How to Be a Person (27 page)

The taste of all the burnished baked goods is like a muscle memory; I can run my mind over them and compare every baked good ever to their perfection. A proper ham and cheese croissant, made with Gruyère, heated up (convection or regular oven, NEVER microwave) remains my primary love, still. Occasionally, someone would special-order a Brie en brioche or a honey-almond tart, then (unthinkably) never show up to retrieve it: heaven. At the end of the day, anything left over was ours—bagsful of baguette and raisin-studded escargot and pithivier.

Sometimes, people would call and say they’d found a rubber band in their croissant or—one time, truly—a Band-Aid in their baguette. “That is
terrible
,” we would say mournfully. “But you must mean La Petite Boulangerie. They’re a Pepsi-Cola chain. This is La
Boulangerie—we are a family-owned, authentic French bakery.” Your spine straightened reflexively as you said this, and you gazed nobly into the middle distance. This was the feeling of justified pride.

In college, I went to see about a job at the Ingleneuk Tea House. It was a stodgy restaurant in a Victorian house; its claim to fame was that James Michener had worked there when he was a student, which seemed like a poor one. They took me on as a waitress, despite the fact that I had a terrible memory and couldn’t carry things. I worked for one shift, during most of which I hid from my trainer, folding and refolding white cloth napkins, terrified to go out on the floor. The shift meal was substandard turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy, with canned cranberry sauce. I hope I called to say I wasn’t coming back; I don’t remember at all. The Ingleneuk later burned down.

After graduation, I was back in Seattle with the world’s most expensive bachelor’s degree in English literature, unemployed. I happened to go to a bar called the Roanoke one afternoon for a beer, and I got to talking to a friend of a friend, who turned out to be one of the owners, and by the time I left I had a job as a cook in the Roanoke’s tiny kitchen. I had no experience. This is the kind of thing that happens at the Roanoke.

It was just simple stuff: sandwiches, nachos. I’m sure the nice owner-man thought: Any fool can do this job. I did eventually attain competence, if that may be measured by people no longer sending their food back because the cheese wasn’t melted. But I never quite got the extremely basic triangulation of making each and every
thing as delicious as possible for other people just as you would for yourself at home. Also, if I got more than one order, I felt like I was falling behind, all alone, doomed; I just didn’t have anywhere near the nerve for working in a kitchen.

I did learn the best way to cut an avocado, and how to pull a tap beer with a snap, and to never, ever take a drink from a man before it was completely, incontrovertibly empty—I almost lost a hand a couple times that way at the Roanoke. The jolly bartender Tom would go out back to “play ping-pong,” leaving me behind the bar, and the guys who drank there in the afternoons teased me, and I was shy, which made it even better sport. Once when I was back in the kitchen five minutes before the end of my shift, the phone rang—an order for 20 hot sandwiches, to go. “
Tommmmmm
!” I wailed, sticking my head out. All the guys all along the bar laughed uproariously, especially the one still on the other end of the line.

My last food job was in San Francisco. It was at a café that paid under the table; I lived in a room that was meant to be a closet, so I’d be able to get by. The café is gone, and for the life of me, I can’t remember the name. I worked with the immigrant brother of the immigrant owner, who treated his brother more like a dog. But the owner wasn’t around much, and the brother and I got along. He was taking ESL classes, and when we weren’t busy, I helped him with his reading.

But there was the matter of the ravioli. I didn’t even know we served ravioli until someone ordered it. I asked the brother about the ravioli. “Ah!” he said, and started burrowing in the
glass-doored refrigerator. He went so far back that he all but disappeared. Eventually he emerged with a metal hotel pan with dripping, opaque plastic wrap over it. He unwrapped it to reveal a school of gray ravioli suspended in fetid water. “We can’t serve that!” I whispered. “Oh, no, no, no, it’s okay,” he said, and fetched a colander and dumped the ravioli into it in the sink. He started running cold water over the ravioli, rinsing away the visible gray skin on each one. “NO!” I said, louder. “It’s okay! It’s okay!” he said. “NO IT IS NOT OKAY! WE CAN’T SERVE THAT!” I said, loud enough for customers out at the tables to hear. We went back and forth for a bit, but I put my foot down, and I made him throw it away in front of me.

