I still haven’t gotten a straight answer as to whether our poet got fired or quit.
Looking back at the poetry she posted over the last couple
of months, it is clear she has been in the midst of a mounting crisis, within
her and possibly in the world around her as well.
And even as I write this, I get calls from insiders who tell
me she’s no longer part of the team, although they are very short on details.
But despite the buildup over the last few months, whatever
happened, occurred all at once.
In the aftermath, some details about her relationship to “the
team” have come to light.
Sal Vega, the mayor before the current one, claims Joe
Garcia hired her last year in order to keep her out of their opponent’s camp.
This dispels the notion to some degree that she had acted as
a spy for the virgin mayor when she offered her services to his political enemy.
Vega said she had floated from place to place (after her
resignation from our office) looking for a camp to land in, perhaps even still
hoping to broker her contacts in our office as a way into one political camp or
another. Her approaching the mayor’s rival made the virgin mayor nervous
(according to Vega), and they (the mayor and his henchmen) decided to buy her
loyalty with a job.
Garcia and others apparently believed she had more influence
than she actually had.
Vega claims she tends to boast about what she can do, a
really good sales pitch, only after she got hired, she needed to prove it.
Vega believes she began to trickle up in the Virgin Mayor’s
organization once she got her position in it.
At one point, her handlers apparently asked her to put
together a coalition of opponents of the Freeholder and The Small Man, but
nothing seemed to come of it.
While Garcia, according to Vega, was the one who hired her,
the virgin mayor and RR, became her protection. She worked under the PR man,
with whom some claim she got involved (There’s no evidence to suggest this).
Vega claims her undoing came one day when she opened the
mayor’s mail and discovered that Sylvio, the mayor’s chief of staff had just
received a $20,000 a yea raise.
According to the freeholder, she stormed into the Virgin
Mayor’s office and demanded a raise as well (even though she received a $20,000
annual increase the previous May).
The freeholder claims the Virgin Mayor got angry and fired
her for opening his mail. Vega on the other hand claims they got rid of her to
make room for Paul, the PR guy from the state Senator’s office.
If she got fired, I suspect it was something other than
either of these claims, perhaps something personal between her and the virgin
mayor. Perhaps the Small Man, who forced her to resign from our office, pressured
the virgin mayor to get rid of her – the small man still angry over her work
with RR to undo the congressman and her attempts to go after some of the small
man’s staff (through the son of the small man’s closest political ally.)
How much of any of this is true, I can’t say. There is even
a rumor that she’s been driving a new car (she gave up her old car sometime
ago).
At the end of the day, nobody knows anything about the
situation only that she’s no longer working for city hall.
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