Ryan Grey
(C)loser: A Work Novel
Excerpt
There were two types of people in the fast food world: openers and closers. The openers, who I’d trained with, were clean-cut, scrubbed, and bright-eyed individuals who seemed to be genuine fans of the restaurant. They cleaned their work shirts regularly and always showed up with a positive attitude and an excitement to serve the customers. They were pretty girls who had once been cheerleaders, studied at the community college, smiled with big white teeth and genuine kindness. They were handsome young men who were barbacks by night, or in local plays, with sharp jawlines and girls of their own waiting for them when they got off work. They were rich kids who drove nice cars with full gas tanks, getting their jobs at their parents’ behest to “learn important life lessons,” “get grit,” and experience what their parents would undoubtedly call “the real world.” A summer job for an opener wasn’t altogether far away from a summer camp. Something to pass the time. The closers were a different breed.
From my first shift I could surmise that the closer was an unlikable character. A person was given the night shift not because they wanted it, but because much like a produce stand at a farmers’ market, you put your best stock forward to make an impression, to draw customers in.
The closers were mostly young men with two things in common: they were ugly and they were all a bit sweaty. They had acne-ridden necks and unwashed work shirts. They chewed gum and smelt of tobacco and marijuana. Their jobs were necessary things and they lived in trailer parks and cramped apartments. These things were of no consequence to me until I realized I was not some exception, but rather a typecast character, a fit of a mold. I had been hired as one of them, a closer. And at the ripe age of eighteen, I darted into the shop’s bathroom, eyeing the graffitied mirror to confront the truth a mother would never say but a fast food restaurant will tell you plain as they print the work schedule; I was ugly.
Not just an ugliness of features, but a deeper ugliness. An ugliness of culture. An ugliness my father had, written across every cheap job he held. An inheritance. Trailer trash. White trash. Drop-out. Loser. There was an ugliness of essence. And for me, six foot one with heavy features, zits, greasy hair, broke and living in an old auto parts warehouse on the edge of town, I was just that kind of ugly. And just so we never forgot, the openers would take it upon themselves to cross out the big letter C from the closers’ schedule posted in the back office, reminding us exactly of who we were, inescapably, “Losers.”
O
I will never know why, but something about a fast food bathroom changes people. They do things they would never do in their own bathroom. Horrible things. Things that they’d never do in any grocery store’s, or movie theater’s, or even a sit-down restaurant’s bathroom. Shit smeared on the white tile walls. Piss spilt off the seat, dripping in sick tidal pools across the floors. Soap caked onto paper towel dispensers. And the towels. My god, the towels. They were everywhere, always, permanently. As if trash cans never were, or ever had been. It puzzled me as to why all this was. I figured it must’ve been from a lack of respect that people did this. But they respected the business, the restaurant itself, of course. They loved the food and couldn’t get enough of it. It was me they didn’t have respect for. The guy in the hat with the mop. I guess the customers knew we had to clean it anyway and thought we might as well have a show.
The women’s restroom was always clean. Occasionally there were tampon wrappers on the floor, sometimes shit stains in the ivory toilet bowls, but for the most part it was well-kept and tidy. Women always have been, and always will be, creatures of great respect— compared to men at least.
The men’s bathroom was always a madhouse. Shit, piss, cum, needles, and occasionally blood. It was all everywhere, any time of day, seemingly permanent. Filth beyond reason. The shit stains clung to the bowl like barnacles, almost a part of the toilet’s structure. There were things carved into the mirror with knives—symbols, names, swastikas, pictures of penises, things that couldn’t be removed and would sit atop your reflection as you Windexed the mirrors three times a shift, as was policy. The men destroyed that bathroom in ways that were masterful. They got dirt in places you didn’t think dirt could get. They pissed so far off the seat that you’d think they meant it. The control they must have had of their assholes to shit atop a sink—it almost made you blush. They weren’t negligent, they were trying very hard, very purposefully, to destroy the bathroom.
O
Working at a drive-thru requires an inherent lack of thought. This isn’t to say thoughtless people work at drive-thrus, or to feed into the assumption that they’re staffed by clueless, uneducated morons, far from it. But truly, to work at a drive-thru window it is necessary to completely stop the voice within your own head. A worker must be able to take and punch in an order over their headset while simultaneously talking to the current customer at the window, giving accurate change, and remembering to smile. All of this is on top of the fact that the worker is also watching the countdown clock, answering questions from their fellow staff about the order, and taking complaints from their manager. It is as if you are having four conversations all at once, endlessly, for hours upon hours. To have a thought in all this—to experience a single moment of reflection, or even an internal scream—is suppressed by the never-ending barrage of others’ conversations.
After a few weeks, seeing hundreds of faces, hundreds of cars, all for less than a minute each, I had a strange mental shift. I began to not think of the customers at the drive thru as real people. Certainly, the people in the lobby seemed real. My coworkers were real. But for some reason, as the drive-thru customers would appear to me like a vision of hell, a litany of momentary floating heads staring back at mine through our narrow window, their voices playing through my earphones, their demands never-ending, it seemed as if they couldn’t possibly be real.
And it was in this that I realized I too wasn’t real to the drive-thru customer. I was nobody—the man over the intercom, a ghost of a person, nonconsequential. Sometimes the customers wouldn’t say so much as a word to me when they approached my window, as if I wasn’t there—handing me cash, staring off blankly. Other times, if I misheard them, or asked them too many times to repeat themselves, they’d go spiraling into an angry tirade unlike anything a customer would do if they were inside. Perhaps it was just too fast of a transaction to accommodate decency, respect, or humanity from either side. Yet, having all these thoughts in my head each night after a long shift, I would head to a drive-thru myself after work, to get dinner. And even though I always meant to make a point of asking the worker how their day was, how they were, to try and reach out to them as a person past the uniform, the window, and the headset, I too would just stare off into space, tired, forgetting it all until the bag was placed in my hand and I had driven away.
About the Author
Ryan Grey is a nonfiction writer. Raised across America, moving continuously in his parents’ search for work, Ryan settled in Bellingham, Washington when he was eighteen to attend college, aided by a Pell Grant. Throughout college and beyond Ryan worked many minimum wage jobs to support his writing.