"Between the shore and the sea"
I’ve linked to Gabrielle Hamilton’s writing here before — on radishes with butter and salt — and last week I read another piece of hers that will stay with me for a long, long time, on what it felt like to close Prune, the East Village restaurant she opened in 1999 and has run ever since.
And yet even with the gate indefinitely shut against the coronavirus, I’ve been dreaming again, but this time I’m not at home fantasizing about a restaurant I don’t even yet have the keys to. This time I’ve been sitting still and silent, inside the shuttered restaurant I already own, that has another 10 years on the lease. I spend hours inside each day, on a wooden chair, in the empty clean space with the windows papered up, and I listen to the coolers hum, the compressor click on and off periodically, the thunder that echoes up from the basement as the ice machine drops its periodic sheet of thick cubes into the insulated bin. My body has a thin blue thread of electricity coursing through it. Sometimes I rearrange the tables. For some reason, I can’t see wanting deuces anymore: No more two-tops? What will happen come Valentine’s Day?
It’s no mystery why this prolonged isolation has made me find the tiny 24-square-inch tables that I’ve been cramming my food and my customers into for 20 years suddenly repellent. I want round tables, big tables, six-people tables, eight-tops. Early supper, home before midnight. Long, lingering civilized Sunday lunches with sun streaming in through the front French doors. I want old regulars to wander back into the kitchen while I lift the lids off the pots and show them what there is to eat. I want to bring to their tables small dishes of the feta cheese I’ve learned to make these long idle weeks, with a few slices of the saucisson sec I’ve been hanging downstairs to cure while we wait to reopen, and to again hear Greg rattle the ice, shaking perfectly proportioned Vespers that he pours right to the rim of the chilled glass without spilling over.
It’s an elegy of sorts, and a commentary on the evolution (or rather devolution) of the food service industry, though you could generalize that part of its premise — that while rents and product costs and operating costs have risen, many people are not willing or able to pay more for the luxury services they have come to think of as pedestrian — applies to the service industry across the board. I had to read it in little sections, overwhelmed all over again by the way it felt last time Dylan and I were in the salon, laying it to rest. A year ago, when one of our former stylists left the salon, she cleared everything off her station except a tiny cactus that I had always assumed was fake. A few weeks later, while I was showing her replacement where she would be working, I discovered otherwise by shoving my hand directly into its spines — a particularly vivid example of starting as you mean to go on. After that, we moved the cactus to the front desk, where it flourished in the natural light and was less likely to stab the unsuspecting. When we closed the salon in March, Dylan and I took the cactus home. We watered the other plants, which were too big to move. We put a sign on the door and unplugged all the desk appliances and turned out the lights and turned off the heating and air conditioning. We emptied the drawer and took all the cash the salon had on hand, a few hundred dollars, to the bank so that we could run payroll at the end of the week. We made sure all the doors were locked, and when we were leaving, I felt abruptly as if I was going to cry. It felt more like goodbye than see you later.
It’s just a salon, at the end of the day. It’s a salon where I spent 50 hours a week, that I put a lot of work into making trans-inclusive, that did not pay me nearly enough. I knew all of our clients by name, and sometimes a new client would call us and say, “I’m a woman but I get a man’s haircut,” and I would get to say, “We will give anybody any haircut that they want.” It made me very happy, to get to do that, to know the space and the people who occupied it so well that I could read what kind of day it was going to be within ten minutes of walking in. It was a place that I put a lot of work into because I cared about it a very great deal, because it brought me joy to welcome trans clients I’d never met before by name without a moment of hesitation, to unpack our latest order, to ask the stylists what they wanted to change and then try to do something about it. I dreamed about it, sometimes, the way I used to dream about work when I was a barista in a little coffeeshop tucked away behind Port Authority, counting off lattes and other lattes and drip coffees. (Habits I still have: pouring a shot of flavored syrup by eye, the knowledge that whole milk is the hardest to foam for a cappuccino, the ability to spill boiling liquid on myself without jerking or dropping whatever is in my hand. Habits I’ve lost: the ability to use an analog cash register, all the prices I had memorized and their respective sales tax.)
