You'll come too, little Indian-giver.
Lately, I’m a quitter.

Not two days ago, I quit my second job in a month here in Beachtown. A job at a supercool restaurant here in town that absolutely everyone loves and which employs the supercoolest most beautiful people and serves the best food and plays the best music.
I quit after one night.

Before that, I quit a job at my favorite coffeeshop here in Beachtown. I quit after two and a half weeks. I gave two weeks’ notice, and then I reneged on that, one fine Saturday morning. Apologized to the owner but said I just couldn’t work another shift; sorry.

Last week I told a gal that I’d discussed moving in with that I’d changed my mind. Then I pulled out of working at this summer teaching camp I’d crossed my fingers to get a position at. Finally, there was yesterday, when I asked for and got back this intricate Christmas gift I’d crafted up for this person who failed to appreciate much of anything I'd ever given.

I’ve become commitment-phobic about every single aspect of life. I’m terrified of becoming trapped in a situation that doesn’t sit well with me. Of entanglement. Of having my spirits broken. So I bow out at the very first indication of discomfort. Which of course, translates to the rest of the world as flakiness. And in this interpretation, the rest of the world may very well be right.


About those jobs, though.
What makes quitting the job at Beautiful People Restaurant so damn cringe-y is that I gained it through a favor by a friend of friend. For what other earthly reason would B.P. hire some 29-year-old non-Beautiful Person who’s never worked in a restaurant in her life?

Still, I wasn’t too worried. All the bartenders I knew at B.P. were super-nice. The manager was super-nice, too. The day she hired me, she joked a lot about how easy it is to be a hostess. Leaning in, she told me, “Honestly? Most of our hostesses don’t have two brain cells to rub together. I don’t think you’ll have a problem.”

It wasn’t till my first night that I met the first non-supernice people. That’d be, of course, the principle folks with whom hostesses have to interact, a.k.a., the servers. Turns out that the servers at B.P. all hate the hostesses, precisely because they hold the opinion the supernice manager had already shared: that the hostesses at B.P. are all about as dumb as rocks.

I feel kind of silly telling you about what crystallized things. I’ve worked in food service before and I know that when you’re busy, there’s not much time for pleasantries, and I don’t particularly expect ‘em. That’s one thing. And when you’re making money, to some extent, who cares? If I had been making money, the birthday cake thing definitely wouldn’t have mattered.

The birthday cake was one that a customer had brought. The hostess who was training me told me to take it back to the walk-in, and make sure to tell that table’s server about it. Okay, I thought: Tell the server, tell the server. What was her name, again…? When I got back, we were officially Slammed and, dumb hostess that I was, I forgot all about the cake, until an hour later, when a different server came up to our hostess podium.

“So, Candi had a birthday cake at her table, and no one told her? Not okay,” she said to the hostess who was training me.

“Oh. That’s completely my fault,” I said, my stomach sinking. Three hours, and something in the air in this place was already causing me to become one of these Stupid Hostesses. Geez.

The server looked from the hostess training me, back to me, slightly deflated. See, she was actually mad because she and another waitress were convinced they were getting stiffed of all the good tables.

“Well,” she said, still looking at the other hostess. “You can’t do that. It looks really bad.” She dumped a pile of menus onto our podium and stormed off.
Not five minutes later, the second waitress who thought she was being stiffed came over.

“Okay, listen: When a server isn’t told there’s a birthday cake,” she said, “that causes big problems-”
“Oh, sorry, that’s my fault,” I cut in. “Totally my fault.” She continued as if I hadn’t said anything.
“When a server doesn’t know there’s a cake, it makes her look really bad in front of her table. You can’t forget to tell her!”
“Won’t happen again,” I said, already more annoyed than apologetic. The server wasn’t even looking at me. And Jesus, I thought. If she’d gonna be this pissy at this hostess, who seemed to me to be doing the very best, decidedly non-stupid, job possible, what was I in for when I started working solo, the very next shift?

During points of the evening when we weren’t busy, the servers huddled together in the restaurant’s opposite corner, talking. No one came by to say hello.

