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Friendly’s, where I was a dishwasher and worked the ice-cream counter. My first big mess-up was the time I ran HOT water over 20 pounds of frozen fish fillet because the lead line cook said he needed them on the fly. Clearly I was sent home for the day. Another memory fromthat time is of wintertime snowball fights near the dumpsters. A genius co-worker decided it would be funny to cover raw potatoes with snow and chuck them around as snowballs. It was pretty funny until I caught one where the sun don’t shine.
N 6OeY 9`OZZ T]]R QS\b`WQ WZZcab`Ob]`( ;g TW`ab “restaurant� job was at the local chain pizzeria to pay my fine after getting arrested for setting fires in the woods to jump my bike over when I was 15. It was a delivery-andtake-out-only operation — in other
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words, a total free-for-all. The manager was an angry mustachioed guy who worked 90 hours a week, loved pro wrestling and chain smoked four packs a day. Most of the employees were also involved in moving fairly large quantities of marijuana, except one delivery driver who ran a Columbia House-CD-selling scam with P.O. boxes under 10 different names, a pager and a list of available albums that he passed out to customers. For a while, there was also an assistant manager who slept on a cot in the mop-bucket room because his wife kicked him out. Two weeks later he was fired for stealing boxes of cheese and selling them to other pizza places in the area. I was trained on the “make table� by a straight-edge graffiti/skateboard art-school dude who taught me to just “throw a bunch of crap on there.� I didn’t learn about rotating stock until years later. We just refilled the pans of pepperoni,
bacon and meat pellets on top of the old stuff, meaning the toppings at the bottom were rancid and slimy, reserved for VIP customers like the local police or people who yelled at us on the phone. Believe it or not, the dough was not frozen (although everything else was) and actually involved some proofing and skill to make successfully. The oven was of the conveyerbelt variety, which meant when we were stoned and drunk on a busy Friday night, half the pizzas fell face down onto the floor before being brushed off, tossed into a box and sent out the door. I made $4.15 an hour, but the perks of all the pizza you want to eat (or give to your friends) and a solid weed connection made it all worth it. The place is now a cell-phone store, a few of the people I used to work with there are dead or in jail, and my old manager is still doing pretty well running a Hooters in Pensacola. (caroline@citypaper.net)