It was not a perfect place to work. I spent too much time there and the owner did not pay me enough for all the work I did, the jobs of at least three receptionists and a manager and a managing stylist. Once I helped one of the stylists screw her lip piercing back in. I bandaged up more shears-related injuries than I can count. I tried (and failed) to loosen the stripped screws in another stylist’s clippers. I learned how to fix shears that cost nearly as much as I made in a month when the screw holding the swivel handle in place came lose and they fell apart in a stylist’s hands halfway through a haircut. I pulled a cape out of the washing machine a shredded inch at a time after it got sucked into the agitator’s machinery. I replaced 25 lightbulbs in one day, once. I fired a client who told me that I was smearing him “as some kind of pervert or predator” (he was one) and called back six times to tell me, “You know what I think? I think this is because I’m a man, and I have a penis, and you want one.” I got in so many fights with my coworkers, mostly resolvable, some not. I tried, always, to prioritize my coworkers’ personhood over their profitability.
So far, the salon’s owner and I have been talking as though it’s a given that the salon will reopen when it’s safe to do so, though we have no idea when that is. I also have no idea whether we will. Our profit margins were never all that forgiving. We had just started to turn that around in March, which is always how it goes. On Tuesday I told my coworkers that we weren’t planning to reopen until the end of May at earliest. No more work dreams for me, not for a long time. No more explaining how much work it takes to strip black box dye out of a client’s hair without damaging it, or why it costs so much. No more counting inventory for our biweekly order, no more grocery runs to restock on coffee or paper towels or laundry detergent for the hundreds and hundreds of towels a working salon washes on a daily basis. No more folding those hundreds and hundreds of towels. No more counting down to our Sunday–Monday weekend.
I don’t dream often, and most of the dreams I do recall are nightmares. I’ve woken myself up screaming more than once. Work dreams, by comparison, are pleasant. All I have to worry about with those is keeping track of what has and hasn’t happened in reality. I’ve had a lot less trouble with that recently, which is a mixed blessing. For a start, I’ve only had one dream that I can remember, and it wasn’t a good dream, but it wasn’t quite a nightmare, either.
How it happened is this: In the weeks before the world closed down, I had started spending a lot of time opening Instagram, looking at the profile of the first partner who ever assaulted me, and then closing Instagram again. I had started considering the merits of leaving him the comment, “Hey, do you remember how we used to date in high school, and how you sexually assaulted me after I broke up with you and then said, Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it?” It felt good to be angry and fearless at the same time, to think about reminding him of what he’d done, that I hadn’t forgotten, that I still remembered him. It felt like progress.
Then everything went to hell, and I started reading articles about how medical students and residents were being fast-tracked to help care for COVID-19 patients. The ex who assaulted me is a third-year medical student, one of the people presumably on the front lines of the pandemic response, saving lives. He is also the reason that my email archives contain a photo I sent to Project Unbreakable when I was 17 years old, holding a sketchbook with what he said to me written on the first page in black Sharpie. “I’d like to apologize,” I wrote in that message. “I’d prefer to remain anonymous, and if that causes you any issues I’m sorry about that.”
That was a long time ago. I don’t care about my own anonymity anymore, and I’m not sorry. But I dreamed about him the other night, as if it hasn’t been years since then, as if I could step back in time and back into my 17-year-old skin, just a little less afraid this time and a little more certain in my anger. In the dream, I saw him in a subway station, one of the big ones, like Coney Island—Stillwell Avenue, where the hallways are wide and bright and there’s a lot of room to move, and first he said hello to me and I walked past, trying to ignore him, and then I told myself, do you really want to go home knowing you didn’t say anything when you had the chance? And I turned around and walked after him and he was in line for some reason — maybe for a Metrocard machine — and I said, in the kind of rush that comes out when you’ve rehearsed what you want to say, but in the moment can only speak plainly, “Do you remember when you sexually assaulted me in high school and said, Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it?”
And he looked so nervous, the way I always hoped he would, because that way I’d know that he knew that what he had done was wrong, and not just wrong but terrible, and then I would be right to be angry. It would be worse if he didn’t look nervous, or if he didn’t seem to think it was anything unusual, or if he didn’t remember it but was polite about it, or if he didn’t remember and didn’t believe me. But he looked scared of me, or rather of what I could do, which was the way I must have looked at him afterwards, in the four months I spent pretending everything was normal before he graduated and I could stop living in that frozen moment where I had learned what he was willing to do over a perceived insult.
This time, in the dream, he was the one who looked afraid, and that felt right. “Yeah,” he said, and tried to hurry me away from the line. I could tell he was scared that somebody else would hear me. But none of that mattered, suddenly. It was just me and him, and the memory of what he’d done, which I had carried for all those years and which he had thought would never catch up to him — but it had. Finally, it had. “Yeah, I remember that.”
“Good,” I said, and from that point I don’t remember anything until I woke up.
—R.