SOMEBODY WROTE ME A NASTY LETTER / I’M WRITING THIS TO MYSELF
DOWN AND OUT IN MALMÖ AND COPENHAGEN, PART FOURTEEN
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual restaurants or hospitality workers living, deceased, or drunk is unintentional and should not be inferred.
To Whomst it May Apply,
When they offer you the apartment above the restaurant, don’t take it. Whatever you do, don’t fucking do that, dude. Live on the street if you have to. Crash eternally on somebodies couch. Find a spot in the burbs and commute. Just, for the love of god, maintain a healthy distance between you and the job. You need a couple blocks of space from the restaurant at least. Ideally, a life outside the workplace or two. I know the apartment will be tempting. I know it will seem like the obvious choice. You already spend all your time in the restaurant anyway. You already have trouble putting up boundaries anyway. Your only friends are there anyway.
Don’t do it.
Get a hobby that’s not drinking or eating at other restaurants. Make other friends, boring friends, friends that aren’t up to spend Mondays not spitting at every single industry wine-tasting Malmö has has to offer. Please find a friend that doesn’t know the meaning of the word “maceration”. But this is your vocation, you say. That’s what I said too. I had to learn the hard way, the vocation is eating you, not the other way around. There is something to be said about complete dedication, yes. To prostrate yourself totally before a lifestyle. I have respect for the addict, the monk, the true believer. Excelsior! True Believers is what Stan Lee dubbed Marvel comic book fans in the 1960’s. Look where they are now. Cultish losers beefing with probably the greatest American filmmaker we’ve got? Pathetic. When you walk downstairs to work and walk upstairs after your shift, that’s pathetic too. Maybe pathetic is the wrong word. Fucked up, sad, cultish loser-like? I mean, dedicated. Lifer. Did you choose this life or is it just that nowhere else would take you?
It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
When I took the upstairs apartment I thought it was the right decision. I had nowhere else to go anyway. My last living situation had grown untenable. Once I moved in, it was exactly 24 hours before someone came knocking on my door asking if I could cover a shift. To be fair, that never happened again. Everyone’s experience is not my own. There is a give and take to it.
Here’s the take:
You will be late to work every day.
You will see your coworkers every day, no matter how hard you try not to, no matter if you were at each other’s throats just last night.
You will go days without leaving the building once.
You will sleep with a customer, who is also a neighbor, and it will be unavoidably awkward after.
You will be asked to look after deliveries, check on things forgotten, and handle emergencies. You are right there after all.
When every other bar is closed after work, your apartment becomes the closest watering hole for the entire staff.
And the best of it?
You can be late to work every day.
Free breakfast if Stavo is working, even on your days off.
When the weather sucks, as it often does in Malmö, you don’t have to step outside once.
The apartment is cheap, and you living there gets rid of one more complaining-ass neighbor. You won’t complain about noise or food smells or garbage in the stairwell will you? Better not. That would be like sending yourself a nasty letter.
Your life will get smaller in meaningful ways. For years you will share a stairwell with the backdoor of the restaurant, four floors of steps chemically altered by either an adrenaline rush or an anxiety attack. Rooftop apartments lose their appeal. You become your favorite movie protagonist in the worst way. Just a dude moving between the four walls of your apartment and the four walls of the restaurant. Has Paul Schrader ever done a film about a waiter? Maybe you can write that one. Maybe you don’t want to be associated with him these days.
The entire time you live in the apartment above the restaurant, you will not install a ceiling light in the kitchen. Life by the stove light is dim but doable if you don’t have anything to do but work. Eventually, you start to believe you will die on that block. The apartment becomes your tomb. The street, Bergsgatan in Möllan, feels like the cemetery your plot is waiting to be dug in. You become fixated on the idea of a car hitting you during work. The amount of traffic accidents you see while working the patio does not help.
First, there is the group of kids who bend the corner, hit a divider, and break the axle on their probably stolen car in the middle of the street. Everyone thinks it’s stolen because they immediately hop out and don’t come back. Then there is the man who loses control of his ATV, falls backwards off the seat as it flies through traffic and into the window of the pizza place next door. Nobody was hurt, you all laughed, another near miss. You can’t say the same for dude who gets runover in the intersection riding one of those electric scooters they couldn’t pay you to use afterward.
That’s run-of-the-mill on Bergsgatan. Eventually you will tune out the traffic. What really fucks with you is the SWAT team, yes the SWAT team, who come barging through the restaurant one Friday night, into your shared stairwell to surround the apartment of another neighbor, a woman whose boyfriend threatens to kill them both with a razor blade, who wipes his own blood all over the walls of the courtyard while a hostage negotiator speaks to him through a megaphone.
