I could be a monument

You get tired of seeing the sunrise, I’ll tell you. Work a job in the early mornings sometime—none of that corporate shit where you can wake up at your desk yawning while pretending to “clear your inbox,” I’m talking four, five a.m. en route to something physically tiring—and you’ll have this week and change maybe where you make your way to the new gig and you see the sun come up, accompanying you on your fresh start. Your very first thought in this moment, I promise you, will be: This Is Worth It. This job I’ve taken to pay my way through is worth it if only to see the way I’m welcomed. I’m telling you that you will feel this way, and I’m telling you that you’re wrong. Now you don’t have to add this disappointment to the rest of the tab.

Suppose I was particularly tired this morning, though. It was already humid as hell and I’d been to the pharmacy and back while it was still dark, you know. As usual I took the red line in and on my way off I nearly walked into a spiderweb, too, joined him in his dining room for breakfast and coffee. There have been more spiders in the city lately. Whole crowds, I swear.

Anyway, I get to the diner already bitter about the dashed novelty of the sunrise, about how the color seems all wrong today. The back entrance out by the dumpsters: I prefer that way because the screen door is simply useless, it wouldn’t suit a dollhouse, and I can whisk my whole body inside with a single flick of my wrist to work my way backwards through the building, yell hullo to everyone else on the opening shift before I create work for them, but also to greet them in the order I prefer, with highest respect paid first to the monkish line cooks and prep guy—grease smelled great—then the teenage dishwasher (good music today, shoegazey shit you’d like, I think), into the dining room with the host (chatty, I already can tell I’ll be bussing everything) and finally to the crux of it: who’s joining me out in the front of it all today? Once I’ve clocked in at that front terminal by the neon cafe sign I’ll sometimes have three or four tables in my section already. Ah, and the owner: he’s back in the bakery with his apron on—I can see his shaved head through the dining room window, unwrapping something and holding it up, a framed newspaper or something—but I’m fine anyway, just 5:58 on the clock. There’d been some dextroamphetamine pills on her bedside table earlier that morning (evidently she’d felt bad enough about the pharmacy thing to offer me one) but I only now noticed the extra pep in my step as I walked into the room of the day. I needed to remember to eat something, plus hydrate, because sans prescription that shit is occasionally dicey.

The reason you do this over something else is that it is a different color every shift. It looks different every time. Of course there are the foundational intricacies of the table layout: everyone knows about sections, about how quadrants of this dining space are typically divvied up equally—that’s number of seats, mind you, not tables—over which a single server holds court, takes care of their own (or doesn’t). Sometimes it won’t work like this and you have a character for every stage of the meal, an awkward water guy and a waiter who gets to feel better than him et al., but that shit is too high-brow for me, the people I like to wait on aren’t here to make an event out of it, you know? They’re hungry, like me. Everyone else thinks it’s funny that I call this place a diner, as if a place becomes anything other than itself when you stack a bunch of offices on top of it. I guess I lied, slightly—we’re not really in downtown proper, but we’re close enough, and everyone that I talk to is on their way to work there anyway. We have a sense of camaraderie, myself and these people who I bring coffee and food. There are some who come here sporadically, who have delayed their collision with the office, and there are those beautiful regulars who have promoted this delay to a default destination on the trajectory back and forth.

Unfortunately neither such characters were around yet at six a.m. today so instead I cracked several hundred eggs and shot the shit with the line guys while I waited to split the room with the other server. I found myself trying not to check my phone in the apron pocket—owner hates us texting—but even though I’d already gone to the pharmacy and forked out the sixty bucks, there was nothing else to say, apparently. I was asking more questions to the guys than usual, too.

“Fuck’s he got in that box?”

“Hm?”

“Saw him with something back in the bakery.”

He’d smiled: “Ah. Fluff piece—‘Downtown Destination,’ I’m sure you know how that goes. Also, hey man, make sure to listen for the bell today, yeah?”

It’s weird, I’m still used to the pagers from our spot back home but I guess it’s small enough here that a bell suffices for the waiters on the floor, a single ding for when your table’s food’s up.

