Anointed by a $20 chicken salad

I was wearing black corduroys and leather boots, it was a hot August day, I’d commuted from Queens through Brooklyn to Manhattan and back to Brooklyn, it was lunchtime, it was 2021, I was in the “they’re trying to make it a thing” real estate development Industry City, down in Sunset Park, on the shore of the East River, and it was the first time I’d ever worked in-person at a job outside of the service industry, in-person in the city. Lunch was on the company (provided we spent no more than $25).

I got a chicken kebab salad bowl from Kotti Berliner Döner Kebab; I actually wanted to get a normal kebab (wrap-style), but the situation demanded a salad bowl. That’s what you’re supposed to eat as an in-person professional: salad bowls. After tax and tip, the total was just under $20. I had cash; I had them keep the change.

Never have I been so spiritually affected in ordering a salad. Not before, not since. I was anointed by the act: a new man, the kind who would spend $20 on a salad lunch.

I remember thinking, “Now I’m the asshole spending more than what used to be my hour’s pay for a salad; at least I tipped well.”

This week was the first the company had worked together in person since before the pandemic and my first week as a full-time employee. I’d been with the company for the previous three months, but only in a freelance-contract capacity. After three years of steadily building a career as a freelance copywriter, I’d “made it.”

Right before I moved to New York, I was a barista in a new cafe in New Orleans' Central Business District, "The CBD." We were situated in the base of one of the tallest buildings downtown, and much of our clientele was made up of lawyers who worked above us.

There was one man, a regular, who always ordered a cafe au lait. Tall guy, 6'4" at least. I remember him coming in once, the cafe empty, just me behind the counter. I began preparing his drink as soon as I saw him; that's good service. It was ready by the time he hit the register. "Thanks, bud." And I felt so humiliated by that "bud," felt pinned by the weight of the building. But at that point, I knew I was leaving — New York beckoned, where there were more jobs, better jobs, where I might mosey down to a cafe to get a cafe au lait on my lunch break. Not that I drink cafe au lait, nor does anyone in New York.

I made $18 an hour at the time (after tips) and was, honestly, jealous of the people in suits buying our remarkably below-average food on their lunch break. It’s perverse. Make your own sandwich once in a while! Go somewhere better! But there was nowhere better nearby, and a chicken salad was a fraction of their hourly wages (I hope; our chicken salad wasn’t worth an hour of a life), and their tips were funding my own future, bright, a future where I could eat Turkish-inspired-German-inspired chicken salads on the ground floor of a renovated warehouse complex in Brooklyn, overdressed for a summer day.