A little while after that, a regular at the café was talking about his new internet company, and it turned out there was a great job for an English literature major there. I called the owner to tell him I had to quit, that I was getting my shifts covered—he interrupted me with a stream of invective I’ve not heard the likes of before or since. “I GIVE YOU THIS FUCKING JOB AND THIS IS WHAT YOU DO TO ME!” He went on and on, cursing fabulously and liberally. It was insane, but he was a grown-up, and I was shaking with an animal fear. Finally, he paused in his rage, and suddenly I knew what to do. “NO, FUCK YOU!” I said, and hung up the phone.

APPENDIX B. THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF PEOPLE THAT THERE ARE

BY LINDY WEST

PEOPLE WHO CHOOSE TO CORRECT YOU ABOUT THE DEFINITION OF “HOBO”

Am I making this up? I feel like every time someone uses the word “hobo” to mean “homeless person,” somebody else has to climb waaay up on their high horse and don their semantics cap and start getting highfalutin all over town about how “a hobo is someone who rides the rails in the Great Depression, and is it 1934 right now? I don’t think so! And I can’t believe you don’t even know what words mean. How embarrassing. Have you heard of
Wikipedia? Hhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Maybe I’m making all of this up, but if I’m not, I’d just like to say that I’m aware of what year it is, and I am going to continue using the word “hobo” however I please (within reasonable homeless-related limits, of course), thank you very much, and the way in which I please to use it is, “No thank you, hobo, I do not wish to go on a date with you.” Also I will accept “transient.”

PEOPLE WHO ARE MEAN TO HOBOES

Lay off, man. Being homeless is the worst thing. Give the dude a dollar. (I’m still not going on a date with you, hobo.)

PEOPLE WHO STILL HAVE JOBS

As bad as things are, this is still most people. People with jobs are great, except for the few who talk shit to people without jobs (things like “Hey, get a job!” or “Where’s your job?”). In such instances, these people need to be reminded that they, too, possess jobs vulnerable to layoffs and should probably shut the fuck up.

PEOPLE WHO ARE QUIETLY LESS THAN $100 AWAY FROM COMPLETE DESTITUTION

You have to hope it’s going to be okay. This can’t go on forever.

PEOPLE WHO SECRETLY HAVE VAST FAMILY FORTUNES/TRUST FUNDS TO KEEP THEM FROM EVER KNOWING COMPLETE DESTITUTION, OR EVEN MILD HARDSHIP

Just do something interesting with it. You already won. Be grateful. Don’t be a douche.

PEOPLE WHO CLAIM TO BE AFRAID OF CLOWNS

These people (and they are numerous) are attempting to cultivate a cute quirk, but they are really just aping a cute quirk cultivated by thousands of cute-quirk-cultivators before them in a giant, gross, boring feedback loop. Yes, clowns can be mildly creepy. But come on. Among the many things that are scarier than clowns: fire, earthquakes, a guy with a knife, riding the bus, colon cancer, falling down the stairs (it could happen at any time!), rapists, people who just kind of look a little rapey and are standing too close to you in line at 7-Eleven, Marlo from
The Wire
, influenza, and scissors.

PEOPLE WHO DON’T WATCH TV

Symbolically not doing something for the sake of not doing it is almost never evidence of sophistication. It is evidence of not knowing what you’re fucking talking about. Are we really still having this conversation? Television is a part of the cultural landscape at this point—a lot of it is good. A lot of it is bad, some of which is also good. You know, LIKE ALL THINGS MADE BY HUMANS? Obviously it is also a good idea to go outside once in a while. But the presence
of a television in your home does not make that decision for you. You make it. Feel free to still go outside at any time.

