The Serial Worker

Hoodwink: To deceive or trick. 

Midwesterners, bible beaters, and countless other Holy Rollers have a reputation for giving everyone—most notably solicitors and traveling salesmen—the benefit of the doubt. Trust now, ask about stopping payment on the check later. My lapsed-Catholic mother was no exception, and let anyone who wasn’t an ex-husband into our home. All they had to do was knock. Avon, Amway, Mary Kay—my mother either bought the shit or sold it. Did she need encyclopedias for her children? Why, yes she did! How about a badass vacuum for our rugs? How did they know? Got Jehovah? Well . . . they were always invited in for coffee.

I remember thumbing through piles of Watchtower magazines, wondering why my mother was interested in such an amateurish display of cartooning skills. As far as I knew, Jesus was just a creepy figurehead on Granny Idela’s walls, his holographic eyes always following me around, watching me pick my nose, knowing when I touched myself under the covers. Outside of weddings and Lisa’s and my brief tour of remedial catechism we never went to church (yet were routinely threatened with eternal damnation). When I was a pre-teen a friend’s older sister once asked me if I was a virgin. I actually thought “virgin” was some kind of religion, and so my answer was, “No, I’m Catholic.”

The phony coupon book hoax was one of many sales campaigns traveling through our area that summer of ‘86. Oblivious to any imminent deception, I followed the instructions in the Estherville Daily’s (tiny) Help Wanted section and arrived unannounced at the Palazzo, the motel where I took my first job and still worked occasional shifts. The advertisement said drivers were needed to deliver coupon books. It also mentioned a flexible schedule and tips. Tips? I could hardly believe my luck. I was already working as many hours as possible at McDonald’s in Okoboji in a tardy effort to save for my freshman semester at Iowa State University. I was convinced a job with tips might put the kibosh on my financial worries.

There was definitely something seedy about running a business out of a motel room, and my skin hardened into gooseflesh when I put my hand on the doorknob. I relaxed when I smelled the familiar odors of soiled comforters and neglected carpet, when I saw two beds pushed against a wall unmade. Every head looked up when I entered. I recognized a few housewives, some retirees I’d seen guzzling coffee at the Estherville McDonald’s (free refills for old farts), and my math teacher’s daughter.

“Um, yeah. Hi. I’m here about the delivery position?” It came out as a question even though I’d rehearsed on the drive over. A woman with arms the size of pencils walked out of the bathroom and approached me.

“Hi! I’m Sherry. Did I hear you say you want to deliver?”

“Um, yeah.” I stepped backwards a foot as she leaned into my personal space. Her breath smelled like cigarettes and Crest.

“Okay. Well, as a driver you are in a contracted position so you don’t need to fill out any paperwork. You get $2 for each book you deliver plus ten cents a mile and any tips the customers give you. Does that sound acceptable?”

“I guess so.”

“Alright, just sit down here until we have a run for you.” 

She handed me a map of rural Estherville and I settled into a club chair with oily stains on the arms, careful not to let my skin touch the fabric. I listened as the telemarketers cold-called Estherville residents and sold nearly every one of them a coupon book filled with hundreds of dollars worth of reduced prices and free stuff. Callers were going through the phone book one name at a time, hunting down the penny-pinchers and promising them cheap haircuts and free ice cream cones. The coupon books were sold with unbelievable ease. A tinny voice crackling through a phone’s receiver was all consumers needed to give away their credit card numbers and first born children. Housewives and retirees were snapping up those coupon books like two-for-one boxes of Hamburger Helper.

At last it was my turn to deliver. It was not the paradise I’d expected. I got lost trying to locate the rural residences (every single one of them), and drove up and down miles of dirt road playing connect-the-cornfield at unsafe speeds as I beat on my steering wheel and cried. I quit three hours later. I wasn’t going to waste another minute breathing in dirt and allowing my Le Car to fill with a bouquet of manure each time I opened the window. How in the hell was I supposed to get any tips?

I pulled up to a tiny diner in the middle of a town I never knew existed until that moment. I hopped into a Superman-style phone booth on the side of the building and called the one room office at the Palazzo Motel.

“Listen, um. I, um, have a flat tire? So I’m, uh, not going to be able to finish.” I tried to sound flustered.

