The Eight-Day Week
Zoe Gonzales Day One: Proud Member of the League of Professional Service Workers. You come into work like a cheetah races after the one antelope it believes to be the best; you are focused, cunning, and bright. You smile most of the time and pout none of the time. How much better could you be? You take personal responsibility for the mistakes of the Back of House, such as cold food, tough meat, and crusty desserts. You smile when customers snap their fingers, crying out “miss” like their life depends on it, and you say hi to every snot-coddling child that waddles through the front door. You are the epitome of service personalities. You are the embodiment of servant idealism. You are a walking golden slave. You get a paltry tip, you say whatever. The cook at the front of the line snarks all night, you laugh uncondescendingly at his drama. You ruin your favorite black shirt with bleach, and you promise you’ll buy yourself a new one on your next day off. Ha! What a fantasy. You are pumping through, pure and untouchable. What else could go wrong? Everything, and you can fix it without a hitch. Tell me again, are you even human? Day Two: Veteran Status Achieved, This Job Might Be Too Easy For Me. You are a professional at what you do, and you are a tad tired of it. Who said doing the same thing over and over again would be fulfilling, enriching? Some dumb bastards, that’s who. You are halfway into day two and you’d love to shoot a customer who for some inexplicable reason wants every dish to be made without a single gram of carbohydrate. It’s not possible, you explain, but they do not hear you. So you fight with the kitchen, then plead with the customer, then fight with the kitchen, then end up giving the person half their food for free because it doesn’t align with the standards of the South Beach Diet Bible. Want to know the real clincher? They left a five percent tip. You now feel justified in your hatred of all mankind. Do you need any more evidence? Nope, you do not. Day Three: Tired, Hungry, and Overly Sensitive. You would have killed yourself if there hadn’t been a goddamn customer in the restroom every second for the past four hours and if you were brave enough to slit your throat right there in the dining room as customers drank the burgundy red reduction blood of cows that died too young. You have reached your third day in a row on the job and you feel as most people who work a five-day week must feel. You’ve given up on adulthood and all forms of Western capitalism and have decided that living in the rainforest under a giant leaf might be where you really belong. Then you remind yourself than you are in fact a big fan of running water and have failed to save enough cash for a plane ticket anyway, so American money-grubbing for you it is. Most of your tables are more concerned with their discussions of the threat of terrorism or the increasing cost of chemical hair dyes, so you just do your job like a soldier goes into battle, stoic and strong. You have no jokes for these people. Day Three is more than just the third day in a sequence of eight. Day Three is the beginning of the end. As you roll the silverware whose fate it is to be unsheathed, dirtied, and tarnished, you think to yourself, “I suppose this is what life is all about.” You ponder as you roll; it is one and a half hours past closing and customers are still in the restaurant, discussing God only knows what. God is falling asleep at the table, their conversation is so dull. You think as your hands perform the same motions over and over; maybe the silverware has a mind of its own, maybe the forks have dreams of traveling to faraway places and finding themselves. Maybe this spoon is tired of performing its role as a cheap vestibule for soup, forever serving unsatisfied, exacerbated humans, sitting in buckets of slimy grease water, and going through the endless rigmarole that is the dishwasher’s routine. Maybe this little utensil has always dreamed of riding upstream and living out the rest of its brilliant, shiny days in Canada or Upstate New York. Cognitively-activated tableware. It’s a pretty abstract concept—perhaps too abstract. Perhaps crazy. This, as you can see, is the fate of Day Three. Days Four Through Six: Zombie Service Apocalypse. The Industry has turned you into something you don’t even recognize anymore. Yes, you are now a something, not a someone. How do you feel about that? Oh wait, you can’t feel. That’s right! You take in orders just as the restaurant’s crappy CD player loads discs from twenty years ago. “What would you like?” you say mechanically, a machine rotating on its head. The people answer, yes, the lucky people! They are still people, by God! And they know what they want! Your movements mimic those of a robot. You’re pretty sure you are a robot. The last sliver of human left inside you is pretty sure you’ve all but announced your passage over to the steel side. Still, there’s a bit of a