Headline Schmeadline
“Goddamn it. Look at this. What the hell is the matter with you? What the hell have you done to these good pants? You should take better care of your clothes.”
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Last month I brought in some clothes and was shocked to see a giant Business for Sale sign in the window. I wasn’t the only one: several customers have walked in crying after getting the news the same way I did, impersonally, from a piece of cardboard. I can handle the occasional dressing-down about my dress-up clothes, but the thought of somebody else cleaning my pants is tough to take.
They married in 1958 and had a daughter, Mariza. Then Maria’s father, who was separated from her mother and living in Chicago, paid them a visit. “They were not ‘divorced’ divorced,” says Maria of her parents. “He got separated from the family during the war. Then, you got automatically divorced. My mother got remarried to a man with the same last name. Then nobody know I got a stepfather.”
She found a tailor shop on 26th, but Kurt put his foot down when he saw that all the machines were in the window. “I’m not going to sit in a window in a store and have people watch what I do,” he declared. “I’m not a monkey.”
It can’t be much of a secret anymore: they have customers from all over who used to live around here and still come back to get their cleaning or alterations. One loyal patron used to mail his dry cleaning to Kurt and Maria when he was in California.
