Pocket Dispatch from 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 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 check ID’s 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.
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,” Paul said. “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 “Flying to America” by Marco Parisi
Was the soft pounding sound coming from the music, or the apartment above? Or was it inside my head? It was gentle enough, not unpleasant, but persistent and mysterious. My suspicion aroused, I strained obsessively to hear it.
The strings washed over the pounding sound, and over me. They could have been acoustic or synthetic. The slid up and down in a bath of reverb, making small waves, evoking an emotional response that surprised me. It was sad—I realized I was mourning something—but I welcomed it as the first strong feeling I’d had in days.
I closed my eyes and imagined the landscape this music evoked. I imagined the environment that inspired it, and the artist in the space where he created it. The title describes an international flight, and the artwork looks like a view of clouds from above, or maybe a view of sand in soft focus, rippled by yesterday’s high tide.
These images gave way to a montage of my own memories, real and imagined, of making art. Strong emotions giving way to dramatic expression. I remember it in colors and slices of moments, silenced and flitting by so quickly that some are indecipherable.
My life had recently stopped feeling like my own; my memory no longer autobiographical.