ETHAN: A PRODUCT OF THE INDUSTRY
Ethan, 34, is a tall man with brown skin, stylish, short black hair and a trimmed beard. “My mom is black, my dad is German,” he told me during one of our first meetings at a local coffee shop. A gay man active in Austin’s vibrant queer community, Ethan described himself when we first met as in a “limbo state:” he was getting ready to go back to school to finish his bachelor’s degree, working a couple of part time service jobs, and “single, on the market, but not desperate!” Ethan tells me all this in his characteristic down-to-earth confidence.
We met regularly for five months in the fall of 2013, spending hours talking about his life and work over coffee. When not meeting in person, we often exchanged friendly text messages: “Study study study!!!! Have all the confidence in you!!!!” he texted the day before my comprehensive exams. But in early December, Ethan stopped responding and eventually, my text messages stopped going through.
I began to worry about him, and soon discovered from the public records that Ethan had been arrested and booked in county jail. “How are you doing?” I wrote in one of our on-going letters back and forth. Ethan responded on paper I had paid for ($0.10 per page), explaining what had happened and why he was still there. He was alone in a hotel room in Houston (“at an AA convention…I know it doesn’t make sense”) when he relapsed on drugs. He spiraled out of control, taking methamphetamine and prescription pills before he was arrested weeks later asleep in his parked car. He clarified, “I was parked in an intersection […] Not a four way stoplight but an intersection in the parking lot.”
Almost three years before his most recent arrest, Ethan moved to Austin and got a job at the W Hotel just months after it opened. How Ethan ended up in Austin managing the “talent” at the W is a journey through restaurants, resorts and hotels in what could be called “service capitals” of the United States: Orlando, Florida, Las Vegas, Nevada and Dallas, Texas. For all of his adult life, he has struggled with addiction; not just to drugs, but as he describes, also to money, stress and “the chase of the tip.”