in the mid-1990s and who was deeply involved in the county corruption legal proceeding in the early 2000s.

In some ways, all of this had the makings of a bestselling espionage novel as RR plotted to get even with his political enemies and using her as part of the plot.

It is possible RR may have even met her prior to her getting a job in our office, but once she became the primary media voice in North Hudson, he apparently latched on and refused to let go.

The plot has so many twists and turns, it’s very difficult to follow, although at one point, RR speculated a run for mayor himself, even when most people perceived him as an insider with the current mayor.

When I asked her about this recently, she claimed RR had broken with the mayor, although this apparently was news to the mayor when I asked about RR. The mayor sang RR’s praises even.

But the mayor may be the only person with anything good to say about RR. An Assemblyman from the southern part of the county, who also served as public safety director, had nothing good to say, but would not divulge all he knew about him.

“He can’t be trusted,” the assemblyman said. “Everything he does is to promote his own agenda.”

Others – non-cops -- have accused RR of secretly recording them, suggesting he might be looking for dirt with which to blackmail them.

A spokesperson for the former county executive said she met RR during a fundraiser.

“He was running for office while at the same time he claimed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress,” she said. “I suffered that, too. He couldn’t run a campaign if he was. I thought he was just a jerk.”

Starting last January, RR became her primary source for inside information about the mayor’s legal trouble and may well have been acting on RR’s behalf in attacking the neighboring mayor who some claim turned his back on RR’s mayor.

But it is clear Tom was right when he warned me about RR in July, although it is clear that she and RR have working closely together almost from when she started to work for us. Considering RR’s history, I’m surprised he waited too long to launch his attack on the congressman.

 

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What happened back in 1995? Sept. 30, 2012

  

What exactly happened back in 1995 depends on who you talk to.

Tom claims RR is essentially right about the congressman.

The bag man was getting money to a number of prominent political figures in North Hudson when he got caught.

“Only he (the bagman) couldn’t give anybody up or the Cuban mafia would have killed him in jail,” Tom said. “So, he kept quiet, did his time and when he got out, he got back into the game.”

A New York Times article from 2001 filled in the details, about a police department loaded with corrupt cops, although this was before the congressman got elected mayor, so it is difficult to know if he knew about the corruption in the department or not.

When elected mayor in 1995, the congressman said he did not know about any of the details until the feds informed him in 1997. He said there were rumors, but that’s all. In the book “The Soprano State,” the congressman said he inherited a corrupt police chief from the previous administration. Once made aware of the situation, the congressman hired a prosecutor to investigate the department.

RR’s arrest prompted a federal investigation in which eventually led to the arrest of more than 30 police officers, including the chief of police.

Although RR had almost nothing to do with the arrest of the police chief but said he did.

The police chief became the star witness in the trial, and claimed the congressman, then mayor, had been given bribes, even though the congressman/mayor was never charged with any crime, supposedly collaborated by another witness, although the assistant U.S. Attorney said no such testimony came out of the Grand Jury, and claimed the collaborating witness was simply trying to shift blame onto the congressman/mayor.

The congressman claims the police chief’s accusation was revenge for his not allowing the police chief to college more than $300,000 in unused sick time.

RR, who had retained his job as a result of his cooperating with the feds in the investigation, was fired in 1996 for what town officials called “Rules violations and psychological and disciplinary problems” including the drawing a swastika on the back of a police exam sheet. (another version of this tale said he was caught drawing the swastika on a wall.)

RR filed suit claiming he was fired because he had exposed corruption.

The congressman/mayor, who was not a defendant in the suit, said the city would fight the suit anyway.

His firing, city officials said, came because he refused to take the psychological test (one account said he took it and failed it). There may be a little truth to his claim of harassment since none of the cops trusted him after his turning in so many. He attempted and failed to get hired as a state trooper. Then in 1999, a court ruled against reinstating him as a town cop, although in 2003 the town settled the suit by giving him $675,000 in accumulated back pay. At some point, RR began plotting against the Congressman/mayor, when he started to claim he had proof that the congressman had taken bribes after all. RR simply couldn’t produce the proof whenever anybody asked for it.

But he apparently had shown it to her or promised to produce it, and she had taken this information to our owner, who then asked me if I thought any of it was true.

