Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  If you think I’m “out to lunch” or not acting in your best interest, confront me. If I don’t respect you or am

  insensitive demand these things.

  I demand them of you.

  Please understand that clarity is threatening to damaged people. They are afraid that they will be seen to be as ugly by others as they see themselves. They will try to create turmoil.

  Don’t miss understand my evaluation of other students, teachers and administrators. Many of them help as much as they are able. Many of them have good intentions.

  This musing about being “not fully baked yet” led a few of us, myself included, to wonder if our science teacher had been baked too long, if his mind had been opened too wide. Prior to Memogate, he simply spent the class time rambling about life according to gestalt and how he’d spent the weekend stacking beer cans. I was pretty sure he was sanity challenged. On the other hand, I assumed the school would have twigged on by now and removed him from the classroom, at the very least. But who was I to be evaluating crazy people when my parents were both crazy and a court had recently declared me legally crazy?

  The Manifesto arrived during the fifth week of senior year and ultimately answered the question of whether to drop his class for reasons of insanity. However, when I went down to the guidance office they wouldn’t let me escape without issuing a permanent grade of F, because it was slightly past the deadline for dropping without penalty. This would mean good-bye scholarships, grade point average, class standing, and the chance of being accepted at a good college.

  I argued that it took me six weeks to figure out that he was nuts. We were supposed to be studying physics, not psychosis. They suggested changing to the other physics teacher, but he was also well known for being nuttier than a squirrel’s dowry.

  The situation was a drag, particularly because it was the first time I had to bring my mother in to fight a battle for me. And it annoyed my mom that she had to waste time on such nonsense. She had to deal with enough crazies at work. Mom informed the principal that: (1) She was a psychiatric nurse; (2) The physics teacher was certifiable and shouldn’t be near children; (3) She’d be happy to turn the Manifesto over to the editor of the local newspaper and see what he thought of it; and (4) How dare they waste her time with such nonsense?

  The principal surely realized that if he wanted to take on this fight it would be necessary to do a lot more than just tighten his helmet and adjust his cup. Suddenly I was out. No penalty.

  I left the class, but my teacher remained. He’d eventually be demoted to hall monitor before the mother ship finally came back for him and he was able to resume using his real name, Gordzikon 16. It was just about impossible to get rid of a public-school teacher in those days. The principal my mother reeducated would come out of the closet as a gay man on Rochester radio a few years later. How much of a surprise this was to his wife and kids, who lived in the district, I don’t know. The other physics teacher, whose class I didn’t switch to, was later dismissed and convicted of sexually harassing several of his students. Those were the days.

  ***

  After dropping Latin and physics, I no longer had enough classes to qualify as a student. However, by assisting the blind Spanish teacher, I was able to pick up the necessary credits. That was actually fun because she was chairperson of the Language Department, therefore I was able to see all faculty correspondence and even write evaluations of the teachers. Even better, she and her husband had two children with upcoming birthday parties and they needed a magician.

  However, I never squealed on Mr. DePass for his party planning and being a full-service exam proctor. Sure, he should have been teaching us some French all those years. But we had fun and he was kind, told us about his personal life, treated us like adults, and took us on trips. Can anyone say café klatch? I had only one small problem with Mr. DePass over four years, and I handled that privately. Mr. DePass had a swimming pool that he was obsessed with and always talked about, even telling us the name of the company that had installed it. One day he was extremely grumpy and passed a misogynistic remark that I didn’t care for, and so that weekend I called his home pretending to be from the Beauty Pools Company, said there was a recall of his model under way, and asked what would be a good day for us to come with the backhoe and dig it out.

  My senior year of high school was a grim time in my hometown. On September 19, 1982, the newspaper where my uncle Jim had worked his entire career printed the last issue. With the Buffalo Courier-Express out of business, a city that had once sold more than six daily newspapers was down to one.

  Right before Christmas, Bethlehem Steel, up until then the largest manufacturer in Buffalo, announced that it would permanently shut down almost all steelmaking over the next six months. Not only was this bad news for steelworkers, but also for the local lawyers and merchants who counted on the steel operations for their businesses as well. More department stores closed. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy were the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Buffalo Museum of Science, and the Buffalo Historical Society. When the American Brass Company announced that it was hiring forty people, ten thousand hopefuls showed up.

  The only bright spot was the release of the movie Flashdance, giving us all “the feeling” that we could somehow overcome the despair of an industrial town in decline. And of course we could, it was now made clear, by donning leg warmers and a sweatshirt with the neck and bottom cut off.

  By the time spring arrived, I was restless and uninterested in academics. I was bored with myself. I’d planted marijuana seeds in the window boxes of the high school office as a small distraction. I had no intention of ever harvesting or smoking it, but simply enjoyed going to sleep at night knowing the school district was watering and caring for this contraband.

