Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Work
We throw cash at my son to clean the litter box. It’s not his only chore — he feeds the fish, gives food and water to the cats, and makes sure the cats are out in the garage at night — but it’s the chore that brings him a steady income. His rates are exorbitant, but neither Karen nor I have a taste for cat poop. Besides, all the kid does is stick his cash in the bank. We could do worse things with our money.
My parents gave me $20 a month to do the dishes, mop and clean the kitchen, and clean the bathrooms. Not a great allowance, but you have to remember: back in the early 70s, you could see a movie for $2.50, and vinyl records were what, seven or eight dollars? Twenty a month just about covered expenses.
But for my first real job, I washed dishes at Sizzler.
I enjoyed washing dishes. Hot, steamy work, and I smelled like garbage by the end of every evening, but on the upside I could eat all the prime rib I liked, I could hang out with the Mexicans (infinitely preferable to the snotty, racist Arcadia High School kids working as waitresses and busboys, kids who wouldn’t even talk to me because I hung out with the Mexicans), and I made enough money to take my girlfriend out most every weekend.
My pals, the cooks and other dishwashers, would ask me to take my bimonthly paycheck and pop it on the hookers in downtown LA. No, no, yo tengo una novia, I told them in my high school Spanish. Some of them had wives or girlfriends, too. They may have understood my reservations, but it didn’t stop them from asking me the same question every two weeks.
I can’t remember why I quit Sizzler; perhaps the manager pissed me off one too many times. He had this weird habit of taking me aside and telling me what a nice ass this waitress had, or how another waitress had amazing tits, and I never knew how to respond. He seemed way too old (probably 45!) and bald to be so lecherous about fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls. And what, precisely, did he want from me?
After Sizzler, I took an even dirtier job at The Cask and Cleaver, a snooty version of Sizzler. I had to drag out the alcohol-sodden bar mats, hose them down, and replace them. I had to empty the trash, vacuum around the tables and booths, and a lot of other nasty things I never got the chance to do because I quit on my second day. It was bad enough the assistant manager answered one of my procedural questions with a lip-curling, “You’ll find we do things MUCH differently than Sizzler,” but then I discovered how differently. I couldn’t throw out the trash. Someone overstuffed the industrial garbage can, and if I threw one more bag on top of it, it would doubtless roll right back on top of me.
“Jump on it,” said the assistant manager.
“Jump on what?”
“Jump on the trash. Make room.”
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t hand in my apron right then and there. No, I climbed onto the trash, and sank down amongst potato skins and half-empty plastic cups of chive-speckled sour cream, fat ribbons and coagulated blood-slime from their steaks (which, unlike at Sizzler, were NOT free to employees), sharp-edged tin cans, and who knows what else — sank down to my waist and began to have doubts whether I would ever be able to climb out without assistance — and that’s when I dragged my ass out of the trash and quit my job.
Next, I went to work at Hanover Shoes in the Santa Anita mall. Clean work. Still minimum wage, but easy pickens after my last two jobs. Unfortunately, it didn’t last; the assistant manager stole from the register, and as a matter of company policy, they “cleaned house.” That’s the first time I ever heard that expression. It struck me as a great injustice, but what could I do? I was sixteen.
I’m not sure how I managed to make money after that. I still had my allowance at home, though, and my brother (then a teacher-in-training — waddya call ’em, student teacher? Help me out, Sis) managed to line up some math tutoring jobs for me through South Pasadena High School. I had two regular students, both cute girls, and it annoyed my girlfriend to no end when I’d say things like, “I wonder how my girls did on their test today?” But this was great work. I earned $5 an hour (about $2 better than minimum wage) for clean work that exercised my brain. I’m not sure how well I taught, but hey, there was a reason these two needed a tutor. For all I know, I pulled them up from Fs to Cs.
To be continued . . .
D.
After writing this, I kept wondering whether anyone from the Politically Correct Police would read my blog and jump up and down about me calling the cooks “Mexicans” rather than “Mexican-Americans” or “Latinos” or “Latino-Americans.” Then, to make matters worse, I accused the rich white kids of being racist, thus seasoning my racism with a dash of hypocrisy.
Back then, in my high school, no one ever said “Mexican-American” or “Chinese-American” or “Anything-American”. Kids in those groups self-identified as Mexicans, Chinese, etc. (Sis, am I remembering this wrong?) Anyway, that’s my excuse; and those rich white boys & girls WERE racist. Trust me on this. But that’s material for another post.
i never got allowance. we got a quarter from the tooth fairy if we were lucky. i was always jealous of my friends who got allowance and a DOLLAR from the tooth fairy.
however, my parents claim that in lieu of allowance, they just deposited a few dollars in our savings accounts every week. of course, i have no idea if this is true. hm.