“Are you sure you have a flat tire?” was the accusatory response that came from the receiver. Perhaps I wasn’t the first flat tire that day.

“Um, yeah. I called my dad and he’s going to come and change it for me.” I could hear the skinny lady whispering to someone. “Um, yeah. So listen,” I went ahead and interrupted, “I’m not going to be able to come back in so I guess umm . . .”

I pulled the phone away from my mouth and heard her talking as I dropped the receiver into its cradle. I went into the diner, got an ice cream cone, and drove home.

Mildly embarrassed by my flat-tire tale, I never returned to get paid the promised pennies per mile. Instead I kept the coupon books I was supposed to deliver, figuring I was coming out on the good side of the deal since they cost $30 each. What the retailers, the buyers, the telemarketers and I didn’t know at the time was that soon the coupon books weren’t going to be worth the paper they were printed on.

Within a month the majority of Estherville’s shopkeepers, storeowners, and restaurateurs were forced to invalidate the coupons. It was a huge scam in which the retailers took a beating. They’d paid a huge chunk of cash to have a coupon in the books, believing a sales pitch about how it was a sure-fire way to increase business. Only the books were so popular all the hairdressers in town were giving every haircut for free, the dairies were running out of ice cream, and the fast food restaurants were running out of fries.

And I never got any tips.

Tip: A small sum of money given to someone for performing a service; a gratuity.

“Taco pizza?” I said as I peeked inside the cardboard box Lisa brought home from work. Inside was a cold pizza covered with wilted lettuce and shriveled tomatoes. A dozen packets of taco sauce were crammed under the crust.

“It’s totally awesome,” she squealed. “Have a slice.”

“It sounds totally sick!” Cheddar cheese and ground beef belonged on a bun with ketchup, not on a crust. Still, my hesitant nibbles turned into enormous bites, and before long I had eaten half of her dinner.

“Jesus Christ, were you hungry? Don’t they feed you at McDonald’s?”

“Tonight was my last night. I had a cheese Danish.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I love those things.”

“No, I meant did you seriously quit.” 

“Oh, yeah.”

“Really? We need someone to bus tables down at Paul’s.”

“Really? I’ll apply tomorrow.”

And so I did just that, locking in job number ten without missing a day’s pay in the transition. Of course, the only thing I knew about Paul’s Pizza when I signed up for dish duty was that when Lisa came home from her shifts she smelled really bad. She stunk. I never thought to connect the dots and just assumed she was boycotting deodorant again. Turns out it was actually onions, and I’d soon have the same stinky cloud following me around. 

As you might imagine, there is nothing exciting or even interesting about bussing tables, and so in between the stretches of time I spent standing on concrete hunched over a stainless steel sink full of dishes—stretches of time I can accurately trace to the birth of my very first spider veins—I ate pizza. Lots and lots of pizza. I tried every permutation of ingredients, searching for that perfect combination of greasy meat and vegetables.

It was my senior year of high school and I’d completely given up any attempt to live as a culinary ascetic—and had packed on seventy pounds. Let me put that in perspective. I consumed an extra quarter million calories beyond what my body needed—in just under a year. This weight gain coincided with (or perhaps catalyzed) an extremely late burst of physical development. I cleaned tables and washed dishes and had far too many people watching as my body began to bust open at the seams.

“Hey, Sandy! Can you get table ten?” I wiped my hands on my apron and grabbed a bus tub, pausing to look through the smudged circular window. To the left of table ten were a few girls from my senior class; to the right of table ten were some jocks. I pushed open the swinging doors and headed straight to the table, looking into the bus tub so as not to meet anyone’s eyes. I loaded up the dishes and thought I’d gone unnoticed when the table of girls started whispering.

“It looks like someone’s been eating too much pizza.”

“Shut up, she’s standing right there.”

“Oh my god, that is so sad.”

As though on cue, the jocks filled in the balance of my humiliation by laughing and elbowing each other, their snickers punctuated with mooing and oinking. I fought back tears and wiped the remaining sauce from the table before heading for cover in the kitchen. 

If only that experience were an isolated incident. As one of the few bus girls I spent way too much time sweating in that dining room. And Paul’s was always short workers so there was never a break. Not for me. Nor for the pizza makers (which was sometimes me, but not often enough). A handful of shifts were so busy unattended pizzas spilled from the motorized oven onto the floor.