That’s a story for another time. But it puts death on your mind.
Bergsgatan is a busy thoroughfare in Malmö. Loud. Ceaseless. At night cars race up and down the street, people get drunk, dance, sing karaoke and eat falafel afterward. There are ten falafel places in three blocks there, only two of them are good, but everybody has a different favorite anyway.
You stop going more than a mile away from the apartment at all times. Why would you? Everything you need is right there. It’s a walkable neighborhood, a fifteen minute city, you’re living an urban planners dream. You rarely eat outside work, your favorite bar is down the street, the market is at the square, even your therapist (every waiter needs a therapist) is right there on the corner. And coffee? You’ve got options. Good options, even. Swedes take their coffee seriously. You know they consume the third largest amount of coffee in the world? Per capita. That’s you too. You’re capita now.
Up and down those stairs. Down and up. Four flights. That’s a life. You won’t need to look past it, so you don’t. The existential dread just looms in the background, constant. Sometime it spikes. Sometimes you think.
You spend your whole life on this street; might as well die here too.
From,
This song from American blues musician Otis Taylor is the oblique inspiration for this weeks story. Somebody wrote Otis a nasty letter but didn’t sign their name. In college, my friends played this on repeat, used to sing it to each other, etc. Had not heard it for years, but recently it popped back into my mind. A masterpiece.
APRIL’S VOGUE MONEY COMPETITION THEME IS… “HOW THE SAUSAGE GETS MADE”
If you don’t know, for the past three months, GUTS has been hosting a writing competition that pays $4.50 a word. That’s one of the best rates in the business! There is, of course, a catch. The prize money comes from our paid subscribers, so every month it fluctuates. As the start of this months contest we had 15 paid subscribers, so the word limit for the competition is 15. You can say a lot in 15 words, trust. Give it a go!
Once again, would love to see hospitality workers send me some stuff. I want to read what goes on inside the kitchen, the walk-in, the lock-in, your hearts!!
Since I was a bit late with announcing the theme, this months deadline is May 9th. Send us what you got! No limits on form at all! Jokes, recipes, nasty letters, whatever.
Please send all entries to gutsmagazzino@gmail.com
ONCE AGAIN, A PLEA FOR A LETTER COLUMN
Last week I took a fantastic workshop with
, “How to Create an Editorial Vision”. This is my second workshop with her and I cannot recommend them enough. She’s an extremely knowledgeable lecturer who does a great job of fostering a community of interested and talented writers. What more can you ask from a class? This workshop was particularly illuminating for GUTS, which at its inception had an editorial vision that I have not quite fulfilled yet. It is a process of course, but Alicia’s workshop brought a lot of things back into focus.I am not looking for every reader, I am looking for the right readers. I am looking for the readers that will be passionate about the things I am passionate about, or at least be glad I am passionate about something. Is that you? If that’s you, I truly appreciate it. In the past year I have received a tremendous amount of support for this magazine, and I couldn’t be happier with the readers I’ve got. Thank you to everyone tuning in. One of the thing that really stuck with me from Alicia’s workshop is this question:
“Will you find your readers if you put exactly who you are on the cover of the magazine?”
Yes. Hopefully. Possibly.
I try to do that every week. There is always more to be done. Things are percolating. Taking inspiration from my favorite publications is important, and one thing I always loved to read in the comic magazines of yore were the letter columns in the backmatter. As stupid and instantly dated as they were, they were important to me. So I am imploring you, reader, to send me, editor, any questions about offal, restaurants, Sweden, Oakland, whatever you might have. I will do my best to answer them in the stupidest way possible.
Email letters to the GUTS WAREHOUSE at gutsmagazzino@gmail.com
IN OTHER NEWS :
A few weeks ago, a story I wrote, On Saturdays We Eat Candy, was published in Chlorophyll #1, an “online literary magazine seeking abundance, desire, community, and insolence in writing.”
The piece is about Sweden’s obsession with candy and the dark history of medical experimentation that got them there.
Go check it out along with stories and poems from other fab writers in Chlorophyll, created by
and , who also make the beautiful illustrations that appear in it’s pages!
Loved this.
I worked three jobs at university, and one of them was as a bar manager for a place that closed late. I would sometimes sleep along one of the padded, leather booths and then walk to my bakery job that opened in a few hours, because it was only a 15 minute walk from the bar whereas my house was about an hour's walk. This was back when an hour's walk was properly measured in the number of tracks I could listen to on my favourite album at the time.