DIARY OF A RECORD STORE SHOP GUY

I am terrified by men.

In college, a sweaty, hammered man named Alex pinned me against his mattress and put his hand under my shirt. It took a superhuman feat of strength to push this fat mother fucker off of my body, but I did, and I ran - left my keys, left my phone, and sprinted down a set of stairs so fast that the sound of my sneakers matched my heart in my chest perfectly. A couple of years go by, and, after a series of amateur sexual encounters with other kinds of mother fuckers, I absorbed this trauma into my body as just another possible indication that men were a mistake. One night, as I’m out to dinner with a group of friends, my eyes start to wander around the restaurant - front-of-house syndrome - scanning for unbussed tables, empty glasses, and crumpled napkins...and in a room full of the aforementioned, I zero in on that fat mother fucker. I instantly look back at my table as if the dimpled, sweaty back of his head had eyes that could see me, and gingerly look back again. He’s standing at expo, and he’s wiping plates. 

With his hands. 

The hand that he put  in my shirt in college, on the mattress, touched my plate, touched my food, touched me, touched me, touched me, he found another way to touch me without asking. Fuck, I almost vomit in my pasta.

The male gaze is a misnomer. For me, the words depict a slow movement of the eyes, like a lift toward the ceiling in a yoga class. A gaze is something you cast gently, something you land on the soft parts and revel the shadows. What women live inside of, what I live inside of, is more like a light beam from a projector in a dark room. It’s unforgiving, it’s blinding, and everything inside of it is captive - a billion specks of dust, suspended and backlit in one ruthless beam. 

A good friend of mine told me that recently, while grabbing an apron to wear for her shift, her general manager came into the linen closet and stuck his tongue down her throat. She pushed him away, and then she smiled at strangers for eight hours. 

Honestly, fuck Harvey Weinstein. Fuck Louie CK. Fuck literally every single man who has ever touched somebody the wrong way. But something about the way this happens in restaurants - in the presence and cultivation of food service - in a business that exists for the purposes of consumption - needs to be talked about, and frankly. 

Our business is hedonism. We dedicate our lives, both personally and professionally, to gluttony, lust, and pride. We revel in decadence, in appearances, in accolades, and we put foie gras on pork belly because we want capital I “it all.” Alcohol, and lots of it, is part of the deal, and we celebrate our toxic habits by slamming Fernet Branca coins on bars and sending boomerangs from bar to bar. And I love that shit, because this is my industry, and this is what I want to do forever. 

At a  cocktail bar, my bar manager asked our service bartender to “make drinks for those sluts that just came in.” 

Restaurants don’t have a human resources department. In fact, most restaurants don’t even really have an office - you’re usually getting reprimanded, paid, emotional, and promoted in the same damp supply-closet with a stack of Great Lakes price books and an extra case of Libbey glassware. If you are lucky enough to work somewhere with a desk, any complaint you may have will go, without protocol, directly to a person who spends 70 hours a week at your restaurant, has deep and boundless relationships with staff, and has no clerical obligation to so much as document your concerns. When you feel smaller than a dust speck in a light beam, your chances of coming forward about anything get even smaller. 

And so we let it go. We let men put their hands on the small of our back when they walk behind us, stare at our ass while we walk up the stairs, grab us across the bar to get our attention and pull us by the arm to hand us a credit card. We let total fucking nerds who have never caught a ball be jocks for the first time in their life at locker-room bars. We let vagrant, terrible line cooks get wasted on their shift drinks and don’t hold them accountable for what they say afterwards. We let the owners of our restaurants get drunk at work, we let predatory chefs take young girls who work for them on dates, and we let entire staffs of an establishment be white men. That fat mother fucker is always, always, always fucking touching me, and I don’t even think he lives in Detroit anymore. And there’s nobody to tell. When the hand that you feel without welcome is always attached to a man, you stop knowing how to believe that a single one is on your side.

It takes a certain type of person to love this work. This industry, with its ruthless hours, physical labor, and triage-unit levels of stress retains a small drip from its employment funnel - and it often drives a man in search of a power trip. The endless, unabiding circle-jerk that is the boys club of this business is real. 