  Otherwise, I was ditching school and riding my bike to the racetrack most days there wasn’t a test, straining every muscle toward the future, just like the horses locked inside the starting gates. Since junior high school I’d always forged my own excuses for the attendance czars. It was just easier. When Dad lived at home, he left early in the morning and Mom slept late, especially if she’d worked all night. Only now I began to get creative: “Laura’s ponytail got caught in the toaster,” “The moral majority tried to burn down our home last night,” “Laura was bitten by a tsetse fly.” Sometimes I’d dash off a bad sonnet as an excuse.

  While I was at it, I composed a poem for the school anthology that contained a hidden message. My parents weren’t aware of my subversive activities, since referrals and notices about parent-teacher conferences still went directly from Dad’s mailbox into my wastebasket.

  This time the principal called my mother. He said he hoped that in the future I’d use my creativity in a more positive direction (perhaps the way he was planning to retire—by hooking up with a guy and opening a B&B in Vermont). The subtext was that he expected my parents to take his side and punish me.

  I showed her the poem from the school anthology.

  Impressions

  Finally we understand the

  Caring and kindness which

  You generously offered to

  Us.

  And so now we appreciate

  Each and every special

  Teacher who helped cultivate

  Our integrity, maturity, and

  Excellence.

  True, but the ultimate and

  Real test now begins

  Impressions of nostalgia shouldn’t

  Hinder our every move.

  Lovely memories last forever.

  Take the first letter of every other word and it reads, “Fuck you, Sweet Home, burn in hell.” The irony was that the secret message wouldn’t have been discovered had the superintendent not decided to read the stupid thing at our commencement ceremony. Word got out. I was turned in.

  My mother said, “I don’t know what he thinks I’m supposed to do. You’re just one of those kids who will either make a living or wind
up in jail.”

  The principal charged me restitution for the cost of having the page cut out of the book, barred me from receiving a diploma at graduation (it arrived in the mail), and attempted to revoke one of my scholarships. He outlined this in a letter to my parents, but I, of course, intercepted it.

  The year wound down and my boyfriend, Rick, took me to the senior prom. However, after going to school with the same crew for most of our lives, we all went together and hung out as a mob.

  The most amazing thing about the senior prom was not anything that happened there or afterward, but beforehand. When I put on the dress (mail-ordered from the J. C. Penney catalog) my mother said, “Hell’s bells! Aren’t you even going to iron it?”

  “I just spent an hour and a half at the ironing board,” I moaned. I’d fought to the death down there with that miserable old steam iron, the cord eventually wound around my neck and all my fingers scorched.

  “You put more wrinkles in than you took out!” declared Mom.

  I checked the mirror. Indeed, I looked like a trampled drapery.

  “Give it to me!” she barked.

  I couldn’t believe it. No one had ever seen Mom iron. There were rumors that she’d pressed dresses with accordion pleats back in the sixties, but at some point her motto had become, “If you can’t dry it then don’t buy it!”

  In fifteen minutes the dress was prom-picture perfect. My T-shirt tan line and farmer shoulders lent the outfit a certain je joue au football.

  I walked the stage at high school graduation in June 1983, on the same day that 3,900 employees were let go from Bethlehem Steel. Of those, 3,400 wouldn’t be recalled.

  For graduation, Mom gave me a photo album and a raincoat. The gifts suggested that I was embarking upon a life worthy of pictorial documentation if I didn’t first die of pneumonia.

  It was my dream to attend and study entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, it was not theirs. I received the thin envelope in the mail, not the fat one containing a catalog of classes and dorm assignment.

  My good friend Debbie was heading to the University of Michigan. The application required a one-paragraph essay, as opposed to those of most Ivy League colleges, which demanded two or three full-page essays. So I’d filled it out as my backup. I was accepted, and her parents offered me a ride to Ann Arbor.

  As we pulled out of the driveway, my mother warned us to watch out for rabid squirrels. The University of Michigan was well known for many things, but this one I hadn’t heard about.

  Thirty-Four

  When the Chips Are Down, the Buffalo’s Empty

  In 1983, the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated following a ten-year struggle for ratification. After this Herculean effort failed, the Unitarians were left with thousands of clipboards that they’d find creative ways to recycle.

  But there was a bright spot on the horizon. On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to travel in space. Maybe women could succeed without an amendment, one at a time.

  That August, a week before I left my hometown, a group of workers at Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna plant raised an American flag upside-down—the international distress signal. Buffalo had finally hit rock

  bottom and would continue to rest there for some time. The city no longer brought to mind great industry or magnificent architecture. It was now a place regularly asking to be declared a federal disaster area in order to buy road salt. The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, would advertise for another city to adopt it.

  After arriving in Ann Arbor, it took me three full days to realize that college wasn’t going to work out. It had nothing to do with the University of Michigan. Or the numerous squirrels, none of which appeared to be rabid so far. I wouldn’t have been happy at any college. It seemed as if there were thousands of students just like me, many a lot smarter, all studying the same boring stuff and listening to the same lectures. It was pretty obvious that success didn’t know where I lived and that I’d have to go out and find it.

