Don’t Spread on Me
Anti-masking in the new West
Your barista leans back against the counter behind the bar. His long hair is tied up in a bun. His mask, filter-equipped and pulled tight along the jawline, tenses his ears toward the door. Hours into his shift, a low-grade headache has settled behind his eyes. He checks sales on the iPad: down 23% from last week. He checks tips: down even more. He looks over to his coworker, a burly Iranian man named Amin, who’s looking down at his phone.
The café is empty. The metal countertops gleam a sterile gray, while the menu, the espresso machine, and the stacks of dusty mugs are all the same shade of medical green. There are no tables, few chairs. There is, in fact, nowhere to settle at all, although customers sometimes try, walking away as if to look out the window, slipping off their masks, and then sipping their drinks with their noses pointed into the far back corner. Now, though, it’s quiet: a late-spring day with sun-bleached sidewalks and a glass door that flashes when it opens.
A customer. He’s tall, in cargo shorts and a t-shirt. He’s moving fast. Your barista sees a baseball cap, sunglasses, no mask. No mask?
“Hello sir,” your barista says, neck hairs hackling. “If you have a mask that you could put on, that would be great.”
“Are you really asking me that?” he says.
“Yup,” says your barista. “That’s the law right now.”
“It’s not the law,” the man says, pacing. “It’s governor’s order. And it’s bullshit. You really think those things are going to protect you? Yeah, right! And it’s not even that serious.” He leans in. Your barista tilts back. He looks to Amin for support, but Amin is hiding behind a pillar.
“Well it’s also our cafe policy,” stutters your barista, “so if you don’t have one, I’ll unfortunately have to ask you to leave.”
“You don’t have one for me?”
“We don’t, unfortunately. Sorry.”
The man scoffs. He pulls off his sunglasses and juts out his bottom jaw. “Let me get this straight, you’re going to deny me service right now? Me, a paying customer?” he says. He raps the counter with his fist.
Your barista says yes.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” the man yells. He puffs himself up, spins around. “I’m sure business is going great for you,” he says. “Ok, then. What’s your manager’s number?”
“You can wait outside and I’ll bring it to you,” your barista says.
The man stiff-arms through the door. Your barista prints out a piece of receipt paper. With shaky hands, he writes down one of the owners’ numbers. He jogs out to the man, who grabs the note and begins dialing as he crosses the street, his gait long, his free arm swinging like a mallet.
Your barista began working here back in May 2020. He had chosen this particular café because he was interested in roasting, and this place had achieved national acclaim for its espresso blend. It was also busy (meaning good tips), and had two locations, for variety: one in a hip hotel on the edge of downtown, and another in an old furniture warehouse beside a thriving bakery. This second spot had a wrap-around wooden bar, bare-bulb lighting, and tall windows with mountain views.
The café reopened for to-go service a few months after the beginning of the Covid lockdown. The owners—two women from California with business and marketing backgrounds—laid out new, pandemic-era policies: masks required, no indoor seating, no cash payments, doors and windows open. They posted informational signs, spread stickers six feet apart on the floors, and, for a while, offered free masks at the door. They warned their employees that they would be focusing on e-commerce and wholesale accounts and may not be at the café as often as usual. They thanked everyone for stepping up during these unprecedented times.
Business starts slow, but quickens as spring thaws into summer. Although the shop is in a blue city, the surrounding region is mostly red, and not everyone is eager, or expecting, to don a face covering.
A gauntlet of “Mask Required” signs accumulates from the café door to the front register. At the hotel location, your barista counts six of them. Customers—such as this man here, who’s dressed in athleisure and hovering over the refrigerated drinks —ignore the signs. Your barista asks the man to put his mask on, and he does, but slowly. “I can’t stand these things,” he says to his partner once your barista looks away. He slips his nose out. Your barista asks him to put it back in.
“I think these are good because they open the economy,” the customer says, using two fingers to stretch the mask away from his face, “but they do nothing for you.”
Your barista says that all available evidence suggests that they do.
“What state are you from?” the man asks.
“Washington.”
“Looks like things are going great there,” he says.
During the morning rush, an unmasked man beats his online coffee order to the bar. He steps away from the counter and hides behind some customers, staring blankly toward the mountains. Anna, a gentle artist with long brown hair, double takes as she brings his drink out. She looks to your barista for backup. Your barista steps up to the man, but before he can get a word in the man raises his palm and says, “No, no, no, stop. Don’t say it I’m leaving I don’t want to hear it.” He pushes past the queue of masked customers and exits through the door marked for entrance only.
