2017 in a southern state known for it’s mighty river. I took my first kitchen 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. Ten hour days from 8am to 6pm sometimes later was standard fare. The manager was one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever worked with.

If I didn’t say exactly what he wanted to hear, it was ‘backtalk.’ He’d apologize at the end of the shift with sentiments like, “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 liked to flirt with the drive thru 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 “Let Her Go” by Passenger. One morning on my hands and knees, elbow deep in frozen coleslaw, the manager looks at me when Let Her Go comes on and says, “Y’know, you look like this song.”
However, this abuse did not come without reward. By my second week, he habitually left early and I became the shift lead. Big mistake.

I was 19, and did not give one singular fuck about this job. Simple tasks like working a grill, dropping baskets of fries, and pulling pork were not engaging for me. Towards the end of my stay here, on a dinner shift, I heard intense screaming from the front register and a coworker was in a fight with a customer.
Another coworker heard what was going on, stopped what she was doing to intervene, but ended up as a new challenger in the ring. I put down what I was doing and mediated the situation because I was sick of it.
I don’t believe calming people the fuck down was what they were paying me all of $9/hr to do. During the aftermath I found 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. Befuddling.

There was a 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.

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Some time in another country town I worked for one entire week 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. Often times our coworkers walked out mid shift and left the store and me and one other dude during a rush.

In the same country town I worked at Teavana in a mall for a season. There’s really no crazy stories to report here. 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.

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I found employment at a vegan ice cream store on a beach somewhere. Imagine thinking, “oh what a lovely day to take my kid out for some ice cream, ah yes charcoal! Great flavor!” Yes, they’re out of business now. This wasn’t your average ice cream store, this shit was bougie. The process was similar to making gelato.

I expected the kitchen life I knew and loved. Where people ran to the bathroom to get high to come back and bust their ass.
I was used to prison rules.
Prison rules was not how shit ran at this vegan ice cream store.

My style came across as intimidating and aggressive to the other employees. Halfway through my shift, I was usually tipsy thanks to 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 the coworker. We both found the job on craigslist, we both started on the same day. We went through training together and during the training, 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.
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. For context, earlier in the day, the owner gave me $20 out of the drawer to go to CVS and buy something for the store

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 mess, the job was straightforward. Somewhere in the timeline a girl was hired to be the “manager” of the store so the owners could be more hands-off. She was terrible at her job.
As a manager, she ran into issues with 21-year-old me who was 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 escalated the conflict from verbal to physical. After two months the “manager” quit. Life was good.

I eventually 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.

I suspect the truth to be closer to:

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.

When my first pay check didn’t hit on time, 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 to be charming. As the theatre of life would have it, 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.

This was the first time I’d ever been fired.

Before I got fired, the coworker lady used to do catering, and she ended up roping me 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…

1. made you look 😛 ↩︎