After one semester of college after high school, I dropped out. Maybe it was the straight Fs I received in all five of my classes, maybe it was the feeling of always being broke, maybe it was the drugs and alcohol…Probably a combination of all three. We used to eat a bunch of acid, pull the fire alarm, and then go and climb on top of the gym’s roof and laugh our asses off as everyone stumbled out of the dorm in their pajamas at four a.m.. I once puked in my own bed and passed out next to it, a nice little present to wake up to in the morning. I came up with many inventive ways to make money. I stole Skoal dip tins from the local supermarket and sold them for a buck apiece. I found a wing in an administration building on campus that had some sort of kitty, an empty coffee canister they put cash and change in. I sold weed, but that always went awry, as I smoked more of it than I sold. My roommates and I once found an entire field of enormous, eight foot tall pot plants. We ripped as many as we could out of the ground and stuffed the trunk full, our bodies sticky, the entire car reeking as we sped away. We smoked and sold shitloads of it only to find out it was just hemp and had no psychoactive abilities. People came to me and said, “Hey man, this shit doesn’t get you high.”

“It will if you smoke enough of it,” I told them.

So, yeah, the best idea was to get together and live with a bunch of my high school buddies who had also dropped out after their first semesters. Four of us. Me, Billy, Dylan, and Meatball. A four bedroom duplex in Winooski. My portion of the rent was $150. Just a few blocks down the street, on the corner of Main and East Allen, stood a Subway. I went down there one night to grab a sando and saw an old friend of mine, Joon, working back there. We spoke, I said I needed a job and he told me he’d put the good word in for me with the owner. Just leave my number.

A few days later I walked down, and met with the owner, an old Asian dude named Jon with wild hair and a limp. He worked at IBM and the shop was his side hustle. The pay was $5.25 an hour. We shook hands. Over the course of the next week Jon handed me a Subway hat and a t-shirt that said “Sandwich Artist” over the left breast and then I watched a bunch of videos about the beginnings of Subway and their dedication to quality. After all that, I was sent to the big downtown Burlington location to train with this roughneck, very tan white guy in coke bottle glasses named Todd, a Golden Gloves boxing champion with a thick goatee. He went through the whole shebang from the video with me. His biggest advice to me was “Don’t fall behind or you’re fucked.” He took me through all of it, the patented “V” cut and how to build multiple sandwiches at one. After the shift I asked him if he wanted to go get a beer and he told me he didn’t drink anymore.

I was being groomed to be the day guy. Most of the first couple of hours of a shift entailed cutting all the veggies–onions, lettuce, tomatoes–in this weird manually operated rotary vegetable slicer. All the veggies were fresh, everything else like the jalapeños and olives came from #10 cans I opened with a huge industrial can opener. The meat and cheese, frozen, came in boxes labelled Subway. The rest of the prep duties entailed making sure to hit the pars on bread. It came frozen in loaves. There was a proofer oven and a baking oven, a quick two hour process. I had to record on a sheet how many loaves I pulled out each day. We were allowed to have one foot long per day for ourselves and had to record that too.

The back of the shop, where the freezer and walk in were located, was vast. A ramp leading to the back door where deliveries came in and a big desk with a chair and the tv and VHS player where I watched the videos. That was about it.

I had keys to the place and came in every morning to open and get started. The first and most important step was to pull the loaves out and get them proofing. Then, I swept and mopped the place, pulled all the cellophane off the inserts from the night before, counted the register, and got started on the veggie prep.

My first day, there was a line of people outside waiting when I opened the door. The words of Todd rang in my head, “Don’t fall behind or you’re fucked.” I got overwhelmed immediately by the lunch crowd, especially the ones with coupons from the paper who wanted special combos which took a moment on the register to discount and record. All i could think of while building one person’s sandwich, was the line growing as I heard the instructions and went down the line. It was a good, easy operation, but people didn’t always adhere to the simplicity. Some people wanted half this and half that, half toasted, half not, more of this, less of that. I got so buried that some dude figured out how to rob me halfway through the scrum. He came budging in, steam from his ears, while I was in the weeds and told me I gave him the wrong change. I apologized and handed him a ten spot and then when I counted the register after lunch I found it to be $10 short.

During this time, my roommate, Meatball, came to me with an ad in the paper for a free seminar. Become a Kirby vacuum salesman, it said. We both went. It was an auditorium full of men, some new bucks like ourselves, some grizzled veterans of the beat. One of those experienced guys was Phil Wills. We knew him from a rivalry with another high school and Meatball had played allstar baseball with him. Phil looked good. A nice pressed brown suit, a crisp white Kangol newsboy hat, gold hoops in each ear. He completed the look with a big old gold watch on his left wrist. I felt like an idiot standing there with my hat backwards, baggy jeans, and too big t-shirt, shitty high tops.

“Kirby had been good to me,” Phil said when it was his turn to step up and speak in front of us all. The other salesmen, sitting in front, all chuckled. They too wore nice suits brand new shoes, and were decked out with big watches. He grinned and told us about the car he had won for being the top salesman of the year. A brand new Honda Prelude.

The head honcho with his big white teeth stepped up in front of us all. “Do you guys want to make some fucking money or what?” We all cheered. Yeah, this would be big. For the next two hours we saw just how good these vacuums were. They could pick up a car. There were demonstrations on how to sell them, how to be ruthless. We would all get lists of addresses, leads to follow so we could do the demonstrations at the potential customer’s houses. If you sold just ten of these babies in a month, you could make $2,000. Money in the bank. By the end of the seminar, both Meatball and myself had signed a contract and each drove out of there with a sparkling new chrome Kirby vacuum in a box.

to be continued…