The Happy Camper

On May 17 I received a telephone call from Kim Shamsky of Vinmar Staffing, which has my resumé on file, offering me a job shoveling shit at the Bronx Zoo. I accepted with alacrity and offered to bring my own shovel.

In addition to offering me the job, Kim told me of her intention to sue me in civil court, screaming that she would “crush” me, “bankrupt” me and have me thrown in prison for writing jokes about her long-running lawsuit accusing her ex, former Mets slugger Art Shamsky, of infecting her with a plethora of sexually related diseases as a result of his purported liaisons with women, men, canines, discarded inflatable sex dolls and an abandoned, bedbug-infested mattress that he found while rummaging through a dumpster in the alley behind the Fulton Fish Market.

Naturally, I was elated at the prospect of being sued for slander by New York’s version of the Octomom. She has availed herself of every imaginable opportunity to publicly humiliate her ex-husband who, after suffering twelve years of marriage to a woman whom he claims spit on him, excoriated him for being old, insulted him unmercifully and threw hysterical screaming fits on innumerable occasions, decided to walk out on her and take a good portion of her money with him.

A lawsuit like that is a win-win situation for any defendant who would know how to defend himself, of which Art Shamsky, being a retired baseball player, was basically not capable. He had no choice but to hunker down in the face of a vicious barrage of insults and suffer in silence, even as Kim gave multiple newspaper interviews accusing him of being a notorious degenerate pervert, ambushing him with a video crew in tow to scream at him after he emerged from a charity event, and filing an endless stream of court documents purporting to expose his vile sexual proclivities. She even set up a web site, www.artshamskysucks.com, to do to him the same thing she accused me of doing to her.

As I read this vile swill on an ongoing basis, I wondered, “How come there’s never a comedian around when you need one?” Obviously, all the good comedy writers had left for the coast. That more or less had left all the heavy lifting to me. To make matters worse, I actually had been acquainted with this Kim Shamsky a few years previously when I had accepted an assignment from her to work at a low-level bureaucratic function at the law firm of Paul Weiss, which was one of the most gruesome experiences of my life. My contact with Vinmar Staffing at the time was limited to filling out a weekly time sheet and receiving a meager pittance of remuneration for my services. I knew Shamsky was a little bit peculiar, but nothing out of the ordinary. It was only after I had ceased to be employed by Vinmar and she had hit the papers, big-time, with an unending stream of vile purification against her ex, that I realized what a treasure trove of comedy material she offered.

I have unfortunately been cursed with some of the worst employers in New York, which is saying a mouthful. Previous to Shamsky, I was engaged by Helmer Toro as industrial relations manager at H&H Bagels, where I helped him negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with Local 2 of the Bakery Workers Union, managed his factory in Hell’s Kitchen and his two retail stores, ordered his factory supplies and performed quality control functions. Toro thanked me for my services with an unending campaign of insults and personal abuse, threw up obstacles to make my job even harder when it suited him, and forged my signature on documents of incorporation, leaving me exposed for a $20,000 debt to the New York State Department of Taxation, which obliged me to go to the newspapers to get this monkey off my back, resulting in a charming little poem I wrote about him which was excerpted on Page Six of The Post, reading, in part:

“He’ll go down in history like the Three Stooges
On the Mount Rushmore of monumental scrooges”

Toro also threatened to sue me, or worse (he keeps two loaded revolvers in the safe of his 80th Street store. Both his ex-business partner and one of his brothers mysteriously died). Anyway, Toro has got bigger problems than me to worry about: after of years of robbing Peter to pay Paul and shifting his assets back and forth like a three card monty game between his dummy corporations, his stores and his factory were seized last week by the NYDOT, and standing right behind them is the IRS, who also holds liens on his properties, including his residence in the Colorado condominium on West 70th Street.

According to Toro’s brother, Juan C. (“Johnny”) Toro, whom he employs as a refrigeration and truck mechanic, Toro started out as a pool-hustling teenage sharpie in the Hunt’s Point section of the Bronx, where he would clean out the marks and then run to his Cadillac, which Johnny would keep idling, to make his escape. After serving in Vietnam, which Toro himself described to me as the happiest memory of his life, he got a job rolling bagels by hand and then opened the store at 80th Street and Broadway. Helmer expressed the ambition to his brother to marry a Jewish woman, of whom there was no shortage among his client base, because, in Johnny’s words “they had the money”.

