"If not by faith then by the sword"
Whose blood greases the wheels of your existence?
I’ll go first. There are the retail workers at the food service distribution company where Dylan and I are buying most of our groceries these days. There are the employees at the apple farm we visit for local eggs and beef. There are the employees at the family farm from which we order ramps, eggs, bacon, pork, and duck for pickup. There are the cooks at the local restaurants we get takeout from every so often. There are the retail workers at the West Side Market, where we buy chicken and produce. At some point in the future there will be the pharmacists who fill our prescriptions, since we’re overdue to refill them. There are the water utility workers and the employees of the power plants that keep our lights on and our gas flowing. There are the delivery workers who drop off unemployment notices and political mailers we didn’t solicit. There are the employees at the gas stations we visit. There are the factory workers who manufacture the equipment used in the power plants and utility companies. There are the processing plant employees who pack and check the few supplies we still buy in a grocery store (soy milk and nondairy butter). There are the manufacturing employees who produce injectable testosterone cypionate. You can keep splitting the atom, further and further, down to raw materials and where they come from: growing and mining.
A million invisible hands enable the way we live, which is fairly small and unassuming. For the most part, we stay at home. We don’t eat out or go to bars often, because even with two and a half jobs between us we typically can’t afford to; we don’t usually go to movies or shows, because neither of us loves being in a room full of people and my attention span isn’t the most conducive to cinema. But we still depend on so many people to live in the manner to which we are accustomed, with the lights on and the water running. Even from six feet away, all of those people are at immeasurable risk — the kind of risk with which we are both intimately familiar. All of our two and a half jobs were in the service industry.
A week ago, one of the stylists I work with texted me at one in the morning because one of her clients saw our announcement that we will remain closed through the end of May, at least, and got in touch with her on Facebook. This is what the client wrote. (I haven’t corrected any of their spelling errors because when I was a journalist it was one of the few pettinesses I could indulge in while quoting fascists and the willfully ignorant and I’ve never felt the need to break that particular habit.)
I actually think salons should open May 1. With some regulations. Say, appointment only. That would control the number of people in the building, and allow for cleaning spaces more frequently. No lines and groups of people in the reception area. So why are you guys not able to open?
And if your cutting my hair you can wear a mask.
“I’m sorry, it’s so late but I am so dumbfounded,” the stylist texted me. “What you’re saying to me is I don’t matter.”
Many people who don’t work service jobs try not to think of service workers as people, because it makes them uncomfortable. It is inherently an uncomfortable position to be in if you treat service workers like servants, demanding that we cater to your every whim, expecting us to read your minds, curating every aspect of your experience so you don’t have to be responsible for any of it, not even the way you feel. All service workers know that other service workers, or people who are no longer service workers but remember when they were, are the most generous tippers and the most considerate customers and clients. We are all familiar with the world that exists outside of Mondays to Fridays, nine to five, whether it runs on the third shift schedule of overnight bakers or the grueling opening shift of baristas and counter workers and grocery store employees, starting at four or five or six in the morning, or whether it’s the overnight shift that starts at nine at night, the sex worker hours that only end at three in the morning when the streets are empty save for the long-haul trucks carrying wholesale quantities of food or flour or newspapers. (That’s the quietest I’ve ever seen the world, not the way it is now, when every window is bristling with confined life — walking through midtown Manhattan when all the offices are closed and the morning shows aren’t on air yet, so tired that I almost wasn’t anymore, the sidewalks empty and the sky just starting to lighten. The sidewalk dark with rain, the whole city holding its breath.)
Here, by the way, is what a haircut costs your stylist: tens of thousands of dollars for cosmetologist training. Thousands of dollars for a good pair of shears (just one! When was the last time you got a haircut in a salon or a barbershop using only one pair of shears?) and hundreds of dollars more for clippers, if applicable. Endless hours, sometimes starting before you go to work in the morning, almost always ending after you eat dinner at home in the evening. Up to sixteen clients a day, assuming thirty minutes for a short cut and an eight-hour shift: sixteen conversations that start with the same small talk and can go anywhere from uncomfortable silence to a full-on therapy session, for which your stylist cannot charge a copay. The holiday rush — God, the holiday fucking rush — when everybody and all their relatives remembers too late, although we remind them every year to book a month in advance, that they’ll be in family photos and they just can’t live with these fucking roots any longer or you’ll ruin their life! Can’t you squeeze them in for just a trim? Just a quick layered trim and maybe four inches off the bottom? And some highlights and lowlights maybe? What about a balayage? What do you mean, you’re booked solid for a week? They have a work holiday party tomorrow night! Surely you have four hours to spare on less than 24 hours’ notice. You don’t? Well, they guess they’ll just go to the party with ROOTS and it’s all your fault. What about next week? Do you have any space then?
