Bar Dispatch
Skewering gummy frogs onto toothpicks in the early evening I wondered what my life had become, but it didn’t last. Really, it was just a sentence I found sort of funny, whose sentiment belonged to a younger version of myself working in some other restaurant, thinking the aestheticization of clumsiness, painting myself as some haphazard cartoon character with hand-drawn tornadoes for eyes, was at least a certain shape. Maybe I was tired of seeing myself as hapless and out-of-step and I was on the verge of changing my life. Maybe I was finally working at a place I liked. Maybe I was bored by the sentence itself because it wasn’t really that funny.
Anyway, I was working. The bar I work at was hosting a pop-up, and the guest bartender was organizing his bottles in the well, beautiful concoctions of vibrant colors: an orangey gold, blue, magenta. It was unclear how this would all go. A clump of people began to gather at the corner of the bar and the bartender began hand-writing their orders on scraps of paper. I declined his many offers to make me a drink and had to remind myself that part of my job was having fun. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jamie Hood’s latest Substack post, this tension between the possibilities of intellectualism—the joy and expansion of writing itself and the “life of the mind” which allows space for it—and the reality of what it takes to uphold or allow room for such creative freedom. And, too, how irrelevant intellectualism is in the real materiality of the world; writing a book fails to protect anyone from the casual indignities of service work. It doesn’t matter the size or caliber or content of your thinking when you’re behind the bar; you’re just a body making drinks.
A ticket for red wine with a cup of ice. Three men in a line wearing white. I pull glasses from the rack in the dishwasher and place them on the back bar. Someone wants to close out and someone wants a Cynar with soda because someone else had one and someone wants to know if the kitchen is still open.
But: just a body? The physicality of this labor, to neither reduce it to the sum of its material parts—this slight open and close of the hand to move the spoon in a circle, this bending down to reach a coupe in the lowboy, this arm stretched out long to pour water into a glass—nor falsify or glorify its materiality. When I worked as a baker, there was so much room for thinking to become a part of the embodied experience, all the dough I shaped into palm-sized balloons, which rose. How the temperature of the kitchen rearranged the hours, the day’s tasks. The endlessness of those repetitions, hundreds of rolls every day, and meanwhile all the men in the kitchen walked back and forth behind me and the songs I had stuck in my head and the conversation I’d had with Clare the night before and the book I was reading and the next book I wanted to read and all the Spanish I overheard but did not understand and someone got fired and someone got hired and my black bra was visible through the thin white shirts we all wore and I didn’t have health insurance and the poem that goes “I won’t be able to write from the grave” and the servers arrived in their clean blue coats.
Bartending is a different beast, frantic and extroverted. I am mostly thoughtless, inundated with movement and noise and this drink and the next one and the next one. If writing is a vehicle for meaning, what are all these hours and rooms in which I am severed from it? The way I become foreign to myself here, that which I so often think of as essential tenets of my subjectivity made inaccessible or on hold. In the bathroom I sit on the toilet and write notes on my phone in the dim disco light: bedazzled pepper spray, keep on trucking, “a difficult home fry,” a guy with curly blonde hair who slides open the door of a van across the street full of indecipherable buckets, a British accent, peas. I’m not sure they’ll become anything.
For a few hours it was kind of annoying, I said to my coworker as the night wound down, but really it was fine. The guest bartender asked how he could help clean up. He spoke with such enthusiasm I felt I had to hype myself up to respond to him. We were all cheerleaders for the championed team of getting lit, or that was, more or less, the vibe of the evening. I threw my pom poms around when I was supposed to, but no, I did not want another shot.
I splurged on an Uber home because it was late. My coworker waited with me on the warm empty street corner until the car arrived. I felt emptied of thoughts but some thoughts remained. I wanted writing to exist alongside working like it existed alongside eating and walking and gossiping over glasses of wine, but it seemed difficult to hold even a thought in the middle of a rush, much less perform the actual physical act of writing it down. Still, there was the quiet back seat of the car now. If I could just bookmark my days with writing, I thought, if I could always return to writing even when writing and living were in opposition. I got home a little after 1, my feet stiff and aching.