Later, I managed to track down the server whom I’d been told had been so humiliated. When I apologized about the cake, she shrugged. “Oh. It’s really not a big deal,” she said.

I felt like I was inside Kitchen Confidential. I’d read about such weird restaurant staff hierarchies, but lord if I wanted such things to actually start to matter to me at this stage in my life. Not for 6.15 an hour plus an average tip-out per busy weekend night of twelve bucks. So, yeah. I called the supernice manager the next day, and I quit.

But first-!
The coffeeshop was 6.15 an hour, too. It’s my favorite place in town: an independent coffeeshop that also makes excellent sandwiches and soups. That works on such a barebones budget, it can’t afford to hire more than one person per shift. This means you never stop working, making sandwiches and milkshakes and smoothies for tourists who don’t tip, making chicken salad and roasting coffee. It means you are always behind and always closing an hour late, for which you do not get paid overtime, and you begin to get a sore throat from the roaster, which smokes up the backroom something awful. And you’re making lattes and mochas for people which you know you could do in your damn sleep because you’ve done it before, in your early twenties. Only you made more money at that job.

You can’t sleep well. Something about the coffee oil that sticks to your skin and hair, even after you shower, and you lie in bed and smell that smell, which reminds you of your early twenties and the feeling of futility.
Even before you quit, you decide you will never work in a coffeeshop again.

Noted in the school library:
19 or 20 or even 21 is far too young for a young man to be answering a cell phone call,
"Yell-o."
That offhand middle-aged southern lawyer or real estate salesman speak. It's just not right.

Lately, I’m mostly interested in hanging out with old people.
To contrast: I talked with Hunter, my ex-boyfriend, now best-platonic-friend last night on the phone, about his weekend up in Madison. Ah-! he told me. The sun's been shining, it’s finally warm, and everyone’s coming out of hibernation. Spontaneous parties start up left and right at friends’ houses all around town and the Coup played a free show on this esplanade at the university. It was a giant lovefest and suddenly he has some magnetic Lady Attractor Beam going on too, because women are flirting with him left and right and yes, summer is starting out allllright.

I laughed, because I also had a great weekend, but I spent the whole thing with senior citizens. I’ve been visiting my grandma in her small town a lot lately, and drove there again, this weekend. Nona is 91 and lives by herself, still, in the house where my mom lived out her teenage years. Also, as I’ve told you before, she’s my favorite person on the planet.
Now that she’s just a few hours away, I find it hard to resist the urge to spend quiet weekends sitting with her on her screened-in porch, watching cardinals and bluejays and drinking coffee or pink wine and cackling together.

A few weeks ago, my grandmother had a fall going out to her garden. It was really scary at first, because we didn’t know if the cause was a stroke or what she’d broken, or anything. Turns out that there was no stroke and that she didn’t break anything, just bruised her pelvis badly. But I did spend that weekend at the hospital. I’ve always thought of hospitals as places where all your needs are met, and although this one wasn’t too bad, I did find out that you actually have to speak up just to get basic things: a napkin and a straw for your grandma who can’t bend her spine enough to sit up and eat the soup they’ve tossed unceremoniously on the tray beside the door; an extra blanket because her bed’s right beside the vent.

Nona’s better now. She’s still using a walker, which she hates and refuses to go out into public with, for fear of “looking like an old lady,” nor can she get very far before becoming too achy. But this weekend, a neighbor came and picked the both of us up on a golf cart (how do people get these things? At what point in your life does a golf cart become a normal item that you decide to purchase and have to keep in your own home?) and we went to a pig picking at a neighbor’s across the street.

It was huge. The back yard itself, the set-up, and the massive group of people who came to eat the crazy-delicious pork right off this gigantic smoker, along with hush puppies, broccoli slaw, boiled potatoes, and my favorite thing in the world for dessert, banana pudding.

What always startles me in Grifton, my grandma’s town, is to see the number of young married people and their kids. This idea that there’d be a new generation at all. What startles me even more is to meet people who don’t know my grandmother and therefore worship her as the undisputed queen of town. Actually, I’ve never met anyone there who doesn’t know who she is. But I never trust anyone who lacks what I deem to be the requisite affection for her.

