1913issue6online

85 When a cute, young blonde woman from Colorado was hired to manage the cafe, I was immediately suspicious. I was not aware that we needed much more management than what Anthony offered. We suffered through her unnecessary directives, mov- ing things around so that she could feel as though she were fulfilling her duty to impose order. But it felt that, without even her own knowledge, her presence was a mere concession to the customers. A sign that someone was in charge in the way we have come to accept without question: someone white. The first thing she did besides having us move a display of tea canisters over a few inches to the left, was to catch Tiffany texting and to, with relief that she could finally exercise her burden of power, fire her. After awhile, I moved to Brooklyn. I interviewed at a small gal- lery near my apartment. The man who hired me was a small, round-faced Puerto Rican designer who had come to some renown in the eighties art scene. He reminded me of Jiminy Cricket, and trusted me to edit his emails. While he spoke with grace of the aesthetic history of this and that, and laughed about the raucous times he›d spent with people who belonged to the names on the spines of books on his well-organized shelves, his grammar was spotty and he reminded me of Mrs. Malaprop. Every now and then he›d get a call from his mother, and it was only then that he would speak in Spanish, quietly, quickly, with a harried whisper. She raised him in Spanish Harlem, and he spoke of her with kindness. He was rich now, rubbed scuffs from his shoes and straightened his tie. He made clever lamps that appeared on Sex in the City and in hotels around the world. He looked to Rilke for guidance and spoke quotes about Bud- dhism on his lunch break. But as he stood pouring sparkling water for his lunch of fresh, organic salad, he did so with the posture of one who can’t go back. He was light years away from where he’d come. Ø In her two volume book, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Piper sum- marizes one aspect of Kant’s work that so inspires her: “In order for us to make sense of experience at all, we have to categorize those experiences in terms of certain basic categories, which Kant thinks of as being innate. He says that categorizing ex- perience in that way is a necessary condition for having a uni- fied and internally integrated sense of self, so that if we did not

1913issue6online

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