Flames, at the Side of My Face

Here is why I liked waiting tables more than almost any other job I’ve had: you get to have small, purpose-driven interactions; you get to talk about food constantly; in a restaurant, no one seems to mind if you’re emotionally all over the place, which is great because when I worked in restaurants throughout my twenties, I certainly was; and at the end of the shift, you get cash money, baby. After turning twenty-one, I spent my nights walking the streets of Baltimore and sometimes venturing onto the dance floor of a gay bar and I spent my days speed-walking the length of the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown Baltimore, balancing burgers and mai tais. I got the job while I was at UMBC and worked there far longer than I thought I would. There came a point where I wondered if I would work there forever. This didn’t seem like a terrible option, but I wasn’t sure.

At the Hard Rock, I also got a great education on a bunch of bands I was too pious to listen to back in the day. Have you heard of Van Halen? Very good work, very interesting. I discovered that, as much as I’d try to stay away from the scourge of hard rock as a churchgoing youth, I’d already heard pretty much every song during car commercials. The highway to hell is chock-full of sport utility vehicles with impressive horsepower.

At the Hard Rock, I also met my future roommate Lisa. We got along instantly and shared a lot of the same interests, which at that point were primarily having strong opinions about certain TV shows and sometimes crying about them, being the funniest people in a room, drinking, making terrible dating choices, and making cash money, baby. It was heaven. Lisa and I started around the same time and were both relatively new to waiting tables, so it was a mercy that two veteran servers—Neddra and Connie—took us under their wings. There is nothing in the world like a server who has been around the block, has seen it all, and lived to tell the tale. You’ve got to have a high tolerance for bullshit and a good sense of humor to make it in a restaurant for more than, say, a couple of years. You’ve also got to be able to tell literally anyone to go fuck themselves, from the gruffest, hardest line cook to the most uppity customer. Neddra and Connie were iconic in this respect. They were Lucy-and-Ethel-like in their interactions and in their propensity for shenanigans and more mercenary than pirates of the high seas in their pursuit of money. I was in awe.

Since Neddra and Connie were two of the lead servers, they’d stake out the best table sections like lionesses on the plain, and they took care of their own. Lisa and I were their own. They quickly caught us up on the many interlocking soap operas that naturally spring up amongst a restaurant staff, and I began living my own personal Melrose Place, except instead of gathering around an apartment complex pool, we’d get up on top of the bar and perform the YMCA for the delight of tourists. Same diff.

The cast of characters in a restaurant is exhaustingly vast and, by nature, transitional. Under Neddra and Connie’s guidance, Lisa and I went from being seen as the college-age kids who would probably blow out of there in a season to part of the regular series cast and, because of that, something shifted in the way the restaurant treated us. We belonged. I needed to belong, as much as I am loath to join things.

I was still living at home in my parents’ basement and felt, in all areas of my life, adrift. I’d made a mess of my life at the University of Maryland with my Black History Month op-ed and a general refusal to participate in the community on campus. I would occasionally venture out to the three gay bars in downtown Baltimore in an attempt to meet people, but found that increasingly discouraging. Baltimore’s gay scene at the time was starkly divided along racial lines, and, just as in the general community, the opportunities for white gays to socialize and advance were greater than for nonwhite. Additionally, I found that white guys would reach out to you on the nascent dating sites but often wouldn’t speak to you in public. The hierarchies around race, attractiveness, and performed masculinity were at once apparent and oblique. It seemed to me, as a person who was dragging himself out of the closet, that Baltimore was a town built on a centuries-old set of unspoken rules. I found the gay community dispiriting and confusing but I also didn’t have much of a choice. The options were small to start, and only got smaller when the black gay bar, the Sportsman (essentially a speakeasy set up in a barely occupied row house), burned down, leaving only two gay bars.

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months. Community goes from being a distant goal to a forgotten idea. My parents, a floor away from me, couldn’t have known how disconnected I began to feel in those days; I barely knew myself.

