On Monday, my husband trudged into his former chef job at a somewhat swanky restaurant to pick up his last check, possibly ever. The two years he spent there on the line were the happiest of his life—stressful, but satisfying. He’d regale me each morning with all the recipes he’d tested, customers he’d served, bonds he’d formed. That’s all over now, of course. He likely won’t find another restaurant to work in for some time.
After he left, I sat on our porch, hoping that he’d call me and tell me they’d changed their mind or found some way to keep their doors open without laying off the entire staff. That didn’t happen. Eventually, he appeared on our now-empty street and we walked inside quietly. I took his hand, and he asked what I’d like for dinner. I could tell he’d been crying.
Like my husband, service workers across the Bay Area are experiencing mass layoffs, as restaurants frequented by affluent tech workers shutter their doors per county-wide lockdown edicts. Many of his friends who work around San Francisco as chefs have been told by management that the layoffs are “indefinite.” The San Francisco Chronicle already reports that coronavirus was the catalyst for mass layoffs in the restaurant industry. Nationwide, unemployment across the service industry has similarly surged.
His own chef has already informed him that there will be a hierarchy to any hire-backs. Not every laid-off employee has a job waiting for them at the end of the shutdown, if ever; depending on how long this drags on, many restaurants may never reopen. But this precarious existence—which seems to have surprised Bay Area business owners, considering the immediacy of layoffs—is nothing new for us or anyone we know, already accustomed to life on the fringes of San Francisco’s tech utopia. As landlords hike rent across the Bay Area and startups push increasingly exploitative forms of employment, you’re either reaping the benefits of this economic divide or being crushed under them.
The warning signs were clear, and still, he and I persisted, defying what seemed like a fate that was rapidly closing in.
Long before Salesforce Tower was erected and its techno-priests flooded the city with their religion of scale, San Francisco cast an entirely different shadow across my childhood imagination. I’d squirrel away in the living room while my parents slept to watch grainy videos on Youtube—then just a newborn—featuring drag performances at bars in the Castro. When I was 17, I lied to my parents about a late-night theater rehearsal and changed into my approximation of drag in the bathroom of a CalTrain, having stolen a wig from the “drama shed” and a PacSun dress from my sister. The conductor looked at me funny as I sat alone on the near-empty train, map printout clutched between fingers weighted down by costume jewelry. I called myself Phoebe and walked around San Francisco until I got lost. On the way back, a woman told me I should practice eyeshadow some more, and then laughed. At home, my mom asked how my rehearsal had went. I smiled and told her it went better than expected, eyeshadow notwithstanding.
My parents would contest the claim that I was “kicked out,” but there isn’t much interpretive wiggle room in telling your 18-year-old that their childhood home would close to them should they start shooting estrogen into their ass. And so I fled to somewhere that seemed safer, more welcoming to teens buying black-market estrogen off the internet and calling themselves “Joan.” I’ve now lived here for six years, but I would call it surviving. Or foraging, considering all the groceries I’ve stolen in the months when rent was short.
My first apartment was a closet in the back of a garage, a barely livable space the home’s owners had built to pad their upcoming retirement. If I stirred in the night their dog would bark, waking my landlords. In the morning I’d get a text: “Could you please be more discreet?” I worked the register at a popular grocery store chain down the street from my hovel, perhaps the busiest store in the city. I was also going to school, so I’d wake up each morning around 4 a.m., and hike up the hill to work. At noon, I’d change in the dingy bathroom into something less embarrassing than a grease-stained uniform and sleep through my first two classes. For dinner I’d eat popcorn, maybe a spoonful of peanut butter. I ignored the hunger pains, and the incessant dog scuttling, and the overly rude customers who’d order me to fill their Teslas with groceries. I was living in the best city in the world. I could die then, happy.
It didn’t take long for the dream to sour. I was injured frequently on the job, but our bosses kept our schedules just short of qualifying for benefits. Worker’s comp was an option, but I already didn’t make enough to both eat and pay rent. So I paid my rent and took long showers at school to soothe the aches in my back and shoulders. The company, meanwhile, insisted we were family. This wasn’t true, of course, but they believed it would instill in us a sense of camaraderie, so when hours were cut, or holiday pay was taken off the table, we could tell ourselves: “We’re doing this for the crew! For each other!” On Thanksgiving, when our pay was unchanged and lines of angry customers extended down the aisles, I’d hear coworkers call me by a long-dead name—my “legal name”—and laugh knowingly. I’d smile, because we were all in this together.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