 

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Jousting at windmills? Sept. 29, 2012

  

A whole month after posting her last poem, she posts one that truly reflects some of the issues she is dealing with.

There is almost a Christ-like quality in her description of her struggles, the falling to the ground, her determination to get up again, carrying her cross even when aided by those who would encourage her to carry on with a touch of shoulder or whisper in her ear.

Who these good Samaritans are, she doesn’t say, or even if they are good Samaritans at all, or if they are even real.

This comes at a time when there is serious conflict in her life, questions about what she is doing and who is supporting her activities, and whether these people can be trusted or not.

The poem opens with an observation about the string of endless days that all seem the same, part of an equally endless struggle and some inner resource urging her to keep fighting – even when she is face down in the dirt.

She has fallen, again Christ-like, from exhaustion, and how she has gotten used to the smell of dirt.

She describes her body as “torn and bleeding,” but stubbornly “hurls” itself up, not so much by conscious thought, but by instinct, from the adrenaline that rushes through her with her need to survive, her body telling her she is not finished yet – even as parts of her protest against her trying to stand again.

She is forced ahead against her will, into a clearly hostile world, a world she clearly does not understand, a world as puzzled as she is about her ability to go on, “jerking one foot, then the next, something automatic, like breathing, which she is surprised she can do that as well.

At this point, helping hands appear like Saint Simon, touching her elbow briefly, just enough to stead her, just enough to “lend momentum” to her advance -- and here, we get the sense that the hands might not be friendly at all when she refers to them as having the “gall to feed off the quest,” she knows is right.

I suspect this is a reference to me and my attempt to undermine her “big scoop” in my column this week, when she clearly believes in the validity of what RR has told her.

Again, we get some Christian symbolism, she as a noble knight on some crusade, believing in her cause when I tell her she is jousting with windmills.

She is determined to move forward when faint voices she does not completely believe are real encourage her to keep going.

The duality of this passage said she is aided by others that she does not completely trust, or perhaps is motivated by opposition that makes her even more determined to prove herself right, alluding to the “gall” of some to feed off her quest, me perhaps, but also perhaps other people with their own agendas, while she remains pure and faithful to her goals.

 As said earlier, the speaker is portrayed as a Christ-like figure, someone noble, a knight who has been wounded, yet not defeated, struggling to advance, inspired, driven even by her need to survive.

As in some of her previous poems, the speaker seems to be offering counsel to herself, using “you” as if the person struggling was somebody other than herself, and the speaker’s purpose is to act as guide, perhaps like those voices she thinks she hears, telling herself she must still achieve her purpose.

The poem creates a sense of the monotony of the struggle, the endless string of days, one no different from the other, perhaps even alluding to the Sisyphus myth, which many scholars compare to Christ’s carrying the cross. Sisyphus is punished in the underworld by the god Zeus, who forces him to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Every time he nears the top of the hill, the boulder rolls back down.

Yet out of this she finds if not an ember of hope, then determination not to be defeated, even at that moment when she believes she can do no more. Her “stubborn body” forces her to rise up, even after exhaustion caused her to fall in the first place.

She is not done, even as her nerves complain after she has tried to rest. Here she clearly refers to the tensions that plague her daily life.

We only get a vague sense of who the villains are who keep her from fulfilling her quest, and she does not define what the quest, except that she knows it is “right.”

This may well allude to her efforts to unseat the local congressman, and her absolute faith that RR is telling her the truth, and the “gall” some people (such as me) to stand in her way, to feed off her potential glory.

 

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Block buster story or what? Sept. 26, 2012

   

She got her hooks into young Richard, the son of a prominent political figure in one of the towns she covers.

“He’s real taken with her,” the PR woman from the congressman’s office said.

Richard works under her.

This may also be true of the police director, with whom she deposited her so called stalking evidence against me.

If you’re a man, then you’re likely going to fall for her.

But Richard is different. As the son of a prominent political figure, he may well be a back door access for her to his father.

“They’ve been talking secretly via email and text for some time before I found out about it,” the PR person said.

She used the son to uncover a supposed scandal with his father.

“She told Richard she wanted to help his father, but needed to have his cell phone number,” the PR person said. “And Richard believed her and gave her the number. I shut it down. I told Richard I want to know what he is telling members of the media, regardless of whether it is by phone, text, or email.”

