Working Hard and Hardly Working

I lost my job. The café job, both spots, the one in the trendy neighborhood and the one downtown by the convention center. Last week I worked during the firefighters convention. 35,000 people, three straight days of nonstop drinks and rote conversations. It broke me.  

Firemen are fat louts with stupid mustaches. 95 percent of the time they’re in lounge chairs talking about pussy. They’re heroes. Women love them like they tend to love all men: as a fantasy, as machines, as roles and symbols. Cops, firemen, soldiers. Men in uniform, emphasis on the uniform part.  

Someone wrote a bad review, took my picture, said the barista wasn’t friendly. People don’t want an angry ape steaming their milk. Fine. The American public’s standard for most things is in the toilet but its standard for friendly service is out beyond the moon. I don’t spit in faces or piss in drinks, I greet people, ask what they want and give it to them. It’s my look, my brooding aura, my reserve. They want a friend for two minutes. Someone who helps them feel welcome. They want lively banter and a break from their boring routines. I want to keep my head down and go home.  

American society doesn’t just force you to work. That would be normal and unavoidable. It forces you to want to work. Not only to want it, but to show that you want it, to convince everyone that you want to mop floors and talk to strangers all day. They won’t let you have your melancholy. They want to know how you’re doing, as long as you’re doing well. Just as everyone wants you to be free, as long your free choice suits them.  

Where I worked, you could show up late day after day, you could spend half the shift on your phone. You don’t need to know how to make good coffee, the syrup will cover the flaws, the decor will mask the rot. People don’t taste and feel, they consume with their eyes. They consume through the eyes of others.  

The only thing you can’t do is tarnish the brand. Displease a customer. Bad reviews matter more than bad lives, bad days. A thousand good reviews shrink before one man who didn’t get his balls cradled when he ordered a latte.  

Five stars, glittering pictures on instagram. This is what matters. Flesh and blood reality is raw material for the presentation of self. Quivering organs and clanking moods downplayed in favor of gliding surfaces. Betrayals and breakdowns papered over to give the idea that everything works as it should.  

The owner of the shop said I could stay at the downtown spot in the drab office building but not the trendy location where women with hats take pictures of their drinks. So I resigned. He offered to pay me for my last scheduled week and I don’t have to go in. That’s how I’m viewed now. He’d rather pay me to sulk in an unlit cellar than show myself in his gleaming shop.  

A strongly suggested resignation. Like I’m a ceo or a politician with a trail of scheming hookers behind me. Stepping down from my position on the bottom to save the image of a café with neon signs and subway tile and pink flamingo t-shirts.  

What a relief. My working life has been defined by elation when I lose a job. Getting fired is my highest promotion. I’m at home with moving on. Jobs, apartments, girlfriends, interests, everything streaming past and disintegrating except some blackened pit in my stomach, some ineradicable piece of my character. Everything changes except yourself. We’ve invested in what’s changeable to deny what isn’t.  

-- 

A paid week off without working. Except I’ll be scrambling to find a new job, earn a living. At least I’m still working for the carpenter. A few hours here and there. It helps. Somewhere down the line he’ll be able to pay me more, give me more hours. When his workshop is finished we can build 4000 dollar oak tables for wealthy widows in cottage homes.  

When I qualify as a journeyman carpenter I’ll be worth at least 31 dollars an hour. Need something else to fill the gaps in the meantime. Service industry jobs are easy to get but I should be kept away from the public. Hidden like a burn victim, locked up, straight jacketed and muzzled like a cannibalistic serial killer.  

Tuesday morning, the first free one in a long time. Thunder and rain. Then the rain stops. Navy blue clouds thick like canvas, storm winds waving the freshly green leaves. Beaming white magnolias. The smell of spring, blooming flowers, rich damp dirt. The sounds of spring, sweet bird songs, the humming earth. 

Flashes of memory, last spring and the hellish summer that followed. When I worked two jobs, fucked women I didn’t want and chased a woman who didn’t want me. I’m with her now and she says everything is good. We spend afternoons and evenings together. Make love almost every night. Most of the time it feels perfect but then I remember the things she said last summer, what she did. A thousand loving moments vanish before a cruel sentence, a thoughtless act.  

I can forget everything but what I need to forget to be happy. She wants me now but I still wonder why she didn’t back then. I’m always the same man. What changed in her, what changed in us?  

From a logical standpoint, I can understand. People make mistakes, they fail to see what’s important, they learn. But the objective reality of what we’ve done weighs more on others than it weighs on ourselves. We have our subjective rationalizations, which are easy to carry, and others have the brutal fact that we hurt them, which is crushing. 

Still, there’s some hope. An impersonal will to work and expose myself to more damage and disappointment. Flickering gratitude for what I have now, what we have. I want us to share the best of what’s left of us. 

Now that I don’t have a job, I’ll be working harder.