NEON ORANGE WET GOO had spilled out of the five-gallon bucket
onto my tennis shoes. It was just one of a toothpick cup of tragedies on this little errand. To start this story, the neon orange slime was food, or at least food-related. It was the top part of the grease pulled off the sausage, hamburger and other fats that had been cooked down during the day and left in two five-gallon buckets to be carried by those little metal straps at the top of the buckets. The idea of carrying a sealed drum of paint in one of those buckets makes sense because the word “sealed” is in the sentence. It doesn’t say, “open, sloshing, greasy food waste bucket,” because someone might think that was a stupid way to use it to carry that messy fluid to the trash, completely open. The restaurant that my brother Tim and I worked at was Julie’s Sunset Pizza. They made really good pizza and part of that came from making a lot of their own ingredients on-site—and that takes us back to the tragedies. When you spill grease and oil on a tennis shoe, there are obvious challenges. They are stained. They are slick. There is another problem: you have to go outside and walk down a driveway slope to the back of the building carrying two swinging buckets of grease with a slippery shoe, empty out the grease into the grease can (think trash can, but all grease and more disgusting), bring the buckets back up the slope and into the restaurant. Mind you, this is during evening hours, going through the front door by the customers and the crowd coming in. This was just one of the small humiliations and odd responsibilities for my brother and me at Julie’s.
How do you get a job washing dishes, pots, and pans, hauling grease, making pizza, bussing tables, and sometimes tending bar when you are fourteen years old? You don’t. Your dad gets you this job. It had already been decided that Tim and I needed to get a job for the summer. Each of us would be attending private high school in the fall, and it was our responsibility to help pay for it. Child labor laws being what they were, even back then, you couldn’t technically hire fourteen-year-olds, but you could work around that, especially with the permission of a parent. One Thursday evening toward the end of our eighth-grade year in school, my dad puts us in the family car, and we drive the mile or so down to the closest restaurant, Julie’s. Dad walks us in the front door and asks to speak to the owner. Julie B comes from the Omaha stockyards where she was a meat cutter. She had fought, drank, and loved tough men. She had cried, laughed, and smoked all night with tough women. She was a constant smoker, whether talking, cooking, cutting, drinking—it didn’t matter. Her hair always looked like it was running two weeks behind when she should have seen her stylist. That’s rough for a woman near sixty trying to maintain some semblance of a blond hue. In the kitchen, she didn’t chat. She was silent or she shouted with a list of expletives—no in between. Her world was orderly (in her sense of order) and in control (in the ways she designed control), but when she got called out to the front of her restaurant by some man in a suit coat with twin boys, she looked as bewildered as if a man had brought along a pair of missing koala bears who needed eucalyptus to chew. Dad said, “Are you the owner of Julie’s?” J: Yes, I am. D: These are my two boys, and they need jobs. They can wash dishes, bus tables, sweep, pick up trash, or whatever else you need. They can work at minimum wage. They can start next week. J: Well, we don’t have any jobs open right now. What’s your name again? D: Don, Don Searcy. (Big smile, hand out and handshake) J: I’m Julie B. Like I was saying, I don’t really have any jobs open right now.
Su ns et W e e ds
D: I see from the cars that you are very busy on the weekends, and even Thursday nights. J: That’s when the softball crowd comes in. D: I’ll have my boys come in next Wednesday and fill out paperwork so that if you get busy on Thursday or the weekend they can come in and help out. J: OK, Don. We might not have any work. D: Julie, if you have any problems from either of my boys not being on time, not doing what you ask, not being your best, you call me and I’ll get that fixed. J: Well, uh….OK, Don. D: Nice meeting you, Julie. Thanks for your time. The following Wednesday we filled out paperwork, and we worked from then on. That was the entire application, interview, and hiring process front-to-back. I learned early the power of the assumptive close. There are always expectations and then, of course, comes reality. For my parents, there were the expectations of • Real world work experience for their children • New socio-economic exposure • Income • Increased work ethic (they had worked us like slaves since we were three, but I am still handling that in therapy) These expectations were met and in some ways exceeded. What happens when these expectations are met in a less-than-sterile environment? Possibly there are contaminants to the process that leave residue on my brother and me. Let me list some of the contaminants, in no particular order: RONNIE
He sold weed so crappy that no one in the kitchen would S u nset Weeds
smoke it even if he offered it for free. His mix included weed, basil, and a little bit of Comet sink cleaner to give it a crystal look and a bit of brand to it. He’d been working there since the place had its first vinyl wood paneling caulk-gunned to the wall, and usually closed the kitchen with the last slop of bleach on the floor. He only rolled dough for the pizzas unless we were super busy. In the three summers we worked there, I can’t remember a conversation of more than two sentences, and those spoken so low that only dogs could hear them. DAVE
Worked the grill for steaks and burgers. He was the funniest guy in the kitchen, possibly because he kept a bong in the walk-in freezer that was three feet away from the grill. No one went in the freezer but Dave when he was working the grill, so he spent the night walking in and out of the freezer. The fastest I ever saw Dave move was the night I was sent to get a 15-lb. box of shredded cheese from the freezer to thaw. Suddenly, panther-like reflexes put him in front of the freezer in a most helpful way, asking, “What can I get for you?” Like most of the employees at Julie’s, he had been hired/fired/quit several times. Everyone was in some way a dysfunctional family member. She had people that she had caught actively stealing from her who still worked there. Which brings me to Lynn. LYNN
She worked the restaurant side, so she was in the kitchen and knew the staff back there, but was a waitress and hostess. To a fourteenyear-old, she was hot. Big smile, mischievous blue eyes, and curves shaped to catch attention. She flirted with everyone, but to be that age and get any attention meant that whatever she needed, pizzas faster, tables cleaned earlier, or errands run, she got. A giggle, a “thank you baby,” and a quick turn and I was ready to do whatever she asked. It was such a shame when she got caught trying to break into the bar one night to steal liquor and the cash that was on-site. True to family rules, she didn’t get prosecuted, and within three months she came and smoked and drank at the bar like any other patron. Casing the joint or not, everybody was still friends.
