Walking down Wood Street at Haddon
A man in his 60’s is playing house music from a Bluetooth speaker in the milk crate on the back of his bicycle.
He seems to understand we are only bugs who might as well play while we briefly crawl this planet. Be silly! The purpose of your existence is to consume and procreate so that our consumption might flourish until the planet can sustain no more and we perish together.
How can I be more like him? What changes are necessary in my life to foster such a lightness of being? What seeds can I sow now to reap his playful vigor at his age, instead of growing more bitter and sad, bent over, head heavy with regret and resentment?
I must disco. Youth is a fleeting physical state, but can be a permanent state of mind. One does not simply retire from the disco. One becomes the disco.
Be the disco everywhere you go, in everything you do.
Pocket Dispatch from the School Yard
Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash
On the school yard, at drop-off and pick-up, I meet more like-minded adults at once than anywhere else. The last time I met so many people around my age and at my same stage of life, I was a freshman in college.
I am an extrovert, and I crave social interaction at this scale. Especially after two years of pandemic.
But this mass networking mixer is different from most. The parents at school don’t enjoy the anonymity that marks similar occasions and affords a person the opportunity of reinventing oneself. Normally, entering a new context and meeting a lot of new people at once allows us to roll all the hard lessons and heartbreak of our life, combined with our bitter compromises and character aspirations into the silhouette of a new, better self.
Instead, at the school yard, our banal daily struggle is laid bare. We benefit from instant camaraderie among other parents of children the same age, but at the price of any opportunity to reinvent ourselves. The context of school drop-off on a gray morning, where we shiver in the damp air, sober and under-caffeinated, shows us publicly struggling to cajole our children into clothing and shoes on time for school. Struggling to grasp our careers while milking every waking minute for productivity, or spending it caring for others, always weighing the costs of working and often concluding we pay a premium for the privilege.
How can we be expected to talk about the best new albums, or our own art, when someone has forgotten a backpack, a lunch, a pair of gloves? Now someone is crying. Is that one of mine? No. Wait, where are my kids? Shit. It’s time to line up.
I’m not ungrateful to have so much company who can relate to my most taxing moments of the day. We form a supportive community, we commiserate, we make friends alongside our kids.
But this is the kind of kinship I crave elsewhere, at a different hour. I want to meet people at this rate and form bonds this deep with musicians at shows, in bars and clubs, artists at galleries, writers and poets in bookstores. I want to relate to artists as artists and en masse.
Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash
Take, for example, a recent evening at Cafe Mustache. A friend interviews bands in front of a live audience there every month for her podcast on mental health in the music industry. I’ve wanted to go for years but only made it for the first time this week. I scanned the audience and saw young and queer creatives everywhere. I doubt I can relate to any of them over much in the realm of traditional life topics. But we all struggle to balance those lives with making things and putting them out into the world. I’m confident we could talk for a long time about wondering if we’re good enough to carry on bothering sometimes, or whether there’s still any point to making anything when we live on such a noisy internet.
There are the people I want to find. I just have to keep burning the candle at both ends, and melting it at a few spots in the middle, to meet them where they are.
Pocket Dispatch from a Lockout
“Corner. Hey Paul, are we out of that Kenyan dark roast?”
“Hmm? Uhh… yeah.”
“K. Th-.”
“Wait a sec. You better get in here.”
“There are customers, dude. I’ve got a line—“
“Fuck em.“
“Oh… K?”
“You guys still with us back there?” Some douche in an button-down shirt is in the back of the stock room, trying to hold the attention of the rest of the staff. My manager, Paul, who never looks worried, is trying to look at the douche and the exit at the same time. He looks like he’s thinking fast.
“Anyway, you’ll all be paid for your final shifts today. All stores will cease operations effective immediately, and you’re dismissed as soon as you can close the store. I’ll be on site to answer questions and take the keys when you’re done.”
I look at Paul and mouth WTF? but he’s already shaking his head and closing his eyes slowly. My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Paul, who is standing right next to me.
closing all stores. Now. we have to get customers out, then leave.
My eyes go wide, then narrow. I turn around and push the swinging door hard. I don’t say corner. I can hear the douche’s voice rise behind me, then get muffled by the door. “Hey, we’re not done here. Hey!”
“OK,” I tell my customer, who is clearly doing Pissed Texting on his phone, ducking back under the bar. “I have bad news and I have bad news.”
He makes the same face at me I made at Paul’s text.
“We’re out of that Kenyan dark roast, and the store is closing.”
“Can I still get my coffee?”
My eyes blur and my mind goes somewhere else for a second.
“Brother, the way I see it,” I say, glancing halfway over my shoulder as I pull a coffee cup from the stack and start filling it, “You can have anything you want.”
I hand him his coffee with a muffin from the case, then pour myself a Hopewell Going Places Hazy IPA. It is 7:30 AM, our busiest time of the day, and my line is now 10 people deep.