A few days later, a suited man comes in looking to do some work and bristles at the lack of indoor seating. Waiting for his coffee, he leans over the bar and fingers to the finance section of the newspaper. “You can’t run a business with a place this empty,” he says. Your barista notes that sales have, at times, been quite brisk, and that most folks seem fine taking their drinks to go. He shrugs the paper closed and takes his coffee out the door.
Mike, an espresso head from Oakland, laments to your barista how all of the pandemic protocols make the café feel like a McDonalds drive-thru. He says that he used to like shooting the shit with customers, but now he just serves coffee. Your barista notices that some of his coworkers have leaned into this change; they offer quick, unexceptional service and cap ugly lattes before anyone can glimpse their over-frothed foam. Others continue to pour silky hearts, tulips, and rosettas. In either case, the lids ruin the images. Devin, a skilled latte artist, notices this and begins pouring penises instead, chuckling as customers thank him for their drinks and walk out the door.
As the days shorten and the cafes slow, the staff withers to a skeleton crew. There is often only one person behind the bar at the hotel café, and rarely more than two at the other. The shift lead position—which pays more—is axed, meaning that there is no one to step in when, say, a customer berates your barista for being unable to accept cash. Some employees compensate by coming in late and skimping on upkeep, while others begin using slow times to scan Craigslist for different jobs. A handful simply close the café early. Your barista ticks the boxes on his shift’s checklist, but can’t manage anything more.
Snow comes, and your baristas must clear it. One stays on bar while the other goes outside to shovel the parking lot and sidewalks. When the morning rush hits, the inside barista must run outside to call the shoveling barista back in. Soon, the owners arrive, pulling their new SUVs into the parking lot and asking why the shoveling isn’t finished. They send several emails reminding your baristas that snow removal is part of their job—that the cafe can’t afford to have a customer slip and fall on the ice— but never think to hire a service to do it. One day, when a foot of new snow has fallen and your barista has managed to clear the sidewalks completely, the owners come in late, grab the shoveling equipment, and pose with it beside the fresh snowbanks for an Instagram story.
Another morning, during the commuter rush at the hotel cafe, your barista looks up from the espresso machine and sees a man sipping his coffee, maskless among the crowd. He pulls a shot and then motions for the man to cover his face. As your barista steams milk, he senses that the man has approached the counter’s plastic shield. He holds his breath as he brings the drink out to the pick-up table.
“Hey, I just wanted to say,” the man says, “thank you so much for reminding me so covertly. I would have been so embarrassed to have more attention drawn to it. I’m a total masker.”
Once the ski resorts open, the crowds form early. Your barista runs the espresso machine while his coworker takes orders. A family walks in—freshly-showered parents and a hoodied teenager, likely tourists staying at the adjoining hotel. None of them wear a mask. Your barista cranes over his protective shield to ask if they have any.
The family looks around, as if buzzed by a fly. Your barista tries again.
“Hi there, do you have masks that you could put on?”
“No,” the dad says.
Your barista delivers his mask schtick.
“But what if we’ve already had Covid?” the mom challenges.
“Well…” your barista freezes, “the evidence isn’t totally clear. If you can still spread it. Plus nobody else can tell that you’ve had Covid. And other customers could feel unsafe.”
“What should I do then?” the parent asks. Her partner looks on intensely. The son feigns interest in the window pane.
“If you don’t have a mask,” your barista says, “I unfortunately can’t serve you.”
The dad herds his family out the door. Your barista gets back to making drinks.
An hour later, he receives a familiar text from the cafe owner, asking whether he’d had any trouble that morning. Someone with a man’s name had written a one-star review: We ordered our coffee and were asked to leave. We even had our masks on. I wont be back or anyone in our party of 3. I will walk an extra block to [another cafe] from now on. I wont be back. Not friendly Not [Mountain West town] Not for me.
Your barista recalls how many of his bosses have encouraged him to read Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business—perhaps the closest thing the service industry has to a Bible. In it, the restauranteur-cum-author Danny Meyer writes, “Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side.” Your barista wonders what Meyer would think of the masks, the shields, the six feet of space, how he’s backing further away from the bar.
Sensing a dip in morale, the owners begin awarding a gift card to one employee each week for going “above and beyond.” Your barista wins for his reliable mask enforcement. He seems to be one of the few employees left with enough energy to do it. He steps up partly out of a sense of responsibility—he has broad shoulders, white skin, and a bit of height—but also because he wants everyone to feel as safe as possible. Whether any of them actually is safe, of course, is a whole other question.
On the weekend, your barista and his partner take the gift card to the breakfast joint where it is valid. It covers one waffle, no tip.
