Midwinter Licks

Here, I am stumped.  This winter has forsaken me, and while I am even now climbing, it's only to get out of the hole I fell into.  For the last three months of 2010, I had the hands-down worst bartending job in New York City.  The owner was abusive, and drug dealers hung out, doing their jobs.  I worked my ass off at this job, and made very, very little money.  I worked 10 hour shifts and left with $71.  And suffered verbal and psychological abuse from my boss, as well as the physical toll it took on me.  I had panic attacks anytime my boss called me, and had heart palpitations literally every single morning before I came into work.  One night, four days before Christmas, my boss came in, shitcanned, berated me for having a bloody nose(I had paper in my nose, and despite the fact that the place was deserted and I was closing, he hated this), and when I asked him why he was such a hateful shitbag, told me that if I didn't like it, I could leave.  

"There's the door," he slurred at me, so fucking wasted on well vodka and sodas that his right eye crossed and he was having trouble keeping his fat head aloft.  "Oh, you're not gonna leave?  Whatcha doin'?  You now gonna leave?  Are you gonna cry?  Are you gonna be a baby?"

He mocked me for not quitting.  Four days before Christmas.  A couple days after this, he waited until it was just he and I alone in the bar(easy, considering the place was almost always deserted in the daytime), and told me that if I wanted to stick shit in my nose, I could work somewhere else. I've never witnessed such moronic, sadistic nonsense, much less been subject to actual insults and sneers from the man whose restaurant I basically ran 4 days a week.  I will never, ever understand intentionally making people hate you, much less people who work for you.

I started drinking at work because it was easy.  It was at hand, and my only possible weapon in the face of merciless enemies.  My body felt horrible all the time, and was usually too exhausted from the massive workload followed by a depressingly low payoff.  I should have quit sooner, but I managed to wait until I secured a new job.  Since then, the last three months have seemed like a bad dream.  And I've been assessing the damage of working a job where pretty much no one liked me, mainly because I didn't think that the place was cool, or in any way enviable.  Spending the entire solar day with people who just don't care for me and my kind of... well, anything, really took a toll on my self-esteem.  Especially when things happened like, for instance, someone Googling me and finding this blog, reading it and mocking it in front of people.  It's hard to feel secure in my art when I have people, even dead-end shit-for-brains like people who would even do something like that, take advantage of the vulnerability that art(and this blog) offers.  

It's been hard to write.  To clear my head.  I've just been enjoying the really pathetic pleasure of making a livable wage at a place where there aren't sociopaths to scream at me about nothing and harangue me over petty, insignificant nuances.  I feel stupid for leaving my previous job in the first place, since obviously that was the worst choice.  I jumped from frying pan to fire with misguided glee.  Is this what they mean when they say you have to forgive yourself?  I felt so unsafe and unwell, but I subliminated it to make money that never really materialized.  It hurt.  Alot.  To give up literal and figurative safety in exchange for money. 

The lack of money brought to a head a situation with my dad that made me realize I'm truly alone in this city.  When I have to defend my buying of groceries and credit score from my father instead of being supported and helped by him, it's time to say goodbye.  It's time to make some waves for myself.  

I want to visit Pompeii.  And I want to be a famous writer.  There are more important things than money, and if the people who you think will have your back, your family, are no better than creditors, then I suppose it's time to get into business for myself.  I will never, ever live the way I have for the past three months, under constant anxiety and strain, for money.  Never again.