emotional labor 1

 To Jen, he is tiring, and I think this is the best way to describe him. Even though sometimes I think it's Jen that is tiring. Sometimes, I think it is tiring to be constantly saddled with being the soundboard for other people's problems. 

He comes in on the verge of tears already, his hat a black beanie with a small emoji face on the corner of it. In the trunk of his expensive Mercedes SUV, there are two carseats and a soccer ball for his five-year-old son that apparently can't catch. There are enough people still in the bar, and my boss is sitting there with her friend, Steve. Steve, who remembers my (almost brand new) coworker Paul after having met him one time but doesn't remember me. (He calls me Elizabeth, and though he is apologetic, it feels more for show that he is not a bad person, rather than for recognizing my personhood). Steve doesn't remember the time when he pulled me aside, pulled me away from the bar to tell me that as a bit of advice, I shouldn't be so quick to share details about my life with customers, because I never know who is listening and who might share my oversharing with my boss later. Steve. I am 15th on his list of contacts with this bar, he thinks I should know that, and though he knows better now than to call me Elizabeth, he wants me to understand that I have not made enough of an impression that he won't make a mistake about my identity later, when he comes in again to try the beer made by the company he works for. 

But this is about Shawn, not Steve. Shawn calls me "Em", and is the man to whom I am apparently a best friend, a person I have been there for countless times, the kind of person whom he feels obligated to come visit on Christmas Day (when I am working) and he wants to buy me a jacket from Nordstrom--in terms of my clothing size (generally) do I tend more towards a small or an extra small? He asks me this while I am unloading the dishwasher. 

Tears spill out of his eyes sometimes when he reaches his hand over the bar in order to indicate that he needs me to grasp it in solidarity. He tries to claim that it's because he cares so much about me, but I have enough empathetic understanding about people who come alone to bars to know that it is more about his own loneliness, his own insecurity in not being able to list off a variety of friends when he is asked or when he watches a TV show. Nights like this are long, they are difficult. The flashing Christmas lights all over the bar make it feel like I am on some ridiculous TV show or I am in the red light district of some tragic, foreign city. 

I know that it is not easy to ascribe my existence making drinks in a bar to a profession, and that this difficulty only increases the more that people drink and the more comfortable they feel talking to me. I also know that I am not supposed to read while I am at work, and that, like when I am at the beach or a coffeeshop, the simple existence of my face behind a book seems like as good an invitation as any to ask me to put the book down so I can tell someone what it is that I am reading. A bartender who doesn't want to drink tonight, not even when customers offer to buy me drinks? I used to think it was impossible too, in the days when I took tequila shots at nine in the morning to get my shift started, when I would order a grilled cheese and it would be the only thing I ate all day until I passed out at my house after an Uber ride home from work. 

But sometimes I just want to work for my paycheck and go home. Sometimes I don't have it in me to take on the emotional labor of caring for others who are using alcohol as an escape and the ensuing drunk confidence to assault me with a need for me to be their therapist, their confidante, the reassuring human face keeping them from staring at the walls of an empty, one-person apartment. Sometimes I am depressed, overwhelmed, barely surviving the emotional labor it takes to keep myself alive. But those are not the stories I often get to tell. 

Shawn had offered several times to buy me a jacket from Nordstrom by a certain point in the night, and he had found a group of four (two married couples) to glom onto--they were engaging with him in a way that was obviously making fun of him but not enough to end the game or chase him away. They quickly joined in on the fun of the idea of this man in his 40s offering to buy a jacket for the young bartender who was obviously uncomfortable--and I suppose thought of me enough to turn to me and ask what kind of jacket it was that I would like for him to buy. What, asked one of the men from the two couples, was on my Christmas list this year? What did I want Shawn to take off of it and buy for me, the person he had claimed as his best friend since he walked in the door and the breath left my body when I realized he wouldn't leave anytime soon? 

Maybe, said the wife of the man who had posed the question, maybe Emily doesn't want Shawn to buy her anything at all, because she seems uncomfortable. And the man doubled down about finding out what I wanted from Nordstrom (from Shawn), and so Emily (me) piped in to say: sir, how would you feel if someone came to your job and accosted you about what you wanted a strange man to buy you from your Christmas list? 

It used to amaze me when I was a kid, the way that adults sometimes pulled me to the center of a circle to do something performative, if only to take the attention away from them for a moment and instead put it on to the silly creature below who would sing and dance when instructed. I've never liked to be the center of attention, but it was only in moments like this, when I was forced into the limelight, that I really felt any anger at the situation--if you didn't want to talk to someone, why wouldn't you say so? Why force me to do something ridiculous to distract everyone from their discomfort instead? I only really understood it later when I began to understand that no matter how much we try to communicate ourselves to other people sometimes, all they really want is to have their attention redirected. 