As angry as I am over losing my job, it suddenly dawns on me I get to tell people to get the fuck out while simultaneously demonstrating generosity and benevolence with stolen goods. Whatever corporate leech or VC bros own the inventory on the shelves surrounding me, I figure they won’t send anyone around to collect it until long after these customers and I are gone.
I turn the baked goods case around on the counter with its back door open.
“Help yourself, folks. What else can I get started for you?”
After about 5 minutes I’m having the best time ever. Most customer interactions go something like this:
“Did I hear you say you guys are closing?” “More like someone is closing us.” “Has this been coming for a while? Did you know about it?” “Nope. Just found out myself. Help yourself to something from the cooler on your way out.” “Can I take these flowers,” one woman asks. “Ma’am, I insist.”
But of course it was too good to last. Eventually the douche in the button-down appears next to me at the counter, puts a few fingers on my elbow, and says quietly to my ear that I need to send the customers out of the store and clock out. Paul is standing behind him, looking bored. There’s no fight left to have, and in this sobering moment I realize that if I’m being honest for once, we are bourgeois vs. bourgeois. There’s no struggle here, no injustice, no privation. There will be no uprising, no martyrdom. We are college educated baristas working in a chain of overpriced convenience stores, acting like basic business is denying us our rights somehow.
“Sure, Brian,” I say to the buttons on his shirt. “My name is Sean, act-” “HEY EVERYONE, SORRY, BUT BRIAN HERE SAYS YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. STORE’S CLOSED.”
The collective scoff from the line, which still stretches to the door, is one of the only crumbs of satisfaction I’ll savor in this experience. Most people turn around and leave quickly. One guy grabs a tray of our terrible sushi on his way out, and Sean, Paul, and I all pretend not to notice—our first and final action as a collaborative unit.
“Thanks,” Sean says to me. “I need to make a call while you guys close down and clock out.” “Sure thing, Brian,” I say.
It’s just me and Paul at the counter now. The front door is locked and the closed sign is up. Paul unlocks it every few minutes for an employee to leave.
It’s now 8:15. I’ve had about three beers.
“I’m fucking taking this rosé,” I say to no one in particular, mostly Paul. “Fuck The Man, man. This is… this is the people’s rosé.”
Paul gives me a look that’s a mix of bemusement and pity. He’s a lot older, like 30, and even though we’re not friends, sometimes he treats me like his little brother.
One time my actual older brother walked in while our parents were out of town and I was having a party. Or at least I’d tried to throw a party, but the only people who came were a couple dudes from the newspaper, and we hadn’t been able to figure out the pony keg he scored for us.
I remember him giving me the same look, like I couldn’t even get into trouble right.
“Amen brother. Grab me one too. Then get the fuck out. I’ll text you later. We gotta find new jobs.”
Classic big brother shit.
Pocket dispatch from host stand (bouncer diary)
Party of six. Pre-gamers at their final stop. Two of the girls drop their IDs when I card them. They’re carrying snacks and open containers, which I confiscate.
They’re celebrating a birthday, the answer to a question I didn’t ask. One of the boys, probably late 20’s, sizes me up. I pretend not to notice and say have a nice night as I click my counter six times, turn to the next group, and hold up my hand.
A lot of the art of my job is how you stop people. The nuances of that initial interaction set the tone for the whole exchange.
First I make the traditional stop sign, then I twist it in a sort of half queen’s wave as I make a little smile with one corner of my mouth. “How we doing tonight?” It tells people I’m in charge but makes them feel like maybe I’m happy to see them.
If the guest feels any sting of rejection, a fight’s begun whether or not either of you was looking for one. I can usually feel that heat radiating off them before they do, right when they step up to my stand. But I take the temperature of the situation again as I check each ID. I look them in the eye after looking over the card. They think I’m checking they match the card, but I’ve already done that. I’m looking them in the eye for a flash of indignation, or worse, a cold, dead stare and a clenched jaw. Those are the boys to look out for: more liquid confidence than sense, and plenty to prove. Usually there’s nothing more on board than a pocket knife and twitchy hands, but now and then there’s a gun in the waistband. Those types like clubs, so I see more guns at work than on the street.
The next group is a foursome. Some kind of double date, but casual. Too casual. The guys have ill-fitting jeans and their untucked button shirts are ten years late. At my last job, the crowd was more curated and I could turn people away for bad style. But I got the ax when new owners took over, and I didn’t have the kind of savings that would have allowed me to be choosy.
I card then and wave them in, soul patches and all. …
The truth is some people are already looking for a fight when they get up in the morning, it just doesn’t come out of them until they’re drunk and standing in line to get into my club. They swallow the feeling all day, go to work, fight traffic, take shit from their bosses and co-workers, then come home tired and try to shake it off for a night out so they can let loose. What exactly they’re letting loose is a surprise sometimes.