CHAPTER FOUR
MIDNIGHT LUBED UP IN TUDOR TIMES
Just before I'd thrown myself into my new life the therapist I was helping was going through a particularly difficult time so I went to see him before I metamorphosed into Willy. I felt that I had ended up in some bizzaro reality. I should have been sitting down to write a TV show. Instead I was wearing a sparkly waistcoat, hiding from wasps on an industrial estate next to Heathrow airport and was contractually obliged to refer to myself as Willy Sabitini.I explained to him that I wouldn't be able to see him for the next couple of weeks as I was going deep undercover into the murky world of zero hour contracts. I told him Willy was a selfish prick who I just didn't feel would give up his free time to help a down on his luck dynamic therapist. Willy was a cocky sort of a guy, fancied himself with the ladies. Hyper sensitive to crtisicm, a bit of a homophobe but that was over compensating as maybe he was gay himslef because he had overbearing judgemental catholic parents so would never be able to come out. I continued... I was joining a crew of 400 people and the idea was to "just have fun and treat everyone like family" He suggested that maybe I shouldn't treat them like my family as I had an unpredictable mother, a remote father and two sisters who were ashamed of me and that was probably why I was working this job and not making my TV show in the first place. I told him he was projecting and he should stop rheumanating on being a failed musical theatre actor in all our sessions because if he hadn't retrained as a therapist he would have been standing in a field in a toga in a white box singing to hen do's and office parties and not making £100,000k a year. He told me I was being defensive. I told him these sessions are not just about me. He said we'd work on my attitude when I came back. I said we'd have to see if I preferred being Willy in which case this would be our last session as "Willy doesn't do commitment."
It was time for the first shift of my new life which felt like it was going to be halfway between witness relocation and prison. Our bar managers were slightly more palatable than the dream weaver who had reprogrammed us at the training session earlier in the week. The main manager had a mantra, they always have a mantra. His was "Strive to say yes." Strive felt like a good word, it wasn't demeaning. It felt noble like if i said to my landlord "I strived to get you the rent on time this month but failed" he'd let me off... "well if you strived for it." I could imagine him saying to me as I missed my payment once again. I could imagine myself striving to get my imaginary wife an anniversary present in ten years time but all the shops were closed as I'd stayed in the pub too long. Yes, strive was a word that I could see myself adopting. "The worst thing you can do as a bar man" the main bar manager continued "is say no after you have said yes. To offer something and it not be there was worse than to not offer something and it not be there" I felt like saying unless it's a zero hour contract in which case it's fine not give us any shifts but before I could he'd vanished into a puff of smoke.
It was half an hour before we opened and the site was a hub of activity. The dream weaver who had indocrinated everyone but me at the character training walked through the bars shouting about characters and stories and making dreams come true. Bar staff got their Robert Deniro on asking blank walls "are you talking to me, well I don't see anyone else here" We'd been honed to improvise and engage with the audience. This was where all the hard work on our characters was going to pay off. The doors to the mansion flung open and in streemed hundreds of punters costumed up and I assumed ready to immerse themselves in Tudor England but before I could even open my mouth the first customer I served gave me the classic English don't talk to me eye contact
"Good evening sir, I'm Willy Sabitini what can I get you this evening, a love potion perhaps"
"do I have to play the game" he replied "do I have to, to have a drink?"
The correct protocol here would have been to not acknowledge that the world was fake and plaster on a dead eyed grin and say something like
"we have plenty of games for you here sir at the mansion"
But I cut this poor dweeb some slack and poured him his drink before wishing him a nice evening in the terrible American accent I'd failed to master. The only organized fun the british public ever engaged in was waving a flag at a royal wedding. To be honest all through the training I was thinking they do know this show is taking place in Britain. Britain where passive aggressiveness is from. Britain where sarcasm is not the lowest form of humour but our love language. Britain where disbelief can only be suspended at the bottom of three litres of prosecco. Had they ever looked in the eyes of a charity mugger after they'd spent a day doing their job on a British high street? This was going to be a long three weeks.
One week in and i felt like I was the starter of a horse race. I pictured the punters all stood costumed up in a paddock on the outskirts of the park and with my mind I'd open the gates. They'd clamber over each other, some would be facing the wrong way, others would never find the venue but eventually the doors of the Mansion fling open and there would be a stampede to the bar. I had to admit the organizers had put together quite a show the place did look amazing and everyone had turned up in costume and seemed to be having fun but my one criticism was they'd made the whole event cashless which was great for the customer but this meant there was no opportunity for anyone to tip you. Well, they could tip you but it was part of a game where everyone was encouraged to give us useless plastic trinkets in game of love to unlock plot points. I'd leave every day with pockets full of plastic crap a turtle wouldn’t be seen dead choking on in the ocean, usually given to me by howling drunk prosecco sodden MILFS. One time I even got a bottle of cherry flavoured lube sadly these keepsakes did not contribute to rent. Three hours later I stepped out of the mansion after what had been a long first shift. The moon was full and high and it lit up a muddy wasteland strewn with broken plastic, half eaten junk food and party detritus. Litter was how you could tell that people had had fun in the modern world. Fragmented remnants guidied you out of the park like space trash floating in the solar system. I imagined this green space 65 million years ago and what it's inhabitants would think if they saw all this crap from this miserable event. I pictured a t-rex putting his massive head into his tiny hands and praying that meteorite hit the earth even harder than it did. I readied myself for the 90 minute commute home.
