Waitress

Dear Stella,

At The All-American in NYC, I was surrounded by wait staff and bartenders who wanted to be something else. Jessica would boom out Beyonce and Mary J. Blige songs every time she’d swing by the service bar for her cokes and sprites. Carl dreamed of recording an album and getting the fuck outta that place.

Isn’t it funny? I thought, Here are servers wanting to be artists, and I’m an artist aspiring to be a server. I’m on the backward track, wanting to be good at what they seem to do effortlessly. I felt comfortable, then, in my notion of myself as a writer doing this crazy thing for the “experience” and the “material.”

Things feel different from here. My novel has been out in the world for months, and no publisher seems to want it. A story I sent out to an editor who specially requested it from me was rejected, and I can’t remember the purpose of keeping a blog. Reasons why I shouldn’t take these rejections personally circle around me, filled with words like “recession,” and “layoffs,” and “the end of the book.” But I can’t really feel them.

Instead I feel as if Who I Am is a waitress—a waitress who is treated badly, is knee-deep in debt, and who aspires to be a writer.

love,
Stephanie

Upon further reflection

Hey Steph,

I’ve given it a tremendous lot of thought and come to the conclusion that my manager was right:

I am a sissy.

In actuality, I don’t actually have it in me to fuck up people who mess with me … Well, barring putting me or my loved ones in mortal physical danger.

I have a big heart and boundless love for humanity, flaws and all.

I’m cool with that.

Love and miss you!

love,

me

A quote I like

Dear Stephanie,

I came across this quote (an epigraph to Part 1 of The Tender Bar) and want to share it with you (even though–you’ve read that book, right? so you know this quote?). Anyway:

“”Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.” (Elias Canetti)

I like it.

love,

me

Something about reading

Dear Stephanie,

I think I read too much. I’ve been worrying about my reading-to-writing ratio. On the one hand, I know that I need to read in order to write. I don’t write well or enough when I’m not reading. There’s something almost addictive and compulsive about the way that reading inspires me to write. “Here are words on paper. See how the eye moves along them. It cannot stop. See how the brain creates strings of words. Quickly! Record the strings!” But on the other hand, it’s dangerous. If the book is good, I get lost in it. I can’t stop until I finish, which leaves me little time to do my own writing.

Also, I fear that I read so much that half of what I read goes right through me. I couldn’t even tell you the names of all the books I’ve read over the past month. I feel almost ravenous, gluttonous. I consume them so quickly then—poof!—they’re gone. They may be burrowed in my unconscious, though, acting on me in ways that I don’t know. I suppose. Like how you can eat a big bag of potato chips and still be hungry, but then your pants are too tight a month later, proving that those chips definitely stuck with you even if they didn’t make your belly feel full.

I’ve even gotten into the bad habit of starting books but then abandoning them when they’re boring or otherwise unsatisfying. I never used to do that! I always stuck it through to the bitter end. Not just because I buy books rather than borrowing them from the library. It wasn’t about the money. I just felt…I don’t know exactly—maybe that because I’d made a commitment to that book, I should see it through. I shouldn’t be a quitter. I should be fair to the book. I should give it a chance, get through the whole thing before I make a judgment. I mean, you never know when it might surprise you at the end and change how you read and experienced the whole.

That’s what happened with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, if I’m getting the title right. I can’t recall exactly (it was probably 50 books ago easy), but I seem to remember that something happened at the end that changed my reading of the whole in a not entirely unpleasant way. It’s a lot like life, actually. You might think you know and understand something, someone, yourself even, then you receive information that makes you read the whole of the past anew.

I guess I lost my patience, though. It became tiresome to slog through something unpleasant with the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, something magical would happen at the end to imbue the whole experience with pleasure and meaning. It happens sometimes, but it’s rare. For a long time, I’ve had the bad habit of staying too long at the party, of trying to create meaning when perhaps there’s no material to work with, or not enough anyway.