Offspring #2 (aged 16) has just taken a similar job to your Job 1 (as a dish pig), but at a retirement village, for about $AUD16 an hour one evening a week. Right now, the inconvenience of dish slops, scraps and floor mops are highly outweighed by his feelings of sudden affluence.
off topic: ever rubbed shoulders with the famous and not recognised them?
Doesn’t sitting mostly naked on Ava Gardner’s lap count as your first job? Or did you do it for free?
Great post – brings back a lot of memories of working in the food industry. I started working at a very young age (collating for my stepfather, weekend paper route) and had a coulpe of other jobs first (phone solicitation, taking surveys in a mall), but I’ll always remember the food industry stuff. I worked as a hostess on the graveyard shift a Denny’s (refuge for late night drunk drivers across 4 counties) and a busser at a Mexican joint. Ah, I can smell the garbage-caked kitchen floor mats, now!
Interestingly, there were only a couple latinos in each place – don’t know why. Most of the dishwashers and cooks were ex-cons, black and white. Never anything but nice to me.
My last few teenage jobs included supervising a student pool hall, being an A/V geek and photo retouching and processing. Believe it or not, the giant vats of film processing chemicals I was continually mixing seemed less toxic to me than the late-night sludge on the floor of the restaurant kitchen (now with extra salsa and sour cream!).
My first job was working for my father, who didn’t pay well, although he did pay. It was real work, too. We had to differentiate between the real work I did and was paid for and the other work that I had always done (irrigation being the prime example) and was not paid for.
I’m not crazy about cleaning the litter box either. But I hate to think of the lousy job my kids would do on that vital chore.
I don’t remember how much my allowance was as a kid, but I do remember it wasn’t enough. But I lived in a small town, where jobs for kids were scarce. So I delivered newspapers, cut grass, and trolled country roads and the local parks looking for deposit bottles. From this, I bought guitars, computers, stereos, and even a broken down old moped. Those were the days!
Nick Kasoff
The Thug Report
I have a Thursday Thirteen in the works, folks. I really do. It’s 4:19 PM, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and read people’s comments.
Shaina, what did you do for money? Or did they buy you everything?
microsaur . . . DISH PIG? I’d never heard that one before 🙂
DN, it was Ava Gabor. And, yes, I did it for free, and I didn’t even get to enjoy it. I was acutely embarrassed by the fact they wouldn’t let me put my pants on between takes. My mother was so delighted to see me sitting in Ava Gabor’s lap, she didn’t give a hang about MY distress.
You reminded me, though — I did a collating job, too, the summer between 9th and 10th grade. Boring! And my dad only paid me $100 for a week’s worth of work.
Dean, I wish I’d had a real work history. Lots of kids learn to build houses at that age, you know? But not me. I can barely build a cage.
Hi Nick. Thanks for stopping by B&W — I’ll come visit your place tonight.
Teacher in training is a student teacher…you’re right.
Bruce cleans the litter boxes; I’ve yet to ever clean one and hope I never have to; there are certain brands of litter sand that do better jobs than others. Our two cats are very good about covering; it’s the uncovering and scooping that makes you want to run for the hills.
I enjoyed the blog…I always learn things I didn’t know or have forgotten.
I think the one job I had that made me appreciate the importance of a college education was working at Whamo Toy Factory after I’d finished one year of college. Putting a piece of metal on a thingy to make it larger drove me up the wall after 20 minutes, and I begged to be placed elsewhere. I got $50 a week working at that dump.
Dish pig? It’s a perfectly cromulant expression.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dish+pig
MY TT is up.
oh and first job was in an Indian restaurant. they let me go after two days when they found out that I was 16. They said it was because they served alcohol. I think it was because I was rotten at the job.
While ‘dish pig’ is perfectly cromulent, the preferred US nomenclature is typically ‘dish dog.’
My first job was working for a nursery, hauling bags o’ peat moss and cow sh!t for customers. Bleh.