How many times have you heard a line cook refer to a rough service as rape? 

I’ve had to tell two sous chefs that “rape” is an unacceptable term to use in the kitchen. One complained - about me - to our general manager. He got no discipline. 

Not all men are bad. Not here, not in politics, and not in show business. But that’s not the point. I know that there are men reading this essay right now who know I’m talking about them. I know that this week, with the Mario Battali story, a few specific men are scared. But even in the face of proven systematic sexual abuse, the media has shaped our dialogue to the man’s experience. 

Famed ______ accused of ________. The media uses names, accolades, and titles to humanize the monsters who do this, and they choose only one victim: the collective woman. Maybe, to other men, or to those fortunate enough to have lived outside of victimhood, a difference exists between each offender. Not to me. In fact, I know exactly who that man is. I saw him that night in college, and I’ve seen him every day since. Every cat call, every drunk guy at the bar, and every single headline I’ve read about the men who get away with this. 

Today I am going to talk about consent.

In lieu of recent headlines regarding Ke$ha’s rape trial, as well as the resulting responses from high profile celebrities and Facebook posters alike, I’ve noticed a pretty reckless throwing around of terms that are actually very important. But just like whenever a social topic, which is considered radical by the conservative majority, gains major media time, the actual focus gets lost in translation. While a wholesome understanding of general rape culture is necessary in following some of these recent news, it’s important to lay down some fundamentals first. So rather than shrouding a very large topic in confusing jargon, I’m going to break it down into very simple terms by way of having a drink at a bar as an analogy. And as a woman who is a bartender, as well as a woman who runs into her college rapist at bars approximately once every two weeks, I feel highly qualified to do this for you.

So, you’re a bartender. A customer walks in to your bar and takes a seat. You immediately ask this person what they’re drinking. Now, obviously, you’re in a bar, and the majority of your customers come in specifically to have a drink. But let’s say that this particular customer just wants a soda. Or, maybe, this person is underage, is a recovering alcoholic, has a terrible hangover, or is there to inquire about dropping off a job application. When you asked this person what they’re drinking, you acted based off of assumptions that took none of these options into consideration, because you operated off of your own experience. Now, this person knows that no matter what they do, they won’t be meeting your initial expectations, because you’ve basically dismissed their ulterior intentions as being irrelevant to yours. Establishing consent happens a mile away from asking a yes or no question, and the key to this is starting your interaction from a point of neutrality, so that your partner feels safe, comfortable, and open about communicating their wants and their boundaries. However, if you launch this interaction from a context that’s only relevant to you, your partner will recognize a sense of obligation to meet you way further than just in the middle.

Let’s say you asked your customer how they’re doing, and they did, in fact, come in to order a drink. They ask you for a certain combination of a beer and a shot, and you serve it to them. Three, or five, or twelve rounds later, you notice your patron has had too much to drink. and asks you for another. As a bartender, it’s your job, as well as your responsibility, to deny service of alcohol which may put somebody in harms way. We call this cutting somebody off. The legal accountability on a bartender in the United States for over serving is an ideal analogy for your accountability in a situation where an incapacitated person suggests to give consent. That’s because consent is shared among all parties of an interaction, and it doesn’t work unless it’s a unanimous yes. And if a person can’t give their consent because they’re in a state of impairment, it’s absolutely, 100% on you to NOT engage in a sexual interaction. This is a hard line, and it’s a line that’s unaffected by time and history, which means it applies to your wife, your boyfriend, or the person you met at the bar that night. If somebody who you overserved kills somebody driving drunk, the institution which served the alcohol, i.e. the bartender, is held accountable. If you engage in a sexual interaction with somebody who cannot consent, you are committing rape, and you are accountable. There are no grey areas here.

After sleeping off the terrible twelve-round hangover, your customer returns to the bar and becomes a regular. Every Friday, once a week, he or she returns to your bar and orders the same thing to drink. After some time, you start anticipating their order, and have a beer and a shot waiting before he or she even sits down. Your regular feels appreciated, and you feel good about providing a little extra hospitality. Except one day, this person comes in for a soda water, because they’d like to take a break from drinking but have come to enjoy your company. But the beer is already open, the shot’s already poured, and suddenly, we’re back to expectations based on assumptions you made about YOUR own experience.

