#9

  

Yesterday I was fired from my restaurant job. I'll explain later.

It is not the first time I've been fired. In fact, it is the ninth. So, it came as no surprise. I have come to expect it. Always. My job at THE PAPER is the only one I've ever been comfortable with. And even there…

Before yesterday, I had been fired from: a campus convenient store, the campus bookstore, The Children's Museum of Tampa, Newk's Café, an art supply store and The Cactus Club. I was fired from a daycare center when a little girl who didn't like me told her mother I called her a bitch (which I did not do---well, maybe I said it to one of the other daycare counselors. But we were always careful not to let the kids hear us when we talked shit). I worked at a country club driving around in a golf-cart with a brush attached to the back, combing clay tennis courts in the 120 degree, Florida sun, among other, more straining feats of manual labor. I was the only one on the premises who didn't know or care about sports.

It was mindless, hard work. And my boss, a big leathery guy with a thick, black porno mustache, was even more mindless. He made a lot of money standing around playing tennis and bitching at 'the help.' His name was Dan Miller and he was as dumb as clay.

As an example of how dumb Dan Miller was: one year, as the country club readied for it's annual children's fair, a poster in the lobby advertised the fair's entertainment, a country band called Wild Horses. They would play poolside. The poster featured a close-up of the band's singer who also had a porno mustache, as well as a cowboy hat. Underneath, read "Wild Horses: poolside."

One day at the club, as I stood in the air-conditioned lobby cooling off, flirting with the girl behind the welcome desk, Dan came in the front door. He stopped in front of the Wild Horses poster, lifted his big, ugly, Oakley Blades onto his baseball hat, and furrowed his brow at the poster.

"Cindy!" He yelled, very loudly. Louder than I'd heard him yell before. Cindy, a blonde woman of about 26, was the club's Assistant Co-ordinator, just under Dan. Cindy came running into the lobby when she heard him bellow.

"What's the matter Dan?"

"What is wrong with you!" Dan yelled at her, pointing to the poster. About a dozen witnessed the scene and all of them looked as if they'd never seen Dan so livid.

"What do you mean, Dan?" Cindy said in a voice that sounded like she'd already accepted that she'd done something wrong.

"Wild horses?!" Dan pointed at the poster again, this time with two hands. "We can't have wild horses running around on the grounds! At the children's fair?! Are you fucked?! Do you know what the liability is for wild horses?"

Everyone stood around frozen. Dan continued.

"I mean, maybe we could have like, one pony, but wild horses? Use your head!"

"It's a band, Dan." Said Cindy.

(…pregnant pause from Dan…) "Oh." Said Dan. And walked back to his office. No apology, nothing.

I am not making this up.

Another time, the clay court sprinklers were sticking in their rotation. So Dan decided to lube them up. He came out of the tool shed, heading for the sprinklers, with a can of WD-40, black spray paint.

"Dan, that's not oil." I told him.

"If you had been doing your job," he responded, not looking at me as he walked to the first sprinkler head and bent over. "If you knew what you were doing out on these courts, this wouldn't have happened in the first place. So, just let me handle this."

I watched him spray a third of a can of paint into the moving parts of over 30 sprinklers. At first, the wetness of the paint did loosen them, and they returned to watering the clay in full, glorious, left-to-right rotation. But when the paint dried, Dan had broken thousands of dollars worth of sprinklers. Somehow, his bosses never found out.

My point being, most of the jobs from which I've been fired, can be handled by morons like Dan, but for some reason, I fuck up and get fired every time.

I once worked for a psychiatrist. He was a brilliant, sensitive man. He was very successful and busy and needed an assistant to do his filing, pay his bills for him, etc. I was terrible at it. But I liked the psychiatrist. I figured that, having been fired by many types of different bosses, all of whom thought me weird, I stood a better chance of being understood by the psychiatrist than anyone else I might work for if I quit.

One day he came to me at my computer (his computer, actually) and began talking to me about the job and my place in the work-a-day world. He told me I was "better than this kind of mindless paper-shuffling." He roused me. And by the end of our conversation he'd talked me into quitting. I left immediately.