The experiences that convinced me that finishing college was a good idea were boot camp (albeit the slightly defanged one the Army runs for ROTC cadets) and heaving packages for UPS. It is perhaps not a coincidence that both of these happened during the same summer…
Everything you wanted to know about being a dish pig but were afraid to ask:
The Dish Pig Manifesto:
http://politecompany.blogspot.com/2006/03/other-dish-pig-manifesto.html
Static: Ve don’t speek de U.S. speeking here. Golly, we do laugh listening to it though! Is it universal that anyone with an Irish or southern US accent is absolutely hilarious no matter what they say? (Except President Shrub that is.)
they gave me money when i needed it for something. but it wasnt the same as getting a specified amount every week, knowing you’ll get it, saving it away for something special, taking pride in saving five bucks or whatever…
My sister and I got $100/month in the early 70’s paid in cash by my father at the first of the month. I did quite a bit of work around the house and the farm. My sister did next to nothing. I’m not sure I could call the money allowance, more like extortion. My sister was a hideous evesdropper. My parents made the mistake of installing a speaker system in the house. She busted Dad on the phone several times talking to several girlfriends but the one that got us the exorbitant cash settlement was his conversation with another female doctor impregnated with his child. I remember the day clearly she met me at the end of the driveway. I had been out visiting a friend. Mother was out of town visiting her mother. She said, “He’s either going to kill us or settle with us.” He settled. He only gave my mother $100/week but she didn’t blackmail him until much later. Then she took him to the cleaners.
Oh, loved the restaurant stories. My first job was at a place coding Fortran for a drunk.
Step away for a few hours and look what happens — you guys take over!
BTW, great story, CD. You need to write a book about that father of yours.
Whudduyuhmean? Actually, that’s okay – we find Aussie accents cute. 😉
As for accents of the American South – weeeelll… no. Not universal. Many drill instructors hail from the South, and at the time that this was salient (ibid., comment #13), I didn’t find them particularly hilarious.
Southern police are also generally negative humor vortices. Things that they say are only funny when recounted in the safety of another county. Or state.
I have to chip in my 2 cents as Walnut will tell you I have not managed to lose my Southern accent even though I escaped the place over 20 years ago. It is a stubborn trait that gets recharged anytime I talk to my family. People constantly ask me where I’m from. I reply innocently, “Oakland” in my Southern accent.
And the strangest and most psycho policeman I ever ran into was in California, not the South. He scared the tee total crap out of me for no good reason. I wish I had a recorder in my truck for that one. I could have sued the city of San Francisco and won. He had to have been on drugs. I never had any trouble in the South, maybe my accent protected me.
I rather hate generalizations about Southern policemen and drill instructors. Kind of stereo typical, don’t ya think?
Hey, we were already speaking in generalizations and (I thought) making fun of them (generalizations, not particular accents)… Sorry. No offense was meant. The crack about cops was a cheap one. There’re good and bad cops everywhere.
But I stand by my statement about DIs – the culture of the military is saturated with Southern influences, for good or ill. Not all of the DIs that I encountered were Southerners, (my own DI was Samoan), but many were and many who weren’t either affected an accent by way of ‘playing to type’ or had honestly gained one through being stationed in the South. Many of the main training bases are in the South: Benning, Campbell, Bragg, Knox, Ord, Sill, Leonard-Wood, Camp Lejeune…
D’oh. Hood, not Ord. Monterey Bay is worlds away from TX, which is what I was thinking of.
Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg are in North Carolina. Fort Ord is in California. I don’t know of another Ord. Leonard-Wood is in Missouri. The last time I lived in Clarksville Tennessee, next to Fort Campbell, the place had given way to special forces. They were specialized soldiers who spoke a minimum of three languages and were highly skilled in covert combat. I lived in Clarksville for 5 years. We shared the city with the military. I was the one with the worst accent. My next door neighbor, Bobby King, was an E7 active military and spoke better English than I ever thought about. I worked the Fort Campbell bookstore Austin Peay University extension for 3 years. I never heard what you are talking about. I estimate I registered 1000’s of soldiers into the Peay. And yes, their motto was Go Peay.
I misspoke on Ord, as I mentioned above. MO is far more Southern that it would ever admit to, particularly once you get past Springfield. I’m also willing to bet that most people consider NC to be part of the American South.
Dunno what to tell you, other than it’s what I experienced. It was (shortly) before a lot of the post-Cold War base consolidations took place, and it’s most certainly influenced by my having grown up in the Northeast. Part of it is almost certainly due to the theatrics that accompany boot camp…
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, CD. You grew up in the South; I didn’t. I was (very briefly) inside a small part of the system; you lived for a while in contact with the outside of a larger part of the system. I’d chalk it up to a Rashomon effect.
Awwwww…
However, thankfully few of us speak like Steve Erwin (used to)! He was a living caricature.
There are regional variations and some are more “broad” than others (particularly Queensland), and those of us with tertiary education tend to be less so, but the Aussie accent is pretty homogenous compared with most geographically large countries. Chalk it up to a young country whose period of most rapid population growth was coincident with the growth of mass communication.
Yours cutely…..
[…] Work, part two By Walnut Here’s part one. […]
[…] If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. What more can I say about Sizzler, aside from the fact it introduced me to meat not cooked to leathery badness? Oh, here’s a quick story: […]