All in all, I’m much more comfortable hanging out with senior citizens in Grifton. Part of this is that the cultural difference between the elderly people and me feels, for some reason, much less pronounced than the yawning divide that I feel between me and the New Country Pop-Rock listenin’, SUV-drivin’ “Yee-haw!” yellin’ young folks.

All of whom seem like interlopers to me. In my mind, I’ve realized, I’ve turned Grifton into this town defined by and equated to my grandma’s generation. There is some suburban sprawl going on outside the town’s old center, but that’s not the part that I consider even to be Grifton, really. I think of its short stretch of downtown, the mostly sad, empty storefronts—one of them once belonging to a store owned by my grandfather. I think of the railroad tracks crossing through the center of town, the old depot that used to be the center of the town’s operations and now is just sort of quaint. (That curse.)

I love to sit with the elderly people and hear about family histories and scandals and how things used to be when my mother’s family had relatives on every block. Because a selfish part of me thinks of Grifton as somehow belonging to my family. I imagine that once we finally have no immediate tie left there, the place will be swept up from the Earth. Going back there in some period after my grandmother, would be like visiting your childhood home after some new people have bought it and made it theirs. The smell in the air, the roads you take to get to Grifton, all of it feels like, to some degree, it belongs to me.

And so I sat at the pig picking with the elderly people at a group of tables set up on a small rise, while the young families ran around at a faster pace down below. There were two guys of indeterminate age, somewhere between 25 and 35, both of whom I chatted and joked with in line while fixing plates for Nona and me. Both came up separately a number of times, to get Coke from the table where I sat with my grandma’s friends, but I didn’t really engage them again. I was too engrossed in listening to what this childhood friend of my mother’s had to say about a teacher they both had.

There are a lot of end-of-year-blowout, alcohol-fueled get-togethers going on here in Beachtown, too, with the school year winding down and a number of people getting ready to move. But somehow, I can’t work up the enthusiasm to participate in all that, either. Right now I prefer the porch, the birds, and more than anything else, Nona’s face as she bursts into laughter.

I tell you, it can rain in this town.
It can rain in Atlanta, too, but it’s nothing like here. As I’ve mentioned before, Atlanta’s an overreacting drama queen when it comes to rain. Having, well, a largely inoperable sewer system, the city’s streets begin to flood after roughly five minutes or so.
“Precipitation?? Why, no one told me I’ve have to deal with that!” says Miss Atlanta, and promptly faints. I think this is the true reason every other person seems to drive a big old ugly SUV there. Whenever it rains, the main thoroughfares transform themselves into scenic, treelined canals and little Hondas become dinghies with flooded engines.

But Beachtown. It wins for, like, marathon raining, here. Last fall, I recall one day when it started raining hard in the early afternoon, and I thought, “Ah, the maritime climate,” and settled in with a nice cup of chamomile or something in front of my computer and felt all comfy. That night, it was still raining. Not "showers,” but nonstop freaking torrents. For hours. I’ll admit; it freaked me out, Henshaw.

And this morning, like our neighbors all up and down the east coast, we got some serious storms. Last night, there was talk of possible tornadoes on the news, and a couple friends and I started trying to come up with plans for this. And we realized that just about every single person we know lives on a 2nd floor apartment, here.
We of the cheaper rent are Beachtown’s tornado fodder.

I was all spooked by this, because tornadoes are an old childhood fear. A fear that caused me, later in the evening, to speak the first words I have ever uttered to the male half of the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? couple next door. My office window looks right over their six foot wall, directly into their swimming-pooled patio, so I am always—guiltily, inadvertently—watching them if they’re down there, though I pretend not to. And they can look right up and see exactly what I’m doing in my little garret apt, but they, too, pretend not to.
And he knows this.
And I know this.
We never speak when we see each other on the street. A tacit Good Fences/Neighbors thing.

