The CETA SCAM
THREE (OR FOUR) PEOPLE DlE OF Gallery 1134
Two (or three) of the people dying because of Gallery 1134 were innocents; they were not even holographers; in fact the one in parentheses never even saw the place! But some unfortunate turn of events in their lives caused them to be thrown into the insanity of Loren and Bob and John Hoffmann and Al Ornelas. The latter was also a victim, as he pursued his own noble ideals but got caught in the fatal flaw of loving the unlovable.
lt was two of the CETA workers who bought the farm, courtesy of a third, whose deaths Loren could have prevented, if not for her own greed. It was all a part of their greedy CETA scam, and I feel remiss for not having come forward before with the news, although I myself would be implicated as having participated in this fraud, which was pretty much engineered by Bob.
Since Gallery 1134 was a "not‑for-profit" institution, they were eligible for the government dole. And one of the grants available for under‑employed but creative people was the CETA grant, the acronym being for Cooperative Education and Training Act, one of Jimmy Carter's pet projects. I guess the basic idea was to train people (mainly slanted to minorities) in new technical fields, jobs that they might not normally be hired for except if there was no risk to the business, in terms of expending a salary for them, and Uncle Sam chipped in not only for that but for managing the CETA trainees. Then maybe if they got good at it, then the company would hire them as a full-fledged employee.
That was where John and Victor's salaries came from in the early days, plus some ghost payrolling on Sheriff Elrod's office as a favor to Bob for politicking for him, I guess. The "City" CETA ran out for John and Victor. To qualify for "City CETA" meant that you lived in the city to work in the city. When that money ran out, they went on to "County CETA", which meant that the applicant must live in Cook County but not in the city proper to have the job. So John and Victor adopted new homes for this program.
And so did the Liebermen, Larry and Peggy. They were trying to get out of a bad business partnership but only ending up with a worse one. Came all the way from Columbus, Ohio to work at FARHC, lying to the CETA office about where they lived, what they did, and their marital status just to work there. And I myself have to confess to using my uncle's address and telling them that I was a free‑lance photographer instead of a salaried teacher. How the hell no one got caught in this scam, I don't know, as all the CETA guys had to do was look up income tax records and BAM! John Hoffmann was so bold once to borrow from his cousin who vaguely resembled him his picture lD driver's license and Social Security Card to go down to the CETA Office and sign up while his cuz was studying abroad in Jamaica for a year. I didn't let on when the CETA office called me as a reference, thinking that since I went John would follow soon enough.
But one guy did get caught doing this same scheme, but he was not a part of the scam. lt was none other than our pal, Larry Z., whose stained glass business was a little flat at the time, these being the Carter recession years. He had been steered to it by his ex‑wife, who was a social worker and knew of the program and told him that they were just giving these jobs away except for this one little catch. So he ended up there via the normal CETA intake, but he used the Oak Park address of his friend Bob Dotz, and when the CETA office called Larry at his "home" once Bob Dotz's dad didn't play along and so Larry got called down to the office to do some explaining. He got off the hook, I guess through some sort of intercession from Bob, but at his hearing he saw on his official forms all kinds of bogus classes which he had supposedly taken while there but didn't, but Gallery 1134 had undoubtedly profited from. He was one of the few who left the place with honors, since he was the best worker other than Victor they ever had there.
We "Plants" were just part of the CETA work force. When I started at Gallery 1134, there were three Black guys working there, the kind that the program was designed for. They were Ron Scott, an outgoing, likable black percussionist, whose natural curiosity got him killed working at this place. Damone Jackson, intelligent, hard-working black actor. And Collins Williams Daniels, or some permutation of those three names, as he had a Social Security card for each one. So while one of his aliases was working, the other two were collecting. He sang gospel after work and recorded, and even sent George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic fame to the museum.
These three were quite nice people. You could have fun with them, they were positive, etc. You could feel at ease with them. But then the second crop came in, and they were not very cool. For Loren to get extra money for managing the CETA program there was a minimum number of people that she had to retain, so the CETA offices kept sending them, and she kept taking them. There was good old lonesome Joe Porter, a white guy in his late forties, who would tell us what he was planning to watch on TV for the rest of the week. His greatest pleasure in life was a pitcher of beer with his lunch on Saturday. Burnt out from working on the ballistics of Atlas ICBM's in the days before pocket calculators, he was extremely withdrawn from the world. Women were anathema to him; he was complaining that all they wanted to do was take your money, which must have happened to him. All he wanted out of life was a nice steady job that he could retreat to, and holography was sort of up his alley because of his technological bent. He eventually got to be the person who did the explaining to the customers who paid that extra dollar on the weekends. But Gallery 1134 literally became hell for him thanks to the likes of Raphael Mallory.