She apparently feels the need to go through Richard because the PR person won’t give her what she wants.

“But she crossed the line when she texted Richard,” the PR person told me. “He trusts her and thinks she will help him when he needs help. But I told him I don’t’ like her or trust her – and I don’t. She’s a black widow and she bites people.”

Richard has a girlfriend he’s been dating for more than three years, and yet according to the PR person, he’s become infatuated with her.

She has discovered just how much power she has as a media person, and after two successful hard-hitting stories, she’s on the hunt for more.

Tom, an old school political operative, warned me over the summer about someone else being behind all this, a guy named RR, who is apparently romantically involved with her and using her to advance his own political agenda.

She is trying to find out if Richard’s father did something illegal in regard to an apartment complex, rigging approvals so that tenants can move in before these apartments are ready and then allowing the landlords not to have to make necessary repairs, using his political position to influence the local judge if and when anybody complains.

The truth turned out to be less odious than she presumed, but this hasn’t stopped her from bragging to one of the office gossips about all the scandals she’s investigating. Those two talk a lot, a fact I only learned later when the gossip appeared to know more about me and her than was comfortable, making it clear I need to be careful what I say when I talk to the gossip since gossip runs both ways.

The gossip is my friend and her friend but can’t resist telling any secret she hears from anybody, even at the risk of exposing herself.

And she can’t resist bragging to the gossip either, needing to leave an impression, a sense of importance.

So when she trotted back up to her desk, I trotted down to the gossip’s desk on the first floor, where I got an earful of boasting, although such conversations rarely get to the point at first, starting usually with the current status of her health or the health of one of the owners, eventually repeating nearly word for word what she told the gossip a few minutes earlier, and in this case, starting with the tale of poor Richard, and then expanding into an even bigger story in which the congressman allegedly ordered the Cuban mob to intimidate a key witness in a corruption case to remain silent, a tale told from nearly two decades earlier in which her new boyfriend supposedly played a role as whistle blower and was fired.  Her boyfriend, RR (who turned snitch for the feds), later got his salary returned, but not his job.

The truth was a lot more complicated than she let on to the gossip, or even what the gossip let on to her.

RR liked to take credit for helping the feds bring down a corrupt police chief in the town she covered two decades earlier. But in fact, he did not.

RR got caught by the feds shaking down illegal immigrant workers at the local eateries, collecting a piece of their weekly salaries to not report them to ICE. RR then turned in other cops involved in the scam. The police chief was caught separately, offering protection to a local Cuban gambling operation.

RR’s firing had nothing to do with the federal sting, but because he acted as a snitch, the cops protected him.

The firing came when he got caught printing Nazi symbols on a wall and this required, he take a new psyche test, which he failed.

RR went to the newly elected mayor (who was later elected congressman) to get his job back. The mayor said the best he could do was allow RR to retake the psyche test, which he refused to do, and harbored ill feelings against the mayor ever since. This won him a reputation has a crank.

But he could also be charming, a womanizer, who cheated on his wife so regularly, she eventually divorced him.

He allegedly had proof of bribes and the threat against the witness – which he offered to give her as a big scoop.

Our owner asked me if I believed he had such evidence. I did not know.

But Tom said RR had offered to provide this evidence a few years earlier when the congressman was being challenged by the mayor of Perth Amboy.

“He never produced the evidence,” Tom told me. “I don’t think it exists.”

Tom believed RR was simply trying to impress her since they were romantically involved, and possibly to get her to print something that would hurt the congressman.

Since Richard’s father is also connected to the congressman, I have to assume her trying to damage him through Richard was something else concocted by RR

RR latched onto the new mayor to get what the old mayor would not give him, his job back on the police force. RR headed a small Latino organization that helped the current mayor get elected.

“Actually, he didn’t do much in that election,” one of that town’s commissioners said. “He was here and there.”

He also used his connections as a snitch for the feds to get inside information about the current mayor’s legal troubles, which he fed to her in order to give her scoops – showing that he wasn’t above biting the political hand that fed him.

The attorney that worked with RR during his heyday as an FBI snitch represents the current mayor who is facing federal charges and is feeing RR information that he feeds to our writer.

