"A Psychotic Ordeal, But Not Without Its Molten Center Of Ecstasy..."

This is the ninth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


Working phones is simple in theory: people call the restaurant to place either a delivery or pick-up order, or walk in and order something to go. I take their orders and their money, and when their order is ready, I pack it up in brown paper and put it in their hands -- or into the hands of the delivery rider, as the case may be. The phones shift is only three hours long; it's a stopgap, meant to straddle the peak of the dinner shift when the servers already have too much to handle without that whole mess, the point when activity reaches a fever pitch and the various Rube Goldberg production mechanisms that keep a restaurant running smoothly crest at a white-hot blur. It is a psychotic ordeal, but not without its molten center of ecstasy.

Dinnertime. I am squatting on a slippery rubber mat in a stifling kitchen. Balancing on the balls of my feet, my forehead inches from the mouth of the deep-fryer, tucking myself into a ball to keep out of everyone’s way, I fill small paper bags with fresh tortilla chips. They're too hot to touch with my hands, so I go at them with a pair of metal salad tongs. It’s like a skill-crane game in which all the toys are greasy, scalding hot, and extremely fragile. It puts the chips in the bag, I tell myself. It does this whenever it’s told. Now put the fucking chips in the bag! Above and around me, four cooks and three servers hurtle through the tiny room in meteoric loops. From somewhere behind there is a deafening crash, a puff of smoke, a cry of “Chinga tu Madre!” I don’t risk a glance upward, I keep plunging the tongs wrist-deep into my crunchy payload until all the bags are full. I take my time, I get it right. These few moments are all the preparation I have for what is coming. And then it happens -- somewhere nearby, a phone rings. And rings. And then another phone joins the chorus. Someone else may answer, but everyone knows that the calls are for me.

Sometimes the storm has already landed by the time I arrive -- both phones ringing, a fax order coming in, a line three people deep at the counter, three boxes of tacos cooling to trichinosal temperatures on the counter. The waitress stuck dealing with it looks like a horse in a lightning storm, and she's got three tables that haven’t even seen menus yet. I leap gallantly into the fray, biting back the urge to turn and walk right the hell out of there. But there’s also a sacred feeling, as if I’m an angel descending onto the battlefield at the critical moment. Hark! I want to say. Suffer no longer, for I bring tidings of --

Two cordless phones are thrust into my hands. “There’s a lady on hold for a delivery! We’re out of guacamole! If anyone from this address calls and asks, the food had to be remade and will be on its way, ASAP! The second server called in sick, you might have to take tables…” These words fading in volume as the unburdened soul is sucked back into her elliptical orbit through the kitchen, where mountains of grilled-fish tacos beckon with purple cabbage grins, awaiting her bearing.

I like the job because it’s impossible. There’s simply no human way to process thirty orders in thirty minutes without making colossal mistakes. Over the months I have reformatted my body and brain to meet the challenges on a synaptic level, limbs acting independently and unconsciously of each other, brain frantically calculating my trajectory around sharp turns and other bodies in motion while also answering questions and trying to remember to smile. It’s the final level of the hardest video game I’ve ever played, complete with blaring music and hidden bonus rounds. Oh help, I think. I don’t know how it could be, but both the despair and the satisfaction seem come from the same locus, somewhere at the very bottom of my heart.

When I was young, there was nothing I resented more than futility in labor. I gave up on math in fourth grade when it dawned on me that it was a limitless challenge -- it would just get harder and harder, year after year, class after class. The more I learned, the more aware I’d become of how much I didn’t know. I went home early that day feeling genuinely ill, and my grades declined steadily from that point on. Math for its own sake -- work for its own sake -- was not a fact of life I was willing to accept.