Plus, sometimes the magical thing at the end is of the negative variety. This happened with My Sister’s Keeper and Atonement, two books I hate with “the white hot intensity of a thousand suns,” as Diane from Cheers once said of Sam. I felt grotesquely manipulated at the end of those two books though in different ways, and this made me angry.

My Sister’s Keeper was, I’m sorry, just stupid. I was irritated at the author’s blatant attempt to manipulate my emotions through her highly contrived ending. It was like she was trying to force me to come to a certain conclusion, and while this can be said of any and every writer, her attempts were so clumsily and transparently executed that I felt offended, actually, that she wasted my precious time with her foolishness. I mean, give me some credit! Don’t insult my intelligence! At least be artful about it, be sneaky. Something.

I liked Atonement well enough. Until the author pulled the rug out from under me at the end. That book actually made me terribly upset, sunk me into such a deep pit of despair at what I perceived to be the author’s statement on the complete absence of justice and meaning in the world (even if it’s true, who wants to hear that?!) that I had to quickly, quickly begin another book to wash the bad taste out of my soul. I needed more words, crafted to lead to an entirely different outcome, an entirely other view of the world, preferably of the light and humorous variety, to get me past the emptiness Atonement left me with. I wondered how in the hell this book became so popular. How did it not lead to mass depression, a rise in suicide rates and prescription drug usage? Maybe it did. Maybe the author was hired by the makers of Prozac or something.

Or perhaps I’m just out of touch with humanity.

Anyway. I’m off to the bookstore now. I’ll try (as always) to restrain myself—one book at a time, or at least one book of a given genre at a time. I keep lists, you know, of books that I might like to read next. I usually lose them, but then I take another trip to the bookstore, and—isn’t it something?—I find all new titles to tempt me.

Love,

me

Creative Crisis

Dearest Stella,

I miss you. As you’ve told me, you’re taking a break from the blog, and I feel your absence profoundly.

I have thought about writing all week. I have tried to write. Without you on the other end, I can’t remember how to put sentences together. Nothing feels right. Everything is jumbled. The tenuous writing contract with the self has once again been revealed.

When I write, I imagine you listening, and I let myself live in the fantasy, I suppose, that my words might mean something to you, that I might matter. This is the big difference between the Idea of Audience and a specific person to whom one writes.

One of the many things I love about you is that you listen in order to try to understand, not to fashion a tightly wound argument or to show off your knowledge of such and such. We talk and write to share and learn. You make me think; you keep me engaged with the work of living. I look forward to your blog posts like Christmas morning. What will you show me today about this world in which I live? What will you make me think about? What will you change about the day’s make-up so that I discover it anew?

Dawn has been trying to get her students to understand the power of a creative crisis. Seasoned writers know that crises are part of the work we do and that they are necessary for a writer’s growth. We are as much psychological warriors as we are craftsmen.

And yet, each crisis feels as if it is the end of the road, even though each one before felt like the end and it wasn’t.

This crisis, too, feels giant, irrevocable. Yet even as the questions loom— Will our project together end? Will I write again? I know I must find a way to keep this going. Without writing, I lose faith in the everyday moments of my life. The big questions become bigger, and they swallow me. What is the point of bartending if I’m not writing about it and trying to understand the bigger picture? If I am just working and sleeping and using the money from working to pay for the house and gas and electric in the house in which I sleep and then which I leave to go to work?

I have to believe that the everyday has meaning, or rather, I have to do the work of making it mean.

Or what then?

When I suffered from paralyzing depression a few years ago, and my “work” was trying to get out of bed or brush my teeth once a day, one of the things that happened is that the external world was stripped of its resonance. When I’m well and I look at a tree, for example, it’s not just the thing—“tree”—but a kind of visual echo-chamber set off by the particular shade of orange or the slight bow of branches or the bright or muted light that falls upon them. As Virginia Woolf showed us about words in “Passing Russell Square,” these echoes, or non-verbal associations, multiply endlessly. I can neither record nor even consciously articulate the echoes, nor would I necessarily want to. I suck them up like a sponge to water; they expand me on a cellular level, each cell coming alive, fat and succulent with echoes of a life richly lived.

