It's Not Depression

“I’m goin’ out for a sm—” is what I say, or what I have started to say, only to be interrupted by the infuriating sound of the kitchen’s POS system (that’s Point Of Sale, not Piece Of Shit), a beep-beep-beep that does everything it can to sound chipper and cheerful; however, the feelings it elicits from your humble narrator are anything but.

“Ah, so close,” Andy, my kitchen manager laughs. “I’ll see you out there.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumble, reaching for the box of blue, powder-free nitrate gloves. “Every fucking time I try to go for a smoke. Every time.”

I read the screen above the line: three Mon Monsters, to go. I guess this won’t be so bad. The Mon Monster is a double decker taco (soft shell and hard shell with a layer of queso in between) with brisket, pickled onions, corn, pepper jack cheese, and honey barbecue ranch. It’s pretty good, one of our better options. Far better than the Chicken Bacon Ranch, which in my opinion isn’t a fucking taco. It’s a taco shaped object that rich white girls love to post to Instagram or Snapchat or what-the-fuck-ever with hashtags like #girlsnight and #tacotuesday and #imsobasicishoulddie.

Okay, I made that last one up.

I finish the three Mon Monsters in record time, partly because of the muscle memory gained from a year’s worth of taco-architecture experience, partly the motivation of clearing the screen so I can get my nicotine fix. I wrap them up in foil and throw them in the window.

“Here you go, Becca,” I say to the food runner. “B12.”

“Can you run it for me?” she winces, her eyes squinting into tiny slits. “I need to go change my tampon.”

“Very funny.”

She leers judgmentally. “I’m serious.”

“Jesus, Becca,” I say, shaking my head. I wish I could say she never does shit like this, but that’d be a lie. “You could have just told me you had to go to the bathroom.”

“Oh, grow up, Danny,” she admonishes, rolling her eyes, all while heading for the restroom. “It’s a natural bodily function. Nothing to be ashamed of. Welcome to 2025.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “My bad.”

When she leaves, I inhale deeply, hold my breath for about five seconds, then exhale. This is supposed to make me feel good. It does not. Better, perhaps. I don’t feel like committing homicide anymore.

I walk around to the other side of the window, grab the tacos, and throw them in a box. This is old hat for me—I started here as a food runner/take-out extraordinaire. I head out into the dining room and walk to the far end of the bar—seat 12—to find a man sitting there in business casual dress, some guy who works downtown, here to pick up lunch on his midday break. Same shit, day in and day out.

“Three Mon Monsters to go?” I say loudly, grabbing his attention away from the nearby TV screen.

He turns in my direction.

We lock eyes.

Holy shit. We know each other.

He knows it. And I know it. One of my professors from college, and despite the fact that I only had him for one class, I clearly made enough of an impact on him so that all these years later, he remembers me.

“Danny, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me. How’s it going, Dr. Stewart?”

“Good, good.” He’s searching for the right thing to say. “How are you doing?”

I shrug casually, like this is a completely normal-fucking situation.

“Can’t complain.”

There’s a pause here, and our surroundings seem to have fallen to silence, like that moment in the movies where all the audio cuts off inorganically the second before a massive explosion goes off that is going to destroy something and/or kill someone and/or irreversibly alter the plot. And then,

“So. You’re working here now?”

I’ve preemptively made a decision for these exact type of moments: Be honest. Because, 1) I need to be better at that; and, 2) Anybody with access to Google can go find out what happened in less than two seconds, so better they hear it from me than from KDKA, right?

“Well, I actually did a couple of years in federal prison. So, yeah, I’m here now.”

His eyes form perfect circles, his mouth drops slightly, and I swear the color of his face loses a few human shades. And despite the genuine shock he displays, I am in disbelief. How does he not know? My shit was on the news in two metropolitan areas. And, you know, people talk. The music community of Pittsburgh is exiguous and incestuous. So…how does he not know?

“I’m sorry to hear that. What did you—”

Do. That’s what he meant to say at the end of that sentence. What did you do? A question he suddenly decided he didn’t want to ask. He wants to know, but he doesn’t want to know. Another question that I’ve decided to answer honestly, because of the aforementioned altruistic need to be honest and Google and whatnot.

But how do I say it? That’s the real question. There’s a characteristic of the term child pornography that is such a brutal kick to the gut, I try to avoid it. The new term they’ve come up with in the era of rebranding is child sexual abuse material. Which, let’s face it, is probably worse. In prison, when talking to one of the clean paperwork guys, the term was pictures. “What are you here for?” “Pictures.” That was all that needed said. Super easy.

