I cannot lie in the bed you made

Since I was 16, I’ve been fascinated by tip jars, by Change. The owner of the ice cream store’s husband, since he made it clear he was the one who had the say, didn’t want us to have tip jars. He said it made us look tacky. It made the people think they weren’t paying us enough. I placed one on the counter when he wasn’t around. I watched people shove the change I handed back to them into the jar.

I became a barista at 20, at a cafe where the owner acknowledged she could hardly pay us so please make the jar noticeable. I made enough tips to buy expensive bed sheets. I felt like I was preparing for a new love to enter my bed, my life. I bought matching hand towels for the bathroom. I dreamt about someone I had yet to meet wiping their hands on them before meeting me back in my bedroom. Instead of Changing my habits, I kept returning to someone I should not have, whose story was completed. I told myself it was alright because I was going to his house and he wasn’t coming to mine, soiling my new sheets.

I remember standing in his bathroom with no towel to dry my hands. I met him back in his bedroom, water dripping from my hands and onto the floor. I raised my hands above his head, letting water drip onto his sheets.

“You have no towels,” I told him.

He pushed my hands to the side, entrapping them in his.

“I wasn’t expecting you back.”

So you are fine living without towels? I would have said to him now but I didn’t say then.

I was sick often during my early twenties. I associate sickness, now, with lack of honesty, of authority. I got headaches that pulsed behind my eyebrows. I brought a peppermint oil stick to work instead of quitting and finding something that worked better for me. I dropped oregano oil into my water bottles. I believed that nothing could work better for me, that I just needed to leave everything and everyone while I still didn’t want places to change or for people to leave me.

My mom visited me during this time and I cried to her about my painful headaches. I told her that I needed to visit a chiropractor. I was watching those videos, hearing strangers crack and moan. That should be me. I don’t know what’s happening but I cannot adjust it myself. She listened to me cry. She put on a guided meditation and laid a warm towel over my eyes. She rubbed my feet. I quit that job soon after she left. I stopped seeing him. My headaches dissipated.

At that time, I had a friend who lived with her boyfriend even though he seemed unaware that they lived together. She called me one evening at the beginning of summer.

“I ran away,” she told me.

She told me she was nervous. She took all her towels from the bathroom, all the products, the shampoo and conditioner for they were never his. She took her lights from the living room, her pans from the kitchen.

“I have never done anything like this.”

“Do you need a place to stay?” I asked.

She didn’t. She had already reserved a coach at another’s friend’s house. I texted her for updates. She never heard from him as she waited by her phone all night. She drove back to him in the morning where she discovered him in bed, still asleep, empty beer bottles on the nightstand and pizza box on the floor. He never knew that she packed up and ran away so she moved back in seamlessly.

I didn’t see her again until the end of summer. She had chopped her hair and dyed it brown. She said the summer had been hard; they almost broke up. She almost moved into a new place with a Katy but didn’t and things are better.

She told me this with her hands clenched on a paper coffee cup. They were pale and shaking, clenched so hard on an item that must have been empty because she took sips after every sentence. She told me about the camping trip they took. She said it was nice to get away, to get some rest, and started in on a comment about paying for the gas. She never finished the sentence because she began to cough.

She pressed her hand to her throat and rubbed up and down. She asked for water and I pointed to the cup I had slid across the table. She thanked me, then apologized because she thought she was getting sick because so was her boyfriend.

“This is the bed you made,” a man once said to me when I cried to him after I kissed him when he wasn’t the man I should have been kissing.

I used to be a liar. With the amount I mention it, it could be assumed I’m proud of it. I’m not. I think I mention it often as a way to check in on the bed I’m making. I used to find honesty difficult because it made people upset. But if it does, why am I with the people I am with? Why am I doing the thing I am doing?

At 24, I became a bartender. There were no tip jars at the bar but tips became more legitimate there. I spent the first month not knowing how to open tins. I passed them to any coworker next to me and hung my head while they easily cracked it open.

I began to learn the spots to hit. I memorized all the little measurements. I asked questions to my coworkers. They recommended books, gave me advice, and taught me about rhythm. I watched as they gradually got fired, got discovered in the walk-in, drunk. All I wanted was to be stronger, have answers.

I’ve worked in multiple bars since then. By now, it should be easy to understand the problems of working in a restaurant or bar that is trying to be more than a restaurant or bar. This recent restaurant and bar was a front to sell perfumes. Fragrances, they called them. It’s more gender neutral. The head bartender made cocktails with similar notes to the scents. Paradiso was tropical, with the taste of passionfruit and pineapple. We were encouraged to bring the tray of perfumes to guests who pointed to the menu and said, “What does this mean–Fragrance Cocktails?”

“Another day in Paradiso!” one of the barbacks and I used to say to each other when I entered the kitchen on Saturdays for a service bar shift. He would already be there, at the station to the left of the entrance, juicing limes or lemons.

“Do you need anything else?” he would ask while he brought me more rocks glasses, more Collins, more coupes throughout the shift.

“An exit.”

