Bar Dispatch

A week in the life <3

I wanted to write something like Claire-Louise Bennett. Little stories, or scenes. But full of thinking, of the movement of a thought and how strange and roving it can be even in sentences, how totally encompassing and unfurling concentrically. But there was no time to put words into place: I was working. My usual closing shift behind the bar. C was covering for L, Oh hey, she said when I walked in like she always does, a phrase whose precise intonation has begun to overtake my own speech, embarrassingly, and when I find myself saying it, Oh hey, in the same way she always does, I recoil at the obviousness of my own cloying mimicry, how it unburies the vast tunnels of my eternal insecurities. G and R were loopy and giggling behind the server station, R in a big greenish sweatshirt which she soon took off. They talked about baseball. They reminded me of little kids, or cartoon characters, their heads swiveling around on their long necks, their bodies standing close together. I missed my siblings. My Monday regular arrived in a grey sweater.

But writing like Bennett required a greater distance. Distance? Or closeness? I couldn’t tell. No, it was distance. “I was alone then too, so although I swam I did not feel brave enough to go all the way to the other side for the reason that when I am alone it is practically impossible for me to gauge distance.” It was like writing from very very high up, looking down at the whole sprawl of a city full of windows falling down in dashed lines like paint on vertical roads. What I loved most about her was her affection for adjectives, that most maligned part of speech which everyone is always telling you to avoid. A few days ago I’d read this in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and pronounced myself a fellow champion of adjectives:

“Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective is itself an adjective meaning ‘placed on top,’ ‘added,’ ‘appended,’ ‘imported,’ ‘foreign.’ Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”

But I didn’t have time to study this exactly. As I said I was working. Sometimes the morning really does just break my heart. Earlier and the sun puncturing through the wiry branches, the cold paleness and the beginnings of walking to the train. A frigid cutting feeling in the air. I’ve been knocked out of my routine lately, as though thunking out of orbit, suddenly trackless and bereft. And it’s such effort to return to it. Without this feeling of constant striving, reaching and reaching, without actively and intentionally and somewhat frantically writing and seeing art and engaging with it, or culture, or the world in this way I want to have it, without filling my days all the way up, or filling them only with hard labor sore feet mixing drinks gossiping, I begin to feel stuck and slack, itchy almost. So maybe it is real, this idea I have of myself, which I always fear is just a shape I like, into which I desperately try to fit myself.

I shouldn’t have agreed to take G’s Tuesday shift, but I hadn’t had a real reason not to and needed the money, etc., but when will I ever not? And I was greeted so warmly when I walked in, A and I rarely with overlapping shifts. But I was in a terrible mood and leaking it all over everything. My head hurt and my stomach hurt and randomly I felt little aching pangs, surprisingly acute, thinking inexplicably about a person I loved a while ago now, thinking, really, nothing in particular about him, just this feeling I had when I was with him, this great sighing relief, a sense of completion in some way, like I had arrived somewhere and so no longer had to worry about holding up the big heavy responsibility of my life, which of course is probably in part what went wrong. The man who brings all his dates here complimented my shirt, which was a gigantic black button-down, totally unremarkable except for its largeness, so I didn’t quite understand why he said this. I think I have the exact same one, he said. I resisted the urge to say it was probably a smaller size. Sometimes saying anything to a man ends up becoming strategic and charming, albeit rife with convoluted and historical self-interest and secret misogyny. Later he moved to the bar and told me the woman he was with was just a platonic friend who worked in real estate, so she was a good person to keep around. Have you ever been to Burning Man? he asked. He told me he was 40, which was alarming, as it implied that one day I too could be 40 and still just as stupid as him. A said maybe we should go to the deli and get some treats to share, that always helps me, she said. She tried to remember the name of the prepackaged donuts with the hard chocolate glaze. Entenmann’s. But I was trying not to eat certain things, on account of my head and stomach. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but eventually I said so. So maybe not that, she said.

