Loose Cans

I have become unstuck in time. Time ebbed today. It slackened and eased, relaxed its hold. There was a sense that nothing existed outside the walls of the living room, and the music on the stereo was all the ambiance of the world. Time stopped churning, stopped altogether. Stillness seemed to settle. I was at work from 6pm to 7am. We’d finished at 4 and some of us went upstairs to party with the restaurant people, drinking champagne left over from the party and skulling pints, in a back room. It was terrific. We only left because the morning shift was coming along, and the guests would be showing up, wanting breakfast, and it just doesn’t do to have your staff crammed behind a curtain, sucking champagne. When I got home, thoroughly plastered, Sadie was just getting out of the shower. She hadn’t been able to sleep well all night. Finally she’d given up and decided to go to the Garda station early. We jawed, I had a slug of sugar water (the bouncer made a very convincing case for it, and did so without twisting my arm this time; apparently, in order to process alcohol, your body produces mass amounts of insulin, so when you wake up, it’s utterly depleted, and you’re in reverse sugar shock), took two Advil and crashed. Two and a half hours later, at 9:30 my fucking realtor calls. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of our conversation. All I know is that he called. Hell of it is, I really needed to talk to him: our oven door’s still hanging off the oven, and there’s this horrible howling alarm that’s gone off in the middle of the night twice. Fortunately both times we were awake, but still. Anyhow, I have no idea what we said. Then I go right back to sleep--I’d not really woken up, of course--and remained so until 12:30pm, when I get a text from Antonio telling me I need to be in from 9:30am to 4pm tomorrow for Morrison ‘induction,’ which is less creepy and Borg-like than it sounds. Fortunately they pay me, meaning that I’ll crack €500 in five days (last night was a bank holiday, meaning double pay till midnight--another €160). I reply, “Can do. Am going back to sleep now.” It also means I’m clocking in full-time. We’re going to do something about this; right now, not only do I not have a life, I haven’t even seen the sun in days. It’s only this mad because I just started, and it should ease up soon. I have Friday and Saturday off. Anyhow, after this, I fall right back to sleep, and am very happy until 3:45pm or so, when the parents call. We talk, though I largely refuse to open my eyes, denying morning, afternoon or Time. Taking my waking slow, in any case. Finally I get up. I stagger bleary into the living room, and there’s Sadie, passed out on the couch. She looks up blearily into my bleary and mumbles, “I’m not very good at going to sleep,” and promptly disproves herself. Nothing much occurs, movement-wise, until about 5pm, when she wakes. We sit in the living room and talk, and looking into the creeping crepuscular dark outside the window, it occurs to us that it seems like dawn. Time, we realize, has gone off shift. The sense of inertia, that driving force, relentless and endlessly pumping as the human heart, was just gone. When you wake up in the morning, you feel yourself directed, shepherded along by obligations, responsibilities, routines. Not today. Today happened in a vacuum, the two of us the only living people in the world. Because the house was quiet and the world was calm.

Well, we’ve got the internet up and running at 60 Stewart Hall. Actually, we’ve had it for about five days. This is what makes the lack of blog somewhat less pardonable. But Sam hasn’t been able to bring herself to do it either, ever since the Yankees broke our hearts. I watched that game, too. Locked in Frazer’s pub from 1:30 to 5:15am with twenty Red Sox fans and not a single ally. So much abuse. Oh my God. These people. They’re not like us. They’re animals, rabid and frothing in the face, twisted, capable of anything but calm. Spent four innings with no shirt on. Called Yankees across an ocean, couldn’t hear a thing amid the din, and ended up blowing all my call credit on unreturnable texts and inaudible calls. A noiseless impatient spider, sending forth filaments.

Got home at 5:30am, wretched, covered in the offal of abuse, and rose at 8 to get to a 9am class. Shattered, still drunk. Staggered through the day--went to all five hours of class. I’ll never know how I did it.

But the anguish has faded in a fog of rationalizing. I am pleased with P-hilophax’s thought: that giving the Red Sox a taste of victory is only a tease, momentary euphoria to be replaced, as the years go by, and they return to their losing ways, by an even more painful sense of hollowness. As cruel as giving a blind man sight for two short minutes, then robbing him of it again.

