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I finish three months of employment with Yo Gabba Gabba today (Haven’t heard of it yet? You will soon,) the same day that Julie My Love starts her new career as a visual effects producer on a network television series. The beginnings and endings of jobs are the chapter breaks of our lives, concluding relationships and creating opportunities. In the third part of his contribution to Your Voice Here, Friend Zach continues to write his own Book of Jobs.
Rat Race (Part III)
After getting fired on my day off, I began to have doubts about my abilities as an employee. But before doubt could creep in, I found my next calling as I began waiting tables. Old Chicago was a pizza and beer restaurant chain that touted having “100 different beers.” That’s all well and good unless you’re 19 years old. Then it becomes Old Chicago, “home of 100 teases”. I had finally procured a fake ID at that point in my life, and the one place I really wanted to use it happened to know my real age. Nevertheless, while I couldn’t drink at the restaurant, I did find myself partying with a restaurant crew for the first time, and it was the most fun I’d ever had in my life.
For your edification, in every restaurant you walk into, there are two universal truths:
- At least half of the staff was out drinking the night before.
- Half of that half screwed each other afterwards.
I was lucky enough to join a group of people in their early 20’s whose mission in life was to corrupt my 19-year-old innocence. My favorite memory, and there are a lot, was a random Tuesday night in Tucson. It was after work, and I was at an unknown individual’s house on the back deck. With five fellow waitresses, all attractive twenty-something college girls, I played spin the bottle with a bottle of Rumpleminze and one of the Top 3 stiffies of my life. It was like playing porn roulette, and I was winning.
“Yay! We landed on lesbian kiss again! What’re the odds?”
And so I did body shots off of a co-worker’s boobs. I made out with two hostesses at once. I removed a waitresses’ pants using only my mouth. And on top of it all, everyone had icy fresh breath and continually promiscuous attitudes thanks to the watchful eye of Mr. Rumpleminze. Unfortunately, this memory now makes me mildly suicidal as I realize that may have been where my life peaked. Seeing as how the next five jobs I had were in restaurants, it’s pretty clear I did everything I could to recapture the dream.
I left Old Chicago because I had decided to move back to the real city of Chicago to “get my act together”. I promptly began by working at Applebee’s. Steaks came frozen in plastic, mashed potatoes and vegetables were cooked in a microwave, and the same hands that made your salads were washing dishes and cleaning tables. What a suck job that was. Wandering around a shit restaurant with tchotchke all over the walls, repeatedly refilling a 400-pound woman’s Diet Coke while she eats her third plate of fries. If you’re wondering how America became the fattest nation on the planet, why don’t you ask the small Applebee’s Oriental Chicken salad with 85 grams of fat? How about all-you-can-eat riblettes and onion rings on Wednesday nights? Or perhaps you’d like the fried cheesecake egg roll that is rolled in sugar and served with vanilla ice cream? I am not making this up. On a side note, my three months on the job wasn’t all bad. I definitely slept with two of the waitresses. In fact, that should be in their employment brochure.
Through a friend, though, I got a shot at a local family steak and seafood place called Timber’s Charhouse. This was the first restaurant I worked at with a wine list that did not include Franzia. I wouldn’t call it fine dining, per se, but I was finally privy to the benefit of working at a more upscale location. Somehow, only by wearing a marginally better uniform, you could serve better food at a much higher cost, deal with a more pleasant demographic, and have bus boys do all the dirty work you used to despise doing. Uh, yeah, sign me up. This was also the place where I learned to speak fluent Spanish. I had learned a good bit in high school courses, but the practical application had eluded me. Now, I realized I could call a customer a steaming pile of shit within earshot, and still get a great tip at the end. If you ever really want to learn Spanish, take a job waiting tables for 6 months. You’ll probably end up cursing like a sailor, but at least you can do it in two languages.
After a year in Chicago, I was accepted at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. It is an incredibly fun town, one that was just big enough to provide four years of entertainment and not one day more. Since I had worked at Old Chicago in Tucson, the Lawrence location was happy to take me aboard before I even arrived in town. I spent my final days in Chicago dreaming of Spin the Rumpleminze II, the unrated edition. Life lesson #684374584: you can never go back home again. I arrived at the Lawrence Old Chicago, only to find that the environ was not familiar. This wasn’t a gaggle of hot, single, twenty year-old women trying to seduce me. It was a mangy pack of sorority girls with inflated pants and meathead boyfriends, who wanted nothing more than for me to bring ranch dressing to table 84. In Arizona, my manager was a hot 28 year-old woman who loved to golf and hinted at the possibility of our hooking up. In Kansas, my manager was a 40 year-old douche with a dead possum toupee, an IQ of 64 and a powerful case of halitosis. You can never go home again. And by home I mean boobies.
After about six months of working every Sunday morning hung over, I reclaimed a position in fine dining. Lawrence had one restaurant that didn’t end with an ’s (Luby’s, Joey’s, McDonalds, et al.), so I gathered my resume, now lengthy, and gave them the song and dance. At 22, I served tables and bartended at Pachamama’s for my longest tenure at any job to date: three solid years. I found the bar much more appealing because I didn’t have to run around like Mike Myers’ hyper-hypo character from SNL. It was more of a wine bar than anything else, and I quickly began producing a weekly wine tasting that attracted a regular following. I learned an incredible amount about wine, and enjoyed chatting with the regulars each week. Two of my frequenters were a friendly gay couple that attended as often as they could. Bruce was a lawyer; Kurt, an interior decorator. I am not making this up. I had met gay men and women before, but they were the first I knew that were comfortably open with their sexuality without being overt. And so, I enjoyed their company, but I also enjoyed the notion that I felt in some way progressive. My mother had always been very homophobic, and I wanted to prove her ignorance. It bothered me that she seemed so willing to discriminate against people that she didn’t know. In defying her lack of knowledge, I contended to be very comfortable around gay people. And that’s how I came to find myself bartending a private Christmas party for the entire gay community of Lawrence, Kansas.
I arrived at Bruce and Kurt’s townhouse around 7 in the evening. They stationed me in the kitchen, where they quickly walled me in with a table of cocktail olives and hors d’oeuvres.
“We’re making you a force field,”Bruce says.
“Ha ha, do you think I’ll need it?” I replied nervously.
He laughed and walked away, thinking I was kidding, but I was dead serious. I needed an answer, man! I had known about the party for about two weeks, and it had been an ongoing battle of creating expectations and defeating stereotypes. Kidding or not, Bruce’s comment had me rattled. While sitting in the kitchen cutting lemons for cosmopolitans, I plotted possible escape routes. After an hour, the party reached its capacity of about 50 men and one fag hag. (Not a big fan of that term, but I don’t know any better ones. I’ve heard one girl call herself a fruit fly… is that more PC?) Much to my relief, the party was not only totally comfortable, but also a lot of fun. Although I was clearly a topic of conversation, no one was in any way stirring the pot (or as I like to call it, Yorking.) As they walked in to the party, guys would arrive at the kitchen counter, order either a cosmo or a dirty martini, and leave at least 5 dollars in my makeshift tip jar. By 9:30, I had next month’s rent paid. By midnight, my spring break trip was paid for. And so went the lesson: Gay or straight, all men are dumb enough to believe that giving a tip is equal to flirting with their bartender. And since I could possibly bankrupt a generation of female bartenders by writing anything else, I’ll stop here.
1 Comment
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Support Barack Obama
Great post. I am appropriating fruit fly for official use.