My Voice: A Memoir by Angie Martinez Read Free Book Online Page B

relief when I drive the van home, go inside, and go to sleep.
Ah . . .
But as soon as I wake up and go outside to get going, what a shock: There’s an ominous piece of paper on the windshield of the van!
    Holy shit, I got a ticket
.
    Obviously, when the station received notice of the parking ticket, they’d know that I’d kept the van. But for some dumb-ass reason, I just didn’t tell them, and I waited until they got the ticket in the mail. Maybe I was hoping it would never come.
    Cut to a few weeks later:
    “Angie, did you take the van home? You know that’s against the rules.” I’m standing in the marketing director’s office and he’s giving a speech that’s going on and on.
Blah, blah, blah
. Then he says, “You know we have fired people for that.”
    Shiiiit!
Two thoughts cross my mind. Number one—
I don’t want to get fired
. But number two,
I understand what he’s saying and I know this is the rule, but let’s just talk about common sense here
. I wasn’t confident enough to verbalize it at that time, but from common sense I knew that what I did wasn’t wrong. Well,
I
knew that. But even so, I was written up and sent home.
    It felt like the end of the world.
    A few days later I was back at the station for a meeting with the general manager, Judy Ellis, where it would be determined whether or not I was going to get fired. Judy was this little five-foot dynamo. She was tiny, yes, but she could be in a room full of six-foot men and dominate. She demanded your attention, your respect. She was fierce. She was smart. She was a big part of what Hot 97 would become.
    At the meeting, I’m sitting there in front of the powers that be—the marketing director, the promotions director, and the general manager. They’re going back and forth about how this is not acceptable; it’s against the rules; we’ve fired other people for this; what are we supposed to do; we’re gonna have to let her go.
    I’m just sitting there as they talk among each other for what felt liketen, fifteen minutes. And as they continue to talk about me like I’m not even there, I start to get irritated.
    “Can I say something?” I finally interrupt.
    “Yeah, sure, go ahead,” Judy said.
    “First of all, I’ve been working here now a pretty long time and I do whatever anybody asks at any time, and I don’t want any credit for that. But I do think that the least I deserve is that if something goes wrong, somebody would ask me what happened.” I paused, took a breath, and then continued. “I think I’ve earned enough respect for you to ask me. You’re talking about what I did. You’re talking about me. Nobody has said to me, ‘Hey, how come you took the van home?’ Nobody’s asked me. You guys are all talking, everybody’s writing notes and making decisions, and not once has anybody asked me, ‘Why did you take the van home?’”
    Oh shit . . . did I just raise my voice a little right there?
    They were all quiet for a second, and then Judy offers, “Okay, tell me what happened.”
    “Well, I had two events that I did back-to-back. Then I took Deborah to Great Adventure. By the time we came back, I only had a four-hour turnaround before I had to do another event,” I explained. “I didn’t want to be late for it. And I didn’t want to show up to a sales event half asleep. My thinking was I could just take a quick nap. And I know it was against the rules, but I just tried to make the best decision I could in that moment.”
    “All right, give us a minute. We’ll talk to you later, okay?” Judy said. Her face remained stern as she and the others stayed put and I left her office.
    Later, Judy called me back in. It was just the two of us. “First of all,” she said, “don’t take the van home.”
    “Okay.”
    “I’m not gonna fire you.”
    My face must have regained its color. But was there something else?
    Judy smiled and went on. “Second of all, can I just say something?”
    “What?”
    “Can I