Depression depletes the thing of its resonance. All that nourishment, all that dimension—gone. The thing is revealed as only the thing. Tree. No life attached. And not just the tree, everything—the mug that holds my tea, the faux leopard print blanket that cradles me on the couch, my own skin, others’ skin. Empty shells, hollowed out of meaning.

Let’s fast forward to now, after battling the abyss, after making learning how to Live (with a capital “L!”) my “work,” I re-gained access to the echo-chamber. Miraculous!

The catch, of course, is that the underbelly of nothingness is also always there. Once you see the world stripped bare, the image lingers. Once you see that meaning is an illusion, what then? Some never come back from the vision of nothingness. Sometimes they can’t; sometimes they choose “truth” over “illusion”; sometimes human activity appears too shallow to be re-engaged in. I choose illusion. But not in a Matrix-I-choose-the-blue-pill desire-to-be-ignorant kind of way. No, I choose the red pill and I choose the work of making something out of nothing. It’s the hardest challenge of my life; I could say it’s the challenge of my life.

So today, I choose to write, no matter how difficult. No matter how stupid or worthless it feels, no matter that today I write into the abyss, against the echo of your absence.

I want to let you know how important you are to me. Because I don’t think you know it. No, that’s not true. I think you know it, but I don’t think you get it. How much the world needs you.

All this is to say, take your time, my dear friend. I’m not going anywhere. I will be here to listen when you are ready to write. I believe in you. I believe in us and our Project. This is not just a blog or a book we are making, but our lives. And yours matters to me.

love,
Stephanie

Yet another problem I can’t solve

My dearest Stephanie,

I don’t agree with your co-worker either.

Surprise, surprise.

I very much doubt that you could desensitize yourself, but even if you could, how would that be helpful, to you or anyone else? Would it be helpful to become a shallow shell of yourself, of what you’re capable of? I just can’t believe it. In fact, I think it would be quite tragic. Your capacity for empathy is what (among so many other things) is beautiful and inspiring about you. Though I can see at times how it might also be like an auto-immune disorder where your body turns against itself, slowly destroying itself from the inside.

What to do?

Perhaps you remember that I volunteered at a nursing home a few years back. I wanted to give, to do something. I’d go in, read to the patients, and then go home a cry for a solid hour almost to the point of vomitting. God, it was so upsetting.

I’ll never, ever forget one woman who, when I entered her room, looked at me and wailed, “My daughter never comes to visit me. She lives so close, but she never comes. She told me she was going to come, but she didn’t. I asked her to, but she didn’t. Waaaa.”

Rule #3 was “don’t talk to patients about their families.” And you know me and rules, so I said, “Well I’m here now, and I’d like to read with you. Would you like that?”

The whole time, she was clutching a big, brown teddy bear. Substitute Baby Alive for the teddy bear, and I could just imagine my future.

It was emotional torture and probably a large part of why I stopped trying to quit smoking.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said to you when you noted, for the millionth time, that you don’t like my smoking. “But I don’t really need to live past, like, 60 or 65.”

“What’s the right way to take this?” you asked.

“Well I don’t have a death wish or anything. I just think longevity is over-rated.”

“Yes,” you said, “but when I imagined what we’d do in our 60s, I was imagining going on old-lady cruises, not visiting my friend Stella in the hospital hooked up to an oxygen tank.”

Haha. Good one. That made me laugh.

But seriously. I quit the nursing home.

For a long time, I felt so disappointed in myself. I couldn’t forgive myself. They don’t get to just stand up and walk out, I told myself. Why should you, you selfish fuck?

But still. I had to quit the nursing home.

