Continued from yesterday’s post.

I made a trip down to Massachusetts to see my girl during her spring break and my car broke down while I was there, so I had to stay there a week. Her parents were very impressed. We went to Blockbuster and I insisted we rent The Commitments, a movie I found hilarious. Her father and mother sat stonefaced as we all watched while I guffawed.

When I got back to Winooski, my roommates all had one message for me. “The cops have been looking for you, man.” What? I went willingly to the station. I had forgotten to give back the key to Subway after being fired. No big deal. The Kirby people had also called a bunch, wondering where I had been. I had driven all the way to Massachusetts with the sample vacuum in the trunk of my VW Golf.

Living with my high school buddies lasted about four months. We had all been giving Billy cash for our portion of the rent but the money never once made it to the landlord. Whoops. No wonder he always had so much weed.

I ended up living with my mother. A weird time. Through a friend, I ended up with a job doing prep at the Howard Johnson’s up the street. The pay was good, $6.25, and the work was fun. A big sunny kitchen. I knew most of the people there already. The hostess was my friend Chris’ girl. Then there was my three drinking buddies, Tudhope, Tim, and Travis who had graduated from Mount Mansfield High School the same year I barely graduated from South Burlington. I knew them all because my girl was roommates with Travis’ sister. Tudhope and Tim washed dishes, Travis was a waiter. We spent most days doing fifty percent of the work, the other time was reserved for smoking cigarettes and clowning around.

My first day, this weird skinny dude with a beard and ponytail named Lane trained me. He basically told me the job was incredibly easy and to get eight hours a day I would have to stretch out each task and take many smoke breaks. We were the third to arrive in the morning. The first was the janitor, Clarence, this older guy with a massive mustache and bug eyes behind thick glasses. He introduced himself to me and I immediately felt a weird pedophile vibe emanating from him. Clarence was roommates with Walter, the master of the egg griddle. A massive older guy, bald, shaped like an egg. The two had met while working as attendants at the same parking garage. The other two line cooks, Jeremy and Joel were complete opposites from one another. Jeremy, young with several kids, a mountain of a man with a mullet, Joel, a skinny old guy who snickered often to himself when no one was watching.

The vibe in the kitchen was laced with testosterone. Tudhope and Tim were constantly wrestling and getting in trouble.

“Hey Clarence,” they would always say when they saw him, “Fuck any kids today?”

One morning, Tim decided to launch a potato at Tudhope. Tudhope retaliated with the same move. Potatoes ended up flying back and forth, until Tudhope hit this enormous, jacked bodybuilder waiter guy in the head with a spud. Evan, a real gorilla. He grabbed Tudhope by the neck, dragged him into the back hallway, and laid him out with one punch. We all just left him there until he woke up. The GM, this lazy dude named Brian who always used the term “golden” to describe good situations asked us what happened. We just shrugged and went on working.

These two guys were always up to something. The line cooks hated them. Jeremy would put them in their place in his own special way.

“Let’s go outside,” he would say. “I’ll give you guys each three punches, but then I get to punch you three times afterwards.”

We often discussed, amongst one another, whether this challenge was acceptable and whether or not Jeremy was as tough as he thought.

“I’ll hit him three times, then run away and never come back,” Tim said.

“There’s no way he can take three of my best shots,” Tudhope said.

The big confrontation never actualized. Jeremy was an evil 300 pound Rush fan. He once told us a story about how he rolled over on a kitten in his sleep and crushed the poor thing to death. He said he woke in the night to a squeal, saw the furry corpse, and simply peeled it off his body and threw it to the floor before going back to sleep. He was 26 and had three kids. I remember thinking to myself that by the time I was his age, in eight years, I would have everything figured out. There was no way I’d still be working in a restaurant.