Red Skinned Grapes

I know I’m supposed to be grateful just to have a job during these unprecedented times. I’m not though.

Waitressing was never exactly a passion project for me. I began working in restaurants back when I was a bright-eyed nineteen year old, before I realized the term “passion” was a trap manufactured by big money to manipulate lost little dummies like me into working away our most optimistic years for them, all the while convincing ourselves this was our lives’ purpose, back when I believed that artists like me could hone their craft and still make money, that art was really everywhere—in logos, business cards, corporate Christmas party invitations, branded PowerPoint templates—back when I thought I had taken the sensible approach by getting my Bachelor of “Arts” in Graphic Design. Around the same time, by some miracle of chance and family-friend connections, I had landed the coveted position of Junior Graphic Designer at a for-profit hospital. Our director told my cohort of creative new cogs early on that in our new roles, we were encouraged to bring our fresh ideas, our untainted creativity, our unjaded perspectives to work every day and to share with the world the visions that only the likes of us could conjure. Within certain parameters as defined by the corporate style guide, of course.

A for-profit hospital’s design department pays better than a not-for-profit’s would, but marginally. This is the new-age version of the starving artist: working on my "craft" by day and moonlighting in a restaurant by night. Unlike a real artist though, who would be awoken in the middle of the night with an inspired vision, I would be rattled awake by the sudden remembrance that I had forgotten to send my manager that markup she asked for. My busy work consists not of washing brushes or organizing studio clutter but of whittling down my inbox and scheduling review meetings and compressing my files so as not to occupy too much space on the company servers.

And so I spend my Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings supplementing my salary at The Gaslighter, a not-terrible tapas-inspired fast-casual local franchise with a middle-of-the-road wine selection masquerading as fine dining for the city’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. After months in limbo we’re open again, at limited capacity of course, constantly over-expressing our smiles so that despite the masks, the customers (“guests”) can see just how thrilled we really are to finally have them dining with us again.

I don’t make nearly as much as I used to. What used to be the spot for after-work happy hours and 30th birthday celebrations is now mostly home to first dates. Young potential couples, those who met online and vetted each other’s virus risk tolerance and teased enough personal information out of each other to determine that they weren’t on opposite sides of the political hellscape, and thus could conceivably build a future together, meet at Gaslighter for the first time in person. I give whoever chose the spot credit, really. You can’t just meet for drinks in a restaurant these days. You have to order food along with it. This is, somehow, to stave off the coronavirus. Mayor’s orders. This and other pandemic protocols are fully backed by the most up-to-date science, the city council assures us. So if you’re meeting someone for the first time and aren’t quite sure if you want to spend the cost or time of a full meal on them just yet, a couple drinks and a small shared plate at Gaslighter is the move. Small risk for whoever ends up paying, small reward for me when I cash out my tips at the end of the night. Tonight will be no exception: reservations show two-tops across the board.

Front of the house bar staff gets an outsider’s perspective on modern dating. Sometimes I imagine myself in a wildlife documentary, narrated by David Attenborough, a curious inspection of the odd homosapien courtship rituals. My first table tonight, table twenty, looks like they were brought together by a professional matchmaker who, like a fight manager evaluating which matchup of opponents would turnout the greatest spectacle for fans, evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each player and deemed them a fit. Neither are without their faults: he’s tall and broad-chested, clearly was once an athlete but never had to worry about eating well thanks to a high-functioning metabolism, that is, up until about nine months ago when his mostly-red-meat diet caught up to him. On the pros list, he still has a full head of hair. She takes pride in her appearance, as she should, accentuating her high cheekbones and long lashes through careful study of contouring videos on YouTube. She’s fit and toned, though she no longer has that barely-legal waifishness through the hips and thighs that she did fresh out of college, and the bony knuckles and protruding veins in her hands betray the years she’s carefully concealed with Botox injections between her eyebrows. Both are dressed to reflect a similar upbringing and socio-economic status. On paper, it should be a good match.

They put in an order of spinach and artichoke dip and wings to split and he requests two glasses of our second-cheapest Merlot, which he orders by name. It’s an odd pairing given the choice of appetizers. She recognizes this, and I catch her micro-reaction of surprise and mild disapproval before she fixes her face back to the carefree, guys-girl, chill-chick façade she’s putting forward for first impression’s sake. He’s a total wino, he tells her, unaware that he's calling himself a drunk, not a wine connoisseur, but she politely ignores this, still hopeful about that full head of hair. He just bought a wine fridge and rack for his condo, he says, in an ostentatious display of just how cultured and refined his wino palette really is. Did she know, he asks, that Merlot is made with peeled red grapes, the skins of each one meticulously removed by hand? That’s what gives it that soft, velvety texture, and that’s what makes it so expensive.

She never knew this, she says. That must be prohibitively time consuming, she wonders out loud. There’s obvious doubt in her voice, as if she knows this can’t be true but is giving him the opportunity to self-correct, not wanting to challenge him directly. Yes, he explains, it’s hard to believe but that’s the fine craft of wine making for you.

None of this, of course, is true. Merlot is made from red-skinned grapes, not red, skinned grapes. He saw this on a framed poster about wine and wine pairings at HomeGoods, which he didn’t buy but still archived this ill-interpreted bit of trivia for use in situations exactly like this one. Her intuition is right but he seems pretty sure of himself, so she accepts it as gospel and will proliferate the lie among her social circles for years until an audacious stranger at a wedding disproves her with a rude but undisputable Google search result, a public chastisement and belittling, and she’ll resent not only this man for the unnecessary exposure, but also the man she went on a date with all those years ago who spewed this fiction with such confidence. Mostly though, she’ll resent herself for not having questioned such an implausible declaration.

I don’t correct him, even though I am technically and literally a paid expert on the subject, given that the Gaslighter is, according to its website, a wine bar. It wouldn’t be my place, I decide without deliberation. To do so, especially while this man peacocks in front of his date, would win me no favors in my already sure to be pittance of a tip on this order.

Instead I disappear into the kitchen, invisible, into the familiar dissonance of the back of the house, knives chopping, pans clamoring, a local news reporter’s harrowed announcements emanating from a staticky TV, the agitated voices of chefs barking at each other. The general manager marches in and announces that all staff must now wear a mask at all times. New city ordinance. The cooks release barely-audible sighs and shake their heads almost imperceptibly, showing just enough annoyance to make it clear they're not happy about this without seeming outright insubordinate, but comply without question, pulling the bandanas tied around their foreheads down around their mouths. The local news cuts to a conference with the White House Press Secretary who assures a room full of flustered journalists that there is no shortage, despite recent reports, of ventilators across the nation’s hospitals. A hot pan clangs and sizzles into the half-filled sink, tossed there aggressively but precisely by one of the cooks. The tension in the kitchen’s air is thickening as the dinner rush starts to pick up, so I take my leave to the bar and pour the two glasses of Merlot for the two people at table twenty, the two people who will never become a couple.