I felt good about my decision on the elevator down. But when I stepped out the big mirrored doors onto the street I remembered that I hadn't wanted to quit. I hdan't even considered it. Plus, I'd never quit a job without having another one lined up first. He had used his psychiatrist powers on me, to make me fire myself! I turned around to get back on the elevator but the mirrored doors had shut. I stood in front of my own reflection, sliced in half by the seam of the double doors. I didn't press the elevator button. I unlocked my bike and rode home.

My firings are often hard to pin down. I rarely do anything directly wrong: I'm always on time, I'm courteous as hell on the phone, I do the job. But bosses seem to sense something in me they don't trust. Or in the case of my job at the HPR, maybe they saw it coming. I was having the damnedest time studying for the food test.

Despite those three mornings of training tedium, I did not retain a fettuccini, an Alfredo, a porcini, a bruschetta, a malanzana. I didn't retain a foccacian thing. But that little black girl likes me, I think.

Anyway, I was expected to memorize 150 items, most with Italian names, containing at least four ingredients apiece. Some up to eight ingredients. Half the items on the menu were so thick with odd, artery-clogging combinations that, if you ate four plates in a row, it would undoubtedly kill you. So many garnishes and cheeses that my sister, who works at an Italian restaurant across town, was laughing and rubbing my arm consolingly as she helped me study.

I just can't do it. And I don't say "I can't" often.

I had one table-waiting job before this one: The Cactus Club. Four months into it I went full-time at the newspaper. I was lucky to be able to quit The Cactus Club before the 12-hour shifts gave my skin that permanent food-smell that keeps servers up at night in bed, remembering that they're not going anywhere right now.

I have very little restaurant experience. And the HPR is nice as hell. The kids around town, the 'life-servers' who will all manage restaurants in 11 years, consider it a good place to work. Two years of interviewing people at the paper, taught me enough social grace to fool THE BULLY into hiring me. But I wasn't ready.

The last two years of working at the newspaper, and the last five months of doing this journal website, have displaced all my brain activity onto whichever side controls the 'sitting on your ass and thinking all the time' gland. Spending so much time writing (after promising myself I'd never work another "crappy job" again) has further deteriorated my already questionable ability to perform manual labor: like ripping open a bottle of wine I suggested (without and idea what it tastes like) to six, fat, old-school Italian guys, as they all stare at me to see if I'll break the cork. I can't rise to the occasion of four, somber, young waiters with spaghetti sauce on their ties, standing behind me, impatiently waiting their turns, with furrowed brows, as I fumble with the restaurant's ancient computer credit card system.

The other guys in the restaurant are average, capable dudes who had all probably played at least one sport in high school. I never played well on teams. Working in the restaurant gives me the same feeling I had in Middle School when I was forced to play basketball: I spent the entire time game flinching and waiting for the ball to bounce up and bloody my nose.

I realize how effete I actually am when trying to balance heavy trays, loaded with stacks of hot ceramic and noodles. My arm will want to shake as plates sizzle and whisper and spit grease in my ear on the way to hungry, impatient mouths. And, to get the huge, heavy tray to the table, I might have to pass by a little baby in a highchair, the shadow of the tray falling across her like a Mothership. I was clumsy and almost scared move in the restaurant.

And I hadn't even started serving yet.

I'd followed other servers. Doing their shit work behind them. Observing. Grating "fresh Parmesan cheese" for their customers. "Table-side service". The servers are expected to grate cheese at the table. Instead of asking, "would you like some fresh-grated Parmesan cheese with that?" I kept fucking up, asking the customers, "would you like some cheese?" The waiter I was shadowing would scold me on the way back to the kitchen. But every time, right before I'd offer it to the customer, I'd know in my head that it was positively Parmesan: that's the only kind of cheese I ever have to lean over a table full of people, and grate while they stare at me. But I continually second-guessed myself at the crucial moment, 'is it Mozzarella? Romano?' and, "would you like some cheese?" would come out my mouth. The customers didn't seem to care.