Bella came in again, the unhoused woman who begs and begs us to help her. She wore a wide red scarf around her head. T, A, and I all stood around her tiny frame, asking her to leave. We’re so sorry, we said. I kept saying I know I know and she said you know what?? The restaurant was full and everyone watched as the three of us pleaded with her ineffectually. She shrieked and cried. And of course she was right: I didn’t know.

Before the R&D meeting on Wednesday, B texted the group chat asking if someone could cover his closing shift, he’s not feeling well. I was at a coffee shop copying part of a Joan Semmel interview into my virtual journal and again into the document that’s supposed to be becoming an essay about her: “Any art object in the end is about itself.” I waited for someone else to offer but no one did. The cold made me so sad I cried a little walking to the bar, hunching over myself, bracing and steely against the wind. C said he’d been puking all morning. I stood in the basement in a yellow sweater boiling pretzels in water. The pretzels expanded and a gummy layer of translucent skin formed around them. C and I agreed that I’d open and she’d close. Vaguely and indeterminately resentful, I asked to steal a t-shirt, as I had worn a very sheer shirt without a bra under my sweater when I’d thought I would be going home after the meeting. I changed in the bathroom and knotted the fabric at the bottom so it would hover over my belt just so, an attempt to transform a shapeless garment into a subtle provocation, effortless and sexy, though the strip of skin there was actually the site of great physical insecurity which often somehow caused my vision to warp, or were all the mirrors through which I saw myself really actually warped, all of them in different ways, so I could never quite tell if my particular body properly communicated the intended allure.

The argument always ran two different directions in my head: there was the frustrating sense of personal obligation to the efficient carrying on of a business, a business that exploited my labor, whose profits had nothing really to do with me; but really, in the gestural teeming world of the world, the obligation was toward my friends, whose bodies would be forced to hold the inefficiencies of the business, of the industry, if I claimed that I did not owe my employer my days off. But of course I didn’t, I didn’t owe them anything and neither did my friends, so while initially I was mildly irritated that no one else would take the shift, and I wondered what better things they had to do so I could denote the true importance of these activities and their place in my own hierarchy of necessity, I then decided that actually it didn’t matter, it was fine, that work was just work, that it wasn’t about helping or not helping someone, that no one gets paid enough, that everyone is allowed their days off free of guilt, free of duty and the conflation of friends and business. But even thinking this, I thought, while pouring liquids into the hollow triangles of silver jiggers, dumping that careful hovering liquid into tins, shaking and shaking, the little dance of straining and throwing ice into the sink and washing my tools and arranging them back into their right places, their starting positions, feels like blatantly ignoring the people standing right in front of you. And actually it is not such a bad thing, and in fact just the way life is, to feel obligated to some other person, to owe one another, to extend and occasionally refuse and even overextend for the sake of a friend who has fallen disgustingly ill. The problem with this industry is that it is so real and personal and the beauty of this industry is that it is so real and personal.

I see I am becoming unwieldy. But a moment can go on for so long, a moment is bottomless, a container for a word which contains every word. On Thursday I had two ideas and I held them in my head little blank spaces which I planned to fill if I could just step away for a minute, hover at the top of the staircase with my phone in my hand. B said he was feeling much better. P’s hair was tied back in a ponytail. A man sat on a bar stool several feet away from the bar and I went around to each of my coworkers wailing about it. It’s like they don’t even try!! I meant men, I meant try to be good. My two ideas slipped out of their spaces and into the abyss of the temporary and swept away, where they remained.

Back behind the bar the next day a couple came in early talking about the operating room. I had bought gel inserts for my shoes and felt taller and positively buoyant. There’s a point below the ribs, the woman said, and you have to press on it—I’m using my attending voice. I had many questions I would have liked to ask them, like exactly where is the pancreas located and what kind of abdominal pain is average and unworried, but I stuck to my script. And my little hand motions: pointing and waving and circling and circling, one finger around the other.