Distancing #24: Immunity

It’s more a season than a moment. Last summer, out of school for the first time since I learned to read, I found myself working at a cheesesteak joint in Williamsburg, trying to scrape together a future. These were not the plans I had for myself. I wanted to write and had gone, twice, to school for it. But I was broke, and jobless, and my family couldn’t help. There was no incoming generational wealth or waiting inheritance or fallback trust fund. (When my father died a few years ago, my grandmother and I used his savings to get up to date on the phone bill.) Two degrees hadn’t brought me into the writerly bourgeoisie, nor had I been elected to run in the circles of its littler, more pitiable version, that middling class that’s always toiling comfortably, eyes on their prize, unaware that the act of looking longingly at high-rise apartments requires turning your nose up too.

So I took a restaurant job instead. I don’t say this to complain; I just mean that, a year ago, I was coming to terms with my class as feeling and not just fact; I felt it spiritually, as a pointed cosmic silence that had begun at my birth. The soundtrack behind me was missing, I was only just realizing, even as it seemed to rage around the Williamsburg constituency I served. They were always looking toward their purpose (an overpriced sandwich) and through the person serving it. My station—in the restaurant, in the neighborhood’s socioeconomic order—was a blackened steel grill, where I’d strike sizzling slabs of beef with a blunt metal spatula, the grill’s surface screaming under each chop. I spent nights drumming out this death-metal clangor, breaking a once-living being into a million fragments until they were ready to be slathered in cheese sauce, swaddled in a bun and sold for $15. When I wasn’t glued to the grill, I walked circles around the kitchen, participating in lackeyhood’s repetitive tasks: fulfilling orders, restocking fridges, carrying out the mind-numbing exercise of making French fries, which involves lifting and dropping baskets like dumbbells into a broiling sea of lard until the potato strips achieve a lifeless golden glow.