"Sleepless" Chapter 5: "The War in the Soul"
The Background World
Dublin, California, February 2020
It’s rare that I attend social events. I am by no means anti-social in the truest sense, but when conversations aren’t stimulating, I don’t feel the need to be present at all. I just escape into my mind and ponder the ongoing questions I have of life. It is both unfortunate and sobering to know that there are few who can stimulate my mind more than my own thoughts can. I have walked away from conversations, and I have walked into parties just to leave ten minutes later when nothing was of interest. I’ve never cared if behavior such as this is off-putting, I just refuse to keep my mind engulfed by chatter. It is by no means a hatred of people, but rather a form of self-preservation.
This night was a night of a party I could not simply walk away from. This was the Christmas party for the staff of my workplace, and considering I was the one white male behind the bar, I needed all the social exposure with my coworkers I could get.
My first shift at this bar made it clear that I was not the ideal model of bartender that the owners wanted on their staff. A straight white male was the lowest on the list of priorities in 2019/2020 Oakland, California.
I had received an interview through a connection from my old San Jose bartending days. The mentor of my mentor spotted me at an Irish pub and asked why I moved back from New York City. In the middle of my response, he declared he had a gig for me in Oakland. Upon seeing my resume, Gavi, one of the bar’s two owners hired me on the spot and asked me when I could start. I told him I could start that Saturday at 10pm after getting off of a shift at my sorry excuse for a fine dining job in San Francisco. He jumped at the availability.
When I stashed my backpack in their break room, I received an assortment of strange looks from a staff of striking black women and deeply hipster white women. The former aired more towards sexual interest, but the latter telegraphed something more along the lines of, “what the fuck is HE doing here?” A white man in lumberjack flannel, boxing shoes, and military cap aggressively shaking hands with each of them, completely discarding their mixed bags of reactions was something giggle-worthy in my mind.
My skill spoke for itself, and in my review with Justine, the bar manager, and the owners, Gavi and Rory, it was clear I was the top performer on every metric.
I was not going to allow my skill to be written off, and my actions would roar over my coworkers’ liberal dismissals. I was determined to earn their respect not because I needed the validation, but because I value being a part of a strong team.
Strong teams require more than performance however. They require camaraderie, and this was an element that was sorely lacking. This proved more difficult for me to facilitate being the odd man out.
Hence the need to socialize at this “Christmas party.”
Common ground can be found with anyone, but surely, I wouldn’t be the first to arrive. I had to get there late when shots were already had and early party awkward tensions were already eased.
So I sat on the couch in my room in Dublin, with my typewriter in my lap and my phone beside me. The writer’s block was nasty, and my mind was in a hazy dream state. I stared at my ceiling in disgust.
“There’s something about all this that is so droning, so peculiar in all the wrong ways,” I thought.
“I doubt it has anything to do with the actual material world.”
“There are people who are so deeply depressed who have amassed incredible fortunes, cultivated genuine friends, and seen every corner of the Earth that called to their hearts who still weren’t happy.”
“There has to be some kind of line, some kind of purpose to follow.”
“All of these externals people clamor for strike me to be simply illusions.”
“But what of the people around us?”
“Are we not supposed to be gracious and kind to those around us?”
“The idea of being positively rude to the innocent for the sake of maintaining one’s path seems to me to be a kind of slippery slope towards becoming a prideful monster flirting with sociopathy.”
“Still, appeasing the expectations of others who have no context of true value or meaning in life can also be a form of voluntary self-administering of psychological cyanide.”
“Even the stimulation from pondering this question has given me greater meaning than most conversations I have with others.”
“This obligation to be around people kills me, but solitude makes a quick friend of selfishness.”
I checked my phone to see the the time.
The screen was littered with messages from the bar staff’s groupchat.
“WHERE IS EVERYBODY?!” questioned both of the bar’s owners roughly an hour ago.
It would take roughly 40 minutes to get to Oakland between the time it takes to get assigned an uber, his commute time to my house, and the actual journey there.
It had already been two hours since the party had started, and the intention was for it to go on well into the night.
