2017 in a southern state known for it’s mighty river. I took my first job at a BBQ restaurant. I went from never worked in a kitchen a day in my life to putting out fires in a BBQ pit. I had shoulder length hair I had to put in a bun and hide under a hat. I worked ten hour days at this shithole. Some days as early as 7am until as late as 10pm. The manager was an asshole. One of the biggest assholes I’ve ever worked with or worked for.

If I didn’t say exactly what he wanted to hear, it was ‘backtalk’ and I would have my job threatened over it. At the end of the day, he’d come up to me and say, “Hey, I’ve tried to be the soft-spoken manager in the past and it doesn’t work. I know I’m rough but this is the only way I’ve found that works for me.”

He’d then play his Bluetooth speaker and flirt with a girl who had fucked up teeth and a fat ass.¹ His work playlist included, “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons, “Tennessee Whiskey” by Chris Stapleton, and my personal favorite, “Let Her Go” by Passenger.

For the record, Let Her Go is not my favorite song. One morning I’m on my hands and knees, elbow deep in frozen coleslaw and the manager guy looks at me when that song comes on and says, “Y’know, you look like this song.” By my second week there, manager guy was leaving early and letting me shift lead.

Big mistake.

I was 19, and I did not give one singular fuck about this job. I was left to work the grill, and make burgers, drop baskets of fries, and pull pork. I recall a night towards the end of my tenure at this restaurant when I heard intense screaming from the front register and one of my coworkers was having a fight with a customer. Another coworker stopped what she was doing to intervene, but that only added another contender to the pre-existing fight. I put down what I was doing and got them all to calm the fuck down because I was sick of it. Which I don’t believe was what they were paying me all of $9/hr to do. Come to find out, my coworker who started the fight was on a 2 day coke binge. Naturally, I asked if she had some on her, she reached down into her bra and pulled out a little baggie and gave it to me. I was dumbfounded how easily I could get cocaine.

There was a kind of cute girl who worked there who smoked a bowl with me in my car on break once, and she openly flirted with me despite having a boyfriend. She ended up moving to Vegas and being a call girl the last I heard from her. I quit that job to move to California and work for the National Park Service.

Before I moved to CA, there was one week I worked at a bagel shop. The first week in training everyone was very nice to me. The day I got out of training, everyone forgot my name and treated me like shit. One of the managers brought her kids to work one day and locked her keys in her car. I had to get a hanger out of my car to help her, but I don’t recall if that solved her problem. Another time the manager chick left the store and me and one other dude had to deal with a line out the door. I lasted a week.

I also worked at Teavana in a mall for like a month or two. There’s really no crazy stories to report here other than I have a lot of knowledge about tea floating somewhere in my subconscious. They were late on one of my paychecks and I couldn’t come to work until they resolved the issue, and I was kind of a dick about it. This was the first job I ever worked black Friday. I quit on that day because the store was closing. But because I did not give two weeks notice, or stay until the closing date, I am no longer eligible to work for Starbucks.

Next kitchen I worked in was a vegan ice cream store in Venice, CA.

Yes, they’re out of business now.

The critique mainly being, “oh what a lovely day to take my kid out for some ice cream, ah yes charcoal! Great flavor!”

This wasn’t your average ice cream store, this shit was bougie. The process was similar to making gelato. Things had to be frozen a certain amount of time or else the ice cream would be pretty bad. The only real vegan flavors were the two flavors made from dates. The other flavors had some ingredient which made them not truly vegan (beeswax? I don’t remember). I was accustomed to kitchen life where people were running to the bathroom to get high and bust their ass working in between. I was used to prison rules.

Prison rules was not how shit was ran at this vegan ice cream store.

My style came across as intimidating and aggressive. I was usually wasted halfway through my shift because there were two liquor stores less than a block from the ice cream shop.

Within my first month, I broke the cardinal rule and I fucked a coworker. But I did more than that. I got into a relationship with said coworker. We both found the job on craigslist and we both started on the same day. We went through training together and during the training, while we were stocking the shelves in the attic, I had a coin to flip. Do I let us stock these shelves in silence, business as usual? Or do I interject my personality into this interaction? I went with option B.

Earlier on our first day, the owner gave me $20 out of the drawer to go to CVS and buy something for the store. I did it no questions asked, but as the coworker woman and I were stocking the shelves I said, “Awful trusting ain’t it? We found this job on Craigslist I could have taken that $20 and dipped.” And the conversation was rolling from there.

Then the conversation grew to texts, which turned to a date, which then turned to sex, which then turned into a series of tragic events to this day still affect me.

People we worked with were pretty quick to figure out we were fucking. Even though we never directly worked together, it was kind of obvious. Apart from that, the job was straightforward: open the store, make the ice cream, wait for the front person to show up, sell the ice cream, leave. Or it was, show up in the afternoon, relieve the opening ice cream person, make ice cream until close, close the store, leave.

There was another girl hired to be the “manager” of the store so the owners could be more hands off. Holy shit she was terrible at her job. She kept running into issues with me because I was 21 and not taking shit off of some kid who didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. The woman coworker I was dating wasn’t having her shit either, and even got so far as hitting her or pushing her or something physical, I wasn’t there to see.

After two months this joke of a manager quit. After she quit, life at work was easy up until I got fired.

I got fired because there was a behind the scenes narrative about me stealing money from the safe. I had no fucking clue where the safe was. Never seen the safe, never stole nothing from nobody that I didn’t replace or pay back.

This was the first time I’d ever been fired and if you want to know what I think the real reasons were?

1) I was drinking every day. Constantly. It was noticeable.

2) I had some lofty ideas and strong feelings about being a kitchen manager there (whatever the fuck that means) and boy did I send the owner some essays over text.

3) I talked a lot of shit. Accused the owner of going through menopause, also called her out on only hiring attractive people. If you work in a kitchen, any kitchen, there’s some real Hephaestus lookin motherfuckers back there. The staff at the ice cream store were 4 hot girls, and seven other guys. Three of the guys were younger than me and still in high school. The one my age was ripped and was a fitness model, one was gay and in back-of-house, the other two guys were early morning prep and were rarely seen but still easy on the eyes. So I hit the owner with the facts, and despite getting a surface laugh, I think my behavior on a whole was probably more trouble than it was worth.

Also, my first pay check didn’t hit on time and I made a federal fucking case about it. I think I also threatened suicide over paying for parking once or twice. If I wasn’t coming to work drunk, I was coming to work hungover covered with hickeys, blasting gangster rap on a Bluetooth speaker and always stepping out to smoke.

All I know is I never stole from the lady, and there’s no hard feelings on my end. If anything I found her a bit of a charming person. The day I got fired was the same day I got scammed out of $2000 (estimated) in an apartment scam. This meant I still had to live out of my car and thug it out on the streets of LA.

Before I got fired, the coworker lady I was involved with used to do catering, and she ended up getting me roped into her catering gigs. The first one was at a Freemasons’ event. I was scared to death because I hear all the talk about the free masons, but I came to find out it’s a bunch of fat drunk nerds.

At least that chapter of the brotherhood was a bunch of fat drunk nerds.

The first time we did the masons gig this portly British dude was hitting on the girl I’d been sleeping with. The second time we did the masons gig this bearded guy who was high up in rank started hitting on me. I… hold no one to nothing.

To be continued…