MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
| MY GLASS HOUSE | THE PREVIOUS EVENT | THE NEXT EVENT | THE WRITERS/GUIDELINES | |
PEGGY RUNS THE SHOW - Wolf DeVoon, our Editor-in-Waiting, and I have had a running debate this week about why these personal reminiscences of mine have become so popular with our readers. I have argued that's its because most people like reading "the dirt," as Thomas Hart so humorously puts it. Wolf believes that it's because there's a universal theme about love and life running through them. He's more high-minded than I.
My first love, Lynda, broke a long silence to send me a series of e-mails about these chronicles of my love life. She said in one, "You must be lucky at cards." That's perfectly Lynda. She always had a dry wit.
My friend of nearly twenty years, Barbara, sent an e-mail of surprise about my piece on Becky Brand. She never knew that there was anything between Becky and I. That's how private I can be.
I'm trying to come to terms with this being my last writing. I told Yo, one of my confessors, the other night, that I'm trying to get it all out. This is the last chapter in the cathedral of words I've been building on the Web over all these years. So I mean to make sure everything is finally on the record.
One of Peggy's games was trying to keep me off balance by finding other women that I might be attracted to. She suspected Becky, but was more worried about a young woman I'd recruited away from the Bank of America. Meanwhile, I was having real problems with a client who was actively trying to recruit the young woman away from my company. I resented that a client of mine would do that and was in San Francisco confronting their Sales Manager about it when I got a call from Peggy.
She was interrupting the meeting to report to me about a call I had gotten from Charles Schwab's people who want to meet with me that afternoon. But she was also delighted to let me know that a new young woman had applied at my company that she knew "you're just gonnah love. She has great legs." Peggy knew I was a leg man *and* that the woman I was trying to hold onto in this meeting had fabulous gams.
It would not have surprised me at all to have learned that Peg had recruited Great Legs 2 to block any movement toward or special treatment she thought I would show for Great Legs 1. She was clever that way, Peggy was.
It was already well-known in my office, I learned when I interviewed Great Legs 2, that fortunes rose and fell on Peggy's favor. One of my employees had told her that "If Peggy likes you, you have it made. But if she doesn't ..." The woman ran a finger across her throat. This was news to me. And the first of many eye-openers. I had thought that people just naturally liked Peg because she was attractive and funny, not that they catered to her because she was seen as the ruthless power behind the throne.
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Part of the reason I was so clueless is because I was on the road a lot. Most of the firms that would use a company like ours were based in San Francisco or the Silicon Valley. The closest big account we had, WestAmerica Bancorp, was in Petaluma. I even had to make a trip to New York to negotiate with one client. We did a lot of business with financial services institutions, so being located in Rohnert Park meant lots of travel for the boss.
Apparently it was during this time of dealing with either clients or investors that Peggy had established her hegemony. The Fool in Love never noticed that Peggy had started to pick most of the people who even made it into his office for an interview. He certainly didn't notice that most of the women who worked for him, and most of my employees were women, regularly took Peggy to lunch to curry her favor.
So, as in most businesses, the boss's secretary was really in charge. And everybody knew it accept me, the boss.
I guess it was natural that things should evolve that way. The first person in my office, on the first day it opened, was Peggy. I remember driving up through the northern California fog to the little complex where our glass-walled office was located. Suddenly, through the fog, there emerged this tall, slender but buxom apparition in a crimson dress and trench coat. She was a sculptured beauty. Aphrodite in Fog.
As I got out of the car, she approached me. "Mr. Amis?"
"Yes?"
"I'm the girl Ms. Brand had come from the agency to be your receptionist."
"Oh! Oh... Hi, you're early."
I had no idea that morning that this was the woman who would take control of my life. Every aspect of it, separate me from my friends, make my employees cower in fear, provoke lust in my clients, consume and destroy my seed, leave me an emotionally damaged member of the walking wounded...
Before working for my company, Millennium (ironic, right?) Peggy had worked for corporate raider T. Boone Pickens' outfit down in Oklahoma. That was where she had met Pam, the lover who preceded and superseded me.
To her credit, I must admit that Peggy did tell me all about Pam while I was pursuing her. What she didn't tell me was that it was not really over.
Of course, when I first met Deb, my ex, she responded to the question I always asked "Are you involved with anyone now?" in the negative.
Then, two months later, after we were already involved, she left me because she hadn't really resolved the relationship she was in when she met me. I was stunned and heart-broken then, too.
Like I say, I've been ambushed a lot.
I don't blame some of the women. I've always come forward ripping open my shirt, baring my chest, and then putting the knife in their hands... Because I'm so untrusting, so closed, I intentionally let those few I'll let in see how vulnerable I am. I keep hoping they'll prove me wrong, drop the knife to the floor and just take my heart rather than cut it out.
Back to cases: So I hired Great Legs 2. Peggy was right, she was exactly the type of woman who'd make my company look "cutting-edge" and who I would secretly (I believed) lust after. I did make time to make a play for her, discreetly, and backed off when I found out about her two kids.
I had just moved out of my friends George and Sharon's. I had met them at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Because Sharon couldn't abide Peggy and I was totally in her thrall, I had no choice but to move.
Peggy installed me in the house next door to her own, owned by the same landlord. We couldn't live together because she was a member of the Church of the Nazarene and it would have been "living in sin." I was still separated, not yet legally divorced. (Yes, I was aware of the contradictions in this woman's philosophy.)
By this time, George worked for my company. He was supposed to be my "eyes and ears" now that I was becoming aware of how much control Peggy had gained over the terrain. At the same time, of course, she had managed to charm him, too, despite his own fiance's dislike for her. He often encouraged my following her recommendations.
"She really does have a good sense of what's going on here in the office, Rod," George would tell me. "You're out in the field a lot. You're our best salesman. But Peggy is the one that makes sure things are copasectik when you bring the clients back here for the Dog-and-Pony."
I started getting the impression that I had better spend more time back at my own company and less time talking to investors, clients, and prospects. Everything looked like my vision when I walked through the door, but I was starting to get the feeling that all these people looked so happy and prosperous because I was working for them.... and they were working for my girlfriend.
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