This was a pretty radical position to take in my father’s household, where work existed to be done, and we all existed to do it. Dad grew up on a cattle ranch in eastern Montana, an environment which required every man, woman, child and animal working together in concert, vigilant against the rising tides of ruin and humiliation. How lazy and spoiled and relatively suburban my sisters and I must have seemed to him, our childhoods uncomplicated by barn chores and seasonal labors that he’d endured ever since he was large enough to grip a hoe-handle. From this, I’m sure, came the perverse thrill he derived from assigning us the very nastiest chores, all of which seemed to require being outdoors in Arizona’s 115 degree heat. We scratched weeds out of the dry earth year-round, we washed the family car on days when the water vanished off its surface before you even had a chance to wipe it away. My sisters and I bond now over memories of being rented out to our grandparents for the purpose of gathering up a full year’s worth of dried dogshit from their backyard. Manufactured by their two well-fed Pomeranians and left to bake in the sun, the nuggets were nearly indistinguishable from the pale gravel, and almost as plentiful. Armed with one plastic glove and one heavy duty trash bag, the elected child would spend hours bending and squinting and bare-handed scooping in exchange for a few dollars and a cold soda.

The lesson I took from this, of course, was that work was for suckers, a fraud perpetrated upon those too weak to pull free, too dumb to think and do for themselves. Growing up and moving out, I applied for the kinds of jobs where you could get by for a long time on the bare minimum of effort, counting on my ability to stay one step ahead of my managers despite barely meeting their incredibly low standards for grooming, civility, and punctuality. I shirked my sidework as a graveyard-shift waiter at Denny’s, I fabricated positive results as a cold-calling insurance telemarketer. During my stint as a retail clerk, I held a paperback under the counter with one hand while ringing up customers with the other. This approach to making a living endured much later into my life than I’m altogether comfortable admitting. Whenever my resolve threatened to strengthen, I’d call my dad and complain about my job. “When I was your age,” he’d warn, “I was working on the killing floor of a slaughter-house, slitting throats from dawn till dusk.” It was an instant re-affirmation of my chosen path.

Despite how it beckons to dreamers, New York is a city that delights in sloughing away its fools and layabouts -- the poor ones, anyway. Very soon after I arrived it became obvious that my survival here would utterly hinge on my willingness to bend my neck and accept the yoke. At first, the only way I could tolerate this was by making the work as personal as possible, holding myself hostage with thoughts about who might get hurt or go hungry if I didn’t do my job. This managed to float me through gigs as a babysitter, a substitute teacher, a personal assistant. When I finally found steady work as a freelance writer, I learned the other half of that lesson -- you either finish the work or you don’t, and there is no one to outsmart, betray, or starve but yourself. It doesn't get more personal than that. But would it ever translate into an ability to do the kind of work that I spent a lifetime avoiding? I had to know this. Working phones is more than just my backup paycheck. It has become my alchemical laboratory.

I chose this, I remind myself as I answer the phones. Every night, I choose it all over again -- feathers becoming ruffled, people crowding up around the counter hungrily (hangrily, a co-worker of mine would say, referring to the onset of crabbiness owing purely to famine) and growing more irritable by the minute as some other person’s order comes up, and then another’s; pens drying up in my hand, paper tickets fluttering away out of sight, rendering whole orders untraceable. The brainless phones or ding-ding “food’s up!” bell interrupting every divergent gesture or thought. Completed orders bagged and then lost in the vortex as I scramble from one emergency to the next.

I put on a brave face for customers, hoping they’ll notice my speed, precision, and flexibility instead of my sweaty face, my twitching eye. I coax them through the hoops of ordering as gently as time allows. I answer the phone for the sixth time in a minute, and a tinny voice lisps into my ear, faint as a trans-atlantic radio signal, asks if I will take a credit card over the phone. And do I have any soups? Any recommendations for someone who isn’t actually very hungry? What kind of tacos do you have? How long will a delivery take?