One night in the middle of the madness, Lisa stepped on the end of an industrial mop, causing it to pop up and whack her in the mouth, just like in a cartoon. It bloodied her face and snapped off half a tooth. She was whisked away on a dental emergency (we were all jealous) as pizzas continued to fall like stones.

“Sandy, get over here and help make pizzas! Let’s go! Let’s go!” someone called from the pizza line. I took a towel and followed the bloody path out the back door, then hustled to join the pizza makers, wondering all the while who was going to do the dishes. After a few pies passed my station, the manager starting yelling.

“Sandy! Cheese!”

“Huh?”

“Cheese!”

“What?”

“Cheese!”

“Yeah, I put cheese on them.“

The manager turned to me, exaggerating her annunciation and gesturing with her hands like one of us was deaf (not sure which one, but one of us).

“Please. Go. Get. More. Cheese. Out. Of. The. Cooler.”

Good Lord. She could have said that in the first place. I allowed a moment of fantasy in which I called her a bitch and we rolled around on the floor, me pulling her hair like my sister pulled mine when we fought, then I went into the cooler and stuffed a handful of mozzarella in my mouth. My head was still tipped back when Cheryl the Delivery Girl burst in.

“What are you doing?”

“Um . . .” I swallowed as much of the cheese as I could, choking a bit (my mouth was dry). “I’m refilling the pizza table. Lisa broke a tooth in half so I’m filling in.”

“Can you help me load up my car for the next delivery?” Cheryl stood just inside the cooler door organizing a pile of wrinkled money and checks.

“Do you always carry that much money with you?”

“No, these are my tips.”

“No way! Those are your tips?” There were some fives and tens mixed in with the singles.

“Yeah, some nights I make over fifty bucks. Grab some taco sauces, will you?” Just then my boss flung open the cooler door.

“What the Christ in Hell are you doing in here?” she yelled.

“Um, I was uh . . .”

(Hopeless.)

Eight months, hundreds of bus tubs, and thousands of unneeded calories later, I was hanging out with Lisa while she got ready for the prom I wasn’t invited to. I’d decided to work instead of going stag with all the other dweebs, knowing I’d stand by the wall and be universally ignored. Instead of satin and uncomfortable sandals, I got to squeeze into my requisite polyester slacks and a horizontally-striped shirt that gripped the expanding chest I no longer wanted.

I told Lisa, “I’m thinking of being a delivery driver.”

“Doubt it. For starters, you have to be eighteen. Don’t you know everybody hates the delivery drivers?”

“No. Why’s that?”

“Duh. Because they make tons of money and never have to smell like onions.”

Hated or not, the more I thought about the cash, the faster I filled with Tip Envy. I promised myself I would one day be a delivery driver. I just had to get my hands on some of those tips. Why was I never the one to get tips? Where were my tips?

“Are you going to stop by the dance later?” Lisa’s voice tugged me from my reverie.

“Yeah, right. I’ll just swing by at midnight when I smell like Farmer Dan’s onion fields.”

“Okay!” Lisa shouted over the blow dryer, her feathered blonde hair shielding her eyes from my envious stare. I reached up and shoved a handful of frizzy curls behind an ear.

To say I was happy to be finished with high school is an understatement. I quit working at Paul’s Pizza as soon as I tore off my tissue paper gown, then immediately signed on for a second summer at McDonald’s in Okoboji. Lisa was nary a shadow behind me. Finally, we’d be free of the tang of onions.

It was far better smelling like French fries.

Legend: a collection of stories about an admirable person or a person who is the center of such stories.

My mother became manager of the Estherville McDonald’s after paying her dues as a burger flipper, salad maker, and super-speedy biscuit baker. It never crossed our minds to be discomfited by her fast food career, as she was always quick to remind that “a job is just a job,” and to be being completely honest, Mom was the fastest burger flipper and biscuit baker west of the Mississippi. I was far more embarrassed as a sixth grader when she worked at the beef packing plant—and that wasn’t because of what she did, but because of her blood-soaked clothing and the pieces of flesh clinging to her bib overalls at day’s end.