Rumor claims RR broke with the new mayor with the idea of possibly running for mayor himself.

“A lot of people hate him (RR) because of the way he turned on his own friends,” the commissioner said. “I’m told he’s a bad guy who got caught and the feds told him to cooperate or go to jail. So, he started turning in all his old friends, while he still pretended to be their friends.”

Much of this I learned after making a number of phone calls, one of which I used to add a few lines to my column about a rumored investigation into the witness, who was facing jail time in the corruption scandal, and the reports that he would not give up other people involved – such as the congressman.

Since our former temporary boss edits my column, I have to assume he’s the one who alerted her.

When she called me, she actually sounded humble, saying my column might undermine her big story.

I told her RR could not be trusted.

“You really need to be careful with him,” I said.

“He’s a good man,” she said. “And he’s not just doing this. He’s got other things I can’t talk about now that he’s working on that are even more special.”

I had heard tales of RR before from another young writer in our office, who said RR had offered her similar “special” projects, but she eventually got the feeling that he was all talk and that there was no validity to any of these projects.

“He’s someone with an agenda,” I said.

One of my former bosses that covered the same beat she did now verified some of the claims against RR.

“He claims to have worked undercover with the FBI,” my former boss said.

“Claims?” I said.

“Unverified,” he said. “He’s a bit of a quack, always anti whatever administration is in power. Your writer needs to verify anything he says.”

When I told him the story RR was pitching, my former boss said RR had tried to pitch the same story to him years earlier.

“But he never had anything concrete to share,” my former boss said.

This was not the case with her apparently. She told the owner that RR was willing to provide her with hundreds of pages of documents that would prove his case, documents with dates, times and other details she was convinced would bring down the congressman.

It is difficult to know just when RR latched onto her, although he began feeding her information less than a month after her being hired at our office. A few months later, she pushed to have him named number 13 in the county’s most powerful people, raising a lot of eyebrows among the political elite who thought he had no business being on the list at all.

RR is a good talker, as one of the commissioners in her town pointed out, but also a strange, unfocused kind of guy, who could charm women into his web, painting himself as an action hero and still relevant. He lured one of our former writers into his web a few years ago, telling her he was on a “secret mission,” and all the earth-shaking things he was involved in.

“He’s a fraud,” this woman told me. “He was always going away somewhere, but he never did any of the things he said he did. Frankly, he scared me.”

When he couldn’t get his job back as a cop, he became a private investigator, but was always jealous of the former deputy police chief from a neighboring town, who had also turned private investigator and was constantly feeding us dirt on the mayor of that town.

“He (RR) wants to be top dog,” another source told me. “He hates the other guy for getting more attention than he gets.”

“The two of them hate each other,” another source said, something the other private detective admitted when I spoke with him.

“There’s more that went on with him back in the 1990s than he lets on,” this private investigator old me.

Most people don’t even know who RR is, though he has a reputation for serving as a professional witness in anti-cop legal cases.

RR is seen as an odd ball that is always carrying a video camera and chasing behind cops.

Hearing all of this conspiracy theory about how RR might be using our office to promote his own agenda sent shivers down my spine.

How far all this goes back, I can’t say for certain, maybe all the way to the beginning when RR first started feeding her stories about the mayor.

But since August, she’s become much bolder and more confident about her control at our office.

Her objecting to my adding lines to my column about all this suggests she doesn’t want to let the cat out of the bag too soon.

During my testing with her, I laid out my concerns about RR’s character and pressed the fact that she needed to get real proof, and not depend upon these unsubstantiated claims. I said her emotional involvement with RR could be a problem in being objective.

In texting my concerns to her about the story, she reminded me of her list of demands, and then got nasty.

The problem is if RR plans to run for mayor, then he needs this block buster story to damage the one creditable obstacle – which is the congressman – so that he can claim his ticket is the only ticket without ties to corruption.

“Let her write the story,” Tom told me. “She’s going to drag your office into a real legal mess and look like a fool for it.”

The congressman’s PR person concurred.

“You’ve done your best to warn them,” she said. “Just go back to what you’re doing. This is not your imagination. They really are trying to take over the paper. But you can’t do anything to stop them.”