After clocking out one afternoon, your barista receives a text from one of the owners: someone he had worked with the day before had just reported a Covid exposure. The test comes back negative, but soon a cascade of confirmed cases sweep through the ranks: Sean, Reagan, Devin, the head roaster, the delivery boy, all out with Covid. A confirmed exposure catches the café manager in a contact-trace—he goes into a two-week quarantine. Those who remain struggle to fill out the schedule. Fearing that the business will have to close if they get sick along with everyone else, the owners start working remotely. The residual employees feel abandoned, disposable, Covid-inevitable.
Your barista reads that death rates among food industry workers have increased by almost 40 percent since the start of the pandemic. Luckily, all of his coworkers recover. Some lose the ability to taste, or catch whiffs of a bad smell now and again. For them, the coffee now seems flat and uninteresting. They lament the loss of this last small pleasure.
Flush with antibodies, Reagan leaves the café to make more money at a diner outside of town. Anna quits, too. Another employee transfers to a tanning salon, and a fourth skips town altogether. Amin ships out to Air Force bootcamp. New hires take their positions.
It’s a couple hours from closing time, and your barista hides behind the register, covertly reading the New York Times on his phone. In the U.S., the coronavirus has achieved a post-holiday spike: 280,334 new cases on January 7th, and a record 4,079 deaths in one day. A white man with dreadlocks rolls in, his beard long and scraggly. Your barista asks him to put on a mask. The man pulls out a crumpled disposable one and loops it over his ears. His nose is out, but your barista doesn’t bother the issue since he just ordered a drip coffee. The customer leans in over the counter, as if in conspiracy.
“So I gotta know, man,” he says, “do you really believe in this pandemic thing?”
“Yes, I do,” your barista says.
“Seriously? Like you really think that Covid is real?”
“Well, hundreds of thousands of people have died of it so far, so yeah.”
“Huh,” the man says.
Later, another man approaches your barista’s plastic shield.
“Your arms look like Michelangelo’s David,” he marvels.
Your barista pauses, looks at his forearm. “David’s ankles are cracked,” he says, despite himself. “I heard that one day he’s supposed to fall.”
The man drops his head and leaves.
The miracle vaccine arrives, and in early March your barista drives two hours to a pharmacy rumored to be offering it to anyone with a rolled-up sleeve. The first poke registers as both a relief and a challenge: as restrictions loosen, will your barista make it to immunity without getting sick? Information about Covid keeps changing, and its litany of potential side effects seems longer every day. Your barista’s a runner. He wants to keep his lungs healthy and strong.
Days later, without input from any of the workers—and despite a previous agreement otherwise—the owners re-open the hotel cafe for indoor seating. They name the decision a business necessity. On principle, your barista asks to be scheduled at the other location until fully protected by the vaccine. He draws a hard line. He knows the shop needs him.
In late April, a ruffled, grey-haired regular rolls in to order his usual macchiato.
“That’ll be $3.75,” your barista’s coworker says.
“$3.50,” the man says. “It costs $3.50.”
“Well,” says the coworker, “we unfortunately had to raise our prices because of issues related to the pandemic.”
The man twists his face. “What do you mean?” he yells. “The pandemic is over. This is ridiculous—the vaccine’s been out for months! My god. No tip for you, then.” The coworker shrugs. He only ever tipped a quarter, anyway.
After closing time, Mike rustles a man out of the bathroom. “He shit on the floor,” Mike says. “I knew it. Used to happen all the time back in Oakland.”
Your barista takes care of that, too. He and his coworkers are out of patience, bitter and thin. Sean blows his temper on enough customers to put his job in jeopardy. The fact that he’d couch surfed and car camped through winter because he couldn’t find an affordable place to live does not seem to earn him much sympathy with the owners. After several weeks’ leave, they offer him one more chance on bar.
A fortnight after his second dose, your barista takes a few days off to go camping in the Utah desert. When he returns, he is jarred to see that the café has returned to normal. The customers are unmasked, the plastic shields are down, and the bar is surrounded by seats with people. Before the pandemic, your barista would have felt energized by this scene, but not anymore. The men smiling at him today are the same ones who confronted him, challenged him, and disregarded his safety for the last year. He can recognize their coats, their baseball caps. He cannot pretend that they are different people. Your barista gives his two weeks’ notice.
In late May, your barista clocks out for the last time. He unloops his mask from his ears and calls some friends to go for a bike ride. As they pedal, he can feel his jaw loosen, his shoulders slacken. He inhales the sweet spring air deep into his lungs. His exhale is unfettered. ▩