On the other end of the bar, somebody’s finishing up a whiskey ginger. Pretty run of the mill in terms of drink choices. This customer notices you making a cocktail and decides to order something different. In the biz, we call it a dealer’s choice. Now, there are two routes you can take here: flex your behemoth catalogue of cocktail knowledge and make a nearly undrinkable, jaw-clenching Manhattan variation that is NOTHING like what you know this person likes, or you can take this opportunity to ask a couple more questions to make the experience more enjoyable for everybody involved. Consent is not a liability waiver, and it’s not the pinnacle of what it means to be intimate with somebody. In fact, it’s the fundamental, absolute first step to building a sexual relationship. Treat your partners’ openness as a privilege, and more importantly, use it to understand him or her a bit better, making sure that your reaction and interpretation of their desires and boundaries makes them feel appreciated and heard. Don’t make somebody who likes to drink a whiskey ginger never want to try anything new again. One bad Manhattan can do that.

Back to your regular customer. After begrudgingly drinking the beer and the shot they never wanted, they wake up feeling the very hangover they’d been trying to avoid, and feel like they’ve got only themselves to blame. Sure, you didn’t pour the liquor down their throat, but you didn’t really have to - the overwhelming sense of obligation made saying no at the moment extremely uncomfortable. Your customer resolves not to come forward by way of a Yelp review, because jumping from an interaction that was meant to be intimate to involving a manager doesn’t feel right. It seems that while their motive of retiring to your bar was to spend time with you, there are other bars, and your moment of insensitivity - regardless of how well intentioned - has opened up a seat on a Friday night.

Consent is often spoken about as a point which oscillates between “yes” and “no” on a linear graph. That’s not how it works. Think of consent more as a questionnaire, with “yes” and “no” boxes to circle. In fact, each and every instance should be treated like an isolated one, completely removed of expectations, so that your partner never once feels like a commodity. Sure, you’re the bartender, but one day, your regular may say something so out of line that you no longer feel comfortable serving them, or stiffs you on a tip that changes the way you feel about their company. The autonomy of both parties involved is why consent is necessary: your interactions will exist on a plane of mutual agreement, a plane which must constantly and incessantly be referenced and reviewed in the growth of each particular relationship.  

Last night, I made the horrifying mistake of confessing - to a half-drunk, belligerent, self-acclaimed ‘old school hip-hop snob’ - that I own a record store. Up until this moment in our conversation, every single opinion I held in regards to comparative rap trivia and whether or not Kendrick Lamar is a GOAT in the making was, to this man, invalid. I was assured, repeatedly, that Tupac and Eminem are the greatest rappers of all time, and that as a woman who is younger (re: dumber) than homeboy, I couldn’t possibly understand hip hop that existed before I did. As soon as a thirty-something white guy tells me how important and life-changing NWA was to him, I know virtually everything else he’ll say before he even says it. You know the type. Worships Wu Tang but says RZA in three syllables, misses the “old” Ice Cube but ain’t never heard of Da Lench Mob, and talks about vinyl audio quality like it’s global warming and doesn’t exist. It’s wild how much leverage sits in telling somebody that you work in a record store. People react to that like there’s a bar exam you gotta pass before you’re allowed to have opinions about music, and suddenly instead of disagreeing with you, they just call you a snob and move on. Anyway, this conversation was just a clone of what feels like a dialogue I’ve been a part of pretty often recently, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the most unaccommodating opinions come from people with the least vested interest in actually listening to and enjoying music. I exited the conversation as soon as I heard my mans say the word “illuminati” out loud, but not before realizing just how angry I felt that somebody who’s never heard of Dipset had the audacity to say something to the effect of “so many people are posers now.”