 

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Top of the chart Sept. 25, 2012

   

It’s Tuesday, we must be in the main office (an allusion to that old movie “It’s Tuesday, this must be Rome.”)

The question is which of the two owners will oversee our staff meeting?

Michelle, my friend from Jersey City, said our office sounds a lot like Einstein’s definition of madness, because we keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

This also seems to be true of her, the same perpetual chaos of trickling up that never actually accomplishes anything, ebbs and flows, but never anything different.

No doubt I have a lot to do with the pattern this time, even if I don’t live up to the pattern of her usual stalkers.

Michelle thinks it’s all about getting attention, or being the focus of it, and that she’s grown so comfortable with having stalkers in her life, she doesn’t know what to do without them.

They feed her craving for attention the way a heroin or cocaine fills a need. Once you’re addicted, you can’t stop.

I wonder if it is possible to give a positive response and still satisfy that craving, without the usual self-destructive tendencies.

Our male owner appears to have caught onto the fudging of numbers of hits for the top story list, apparently looking at IP addresses, her and her friends, me and mine, spiking different stories to get top billing – although the rise in her stories hit list seem to come to a halt the minute her stories reached the top spot.

The owner actually yanked a couple of the stories off the list entirely and seems to be monitoring the site to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The whole thing seems immensely dishonest, as if she feels a desperate need to cheat to get ahead.

All of it may not have anything to do with her, of course. Some admirer, perhaps her stalker, might be doing it, just to ingratiate himself or herself with her.

I wouldn’t put it passed her stalker from Brooklyn, and maybe he isn’t even telling her he’s doing it, just loving the idea that she’s top of the chart.

I’m certainly not going to ask the owner if the IP addresses are from Brooklyn. I suppose the whole game will end now that he’s cracked down on it.

Or maybe not. One can imagine an army of her current and former stalkers getting behind such a project to pump up her ego by pumping up her numbers.

A silly idea, I know.

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How ‘cheffy’ became a stalker Sept. 23, 2012

  

She talks so much about her New York stalker (the man from Brooklyn), I actually became more curious about him.

What was he like? How did they get entangled?

He, of course, became the next step in her budding career as a future chef after she arrived in Manhattan again.

But it wasn’t what she’d expected.

“I was thrown into what seemed to be the careless observer of a pretty solid life track,” she wrote. “I love food. I love the unpredictability of the food industry. But as happened before in moments like these, I found myself slowly smashed into an unsettling, underlying predictability in the middle of all the crazy appearance, a familiar equilibrium. I was trapped. I knew in my heart things were not right. But I beat myself back into submission with the usual arsenal of excuses.”

The Sadomasochistic language of this last sentence is striking.

Unsaid in this written account was the romantic entanglement with the co-manager that turned into love (at least in his thinking) and later into stalking, at a time when she was still being stalked by a woman she had fled from upstate, the latest link in a chain of unwanted attachments that got in the way of her economic and career plans.

“The original intent behind bartending once again (which I never, I assure you, included the intent to manage, and insistence that fell on my former chef’s deaf ear, bless his heart) was to allow myself freedom to pursue things that sooth the soul,” she wrote.

In other words, she was looking for a gig similar to the one she had had prior to coming to NYC, where she previously acted like a boss, while using the venue as performance space.

Although she had worked as a bartender during her return to New York after her teaching gig, and prior to her five-year musical tour, the kindly chef made her take training – although despite her claim, she apparently had her eye on becoming floor manager.

Within six months, everything went sour, and she fled to Europe for a short trip to recuperate, and apparently to escape the good chef’s stalking.

“Which leads me to my decision to quit my job,” she wrote “By a string of eternal punishments, I mean the sort you don’t bring on yourself. Life takes care of that for you, making the best of it consists of conscious choice to minimize the crap you rain down on yourself.”

Was it worth it for her to suck it up and live in what she called “a perpetual state of trauma?”

“like a hunt animal, where nothing you do right is recognized and everything you do wrong is thrown at you like a very long and sharp spear, for the sake of putting on an extra helping of sliders on a table in a restaurant that every day became more and more like a flaming sinking ship?” She wrote.

To this point, I had assumed the spoiled romance was the reason for her leaving, but this suggests the real reason was financial. She no longer had any use for him.

