Conversations With People Who Hate Me by Dylan Marron

Author:Dylan Marron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

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For many years after college I worked in the service industry. First as a cashier at a gourmet grocery store, then as a barista at a celebrity-infested New American restaurant, later as a server at that restaurant, and eventually, when I couldn’t handle another supermodel indignantly refusing my third request that she extinguish her cigarette, I walked my résumé a few blocks over to a small, beloved vegan restaurant where each day felt like a new Portlandia sketch.

I loved this work very much. My days would fly by since time was not marked by minutes, but rather a steady stream of customers who, simply by existing before me, opened up a small window into their lives, even if only for a fleeting moment. All of them just feeling their feelings and, to varying degrees, using me as a receptacle for those feelings. Within one hour I might be a confidant to the local gallery owner, a sentient coffee machine to the ad executive who lived across the street, a captive audience member for a regular customer’s impromptu open mic, or a punching bag for the renowned columnist who regarded all of us as his personal staff. My job was to receive whatever they sent my way, while silently taking their orders, honoring their tailored requests, and treating them as royalty I was lucky to serve, all while knowing that forty minutes after our exchange, most would likely forget that I even existed.

Some customers were wonderful; the vast majority were benign and forgettable, but it is the bad customers that I’ll remember until my last breath. In the same way that there are some social media interactions that make me want to throw my phone into the deepest chasm of hell, sell all of my earthly possessions, and join a screen-free farming cult in rural Maine, there were customer exchanges that made me dream of dramatically ripping off my apron, setting it on fire, and delivering an impassioned monologue about proletariat resistance before rage-quitting in a blaze of glory.

Unfortunately, I needed money to pay rent and feed myself. Fortunately, my roommate tipped me off to a helpful coping mechanism.

In my first year in the service industry, I lived with my college friend Nomi in an apartment where we traded such luxury items as “windows” and “fresh air” for cheaper rent. She was my rock throughout that year, often there to console me after a rough shift. One day when I was regaling her with an account of the way some monster masquerading as a human being ordered an omelette, she sighed and said, “Well, hurt people hurt people.” The phrase landed within me like a small poem. It was a puzzle I needed to do right then and there. Hurt people hurt people. The first “hurt” was an adjective, the second was a verb. It was a shockingly succinct way to distill the cyclical nature of harm.

Immediately, I applied the phrase retroactively to a customer I remembered from the grocery store.

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