“When you find it, let me know!”

Austin’s bday September 25, I have written in my phone. That’s when he’ll be turning 21. I wanted to remember it so I could get him something, probably a larger bag of snacks than he picks up for himself at the corner store. I would get him every flavor of Arizona Iced Teas and every variation of Reese’s peanut butter cups. It would be my way to tell him how much I appreciate him, that he is the only one who sees all of it, can see through it. But that won’t be happening because he walked out of his shift on Friday and I walked out of mine on Saturday.

I knew my end was approaching when I heard myself as I dropped off the tray. “If you like your drink so much, you can smell like it, too!” Or, “If you like the way this smells, you have the option to drink it!” Ha ha, me and the guests would laugh together. But sometimes they wanted to buy one. Sometimes they wanted to smell like their drink without spilling it on themselves so I would say, “Yeah, that one’s nice.”

I cannot lie and say that it isn’t a beautiful bar. I hear guests say to my coworkers and coworkers say to guests, “Not a bad office!” Ha ha.

I’ve never worked in an actual office. I was a teacher for a year but that was hardly an office. There was one large table full of computers and one guy named Greg who was always spilling food and drink on his keyboard. He once followed me home from a Halloween party in his Mario costume and told me how I moved to Boston at the worst time. There used to be so many better spots before Covid shut them down. Now there’s nothing so he feels sorry for me. Still, he invited me to his favorite ice cream shop.

“I thought there was nothing good here now?”

“Besides this one place.”

I told him, No, I want to go home. He hung his head then asked if I would wait for him while he unzipped himself from his Mario costume. Apparently he was getting hot.

A student followed me home a few months after this. He waited for me outside the school. I walked fast while he told me that he was going to re-enroll so I had to be his teacher again. Ha ha. I ducked into an unknown building that I said was my home and cried in the entryway. The next day I reported him to the school director. She told me he’s not allowed to re-enroll. She told me that if I see him waiting for me outside the building, I need to come back inside and wait with her. She said we take this seriously and she did. I never had to deal with him again.

I posted a story in February that mentioned reporting a cook for harassment. The cook did not send me anything more because I blocked him so I had no new incidents to cite. I spent the remainder of winter, all of spring, and the beginning of summer dodging him. He would stand in the middle of a walkway and not move if he saw me approaching. My service bar shifts on Saturday are close to the kitchen so I have continued to hear his voice, his laughs, his complaints. He grumbles about having to cook food. He says he can’t wait for the day he doesn’t work here anymore.

I thought I was alright. I needed a job to get me through the winter so I told myself I was alright. But every day I came to work, I heard him complain, all the cooks complain, servers complain. No one wanted to be there. But the money is so good, they’d say. On Saturdays I was making $16.50/hour plus a cut of their tips while I shook cocktails for invisible guests and complained. I complained to the servers and to Austin. Austin was my voice. He yelled at the cooks for being stupid. He said the words I could never speak. Management found him volatile. I saw him as a beacon.

“They all got worms in their brain,” he would say to me as he looked me in the eyes with striking clarity. “Worms for brains.”

During the last week, I started to cry at work. I told myself I was tired. I was working too much. Austin looked at me as I held a napkin to my eyes while my coworker did all the bar set-up.

“When this place burns down, I’m going to griddy on it,” he said.

When I walked into my shift on Saturday, Austin was not there to greet me. The kitchen loomed large. I found myself stuck at Austin’s station, at the empty stainless steel island.

“What happened?” I asked one of my managers.

“You’ll have to ask him,” she said. “He just left.”

It’s common in food service for coworkers to come and go so I have gotten used to it. But this one hurt. The kitchen loomed larger. I heard all their voices, their laughter. My coworker helped me set up my bar, poured syrups into glass containers, while I felt myself getting smaller. I started to cry and my manager met me outside after I heaved.

“What’s going on?” she asked me with her arms crossed over her chest. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing has happened. I’m still uncomfortable.”

“I’m not sure what I can do for you. I don’t think any of them are bad guys. I just think they’re young and dumb.”

I blinked back at her. The other manager met us outside. Two women looked at me then looked at each other.

“Am I where I want to be forever? No!” one of them said. “But am I having panic attacks when I walk into work? No. So if you can’t fix this, if you can’t leave this at home, then you should put your two weeks in.”

The other one nodded.

“What I was telling her earlier, too, and maybe you can agree with this, but nothing is going to change here. So.”

The other one nodded.

“I mean, even look at the way you’re standing.”

I looked down at my hands holding my water bottle between my legs. I felt my shoulders hunched over, my cheeks stained.

“I need to get my stuff and go home,” I told them.

“Oh no,” one of them said. “We’ll get someone to bring your stuff out for you.”

“Yeah, don’t let them see you like that.”

Maybe I’d prefer it if they did. Give them my red eyes, my resign. But my coworker came out with my bag and hugged me while I told her that I’m never coming back. I cannot be at a place where Change doesn’t exist. She gave me Austin’s number so I could text him, tell him that I also left.

“You found the exit!” he responded.