KILL YOUR INNER CHILD by Samuel Bernstein

Thursday, July 06, 2006

The Glamorous Life

This is my life in New York: The alarm goes off and I have a glass of water, an amphetamine pill, and a caffeine pill on my bedside table. I take both pills and stumble into the shower.

By the time I towel off I'm bouncing off the walls, ready to face a new day. When I want to go to sleep I take a sleeping pill. I love the idea of it, since it's all so very "Valley of the Dolls."

Maybe tonight I'll take two. After all, it's New Year's Eve.

It is never actually as dramatic, or as Mickey and Judy as I like to tell people. The couple of months after I stop taking the pep pills are a real drag, but I can't say for sure whether during that time I don't want to get out of bed because I'm in withdrawal, depressed, or just being lazy. Sometimes I get myself out of bed and spend the day lying in the bathtub with the shower running, eating boxes of donuts and smoking, destroying the bathroom walls from the constant moisture. I resent having to get out of the tub to order nachos from the Mexican food restaurant on the corner, but a cordless phone around all that water seems unwise.

Lethargy mixes with an almost subconscious fear, not of anyone who lives in New York, but of my father coming to attack me. I have security alarms on my windows, again, not because of robber or rapists or killers, but because I dream about my dad, Adam, shooting me dead. He probably thinks about me rather less often than I imagine. And murdering me isn't a likely part of his mindset.

No matter how glamorous I pretend my life is (since glamour is absolutely defined by eating donuts and smoking in the shower, waiting on tables between bouts of depression, and occasionally stumbling home with a stranger) I'm finding it hard to shake the past.

I look back now on the crazy restaurant where I vent my fury by hurling entire trays of water glasses at the wall, shattering them into a million little pieces for real, with a perverse kind of affection. I haven't had any job since where I can get away with chucking sour cream and destroying property with impunity.

At the time I don't connect my frequent bouts of rage with anything having to do with my family. I'm just blowing off steam. It's normal. Right? I remember people I wait tables with there, I can see their faces more clearly than some friends I've known for years. Restaurant staffs are good to one another, creating family, even if it lasts as little as a week or two.

I first learn about workplace family life from my mother. During the last ten years or so of her life she is the manager of a department store, first in Austin, then in Georgetown, Texas. She cooks for the women who work for her. She gets involved in their lives, warning this one that her boyfriend is treating her badly, helping that one with a sick child. I don't connect those dots at the time. I don't understand how much I absorb from my mother during the six years I live with her. It's all subtext waiting to be fully realized later.

The camaraderie of the wait staff is exactly the same though. And the lonely 4:30 A.M. shift notwithstanding, we usually travel in packs after work, getting hammered together, hanging out in all-night diners, having sex. A shift is like a performance of a show. Sometimes I even pretend to have a different name. I tell phony stories about my background, use accents, or I even sometimes fake a limp. After a shift there is this leftover energy to burn off. We aren't the lifers - the waiters and waitresses who make it a career - so we can party.

It's a wonder we don't all get mugged or killed once we split up to make our separate ways home, drunkenly wandering the streets of New York in our tell-tale uniforms of white shirts and black pants, our pockets full of cash.

The glamour of it all still astounds me.

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