Shawn and the two couples leave together, and I'm happy to see that they care enough about his safety not to let him drive and instead to offer him a ride home. I don't know where he lives, but I know it's close. Twenty minutes later I've finished all my closing tasks and I'm preparing to turn off the jukebox when I look to the vestibule (the space between the metal gate and the actual door to the bar) and through the window I see the silhouette of a person, My heart jumps to my throat then drops--I realize it is Shawn and I feel no better. I am alone now, no regulars to help me strong-arm a man who is not yet ready to go home to his empty apartment. 

He isn't wearing his jacket (it's from Nordstrom, he tells me, $279.99), which is alarm bell number one. I leave the bar and lock the gate behind me, it's 1:30 in the morning and I have already clocked out. He's starting in again on his tirade about how I'm one of his best friends and he cares so much about me (am I okay? It's the thousandth and first time he's asked), but at this point I am so tired I can barely let him finish the first few words before I start threatening to leave him outside and get in my car to go home if he doesn't let me call him an Uber. No his jacket is not inside the bar. No i don't have his car keys. It starts to rain, I start to see pictures in my head of him lying on the sidewalk like a piece of cardboard, unable to get into his house. The night is so dark, his fly is unzipped. 

I finally go back into the bar to check for the jacket he insists is there (it isn't), and with the door locked, I call my manager. I don't know what to do here, I tell him. There is nowhere to send Shawn, and now he's holding onto the metal gate (I can't lock it from the inside) like it's the only thing keeping him tethered to reality. I'm scared, I'll admit that. My manager suggests I call the non-emergency Berkeley police line, it's written on a piece of fluorescent yellow tape below the chalkboard where we write the 86'd list. Shawn is getting frustrated, he's pacing back to his car and then back into the vestibule, he now and then lets out a yell, and though I am empathetic about letting emotions escape the confines of your body in order to restore its equilibrium (I'm reading that book The Body Keeps The Score), a man is screaming and the front door of the bar is half window. And I am scared. 

The main thing I have to communicate with the police is that I need someone to escort me to my car. It seems ridiculous because my car is parked on the curb out front; I can see it while standing inside the bar. It isn't as nice as Shawn's expensive white Mercedes with the carseats in the trunk. But Shawn and I are both lonely. The officers arrive very quickly--only one of them (the Asian guy) is wearing a mask, which he doesn't take off the entire time. It feels nice to have this problem spread to a few different pairs of shoulders than just mine. And unlike the two couples who presumably had taken Shawn home, they understand that I am not Shawn's best friend, I am someone who performs a job, albeit a social, sometimes tragic one, just like them. 

When we are all outside together, Shawn tells me not to worry, he only wants me to be safe, then explains that because he is not white, this will not go well for him, that he wants me to understand that. I say nothing, let the anger pass. I am not white either. I wanted to leave out the back gate, I wanted to get into my car, I wanted to go home. But that didn't feel safe anymore. And so i called the police, and they showed up with recording cameras on all their chests, and they asked him to tell him their address so they could maybe find a way in, and they closed him gently into his car so he could sleep it off, because they didn't want to arrest him for public intoxication. 

It's raining harder, and one of the police officers has gone the few blocks down to Shawn's apartment and come back; the lights are all on, and some chairs are tipped over, like a drunk person stumbled over and through them. Kelso, Shawn's golden retriever, was curious and sniffing at the window when the officer peered in. That's how, Shawn says, they know the officer went to the right apartment. The most likely explanation being, then, that the two couples took Shawn home like they said they would, made sure he got inside, where he left his jacket, and after they had gone he left his house with the door locked and himself outside of it, and walked the few blocks back to my bar, where he waited in the vestibule for me to see him. 

This was the first shift where I didn't cry, since last week when Eli broke up with me. It's the day after I scheduled an appointment with my primary care doctor to take a hard look at my Lexapro prescription because I have been having suicidal thoughts and have been obsessing over them (don't worry, I'd never act on them). Rain drips down my jacket and into my boots as I am driving home and wondering where I am supposed to draw emotion from in a self that feels like an empty well. Two days ago my dad texted me that I am dead to him, that I need to take my anger and go live in it, and it's been hard to convince myself that I didn't provoke that. What do you do with people that seem hopelessly unable to change? Who think it is okay to pull you from your job to hold their dry, cracked palm, who wait in a rainy vestibule and keep you an hour past work to continue doing emotional labor for them? Where is my agency when I am standing next a man who insists he will sleep on the cold, wet street next to his car if I want to drive home, because he cares about me, because I am his best friend, because it doesn't matter?