My first job

I had a paid job once. Well, a couple times. Three? It was many, many years ago, and it was nice to get paid, but I didn’t miss it once I went to college, nor when I quit to have a baby after my marriage.

My first job was as a dishwasher in a greasy spoon. It had been the nicest restaurant in Greybull, Wyoming, in the first part of the 20th century. I worked there in 1989-90. The owner had died and his wife, in her late 50s, was trying to keep it going. For most of its life the food had been homemade: chili from dry beans and hamburger, cinnamon rolls from flour, butter, and sugar. The elderly cook who made the cinnamon rolls had worked there for years. She left around the time they started baking premade cinnamon rolls from frozen dough. I don’t know the order of events, but I do know that a five-gallon stockpot of chili went bad in the walk-in refrigerator around that time. When I was told to mop the floor with a mixture of ammonia and bleach in water, I knew enough to read the directions first. After that I used only ammonia and water on the floors.

Besides washing the dishes, pots, and pans, I had the job of wrapping potatoes in foil to bake, and prepping 10 gallons of potatoes for hashbrowns. The head dishwasher, my boss, worked mornings, and I worked afternoon/evening. There were a couple other dishwashers but mostly I was there by myself. There was very little training.

The head cook when I started was the head dishwasher’s wife. She was a large woman, a hard worker, not well-educated in book learning but able to cook almost anything. She had a good relationship with her husband. At the time I didn’t realize what a blessing that was.

I didn’t eat much of what the cooks made. I was allowed one meal a day; at first I was told, “anything on the menu.” Most of the time I had a plate of french fries smothered in brown gravy; I loved that. But one day I got it into my head that “anything” included the most expensive thing: a whole trout. The elderly cinnamon roll chef made it for me in a frying pan. She grumbled good-naturedly the whole time. When she served it to me, the other employees gathered around to watch me eat it. None of them were brave enough. The manager got mad and changed the rules. I got chewed out; I calmly went back to having fries and gravy every day. The dishwasher’s wife was horrified at how I was treated. It must have been her last straw; she threw off her white apron and stomped out the back door in disgust. I didn’t see her again.

I worked at the same restaurant for a month the following summer. By then I was engaged to be married. There was a succession of short-term cooks. One woman teased me about being engaged and knowing next to nothing about men. From her I learned that a woman’s nether regions need exercise (from men, implied), or she’d leak pee.

One cook was the stereotype line cook passing through, tattoos, long hair in a ponytail, working there just long enough to earn money to move on to somewhere else. He told tales of working in other restaurants, of getting up onto the grill to clean the stove hood. He claimed to have melted the skin on the backs of his fingers together by leaning his fist on a hot grill, and then using a knife to separate his fingers.

One day I ordered a shrimp salad for my dinner, hold the salad. I went into the back and grabbed a can of tiny salad shrimp and ate them. I got scolded for not ordering it officially through the head waitress. Apparently they didn’t like that I didn’t eat the salad part, or maybe it was missing paperwork to account for the meal. No one explained clearly.

Anyway, I got to talk with the head waitress more after that. She had been a waitress 40 years, in the same place. She was married to a disabled man; they needed her income to survive. She was slightly shorter than me, with hair in a sort of curl-and-set bouffant — the same hairstyle as my mother and Queen Elizabeth II. Unlike my mother, she kept hers a red-brown, probably dyed, and wore bright red-orange lipstick with sharp edges, carefully applied. I admired her; she struck me as a hard-working, calm woman, with an air of authority and the security of knowing she belonged there.

I was too young to work as a waitress, not old enough to serve alcohol. I didn’t mind. I called off sick one weekend. The following day I felt much better, so I called back to say, “I can work tomorrow.” The manager said, “I already hired someone.” I started in surprise, hung up, and cried. I returned a week later to pick up my paycheck, but I never went back to work there. Twenty-five years later, in telling my husband about it, I realized, she never said I was fired. She probably meant, “Tomorrow’s shift is covered already; you don’t need to worry about it.” But that’s not what she said. I took it to mean I had been replaced.