Dangerous of Nostalgia, part 1

Waiter Detox Day 4

In my waning days at the Thinman, way back in the late months of 2004, my patience for just about everything was very thin. I have two reasons for this. First, I was a very chronic weed smoker. Now, say what you will about people in Colorado, in Denver particularly, weed was still illegal in 2004. I was a weed smoker, I think because I worked in a bar and booze was very unappealing to me at that time. The real trouble with being a chronic weed smoker is that it makes you into an asshole. Now, I didn't smoke weed before work. I wouldn't smoke weed at all during the day if I had to work. I smoked it when I got home. And I smoked it on days off, often many times during the day. I was saturated with weed. As I think about weed and weed smokers, I don't think it works any other way.

But, therein lies the problem. When you're saturated with weed, it wears off at predictable times. For me, it was generally around nine o'clock every night. At nine every night, I was only half way through my shift. I would become a very irritable asshole. I've seen this behavior with so many others over the years. I have sympathy for they. Anyone who says weed is not addictive is wrong.

At nine in the evenings, the noise, the bullshit, the people, all of it would just make me want to scream.

The second reason for my thin patience was that I was always looking over my shoulder. I was waiting for someone to pull the carpet out from under me. I was just waiting for someone to come along and call me a fraud. I mean, here I was working at this fashionable bar, hating every minute of it and anyone who looked a little deeper, I thought, would see me for what I was. In the following years I have realized this is called imposter syndrome and I'll be damned if I still don't suffer from it a little these days.

I knew, pretty much that whole last year that any day would, and could and probably should be my last day. I wanted to get out into the world and do something more fulfilling, but I had no idea what it was that I wanted to do. What I really wanted was to be a writer, but by the end of the four years I worked at the Thinman, I wrote less and less every year. I had a few publications during those years, all of which I was glad, but not very proud about having.

Then, in the fall of that year, enter Max.

Max was hired as a painter/handyman by the people who owned the bar where I worked. From the moment I met him, he put me off. If I thought I was a fraud, I knew Max to be one. He talked a lot. He chained cigarettes, and he smoked more weed in a day that I did in two weeks. The last time I saw Max, he came to my house a day or two after I quit the bar. He wanted $300 to get his wife out of Arizona, and he thought I would loan it to him. “When can you pay me back?” I asked. He said he could pay me back on Tuesday. Fucking Whimpy, I thought, this isn't a hamburger. “Listen Max, I don't have $300.” But I knew that there was an opportunity here. I excused myself and went into my room where I kept my cash. I had $300, a lot more, I suspect, but I wasn't about to give this guy that kind of money. I took thirty dollars from my stash. I took it in singles and fives. Wrinkly singles and fives. “Hey, Max, I want to help you out,” I said. “I got thirty bucks.” But, I need 300, he said. He looked dejected. It may not have been an act after all, but I had a plan. “Well, it's thirty bucks, that's 10% of what you need. And you can pay be back on Tuesday?” He agreed to pay me back on Tuesday and he left.

I watch him walk down the path to the street. I watched him get into his truck, the truck given to him by our boss. And I watched as Max drove away. I knew at that moment that I would never see him again. And I never did. Thirty bucks was an incredibly small sum for that.

The thing about Max that really put me off was that he was always talking about his time in the Coast Guard. He made it seem like it was the best thing he had ever done. He had had a four year enlistment that ended sometime in 1979. And he was talking about it still in 2004, some 25 years later. He had that nostalgia that is dangerous. If it was so great, why get out of the Coast Guard at all?