I was suppose to take the food test at 7 p.m. last night, after getting off work at the paper. The impending test had my brain fucked up all day. I studied all day. With flashcards. All that shit. As if it were really important. It was a dumb restaurant job, but it felt like a moral dilemma: "Why can't I just do normal things well, like normal people?" I even went to the restaurant on my lunch break yesterday and bought lunch for me and my sister, figuring I'd at least remember the two dishes I'd paid for just hours before the test. The server that waited on us had worked with me the day before, but he didn't recognize me at all. He just looked at me blank, like he would any other customer.

I studied and studied and the food test laughed at me. I had so much anxiety all day: forcing itself up through my guts. I expected it to force it's way out my tearducts: little Alfredo sauce tears. If I hadn't been at work in the newsroom in front of 30 reporters, I would have broke down. Working in a restaurant is a lot harder than working in a newsroom.

At 7 p.m. I called the HPR to tell them I was on my way to take the test, and they told me they didn't think I should work at the restaurant. They fired me. I hadn't fucked up anything yet, but they could feel it in me.

The day before, I had given the manager my work schedule at the paper. When I called, he told me that the schedule I gave him wouldn't work. "Change it to accommodate the restaurant." I told him.

"Yeah. Uh." He fumbled a bit and repeated himself with a hint of fresh-grated regret, "Your schedule just isn't going to work for us."

I consider this to be even more evidence that I must carve my own path through this life (this and those eight other jobs I've been fired from in my life). A path without pasta. A path without servitude to anything but my own neurosis. I still have to find a new restaurant job to make cash for the move to California. But I'll try an intermediate-level serving environment next time. One that doesn't require memorizing a new language or putting little babies in jeopardy.

Though somehow I still feel really bad about myself for failing. Like trays over babies: I wish I were better able to balance my energies.

But regardless of my defeat, the firing has left me with a day off. All the pressure of that fancy restaurant is gone and I relish its wonderful absence. Instead of running around nervously as I would have been doing today had I not been fired from the HPR, I am writing. And I am happy. If a bit hungover.

Last evening, I went to a beer and wine lecture given at the University by a famous Cuban artist. I wanted to take notes so I brought in my training manual from the restaurant, a stack of dittos with blank backs, to write on. The room was packed with over a hundred college students and important Tampa types. Gorgeous girls who don't wear makeup or bras.

To celebrating my firing, the loss of anxiety, I slammed three beers in 15 minutes and carried an unopened Beck's back to my plastic chair, opening it with my keychain as the Cuban artist walked to the podium and the lights went even lower.

He was about 60 and had a thick, creamy Spanish accent (my brain is clogged with adjectives like that from studying that menu this week). He was a good speaker. He started by telling a funny story about how he once fell asleep while giving a lecture. "Eed was very dark," he said, smiling gently, "Very dark. Jus a smole singel spotlight. As I read, the text became very light. Then it became the most amazing text I ever read; until I woke up with the audience laughing at me."

I wrote his story down on the back of a the training manual. When he was done with the story, I continued writing. I just started going. I wrote about getting fired, about feeling inadequate for not fitting into the work-a-day world, about whatever else I had been obsessing over all day. It felt so good to let it all out. The college kids around me knew I wasn't taking lecture notes: I went off, noisily scratching the paper, looking up every three minutes to catch someone in a seat near me staring as if I were talking to myself out loud, which I might have been, had I not had paper to write on.

Suddenly, daylight illuminated the dark room behind me and I turned to see the former publisher of THE PAPER, coming in. She is a woman of about 50, with short, salt and pepper hair. She left the newspaper several months ago. But she's still a noble community figure.

The door shut, darkness came again and she walked in and sat in the empty seat behind me.

I drank two more free beers over the course of the lecture. As the lights came on, I almost lost my balance standing up and turning around to face the former publisher. "Hello (FORMER PUBLISHER)" I said shyly, sticking out my hand, "I'm (EDITOR), I work at THE PAPER."

"Oh!" she said.

We had worked 100 feet from each other for two years but I could tell she didn't remember me. The look she gave me, before shaking my hand, was exactly as blank as that of the waiter that took mine and my sister's order that afternoon at lunch, before I was fired.