What I Learned One Night in July

Itinerant Memories

It is odd to think that the COVID-19 pandemic—which was first prefaced to me by John Oliver’s warning, which I dismissed, as early as December of 2019–began four years ago this past March. Odd in part because the person I was on the eve of the pandemic feels in some ways now as distant as the person I was, say, as a college student in Springfield.

In the summer of 2019, I was working three jobs. One was for my family’s erstwhile window cleaning business, which was also the location of my first job when I was fifteen (and the last I held, in a different capacity, before I became a full-time teacher). Another was as the front desk concierge of a Lifetime Fitness: I started working there the Fall before because Washington University, where I was doing my second graduate degree, was not giving stipended work to MA students at the time. (I think, but I’m not totally sure, that this was because of a dispute between administration and the graduate student association.) This job had me consistently waking at 4 in the morning to arrive at the front desk by 5, clean, and check customers in. I tried to take books, until it was made clear to me that I was not permitted to read; at that point I found ways to type on my email on the company computer, until logging into my email became unnecessarily difficult. Four days a week, I would work from 5 to 12; and during the summers and days that I did not have class, I would then walk down the street to the deli I had worked in since I was a junior in high school to cover the evening shift, from 1 (when I would typically arrive) to around 8. Running and closing the deli is still a gig I can do when I close my eyes; years of practice, most evenings of my high school life spent working and reading there, and most Saturday mornings have seared it into my mind. I used to live right up the street, less than a block away, in a rundown apartment building across from the First Baptist Church of Ellisville, where my great-grandmother had been a member, and where I grew up going to the youth group without family patronage. The church is not there anymore: these days there is a car wash, a coffee shop, and a storage unit. I remember how to make every sandwich; I remember exactly how long everything needs, exactly when to start cleaning, how to roll the dissipating food cart into the walk-in and where the owner, a long-time friend of mine, keeps all the sauces and cheeses (and in what order), how to restock, when to shut down for the evening. My shoulders remember the feeling of hauling those giant bags of trash (and how to tie the new ones: always at the corner, always as tight as possible) out to the dumpster, and the elation of hurling them over my head, or the billowing heat pummeling my face while pulling brisket off the smoker into (clean, sanitized) bus tubs before the place opens or in the mid-afternoon between rushes. I have finished lots of novels and pieces of scholarship, and a paper or two, at the back table near the fridge, often while the rain came down in sheets outside and the thunder gently rumbled away any would-be customers—my own Noah’s Ark, I once called it.

Anyway, I would usually follow up my seven hour shift at Lifetime with a second one at the deli, sometimes more than that given the amount of time it takes to close a restaurant (even a small one) by one’s self. And on the particular day I have in mind, there was an additional consideration: I didn’t have my car.