Jared Joseph’s Book Notes book Rose Mask, a collection of conversations with patrons while he was a waiter during the pandemic, is a profound, moving, and funny snapshot of modern life.
Kate Durbin wrote of the book:
“Jared Joseph’s Rose Mask is Beckettian banter, where the roles of customer and server become mythic in scope, even as they remain grounded in jokes and the inescapable power plays of our late capitalist hellscape. Brilliant, witty, satisfyingly aggressive while also somehow tender and even sweet, this original book becomes increasingly profound as it accumulates.”
In his own words, here is Jared Joseph’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Rose Mask:
Rose Mask is a transcription of conversations between myself and the customers I waited on at a bar/restaurant in Santa Cruz, California, July-October 2020, during the mandatory mask service portion of the pandemic.
The service industry during this time was an especially interesting staging arena for communitarian anxieties and frustrations under pandemic life. Restaurant, or “restaurer,” literally means “restore to a former state.” At the restaurant, guests – we called customers “guests” – could forget, or at least take a rest from, their experience of quarantine and isolation. They could be “guests” in someone else’s home, a simple social phenomenon totally taboo-ized during the pandemic. They could drop their masks, they could surround themselves with a public, they could order food, they could order drinks, and they could order people (me) around, a state they could enjoy for purchase for a brief interim before their return to a state of uncertainty and powerlessness.
The mask I wore most often was black with a painted rose on its cover. It was beautiful, and it was from CostCo. Guests were always asking me to take off my mask. “We just want to see your face,” they’d invariably say, but that is not what they were saying. “I don’t feel like a guest if my host is hostile towards me,” they were saying. “I don’t feel restored to a former state if you are reminding me of my current state,” they were saying. It was the era when hearing someone cough made me want to stop drop and roll, when if I saw an approaching maskless pedestrian on the sidewalk I would briskly shuffle across the street, when I viewed every customer as a viral bag of skin sent to kill me.
A server is always wearing a metaphorical mask: a literal mask is the material realization of the self-composed public-facing face, it is consistent and it is unflappable, unless there’s a wind advisory. As a server I am a server, it’s complete tautology, I am at your service, my entire job is this, and so the customer’s primary expectation is not good food, is not good drink, is not “good service,” but service itself: I will give you what you want, and if I cannot give you what you want I will apologize instead of saying “No” to you, I will say “We are so sorry we cannot accommodate that request” instead of saying “No” to you, apologizing for something that it is not in my agency to do, and saying “we” to garner the entire restaurant entity as a shield against you, the customer, who holds me in your purchasing power. This is a very refined system that preserves a vestige of aristocracy, what you as a customer are paying for is one or two hours to be royal. I myself always avoided saying “sorry” because “sorry” functionally means “you don’t have to tip me now,” but that didn’t save me from my position as viewed by the customer. Once one of my customers called me “an indentured servant,” and that’s recorded in the book.
Being called a “waiter,” during a time we were all waiting for the pandemic to end, I thought this would create empathy. It did not create empathy. There was more impatience, more entitlement, more frustration amongst guests than ever. My guests became even more themselves. I became even more myself, too. I was writing books, for fuck’s sake, multiple simultaneous books. A waiter and a writer are one letter away from one another. It’s not difficult to misspell one into the other on a keyboard. This is meaningless, but everything then was meaningless. I clung to meaning, reshaped it, anagrammed it, beseeched it. I clogged it, I coughed on it, eventually I inoculated myself against it.
Rose Mask is a record of my decision to say “No” as frequently as possible. I think the record is pretty faithful to the events described. If a conversation/order was interesting, I went to the POS, I input the order, and then I scribbled everything the customer and I had said to one another on my notepad. In the early stages of this process of compiling notes, I got reprimanded, until I started showing management the notes themselves, and then eventually, instead of asking me “what are you doing” while I obviously was not fulfilling my service tasks, they started asking me “so what did our lovely guests say tonight” at the end of the shift.
This playlist is the first 13 songs of a playlist I curated for the restaurant, for service hours. The restaurant was called Venus, and I had various playlists for various shifts, one called Venus Out of Furs, one called Venus Thigh Trap (idfk), one called Menus are from Mars, one called Work Hard Play Dead, but this one was called Rose Mask.
- “Isolation” by Joy Division
It was my private joke to have a public playlist that would facilitate a mood for guests to gather and find a brief relief from social distancing start off with a song called “Isolation.” Nonetheless the song is a dance number and the mood of the song is at variance with the content of the lyrics, although maybe that is not so much a disconnect, actually, insofar as making art about the thing that’s killing you privately, when shared and made public, becomes something else. But in this case what was killing us was killing us socially, and I wanted to call it what it is, which you can’t really do verbally as a waiter, but with a music mask you can, or I can, or I could, I felt. Customers were always nodding their heads at this song, but was it out of comprehension? I don’t think it was that kind of nod.
- “Only You” by Steve Monite
The cocktail bar / restaurant was a pretty lively place and the song is fun and sexy as fuck, and only barely veiled in its innuendos: “only you, baby, can put out this fire” does not refer, for example, to the head chef ordering the sous chef to stop blackening chicken. As a server you are meant to convince all the “guests” that they are special (calling them “guests,” for example, or having on the menu the “From the Land Special,” which was the same every night) or even that they enjoy a relationship with you that is conspiratorial, so it’s useful to single out the guest in some way, a remark, a look, a shared piece of intel, to give the guest that “only you” feeling, and that’s why the next song I chose is also called,
- “Only You” by Yaz
because they’re not special, it’s all repetition. Like, when the army says “We want you,” the word “you” is just a room they’ll let anyone into as long as that anyone is willing to die for a cause greater than themselves, like oil.