He liked it to be pronounced Ray-fell instead of the Italianish Ra-fa‑el. His path and mine had actually crossed earlier in time, as his brother was a classmate of mine in high school. I think that Raphael was the recipient of my gym shirt. Some buddies of mine asked me if I had given my shirt to any pickaninnies, because they had seen Wesly, E. running around in the public junior high playground. I told them that it had been stolen. lt makes sense to me that Duane Mallory (he liked it to be pronounced Du‑wayne) got my shirt and gave it to his kid brother. This cat was the devil of death. In fact, he didn't even like Loren's black cats, Shadow and Midnight, he said that they were the only things sneakier than him.
His flunky was named Frankie Thigpen, definitely of room temperature lQ. They were high school buddies, having gone to good old Argo High like myself. But it shows what a difference 8 years could make in schooling. Sure the negroes were dumb back then, but not this incredibly stupid.
And they were joined by a big tall one called Goose, who was undergoing methadone treatment. He snowed Loren into letting him come in at ten o'clock everyday since he had to wait in long lines for his daily shot. When he came in to pick up his last paycheck he brought along his wife or girlfriend, a not bad looking white woman but who definitely needed to get her cunt cleaned out with the high pressure hose at a car wash. When they were there, Goose was singing his version of the line from the Doors' song L.A. Women, "Did a downer in a diner an hour ago", and took a long time in the bathroom, probably shooting up. A totally worthless bit of subhumanity.
There was some other black kid in this group, I forget his name but not his looks, as he was always dressed "clean", too clean to do any dirty work. I also remember his car had a loud burglar alarm with lots of flashing lights that went on when I bumped into it one day leaving a parking space. He stopped coming in after somebody got killed in the car, sitting right next to him, and he was afraid that the gangsters were after him for being a witness. So he quit, maybe left town. Or maybe he was just full of shit.
Another of the second bunch of the Afro-Americans was named Darryl, and he was OK, having been in the service. But he made a major mistake in stealing $500 from Loren's stash. She had a wad of bills in the filing cabinet behind her desk, probably didn't even know how much she had. So this guy took it all on a Friday afternoon. That was his first mistake, critiques Victor Morales, instead of leaving some to fool Loren. The CETA workers were still there when she figured it out, and called the cops. They came, and even strip searched him, and he came up clean. Evidently he had hidden the dough somewhere in the place before the cops came, and retrieved it before going home. But his biggest mistake was in confessing, because they pressed charges and he ended up doing a little bit of time.
But the white guys that came in were no shining examples either. Two guys from Cicero, that should put it all in a nutshell, alcoholics, vets, my age or a coupla years younger, Spitznagel, whose first name I forget, and his sidekick, Ray, whose last name I forget. I remember them eating some takeout food and drinking beer, sitting on a loading dock that had NO PAKlNG (sic) written on it. They were always trying to pawn things off on John, "Look, here's my shaver, give me $10 till Friday, and I'll give you the money back then. And you can keep the shaver." Anyhow, after they got fired or quit, they came back and burglarized the place. The tall skinny one snuck down the chimney and got all the filing cabinet money.
And there was Peter Demos, missing a front tooth and then some, definitely not all there. He tried making a hologram of a dollar bill by sandwiching it in with the film. lt actually worked but whether or not he tried to pass it I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past him. And then there was John Hooper, a balding guy who bicycled all the way in from Evanston because although he had a front yard full of old Porsches and what not; none were running because he was always working on them. He showed up at the big party at Victor Heredia's house with his head completely shaved, I would think in honor of him giving head, as in retrospect I can see him now as that type that was coming out in the late seventies.
And I had to teach this crew holography. Every Friday was their class day. Al Ornelas would teach them in his "Art and Holography" class in the morning, saying such blissfully ignorant things like "your assignment will be to make a holographic artwork using only three toothpicks," and he would then pass out the toothpicks, and I was expected to make sure the holograms would come out. Luckily they lost their toothpicks by the time they got back from lunch so no more was said about it. After a session like that, Ron Scott would tell Al, "You're a wonderful person, Al and I love ya, but you're a terrible teacher!" But he was being sincere about it. He was striving to achieve something for himself. He actually moved in with the mother of his child in order to make their lives better.