Anyway I don’t know what time it was but I’d been staring out the window at the skyscraper going up next to the river—holy hell, did you know tower cranes build themselves, lifting up the same pieces of wrought steel that form the body in which they are inserted via careful, counterbalanced vertical increments that rise alongside the buildings they lift things upon, so that, watching this process for weeks of opening shifts on end, you can’t help but ponder the way a city builds itself—but anyway everyone arrived so suddenly that I went from small talk to a three top, a two top, and two singles (still four empty tables, but seven menus out at once is at least unlucky company)—last two being easy, the first guy reeked of booze and didn’t even seem to want to eat, just sat there pounding coffee and OJ in a dirty buttoned-up shirt (while on his phone), seemed content, though; second guy had a terrific hat on and was hunched over a novel which, judging by his expression, was the best company in the room. Readers are great because they want to be left alone as much as you want to leave them be. Old couple in the corner was easy enough, two straight omelettes and black coffee, some real “we actually live here” type energy. The three top was a bit fussy and I couldn’t get a grasp of their relationship to one another—weird age gaps (and all on their phones), but didn’t seem to know each other that well—this makes it all the harder for me to become necessarily invisible. Harder to intuit mannerisms—to memorize the way someone looks just as they decide that they need something, and so, harder to act upon it, stack it on the vertical queue of tasks as I wind my way around—it complicates things when they are also confused by their own presence in my room. But so here is the best part and aside from the respect paid to the back of the house, the reason why I jumped a few places in line when I was hired, right past dishwasher and host, the circuit that you used to like to hear me talk about. (Needless to say I’m excited for you to get here tonight.)

The start of the second lap: my stomach (and forehead?) felt a bit tighter than usual as I began to wind around clockwise with the first two plated omelettes (ding) in one hand and the coffee carafe in the other—my hat/book man having reached that near-ninety acute angle of mug-to-mouth that signifies near empty—with the woman requesting jam for her toast—“of course”—while the tallest of the three waved me over impatiently despite the fact that they had not been ready to order forty seconds prior (lap one) and gave me glares for asking, and though I didn’t have a free hand to write I say, sounds great, go ahead—breakfast, after all, being the easy meal when it comes to the combinatorics of ordering, really just entrees, drinks, and adjustments for both, per person, so four or five menus out is doable, doubly so when peaking recreationally on ADHD medication—confidence which lent them the camaraderie they otherwise lacked, evidently, as they now clung to the common ground of doubting my ability to remember two lattes one cafe au lait one parfait side of wheat two house omelettes first with egg whites second no spinach both multigrain oh and no butter, please, from tall gesturing gal, superfluous information even for a downtown non-diner—and en route to hit my reader with a refill a quarter past the room—“cheers,” lovely thing to say, my guy—I see the owner make a face as he dallies along the wall by the windows looking for a spot for his periodical quasi-praise because he’s just passed by our hungover desk jockey, whose mug is also way too close to the edge of the table, who’s mumbling something about “just colleagues really but such a great night” to what would appear to be a parent over-parenting on the other end of the line.

Actually, I was thinking of you as my own phone buzzed in my pocket halfway around the room because I’d now seen that two of three (egg whites) was editing a photo on her phone rudely—a close-up of marigolds—and had bled the meaning dry, burned through that sunrise brilliance of the petals by amping up the contrast (and including a dumb comment, probably), but at this point (minutes ago, now) I was hit with that unique confluence of troubles that gives the gig its intellectual heft:

As corporate boy wonder’s mug fell off the table (of course) and shattered, I noticed a spider suspended in the air next to me, yellow splotches on it and legs like those stainless steel pyramid scheme knife sets. Upon moving away from it I realized that I was its marionette, that there was some invisible line linking our movement through the room, through the city, and, twisting my body with carafe still upraised, the line I’m a little teapot went through my head just as I felt my nose start to bleed heavily. With blood now dripping onto my shirt and my clockwise rhythm interrupted, I noticed that the owner was glaring at me, clutching his own little legacy while I went to set down the coffee carafe, locate the spider, hold a napkin to my nose, grab a broom for the shattered mug, give the three top’s order to the cooks, and return with the jam for the two top after quickly checking my phone to see if the sixty bucks I’d not yet earned doing these things but already spent hours ago post-condom scare had earned me any empathy or sappy emoji dopamine otherwise.

I am in the kitchen now, holding the bridge of my nose. Thinking of how you're the only one that hasn't asked me when I will have A Real Job—as if I could be a monument to anything other than all of this. How I won’t tell you any of it, later on, and instead ramble about how the skyscraper outside seems to lift itself without anyone inside, above the rest of the city.