I was twenty-eight years old and badly in need of a beer after an interview for a photo-processing order taker conducted by a balding man with beady little eyes and a rodent wide grin.

I was hot, feeling small as I drove to a local bar, thinking that I hadn’t really wanted to work in one of those instamatic-sized boxes, taking people’s film, stuffing it into envelopes, tearing off stubs and saying “Have a good day,” chimpanzee-style for eight hours a day anyway. It was work for high school kids and aging housewives who’d never worked a day in their lives.

I saw the HELP WANTED sign out of the corner of my eye as I walked into Rudy’s Stop On Inn for a beer or three to calm myself down. After a couple I was still fuming about all the interviews I’d gone through in the last couple of weeks. They were usually conducted by mindless sadists. And there’d been the polygraphs. There’d been three of those tests in three little white rooms. Apparently the only persons qualified to administer them were well-trained ex-Nazis whose teeth all glowed metallic as they smiled and strapped you up to the machines that each of them, secretly wished would produce searing currents of electricity rather than merely a bunch of jagged lines evidencing physiological responses to various yes-no questions.

Do you take illicit drugs of any kind?
What do you consider illicit?
Anything illegal. Just answer the question, please, or we’ll have to start all over again.
That would be a shame.
Now, I’ll repeat the question one more time. Just answer yes or no. Do you now or have you ever taken illicit drugs of any kind?
No. (The tracing needle would jump a little on this one but not enough to worry about.)
Do you drink more than two six-packs of beer a week?
No. (The needle would jump a little more on this one but I was still safe.)
Did you ever steal anything other than the pencil you told me about that you accidentally put in your pocket on the way home from work in the drugstore in 1973?
No. (The tracing needle would go crazy and I would be out of a job.)

I’d stolen quite a few things as a kid but wasn’t about to admit it all now. It hadn’t ever been anything big. Just candy, cassette tapes, beer, one of every kind of rubber made, which I’d never used...it was the stuff of adolescence in the suburbs of Chicago.
And there were the fishing lures.

As a kid it was a challenge to go into the E.J. Korvettes store, a place that was hooked up these revolving video cameras that hung from the ceiling at strategically calculated intervals, and stick three or four fishing lures in my pocket when the camera wasn’t looking, then, turn around and walk right out of the store. It made me feel like I’d beaten the system. I’d beaten the guys who’d stared at you Big Brother-style while I roamed through their store.

It made a kid proud.

But I’d outgrown those days and it was pretty humiliating to have to list everything I’d ever stolen as a brat just to get a crummy two-bit job. And, even if you did make a list, there’d always be something you’d forget and then remember as they’d ask the question again and the machine would go wild, the Nazi’s metal glowing in his canine smile and you’d be out of a job, simple as that. What employer in his right mind would hire a guy who’d admitted stealing as much as I had, anyway?

So, you didn’t tell them and saved a little pride while losing a job. I’d lost some pretty good paying jobs for pride’s sake. But, after a while, I just figured if they wouldn’t judge me for what I was now and not for the mistakes I’d made as a kid then they didn’t really deserve me.

It was a couple of beers later and I was feeling pretty good again. Back to my old self. I remembered the HELP WANTED sign in the window and thought, what the hell, I’d give it one more try. What did I have to lose?

I went right up to a guy who looked like the manager. They’re easy to spot — they’re the ones who always stand around doing nothing.

“You Rudy?” I asked. “I’m looking for a job.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m William Rodgers.”
“Sorry, I was looking for Rudy.” I took a long slug from the beer bottle and, after looking at the deadpan, bespectacled face before me for a few moments, feeling for all the children whose parents imposed tragedies on them, said, “Will Rodgers. Your parents sure had some sense of humor.”

He stared at me sadly, tired of the jokes I imagine, gazing out at the restaurant where John Joneses and Sam Smiths quietly drank their beers in peace. “There is no Rudy. That’s just the name of the place.”
“Some gimmick.”
“So you need a job, huh?”
I felt like I was talking to a mirror.
“What can you do?”
“Drink beer. Maybe do a little song and dance; for an extra buck or two I get up on the tables, but absolutely, positively no windows.”

The man reached under the counter and produced an application. His expression had not changed. “Fill this out,” he said, shoving a pencil toward me, the name of the bar inscribed on it. Then William disappeared in the back somewhere.

The pencil had no point. I asked a waitress to get me a pencil or Mr. Rodgers. She produced neither. I sat down at a table and polished off a couple more beers. When Rodgers came out I was bleary-eyed.

