On summer vacation between my first and second year of college a good buddy of mine, Chad, told me to apply to a Red Lobster where he worked in the kitchen. “It’s pretty cool there,” he said. Desperate for beer money, I went in to speak to the general manager, this chickennecked guy named Will, who wore a white shirt and tie. Loafers, I’d never seen a man wear loafers before. An impressive mane of windswept blond hair and the obligatory pencil thin mustache completed the look. He put me through the whole song and dance. He took it very serious.

I said all the right things and got the job. $6.25 an hour. I lived with my mother and the restaurant was in the next town over. I remember not being excited at all. My current girlfriend had gone home to Southboro, Massachusetts for the summer. I spoke with her on the phone every night then went out and drank beer and smoked weed with my friends. Sometimes there was a party, more often one of us drove around and stayed mildly sober while the rest of us got tanked.

After surviving a day of training where I sat in front of a small television set in the dry goods room, I showed up at 8 a.m. sharp for my first shift. I had worked in kitchens before, so I was familiar with the typical rabble. Shit, they were my people. I smiled when I pulled in and got out. I actually knew one of the guys from my very first kitchen job in high school, this dude, Marlon, a jacked alcoholic type, always on edge. Mullet. He had bought me beer for me and my buddies in the past. In general, everyone was a lot older than me and Chad. The oldest guy, Gerhard, was from Germany. A short but stout sixty year old marathoner type. The whole thing was just odd. I hadn’t asked enough questions about what the job entailed and I began to curse Chad for the early morning wake up call.

This other dude, Jeb, a strange blond kid, not much older than I, but married with two kids, took me through the training procedure. “I really gave it to my wife last night,” he said. “Uh, ok?” I said. “Yeah, I really nailed her. Now look, this is how we do all the fry station prep.” We worked at a stainless steel table with different types of breading for different types of seafood. A printed prep sheet told us the exact amounts of each. Each morning, we prepped ingredients for our stations. For the fry cooks, it was all breading, counting out each order, let’s say, of shrimp, and then laying it all out on a sheet pan that went into a double sided cooler with slots in it. Fairly ingenious. Raw, breaded material in one end of the cooler which also faced onto the hot line. When you needed an order you reached in from the other side.

I had no idea you could fry a goddam shrimp so many different ways. I felt like Bubba from Forrest Gump.

We finished at noon. Ok, great, I thought. Getting up early sucked but it was just four hours a day, then I could go home, take a shower, maybe go for a bike ride down to the lake, see what the boys were doing tonight. Everyone from the kitchen punched out and as we smoked outside the back door they all said to me, “See you at four.” Huh? Had I missed that part? A car pulled up, the shocks heaving on the driver’s side. The passenger window slid down and an enormous angry fat woman shouted from inside, “Jeb, get your ass in the car, let’s go!”

Back at four to get ready for dinner service at five. As cooks we weren’t allowed to have contact with the front of the house at all. If we wanted a soda we had to ask Will and he would have a server push it through the window at us like animals at the zoo. Jeb took me through the procedures, turning on the fry-o-lator, etc. “I banged my wife on my break, what did you do?” he said. “Uh, not much,” I said.

Five minutes before service started, Jim arrived. Long greasy mullet. Beard. We all had to wear the shitty polyester pants and dishwasher shirts but he wore jeans. I remembered somewhere in the training manual about that not being allowed. He also wore a cotton, short sleeve chef coat, unbuttoned two rows down so you could see his chest hair. Oh, and cowboy boots. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out a round tin of Skoal, placed a giant pinch of chewing tobacco in his lip, and put one foot up high onto a trash can he would spit into.

“That’s Jim,” Jeb whispered in my ear. “He worked a Red Lobster down in Houston that did 1,000 covers a night.” A stunning brunette woman walked into the kitchen. Jeans so tight it looked like she had to jump off a roof to get inside them. Tall, statuesque, short cropped hair, a razor edge to her. The trailer home version of Cindy Crawford. Any cook that glanced at her got the death ray. She walked over to Jim and melted instantly when he looked at her. The two spoke in hushed tones to one another. “That’s Alexandra, the front of house manager,” Jeb whispered again, “That’s Jim’s girlfriend.”

Will nervously went and spoke to Jim while Jim kept his back turned to him and spit into the trash, nodding, hearing the instructions, his mind focused somewhere else. The first ticket came in through the printer on Jim’s station. He grabbed it, reached up high, fastened it to a clamp attached to a long wire, then launched it down toward me and Jeb. Shooooosh! “Order in two fried shrimp combos!” he yelled at us, a smile on his face.

And so it went throughout the night. Jeb and I dipping the baskets into the hot oil, pulling them out, sizzling, launching the contents into cardboard grease absorbers and putting together all the combo platters and appetizers. To our left Chad put together salads, shrimp cocktails, and desserts while the German to our left served up pastas and corn. Marlon stood in front of the grill, the smoke curling around him like a trained djinn. And Jim? He commanded us all while toiling in front of the “broiler” as they called it. A massive three tiered pizza oven distorting the very air with the immense heat coming off it. He slid all the casseroles into the maw of this behemoth. This was how all the other dishes were timed. He just knew when to slide them in and the moment they would be ready, reaching way into the back of the ovens to grab the lava hot ceramic boats with a pair of tongs and placing them on a pre set plate with a doily on it.

Saying the place was busy would be an understatement. It was fucking madness. Total madness. Every so often, Will would come mincing back to the kitchen with a live lobster in his hands from the tank at the front of the restaurant coming onto the line and shoving it toward us with two hands the antennae and claws of the damn thing going haywire. “Gimmee that fucker!” Marlon would say, snatching it one handed, tossing it into a roiling pot where the poor crustacean would meet its demise. As service went down in flames, tickets pouring into us, Jim would yell “I need to know what the fuck is going on out there!” and Alexandra would come back to coo in his ear, soothe him, then leave, replaced by Will who shriveled and bent at Jim’s presence like a lowly mendicant, speaking to him in in hushed atonement. “We’ve got 60 covers coming in in the next half hour!” Jim shouted down at us. “Bring it on!” Marlon screamed back, loud enough so the waiters all turned their heads as they scrambled behind the windows.

After service, while we cleaned, we were allowed to have beer, also not something allowed in the Red Lobster manual which stated any alcohol consumption on premises would result in immediate termination. “Six beers for the boys!” Jim would say, and Will would return, supplicant, with a tray adorned with cold pints of glorious, golden draughts. Jim would dole them one at a time to each of us and take his own, quaffing with his foot up high on the trash can, his lip still distended with a plug of dip, shushing Will off with a flick of his hand.

Ah! And that was it! Night after night, sheathed in a layer of grease, the shrimp stench baked into my skin, the glory of the magical barley suds caressing my teenage throat as I scrubbed away the dratted breading which caked its way into every crevice, bending to mop oil off the floor, cleaning the fryer, filtering the still hot oil, an action performed after every shift, a horrific endeavor where one could be grotesquely burned with one wrong move. After extra busy services Jim, at the protestation of Will, would bellow for another round and we’d all nod at him, smile, raise our beers and rejoice. Yes exalted one!

Once, just once, before the summer ended, Jim beckoned me over and showed me how to time everything and take the reins. It seemed easy enough to shove the casserole dishes back into the oven and retrieve them but when I went to reach for the first one, my hand shriveled back from the heat as if I had been snapped at by a large dog, the hairs on the back of my hand instantaneously burning off. What? Jim looked at me and smiled, reaching in with his tongs and grabbing the dish of blistering hot shrimp scampi, not a trickle of pain on his face. “It takes some getting used to,” he said.