I realize that I’m not going to save the world. I’m not going to stop time or triumph over death. I’m not going to bring about peace in the Middle East or end world hunger. I’m not going to find a cure for AIDS or cancer or heart disease. Nor will I cure depression or solve the financial crisis. I can’t even compel a single person to be more ethical or more kind or more courageous. Not unless that person really, really wants to in a deep committed place in him or herself.

Stop. Triumph. End. Cure. Solve. Compel. None of these verbs come close to what I can do, no matter how much I want to, no matter how earnestly I try.

The verb I favor is alleviate.

I’ve come to understand over the last year that some people like being around me. They don’t necessarily care to know me, for real—my interests, flaws, talents, potentialities. They just like having me around. They like that I smile and look them in the eye. They like that I say “please” and “thank you” and “have a great day.” They like that I take an interest in them even if they don’t take an interest in me. Maybe they feel my warmth, and it feels good to them.

Call in “the warm towel” effect.

I suppose I could call their interest in me mercenary, if I cared to.  I suppose it is, to some extent. It certainly drains me sometimes and leaves me with a deep sense of longing. But oddly, it doesn’t divest me of my good cheer and compassion. Maybe this is because I believe in each individual’s capacity for goodness (I really do, you know?). Maybe this is because I’ve found a way to translate these qualities into financial gain (i.e. big tips).

I think it’s terribly sad to lose the best part of yourself (for whatever reason), that part of yourself that can be open and real even when it’s hard and brings you pain. And usually, it does both because, in truth, really truly living means experiencing and surviving pain. Come to think of it, I do believe you’re the one who taught me that.

Surprise, surprise.

The thing I want to believe in the end is that my capacities for empathy and care and forgiveness alleviated someone’s suffering, even if it was just for one hour of one day, even if that suffering was, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant or (perhaps more to the point) inevitable. Maybe it’s the libertarian in me, but I’ve sort of lost interest in grand schemes. I’ve been called “too nice,” “too naïve,” “too innocent,” but I really don’t care. I only care that I hold onto my faith in the capacity for and value of a beautiful moment.

In this spirit, I decided to forgive myself. I’m not saying I don’t still get a little teary when I drive past the nursing home. But even though I couldn’t sustain it, for at least a moment, it made a difference.

Love,

Stella

The Empathy Problem

It seems the empathy problem has followed me to Hotel Bar. I thought I could lick it by ignoring the news, switching the channel during ASPCA commercials, and leaving teaching so I would no longer bring students’ problems home.

I have a delicate ecoskeleton. Unlike the cockroach, which can survive Armaggedon, one conversation with a person in duress and I wilt and crumble under the weight of their pain.

No matter that Susan Sontag says empathy (or sympathy, I believe) can actually be dangerous socially because it can trick us into believing we are doing something by feeling and keep us from acting.

My body doesn’t care for such logic, though, especially after eight hours of running around, sans food and water, when I am pushed to my mental and physical limits.

Many of Hotel Bar’s “guests” are visiting loved ones in the neighboring hospital. They stand out right away because of their tired, weary looks; often they slump over the table and look far into the distance. In contrast, university professors are engaged in lively discussion with other colleagues and businessmen look all too eager for conversation.

“I could buy two gallons of ice cream for the price of this one bowl of vanilla,” one mother said to her daughter and husband. It’s true, of course, the prices are outrageous. The next night the family was prepared. “I’d like the cheapest beer,” the dad said. He was angry from the start, but because I knew they were visiting his mother, who wasn’t doing well, instead of being annoyed I felt the empathy tug. Maybe it’s because I have no outlet for feeling here—there is no possible action feeling might lead to—that I became so focused on the ice cream. If only I gave them more ice cream. If only I didn’t charge them so much for it. I asked the other bartender if I was allowed to give them dessert on me.