The use of the word poser is reserved strictly for toys and kids under the age of sixteen who are just beginning to discover counter-culture. I don’t like that word, and I generally write off whoever says it as the kind of person who thinks “hipster” is still an insult and uses words like “obscure” as invective. However, since opening a record store, and therein surrounding myself with people who talk about music almost exclusively, I’ve found mad levels of dishonesty in statements which seem to rise in direct proportion with the volume at which they are said. Half of the rankings I see talking about so-and-so’s favorite and greatest seem to be tailor made for a retweet on Twitter or a round of applause from whatever pre-approved choir it’s preaching to. But expressing things that we already know isn’t a rite of passage into music headyness, it’s actually just really lazy. And memorizing track listings from albums that came out two decades ago doesn’t make you a head, it makes you a Pitchfork headline. But all of this makes sense in a world where tangible things are deemed archaic, and also explains why Adele sold over a hundred thousand copies on wax. It’s because vinyl culture has belonged to the underground for the better part of the last quarter century, in that perfect sweet spot after CDs and before novelty, and it’s because if the underground does one thing well, it’s exclude the forbidden p-words from capitalizing on its careful attention to detail. But the cult of snobbery seems to have left out one crucial detail: In those twenty five years, people were born, and people grew up. Empire Records became a throwback movie. And a lot of fucking people listened to music.

Here’s the thing. If you’re between your forties and sixties, you grew up in a house with a record player. I’ve met you before. You probably got rid of your albums in the 80s, own multiple CD racks, and sometimes ask your kids to help you put these CDs onto your iTunes. You don’t really know why somebody would buy an LP anymore, but you smile when you see reissues of albums you used to own in my crates and you hope your twenty-something year old kid has the same religious experience that you did the first time you heard Hendrix, or whatever. I love talking to you, mostly because you saw bands live with their original lineups before “original lineup” was a term.

If you’re in your thirties, your parents probably threw out their turntable to make room for your nursery. You were definitely bumping 50 Cent and R Kelly in high school, and you were doing it with CDs, if not the radio. If you were lucky, you had an iPod, but I don’t think anybody really had a grasp on the future of the mp3, and in a time before car auxiliary cords, you had a repurposed Pokemon binder full of mix-CD’s covered in sharpie and a very scratched copy of Bleach by Nirvana. You also had the option of going to a record store and buying records on wax, but you were probably risking a lifetime of debt in your basement downloading Remix to Ignition on Napster. You had no idea, but while you were killing the music industry one click at a time, something big was happening. This window of your early adulthood was actually marking vinyl’s extended sabbatical from being a lucrative industry, but unless you were of the weirdo persuasion, this probably didn’t matter because the idea of a vinyl record as a novelty item had already been established by High Fidelity in 2000. In fact, unlike the movies before it which celebrated record stores, High Fidelity sealed the fate of vinyl culture as something pretentious and off-limits to fans of “mainstream” music. And thus began the slow but sure association between a musical genre and its format.

And here we are, Generation Z. Outliers aside, if you’re in your twenties, you did not grow up in a house with a turnable, and by the time you got an iPod, you were so good at Limewire that you were probably uploading files to it. This was an era of iTunes gift cards, dwindling music videos, and very terrible punk bands. If our adolescences were anything alike, I know for a fact that your first favorite album was by Brand New, you didn’t really notice vinyl until Urban Outfitters started selling Crosley turntables, and you spent most of your free time painstakingly selecting information about your musical interests to share with the internet: you didn’t know it, but every time you chose a Myspace song, or added a band to your Facebook music section, you were sliding into the black hole of misleading representations of music you think you should like vs. music that you actually listen to. The interaction between your ears and your headphones grew further and further away from what you told people you liked in your various social media pursuits. And that’s why this drunk mother fucker is shouting his top-5-ever list to me at a bar. It’s not because he’s listened to ten thousand hours of hip hop and made critical analyses comparing regional trends in beat-making and cadence, and it’s also not because he’s a fan of the sound of rap music. It’s because the relationship you have with music is moving from intimate to sterile at an alarming rate. But that's only if you want it to.

