At work I get so bored I could rip my entrails out and feed them to a dog. Every day I want to walk away and let my spirit cry out across the street, the sky, places where birds sing. My spirit ached that day last year in Nashville, that first glorious day of Autumn, while I was stuck serving at the Wild Cow. Summer slipped, fall was falling, and I longed to fall with it like a leaf and drift off down the street, perhaps towards the geese of Shelby Park. I’d indulge this feeling on my lunch breaks and escape with a beer and my guitar, singing in an alleyway or in the grass of the gas station up on Shelby Avenue.
I love my lunch breaks and always have. Thirty minutes of ecstasy, except for that last minute when you’ve got to scramble to chew some gum, brush the tobacco off your shirt, hide your guitar back in the car, apply deodorant, get yourself back together and ready to serve. I didn’t always chew gum, though, and part of that was because of the Wild Cow’s generally relaxed temperament in which no one had to fear having a bit of beer on their breath. We could drink on the job if we wanted to–one of the benefits of working for alcoholics.
Besides the chaos and disfunction, it was the best restaurant I’ve ever worked in, by far. We did our best to stay relaxed, and the cows enjoyed themselves. A manager got too high once and spent all afternoon resting on the steps in the alley behind the Cow, overcome with the darkness of his meditation on racism. I am the face of the oppressor, he repeated to his poor stoned white self in the sun for hours, so we were left alone to work the floor, just two of us servers stuck serving the hungry thirsty people at brunch, but we did fine. I got my lunch break in and refreshed myself.
The longing to slip away has been with me for years. One of my most poignant childhood memories is walking to the bathroom during class in middle school and gazing up the hill, thinking how wonderful–how magical! –it would be to simply walk off and explore the neighborhoods and the streets, pass through town, and see the ocean. Of course there was no fence around the school back then. Today, my old school, like all the schools of America, looks more like a prison. I imagine that the walls would only make the urge to leave even stronger.
That urge was always strongest for me in the fall. It’s a melancholy season, one in which we feel the ephemerality of our condition most acutely. I’m feeling it now, but I’m content here in New York, meditating on all this sorrow, all this frustration. Autumn is a time of reflection and change, a season of saudade.
On that Autumn day at the center of my essay here, great and terrible changes were happening in the world. It was October 7th, 2023. I don’t know how and why I include this horrific detail in my essay. Perhaps it’s incongruous to include such a cataclysm in an essay about myself and service, but that shadow was there; it broke over my day and the ensuing violence still burns and casts a shadow over the whole world. This is an essay about a day, and that was the day of a rupture, the day Hamas broke through Gaza’s prison walls and struck the deadliest blow against Israel in the country’s history, and it was the day Israel began its campaign of slaughter and fear that continues. The world ended, life was shattered, and life went on. We kept serving vegan meals at the Wild Cow.
I found out about the events of the day at the end of my shift and spent the next several hours drinking and pacing the five points neighborhood in East Nashville, reading everything I could online and messaging my friend Peter, one of the only ones within my network of mutuals on social media who expressed any awareness of the extremity of that day. People were partying all around me. It was Saturday night, and I knew then the world would never be the same, and it’s clear as day now. You and I will not be the same, either. Whether or not you have people you love in the line of fire, you are changed. No matter your ideology, your perspective, or your awareness of the atrocities being committed by the state of Israel in Palestine, the fact remains–you are a witness. We are all bearing witness.
You go about your day and your struggle. Your struggles may be terrible or quotidian, and the slaughter continues. You struggle with your family, your friends, the strangers on the street, your weight, height, skin and words. You struggle with your co-workers, the customers; the police stare, or perhaps they menace you; the cars fly by and startle you; the mice are chewing through your walls and a dog won’t stop barking. It’s all hard and it affects your sleep. All this struggle is real, and yet, an apocalyptic struggle for Palestine goes on simultaneously. I can’t help but think and write about it. The whole month of October I felt like I was going insane at the Wild Cow, doing customer service while the holocaust began. If my inclusion of everything within my mind and my day comes off as insensitive, or worst of all, glib, then I’ve failed.