My brain begins to hurl itself against the walls of my skull, hearing this. Our tacos, I want to hiss, are forged in a cauldron of strife. They are wrought in suffering. By the time you receive them, your tacos will have tested the limitations of at least four desperately busy, hardworking people. Hands quivering with fatigue, neck tendons visible, hearts hammering, we will put the sour cream on the side for you, we will add the extra salsa. These, I would say if I could, are blood tacos.

“It will be about forty minutes,” I say instead, scribbling down the wretched card number and moving on to the next call. That’s yet another way in which pressure eats at my sould; it turns out that all my horrible suspicions about human nature are waiting to jump to the forefront at once, desperate for opportunities to be substantiated, to lie to me about who someone is and what they’re really like. Even banalities like hearing someone botch the pronunciation of the word chimichanga are enough to stir them awake. Probably, nobody loves you, I’ve thought at someone as they handed me their money, and I can’t say I blame them.

There is nothing to do in these moments except move on, and on, and still further on until I become blind to the unfairness and imbalance of the world and lose myself in pure, mindless movement, the terrifying dance of energy and matter. This is where the work itself often becomes mysteriously transcendent; I have begun to think of each shift as a crucible, an abridged crisis just intense enough to boil away the scant flesh of complacency, the worst in myself, the sores in my psyche. Sometimes they vanish as soon as the air hits them, like toxic vapors. I emerge raw, cleaner. It’s like a trip to the Russian bath-house, where you sit in underground rooms so hot that it literally hurts to breath, and just when you feel like you may panic or suffocate if you don’t get out right now, someone dumps a ten-gallon bucket of ice-water over your head. It shocks you sputtering and swearing back to your senses, resetting all your gauges. After several blurry hours spent hurtling from one extreme sensation to the next, my very bones feel pliable, my muscles buttery smooth, my skin practically bioluminescent. Suffering and submission are not inherently ennobling, I remind myself as the chips shatter in the grip of my clumsy tongs, but the potential is always there.

I think of my father often when I’m drowning my way through a shift on the phones, dispatching orders with a relentless intensity and accuracy. When the restaurant becomes like an WWII submarine movie, all strobing lights and jets of water and flame, I know of no one else to credit for my instinct to dive into the smoke and begin pulling my fellow mariners out of the fire. I have witnessed dinner-shift miracles that I can’t explain, battlefield crises that should not have been rebounded from. My colleagues and I bask afterward in the lull, nerves humming as we drink in enormity of our collective feat. It’s silly, I think later, it’s only a restaurant, nobody cares, we’ll all do exactly the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, until something breaks in us and we can’t take it anymore. Pointless. But there is no mistaking the pride I take in my work while I’m doing it, an experience so relatively new that I find it nearly intoxicating -- nourishing, even. Quit this job? And lose the chance to be beaten like soft lead into some new, better shape, twice a week? It means more to me than I ever thought possible.

Dad is in his fifties now, and degenerative arthritis has seized up most of his joints, slowing him down considerably; he claims that he can dislocate his knuckles by making a tight fist. He’s been dragging himself toward the finish line of retirement with full benefits for years now, but due to various unforeseen complications and some-restrictions-may-apply, that line keeps inching out of reach. One more year, I have heard him say for several years now. One more. It hurts him to stand, it hurts him to sit, it hurts him to ride his motorcycle to work but he does it anyway because it thrills him. We talk on the phone about our jobs and the respective shit-heads who complicate them, exchanging the heavily salted dialogue of people who routinely work harder than absolutely necessary. I used to think that I’d be better off never being able to speak his language. Now, weighing my lifelong desire to do things my own way against the sympathetic twinges I feel when he describes his ailments to me, battle scars accumulated during a lifetime of grueling physical work, I come up even every time, both hands equally full. How is that possible? I wonder. This man, with whom I once hauled rocks out of dry creek-beds and built a stone wall around our yard’s perimeter, doesn’t have an answer, doesn’t need one. “It is what it is,” he says at least once every time we talk. I really hope so, I think.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Temperance