So, to find a community at the Hard Rock was a relief and a surprise. Despite the large population of LGBTQ servers, a restaurant is not a naturally open and affirming environment. Kitchens run on bravado, machismo, and the sort of hostility that comes from being underpaid, overheated, and out of options. Front-of-house workers—servers, bartenders, bussers, hosts—often have a naturally adversarial relationship with the back-of-house ones—line cooks, chefs, dishwashers. Though the groups must depend on each other for their livelihoods, it’s very easy to come to believe that the opposite side of the house is the sole cause of all of your problems in life. Your table is angry at you because their food is taking a while and they’ve got tickets to the aquarium they’re going to be late for? Definitely because the line cook is taking his sweet-ass time with that well-done burger. Got twelve orders of a complicated menu item spitting out of the kitchen printer all at once? The servers surely colluded to end you. It was a vicious symbiotic cycle and it restarted every day. So when tempers flared, it was not unusual for someone—from either the front or the back of the house—to lash out with a homophobic insult. If I made a mistake on an order or slacked on my upkeep tasks, somebody was shouting down the long aisle of the kitchen about how I was an idiot faggot. It wasn’t constant—Hard Rock is a corporation, after all, and there are high standards and a really impressive training program—but it wasn’t rare either. This was Baltimore, this was the early 2000s, this was a restaurant, this was America. Are you surprised?

Regardless, this kind of talk absolutely did not stand with Neddra and Connie. They were fearless and all too willing to escalate their objections to incidents, whether it was through management or through verbal takedowns. They were my heroines. And during our time working together, I learned how to embrace a kind of fearlessness myself and saw the same lioness streak grow in Lisa, too. And so the community of a restaurant, the watchful eye of the veterans, the idea of a future, even the caustic relationship with the other side of the kitchen, it all rescued me.

A restaurant, however, is its own ecosystem, a temporary world of short-term goals that resets itself at the end of every shift. The larger world would remain a challenge to me, particularly as I navigated life as a gay person.

Neddra’s longtime partner was a guy named Edgar who bartended at Hard Rock. They were a dynamite team. While she was short and spunky, he was tall and possessed a chill I could only dream of. They were united in their intensity; they were both about the money, baby, and their desire to have fun. The crew that they and Connie and a few others presided over grew to include Lisa and me, and as time went on, I started being invited over to their house to chill, watch TV, and have some cocktails. The community that I found in the restaurant began to form fledgling roots in the real world. We were friends, it turned out, which was a nice surprise. So it wasn’t a shock when Edgar invited me to his birthday party, held at a friend’s house. I knew they weren’t inviting a bunch of people from work; it was more a family-and-close-friends thing, so I felt honored. I was also extremely worried because, as I mentioned, I’m not sold on the idea of meeting anyone I haven’t yet met, and I find myself at a loss during conversations in unfamiliar settings. I also hate small talk. What am I supposed to do with it? Small talk is always shouted. “Nice weather we’re having!” Okay, well, the ice caps are melting, so lower your voice, honey. Small talk is purposefully avoiding every interesting thing there is to say.

I feared my aversion to small talk would not go over well with Edgar’s family and friends. Edgar and Neddra were also, I should note, black, and I surmised that most people there would be black also. Having worked through, or at least identified, some of my issues about my race, I was still unsure exactly what my blackness was. I never felt black enough, no matter who I was around, and this was exacerbated in moments when I felt overtly gay. It felt like, despite the evidence provided by the charred frame of the Sportsman, blackness and gayness canceled each other out. They were both communities to which I belonged and yet for which I didn’t know the rules.

The party was in a small house in West Baltimore, packed with grown and sexy folk. Music blasting: Prince, Tevin Campbell, Luther—a marked change from our workplace soundtrack of wailing electric guitars and white screams. (This is perhaps not the official way to describe hair bands, but it is accurate.) The lights in the house were low; votives dotted the walls on little pedestals; food was plentiful, drinks flowing—a scene out of a movie. And in this movie I was the awkwardly gay, small-talk-averse wallflower, wandering from room to room, trying to avoid the appearance of dancing, and mumbling facts about the weather.*1

I should note: everyone was really nice and the only problem was me.^*2 In any case, this party wasn’t much different from every other party I’ve ever been to where I knew a handful of people and I’d psyched myself up for it. Maybe I would suddenly be possessed with the physical wherewithal to navigate a room full of strangers and, who knows, maybe meet someone I really got along with. And yeah, my idea of getting along with someone was trying to have a serious discussion about which Sally Bowles from Cabaret was the best, and that tended to be difficult to do over a party-volume stereo, but there was always hope. Maybe this time!