  Compounding the feelings of doubt were concerns about money. Dad was willing to spiral further into debt for me to attend college. However, I knew that he was paying alimony and engaged to be married. Meantime, my mother was finishing her master’s degree and still in possession of some hefty unpaid legal bills.

  I called around to brokerage firms in Ann Arbor to see about finding a job trading stocks. They all said the same thing: a person has to be twenty-one years old to work buying and selling securities. Recalling my first visit to the floor of the American Stock Exchange three years earlier, I phoned their personnel office from my dorm room. To get an entry-level gig there, all one needed was a high school diploma. And it just so happened that they were hiring!

  I went to the guidance office at the University of Michigan and asked about taking a semester off to work on the floor of the stock exchange. They said no. I flew to Manhattan the following week and interviewed for a position on the trading floor. A few weeks later, the stock exchange phoned and offered me a job as a data clerk for $375 per week, which would put me near the poverty line at the time. But it didn’t involve shoveling snow.

  I rented a car for seventy-five dollars and posted a notice on the ride board to see if anyone needed to go from Ann Arbor to New York. Four people signed up and paid twenty-five dollars each, which left just enough for gas and tolls. Having been raised in a place with a high suicide rate, I eagerly headed for one with a high homicide rate.

  When I started working on the trading floor, I had no way of knowing that it was the beginning of the biggest bull market in history, one that would see the Dow Jones rise more than tenfold. I also had no idea how to get to my new job. The third day it rained and I lost my way because the flag wasn’t flying out front. After explaining my reason for being late to a supervisor, he said he’d never before heard anyone use the excuse of getting lost, and after being at the exchange for thirty years, he thought he’d heard everything. At the end of each workday, I’d scurry off to nearby New York University to earn my finance degree by taking night classes.

  It transpired that my years of independent living, stock trading, and gambling had indeed been the perfect jumble to prepare me for life in the big city and success on the trading floor. The best traders were not Harvard MBAs, but championship bridge, backgammon, chess, and poker players. There were also a considerable number of track junkies and several racehorse owners. Not only that, but a handful of traders had actually been thrown out of casinos all over the world for counting cards in games of blackjack and winning big money off the house.

  After working my way up from clerk to trader, combined with the advent of financial instruments known as index options, by age twenty-one, I was a millionaire—most of it made before I was legally old enough to buy, sell, or own a single share of stock. Or have a drink, for that matter. I was also ready for semiretirement, having lost a good chunk of my hearing and seared my throat and vocal cords by becoming one of those screaming lunatics I’d observed with such fascination during my first trip to the floor as a teenager.

  Eventually, I had my medical moment in a crowded Manhattan movie theater when an older woman fainted. It was as if Nurse Ellen momentarily possessed my body. Without thinking, I ran over to see if the woman had any medical-alert bracelets or pill bottles, ordered the youthful and bewildered manager to call 9-1-1, and then checked to see if the woman was breathing. She was. By the time I began searching her bag for identification a large crowd had gathered around us. Contrary to popular belief, New Yorkers are not coldhearted pedestrians who casually step over dying moviegoers. All the people in that theater dug into their pockets and purses and helpfully offered all the prescription medications they had with them, which came to about two hundred bottles of beta-blockers, amyl nitrites, antidepressants, eyedrops, and asthma inhalers.

  The manager returned and said that an ambulance was on the way. It
was a large movie theater, and the rubberneckers were pressing in. The manager suddenly awoke from his trance and asked me if I was a medical professional. “No,” I replied. And then I don’t know what was going through my mind because I added, “My mother’s a nurse.”

  The manager began pushing the crowd back and officiously shouting, “Stand back everyone! Her mother’s a nurse!”

  Epilogue

  The People’s Republic of Buffalo

  The Republic Steel plant shut down for good five months after I left Buffalo. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the local population continued to decline, with the city sinking from eighth largest in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century to fifty-ninth at its close. From 1991 to 1994, the Buffalo Bills lost four straight Super Bowls. In June 2003, a control board was imposed by the governor and state legislature to investigate and reorganize the city’s finances after an audit revealed a $24 million budget deficit, which ballooned to $100 million by 2005, and an advisory board was added.

  In the last two decades, however, Buffalo’s economy has been lifted from despair by an influx of high-tech companies and white-

  collar industries, such as healthcare and financial services. Perhaps as a result of decades of economic distress, the locals have become proficient at debt collection, with over one hundred such agencies now operating in the area. And what was just a small, local airport when I left in the early eighties is now the Buffalo International Airport, either as a result of offering regular flights to nearby Toronto, or because flocks of Canada geese fly overhead twice a year.

  The city itself remains an ethnically rich community, with accompanying street festivals every weekend in the warm weather. It continues to be a melting pot of Irish, Italian, British, German, Greek, Slavic, Jewish, Native American, Polish, and dozens of other cultures. In fact, nearby Lackawanna was discovered to have its very own Yemeni American