Once, a client complained that the stylist had made her look like “Frankenbitch” (direct quote, not the kind of thing you can make up) because she had insisted on the stylist following her exact color instructions rather than taking the stylist’s advice. Once a client revised the concept of penis envy to be trans-inclusive just so he could leave a voicemail accusing me of it. Once a client I had never met before in my life spent two hours staring at me and I found out later that they had done so because they were friends with someone who was stalking me, and were letting them know at that very moment that they now knew where I worked. Your haircut costs encountering sixteen of those people, every day. Your haircut costs remembering which client is going to come in at four in the afternoon and demand a fresh pot of coffee. Your haircut costs forty to fifty percent of whatever you pay at the front desk, if your stylist is paid commission, which most of them are, with the remainder of that total going to the salon to pay for utilities and maintenance and administrative staff — and a profit, maybe, sometimes. Sometimes not. Not to borrow overmuch from Gabrielle Hamilton, but balayages are dead. You will not be willing to pay someone enough to hover around your face for three hours, hand-selecting sections of your to hand-paint with lightener so you can tip them ten percent and not come back for a year. You already aren’t.
Balayages are dead and salons might be dead, too. A year from now, when it might finally be safe to go outside again, people will already be used to staying in. People have changed their behavior and that signifies the kind of shift that you can’t achieve with legislation or altruism or shame. Restaurants, the kind where you go and sit down with your friends and order dishes for the whole table, might be dead. Bars are almost certainly dead. In a country where the highest form of success has always been measurable by the ability to isolate yourself in your own home and compel others to bring all your needs and wants to you, we finally have an excuse to democratize that alleged good — by which I mean that companies who already capitalize on that aspiration have the opportunity and justification to drive all the alternatives out of business. There are so many places I don’t think I’ll ever see again the way I could have if I’d gone just a few years ago. I never sat in the Grand Central Oyster Bar at lunchtime holding a book as a pretext to eavesdrop. I may never jam in shoulder-to-shoulder at Taboonette for a salmon-and-egg pita again. Ice skating in Bryant Park, browsing at the Strand, lying in Union Square in the sun, all these places that I thought would be there forever, that I thought I’d always be able to go back to — they are already gone. Trash and Vaudeville moved away from St. Marks Place four years ago. Three years before that, I read a piece about it — or rather about Jimmy Webb, though the difference is moot — in the New Yorker that made me want to spend the rest of my life writing my way into so many lives and stories that I might otherwise never get to experience. Jimmy Webb died in April, taking the Trash and Vaudeville I loved with him. I was just starting to feel like I knew Cleveland in any useful, real sense. That is gone now too.
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. The kid on the uptown No. 1 train, the new arrival stepping out of Grand Central, the jerk at the intersection who doesn’t know east from west: those people don’t exist anymore, ceased to be a couple of apartments ago, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
Colson Whitehead wrote this essay for the New York Times nineteen years ago and I think about it all the time. Another essay that I think about all the time is “Happy Endings,” by Margaret Atwood, in which she writes, “You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it.” The only certainty is that nothing lasts forever. We walk side by side with death every day that we are alive. Most of the time, most of us are lucky enough to not feel that as acutely as we do now. Some of us are not, for various reasons. One example: I have a family history of suicides, an inheritance I have not been spared. Many trans people have similar experiences among our chosen family. Large parts of our shared history are written in eulogies and obituaries. How do you build a future on a foundation of loss?
Leah, the writer whose excellent thread on trans suicidality I linked above, draws a few conclusions on the question she raises there. One of them is: “I think this means taking on love as a precondition, a kind of practical openness towards life’s possibility. The more there is love, the harder it is to shut down this possibility.”
Dylan and I spent some time last week trying to list as many deaths as we could think of: live music, fan conventions, cruises, resorts, amusement and theme parks, public pools, tattoo parlors, cafes and restaurants and coffeeshops, of course, festivals, movies in the theater, block parties and barbecues, camp, in-person education. In the spirit of Leah’s question: How do we conceive of this? What comes next? How can we make it a future we want to live in? Every time I see an Amazon delivery van on the highway, which is more and more often these days, I think about the autonomous trucks depicted in Logan, the uncanny-valley shipping containers on wheels that zip across the country heedless of other travelers. I do want to live, but I don’t want to do it in a world that Jeff Bezos owns wholesale. I want to know the people whose work makes it possible to live the way I do. In the midst of death, I want to find life. I want to believe that all of this is possible. That, perhaps, is as good a place to start as any.
—R.