He succeeded in that ambition, marrying a naïve, trusting female dentist whose family bankrolled his factory on W. 46th Street, and Toro expanded into the delivery route and export businesses. Unfortunately, the bakery business being an unbelievably cutthroat industry, Toro immediately found himself behind the eight ball. First, the union, after a bitter, tooth-and-claw multi-year battle, succeeded in organizing his workforce, putting Toro at a permanent disadvantage against his non-unionized competition. Then, he was undercapitalized, being obliged to equip his plant with obsolete, antiquated machinery, which let to unending battles with regulators such as the Fire Department and OSHA. Finally, Toro’s own pool hustler proclivities induced him to take chances with the fiscal authorities.

In order to keep operating, Toro continually tapped his wife’s family and leveraged himself and his operations to the hilt. While I was working for him, his strategy had settled on a plan to sell the 46th Street property and move his operation to New Jersey, where he felt he would be able to get out from under the thumb of the union. My collaboration in the latest round of collective bargaining negations, where I had written all the documentation in English and Spanish, negotiated for him at the bargaining table and actively lobbied the employees to pressure the union executive to sign the loaded agreement I had written, the provisions of which I am still prohibited from disclosing because of a confidentiality agreement that may still be applicable despite the company’s imminent demise, were groundbreaking for the state of New York but still did not go far enough to put him in a competitive position vis-à-vis his better financed non-union competition like Bagel Best, which works out of a modern, fortress-like facility in the Bronx.

The enormous hygiene and regulatory problems concerning the dilapidated manufacturing facility in Hell’s Kitchen were putting unbelievable pressure on me and Toro, who was himself at the breaking point because of his tax and debt problems, would come down to the factory early in the morning and scream at me for the unbelievable mess left behind by the night shift, even though he knew perfectly well that I had just arrived myself. But taking his problems out on me was his system for burning off steam. Finally, I just walked out.

Not that I would have stayed much longer anyway. A few weeks later a letter arrived at my home naming me as an officer in First Toro or Sixth Toro, I forget which, Family Partnership LLP, and dunning me for a twenty thousand dollar share of Toro’s tax assessment. That set off a whole new round of fighting.

It was under those conditions that I went to work for Kim Shamsky’s agency, which is located in a shabby little three-person office on East 34th Street. I considered her just to be a typical garden-variety nuisance. It was only after she broke into the papers with her insane attacks on Art Shamsky that I came to a full appreciation of what a boiling cauldron of venom and malice was erupting within that seemingly banal and inconsequential individual.

Let her sue me if she wants to! She is not a private citizen who is the target of slander and vicious innuendo but, rather, a person who elbowed herself into the public forum on the lowest possible level , initiating a monstrous campaign designed to humiliate another public figure, her ex-husband, by exposing him to what are unsubstantiated and undoubtedly fictional accusations concerning the intentional contamination by him of her reproductive health, which she described in the most graphic terms before the mass audience. By going public in such graphic and vociferous terms, she exposed herself as a legitimate object for satirical treatment.

Shamsky was in the papers again just last week, declaring herself to be a “happy camper” about the out-of-court settlement of her lawsuit against Art Shamsky. After years and years of her unmercifully hounding this guy and calling him every dirty name in the book, the whole case was litigated out of existence. This “happy camper” remark was her feeble attempt to put the best face on being forced to concede defeat. According to the terms of the settlement as described by The Post she received nothing, nothing! Kim Shamsky and Art Shamsky were obliged to undergo physical examinations, which revealed nothing, and Art Shamsky’s attorney had a clause inserted that prohibits Kim from any more public harassment of him.

In the meantime, I intend to continue writing my blog as usual. This blog site contains over 500 stories, including many hundreds about baseball and sports. Out of those, there are maybe four references to Kim Shamsky, all concerning her public campaign against baseball star Art Shamsky. If she and her attorney find that any of that material is actionable, then I shall defend myself vigorously in court and in the court of public opinion. Helmer Toro also underestimated my ability to defend my own interests. Helmer may be a very flawed individual, but compared to Kim Shamsky, he is a freakin genius!

Helmer has his own problems. Last week his operation was seized, then reopened, then seized again, this time with the Tax Department declaring its intention to put the whole mess up for auction. I bear him no malice. He got too big. If he had been content to just operate his 80th Street store, which was profitable and famous, instead of striving to be a big-shot capitalist, he would have had a happy life with his successful, loyal wife and all his lovely children.

As for Kim Shamsky, forget her! I may be an impecunious writer suffering through tough times, but I am holding up rather better than the Helmer Toros of the world, and I am sure not a Shoot The Freak target bozo attraction in the Coney Island sideshow of Kim Shamsky’s mind. Her last words to me were, "I want you to go to hell and die!" Naturally it all boils down to what she wants. When all the temper tantrums and destructive behavior are analyzed and peeled away, it reveals a woman possessing an emotional age of about two years old, like a spoiled infant petulantly stamping her feet, demanding an ice cream.

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Posted on 6/1/2009 ( Permanent Link )
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