Things weren't as bad as I thought and I had avoided my fate at the meatball bar but the gods do not look kindly on those who play with hubris and one day I got summoned out of my mansion to go and help at the dreaded white box. I had underestimated how hellish this bar was by quite some way. There was a queue 30 deep at each till and the sun was blazing down. I was not allowed to wear a hat as part of my costume so my bald head was going to take the full force of the sun for the next four hours. Wasps were swarming around the fizzy drinks and alcohol and every time you poured a drink you’d have to dodge a wasp. I’ve heard that if a wasp feels like it’s in danger then it sends out a distress signal that attracts the rest of the hive. I’m not au fait with where wasps stand with nuance but i’m imagining five guys and girls in garish red waistcoats swinging bottles around full of sugary alcohol that the wasps would love to suck on constitutes danger in their tiny insect minds. 3% of the world's population are allergic to wasp stings. I’ve never been stung by a wasp and i’m not being paid enough to find out on this particular shift if I’m part of the 3% As much as my life was spiralling out of control I wanted to die on my own terms not on some confused pests terms who thought I was trying to take his coca cola away. I relayed this information to my manager. I'd jizzed out sperm older and a whole lot less serious than him. He instantly started to malfunction his face started to twitch as he hadn't yet acquired the correct skills to process such a complaint out of the left field. You could see his brain scanning through his training manual to see who's side he should take, mine or the wasps. The cogs in his almost formed brain whirred, he agreed with the principles of the argument and obviously he definitely felt wrong about taking the side of a swarm of deadly wasps but what was the correct protocol when a needed staff member doesn't want to work in a swarm of wasps. I didn't stick around to see who's side he took. If all your hopes and dreams are wrapped up in managing a bar that is a series of tents and portaloos on wheels that are going to be packed up in a van in two months time and driven to an industrial estate in leamington spa i’m fine with that but don’t pull me into your depressing life. Him and his wasp friends could work it out themselves as I walked back to my mansion.
Despite what I've spent the last 3,000 words talking about I do not want you to think I am work shy. I am fully prepared for the eight hours, three days a week I am being paid to work for you to put the minimum effort required into doing the job. I’m not getting a pension, I’m not getting sick pay, I’m not getting tips if I do a good job, there is no chance of a raise as the supervisor positions are filled by friends of the managers and owners and when the run finishes there is no further work for six months and the job has no security whatsoever. We are working at a temporary circus that will crumble to dust on it's last day and nothing we do good or bad will change that. This was a highly profitable multi million pound worldwide brand who were offering worse employment rights than a workhouse in a Dickens novel. I understand that there are risks from running your own business and it’s stressful but if it works out like it has for this particular multi million pound company it’s worth it and the little worker ants who helped you get there should be rewarded instead you have to settle for whatever little scraps are thrown from the table. You are a slave to the myth of choice "if you don't like it get another job" but the only other job for someone like me is starving to death digging your own grave on the side of the road as the owners spit on you out of their limos on the way to the bank.
Three weeks later the run finished. I had no work on the horizon. It was back to the Polski Sklep for me. On the last night the organizers got together all the cheap booze we didn't sell and the CEO gave what felt like a six hour speech. Don’t get me wrong it was a high class well organized event but anyone would think that we’d repatriated the Elgin Marbles and carried them on our backs from the British Museum back to Athens not served a load of drinks to people in fancy dress in an abandoned park two hours away from civilisation. At this point all anyone wanted to do was crack open the drinks and get hammered and wash the hellish three weeks we’d all just experienced away in a sea of booze not hear someone who’d fallen face first into a bag of coke lecturing us on his leadership skills as a CEO of an immersive events company. I wasn't sure whether it was Willy or Harry but one of us befriended three children who ran a food truck at the event - Wendy, John and Michael. They said they were going to another party after and asked if Peter Pan would like to join them. Anything to get away from my colleagues, all of whom’s anecdotes seemed to begin with them falling into a K-hole and ending with me feeling like I’d fallen into the same K-hole because their anecdotes were so boring. We made the long journey to Camberwell. All I knew about Camberwell was it was the home of drill Rap a violent style of London rap where all the lyrics focussed on stabbing people. And yet I went, like a glitch in a computer endlessly circling the mainframe unable to be fixed. What they actually meant by the party was me sat in a student flat with cancerous lighting and my old friend black mould and the smell of despair watching Wendy, John and Michael sniff poppers and play FIFFA. I was asked if I wanted any poppers. 10 second high for a two hour headache, "I'm ok with my 20 Year headache" I said. I stayed for a weirdly long time.
So this was my new reality. I felt like a nuclear bomb had gone off in my head incinerating my personality and leaving behind a burning pulsating piece of flesh. I really had no options, well none that were particularly appealing. The last twenty years had all been on black and now the ball in the roulette wheel had dropped on red. I didn't really know what to do. Maybe I could just sit in this student flat for as long as I could in the hope I would never be asked to leave. I knew what I wanted to do with my life it wasn't my fault that being a writer wasn't an essential resource. I'd have dedicated myself to Tik Toking for the last twenty years if I'd known that was going to be a thing. I was stuck between a rock and hard place, a low paying pointless job forever or the abyss. When I got home that night I shaved my head apart from the island of hair I had in the middle showcasing all the follicles I had left (in hindsight it looked like I had a vagina on my head). I bought a load of baggy black clothes that were too big for me. I got my ear pierced. I was a collection of impulses, irrational anxieties wrapped in a cyberpunk aesthetic. I had a decision to make. Give up on my dream of being a paid artist and retrain in something with a career in mind or take something temporary so I had time to lick my wounds and go into battle again.
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