“It’s a dangerous practice to get into,” he warned. “You’ll get in trouble, for starters, but more than that, you’ll feel this way a lot working here.” He told me about a woman who came to the bar every day while her husband was dying in the hospital. “She had 3 weeks left with him,” he said, “and I was the only person she could talk to. I felt like crying every day.”

“Pretend you’re a doctor,” he said. “You’ve got to desensitize yourself or you won’t survive.”

The story of my life, it seems. But I can’t desensitize and I’m not sure I would want to anyway, although I understand its value, believe me. I must be like this for a reason, though, right? True, I can feel things to the point of paralysis, but also, in the way the act of drawing makes one see subtle details in the world, feeling is my link to sight; through feeling, the world comes into sharp focus.

So, with the care and precision of a surgeon, I lay out the tools: fork, knife, spoon. I offer warm bread and creamy butter as a salve. Wine and vodka and lager are our anesthesia.

My regular, who has been coming for weeks now to visit her husband with “black lung,” tells me they put tubes in him today. I don’t know what tubes she’s talking about, but I know it can’t be good. There is nothing I can do for her, of course, so instead, I have her milk ready as soon as she sits down. I remember her burger is to be well done and that she likes mayonnaise and ketchup and ranch dressing. I exchange her ashtray for a clean one at least twice as she smokes. So that for at least an hour, during the only meal I know she will have all day, she can feel tended to.

And last night? After the man with Parkinson’s fell and hit his head against the floor, his wife watching helplessly from a distance?

Hours later, lying in bed, I could not stop crying. I thought about the margarita I had made for him. Was it good? Did he enjoy it? I could have made it better, couldn’t I have? Feeling is not enough, of course; Sontag is right. What good does it do to focus on the margarita?

What good is one small bartender crying in the dark for a stranger and his wife?

Party Slogan

Dearest Stephanie,

You know, I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with verbs. You’re quite right about them: verbs dictate the tone and tenor of experience. They can aid and abet the sneaky and manipulative. Verbs can infiltrate how you think, sometimes rather insidiously. Who can resist the power of Action (i.e. verbs)? You must have a very strong character indeed! At the very least, verbs can cause you to question your experience.

“He ignored me!” said my friend Kim, lamenting what she perceived to be insufficient attention paid her by her love interest at his birthday party. This is a familiar refrain. You might even call “He ignored me” her party slogan.

“Hmmm,” I replied. Did he ignore her? “I don’t think so,” I decided upon further reflection. “I believe he attended to all of his guests, you among them. He came over and talked to you and hugged you.”

Incidentally, they went home together at the end of the night, so I think we know whose interpretive skills we can trust here. I think we know whose verbs most accurately and precisely conveyed the action. The descriptive (attended, came over, talked, hugged) trumped the judgmental (ignored), just this once.

Like “no shoes, no service,” we might say, “no verb, no sentence.” In fact, verbs give you all the material you need to construct a sentence. For example:

“Run!”

Sure, it’s a command, but it’s still a sentence. It’s still a complete thought. It gives you everything you need to know.

A couple of years ago, I happened to be in Athens during election season for a cousin’s wedding. At the time, I was deep in the throes of writing my dissertation and preoccupied with the strange chameleon-like quality of words. I had been thinking about how a single amorphous idea (event, thing) takes on a distinct shape and can morph from malignant to benign and back again all when made corporeal in words.

What is a word if not a physical manifestation of being?

If I run a red light, how do I render it when I tell you (or perhaps a police officer who pulls me over) about it? Do I confess it? Confide it? Concede it?

My memory falters somewhat, but as I recall, the election slogans went something like this:

New Democracy Party:

We must unify to achieve change and progress for our future.

(written under a close-up head shot of the party’s leader, an anodyne, fatherly-looking figure complete with receding hairline, smiling benevolently into the camera)

Socialist Party:

Change, unity, and progress for the future.

(written under the image of a rising—or I suppose, could it be, setting?—sun)

Communist Party:

Unite. Change. Progress.

