I woke up this morning and the springtime, it seems, has finally reared its beautiful (though pungent) head. The trees outside my window have buds that are beginning to sprout alienlike into leaves and the breeze is warm. No need to worry about the bugs quite yet. I’m listening to American Beauty by Grateful Dead and everything is fine and well in the world.
At work last Thursday, I overheard a mildmannered fight at the bar between two older gay men:
“Well if you want to get into it, why are you hanging out with all my enemies?”
“Well NEWSFLASH: they were my friends too… before you started burning bridges…”
This newsflash was followed by a long silence. Radiohead’s Karma Police hummed soft somewhere overhead: this is what you get…
Another conversation, later in the night, between two bald men with their shirts unbuttoned three holes down, their collars still crisp, went like this:
“What AI do you use?”
“Mm? Claude.”
“Only Claude?”
“Yeah.”
“Well… I use ChatGPT for business and Grok for personal. See you have to…”
After years of working in restaurants, it’s become clear to me that people tend to be outwardly prescriptive with their topics of conversation; but whether or not they’re prescriptive to the other person is another question entirely. It’s more common, I think, for people to speak to reassure themselves, to justify their seemingly arbitrary choices and allegiances.
I tend to get off work around 11pm on Thursdays, sometimes 12am. Either way, the busses have stopped running for the night and I’ll sit at the bar for a couple minutes while I request an über. Rideshares are fairly cheap in Chicago and I’ve had many wonderful conversations with über drivers over the past two years.
Two weeks ago, after cleaning the floors and gossiping at the bar for a bit, I climbed into an über feeling exhausted but still somewhat conversational so I asked how the ten-gallon driver how his experience had been driving in the city so far and he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror before saying “an OnlyFans model masturbated in the seat you’re sitting in” to which I said: oh. huh.
“She was on the phone with someone who was paying her to do it. I think it was a kink or something. I don’t know.”
He then proceeded then to describe all of the sexcapades he would have embarked upon if only he had more body positivity.
“No no,” I said, confused but trying to reassure: “there’s no need to be ashamed of your body.”
He smirked. “I’m fat and I know it,” he said, continuing on to describe a woman he drove one time who was “smokin’, man. She was too smokin’.”
She had requested a ride from SmartBar in Lakeview to the far West Side of the city and she talked at length about how her husband “just didn’t want to go out dancing anymore” with long exasperated sighs. The driver mentioned she kept poking at his arm from the backseat and then, about halfway through the ride, she had taken a phone call from said husband and her face took on a somber quiet look while she murmured “mmhmm” and “I promise I didn’t” softly while staring out the passenger-side window. The driver glanced back at her, made brief eye contact and held up his thumb and pointer finger to make a one-inch motion. “I never know what to do with my hands,” he explained to me.
Finally, he concluded his tall tales with this: “Another lady, an older lady, asked me to come into her place with her one time. I woulda cracked her if only I wasn’t so fat.” He went quiet, looked sadly ahead down the dark Chicago bridge. Over the river, the skyline loomed like the teeth of a vast monster in shadow. We spent the rest of the drive in silence.
When I returned home, I put away my bag, pulled off my shoes, took a shower. I couldn’t sleep so I watched The Elephant Man and then fell fast asleep.
As for the über driver, he was more than happy to tell his tales so long as he saw himself as an outsider without a chance. There was no curiosity about my side of the conversation; he wanted a sounding board, which is fine. I love a strange encounter, for the most part. As soon as I said that he shouldn’t be ashamed of his body, he stopped listening to my opinion.
The landscape is always set to evolve accordingly. When the Walmart grows quiet at 3am, the bottomless pit beneath — which exists below every supermarket, I might add — is breathing in all of the dead fluorescent air, and upon its exhale the store’s incessant humming becomes complete and beautiful in a dark, dreary way. Like a silent siren. Like dead desire makes a person into a living corpse ignorant of its having already withered away, it’s all too easy to become subdued beneath our feeling like insufficient cogs in a machine...
But what would the answer be for someone like our über driver, here? To escape the machine? to return to the circumstances which make his life feel more in his own hands? To escape the bubble of his life in the driver’s seat? These solutions are not so easy when there are bills to be paid, when he makes your own hours without coworkers to share drinks and words of advice with. Is the answer for him to love himself like he loves the idea of love? It’s the only answer I can think of while I’m writing this out.
Anyways, he came to me in a dream a couple nights later. Or at least I believe it was him. He had achieved his goal of losing weight; in fact he had the physique and tan of an ‘80s Miami sunbather with which he flexed around town all year long, night and day. He had achieved his dreams, too, of sexual conquest only to succumb eventually to a dependency on B-grade amphetamines and amaretto sours. Now he lives in a house he built on the side of a mountain in Tibet where it appears he’s found some sort of peace for himself but then again one never really knows.
I missed reading your pieces, briffin! I worked in restaurants too, still do sometimes. I get some freelance shifts from time to time. It’s a great business if you are a writer. Being constantly surrounded by people from all backgrounds can truly show you stories are built. And to hear their stories… to hear their conversations when they think no one is paying attention to what they are saying, that is priceless.
Loved this. For the most part, we’re all immersed in our own bubbles. When it’s finally popped and we become observers rather than participants, we realize how arbitrary parts of our existence seem. Then we can acknowledge that everyone’s got their quips and mishaps and we’re not the only ones on this rock. It’s nice to get that reality check every now and then.