Wild Violet online literary magazine » Dean Borok

My Calderon Years, Part 2

Dean Borok — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:19:42 +0000

[In part one, Dean Borok found employment at Calderon Bags and Belts as an assistant designer, over the heated objections of the company sales manager. In this installment, he retells his experience putting together an unusual fashion show. This installment previously appeared on Hackwriters.com.]

I became an expert leather cutter, which is a very desirable thing to know. I developed into as good a cutter as the workers who had been working for the company for 20 years. I learned to operate the splitter, which reduces the thickness of the leather, and the paring machine for thinning the edges for turning. Between Louie and Morris, I was becoming a one-man show, and once I had that, there would be no stopping me.

I was not a particularly sympathetic child. I never paid any attention to the authority of adults, who gave every indication of being imbecilic and slow-witted (oh, how right I was!). In their turn, adults loathed me for discounting their authority. What’s the point of being a responsible representative of authority and a pillar of the community if you are being mocked, ridiculed and ignored by children?

I got beat up a lot, not by other kids but by adults — teachers, camp counselors, boarding school deans and family relations — because I had so much fun jerking them around. How could it be otherwise? They were paper tigers, and I had a visceral repugnance to the hypocrisy that was the glue that cemented the social order. The dysfunction eventually led to a total breakdown in relations between myself and authority, myself and society. I went my own separate way. Catch me if you can!

On the way out the door, I received one last verbal kick in the ass, a malediction that was absolutely society’s word of judgment to me regarding its complete and unanimous verdict of condemnation of me, consigning me to the lumpenproletariat underclass of untouchable trailer trash. This lady told me, with implacable and unyielding certitude, “You will end up working with your hands.”

That woman was right about my hands, but she would have been dismayed to see how far they took me, to places she could never even imagine. Trained hands are what built our material world. It’s all very well to have an agile and analytical mind, but if you can’t construct an edifice or manufacture a product, what are you? A tank of hot gas, polluting the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. Sorry, but that’s my opinion. My hands got me far in life, and they would have gotten me even farther if globalization had not destroyed American manufacturing.

I believe that manual dexterity and the use of tools is what got us out of the trees, as well as actuating the part of the brain that stimulates language comprehension. That is why human evolution is moving forward with the astonishing velocity of science fiction, practically on a daily basis, instead of remaining static for hundreds of millions of years like ants or crocodiles.

I believe that my styling talent and mechanical aptitudes make me far superior to most New York writers, who are useless parasites, only good for wasting your time. And the fact that I am Saul Bellow’s nephew and portrayed in his most celebrated novel, The Adventures of Augie March, propels me so far into the stratosphere of world literature that the other writers of New York are as apes in the trees by comparison.

This year, Viking Press is publishing a collection of Saul Bellow’s correspondence, including correspondence to me of a very intimate nature. At the same time, a British professor is publishing a biography of Bellow commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation, including his relation to me. These references to me will be enough to stimulate an interest in me by future generations, and that is the reason I have begun to create my memoirs, to leave my footprint on human civilization for future generations.

Needless to say, I consider it to be my prerogative as an artist to use my pen as a weapon of attack or ridicule, to settle old scores against persons or parties whom I feel have wronged me or unnecessarily stood in my way for no other reasons than self interest or envy. Bellow himself, who wrote in a letter to me, urging me to “forgive all those who have sinned against” me, would probably liked to have been forgiven as well but, alas, that is not in my nature. I feel that my only obligation as a writer is to be entertaining. I don’t have to be accurate or truthful (although I can document everything in this memoir). Whatever works! If Oprah decides to invite me on her show to scream at me, I will just bray at her like a jackass. [Editor’s note: This piece was accepted for publication while Oprah’s show was still on the air.]

My Calderon Years

Dean Borok — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:12:31 +0000

(Part one of a series)

[Synopsis: After several months of scrambling around the New York fashion market in search of an opportunity, as recounted in his previous story “How I Broke Into New York Fashion,” Dean Borok finds employment at Calderon Bags and Belts as an assistant designer, over the heated objections of the company sales manager, Ernie Dornbusch.]

It’s impossible to determine what music soothes the savage beast that resides in the heart of New York City, but in 1982 Madonna was perfecting her formula, singing for dollars at the Danceteria Club on West 21^st Street. Michael Bloomberg was taking his lunch at McDonald’s, Bernard Madoff was watching Mr. Rogers and learning to spell P-O-N-Z-I, and young Rudolph Giuliani was having autoerotic fantasies imagining his first party dress.

The green shoots of what would eventually become 21^st century New York were springing from the manure pile that was 1980’s New York like the rose that grew out of the sidewalk crack in the old song “Spanish Harlem.”

Then, as now, the economy was like a Toyota that had run out of gas but was still cruising downhill on empty as Ronald Reagan crooned over the radio, like the Britney Spears of his day, singing the refrain from “Morning In America.”

Gangs of overfed rats overran the distressed terrain of the city parks like vast herds of wildebeest traversing the African veldt and luxuriated in filthy ponds of accumulated waste water that collected under the trash-strewn subway tracks, the tiles lining the subway walls yellow and brown from 80 years’ use as an open-air latrine.