“Perhaps if the cheffy captain has his whole heart into it and therefore provided you with the original incentive to carry on, but he didn’t. He saw it and it was not good and as I stood there peering around me at the burning people and dwindling bar tips and the push for Caesar salad as a diner entre, and having no noble cause to stay other than to ‘ride it out’ until it smashed to bits on the ever present rock of failed ventures, I made the decision to bail. It broke my heart, but I did it.”

There was no point in trickling up on a sinking ship.

It broke the chef’s heart, too, at which point he went from her meal ticket to her stalker, as she moved on in search of some new career.

“Of course, for me, this type of move pours salt on my life-long wound of anxiety and my stubborn tendency to equate my self-worth with employment of any sort,” she wrote.

She moved on, took her trip to Europe, but her stalker was still waiting for her when she came back, still heart-broken, still making assumptions that he might win her back, though as she pointed out more than once, when she moves on, she never looks back.

 

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Monkey mind Sept. 22, 2012

   

“They call me a jack of all trades, usually use the word ‘lucky’ in the same sentence,” she wrote in an essay back in mid-2011. “I beg to differ.”

This came during one of her in-between career times, during a trip to Europe.

“With some many interests and the propensity towards kicking ass out of sheer will power and the sort of quick burn out effort that would put an ant to shame, I find myself unable to focus. I’ve done the singer thing and found out how quickly what you love can turn to what you love to hate. I’ve done the teacher thing, the horse training thing (a new one to me since she never mentioned this during our early conversations), the visual art thing, the writing thing, the restaurant thing.”

When asked what she wanted by a customer one day, she said, “I want to be happy.”

But in quoting Camus, she let her paranoia show: “external circumstances will bring you down,” she wrote, and you can accept life “as a long string of eternal punishment or you can accept it as inevitable and make the best of it.”

She ignores the fact that throughout her life, she seems to have manufactured those external conditions that ultimately bring her down, and neglects to point out that these come often as the result of romantic entanglements, and the “lucky” she referred to appears to be about her “trickling up” the corporate ladder – generally leading to someone eventually stalking her.

She talked about her previous boss and current stalker.

“We had a good time,” she said, “until he made it turn bad,” a statement she made to me back when I asked about it in April. How he made it bad was by falling in love with her.

“We were just having fun,” she said, neglecting to say in her written account how he turned into a stalker.

She also neglected to point out in her written account that he was so distraught, he closed the restaurant (which at this writing appears to have reopened).

In explaining why she needed to go off to Europe at that point, she wrote: “At the very moment I think I’m stuck again, frittering every possible bit of energy away into ever random tasks/job/relationship (keyword here) I’ve decided to co-dependently sacrifice myself to, wondering if there is any hope for me at all or whether I’m going to spend the rest of my life only half committed to the grand notion of carpe diem.”

At which point, she books a trip to Europe.

All of this is relevant today because she seems to have come to that point in her life again, “burn out” as her most recent poem indicated and fewer and less quality stories she’s been producing, not to mention the low salary she is working her ass off to earn.

The question of whether she actually got the raise or not still remains unanswered, and if so, has her work load been reduced by the owner so that as she can pursue those things that sooth the soul as she wrote, “Dancing, singing, traveling or more frankly, trying to figure out what the hell it was that was going to south my soul.”

It is hard to tell with the owner these days since he’s floating in a limbo all his own, absent from staff meeting and planning his own trip to Europe. He may have retreated into a mentally safe place of his own, leaving her to do whatever the hell she wants.

The trouble is when she gets into this state, she always looks for someone to blame, and gauging from her most recent poems, that person is likely me.

Over the course of the month of August, I thought thing had calmed down, a space of non-interaction that would allow us to reboot and get back to a non-hostile environment.

But that’s not her.

“I have a rather annoying tendency to attack the semi-tended sol around me with the crazy spade once things appear to be quite and seemingly well-tended,” she wrote about her job in the New York City restaurant and places prior to that.

Calmness is an illusion

“That’s how it might appear on the outside, but I may assure you, there have been – during my 31 years of my life – perhaps a total of five minutes during which I have actually been calm.”

She calls it having “a monkey mind.”

Somethings never change, and you have to wonder how soon she will depart of office, repeating a pattern of behavior she apparently has engaged in all of her life.

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