(written under traditional communist imagery—a red, muscular arm ending in a raised fist, rendered in sharp edges)

I mean, it was almost funny.

The communist slogan was a command, a threat almost. Three (the magic number) actions must be undertaken, preferably in this order. Nevermind by whom. See the fist? The Communist Party is about action! The Communist Party makes sure things happen!

What was I (or any voting citizen) to make of the sentence fragment that constituted the Socialist Party’s campaign slogan? Verbs became nouns. Action was reduced to thing, floating about disembodied-like with nary an actor or an action to latch onto. Who is going to do what? And why? And to what end? So many questions.

The New Democracy Party’s slogan was a full sentence in which I was implicated, suggesting: I’m important and necessary because we’re all in this together. Nothing will happen (“progress” and “change”—see how the Communist’s action is the New Democracy’s thing, their goal?) unless “we” commit to the action (“unify”). It’s “our” future, after all!

Such a lovely thought.

The Socialist Party was the lame duck, as limp and ineffectual as their sentence fragment, losing both the election and a number of parliament seats. And while the New Democracy party won the day, the Communists experienced record gains in that election.

Love,

Stella

It’s All in the Verbage

Photo by Stephanie Hopkins

Photo by Stephanie Hopkins

Dear Stella,

It begins as pure energy, created first with words, like gossip or rumor. Is something going to happen? Twitter forecasts potential meet-ups. Local newscasters speak clichéd truths, “We are honored to be chosen for the G20.” The buzz comes first. Then the thing.

But what is the thing?

Is it the image of a young man—anarchist!—in black kicking a smoking canister of tear gas back toward its thrower? Is it the uneasy tension between cops and protesters three blocks from my house? Is it the thing that happens to the body in proximity to such tension? The pin-prickling fear and excitement that such tension creates?

Dawn and I stay in that first day (Thursday)—from laziness? From caution? From the inaction that stems from questioning our own motives? Is ours the rubber-necking impulse, we wonder aloud. The impulse to slow down, drive by, and stare? We reminisce about our own protest days, what it felt like to believe in protesting’s effectiveness. The fervor of 18 year olds rushing into the world to create change.

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t even know what the G20 was, never mind what the protests were all about. But still, I feel something. An accumulating energy seeking a kind of clarity, the unborn urge seeking language to define it.

By day two (Friday), the thing has become the thing told as well as the thing that happens. It is impossible, of course, to distinguish between the two. These days, especially, an event consists not only of what occurs, but layered perceptions of what occurs. Language—through twitter, facebook, news, word of mouth—shapes the thing, not in retrospect, but as it’s happening.

The news replays the same image (anarchist in black kicking tear gas canister) over and over again. They say, “This isn’t as bad as it could get. It’s been much worse in other places.” Expressing relief? Down playing potential violence? Challenging protestors to step it up? This is nothing; you are nothing; no one can hear you.

Dawn and I ride our bikes downtown to watch/participate/bear witness to “the people’s rally.” I shouldn’t be biking anywhere, as I’ve got a 12 hour shift in a few hours, but I can’t stay home.

At the rally, people take pictures of people taking pictures. The riot police line up and it appears, at times, as if they are posing for a photo shoot. A massive tank rolls by, a helmeted head sticking out its top. I search for faces behind the helmets. As always, I am on the prowl for the human. It is hard to find in the you tube images of head-to-toe riot gear, cops marching like harbingers of the apocalypse. But I glimpse it in the cop who has let his robot posture down, hands resting on a relaxed belly. I wonder what he might be thinking. If he is tired. What his orders were. If he is scared. If he is afraid of himself. Of what he might do if shit breaks out.

A man on a bike with a love-bubble-machine zips in front of us. Bubbles float through the air. A cop swats a bubble with his hand. Is he annoyed? Playful? I can’t tell.

