There Was This One Time:
When I Had a Mentor Whose Husband Cooked the Books for the Mob
Memories are messy.
They show up like broken-down circus performers trying their hand at magnet fishing, pulling up a scent, an image, a song, wrapped in a story you almost forgot. There’re the kind of stories that start with, “There was this one time…”
They rise up whether you want them to or not. So, I say—let's own them. Unapologetically!
Here’s one of mine. Might not be so different from yours.
I met Rita in the early ’70s, when I was working for an employment agency in the brand-new Shaklee Terraces building—a gleaming skyscraper at 444 Market Street in San Francisco. They later changed the address to One Front Street, since the number four is considered unlucky in many Asian cultures.
The 38-floor Class A high-rise smelled like a new car and gleamed with polish. It was nothing like the Phelan Building up the street, which still clutched the history of the 1906 earthquake.
Rita was covering one of the temp desks because someone had quit. They were short-staffed when I walked in looking for work, and just like that—she offered me a full-time job. I started the very next day.
San Francisco was poppin’. People from all over the country were flooding in like it was another gold rush. Working at 444 Market made me feel like I was riding the tech wave. Sony had just dropped the Walkman. Apple Computers launched the first personal computer with color graphics. The U.S. Navy had debuted GPS after nearly a decade. And me? I bought a Casio calculator at Long’s Drug Store.
After the early ’70s slump began to wind down, the City was alive again. Our agency started buzzing with new arrivals. Folks were hungry for freedom—however it came. I must’ve interviewed a dozen military men fresh out of service. With the YMCA full, most landed in men-only squats in the Tenderloin, just to get an address and a phone number. One of them, Mickael Habicht, a Navy Yeoman, clocked in at 147 words per minute, zero mistakes...shaming my 68 words per minute.
While I was interviewing a woman named Janet, I noticed Rita thumbing through a file drawer behind me. She was clearly eavesdropping. I was certain a critique was coming. But the more I tried to close the interview, the more Janet leaned in, her bleached-over spry hair dangling over my ashtray, cigarette burning.
“It’s just $150 for the full three days,” explained the woman I was interviewing, equivalent to about $450 today. “It’s so powerful, it’ll change your life.”
I told her I’d think about it and brushed her off with a handful of time slips.
Rita didn’t miss a beat. She slid her chair closer and dropped her voice.
“That three-day retreat is Scientology,” she said. “You sit on a hard floor for hours. No food. No bathroom. If you have to go, you go in your underwear.”
I cringed.
“It’s to humiliate you.”
“Fat chance I’d get caught up in that. I couldn’t afford it even if it were $25.”
Then she pointed at my ashtray.
“That’s not a storage bin,” she said. “It’s for putting out the cigarette.”
Rita was our agency’s only outside salesperson—and she was crushing it. She had a touch of New York brash, but dressed straight out of Vogue. I. Magnin. Gump’s. Saks Fifth Avenue. Petite, dark-dyed French bob, smile like the building’s polished glass.
Once she decided I was trainable, she took me on sales calls. One day, we headed to lunch with a client at the Embarcadero. Rita wore an aquamarine power suit—sharp tailoring, padded shoulders, a three-inch black leather belt cinched her waist. I trailed beside her in a canary-yellow coat over a black sheath dress. All gifted by Rita. I was starting to feel like someone.
While Rita chatted with someone on the street, I pulled out a box of Nat Sherman multicolored cigarettes. I picked a yellow one with a gold tip to match my coat and lit it.
Rita turned, sharp as ever. “It’s not acceptable to smoke while walking down the street,” she said flatly.
I dropped the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of my olive Ferragamo Oxfords. Another hand-me-down from Rita.
We sat. Rita ordered martinis—my first. It tasted like cleaning fluid. Just as she finished hers, the maître d’ told us our guest, Mr. Thomas Cutright of Crocker National Bank, had called to cancel. He’d gotten tied up. Rita ordered another round.
By the time the Cobb salads arrived, she was deep into her story. Madison Avenue. Boutiques. Art galleries. Antique shops. I’d seen her house. The paintings, the soft leather on my feet—all checked out.
She and her husband always wanted a family. He was an accountant for a company with so many business interests in New York City, she lost track—garbage collection, labor unions, construction, retail on the waterfront, and garment districts.
Then something went sideways. She didn’t get into it. But it was bad. She was forced to testify against him. He went to prison somewhere in New York. She packed up her mother, salvaged what she could, and started over in Palo Alto with the emergency stash her husband had hidden away.
By this time, the restaurant had thinned out. Plates clattered in the kitchen. In the back, I could hear waitstaff griping about cheap tippers.
The waiter returned, collected our plates, and said, “I’ll leave the breadsticks, just in case,” while looking at me like I was a jellyfish about to slide off the chair.
Rita ordered another drink. Then smiled. “I think we’ll keep you at two for the time being.”
I pulled out a breadstick and cracked it between my teeth while Rita slipped back into memory.
On the way back, she made me promise to keep her story private.
About a month later, she invited me to dinner. After we ate, she handed me an unusual necklace. It was a long copper chain with four one-inch scrolled boxes that don’t open, and tiny silver scroll beads that flanked carved amber glass.
“It’s one of my favorite antique finds,” she said.
I’ve worn it off and on for fifty years. When people ask what’s inside, I say, “These are Pandora’s boxes. They hold special secrets and are never to be opened.”
EPILOGUE
Mentors don’t always arrive when you expect them, or in the form you imagine. They might be older or younger, polished or rough-edged. They might show up during a pivot point in your life, or simply hand you something, a lesson, a look, a necklace, something that you carry for decades.
Rita wasn’t just a mentor. She was a signal that I was worth investing in. She saw something in me before I saw it in myself.
If you stay open—quiet enough, aware enough—one will find their way to you. And when they do, listen. You may not realize it at the time, but that moment could shape the next version of who you’re becoming.
Did this story stir something in you—a memory, a scent, a sound, a story of your own?
I’d love to hear it. Drop me a line on Substack, and let’s breathe life into our stories together.
If you’re craving more grit and truth, check out The Boloney Trail Trilogy, available now wherever books are sold.
Thanks for sitting with me. And if it feels good, go ahead—like and share.