She talks so much about her New York stalker (the man from Brooklyn), I actually became more curious about him.
What was he like? How did they get entangled?
He, of course, became the next step in her budding career as a future chef after she arrived in Manhattan again.
But it wasn’t what she’d expected.
“I was thrown into what seemed to be the careless observer of a pretty solid life track,” she wrote. “I love food. I love the unpredictability of the food industry. But as happened before in moments like these, I found myself slowly smashed into an unsettling, underlying predictability in the middle of all the crazy appearance, a familiar equilibrium. I was trapped. I knew in my heart things were not right. But I beat myself back into submission with the usual arsenal of excuses.”
The Sadomasochistic language of this last sentence is striking.
Unsaid in this written account was the romantic entanglement with the co-manager that turned into love (at least in his thinking) and later into stalking, at a time when she was still being stalked by a woman she had fled from upstate, the latest link in a chain of unwanted attachments that got in the way of her economic and career plans.
“The original intent behind bartending once again (which I never, I assure you, included the intent to manage, and insistence that fell on my former chef’s deaf ear, bless his heart) was to allow myself freedom to pursue things that sooth the soul,” she wrote.
In other words, she was looking for a gig similar to the one she had had prior to coming to NYC, where she previously acted like a boss, while using the venue as performance space.
Although she had worked as a bartender during her return to New York after her teaching gig, and prior to her five-year musical tour, the kindly chef made her take training – although despite her claim, she apparently had her eye on becoming floor manager.
Within six months, everything went sour, and she fled to Europe for a short trip to recuperate, and apparently to escape the good chef’s stalking.
“Which leads me to my decision to quit my job,” she wrote “By a string of eternal punishments, I mean the sort you don’t bring on yourself. Life takes care of that for you, making the best of it consists of conscious choice to minimize the crap you rain down on yourself.”
Was it worth it for her to suck it up and live in what she called “a perpetual state of trauma?”
“like a hunt animal, where nothing you do right is recognized and everything you do wrong is thrown at you like a very long and sharp spear, for the sake of putting on an extra helping of sliders on a table in a restaurant that every day became more and more like a flaming sinking ship?” She wrote.
To this point, I had assumed the spoiled romance was the reason for her leaving, but this suggests the real reason was financial. She no longer had any use for him.
“Perhaps if the cheffy captain has his whole heart into it and therefore provided you with the original incentive to carry on, but he didn’t. He saw it and it was not good and as I stood there peering around me at the burning people and dwindling bar tips and the push for Caesar salad as a diner entre, and having no noble cause to stay other than to ‘ride it out’ until it smashed to bits on the ever present rock of failed ventures, I made the decision to bail. It broke my heart, but I did it.”
There was no point in trickling up on a sinking ship.
It broke the chef’s heart, too, at which point he went from her meal ticket to her stalker, as she moved on in search of some new career.
“Of course, for me, this type of move pours salt on my life-long wound of anxiety and my stubborn tendency to equate my self-worth with employment of any sort,” she wrote.
She moved on, took her trip to Europe, but her stalker was still waiting for her when she came back, still heart-broken, still making assumptions that he might win her back, though as she pointed out more than once, when she moves on, she never looks back.
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