I walk the shining August afternoon red-bricked streets that will forever run through my blood, on my way towards Captain’s, which, coming from campus, is the first place to eat or drink on the town’s hilltop commerce district. It’s location, patio and lax eye has always made it ideal for attracting the underage crowd, one of the reasons it’s been there for nearly a quarter of a century. My first bar drink in this town was there, on my first night visiting as a potential transfer, with a good man named DiSalvio who later made good for himself in Chicago. It was a Jack and Coke. I’ve never liked Jack, and had never drank it beyond a lack of options. But I was about to let this town become a part of me, and in my mind decided that I needed something stiff.
Years and lives later, I’ve found myself stopping in to inquire about a job set up by my new roommate and current Captain’s delivery driver. It’s hard to imagine that not so long ago I was on a skyrocket to another plane of existence. An impressive resume, eye-popping entry-level offers, exuberance and talent. And then I met a girl and fell out of touch with myself and everything sort of unwound. Now I’m looking to flip burgers in order to pay rent and feed addictions. The looming neon arch proclaiming the establishment’s name is asleep, and I walk in to find the room settled by darkness.
“Power’s out,” the man behind the bar with sharp glasses and an aging Caesar calls out. His arms are folded and he’s staring at a television screen that isn’t on. “I can serve beer for exact cash only.”
“Uh, actually I’m here to meet Bryan?”
“I’m Bryan.”
“I’m Dan…Phil’s roommate?”
“So you’re looking for work?” he asks, removing his arm from the fold to shake my hand.
“Yeah.”
“Are you in school?”
“Graduated.”
“Any other jobs?”
“No.”
“When can you start?”
“As soon as possible.” I have to contain myself. It’s never wise to let your eyes widen, to let the words come out too frantically. They might assume that you’re a desperate bum, which you are…but you don’t want to give them the connotations that implies. Most of the management of the world doesn’t understand that a desperate bum can ascend if they’re given the chance and possess the desire to.
“What’s your availability like?”
“Totally open…I’ll lose any job before I miss a Browns game and I’ll need the day off in the event that Bob Dylan dies.” Everyone always takes this comment as cheeky, but I’m as serious as a terminal diagnosis. In the unlikely event that I get a ‘real’ job someday, I imagine that I’ll never have to work on Sundays, and I can always just call in ‘personal’ if Bob passes.
I fill out an application as a formality, Bryan nodding that it’s good enough after I’ve filled in the pertinent boxes in the squinting darkness. I claim no exemptions. I am told to come in the next morning at ten to train. The last four digits of my Social are to be my punch-in code. Ask Nick for a shirt when I get there.
And that’s it. The entirely trajectory of my life is changed by that everyday, semi-formal exchange with a stranger. Bryan will go from the man who hired me to the boss I’m afraid of to the boss who lets me off too easy to a kind-hearted friend who suffers the empathetic ills of living in a cold-hearted world. Valerie will go from the girl who I had Spanish with to the girl who taught me how to wrap burgers like a gift to my favorite human being on the face of the planet. Seth will go from the boyfriend of a friend to a roommate to the most kindred of souls. Marie will become the life raft that allows me to seek comfort in my destruction while always quick to listen to the screams of my pain…to think that she started out as the short girl who left early on my first shift. Phil will go from classmate to sudden roommate to one of the most selfless and brimming people I’ve ever met. Amber will go from the cheery girl who became the first person I let myself friend in months to my closest confidant to Seth’s girlfriend to someone whose sneer lights up my insides with regret and anger, leaving me buzzing like the top score of a pinball machine. David will go from the droopy-eyed, pot supplying bespectacled doorman to my most-trusted and supportive corner man, one of the people that I most aspire to be like in this world. Devin will go from the weird, needy girl who fell for me to the run-of-the-mill, flitting girl who spurned a weird, needy me. I will go from a broken man to an enlightened man and break myself again.
Everything will change. Love will pour into my heart like a thick-based can of red paint. Anger will consume me to the point of physical and mental destruction. I will understand the greatest love I’ve ever had, a non-singular love that is borne within myself and not an idea. All because I desperately took a job that requires an apron when I allowed my life to bottom-out. Bottom-out. Ha! That was a fucking paradise. A Shangri-La I will never again re-discover. I’d fight armies to shake Bryan’s strange hand for the first time again.
It’s the moments you don’t ponder that make or break you.
