Heroes
August 10, 2011
London is burning. Townspeople are banding together to drive out hooligans. It’s madness. It sounds like a period movie about ancient times, but it’s now. I wish Superman was real. Batman could put out these fires with his plane.
Brave Buddies is starting again soon. I’m nervous and excited. I watched myself in my intro video. I need to work on talking proper.
This 18 year old kid who lives in Texas is in the same situation I was when I was 18. He wants to run away so that it’ll be easier to talk. I don’t know… maybe that’s what he needs. I’m terrible at giving advice.
I need some way of getting selective mute people in touch with each other.
So back to 21 year old me… it was around this time I finished a course at a bartending school, and started working at a restaurant called Chappy’s. There are people you will meet in life that will make you think, “If Santa Claus was real, that man would be him.” Chappy was aesthetically one of these people. He was jolly and friendly, but also had somewhat of a temper. He worked in the kitchen as the head chef, and frequently bit off the heads of servers who brought back food or returned unfavorable comments from the diners about the food.
My idea was if I had a job where I was forced to speak to people, I would eventually get used to it. A bartender would especially have to talk to a lot of people and be quick on his feet. For the most part, it was a service bar for the waiters. I found that I was very fast and skilled at making the drinks. I was speaking fine, and people seemed to like me. The trouble came when people wanted to sit at the bar and eat the full three course meal. I would have to somehow keep coming up with things to say to them throughout the whole duration of the meal. And when I couldn’t think of anything, it felt incredibly awkward just standing behind the bar.
To get better at speaking, I would inevitably have to fail many times and learn from my mistakes. If I talked to a girl at a nightclub for example, and it didn’t go well, I could just walk away. Behind the bar, I was just stuck there with my customer. It became sort of a prison where I could no longer indulge the desire to run away from pressure. I found that I dreaded going to work every day. What I decided was that this pressure was good, but it was a liability being tied to my only source of income.
Chappy’s restaurant wasn’t doing so well and most nights were unbearably slow. I quit after about a year of making drinks. A few months after I left, Chappy called, asking me if I could come work again for a few days. I left on good terms, and I agreed. He’d gotten on a show called Kitchen Nightmares, where celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay came and “fixed” failing restaurants. For a week, I got to be a part of the filming and witnessed the drama unfold between Chappy and Chef Ramsay. He was the first celebrity I’d ever met in person. It was both intimidating and odd seeing that he was part of the real world.
Gordon hated all of Chappy’s food, and he remodeled the entire restaurant, changing the decor, the menu and even the outfits — from white shirts and bow-ties to flannel. Chappy didn’t take it sitting down, and after the show had finished, he changed everything back to how it was. His restaurant was shut down soon after for non-payment of taxes.
As soon as the episode aired, Elizabeth and I watched it together, getting a kick out of seeing me on the show for about two seconds. She and I had dinner at Chappy’s a few months earlier on one of her visits. We always had a lot of fun the first few days of being together. But towards the end of each visit, when one of us had to go back home, she would become extremely weepy. I never cried with her. Compared to the emotional torture I put myself through with Nell, saying goodbye to my girlfriend for a year was a walk in the park.
Sometimes though it was difficult to maintain my composure. When I visited her one year, I went and had a meal with her parents at a diner. This would be the first time I’d seen them since Disneyland. Elizabeth and I sat down on one side of a booth across from her parents. We had only gotten through some pleasantries and ordered our food before they started telling me exactly how much they disliked me.
It was revealed to us that in the early days of our relationship, they were reading all of our online text conversations. They recited some of those old conversations from when she was 16 and I was 18. For example on one night, Elizabeth admitted to me that she wanted to kill herself. They quoted my response as “at least let me have sex with you first,” which was meant as a joke (although not the best joke I’ve ever come up with). Of course, the last thing I wanted was for her to kill herself. I cared for her deeply, and I struggled with suicide and depression not long before she did. Elizabeth had a strong desire to be with me and loved hearing that I wanted to be with her too. I wanted to remind her that she was wanted and that suicide was stupid because we hadn’t even had a chance to see how amazing our relationship could be. The conversation they recited was from before we met for the first time, and I was sure that if I could connect with her in person, she would see how great life was and could be. But they didn’t see it that way.
This was how her parents saw me, as a perverted internet pedophile, and their opinion was set in stone. It was one of the biggest sources of discord between Elizabeth and me for the entire duration of our relationship.