Things Men Say to Me at Work (Part 2)
Tom strikes again
As we approach May, the country club’s golf season is now in full swing. We had some days of too much rain and a flooded course, but overall, most of the golfers I see every Friday during my dinner shift are back in the game.
This past week, I had my first encounter of this new year with Tom. If you read my last post about him, you will not be surprised to learn that my first conversation with him in three months was enough to warrant another post about him and his big mouth.
When I pulled into the parking lot for my 4 o’clock shift on Friday, I saw him loading his golf clubs into his car. I groaned audibly as not only is he my least favorite person to converse with, but it also meant that the league he plays on, a group of mostly grumpy, Allgash demanding men, were back for the season. I parked my car and quickly ran into the club before he spotted me. But I couldn’t bypass him when he later came up to the bar.
“How is Write or Die?” he asked. I cringed inside, still kicking myself for having told him about my magazine the first time he asked. “Are you making any money yet?”
I said yes, and he went on to say that my magazine logo should be a skull and crossbones and that the name Write or Die—which he always says with gritted teeth like that’s how you are supposed to say it— reminds him of the Satanic Panic. I blinked.
“I started looking at you differently after you told me about that,” he said, referring to when I told him I run a literary magazine, that he later googled and found online.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, you are older than I thought you were.”
“Yeah, you told me that last time.”
“But before you were just” — he lifted his hands up in prayer to his cheeks and raised his voice a few octaves like a child— “you were just like this young girl who waited on us and worked here.”
More blinking from me.
“And then I saw you have all that going on. That you are an ENGLISH MAJOR.” He said, indicating that there are regular English majors and not-so-regular ones like me who start websites.
I asked if he wanted a beer so I could move on from this “conversation.”
I told my boss about the encounter —well, actually, if I’m being honest, I said, “Why is it that Tom can’t open his mouth without me wanting to punch him in the face?”
“It’s like he has no filter at all,” my boss said.
“It's like he basically just told me he thought I was an airhead until he realized I had a brain.”
*
One of the new servers hired this year has been working in the industry for ten years, but this is her first time working in a country club. I really enjoy our shifts together. The other night, we had a function that had half members and half everyone else, and a group made their way over to the dining room after the function ended. The new girl and I were cleaning up, hoping to get home early, but these folks ended up staying awhile. One of the non-members, seemed very drunk and was joking around with his friend. I’m not sure why he turned to include us in the conversation, but he pointed his thumb at his buddy and said, “Hey, make sure you girls get an education, or you will end up like this guy!”
I was caught off guard, but honestly, at that point in the night, I was barely listening to these guys. But the new girl stopped loading the glasses into the dishwasher, stared him down, and said, “We have educations.” He chuckled and turned away.
Later that night, we recounted the comment to the functions manager. “That triggered the shit out of me,” the new girl said. It had been assumed about her so many times, she told us. That because she was behind the bar, she hadn’t gone to college.
*
While both of these comments are not the worst things said to women in the workplace or even the worst things that have ever been said to me on the job, I wanted to write about them. Partly, because I have a feeling Tom is going to become a series regular if he keeps it up. But also because this idea is getting so old: that people who work in the service industry are uneducated. It seems like everyone knows that's not true except for these old guys. And even if that drunk man wasn’t completely coherent, it's still an attitude he clearly possesses—he is superior to the bartenders.
Of course, I can’t help but wonder if he would have said the same comment if we were both men. I doubt it. I wonder the same about Tom, who was so shocked by the fact that I have a business he now has to “change the way he looks at me.”
I have a better idea, Tom. Don’t look at me at all.
*
In my last post about Tom, his comment bothered me more than I wished to admit because it brought up my fears about time and my writing career. Although I immediately knew I would write about this week's encounter, it didn't stick with me as long. I feel myself detaching from this job and these people. And I can’t help but note the timing: when I’m finally almost done —well done enough to query—with my novel.
If you don’t know, the majority of my novel takes place in a restaurant, specifically a country club. I’ve worked in clubs for ten years and have written about them for over three. It's been a long time. While I know I will be writing about bars, restaurant kitchens, servers, and country clubs for a long time (two of the short stories I have out on submission right now are set in these places and they were a joy to write), I’m getting tired of actively being in them. It’s been so many years of doing the same things, being with these same people, listening to the same conversations, and rolling my eyes at insensitive and rude comments made by men who were born in the 1950s. I think I’m craving that distance. Some people claim they can’t write about a place until they are away from it. I believe that’s true. But I can also say that being immersed in the place I've been writing my novel about has also strengthened my work. So maybe that’s why, as this draft comes to a close, I’m more than ready to get the hell out.
*
Sometimes, when I spend too much time in my head thinking about my dreams—my aspirations, what I hope to manifest with my positive thinking, what I pray for, my goals—it can feel as though my present life is small and insignificant. I’m fixated on what I lack and not what I have. That the future holds the key to my happiness, or that when I reach these levels of achievement, say publishing a novel, I will find true contentment. But I know, well the rational side of my brain knows, that this isn’t true.
When I’m at the restaurant and thinking, “Oh God, here you are again. You still work here. You are still listening to these bullshit comments,” I have a choice to make: Lose myself in the negativity, scold myself for the decisions I have made that brought me to this place, think of what I could have done differently. Or, I can think about the writing—the real work.
Writing makes me feel powerful. Writing is something I can control in my life. Writing is important enough to me that I chose to work in a flexible service industry job over a corporate one so that I would have the time and energy to pursue it and make it my life.
I’m proud of what I’ve created and looking forward to the day when writing about country clubs allows me to have a life where I don’t need the country club to be financially stable. I know it’s going to happen. (People say publishing won’t change your life, but I choose to believe differently. Why not??)
But until then, I think about the work, the process, the actual act of writing, and how much I love doing it. Then, it seems, I can get through anything. I can detach from the ways in which I make money to pay rent. I can quickly move past sexist assumptions said between sips of beer. I can focus on what matters: this present moment with me, myself and my keyboard.
*
When I told my husband I was writing another article about Tom, I wondered, “Should I have changed his name when I wrote the first piece? What if he finds this?”
But my husband shook his head and said, “Too bad. He says whatever pops into his head about people. Why shouldn’t you?”
Cheers to that.
Writing through and about these experiences is like alchemy, and I for one cannot wait to read how you transmute these elements into a novel! And screw Tom. He truly sounds like the worst.
"Writing is powerful." You're so right, and I love that it's your reaction here. What a jerk this dude is, and your husband is totally right! Say what you think. Write what you know. Take down the jerks :)