person left in you. A sad, disappointed, and desperate person. That person only makes up five percent of your form, so you know, she’s not that important. All that matters is that table five gets their vegan grilled cheese, also known as toast. The customer is nearly always wrong. Still, you trudge forward, blunted and weary. Day Seven: Release of Pain. Today you are free of all pain. You have flown the trenches of its dismal darkness; you escaped the endless abyss. Neither the long hours nor the wear and tear on your body can bring you down, for you have seen the bottom and you have dwelled there. Now you can discern the light, you can see through the other end of the tunnel. How have you accomplished this task? What has caused this sudden clarity? Was it the hope of a fresh opportunity? An immediate, fearless connection with a stranger? A simple pleasure, perhaps a scoop of caramel ice cream with a generous dollop of chocolate sauce on top? Nope, it was none of these things, nothing at all. Before all other things, first came the comfort. The reasoning won you over. You’ve succeeded in convincing yourself that you actually are less important than other people, you are truly just a servant nouveau, a piece of capital essential to the business, but just as equally replaceable. A pawn, a puzzle piece, a chip, a hole; a part of the whole but not all that important. Nothing else matters, because the very reason you are here is so that you can live, and there’s nothing much to do about that, besides maybe to stop living. You’re past that point now. Suicidal thoughts belong to an earlier time (Day Five, for instance). No, Day Seven is an anomaly in the eight day sequence. Day Seven is spectacularly positive and hopeful. You’re surprised it even exists. Day Seven is when you get to breathe, so you take a great big inhalation. Then, on the exhale, you shrink a couple inches. You fall into yourself. You fetch things for other people. To them, you lack significance. You might as well be invisible. And what they think is everything. If that is so, then what are you? Nothing at all. Just a mere whisper in the breeze, unheard and unseen. Day Eight: Animal on the Floor. On the eighth day you arrive to work earlier than usual. You’ve become less aware of time, after all, it’s just a man-made concept like deadlines and to-do lists. You begin the work mechanically, like a wind-up doll ready to run circles for hours and hours. You smile and greet guests. You welcome all the people into your place. That’s right it is your place now that you’ve scrubbed it from window to floorboard. You’ve stuffed complaints in every crack, slid wishes under every gaping floorboard. There’s not a thing you do not know about this place. You could be the owner, but you’re not the owner. You could step right out, walk two feet from the door and realize you don’t know a smidgen about the world outside your world—you only know table numbers, flavors of dishes, spices in sauces, and the hues of a particular set of red wines—what else could you know? What else could you see? Do you even wonder anymore, or is it just a dream? The lights are dimming now and you’re supposed to go home. The bar is warm and welcoming, just how it’s supposed to feel. Down the highway, there’s nothing but road, no direction to go but forward. Trees hang out on either side, their branches slung over one another like the cool kids. Streetlights at your back, you cling tight to the tender cord that drags you home. You cry when it snaps, but you’re okay. Mother Nature is no warm and fuzzy maternal figure. She pushes you before you’re ready, when you’re still purple and premature, out into the world. Calloused from eight straight days of service and slowly disintegrating, you lay in bed and wait for sleep to come. You don’t want to die anymore. Who has the energy for that? Staring at the ceiling above, you only live for each generously granted breath. Now your labor’s over, you close your eyes, smile and wish for a quick, effortless escape. |
Zoe Gonzales started writing at the age of nine, when it was of utmost importance that poems be painted on the floor, carved in sand or otherwise imprinted on the earth. Since, she has amassed filled journals that match her body weight and size, as well as contributed to magazines, weeklies, and online publications, even launching a feminist blog back in her wild, extremist days. These days, she writes poems and fiction from a small attic in Brooklyn, where she sleeps on stacks of paperbacks. https://zoegonzales.wordpress.com/
W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com). To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over six-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.
W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage.com). To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over six-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.
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