Su ns et W e e ds
PHIL
The bartender wasn’t a tall guy: maybe Tom Cruise’s height without the lifts in the boots. Actually, he wasn’t very big at all. He was more of a serious person, Julie’s only son, and he ran the part of the business that Julie wouldn’t. Julie might yell at someone, but Phil would stand by the door quietly, making certain that the person left. He broke up fights with guys over six feet and more. If inventory was short, vendors had to deal with Phil. He was back-alley tough and you could feel that off of him, even if he didn’t talk much. Phil didn’t say anything to Tim or me except one night. The bar was packed. We were short of staff, and softball teams had filled the bar and the restaurant. Phil grabbed us, put us behind the bar, and said, “When I say pour beer or make drinks, you do what I tell you.” You are probably thinking several things, like “Isn’t that illegal?” and “You were fourteen; how did you know how to tend bar?” As for the law, an off-duty deputy sheriff was at a stool at the end of the bar. Phil looked at him, and the deputy looked around the room and then just shrugged his shoulders. Fortunately, we were raised Catholic, so we had been tending bar since we were eleven. For us, the problem was learning how to work the soda and mixer gun as well as the way to pull a beer without leaving it all foam. These are not items you have in the home or are taught in any of the classes in middle school. Finally, one of the patrons came around the bar and showed us how to do it and, in the process, helped himself to a free beer. We spent most of our time working in the kitchen, cleaning pots, pans and dishes by hand. There wasn’t a dishwashing machine. We used a trashcan, two sinks, and a drying rack. Trashcan to scrub off the food, sink one for the soap, sink two for disinfectant and rinse, and then the drying rack. The real key to the whole process and every aspect was the importance of the soak. The soak, properly managed, did much of your work for you. The first thing you did when a shift started was to clean up from the lunch shift. There wasn’t enough business on the lunch shift to employ dishwashers (I have always believed this is how Julie justified hiring us), so we had to
S u nset Weeds
take care of all those dishes as well as the evening dishes. More importantly, we had to take care of the pots and pans. You may be thinking naively of pots and pans that look like the cookware in your home. Possibly nonstick, carefully maintained pots used lovingly for the preparation of food to be eaten by people for whom you care. Shift your thinking. Envision a prison fight from a movie where large, all-metal pots and pans are used by inmates to kill guards and each other in a riot. If you could see inside these lethal items, you would see only more scratched metal with no coating. Why should there be? They are only used to simmer gallons of meat, stew, or some undistinguishable slop to be served later. In our case, the pots were used for all the sausage, beef, tomato sauce, chili, and soup, and every one of them was burned solid at the bottom. The expectation was that we would have them cleaned to steel by the next morning. Pots, pans, lunch dishes, and silverware were all filled with soap and water and soaked. Silverware, twenty minutes; dishes, twenty minutes; pots and pans should’ve been two days, but we usually waited two hours. We had to work on them during the breaks between when the dishes were needed. Here comes an important timing note for small restaurant owners: they never have enough. In our case, it was serving ware. This means that we were forever washing dishes for meals that were being plated on dishes that actually had just come from someone else’s meal. You will notice this in a restaurant when a dish comes to you on a plate that is warm and doesn’t need to be. It has probably just been washed by a kid like me, whose back is to a guy getting high in the walk-in freezer with weed he won’t buy from the “sous-chef” because that guy sells crappy weed. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Also, small restaurant owners do not waste money on air-conditioning for kitchens that are just going to get hot anyway. In the summer, it would get to 100 degrees outside and 125+ degrees in the kitchen. Of course, the recommendation from management was sound: drink more water. Cleaning out the pots and pans in the breaks was not a job for scrubbers or bristly brushes. Those did not make a dent in burnt materials that had slow-cooked for hours. Instead, it needed steel on steel work with
Su ns et