- “You’re Dead” by Norma Tanega
The TV series What We Do In The Shadows was big at this point and this is the opening theme song, so I wanted to make the customers who recognized it feel in on it, while those who didn’t and who thereby felt a vague and almost subliminal sense of dread at a chorus that repeats “you’re dead you’re dead you’re dead” would feel moved to order more alcohol.
- “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer
This song lasts over 8 minutes, and it has no other lyrics beyond the title, which is astounding. When I feel love it is as simple as that, and as long-lasting, there are no other thoughts or feelings vying with this feeling which itself absorbs vast amounts of time. I do not feel that I feel love, I just feel love, full-stop. Serving is similar: while it’s true that I do not feel love as I am waiting tables, there is for me a sense of being truly present, whereby the only thoughts I have are those immediately relevant to my tasks, to my guest interactions, and to talking shit about my guests with my coworkers, the latter being people towards whom I do actually feel love. Sometimes this gliding feeling of being a fully present sublimely confident multi-armed figure-skating Buddha lasts for and absorbs an 8-hour shift, sometimes it only lasts for 8 minutes.
- “So Alive” by Love and Rockets
One of my customers once said our broccolini sauce was so good it was like cocaine. I don’t find cocaine very flavorful, and generally I eat cocaine with my nose, so I didn’t understand the comparison really. But he did seem very energetic, so maybe he metabolized things differently, and I did point out to him that he was profusely sweating. While this is all pretty well-documented in Rose Mask, I left out the detail that “So Alive” was playing at the time, and the customer did in fact appear so alive.
- “Paid” by Andy Pickett
“I wanna get paid, does that sound crazy?” is my anthem as a server.
- “I want more” by Can
“I want more” is my customers’ anthem.
- “Come down” by Anderson .Paak
This song is also anthemic and, considering that the previous two songs were also anthems, and that anthems are generally songs that are meant to rouse a collective body, I realize that most of the decisions I make as a server are calculated to be communally oriented. Even the “personal anthem” is ultimately communal, insofar as I need to uplift myself to be public-facing. Although I generally wanted Rose Mask to be a documentary effort that focused on the customers’ desires and behaviors as exemplary phenomena instead of on myself and my let’s say Morose Wackiness as an exceptional phenomenon, sometimes for the sake of writing something interesting, or for the sake of escaping being bored as shit, I would make my behavior more catalyzing, something that would provoke an event worth writing about. In this sense then Writing was the first term, and this conditioned Experience as the second term, and then the third term would be Writing again. But maybe this happens all the time and, as an observer that is also an actor, there is no way to be disinterested, objective, public-facing. What does this have to do with “Come Down” by Anderson .Paak? Idk, I like the song. It is indeed a bop, but mostly I played it for my coworkers. It made our steps bouncier, it uplifted rather than effected a come-down. My writing self and my waiting self are companies.
- “Jive Baby on a Saturday Night” by The Jellies
This song is weird and good, it is slow and disco, as shoulder-poppy as it is sinister. I imagine the cast of the Godfather muscling out the cast of Saturday Night Fever, and then shuffling in sync on the dance floor beneath an enormous hanging revolving silver horse head-shaped disco ball. But then it wouldn’t be a “ball” anymore.
- “We Belong” by Pat Benatar
To counter the Anthem Narrative I’ve been promoting, I didn’t play this song for anyone except myself, I love this song, and the Boom, Boom-Boom of the drums makes me want to cry. Sometimes when I’m writing something, anything, I write a line that I don’t think anyone will get or like, but I get it and I like it and I leave it in, maybe as a defiant gesture against considerations of readability or considerations of the nebulous “reader” entity at all. Then when I feel anxious about what I’ve done, I tell myself it’s like Barthes’ punctum, the part of a photograph that seems not to belong in the photograph, that seems to transcend the photograph and threatens its very mediumicity or formal integrity and makes the art leak out of it, as through a puncture wound, but instead, in fact, because art is artifice, it is the very punctum, the very non-artistic element seemingly interloping within the artistic framework, that actually is immanent to and inherent within all art, and thereby cements and sanctions the art as art, that transforms the “artifice” into something “real,” so it is its organizing center. Sometimes I tell myself that. Turns out customers like this song too and I feel kind of demoralized. Belonging is weird.
- “Our Secret” by Beat Happening
Never mind, this is the song nobody liked but me, and that was a real pleasure, maybe that is something that I like about solitude, that it seems provisional, because the song is still called “our” secret, so there is an implied someone somewhere and sometime, who will contradict the lyrics “and no one in this whole world will ever understand,” because someone does. Maybe that’s what you imagine a reader is / will be. Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know, I don’t know you.
- “Bandiera Bianca” by Franco Battiato
Bandiera Bianca is a shimmery Italian pop song that in its chorus puns off the title of one of Theodor Adorno’s lesser-known works, the song means “white flag” but it very much seems instead to raise a black rose mask to its face, and I feel that.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jared Joseph’s playlist for his novel Danny the Ambulance
Jared Joseph’s playlist for his poetry collection A Book About Myself Called Hell