Enough time had passed to justify getting ready.
I threw on blue jeans, a blue and white pinstripe button up, chelsea boots, and a tweed overcoat.
February in Oakland stays cold.
The uber was on its way, and with the remaining four minutes I decided to think about how I’d enter the party. It wasn’t really one I could be myself in, as I was a fish out of water surrounded by vultures waiting for me to say something remotely offensive.
Walking out of my house to the driveway to step into my uber had me feel the shadow of night.
I love being up late into the night.
Less noise.
I can feel the background world more.
I can see the hidden threads of life.
I feeI like myself in the night.
The journey to Oakland read 32 minutes in total, which was just enough time to see the glory of the drive over the hills on 580 and merging to shoot up the coastline on 880 to Oakland while pondering.
The journey itself was always a joy. Going to Oakland was a blessing in my eyes. To see the beams of light from the Mormon temple atop the mountain, the Bay Bridge in the distance, and the Grand Lake Theatre in all of its glory.
But in this drive, the surrounding world wasn’t what mattered.
I wanted to be anywhere other than the party I was headed to.
I had practice at six in the morning that next Monday, and I wanted to be mentally anchored in that not drunken toasts. There was certainty in such tangible things as launching my shins against Fairtex heavy bags. But this kind certainty wasn’t enough.
That old feeling came back again, the longing for transcendence. The longing for the old way, a way that was just from two years prior. It showed itself again in my mind, and I didn’t want it to leave.
I had to somehow facilitate its staying put and not fading away into a forgotten ether.
I had recently been shown a peculiar track by Darren, a track titled “Earthcult” by a Russian band named “Trna.” Darren described the song as “atmospheric black metal instrumental.” The track lasted 15 minutes, and it was one that evoked a deeper anchor in my mind than most music could ever be capable of. It was a feeling that had been sorely lacking.
I placed my headphones in my ears, turned the volume up at 85 percent, and let the sounds wash away the humming highway noises from my ears.
This flood consists of a hyper-aggressive drum machine, distorted guitars with an echo that could traverse the Earth, and synthesizers that did their damndest to paint a harsher and stranger but beautifully heightened atmosphere that induces my mind to imagine a forest far away in Karelia, untouched by the sanitized minds of “Illmerica.”
But this dark forest in my psyche could have easily been the backdrop hills of eucalyptus and oak that nestled Oakland into the Bay, and this is what my mind likely drew from.
But there was an essence that I had only read in tales of Siberia, felt in humble Russian Orthodox parishes, and dreamed of in fantasies since the age of ten. Something about Russia always fascinated me.
This essence was threaded into this dark forest I crafted in my psyche, and if one were to see my optics in this music-induced dream state, he wound find an overhead, circling view looking down at a clearing. The view of a circling bird of prey.
But in the center of this meadow, this grove was a man with his palms out and up, his eyes closed, and bracing his being into fortification, preparing for an onslaught he knew full well was coming.
His thoughts leaked from his skull, and they stated a knowledge that if he could remain rooted, no foe would end him.
The onslaught indeed came, a storm of a thousand phantoms, black, and grey, and translucent. All of them would take form and lose form, engaging in physical manifestation and abandoning it for fluidity in staggered rhythms with all of the others.
The sky above the grove began to darken with each new phantom that came for the rooted man. Thousands more rotated around the grove, forming rings upon rings, all chomping at the bit in a gyroscopic lockstep to find the opening to kill, no, possess this man.
The phantoms collective energy radiated from every direction it could trying to break the spiritual fortifications of this man.
A tear came to the man’s eye regarding the herculean feat of spiritual strength, resisting the will of thousands upon thousands, whispering, hissing, ghoulishly howling at him to give in to his darker nature.
He knew victory was at hand.
In the song came a slow, somber reprieve with a glimmer of hope, the kind of hope that was far more real in the distance of time’s presentation.
This late eye of the storm gave the man time to realize the temptation he had endured.
The phantoms were further away now, lurking in the distance, mobilizing to launch all of their might on the coveted man.
The song and the phantoms jolted into one final push, one final attack on the man and his soul, but his defense was ready.
