#92

Reading comics has been central to my life for as long as I can remember. I used to read the funnies to my grandpa on his porch when I was three years old. My mom taught me to read when I was two, and I was at my grandparent's a lot, learning table manners from my grandma and watching VHS tapes and reading the comics pages while my grandpa moved through the rest of the paper. 

In order to grant myself turnkey access to comics every day, shortly after my family moved into the house where I am typing this, I took a job delivering the local paper around my neighborhood. I was eleven, and it was my first job. I held it for a few years, and then the newspaper gave up having a paperboy just for my neighborhood because a man with a car needed a recession job. Later the paper folded.

My second job was at this Chinese place on the way to downtown from my neighborhood. I went there with my friends and we had a nice time, and I left a big tip because I had just helped my uncle move a giant cooler and I had a little money. That went over real well with the server and something about my mood and the place and the day made me ask if they might be hiring, and she said she didn't know but to leave my number and if they were then her boss would call me. She did, and I started there with the understanding that I would be going off to college after the winter, spring, and summer. 

After I dropped out of college I came back and worked there for four years except for once when I had a manic breakdown and left for a couple of months and another time I went to open a restaurant with my aunt and worked there for a few months before I had a physical altercation with my uncle, the giant cooler guy. I had also done some other jobs with him in the past: demolition on a house, a big sink installation, odd tasks and heavy hauls. He took a disagreement too far, but I should have just ducked his swing and dipped. Rather, I ducked his swing, picked him up, set him down hard on a table, then dragged him to the floor and put him in a chokehold till he tapped out. I should mention he is my uncle by marriage and no blood uncle of mine would ever have did me the way he did, and if they raised a hand to strike me I would probably just take the hit. I respect my blood uncles. I did not respect that dude. He nicked his scalp on a table-mounted can opener when I smacked him onto the table and he bled all over my shirt as he tried to punch my head, not really able to because I know my holds. Dude had no business taking a swing at me. Also they were overworking me and shorting my late paychecks. 

Still, they were family, and I was wrong to fight him and never come back. I forgive them, but my aunt and I don't talk much, and she was once my favorite aunt, a special friend to me and my favorite cousin. I shan't be working with family again. Never spoke to the uncle again, don't know if he forgives me or not. Well, life is long. Perhaps one day there will be a peaceful reckoning.

Returning to the Chinese place as many times as I did is emblematic of a certain sentimentality I am prey to that has more or less destroyed my life several times over. There was no need to work there that long but that I could work hungover and read books behind the counter with my feet up when it was slow (this was not at all encouraged, you understand). It was not satisfying work; it was the menial, dragging, customer-and-telephone purgatory that is the lowest rungs of the service industry. Working for my aunt I learned how to work in a kitchen. I had to, fast, because she lied to me about what I would be doing; not merely "packing and register and some little part of the cooking and finishing the arepas and the empanadas", but line and dish and stock and janitor and register and packing and pantry and grill and fryer all at once. I even had to bake some shit. I also made drinks. I did everything you could imagine in that place. I got so I was getting good at it. Then that stupid, fundamentally moronic night with my uncle. 

At the Chinese place the most involved thing I did was toss some soy sauce with chili oil mixed in over some cold noodles, ladle some peanut sauce over that, and throw sesame seeds on top. Folding crab rangoons and wontons, well, I never even got very good at that; I usually asked the girls to do it. I worked with mostly women. The other dudes were all drivers or cooks. I was the only male register monkey. I wiped tables and took orders and served people their food and bussed their shitty fucked up messes and smoked weed in the basement of the downtown location and a cigarette every hour, or two an hour if I thought I could get away with it. The last time I returned to that place, that level, watching the cooks do their thing, after actually working, having been the dude with the knife and the fire, was a considerable blow to my sense of self. That is when my drinking became very serious, instead of just serious.

Once my very serious drinking became a terrifying monster problem that ate my life and hurled me into an abyss, I really couldn't go back. When I began to drag myself up into some semblance of a new life, I started working at a national used car parts retailer. As a delivery driver. One step up the ladder.

Sentimentality. Maudlin and unrealistic and fixated on illusions and fleeting moments long past. That's the shit that kills me every time. I possess a more temperate form, which fuels my inveterate rereading and which I consider one of my great strengths, but if I don't watch it I can tie myself to anchors, several at a time, and throw myself into the ocean, and just try and hold my breath,

It doesn't work.

Working at that Chinese place defined my life in key ways. The stuff I learned, the people I worked with, the interactions I had with customers and bosses and partners and the food and the commuting, the different places I was at personally when I worked there, the stunts I pulled--I wouldn't take it back, you know, but it wasn't very healthy. It was a relationship based on valuing fleeting highs and allowance for misconduct and the indulgence of vice more than addressing grave structural problems, imbalances, and abuses, both ways, which mirrors a lot of other relationships in my life. I tend to stay. That's not always good. I tend to come back. That's not always good either. Sometimes it is good to break up and stay away, because the reasons you're staying sound beautiful in your  head but they're fishhooks in your skin, the ones that drag you back thinking you were crazy to leave even though you had never before contemplated a more total suffering.

The very first shift I ever worked there was the very last day for one of the cooks. He'd worked his bit and he was going back to China to get back with his family and set them up with what he earned. We had a special dinner after close to celebrate him and see him off. It was the first time I had ever tasted jellyfish, and it was absolutely delicious. I was so happy to be there. I felt so warm and nourished by that food and by the laughter and the companionship of that night. Many times I thought of leaving, even years later, it was remembering that night that kept me going; the smell and taste of the broth, the shining faces. 

Just ridiculous. 


--JL