The Encyclopedia of My Life- the letter S

Mar 02, 2008 - 23:25 PM PST

Summer job
At 16 I found myself working in the kitchen of my towns country club, which wasn’t really a country club. There weren’t any collared shirts or dress codes but it was a membership based club where parents lounged by the pool at noon drinking wine while their kids were watched by an array of horny teenagers and their food was prepared by a bunch of hung over teenagers as well. This was all for a large sum of money of course. I was one of the hung over kids working in the kitchen. My best friend and I took the job and found ourselves accompanied by 5 other guys from our school and grade, the 45 year old ex drug addict chef, his 4 foot 8 Asian sue chef, and Dave, the 26yr old college history teacher who had worked summers there since he was 16. It was an odd group but by the end of the summer I was sad to leave. The seven of us all age 16 formed a pretty tight bond. Every night after work we would drive around almost always ending up at the beach or someone’s house, high and occasionally drunk. But back to the summer job. My job was to take all of the order form that the members gave me and shout them out to the people making the food. After the food was made I would prepare it all on a tray and hand it to the appropriate family. Ok this is way harder than it sounds. Those god damn members seriously had it against us or something because there would 13 families of 5 people each ordering food at the same time. Us seven 16yrs old were in charge of the food for everyone. The concept is ridiculous and they really shouldn’t have hired us. Once I called out the food for what seemed like 200 people it became chaos. I occasionally broke out in hives from all the pressure. Alex a friend of mine only lasted a two weeks at the job. The job broke him. He could be found hiding in the walk-in freezer during the rush unable to face the screaming moms about how their sons chicken tenders were raw. Lucky me. I had the responsibility of telling Mrs. Bartly that we all sincerely apologized that not only did it take an hour for her order of chicken tenders and two small sodas to be ready but that the tenders indeed were uncooked. She would be getting a refund and new chicken tenders. By the end of the summer the vulgarity of working with all boys had broken Cyd and I. We talked and acted like them and it took us by surprise when hanging out with out girl friends that constant sex jokes weren’t always appreciated. The slow days were always the most fun. The entire club was run by teenagers from the life guards to the counselors to the maintenance staff. When it was cold and drizzling everyone was in high spirits the maintenance boys would come in to the kitchen escaping their boss and hang out with us. The head chef would talk about his drug days and occasionally suck the air out of the empty whip cream cans. Even though it was completely inappropriate for the boss to be doing that we found it oddly amusing. I could write a book entirely of the people and moments from that job and that summer. But then again I’m sure it would get dull, and I would lose your interest.

Skimming
I am a superb skimmer. I used to skim everything and stop when I saw a dirty word or something either referring to or mentioning something sexual. It was a talent of mine. As English reading quizzes returned with little frown faces, and comments such as “are you reading the right book?” I decided my years of skimming may be limited. I still love the occasional skim, of course I never pick up on anything thing that’s going on and always end up confused.