The first one to go was Ron Scott. Although he was trying to settle down, that didn't stop him form buying some powdered recreation for the weekend from Raphael. It was "Tick" or some such nonsense which was poorly disguised animal tranquilizers. Since the weekend began early, like Friday afternoon, he and a friend split the shit. Ron passed out, but his friend was still somewhat awake so he took the wheel but he was not awake enough to prevent an accident on the Eisenhower Expressway which threw Ron out the car window, and broke his neck, killing him instantly. Since he was sleeping he died never knowing what hit him.
Loren took us all to the wake. lt was held in a black funeral home just west of Gallery 1134 and we walked over. We were the only white people there amidst Ron's friends and family, including his mother. Since Ron's widow knew exactly what had transpired, the hate rays going from her eyes to Rayfell were clearly visible to all in the room. The fucking asshole had a look on his face like, "Hell, I sold him the shit, and I'm sorry, but I didn't tell him to take it and drive."
And I blame Loren, too, even more so, for Ron's demise. There were enough warning signs that Rayfell was a bad influence on the place, plus he was counterproductive. He would rather do nothing than anything. As soon as any authority figures were out of the room, he would put down whatever he was doing and start nigging. But since Loren had to keep her quota of CETA workers to continue receiving a manager's salary, she kept him anyway.
Even in spite of poor old Joe Porter's complaints. Because that scummy Rayfell delighted in needling him constantly, all day long, as often as he could, "You know why you ain't getting no pussy, Joe? 'Cause you so square, that's why!" was what I caught him saying to old lonesome Joe, who wanted to stay as far away from pussy as possible since somehow it was involved in his nervous breakdown. So Joe would be the only one working in a room full of people, trying to ignore all this needless insanity.
He complained to Loren, who wouldn't get rid of Rayfell since she needed his stinking body for that critical number of employees to allow her to collect the manager's money. She shifted Joe's schedule so that he worked his five days over the weekend. This made him the official explainer to the museum-goers who paid the extra buck for the talking tour. Just another thing that the poor withdrawn soul needed, but at least the explainees thought he was smart, and didn't sass back.
But he still came in contact with the assholes three days a week, and even when he complained directly to the CETA office Loren still wouldn't relieve Rayfell of his position and so Joe did the most logical thing, he quit. When he started running low on money, he went down to Decatur, IL, to collect on a debt from his sister's husband. The brother‑in‑law didn't pay up, so Joe blew him away with a handgun and then blew his own brains out. All for $300. All because he couldn't find decent working conditions. Because Loren wouldn't fire his nemesis, because she "had to get money into this institution anyway she could!" So Joe Porter was the second person to go who worked there, and his relative gets the (or four) epithet which I referred to in the beginning.
The third Gallery 1134 person to go was Al Ornelas. He was one of the founders of the place, along with Bob and Loren. I guess he had met Loren at the 'Tute, and had fallen in love with her. But when I left, they were at war for some reason, only leaving notes on each others' desks to communicate. One time during this period they both disappeared into the classroom for an hour or so, and we figured that they had made it. Al would have been a much better mate for Loren than that asshole Bob.
But Al was married to a very nice lady, Laverne, and Victor Heredia and I went over to visit her to offer our condolences when we found out that he had died, which was after we had both had been ostracized from there. I found it out after touching base with my mole who was still there, Lisa Liewalt, after I had returned from my epic Motorcycle Trip of the Summer of 1981. The widow Ornelas said that he had died of a heart attack on the way to the Seven Eleven to get some groceries on the first day of his vacation from his normal job and Gallery 1134. Henpecked to death by Loren was her estimation of the calamity, and she said that he had kept a diary of it all, with poetry, some of it shocking to her, but understandable.
So three or four poor souls could have still been alive, if it were not for the evil brewing in the depths of Gallery 1134. These are all I know about, there may even be more than that, I wouldn't be all that surprised. And could there be any more in the future?
I saw Damone after he had left the place. He was just driving by when I saw him, and we rapped. He too had knocked up a girl, like Ron Scott, so he was trying to clean up his act, too. He was maybe a little saner, as he just stuck to smoking pot and not taking those animal tranquilizers that were all the rage amongst the other CETA folk. He came to visit me at Gallery 1134, and I tried to pass it off as a personal friendly visit, but John told me that Loren suspected that I was buying dope from him. Which was true. He had to supplement his income from being a shoe store clerk by day and trying to direct plays, which was cool.
I was just walking along outside, before class, trying to get some "fresh air" if you know what I mean, had my shirt open trying to get some Vitamin D produced becasue I had been spending way too much time in there, when a nig yelled out of the window of a passing car, "Suck me off, I don't care, I'm a freak!" what a creepy neighborhood!
reagan getting shot while i worked at 1134 nigs saying there were going to be riots
puddy and tiddy