Will Professor Roger Stewart understand if I say “pictures”? Maybe. He’s a smart guy, but this isn’t his world.

“Well,” I say, beginning a sentence that I have no idea how I will finish. This is a situation I should have prepared for, if I’m being honest with myself, but I spend most of my waking day trying to forget what I did. To move on. Because that’s what everybody and their mother tells me I need to do—forgive myself and move on. “Well, I was caught with…illegal images.”

Now that I’ve put some lipstick on the pig, I wait to witness his reaction, and it only takes him a second or two to figure it out. He tries, but he can’t hide the disgust, the contempt, the horror from his expression. Which is a perfectly normal reaction. If someone were to respond with, “That’s no big deal,” that’d be kind of fucked up, right?

“Oh, well,” he starts, and I can tell he’s now in my former position, beginning a sentence that he hopes he will find along the way. “You’re moving forward, aren’t you?”

This is why all I can think about it is moving out of this fucking city. How am I supposed to move on when this is liable to happen at any point in time. Shit, I’m even working downtown, twenty-five minutes removed from the suburb I most recently lived in and the town I grew up in, a spot where I’m more likely to run into a visiting Maple Leafs or Red Sox fan than someone from my graduating high school class, and I work back-of-house now instead of front-of-house, and this shit still fucking happens. Move on? How exactly am I supposed to move on when moments like this pull me right back into the thick of it, like I’ve crossed the event horizon of a black hole from which there is no escape.

Is the entire industry of people meant to help someone like me—a federal felon, a sex offender, a guy who is simply trying to reinvent his life—nothing more than lip service? Is it actually possible to move on? It’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that change when you set them in their place. I don’t see a solution.

There is pity all over Dr. Stewart’s face. I want to tell him to save his pity for someone else—I have no use for it. As the great poet once said, “Either love me, or leave me alone.” But I get it. I mean, of course I fucking get it. It’s my life, after all. He’s interacting with a guy who had so much, and is now slinging tacos in downtown Pittsburgh. I used to have my own office that flaunted my collection of diplomas in expensive frames. People called me “Mister” Watters. I drove a new Subaru with a moonroof and heated seats and a Bluetooth stereo. Now I ride the G2 that traverses the west busway, and because they recently changed my route I don’t get on the bus early enough to have my own seat. Whenever I prep food, I have to fight people to find a table where I can cut steak, mix rice, and fill avocado ranch bottles all while trying to not make too big of a mess. I wash dishes most days, and even when I’m not at work I cough from breathing in the vapors of hot salsa and jalapeños. I go home stinking of ground beef and onions and aioli.

But no, I don’t want his pity. It is actually I who pity him. Because right now, he’s discovering something important and possibly shocking—people like me, people who have done what I’ve done, we aren’t going away. That’s what people want, and that’s even what some of us—including your humble narrator—want. But what actually happens is we do some prison time, and then we come back. We’re told we have to work. We’re told we have to establish positive relationships. We’re told not to isolate. We’re told we have to go to group therapy. We’re told there are places we have to go. And we’re told there are places we cannot go. Most of the time, we go wherever we can.

Like downtown taco restaurants.

But it’s not all doom and gloom—occasionally, I like making tacos for a living. It’s a simple life. Tacos don’t argue. Tacos don’t need you to spend six hours every Sunday writing lesson plans. Tacos don’t email your principal because you yelled at their precious little taco child. The people who work here are pretty chill. If I could step outside myself for a moment, I might believe that my life is better than what it was before. Shit, if I was so happy back then, why did I do what I did?

In times like these, however, when my old life and my new life collide, I feel compelled to mourn the loss of what I once had. The office, the respect, the Subaru. And in a gesture of scientific futility, I yearn for the ability to travel back in time and warn my past self of what waits for him in his future. Because I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.

My therapist tells me I’m depressed—major depressive disorder, to be specific. But I disagree. In the beforetimes, I was in possession of the belief that my life meant something beyond the borders of my own consciousness. That what I was doing would live beyond me, that the ripple effect of my good deeds would be unmeasurable, perhaps infinite. Today, all I can think about is how this planet has been around for billions of years and has been inhabited by billions of people, and how in the grand scheme of things, I am not even a proton within an atom of a molecule making up a flea on the back of a rat. It’s not depression. It’s math.