Queen of the Bondo

A few years ago I went through this vintage lingerie phase, probably because I was unemployed, sans car, and lived within walking distance of three stores that sold vintage lingerie. I was interested in old bras and slips as a sort of memento mori, the begetting part of whatever is begotten, born and dies. I’m an archivist, and I feel most at home among old things. Or at least things that remind me that I’m not the first or only person to ever go through the less pleasant tollbooths of life’s highway: I can see how the crush of history might make someone feel insignificant, but knowing that people felt heartbreak in Byzantium is an enormous relief to me.

Archival work, for those who are unfamiliar, involves sorting boxes of miscellaneous papers, photographs, and other unpublished material that may not have seen the light of day for decades or centuries, and even then may only have been seen by a handful of people. It’s like being privy to thousands of extremely boring secrets. And an occasional couple of really juicy ones that you get to stamp with a red stamp that says RESTRICTED.

When I worked at the Western Reserve Historical Society I processed the collection of a large, longstanding architectural firm. The collection was by no means a comprehensive corporate history, with the bulk of the collection dating between 1940 and 1975. During this period they mainly built warehouses, small factories, and office headquarters around the Midwest.  The collection, therefore, comprised approximately 200 unsorted boxes of memos and photographs of office interiors, warehouses and factories in various states of construction.

Though (if I’m not mistaken) this particular collection is closed to researchers, you can probably see pictures of these same warehouses and factories on the internet, taken in less prosperous times by bored kids with iPhone cameras. The office headquarters, some of them, the ones I’ve Google mapped, have been reused as social service agencies or old folks homes, usually for the indigent kind of old folks. They are in neighborhoods that “aren’t nice” anymore. The rows of identical desks equipped with identical ashtrays are long gone, as is the oak-paneled executive office. I have no idea what has become of his moose head or his liquor cabinet.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, sometimes I say that if I can find inspiration in 200 boxes of pictures of warehouses and office interiors, I can find inspiration anywhere. (I use this in job interviews too, to answer the question “Tell us about a time when you were assigned a particularly tedious project. How did you manage your time?”) I don’t think you can look at pictures of manmade environments and not imagine the people in them or wonder where they went.

Everyone has been telling me for  years to watch Mad Men, but I haven’t, mostly because I still haven’t seen the last episode of The Sopranos. (I know everyone was pissed about the way it ended, though it can’t have been worse than the way Roseanne ended).  So anyway the thing that made me start watching Mad Men was that I am wrangling a novel manuscript right now, and I thought how better to study character development than to watch the first four or five episodes of hit TV dramas that everyone has seen but me.

Mad Men has been unsettling for me to watch because of how accurately I’d daydreamed the people into those photographs, to see Joan and Peggy made flesh instead of relegated to a “pjo” or a “jlh” after a “DD/” or an “RS/” at the end of a memo.  When I watch Mad Men I don’t just see Madison Avenue glamour, I see what will become of the trappings of Don Draper’s life: the crisp new memos when they are brittle, yellow and stained. The expensive new leather binder that you, fifty years later, have to isolate because of red rot. The stink of vinegar that pervades boxes of negatives. I see all those account executives as old men dying of emphysema and liver disease, and when I see Betty and Midge and Joan I can only smell that particular must that fifty-year-old acetate slips and nighties give off. All of the accessories of daily life, the things that will spend years in a box in a damp basement or a poorly-ventilated storage room after the company goes out of business.

It’s like watching ghosts, or watching your dreams come alive and act according to scripts provided by someone else.