How To Disappear Up Your Own Ass

Another Cruella entry briefly. It's not a funny one but it gives you some perspective about the level of evil we are talking about.

On September 11, 2001 some serious crapola went down here in Manhattan. You might remember it? Big, tall towers, planes crashing, stuff asploding, people jumping?

That morning I was on the subway when it all started. I got to work just a few minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and a few minutes before the second. We (Cruella's four other assistants and myself) were all huddled round the TV in her office watching the news unfold, while Cruella herself, was still home in her luxury Park Avenue apartment uptown - she never graced us with her presence until at least 11 a.m.

Now a lot was going on. Chaos reigning. Everyone in the company was trying to reach family or friends who worked in the financial district and the WTC in particular. I was trying to reach The Boy who worked at the WTC site. No one was getting through to anyone. Our phones would work but we couldn't get a line to anywhere. Cell phones were down because just guess where the transmitters were? People were understandably a wee bit stressed.

In the midst of this chaos, Cruella calls, furious because she'd checked her voice mail and had three new messages and Cruella rule number one is: you never let the phone go to voice mail, it must be answered. This crime is akin to murdering your own mother after first sodomizing her with Erik Estrada.

One of the other assistants took her call (it figures that most of NYC can't get a line in or out yet the Devil manages to connect).

"Have you seen the news this morning?" this assistant asks Cruella. "Have you seen what's going on?"

"Oh that World Trade thing..." Cruella said dismissively, "Yes, I heard about that. But this phone business is not going to be tolerated. I have important clients that have to be attended to!"

We finally got rid of her and all sat down on her designer velvet sofa and watched the news come in about the plane hitting the Pentagon then the Pennsylvania plane. Most people had already left to try to get home. Cruella had called again around 10:30, right as the first tower at the Trade Center was falling.

"There's a man I need you to call..." Cruella says. "He's a jewelry designer. He has an ad in Cosmopolitan. He makes this sapphire ring in a platinum setting. I want one."

At this stage only three of us assistants are left, the others having gone to rescue their kids from daycare. One of the assistants has been IMing her friend who worked on one of the higher floors at the World Trade and the connection just went dead. We're all freaking the hell out. So, we're all a little speechless at her request.

Her personal assistant, who was still there with me and the other girl took the phone and said, "Look. Everyone has gone home. We are about to leave. There is no public transport. There are no cell phones working. All the bridges and tunnels are shut down. Everything below 14th Street is an emergency zone. The ARMY are in the street with guns. People are throwing themselves off a 110 story building rather than burn to death and you want us to buy you jewelry?"

There was that silence you get when everything stops at once.

"But...who will answer my phones?" Cruella whined, clearly unhappy.

"Voice mail." said her PA and hung up.

When work resumed the following Monday after a six day hiatus, Cruella was hyper and irritated because we were "out of the loop". One of my fellow assistants' best friend was a fire fighter who went in to the WTC and never came out. She was at work but understandably freaked. Cruella berated her all day about all the things she was messing up because her mind was elsewhere.

The part that really got me was all day long she had us write thank you notes to "important" clients who'd been calling her on her cell to make sure she was ok.

I guess they had no idea she was four miles away, uptown when this stuff happened and as soon as it got serious she got her family in her SUV and made her driver, who had to eventually find a way back to Brooklyn, take them to her Connecticut farmhouse. Of course she was fucking "ok". If that woman ever went below 42nd Street she'd die from the cooties.

This is who Cruella is. Completely free of reality or scruples of any sort.