Till last night, when I noticed him out on his front porch. I was carrying my trash outside and something in the weird, gusty, pre-storm air sparked a bright chattiness in me. So I went with this brilliant opening gambit,
“You think we’ll have a tornado?”
He started, and looked over at me like one of his shrubs had spoken.
“Uh. Why?” he said.
“There’s that really bad storm coming through tonight. They say we might get a tornado.”
(Pause. Still looking like he’s not sure why he should be talking with me.)
“In my 25 years here, I’ve never seen a tornado.”
Then he went inside, and I called out some lame, “Have a good night!” type thing after him.
I’m telling you; Richard Burton ringer.

But so far, no tornado has touched down in my neighborhood. The hail and the wind woke up Dangercat and me a couple times, but I managed to fall back asleep, with that contented Tomorrow-is-Sunday feeling, hearing the nasty storm, all of it outside, all unable to come in.

What happened to The Natural History?
Some music albums are linked, inextricably, to particular periods of your life. It’s a Shame About Ray by our dear old Lemonheads, will always be about my high school contingent of friends, about the hours spent drawing on our Chuck Taylors with Sharpies and shouting out car windows at the top of our voices, “She’s the puzzle-piece behind the couch/that makes the sky compleeeeete!”

And then there are some records you never, ever tire of listening to. The album I’ve had in mind I’ve only owned for five years, so it may be too early to classify it as Timeless.

But there’s a second component to this sense of fascination. There are bands who put out a really stellar first album, and then an all-right second album followed by a so-so Record #3, the bands who just sort of peter out of your life. And then there are the bands who shine so hard that they’re difficult to look at directly. To use a worn-out turn of metaphor, these bands explode. And then just disappear.
Like, Eddie and the Cruisers style.

On the Dark Side
I first saw The Natural History perform at the Earl in Atlanta in 2002, when my boyfriend-at-the-time’s band opened up for them. Following his band, a group of us all stood around the stage, politely waiting for this headlining band we’d never heard of instead of going home, because that’s what rock ‘n roll etiquette calls for. Then they came on and started playing. And we all did that looking-at-each-other-thing. That Oh, my god; who are these people? thing.

I’m bad at writing about the direct experience of music, but I’ll try to describe The Natural History: Three young men from NYC, a guitar-bass-drums deal, and their music was an angular, muscular, extremely-rhythmic thing. The chords were all jangly and broken up weirdly and the whole thing, put together, was insanely catchy. If you wanted a real idea of exactly what the hell the above is supposed to mean, I guess I’ll just list influences I heard: I’d guess early Elvis Costello and Gang of Four and I heard others say early XTC, but I don’t know about all that.

They were also really enthusiastic about what they did. The singer, Max Tepper, played guitar and wooed the audience like freaking Elvis. He and his brother, Julian, who played bass, would shoot each other glances before pounding down on these cathartic chords together—and Derek Vockins, the drummer, was all the right mix of understatement and brashness and complexity. Just mesmerizing to watch.

So they rocked our world; turned The Earl on its head that night. It also helped that they were really nice guys; they gave Hunter a copy of their five-song EP, which took up permanent residence in my car’s cd player for weeks. It managed to sound just like the band did live: really raw and energetic and barely restrained and catchy and poplike, too. In the months that followed, I felt myself becoming something of a groupie. I was keenly aware of this and tried to play it cool, but still, every time the band came to Atlanta, I found myself back at the Earl, right there in front, dancing and dancing and singing along, loud.
Beatlemania.

It would be misleading if I kept from you the fact that these were not wholly unattractive gentlemen.

They came out with a full-length album, Beat Beat Heartbeat, which lacked some of the raw spontaneity of the EP, but the songs were still great. Then they stopped touring, said they were putting together a second full-length record. Their website said they were looking for a new drummer, and then there were these articles about shows they were playing in New York with larger and larger ensembles; they were trying for a new sound. This didn’t sound good to me, but I waited, still. Waited months. And then their website went down. And then, nothing.

And still. Every now and then, I search the web for something, for any piece of news online about what happened to this band, which, whenever I hear them I’m forced to declare to be my very favorite: The Natural History. What happened? Where’d you go? Jeez; give a fan some closure, at least. Don’t just disappear without a word.

A thousand-one thanks to Crackergal.