Zero Gravity Bussing

Hollywood is dead and it’ll never be summer. Today is the first day it’s been warm in months. By the time it’s June, it’ll be spring. By the time it’s Fall, it will be winter.

Everything I write sounds like AI Lana del Rey lyrics now. I just read a piece about the dying entertainment industry, sputtering out after a feverish high from last year’s victorious writer’s strike. In the cum glaze glow of our union’s deal with the studios, it took a minute before we realized it’s still bad. The piece made me depressed, as pieces tend to do. I know it’s probably all true. The alcoholic narcissist in me thinks all these pieces about this slow burner apocalypse of film and TV is a ploy from writers to psyche other writers out from writing so they can be the only writers left. Mind games. Quit while you’re ahead, the smoke is thick down there. And if you do go down, you’ll only last a minute.

The good news is, I’m good at waiting. I’m a spiritual squatter. I’ll hang in till I’m forcibly removed. This is my new writer’s strike: to continue to not make a living from writing as of 2022. You can’t stop me from not making money. I won’t even say I‘m good at that — I’m a fucking scholar. I’ll do this until I am chased out of this town with a broom, or get swept away in the floodwaters. LA is a damp city now, after all. We’ve had more rain than Seattle so far in 2024. I don’t make this up. I used to worry I’d burn alive in a wildfire. Now I worry about drowning on my walk to CVS. It could be worse. I have my health. When I type that out, I imagine myself as late 60s faggot living in Palm Springs and toasting at a dinner in town with friends, with those misters spraying down on us in the hot night.

“I have my health! Thank goodness for that,” I’ll say, raising a glass of non-alcoholic Heineken. That’s what I drink in this future. “To health!” I say next. And the rest of my friends respond with “To health!” Then I finish my meal, stand up, and begin clearing off the table, and carry on with the rest of my busser shift.

I started my career bussing tables at the Standard Hotel in New York. The one under the High Line. I moved to the city after a year of living with my parents in south New Jersey when I graduated college. It was 2011 and the Recession was continuing to edge its meaty cock to the misery of American citizens. I watched my parents argue about money. I went on walks at night, every night, and listened to my iPod and craned my neck to see the lights of center city Philadelphia, less than eight miles away, through the suburban trees. I waited till my parents went to sleep every night and stayed up till three am drinking their wine and eating food over a trash can in the garage. I stayed away from the far corner of the dining room when it was dark. That’s where my grandfather—who lived in the house before we did— had died in when I was in college. We went over after he passed away. I saw his body in his bed; his mouth open, eyes closed tight. We weren’t close but it still upset me. I missed him even though I also didn’t care. Sometimes late at night, when I was drinking my seventh glass of Merlot and watching a TV show about hunting, I’d imagine my grandfather on the other side of the wall in his narrow hospice bed and try to keep my head as still as possible, worried that if I shifted even a millisecond, he would wake up and drag his fingers along the wall.

I downloaded Grindr for the first time that year, and talked to married men all over South Jersey. I took the train into Philly and floated through the Gayborhood and went home with a middle-aged couple in town for a birthday, and staying at a Sheraton. I went on a date with a closeted guy my age at a shitty bar in the next town over, under the above ground train rail into Philly. He texted me before we met and asked me to “not act gay” in the bar. I got fucked by a grad student and afterward he told me I took it like a champ and high-fived me. I fell in love with my first boyfriend, who lied about everything. I took my dog’s Xanax to come down from cocaine. I smoked cigarettes in the back corner of my parents’ yard and stamped them out in my neighbors’ cold soil. If anyone asked, I’d blame them on my dad.

I interviewed at the Yankee Candle Store and the Christmas Tree Shop and Dicks and Wegmans and didn’t get the job. I interviewed at Starbucks and then saw a man my dad’s age in a full business suit waiting to interview after me, and wanted him to get it over me. He did. I locked myself in my bedroom. I tweeted. I made YouTube videos.

I ran social media for companies that barely existed. I got let go from those jobs. I got paid to take photos on a digital camera at an event held at an Italian restaurant for local business people, with the promise that I’d run the social pages for the woman hosting the event. I took photos for an hour, some of the photos featuring popular kids who ignored me growing up, then I hid in the bathroom. I attended a conference held at a community college about the power of social media and ate lunch in my car. Later that week, the woman who ran to the company told me she didn’t have a budget for social media; she would be handling the company’s Facebook page from now on. Two years later I spotted her while walking out of a liquor when I was home from New York, visiting my parents. She was standing in the parking lot smoking a cigarette and talking to some man she probably knew. I tried to slip by unnoticed but she recognized me and introduced me to her friend, and then told me she had some upcoming projects she had me in mind for. I thanked her and never saw her again.

I got a job as a busser at The Standard. I lied and said I had restaurant experience. An older gay cousin gave me a list of restaurant references—most of which were friends he’d made in his own service industry journey—to use on my resume. I flirted with the hotel gay who interviewed me. It worked. My parents all but kicked me out. I stayed with my childhood friend in her apartment in Soho that she was moving out of soon. We shared a bed for a month. When she vacated the apartment, she let me crash there for a few nights when I got off my late shifts. I slept in a sleeping bag with a shirt as a pillow and drank tall boys and looked up at the Empire State Building through her tiny kitchen window. I wheeled bins of trash water through the line to the night club at the top of the hotel. I smoked cigarettes and stared out at Jersey City across the Hudson. I wore a coral red ascot and a denim apron.

I watched Heidi Klum and her kids get photographed by paparazzi. I watched a parade of Occupy Wall Streeters process past the outdoor restaurant while yelling and banging things. Our patrons —mostly Europeans shopping in the Meat Packing District— watched on in ambivalence from their tables. I served stranded hotel guests breakfast after Hurricane Sandy and was told to go home when the last generator blew. I got promoted to barista when the holidays came and our outdoor restaurant was converted into a tiny ice rink, and sat in a mini-ski chalet the size of a shed and made hot chocolate and hot toddies for mean parents and their kids and was terrible at everything. I was demoted back to bussing.

I started doing MDMA every weekend. I had no gay friends yet. I had a crush on a straight guy and prayed he’d want to experiment with me when we took ecstasy together. I went out alone when my roommate didn’t want to go to a gay bar with me.I couldn’t blame her. I did meth thinking it was coke at an after hours party. I watched a guy cutting it up on the restroom sink and asked him if I could have some. He said “Sure!” and watched me do two fat lines. I went home with a ballerino in Harlem who had a shaved head. We listened to the same song on repeat for seven hours. I quit bussing.

I started catering. I did social media again for a start-up. A month later they told me they didn’t have a social media budget. I worked for a tech company. I got addicted for drugs. I got laid off. I worked at a TV network. I showed up hungover or strung out every day. I got fired because I was constantly late and unfriendly. I catered again. I worked at a magazine. I wrote on a TV show. I lost my Philly accent, except for sometimes. I got addicted to drugs. I pissed my bed. I was a dumb slut. I broke my face. I got sober. I got clean. I was a dumb slut again. I moved to LA. I met my husband at 7-Eleven. I fell in love with my husband after three weeks and didn’t tell him for six months because I wanted to be chill. I wrote on more TV shows.

I missed my parents. I missed New York. I missed New Jersey.