What consequences will I face for writing this essay, in which I draw threads between all kinds of misery, small and titanic? Who will be offended that I attempted humor within the same essay in which I acknowledge the slaughter in Palestine? The only offense that truly matters to me here is the one the people of Palestine may feel, but then again, this essay is not really for them. The people of Palestine don’t need the thoughts and musings of an American waiter– they need American hands to wrest control of the factories and ships that deliver the weapons of their annihilation to Israel. They need American voices to command their leaders to stop killing. They need us to remind Vice President Kamala Harris that she bears full responsibility for this holocaust, and they need us to tell her again and again, until she goes further than express her sympathy with the Palestinian people. Though Harris is sorry to see so many Palestinians killed, weapons will flow unabated to Israel, she says, for as she reminds us, “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” and she exists in an environment that is dominated by the the arms industry, the Israel lobby, and the capitalist class, and they are a demanding bunch. Harris can’t forget about them, and neither should we. I’ll remember them here, even as I write about the Wild Cow.
I must not trivialize anything important; I must not take anything trivial seriously. I wish to raise the stakes of everything that demands it. There’s too much we don’t take seriously, and so much we do that we shouldn’t. There is a multitude of pain within a day. There are paper cuts, bruised limbs, and broken hearts. I try to move past the paper cuts so I can focus on the heart. A million things make mine ache, and it aches at work for reasons great and small. But above all, it’s the indifference that gets me down.
The server feels the agony of indifference. In a restaurant it swirls all around you—the bosses, the customers, the beleaguered delivery drivers, etc, all make their demands and sprinkle their indifference like fairy dust upon the machine. People want perfection, a well oiled dream machine. The customers do not want to see your pain. It reminds them that life is not what they hoped it would be, or perhaps it reminds them that they don’t have enough money to create the life of their dreams, for the truly financially successful hardly have to put up with the shame of witnessing a servant struggle. The more money you have, the less you have to witness the pain of others.
It’s jarring to witness people’s pain, and if you look carefully, there’s plenty to be seen inside a restaurant. You can see it in the eyes, the slump of the head or the shoulders, the way someone rubs their neck or sighs when they feel they’re unseen. I wonder how many have overheard me muttering fuck under my breath. If you’re a sensitive person, witnessing this can kill the vibe, or worse. Keeping an atmosphere conducive to eating and drinking is paramount: we must keep the vibe alive. The customers need it, and we need them. We need them to be happy. They are taught that their happiness is dependent upon getting what they want.
“Is there ever a situation in which the customer is not right?” I was once asked in an interview for a delivery driver position at Woodstock’s Pizza in Santa Cruz, California.
“Yes,” I said humbly. “What if they ask for bacon, and we’re all out of bacon?”
The manager was taken aback. “That’s interesting! I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. They promoted him to the general manager position after the general manager left to generally manage another location.
There’a always so much to manage–so many systems, so many souls. A manager is a manager of souls, and they ought to appreciate this, though I’ve rarely seen a manager exhibit sensitivity to the weight of other souls. Most managers behave as if unaware of the gravity of the soul, but to be fair, the brutality of their position requires them to ignore it. No one talked much about the soul at Woodstock’s pizza, not even in hippy town USA, Santa Cruz California, a college town at the edge of the coast and the woods whose university calls itself “the original authority on questioning authority.”
The university fired many of its striking grad students in 2020, but they won back their jobs after a struggle. Revolution was in the air that year, but it was quickly stamped out under the crushing weight of liberalism and police brutality. I began reading Marx. I graduated college and got a job as a pizza delivery driver. I quit that job after a few months and left my co-workers with a manifesto laying out the ways in which Woodstock’s Pizza was a dehumanizing environment. I received very few responses to my letter, though the responses I did receive were spirited and polarized. Then I went on to a job working for an ecological landscaping company called Ecological Concerns Incorporated that turned out to be utterly insane, but at least we didn’t have to do customer service.
Everyone with a brain knows the customer is not always right, but perhaps they are always right about their happiness, you say? No, I don’t agree. Believe customers, the managers tell us, but I can’t. Many seem confused about what they need, but I know what they want. They want love and dignity, and they want to have a good time, but it’s hard to have a good time when you realize you’re seeking love and care from someone who’s suffering. It’s easier to let the good times roll when you can forget about the suffering you’re complicit in. Your servers’ smiles will help you forget. To have a good time, the customers must forget; and in order to make money, we need the customers to have a good time, so smile away, fam! Their joy is our tip money, and our tip money is what makes a career in service possible.
And the only thing that makes it possible to keep smiling is laughter, so we laugh and laugh. We grin and bear it, drink and smoke and let the good times roll. We laugh at our customers, our precious guests. I set their dinner down and blink at them like a cat, thinking, yes, my dear, you’ll never know how much I care. I would die for you. And like true love, us servers give it without any expectation of reciprocity. We receive indifference, and we go on giving, loving, and working. Love is work, and work is hard.
part 2 of many