Blinding light emerged from his being and engulfed the army surrounding him, vaporizing them in their entirety, bringing the much awaited dawn of the next day.
“There is a war in and for every man’s soul.” I thought.
“There is a war in and for every man’s soul.”
I wrote it in my instagram story shortly after realizing this.
Black screen. White courier text.
I sat there in a daze after seeing this as vivid as thoughts could ever be.
The song played once again on repeat for six minutes before arriving in Downtown Oakland.
“What a comedown,” I thought.
I walked into the bar to see a group of my coworkers and workers from our two sister bars in San Francisco, Jackalope and Soda Poppinski’s.
I went up to the bar which was manned by Justine’s boyfriend and ordered a double neat pour of Rittenhouse rye.
The owners were pleased to see me there, and the hipster white girls I worked with were somewhat apprehensive.
Jane was dressed in a white gown that contrasted and complimented her dark skin, and she greeted me with a hug. She was clearly drunk cause she held the hug for extra long, her new afro bouncing on my shoulder.
“I saw your instagram story, Is everything alright?” she asked.
“Yeah, things got a little intense. Had some writer’s thoughts, but I’m good.”
“You’re always intense, like fuck man.”
“Yeah, it’s not something I can really turn off.”
I arrived just before a champagne toast that sent her over the edge and achieving an inner wisdom that told her she should get an uber home.
I had a conversation with the bar manager of Jackalope named Scotty about picking up some shifts to finally free myself from my purgatorial fine dining job.
I had a conversation with Justine witnessed by the bar owners that ended in a genuine embrace of mutual respect. She had said I brought so much value to the bar. I knew this was the case, but it was still nice to hear it.
I had a conversation with someone about something, and I say that cause it didn’t matter.
People were talking at the pace of rabid CNN corespondant, yet no one was saying a damn thing.
I promise you though, I really tried. I was looking for camaraderie, but it simply wasn’t there.
Upon that realization, I thought the best way to telegraph my commitment to the bar was to stay until the end.
This dance to the end saw me make dealer’s choice cocktails for half of the staff members who were blown away each time. I couldn’t tell if it was because they were drunk, or they were actually that good.
Gavi, the drunkest man in the room yelled, “OKAY, ARTHUR MAKE ME A COCKTAIL DUDE, I FEEL LIKE IM MISSING OUT.”
I grabbed a miller high life bottle, wedged the cap off, poured out two ounces, and then funneled in an ounce of Braulio amaro and an ounce of Rittenhouse rye, to then shove an orange wedge into the bottle and lightly stir with a straw.
“Holy Balls dude! This is fucking amazing! How the fuck do you do it man?!”
Truth be told, that wasn’t one of mine.
It’s called a “State Park,” and it was a menu item off the “Bastard’s Corner,” created by the man who trained me to bartend. Bastardized classics were loved by my bartender who enjoyed pissing off cocktail snobs. Sazeracs rinsed with Jägermeister instead of Herbsaint, pickle juice martinis, and a French 75 topped with Red Bull called a “Jersey Howitzer.”
That drink seemed to be the one to push Gavi from drunk to faded, and people began to slowly clear out.
I had my ear talked off by some sommelier who for some reason worked at Jackalope every Monday, likely due to his friendship with Gavi.
His chatter turned to pestering questions asking why I fight.
“What do you really get out of it at the end of the day?”
“I feel alive. I feel like myself.”
“But what do you get out of it in the long term?”
“Most likely nothing, but I also don’t care.”
“I don’t know man, it sounds pretty harsh.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re not the one doing it now isn’t it?”
Gavi interjected with a drunken but hospitable, “hey guys, I’m just gonna start cleaning up. I want to get out of here by three, but you guys just keep drinking whatever you want.”
I responded, “It already is 3am.”
Without a missing a beat Gavi declared, “I want to get out of here by 4am.”
It was already far later than I wanted it to be, and Muay Thai practice was now in three hours.
I attempted to help Gavi clean, but it was met with fierce protests resulting in me calling an uber home.
My soul was bored.
I was in the wrong place.