Bitch

for ML

It was an August afternoon so far gone it crept towards early evening. I was working the door at The Mission, a bar at the base of Boston's Mission Hill. I stood just outside the propped-open front door, which looked to have been taken from a medieval keep—thick oak slabs with black riveted steel banding as hinges, and a wrought-iron-caged "speak-easy" window cut at eye level. The Mission (caféwindowed, black lacquer paint, dark wood, exposed brick) stood where had been, for decades and up until about two years prior, a dodgy neighborhood nightspot called The Choppin' Block: the kind of place with wall-to-wall red-carpeted floors to hide spilled blood, and where the bartenders readily snorted coke in plain view. The customers who frequented The Choppin' Block assumed they could come into The Mission and behave as they'd always done: drug deals, sex work, gang disputes, beatdowns. I worked at The Mission the first year the newly remodeled spot opened under new ownership with its new name. So, I was there for the whole learning curve when, especially on the weekends, especially during the hour leading up to last call, the place bustled with a rowdily drunken and dancing crowd. And while for the most part the place was otherwise quiet, the bar simmered and occasionally popped off with violence during that last late hour.

That August also marked the end of my first full year in graduate school, and the night ahead was to be my last shift at the bar before I started my first semester teaching at a nearby university. Not only was it my last door shift, and the last shift of a long year at a new bar in a tough neighborhood, but my marriage had fallen apart the previous summer, and I found myself living in an overpriced, cramped, Mission Hill studio. In fact, had it not been for the end of my marriage, I might never have stepped foot in The Mission. I knew I needed a job to work my way through the semesters ahead, and when I walked down to the corner bar for a beer one night, I met one of the co-owners. Well-tanned, trim, fidgety, mid- to late-forties, a fairly thick French-Iranian accent, hair already gone more or less entirely silvery-gray, he told me he was looking for staff. I told him I'd just started grad school, but had a background working doors. He bought me a beer, we talked a while, and he hired me.

That year proved to be a long period of harsh self-assessment, of struggling to cope with emotional turmoil: living alone for the first time in years, writing, reading, eating nothing but take-out, classes during days, more writing, eating alone; reading while eating; reading while riding the bus or T; reading on the toilet; reading deep into the night; sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor; late nights working the bar; drinking after hours when the bar shut down; a handful of sunrises with women I met while I was working at the bar; the way those encounters left me feeling emptier than I began; sleeping alone; even if someone else was there, sleeping alone; alone. But after I clocked out and locked the door at the end of that night in August, I would start making my way as a professor. I remember thinking that if I never bounced another shift in my life it would be a very fine thing. It wasn't even really a thought. Rather, it was an ache to be free of sloppy drunks, junkies, fistfights, and all the rest of the deeply saddening nonsense that came along with the job.

As I stood on the sidewalk the August air clung humidly thick in the way only crowded brick-and-mortar coastal cities get near the end of summer: day after day absorbing heat, giving it back off at night when static air smothers like a wet blanket in a hot oven. I looked out over Roxbury...