We pass a single policeman in regular gear, not part of the doomsday squad. “Everything’s a mess,” he says. “Good luck getting anywhere.” He has a nice face, this cop, and I notice he paces back and forth. “I’m going on 28 hours of no sleep,” he says, appropos of nothing.

Events will become stories, stories will solidify into narratives. Perhaps I want to bear witness to the time before the narratives take over and I, too, forget about the messy “real,” what slips out of our linguistic grasp, like those moments of waiting for something to happen, to which each of us brings our own expectations, fears, desires, nostalgias. They float in the air, spinning, gaining momentum until… POW! – some noise, some yell, and suddenly the thick cover cracks and things start to happen, crazy things, that then become the things that people talk about, as if all we were waiting for all along was some kind of clarity.

Getting shot with a rubber bullet is clear. Breaking a cop car window is clear. Now the city has something to fear. Now the protesters have something to mobilize against. Now the cops have something to justify.

That’s what verbs do—they cut through ambiguity and give shape to actions, provide an irresistible clarity. The cops shot students; protesters broke glass. Can we say the cops assaulted? Can we say the protesters provoked? The stronger the verb, the more severe the clarity of action, and ironically, the more questionable the truth. We have entered the Land of Fox News, though to be fair, isn’t Fox News just doing more visibly what all news does? “Police forced to use weapons against protesters,” and there you go, a massively complicated dynamic reduced to a single skewed verb.

What really happened when police gassed and shot students in a Pitt building? What really happened when a Boston Market (gasp!) was vandalized? The closer we get to naming what happened, the further I feel from the possibility of knowing.

Friday night I go from girl on bike to bartender, from “the people” to the ambassadors’ circle. The Prime Minister of Australia is celebrating the end of the G20 by watching a rugby game with 40 of his peeps in my bar.

A helicopter hovers overhead. Riot cops block the next street. A teenage boy, who I waited on earlier with his family, saw cops shoot protestors in front of the hotel.

A string of black government cars passes the riot police, heads toward the hotel. Secret Service Men who I served earlier this week when they were just men at the bar (pleasant and likable) strategize for the Prime Minister’s arrival. They make sure the back door to the bar locks.

A filthy girl slips through the front doors and into the bathroom. 10 minutes later, a filthy young man heads to the bathroom. I hear him say to someone as he passes, “They just open-fired onto my best friend.” I am not about to turn them away from using the bathroom. I may physically be on the inside, I may be in uniform now, but I am still me. No more protesters come, though, and later I hear that the hotel security chased them away.

Soon, the Prime Minister is here. He drinks an Aussie beer brought especially for him. This group is fun, vivacious, sweet. There is an abundance of cake. I wonder what is happening two blocks away, what I will read tomorrow. The People’s Protest. Who are the people? Surely the dirty kids looking for a clean bathroom. Surely the boy too young to smoke who witnessed his first police violence. Surely the secret service man whose wife in North Carolina awaits his return. Surely the riot police, somewhere inside their gear, going on very little sleep and some clear or ambiguous notions of duty, perhaps also fear, adrenaline. Surely the Prime Minister, quiet in his red sweater as he watches the game. Surely the other bartenders. And me, finding myself in the middle of a life, this life, messy and not at all the place I intended to be, but here I am nonetheless, at the intersection of a whole host of random events. Me, ready to bear witness to these undocumented and perhaps undocumentable moments, and (always) what happens inside—to face the self, whatever comes.

love,
Stephanie

Photo by Stephanie Hopkins

Thanks for being my warm towel

My dearest Stephanie,

A couple of nights ago at the bar, an older woman sat consoling her younger friend. Apparently, the younger woman is a two-time cancer survivor (and mother of four young children) who had been told that her cancer might be back. For quite some time, they were the only two at the bar, and though I tried to make myself scarce, keep myself occupied with my endless little tasks, you know how it is—even if you don’t want to eavesdrop on people’s conversations, you can’t help but overhear in such a small space.

