"Free to spend eternity in the factory"
Dylan and I were in a liquor store yesterday picking up a bottle of wine for our coworker’s birthday. There was a clear sheet of plexiglass hanging in front of the checkout counter that wasn’t there last time we were there, a few months ago, and the woman ahead of us in line said to the cashier, “Things have to get better, right?”
This week, if we’re being honest, has been more or less godawful. Yesterday morning the first wave of a Mother’s Day weekend storm expected to drop temperatures by 30 degrees Fahrenheit reached Cleveland, something I know because as a cosmic punishment for unknown crimes I have been gifted with a barometrically sensitive skull that constricts at the slightest change in pressure or temperature, and on Friday I woke up with my head in a vise. My skull does a lot of interesting things that I largely only find out about after a decade or so of assuming that everyone (for example) experiences presyncopal symptoms as a side effect of anxiety. It’s like those posts you read by people who just assumed that peaches make everyone’s mouths itchy and only find out years later that what they have is in fact a mild allergy (I am also guilty of this).
Speaking of anxiety and the ways that this week has been terrible, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) on Thursday announced that salons will be allowed to reopen next Friday, May 15. That’s less than one week from now: less than one week to establish (insufficient) safety procedures, to stock up on out-of-stock disinfectants and cleaning supplies, to train staff members in best practices. I am not even remotely an optimist, despite my best efforts, but I was still taken aback by the overt callousness of that decision. During the press conference where he announced, essentially, that people are just going to have to do their best and hope they don’t get infected, DeWine also acknowledged that this will reverse the beneficial effects of the lockdown he announced in March.
“As we open the economy let me state the obvious and not shy away from it: The risk is up,” he said, and added, regarding infection statistics: “We can expect the opening up of the economy is going to take those numbers higher.”
I would truly rather these people came out and said, “Okay, we know that opening the service sector means that you will get sick and some of you will die, and we’ve decided that’s fine.” Admit it! Just say what you mean, which is that you have assigned a value to human life and found it acceptable to guarantee losses. If it’s what you believe, and what you wish to act upon, then you should have to say it plainly, and to live with the fact that you have said, I have decided that it is okay if you die. I am no stranger to the idea that a human being is worth a certain amount of money. I am familiar, even, with the amount of money that I am worth, according to the market value of the human body. I find the idea of basing public policy on any such concept to be totally abhorrent.
One of my coworkers called me on Thursday. “I know neither of us likes talking on the phone, so I promise I’ll keep it brief,” she said, and then we spent half an hour talking about our other coworker, defender of rapists, who is convinced that it’ll be safe for her to spend up to five hours at a time hovering around a client’s head as long as that client wears a mask and washes their hands when they come in. (On a side note, I’m beginning to realize that I might not be able to work with somebody who I am unable to talk about without appending that epithet. I spent some time on Thursday falling into little daymares about what our first interaction back at work might look like:
HER: Hi! How are you doing? It’s so weird to be back!
ME: Hi! How are you? Still friends with rapists?
Etc. End scene.)
On Friday, another one of my coworkers called me — the one whose child got sick back in February with an unidentified upper respiratory infection that didn’t respond to medication — and we spent another half hour talking. She was worried because she hasn’t been able to get unemployment or assistance through the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program and doesn’t feel safe coming back to work yet. What I said to both of them is that I won’t be coming back to work until I feel safe, and I don’t know when that will be, if it ever is. I didn’t sign up for this. I did not sign up to be on the front lines of what Texas Monthly reporter Dan Solomon accurately described as “the latest front in the culture war.”
I started working at the salon because it was a safe place for me to be mentally ill and visibly trans during my first year on hormones. It is now the opposite of that. Ohio, in case you weren’t aware, is a concealed-carry state. Oklahoma, where a woman shot a McDonald’s employee this week for asking her to leave the restaurant’s closed dining room, is also a concealed-carry state. Michigan, where a man shot a security guard in the head for asking his sister to wear a mask, is also a concealed-carry state. We’ve already had clients reach out demanding services from stylists who aren’t comfortable providing them. Yesterday, one of my coworkers told a client that she’s stressed about going back to work because of the personal risk.
“Why?” the client replied. “Who knows what is and isn’t real.”
One of the parts of my job that I loved most was getting to talk to people and make their days a little better, and most of the time, I genuinely did believe that those people saw me as a person as well. But of course that was always conditional. Of course I am only a person as long as that doesn’t inconvenience anybody else. The moment that acting in my own self-interest requires somebody else to re-evaluate their own behaviors and actions, their own pre-conceived ideas of what it is reasonable to expect from others, there is the possibility of resentment. People don’t like to realize that they have been unreasonable, and often they take that out on the person who is pointing it out to them, as if that will retroactively justify their behavior when the simplest answer — and the one most likely to be productive — is to take their word for it and apologize. Saying sorry, as I remind myself often, costs nothing and is good practice. I would rather demonstrate that I am willing to examine my own behavior and correct it in situations where that doesn’t end up being necessary than refuse to do so when it actually is.
So often, people are so afraid of admitting that they’re wrong that they would rather double down instead. People are terrified of being vulnerable enough to say, It was wrong of me to say that I was fine with putting your life at risk for my haircut. Or, It was wrong of me to say that trans people are all sexual predators seeking to infiltrate society. (Never mind that out-and-out sexual predators already have a perfectly fine time living openly with no consequences.) Or, It was wrong of me to capitalize on racism. And so on. What’s the worst that can happen? Everybody says, yes, that was wrong of you, and now you will experience consequences for the way your words and actions affected other people, though those consequences will likely be of lesser magnitude than those effects. I suppose, if you’ve never experienced either, those consequences probably feel like the end of the world. I still think it is cowardice to try and avoid them at all costs, the way so many people do.
“I understand people who are scared and don’t want to go back to work,” my coworker the rapist defender said in our group chat on Thursday. “I think everyone is able to have their opinions and do what they want to do.” (Especially, I assume, when it comes to giving known predators of their acquaintance a personal pass on their behavior. I have real difficulty not bringing this up in every conversation I have with and about this person, as I assume has become obvious.)
I also think everyone is able to have their opinions. I don’t think they should act on those opinions when doing so actively hurts the wellbeing of other people whose opinions differ from theirs. It goes without saying, I hope, that I mean that in a literal sense — not the way that people talk about how it’s oppressive to ask them to shit in the same bathrooms as trans people, for example, or to ask them to not be racist, or to ask them to have just one fucking ounce of consideration for other people. Every day I discover a new way to be sad about how impossible a request that seems to be. Every day I find a new way for my heart to break. Gem Spa, a corner store on St. Marks Place, is closed for good. I spent some much-cherished days with my dear friend Jo on that block, sitting on stoops, watching the hours and the seasons pass, getting our fortunes told by the machine under the bright yellow awning. I still have the printed card:
As Elizabeth Bishop wrote and Jo quoted on the occasion of that awning going away forever:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Things have to get better, right? No, they don’t. The idea that history is teleological is a lie of the kind variety that we tell ourselves in order to believe that things will work out, that we do not have to lose and lose and lose for the rest of our lives. The truth is that most of the time, things just happen, and we have to figure out what to do with them. That part — that art — is never so easy.
—R.