More than anything, I just didn’t want to find myself in a space where my gayness was self-evident and the rest of the attendees found it to be a problem. It wasn’t ever about a particular party, it was about occupying a particular space in the world and the feeling that the world was suddenly, randomly, and ruthlessly hostile to that space. I had learned how to be fearless in the restaurant because I had allies and I had a strong corporate structure and, failing all that, I had a counter separating me from the kitchen. But the world is different and I felt frequently alone. There were days I’d be walking home from work or from a bar and someone would pull up in a car beside me and start shouting at me, threatening me, just for existing. And to whom do you escalate that complaint? Once, I was almost home from a night at the Sportsman when a kid, no older than eleven, rounded a corner, spotted me, yelled “Faggot!” and then hurled a piece of a brick at me, grazing my head close enough to draw blood. I grabbed at the wound and turned around, tense and totally unprepared for a further attack. I saw him just standing there, staring me down, seething. Bare chest heaving up and down. “Faggot,” he called again, and then disappeared back around the corner.

I carried the shock and the fear of that moment with me always in those times. It smoldered inside me, moving slowly but overtaking everything, like lava.

So. I wasn’t always a hoot at parties.

Edgar’s was great, though. The crowd was fun and welcoming. Of course, Neddra’s and Edgar’s personalities and big-tent sensibilities didn’t stop at the restaurant door, and throughout the evening one of them would spy me lingering in a doorway or against a wall and physically push me into the action. I found myself starting to relax a little. These were just people, after all, and the drinks were strong and Luther Vandross on a stereo solves every problem, really. Oh, that all of life was just strangers floating through murky candlelit rooms, bellies full of home cooking and ears full of classic R&B, occasionally bumping into another stranger and swaying for a moment to the beat.

And just as I was beginning to sink into the vibe of the evening, the lights came on like last call and the music descended to a background whisper. Someone brought a cake out from the kitchen, set it down on the table beside me, and started lighting the candles. I realized too late that in my slow detachment from the wall, I’d managed to position myself at Cake HQ, in the quickly forming center of attention. As comfortable as I had begun to feel, as welcome as I’d been made, the last thing I wanted was all eyes on me, with the lights on, as we sang the black Happy Birthday song and Edgar blew out his candles.

As we started to sing, I backed into the wall again, grateful for the time in a space that felt something close to normal but not wanting to press my luck. I kept my voice down, as I’m not a great singer, and tried to will everyone away from the lilac button-down with elaborate hand-printed mulberry patterns I’d decided to wear, and away from my permed hair, and away from me, again. My fingers pressed against the wall; my shoulders brushed a shelf; I couldn’t be closer to the wall unless I was inside it. Was that an option? Out of the closets, into the walls, like a gay poltergeist. How long was this song? Stevie Wonder was really trying it. My face flushed; I felt a pain in my shoulder blade. The tension was constricting my muscles. No, not tension, I realized, heat. I must have been feeling the heat from one of the votives. I kept singing, as inconspicuously as possible, and turned my head to gauge the distance to the flame. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied a wisp of smoke rising up from the back of my shirt, and then a curlicue of fire. Turns out, la flamme, c’est moi.

When you are on fire, people tend to look at you. This was the last thing that I wanted, so I slowly reached my arm up, still singing the damn Stevie Wonder “Happy Birthday,” and started patting myself on the shoulder to put the flame out. Just a regular uncomfortable gay person standing against a wall, patting himself on the back. Self-care! Nothing to see here.

Girl, I really thought I’d gotten away with it, too. The fire went out, and though I could feel my skin exposed from a gash in the shirt, I figured the lights would dim again and no one would notice. I showed up to a party hoping to disappear; I ended the night lit up and semi-clothed. A real gay experience all around.

After Edgar cut the cake, the lights went down again and I extracted myself from the wall and headed to the kitchen to say my goodbyes. Neddra’s voice from behind me stopped me in my tracks. “Eric! What happened to your shirt?” I cast a look over my shoulder and saw a gash in the fabric that can best be described as “Struck by Lightning Chic.”

Before I could answer, another woman called out from across the room. “I couldn’t stop staring! Girl, he was flaming!” It was true, but sometimes things are just too real.