PEOPLE WHO WILL JUST HAVE A BITE OF WHATEVER YOU’RE HAVING

Please, please, please just order your own lasagna.

PEOPLE WHO STUDIED ABROAD IN A THIRD-WORLD COUNTRY

Congratulations.

PEOPLE WHO ARE INTO WHIMSY

You can’t really be mad at people who send away for porcelain figurines of poodles wearing poodle skirts that they saw in the back of
PARADE
, or who enjoy movies in which impish children attempt to call grandma in heaven on the CB radio. That’d be like punching Helen Keller in the face. These people just want to be left alone with their extremely lifelike baby replicas—small false humans filled with pretend love that can be asphyxiated with attention and never poop, cry, or grow up to make fun of anyone’s stretch pants and doily collection. Forever-babies. (Note: Sometimes people who are into whimsy are
not
into things like gay marriage. In which case, fuck ’em.)

PEOPLE WHO ARE WHITE WHO CALL BLACK PEOPLE “BROTHAS” WHEN TALKING TO OTHER WHITE PEOPLE, AS IN, “A LOT OF MY FRIENDS ARE BROTHAS”

These embarrassing people have lots of black friends and are very comfortable around black people. They also aren’t weirded out about being at the gay bar because their ex-girlfriend was bisexual.

PEOPLE WHO ARE OLD

Notable old people include: Methuselah, George Burns, Andy Rooney, an elephant, Dick Van Dyke, Slade Gorton the senator, Father Time, Slade Gorton the Gorton’s fisherman, John McCain’s mom, the old lady who dropped it into the ocean at the end, Harrison Ford.

OLD PEOPLE WHO THINK PIGEONS ARE THEIR BEST FRIENDS

Listen, old people. Pigeons do not love you. Much like robots and the British, pigeons do not have the capacity to feel love. They only have the capacity to desire croutons. And when you spread infinity croutons across the grass outside MY house, for the purpose of making pigeons love you (WHICH WILL NEVER HAPPEN), the only result is infinite feces. I now have to walk upon feces-encrusted streets through a feces-encrusted world. Because of you and your delusions of pigeon love. Stop it.

BABIES

The opposite of old people. They are like you and me, except smaller, more illiterate, and with less money.

PEOPLE WHO ARE SECRET HOOKERS

They’re your friends, but they’re
hookers
! Ssssh!

RECESSION HOOKERS

No judging. Sometimes these things happen. There but for the grace of writing a bunch of bullshit go I.

PEOPLE WHO ARE PRETTY
AND
SMART
AND
FUNNY
AND
NICE

You probably want to hate these people, but why bother? They are absolutely wonderful, and all we can do is deal with it and hope to be charming enough that they will someday mate with us so that our children can absorb some of their impossible magic.

PEOPLE WHO ARE HOT GREEK WAITERS

Once, my sister and I were in a restaurant in Greece, having a fight, and the hot waiter (all waiters in Greece are hot) took one look at our bleak, tear-puffed faces and said, “Ouzo power.” He brought us two little glasses of cold, cloudy ouzo, and the ouzo cured our fight. OUZO POWER.

PEOPLE WHO SMILE AT YOU ON THE STREET

It’s always nice when any noncreepy stranger smiles at you. There
is not enough interstranger smiling going on these days. I also appreciate it when people working in customer service behave in a genuinely nice manner. Thank you. Please enjoy this large tip for your wonderful smile.

PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW HOW TO DRINK

Sometimes a person forgets to eat dinner, or sometimes they just didn’t have time or money, and then they end up at the bar and the only snacks available are tallboys. And yes, sure, sometimes they grab your beard and tell you, “You are drinking the most successful sausage,” even though that’s barely even English, and then they lose their keys and have to sleep on your floor, where they wake up utterly bewildered and have to walk all the way home across town and drink a Big Gulp of Sprite for breakfast on a Thursday. Be kind to these people. They mean well.