At one point, the older woman turned to me (it’s entirely possible that I looked visibly upset) and said, “Did you ever have this experience as a child? You’d get out of the bathtub, and whoever it was—maybe your mother or father or grandmother—would wrap you in a big, warm towel, and you’d feel like you were safe? That’s what’s friends do—we’re that big, warm towel.”

My dad has always taught me that the strong should take care of the weak. He didn’t mean this in a condescending way, but you should be grateful for everything that you are and have, and to show your gratitude, you should give whatever you can. It’s your human responsibility, he said. I couldn’t possibly do justice to all that he has given in such a confined space as this. Suffice it to say that as long as I can remember, he has given his time and his money in ways large and small. Trust me when I say that I am a reliable witness.

When I was growing up, the “weak” I was intended to take care of were my mother and my older sister. Both were known to fly into fits of rage and/or despair rather frequently though unpredictably. Not to be melodramatic about it, but it created quite the chaotic environment. The way that I could take care of them was by not making trouble. Be very small and invisible. Be obedient and don’t talk too much. These don’t really come naturally to me, but I learned how to because “be neither seen nor heard” was a pretty good motto to live by.

I don’t actually have a whole lot of childhood memories, probably because I don’t want to, but one particularly vivid memory has stayed with me despite my best efforts. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. I must have been about four or five years old because I remember that I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach the faucet. I was leaning over the basin spitting toothpaste into it when my mother came in to check on me.

The next thing I knew, she’d backhanded me across the face, hard, and I stumbled backwards, still clutching my toothbrush. For some reason, it seemed deeply important that I not drop the toothbrush. Don’t compound the wrongs! Don’t show weakness! Maintain your dignity!

I didn’t say anything, just pressed my palm against my cheek and looked up at her.

“How many times have I told you not to leave your hair in the sink?” she screamed.

“But that’s not my hair,” I said softly, speaking to the bathmat. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Too late. She glanced at the basin. My hair was short, chestnut brown, and curly while my sister’s was pin-straight, long, and black, so there was no mistaking what was in the sink.

“Oh,” she said. Then she walked out of the bathroom.

At this point, I would like to delete this whole document and start this letter over. Partly because I hate to sound self-pitying (maintain your dignity!) and partly because it’s not such a big deal, though I suppose the fact that I still remember this incident suggests otherwise. But I mean, people are starving and dying, victims of war and disease as I type, so what’s my gripe? Boo hoo. I took a lot of beatings as a kid. So did a lot of people.

I have a theory about why I remember it. Perhaps it’s so that I never allow myself to forget that bad shit can come out of nowhere, so don’t get too comfortable, don’t expect too much, and above all don’t trust anyone no matter who they are and what they tell you. Depend only on yourself, and don’t expect to be safe anywhere ever.

“You’re too nice of a person,” my manager told me after I bought the two women fondue for dessert. “You probably get taken advantage of a lot.”

“Well, yeah, by some people. By a lot of people actually,” I told him. (Not by those two women, though. They were lovely.) “But I’d rather be hurt than hurt someone.”

The thing I didn’t say (because I didn’t think to) was that I feel this way because I know that I’m strong. I know that I can survive being hurt, but I don’t know how much someone else can take. So it’s my human responsibility to endure, to be the warm towel.

“Are you always this cheerful?’ A middle-aged man dining at the bar asked me that last night. He’d been watching me move up and down the bar doting on my customers, and now it was his turn.

“Pretty much,” I told him. “Like maybe 85, 90 percent of the time. I can be, so why not?”

“Well it’s good that you can do that, chemically,” he said.

And the thing is that I can. I don’t really give a lot or in any significant way, and I’m pretty self-absorbed. So the very least I can do is give my compassion and good cheer.

But I must admit that maybe 10, 15 percent of the time, it does make me feel a bit soggy.

Love,

Stella