By the second day of my sunbathing, my mother put her foot down and insisted that I get a job until I shipped off to school for good. She used scary words like “responsibility” and “self-worth” and “pride” and she laid out workplace options like local clothing stores and book shops, none of which interested me or were in the market to hire someone for two months of work. You can imagine the look of disbelief on her face when I came downstairs the next morning and defiantly said “I’m going to get a job at McDonald’s.”
The sound of my mother choking on her toast said it all.
At 8:00 AM that following Thursday I reported for duty and walked into the restaurant. Although I hadn’t been inside many McDonald’s up to that point—and was by no means an authority on them—I was certain, however, that this one was trapped in some sort of time warp. The tables were dirty brown with yellow plastic seats that attached to the tables by an under bar. Against the wall where I entered there was a mural of an alternate universe in which trees fruited hamburgers and a milkshake stream flowed. Parading across a bridge was Ronald McDonald himself, holding a staff while fries poured out of his stuffed pockets. I took a look at my surroundings and mentally pumped myself up. “They’ll like me, they’ll like me, they’ll like me.”
My manager didn’t like me. That was apparent from my first minute together with Megan. I knew her slightly from high school, and while we didn’t exactly run in the same circles, I was aware of her social status. She was a “vo-techer” which means that she spent her day going to vocational classes like plumbing and restaurant management. She was a tough girl in school, or at least that’s what I assumed. At 13 Megan began dying her hair a flat jet-black—where it lacked in shine, it made up in being badass. It was down to her back and she teased the bangs up off of her forehead, which was powdered a constant shade of Goth-white. But when I saw her that morning, her hair was tied back in a ponytail, poking out of the back end of a purple baseball hat with golden arches embroidered in its center.
“Well, well, well...you know, when I saw your name on the roster this morning, I didn’t believe it,” Megan said to me, while looking me up and down. “I thought you were off to become a doctor or something, right?” she continued while handing me my own purple shirt and hat that, with the black pants and shoes I was told to wear on my first day, completed my own uniform in hell.
I decided against any comebacks and just nodded my head and chuckled with her. “I have some time before school, so I thought, why not, right?” I replied. Megan squinted her black-lined eyes—some make-up habits were hard to break, apparently—and immediately began her new employee tour with me. We walked behind the main counter as the breakfast crowd began to come in. She stopped in front of a large clear plastic bank that was in the shape of a house. The chimney had a slit in the top of it that people were supposed to drop spare change in, the bottom a pile of copper.
“Now this here, this is so customers can donate to the Ronald McDonald House,” Megan explained while smiling to the elderly couple silently waiting at the counter with their order.
I turned from Megan to the elderly couple and asked, “Just how elaborate of house does this stinking clown need?” The couple silently stood there—or rather, they didn’t have a chance to respond to me as Megan drew me into the back kitchen. She led me to the double grill, stopped and looked at me.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Jesus,” I said.
For the next four hours Megan stood behind me instructing me on how to properly grill frozen beef patties. When I asked when I would be briefed on the special sauce, she wordlessly pointed to the grill with her finger and I threw more beef circles on the heat. After four hours I was dizzy, dehydrated and my ears rang from Megan’s constant play-by-play yelling in my ear, Deer Hunter-style. I went home smelling of grease and despair. Two shampoos later, I passed out in bed.
My second day began with the morning lesson of the assembly of a Big Mac, and I finally learned about the special sauce (it comes in a tube gun). When I was asked to retrieve more hamburgers from the walk-in freezer, I left the door open for about half and hour and my co-worker flashed me queasy eyes and I retreated in the back. My manager asked if I could throw out the trash, which was easy enough until I set off the fire alarm throughout the place—not a good look for a room full of senior citizens eating pancakes from white Styrofoam containers. Megan told me to follow her outside for a break and offered me a cigarette.
“Marlboro Red? No thanks, I’m not a rapist,” I offered in return. Megan shrugged and between puffs told me that I could go home early and report at 11:00 AM the next day.
My third day I woke up to dark skies outside and drove into work. All in all, the day started out quietly, and I was stationed in the back. Around lunch time a school bus pulled up and kids started to pour in the doors, on their way to a summer field trip. Megan ran to the kitchen and screamed, “We have a McNugget emergency!” She barked out orders for me to fry up a batch—a task I wasn’t properly briefed on.
I ran in the freezer and tried to find the right bag in the chaos (what kind of degenerate would leave a bag of shredded lettuce in a freezer?) and grabbed a giant paper bag with “MCNUGGETS” in a large black font on the front. I ran to the fryer and looked around, hoping for help on how to work this vat of grease. I could hear the kids, by now inside the place, and I truly panicked.
“Um….Megan? Can you come here?” I yelled, the co-workers too busy in their own chores to help.
Megan came up to me in a huff and looked at me holding the bag in my hands. “What are you, slow?” she said with a sneer. “For god’s sake, Mr. Doctor can’t cook a kid’s meal!”
I ripped open the top of the bag and poured the contents into the fryer, never breaking my stare with Megan. What was once a dark sea of oil--so hot that the surface appeared calm and hypnotic--turned into a raging pit of boiling poultry. The oil rose and pulsed into the overflow tray and my jaw dropped at the instant storm. Megan looked at me with wild eyes and yelled, “What are you doing?”
I looked at her, I looked at the fryer and I closed my eyes for second. When I opened them up I said, “What I’m doing is trying to be a good sport. So. I’m going to go now. And I’m not coming back. Ever.”
I laid my hat down by Megan’s station in the back and as she yelled “You quitter! What about your paycheck?”
“Keep it,” I said, walking to my car. “I don’t really deserve it.”
I started the engine, not moving as the storm rolled in. And so I sat for a few seconds, hating to admit to myself that I couldn’t hack it at a simple summer job and anxious to reinvent myself at college. Eventually I shifted the car into drive and went home in the direction of the storm, blissfully unaware of the long line of Megans that were waiting for me, and smiled.
I too have smelled of "grease and despair" in high school. In fact, that might be how I remember ALL of high school "smelling." Nice work.
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