The streets were full of crackheads and crazy people who had been turned out of mental hospitals because of budget cuts, and at night even the best neighborhoods went into lock-down mode, but there were plenty of places you dared not go even in broad daylight.

Back in those days a fashion career was a surer route to making a living than being a musician and less stultifying than working in finance or legal services. I once picked up the guitar and learned a few chords, even going so far as learning “The House of the Rising Sun,” but then stopped because I knew that it would distract me from mastering my trade as a designer. I was right, but I was wrong, too, because I have always been sure that I would have had a great band. I was right, because during those years employment was always guaranteed for skilled hands and an agile mind, which explained how I was able to keep finding job after job, despite landing in New York in the midst of a full-blown depression.

To my way of thinking, where did it say a man had to be gay or metrosexual to succeed in fashion, as the stereotype would have it? The way I saw it, a straight guy with an artistic sensibility, who admired women — adored them — might be preferable to an androgynous drip who wanted to emulate them. That concept always drove my motivation. I took my cue from my friend Guy Décarie, a French guy who was an ace with a sewing machine and always accompanied stunning, beautiful girls. My original motivation for starting out in fashion in the first place was to get a lot of women and make some money. I reasoned that the fastest way to get a woman to disrobe was to propose her something even nicer to put on. But being straight in the fashion business worked against me to some extent, and my problem with fashion is the same as that which I hold against society at large, in that the whole thing is run by a soft, white underbelly of metrosexual males.

How I Broke Into New York Fashion

Dean Borok — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:35:44 +0000

There was no point to sticking around Montreal any longer. It was 1982 and the economy was in the tank. I put all my things in storage, packed up my best clothes and my design portfolio, and caught the Montrealer express train to New York. I remember gazing wistfully over the hardscrabble Pointe St. Charles neighborhood as the train roared south.

When we arrived at the U.S. border, I had to show Canadian identification to the U.S. immigration and convince them that I was a U.S. citizen. They held up the train for a long time, deciding what to do about me. Finally, they let me through.

Arriving in New York, I checked into the Pickwick Arms Hotel on E. 51st Street. At that time it doubled as a low-cost tourist hotel and an SRO. I convinced the manager to give me the SRO rate for a room facing the synagogue and garden across the street. Very charming and, unbelievably, only $160 per week.

Back in those days the fashion jobs were advertised in the classified ads in the back of Women’s Wear Daily. I wasn’t trying for a designer job. I was looking for something in production, because the prospects were more immediate. I had no references and no resumé. All I had was my design portfolio of styles that I had designed and executed in my boutique in Montreal, along with a fast line of talk.

At the time there was a lot of manufacturing going on in New York, with a constant demand for skilled help. My pitch was that, even though I had no industrial experience, I had talent in the design and construction of leather garments and accessories. That at least got my foot in the door. A guy named Lou Smoltz took a chance on me. He owned a handbag factory that he called “New York Reptile,” and he did contracting for the Etienne Aigner (which he pronounced egg-ner) handbag line. He was short and bald and not very charming. In fact, he was a total nut job, but he was a real handbag pro. He could fix every machine in the place himself. He stayed on top of his own production, and he produced a beautiful product.

Lou Smoltz did not like me at all, but he wasn’t making as much money as he could have, because he didn’t have an effective foreman to push the work forward. My job was to receive the cut pieces that came from the Aigner cutting facility and put them through Smoltz’s factory, so that they emerged as finished handbags. This is a very useful skill to have, so I let him train me a little bit and then pitched right in. The guy immediately improved his daily production by 50%, strictly by virtue of me pushing the work forward. That is the value of employing a good industrial foreman. “You have good hands,” he said, “and you work hard on a steady basis.” Those were the highest compliments he was capable of giving in that business. Nevertheless, he fired me. “We have a personality conflict,” he told me.

“I don’t have any conflict,” I answered.

“But I do,” he said.

Nevertheless, he knew I would be useful to somebody, so he referred me to this other turkey, Ed Stein, who had an office in the Empire State Building. Stein ran something called the National Handbag Council, which was a sort of industry association, I suppose.

Stein was a degenerate. “Oh, nice jeans you’re wearing,” he exclaimed as he grabbed my crotch. Gay guys have always liked me a lot. Too bad I can’t elicit the same reaction from women! I put up with this jerk grabbing my balls because I needed a job, and fast. Ed Stein sent me over to see Pearl at Accessories by Pearl, a ladies’ belt company located in the 330 Fifth Avenue fashion market. She interviewed me with her husband sitting in the office. I showed them my portfolio and gave them my pitch. Only now I had Ed Stein and Lou Smoltz as references, just as though I had been working in New York for years. The only problem was, I didn’t know anything. Unbelievably, Pearl gave me a job running her cutting department, which was a big department of about 30 cutters. I spent the first couple of days making them clean up the impossible mess in that department, but after that I was clueless. I just gave out cutting tickets and hoped for the best.