Still, though, the world is topsy-turvy this week. Look up. Have the clouds turned blue and the sky gone white? Does the sun hide from the daytime? I said to one who listens well, the fabric of my faith is woven from the warp of our impossibly winning and the woof of their impossibly losing. The recurrence of the impossible, the cold, chilling breath of the cosmic, the interference of the angels in the outfield. All out of joint, now, out of joint, out of joint.

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These people trust me way, way too much. My first night, they throw me to the busy bar, the Morrison itself (there are three bars, Cafe Bar, Morrison and Lobo, the club downstairs, where I am tonight). I work there for nine hours. No real training. No explanations. Brief overview of the massively complicated--but sophisticated and efficient--POS system. I swing right into it and everything is perfect. Luke, the Chinese head bartender, very organized, not very personable--crippled by language barrier--is on shift, and so is Gerard, an blond Australian Jewish surfer dude who speaks something like five languages and is on exchange at UCD from University of Sydney, and who got into Princeton and couldn’t afford it. It was his first night at the Morrison, having moved up from the club. We get along very well, he and I. So we close up around 2am, but there’s still this guy at the bar trying to nail this less-than-lovely bottle-blonde, and he’s not leaving. He’s joking around with Alex, the bouncer (who, last night, was good enough to demonstrate on me some trouble-maker control techniques. Couldn’t hold a bottle for ten minutes), who asks him twice--politely--to piss off, and then with Antonio, the manager (who is a spectacular manager, very cool, as is his assistant, Stephane). He obviously wasn’t going quietly, so Antonio called me over (by now I was the last bartender at Morrison) and asked me about a drink with Bailey’s and lime. Cement Mixer, I told him: a shot of Bailey’s, held in the mouth, followed by a shot of lime juice. Curdles explosively in the mouth. Pretty ghastly. So Antonio went off to get him some. It took a lot of coaxing on our part to get the guy to do it, but when he did it, oh, man. For five full minutes, he couldn’t open his mouth. The contortions his face went through, the twitching of the eye, the look of sheer perplexed apoplexy: “Oh, dear God, what’s happening to me?” He compared it, when he regained the power of speech, to eating microwaved pepperoni. He cleared out pretty fast.

After finishing the cleanup and restocking of this very large bar (all by myself), I figure I’m done. I go over to Luke. He hands me the keys to the beer fridges, shows me how to record residents’ orders, and tells me I’ll be running the post-club hotel guests’ bar at Cafe Bar (where I spent all of 30 minutes). Alone. All morning long. I tell Luke he must be joking and ask if he has lost his mind. He says no, he trusts me fine, I know what I’m doing. I restate the question. He repeats the response, and I am resigned to disaster. The club will close shortly, and residents, those that wish to keep going, will come up to me. I will likely be staying until 4am or so. He brings me some food from the kitchen and goes home. There are already four guys, Scottish and American, having a few rounds. We chill, they all want to hear about being from New York, and being an American abroad. I will find that this is really all anyone wants to talk about. Then the club closes and clients trickle upstairs. Soon I have seventeen at my bar. They will remain well past four, because we end up having such a good time together that I stay on all the way till 5:30am. Some highlights: having a coaster chucked at me, picking it up and hucking it back at him, chickenwing-style (over the head), and nailing him right between the eyes, to the merriment of everyone; being bought drinks; finally, having this one guy buy for the house. Between the 90 euro bottle of champagne (the house stuff is Veuve Cliquot. We also have Cognac Louis XIII, with a glass going for about 115, and a bottle at 1600 euro. Oy) and all the rest, he must have blown over 350. We had a good time, he and I. When, at 5:30, after twelve hours of being on my feet, I finally caved, I got a standing ovation from my customers. It was fun. I made 160 euro. Not too shabby for my first night.

Worked ten hours last night, too. Have already gone sailing past the legal limit on my working (20 hours a week). Apparently no one cares: I’m on tonight, in the club, for a wedding, at 6pm. In five minutes. Bye.