Most of the albums you see on GOAT-level scales came out before I was born, or at least before I was old enough to buy them at FYE without an adult. One of my favorite music writers, Dart Adams, talks about the fallacy of understanding music as beginning at the time you started listening to the time you find yourself in now. I agree with that, and admittedly, most of my favorite records are turning thirty soon. But my level of access to information is limitless, because I can connect to the internet virtually anywhere in the free world and download a beginner’s guide to fucking anything. I spend all day reading other peoples op-ed pieces on music history and consider myself an expert on most of the things that I like, but that’s because it’s my hobby, and it’s my job. If I didn’t do that I’d be a hack. But it’s not like I just woke up one day and decided to be a head. I got into music to the levels that I did because people put records in my hands and shared not only the songs, but they shared their experience and connections to it. No teenager in the 21st century just happens upon Morrissey, or Big L, or Sonic Youth, or whatever. If it weren’t for highly-capitalistic reunion tours, I would’ve never seen half of my favorite bands, but that doesn’t make my first time seeing the Cro Mags or Jeff Mangum any less life-changing. Regardless of the degree of access kids have to information, you need a liaison or else you just don’t know what to look for. Sharing playlists just doesn’t feel the same as spending three days on a mixtape for somebody, and hitting “related artists” on Spotify is certifiably less cool than browsing a genre section in a record store. But unless you KNOW that, you’re probably not going to change your mind out of nowhere and suddenly become a committed audiophile just because that’s the only “legitimate” way to like music. And that’s where vinyl comes in.

We’re in a bizarre spiral of disconnecting ourselves from everything physical and instead plugging in to the ominous “cloud” at every opportunity. The experience of listening to music is becoming progressively less mindful, and that’s not a bad thing - our treatment of music formats is evolving and, as all things, bending towards convenience and efficiency. But listening to music isn’t just anything. It’s the most personal fucking thing in the world, and as such, it’s an exception when you’re throwing out photo albums and address books. There is nothing like a record, man. Listening to music on wax is superior and the audio quality is at the bottom of the list for why. Everything about playing a record is intentional, and that isn’t just nostalgia - it’s the conscious commitment to how carefully you handle it, from taking it out of its sleeve to putting it on your turntable. It’s how slow and steady you lower the needle onto the wax, and for me, it’s knowing that you’re committed to giving that record your attention because it’s up to you to flip it, and that’s more time than we spend doing virtually anything anymore. Stop stealing music from the internet. That’s fucked up. Somebody worked hard to make that song. The reason Adele sold 100k LPs is because her fans aren’t too proud to pay for her music. Where you buy that record and what your experience is doing so is a world of opportunity. I check the vinyl tab on Urban Outfitters’ website once a week, because I know that if it feeds them, it’ll feed me. I love when I hear that Hot Topic sells Fugazi LP’s now.  And it’s not just because I like that band, or that I give a shit that some major corporation is nailing it with their catalogue. It’s exciting to me because I know that if a kid didn’t buy that record at the mall in 2016, they probably wouldn’t have bought it anywhere else.

Subculture is a blessing that doesn’t grace everybody. Neither is finding a hobby on which to fixate. People who don’t know shit come into the record store all the time. The ones that are willing to admit that they’re just starting out usually walk out with records and come back for more. The ones shouting asinine claims from a high horse of music super knowledge don’t buy shit and probably only listen to music they like when they’re alone in their car.  A real head spends less time studying ancient albums and spends more time with their finger on the pulse. You don’t hate Drake and your favorite album isn’t Illmatic. Stop fronting and accept yourself. Having controversial opinions about music will make you look like an idiot 90% of the time. You don’t know all the words to all the songs and you say J Dilla is your favorite producer because you can’t name any other ones. But you aren’t a poser, or some illegitimate idiot who’s carelessly listening to music. In fact, you don’t have to give a shit, you can just like what you like. But either way, you have no idea how lucky you are, because if you choose to, you can listen to all my favorite albums for the first time. I’d give anything to hear Reasonable Doubt for the first time again. There’s a reason that record stores continue to be social clubs, and it’s because they exist for the sake of sharing the experience of listening to music. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what you like, or how much we disagree - I can always learn from you. And if you fall under the category of the drunk bar guy, then you’re just an asshole. You could recite the history of hip hop backwards to me and I’d still call you a toy, and that’s because you stopped growing a long time ago. That’s why you hate that vinyl is cool again, that’s why you call kids posers, and that’s why you refuse to count new albums in the running for some of the greatest. And I’m sorry that music has lost its magic for you, because my life would probably lose most of its meaning if it happened to me.