I received a text from one of my old college roommates the other day that she was in New York and thinking of me.

It brought me back to those early days of college, when New York was the pipe dream I told everyone about, the long distance lover I dashed off to be with every summer, and the thing that single handedly got me through the long restaurant shifts of those years.

This is about how one thing is always leading right into another, about how the world you knew spit you out into the world you know.

THIS PLACE I KNEW

I had this dream the other night about the place I used to work. Maybe because of that text or maybe just because I am here now.

I was standing on the corner of Kettner, at the host stand with the black and white striped umbrella that I had to roll out and fight with every morning as the city woke up. It was summer, summer in downtown San Diego, which meant it wreaked of hot urine sizzling on the sidewalks and distant cigarette smoke from the dishwasher on his break. His name was José, he was maybe forty-five, and I miss laughing with him at the end of the shift as I ducked through the kitchen to take the trash out, embarrassing myself with the little Spanish I knew. Restaurant kitchens have a very distinct smell that anyone who has ever worked in one would recognize immediately. Steamy and warm, the air is laced with both fresh food on the grill and old food getting power washed down the drain. I’ve been in a lot of different kitchens and it is always just the same. It incinerates itself right into your nostrils and never quite gets out.

I don’t know why these things came to me in my dreams, only that they did. Only that I was nineteen, dealing with the absolute nightmare that was weekend brunch at a downtown hotspot one moment, and waking up in Brooklyn the very next, thousands of miles away.

FOND NIGHTMARES

In the dream, the sun was out and the sky was the impossibly brilliant blue that it always is in that city. I was standing there, on that corner, waiting for the hungry masses to descend upon me, each asking for a booth by the window please, and I could hear Chris laughing behind me.

There were several managers, but Chris was everyone’s favorite. She wore her jet black hair tied up in a high bun and had blunt bangs that fell into her shimmery-eye-shadowed-eyes. She had a nose piercing and an infectious energy. We liked her because she was fun, never pretending that dealing with people in restaurants was not the most abysmal, pull-your-hair-out kind of way to spend your days. She taught us how to be ridiculously nice and accommodating to even the worst of our customers, how to grit our teeth and tell each other with only our eyes that we would rather stab our own leg with a fork than have to deal with the elderly woman who comes in everyday and orders soup with a side of steamed vegetables and extra garlic, never failing to inform us that the vegetables need to be severely steamed so that she can digest them, as if our sorry souls could ever forget such riveting information.

It would have been one thing if she were at least kind, but no. No, she would shout from across the room at you and wave her hands in the air and, perhaps everyone’s favorite part, take really loud phone calls for the entire course of her stay, pressing the phone into her shirt only to pause and tell you not to forget about the steamed veggies. It’s been years and here I am, remembering all the times I had to reiterate to the chef that yes, she really does want them to be on the broccoli to be on the absolute verge of disintegration. That that’s actually ideal, from what she tells me. Poor guy went to culinary school in France.

Chris taught us how to deal with such instances and we all bonded over it. She was authoritative, yet one of us. She was the only one of the managers who really knew any of us, meaning, she knew all about my dreams of New York. We used to talk about it all of the time, for she had her own dreams of moving too. She longed to move far away from that restaurant, up to Portland. Done with people, she wanted to move to a farm and raise animals. She used to ask we when I was moving, a year and a half hopefully, and promise that when I did it, when I really did it, she would too.

The restaurant ended up closing it’s doors before we could see to the end of that deal, but I like to think she’s in Portland now. I like to think she really did the thing. I think about it sometimes when sitting on the train.

Mostly, I think, because my being here at all is forever bound to that job. The butterfly effect and whatnot.

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

For when I think about it, I wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for that job. It was the first one I ever had, the one that allowed me to save up enough money to come to New York that summer and dip my toes into this living cesspool.

I remember walking through Manhattan that June, trying to part the thick air like a wet curtain, when I got into this conversation with some guy. He was maybe in his 70s and quite eccentric, dressed like a fashion designer. I don’t actually remember how we started talking, which, might seem creepy, but these things just happen in New York. The streets are swarming with people and you just bump into them sometimes, interacting for a moment only to never see each other again. Anyway, I can’t recall much of anything else that he said other than one thing. It came up that I was just visiting, probably my way of getting out of the conversation, when his eyes went wide and he said, You don’t live here yet?

It was like it was the shock of the century to him. He said it as if it were a mortal sin, like he just couldn’t believe what anyone does with their life if they don’t spend it in New York. Yet I remember freezing for a moment and going a bit cold, as if this guy were some sign, some ephemeral spirit, sent to me on that sweltering day in SoHo to nail in what I already knew. That I needed to be there. He said it like a prophet and I loved that because this was long before most people believed that I would really do it. When he said “yet”, it was like it was already all in motion.

Which, it was.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)