After work she’d retrieve us from school in our copper Ford pickup, then drag us into the grocery store bloody clothes and all, opening a carton of cigarettes and smoking through the aisles, lightly quashing her butt out on the floor then quickly lighting another. Sometimes she’d poke a finger in her nose and crank her arm a good turn or two when I looked in her direction. Then, for extra effect, she’d pretend to deposit the tiny payload in a seam of her overalls, hee-hawing at how horrified I was by her behavior. Sixth graders are fragile, and it didn’t help that my mother has never been bound by social convention. 

In September of ’85 my mother suggested I work for her at the Estherville McDonald’s, as it was impractical commuting to the McDonald’s in Okoboji once school had started. I said yes when she promised a raise to the tune of $3.85 an hour, though it seemed a foreseeable nightmare switching to a small town McDonald’s after a summer working in Okoboji. At the Okoboji McDonald’s at least six crewmembers and as many as three assistant managers closed the store on weekends. Plus, I didn’t know many of the customers; most were tourists and drunken boaters.

Now I would be working in Estherville, where it was just one employee and one assistant manager closing a store with twice the square footage. And instead of vacationing strangers, the customers were my classmates, friends, and relatives. I would also be working with my mother—the legendary Pam Breiner. Everyone loved working with her. Not only did she sport trendy hairstyles (at the time it was short with the top half platinum and the lower half her natural black—the skunk, I think it was called), but she laughed constantly, swore under her breath, was compassionate to a fault, and yelled “Oopy!” whenever she farted—which was often.

(A short aside: In regards to Mom’s relentless gastrointestinal output, my younger sister Charity said to me just last week: “Farting—I think it leaked out of Mom when she died, and went into us, her mad farts. I bent over to put clothes in the dryer the other day, and out, totally spontaneously, flew one of Mom’s “quacker” farts, and I actually looked around like, where the hell did that . . . Oh my God, that was from ME?!?) 

Working with my mother was a traumatic fusion of pride and humiliation, though I never displayed either emotion, I was too busy trying to impress her by forcing my face into an “I love working” mask and resisting the urge to whine. Mom had long before taught us to value employment (or at least the necessity of it for existence). We couldn’t always count on dinner or domicile, but we could count on Mom headed off to work in a frenzy, a genuine smile on her face, returning with an exhaustive plop in a tattered chair for a cigarette, a sense of satisfaction knowing a job was well done. I both respected and loathed her zealous work ethic—it was a tremendous burden to labor at her caliber, and a tragic reminder that hard work sometimes gets you nowhere. Look where it got her.

Serving the Estherville McDonald’s endless stream of customers practically on my own proved exhausting. To sustain myself during nightshifts, I’d sneak into the cooler and stuff an entire cheese Danish in my mouth. Too often I’d be found and hurried along to deal with a rush, with no time to wipe the icing from the corners of my mouth. A dozen cars would be beeping for window service and there would be a line at every register, even the ones clearly marked closed. Having so recently been a drive-thru superstar in Okoboji, I was frustrated by the inability to demonstrate my fast food skill set under these circumstances, and was constantly filled with bad worker shame. I desperately wanted to give jobs my all, far beyond their ability to give back. In doing so, I knew I wouldn’t feel bad if I filched or left on short notice.

It became clear my days were numbered when I tried to cut myself a short month after I’d started. The plan was to slice my thumb, then arrive at work and show the open wound to the manager on duty and ask, “Does this need stitches?” Then I’d be hustled off to the doctor and not have to work my shift. Seriously, it sucked that much. I locked myself in our upstairs bathroom and tied a bandana around my left thumb, tourniquet-style, and waited until it was bright purple and tingly. I held it under running water and started slowly etching into my thumb, trying to envision a quick and painless whack into the bulging skin. It would split open; a yawning hole relieved of pressure, splaying out to reveal those hidden layers underneath.

Resting on my elbows, I scraped the blade back and forth, casually wondering if this particular activity might warrant a trip to crazy town. In the end, a simple lack of courage prevented me from joining the ranks of self-mutilators that day. I couldn’t bring myself to bring the blade down hard. I could barely filet a callus. So I gave up the butcher project and went in for what I decided was my last shift. I knew Mom would understand. My imminent exit was a lovely little secret . . .

That night I ate my cheese Danish outside the cooler.