The punch out years

One of those April noons, fresh from days of rain, when the damp earth saturates the sky. Bottomless ocean without waves. Right before a shift, bracing my spirit on the stone ledge of the courtyard. Shining through the fledgling leaves of a japanese maple, the sun burns scattered parts of my face, as if someone had hit me with a lit cigarette.  

Cyclists roll up, twenty or so, not the kind in the alien sex suits, but occasional cyclists, less aerodynamic, on a coffee crawl, a tour. Off balance on those taint-torturing seats. They head for the cafe where I’m about to work. My last idle moment despoiled.  

In the service industry, you watch groups shamble to the door like a Mexican villager spotting a cloud of dust from Apache horsemen on the horizon. 

-- 

Yesterday the heat had sucked up most of the moisture, and the sky shone with a bloodless blue like a tarp stretched thin, dulled by the sun. Weekend work at the cafe. Dog walking couples, ballcaps all around, ballcaps on the dogs.

Weekday professionals. Enigmatic beings disguised as conventionally successful blockheads. Sometimes I think a see a bolt of desperation in their eyes. But I can’t help.  

The vanilla latte tricks them into believing they’re on a beach in Tahiti for a few minutes. Then they get back on their routes, on to the afternoon pickleball, in grassy parks swinging their lunch meat limbs, with jutting guts playing games without stakes, until their weekend flutters off like a full balloon that has opened its lip and they go back to work, one more crank on the killing wheel, and no matter how many thrilling syrups they drink or flabby matches they flail around in or riveting dramas they watch, nothing will save them from being ground down by time’s stone teeth, crushed by the gears in the watch of the great watchmaker. 

I can’t help them or myself. Anyone who claims they can help you in a spiritual sense is some kind of viper, or a plain old fool. Our souls are nothing more than the inner spacing of our solitude; within us nothing is shared. That’s why we have vanilla lattes and afternoons in the park. Porn and talk of who’s fucking whom, the Abbot and Costello radio routine of who’s on fucking first, who’s on fucking second. No one knows themselves or anyone else; to be is to be stuck in a membrane, to see and feel through the prism of a self that never shows. 

(As for the preeminence of dogs: not man’s best friend, but a man’s symbolic strap-on, his stand-in, a sackless dick led on a leash by the wife.) 

Men and women wear baseball caps (among other articles) to signal an identity less traditionally sexed, a more androgynously adaptable body type, a more amorphously ordered mind as well, a so far successful progressive neutering. Related to the bike people buzzing around. A stripping of secondary sex baggage through optimization of performance under certain rubrics. 

But what else are they going to do, resist their time and place, latch onto God’s robe and climb all the way up to his ear, tell him they need something else, something more? Not in this life, not anymore. It’ll have to be movie releases and date nights, trips to river cities, crass jokes, nods that pretend to know.  

I’m going to do the same thing as them, squint through the same dark distorted glass, only I’ll stand far enough back for it to feel like something else, as if I could see more clearly, when I know I’ve fallen into a pit of sewage and tar.  

-- 

Comic company fired me. Let me put it less violently; they downsized and no longer needed my services. That could be the story, or it could be that the boss didn’t like the job I was doing. Why would he tell me that, even though he should. Good for us both if he looked me in the eye and said I wasn’t fit for the role. I can take it; I’ve taken it before.  

Like when I worked for a month or two at Pita Pit, a fast casual restaurant that serves customizable flatbread sandwiches. An old woman owned the franchise. One day as I mopped she asked if I was happy with the job. I could only answer that I didn’t understand the question, I couldn’t be sure. A week or two later I was out on a delivery and I dropped an order on the wrong front door, and when I went back to the shop the old woman, in uniform, in a green polo shirt and black visor, with a weariness that rippled through the air, told me she’d lost her faith in humanity. I said I had too

A boss and I will never be in greater agreement than when they fire me. The main difference is that the boss is slower in coming to the same conclusion; I know I’m not right for the job before I hear of it.  

There was the Malibu Grill, a downtown sports bar with a cheesy midwestern oceanfront theme, that on evening weekends would drop into hell, and the kitchen would throb with red faces and a hateful punishing volume of orders and tasks and unreal urgency, as hot and stinging and commanding as the dark lord cracking a whip on your back. I worked in the kitchen a few months and moved to bussing tables. Within weeks the managers chipped at my schedule until there was nothing left. 

Before that, or after, I don’t think it matters, I got a job washing dishes in an Italian restaurant. Two or three months later I didn’t show up to my shift. No one called. I interviewed for a dishwashing job at a different spot. On a shadow shift I bumped into a table with several tall stacks of plates and bowls and they all fell and shattered. No one told me when I’d start and I didn’t ask.  

In Washington DC I worked at a shop that sold popsicles. Handed frozen fruit bars to bureaucrats, learned how to make coffee for courtiers. A little later, a two star michelin restaurant with a seasonal tasting menu, where I wore a vest and served decaf cappuccinos at midnight and wrote an email to a manager saying I’d go insane if I worked one more shift.  

My work history plays like a series of skirmishes, grudge matches between parasites trying to drain each other. I lose and win them all, win by losing, by staying on my feet through the tumble of days, almost out of spite, looking for new places to punch in.