Better Days 2
Nordstroms in downtown Vancouver is as sombre as a church in the mornings. I know this because I went there in the spring of 2022 to apply for a bartending job. The store’s typically ritzy theatrics — — wide aisles, waxed floors, racks of $180 collared shirts — — are tranquil and gloomy when the store is devoid of people.
It was 10:45 in the morning. I needed to see manager Naomi Byrne about a bartending job, and make a memorable impression on her.
I had dressed myself in leftover TV clothes — — vintage shirt with pearl buttons, threadbare Harry Rosen blazer. I practiced my weak smile in one of the blinding mirrors in the Nordstrom’s makeup department. Harsh truth: I have a crummy smile. My whole family can’t smile for beans for some inexplicable reason. Our faces simply are not inclined to smile. In every single family photo from my childhood, you can see the four of us — — mom, dad, me, my brother — — coaxing our faces into unnatural shapes.
A security gate was blocking the restaurant’s entrance. Behind the shuttered gate, a series of leather banquet booths, as vacant as pews, stretched to the restaurant’s bright windows. A hollow-sounding muzak was coming from a set of invisible speakers. Ambiguous cooking smells were wafting from a kitchen somewhere within.
I was early. Therefore, I had to kill some time — — about fifteen minutes — — before I could make my arrival at 11 o’clock. Didn’t want to appear overanxious or desperate or anything. I found a quiet area near the department store’s elevators. I took a seat on one of the Nordstroms’ lounge chairs, and tried to soothe myself — — in vain, of course — — with calming thoughts.
This is a silly restaurant job, I told myself. That’s all this is. I’ll charm this Naomi Byrne person and begin my training tout de suite…
That is not what happened.
What happened was this: Naomi Byrne, looking quite fresh faced and bright (any annoyingly young) after her presumably restful vacation, told me point blank that the position I was applying for had been filled. It was filled weeks ago. The ad for the job, which I had found online, was dated. Naomi, trying to be kind, asked me when I had last waited tables or tended bar. I told her it was Chicago. In the mid 90’s. Naomi, who was smart, did a quick smidge of math in her head. Then she asked me a question that landed like a blow to my midsection.
“So then,” she began, “you haven’t waited tables or bartended in nearly thirty years?” She moved behind the hostess stand as she said this to me. Her eyes, I noticed, in this moment, were a kind of lavender color. She was pretty. Tired. Ambitious. She blinked once, then waited for a response from me…
Was it possible that almost thirty years had passed since I’d waited tables? That couldn’t be right… Could it…? Thirty years sounded like an absurd length of time.
Naomi said that if she did hire me — — which she didn’t think she could do at that moment in time (job was filled weeks ago, remember) — — then she’d have no alternative but to start me off as a trainee. “You’d have to learn the ropes for a few weeks, before we could even think about assigning you a section,” she matter-of-factly explained. She handed me her business card. Told me that they might have “something” for me in the next month or two. Told me that there was plenty of turnover in the service business. Then, like the good Canadian she was, Naomi apologized for not being able to offer me anything tangible, then sent me on my merry way.
I retreated from the restaurant. My legs felt perfectly numb. Like I’d been anesthetized somehow. This was not the result I’d hoped for, of course. This was not the barnstorming experience I’d imagined it would be. I’d hoped that Nordstrom’s/Naomi would be dazzled by my forthrightness — — how I had just showed up, in person — — can you believe this guy? — — and how that told them everything they needed to know about my character. I also assumed (hoped?) they might have remembered me from my TV days. It was possible. People still stopped me in the streets from time to time…
Instead, what I learned was that it has been nearly thirty years since I’d last worked in a restaurant. Had three decades really elapsed since that time? It had, yes.
And that if I was hired by Nordstrom’s, that I would have to be a 53-year-old trainee, fetching teas (side note: waiters utterly despise tea because it is cheap, and absurdly complicated — — there are what feels like a thousand peripherals involved in a tea service — — and, worst of all, it involves piping-hot water) for some mentor-waiter who would likely be twenty, twenty-five years my junior.
On Robson street, just outside of Nordstroms, I doubled over. I braced my hands against my knees. I felt like throwing up on my old TV shoes. Then I gathered myself. I promptly emailed Naomi Byrne from my phone before I got on the R5 bus.
A response was waiting for me when I got home. “Thanks, but no thanks,” Naomi said.
A new kind of gloom draped over me that day.
I thought I knew darkness, depression, all of that horseshit. But this was something new and far more menacing. And this was the beginning, unfortunately.
Originally published at Scott C. Jones.