“All set?” he asked.
“I haven’t filled out the application yet. No point to this Rudy’s Stop On Inn writing utensil.”
“That’s okay. Can you start tonight?”
“Start what?”
“Working at the door, checking ID’s, keeping the kids out, that sort of thing. It’s real simple. Most of the time you just stand there against the wall, watching the band play.”
“How much do I make?”
“Well, only minimum, but if you’re interested in getting into our management program, it’s an excellent place to start. Let me tell you a little about....”
“Not interested. What time tonight?”

I began the next morning.

It wasn’t much of a job. There were a couple of younger guys in the kitchen making sandwiches on these big steel trays, cutting up different types of processed meats with an electric slicer. I was issued a white apron and a little white paper hat. Then they gave me the broom. I had to go through the whole bar and sweep up all the crap the drunks had dropped on the floor the night before. I’d do my sweeping, occasionally finding a quarter, a dime, a nickel. I kept my eyes open for tens and twenties but they never showed up. Sometimes a pretty girl would walk by the windows and I’d take a break to watch. Even if I’d given up being with women, they were still nice to look at.

After a quick mop job and after checking out the johns to see what atrocities had been left on the floors from the night before, I was back in the kitchen, helping out with the sandwiches, and setting things up for the lunch rush.

There were these little scales you weighed the meat on. They looked like cheap postage scales, the kind you buy in the drugstore. You were to put only four ounces of meat on a sandwich. Sometimes, I was told, the bosses would come back and double check the weights. They’d have tantrums if there were over four ounces of meat on a bun. Against company policy, you know.

The bosses didn’t know it, but while their eyes were focused on profits and promotions, they were probably doing their customers a favor. Some of the meat had a distinct iodine smell to it, the natural smell of decay. I seriously doubted that anyone could eat more than four ounces of some of that meat and leave the restaurant without a stretcher. Not to say that anyone would be able to tell the stuff was rotten when they ate it with all the lettuce and tomato and fresh dressing plopped on top of it.

The lettuce was also camouflaged. Or transformed. I was told to rinse the brown stuff with potato starch. Three or four soakings and voila, the stuff almost looked fresh again. It was green but tasted like hell. Occasionally salads would come back with the customers’ complaints that the lettuce just didn’t taste right. If that happened, you’d give them some of the new lettuce that was kept in the back of the cooler. Otherwise you’d stick a few slices of old meat on the hill of lettuce, shove a couple of overripe cherry tomatoes into its side and then smother the whole thing with croutons and dressing to hide the bitter taste of potato starch.

Besides the quality of the food and the low pay, the job wasn’t so bad. You saved money on food due to a loss of appetite from all the bad food and by stuffing yourself on the good stuff, the safe stuff, while the manager wasn’t around. All the guys did it.

Once Roseanne walked into the kitchen just as I was shoving a corn chip into my mouth. She blew up at me and wrote something down on a pad of paper, then tore off the slip and handed it to me.

“I’m giving you a written warning. One more time and you’re automatically terminated.” It sounded serious. She stared at me with those cold marble eyes of hers, then walked out of the kitchen with a small, sadistic smile on her face.

At the lunch rush, each of us got our own stations. There were four of us. One guy would make nachos all afternoon, scooping chips out, throwing a few jalapeno slices on them and ladling some artificial cheese sauce over them. Another guy would just make salads and usually there’d be a couple of guys making sandwiches, taking them off the tin trays, dressing them and popping them into the microwave for thirty seconds.

Lunch was the only busy time. The tickets would come flying back to the kitchen, and all of us would make our mechanical motions which were never quite quick enough for Roseanne. Occasionally the whole machine-like order would fall apart when a waitress came back to bitch about getting a wrong order or getting only one pickle spear instead of two. It got on your nerves real fast, all these college girls whining about everything because even though their tips depended to a great extent on how we sent out the orders, we didn’t get any part of those tips, so why should we care?

The only one who really did care was Tom, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who aspired to be a rock guitarist but would never make it — he was too clean. Tom had been working in the sweatshop for two years. He’d been rewarded for his loyalty with 25 cents in raises and the honorary title of Kitchen Manager, which just meant he had to work harder and longer for under four dollars an hour.

When the waitresses came back to the kitchen crying, Tom would talk to them softly and see what had happened. He’d calm them down, fix their orders, get them fresh lettuce, whatever it took. While he worked at being nice to the waitresses, he didn’t seem to see that they all looked down their noses at the kitchen crew. Most of them were sorority girls making a little extra cash. What did they want to mess around with dishwashers and pot scrubbers for? After a couple of weeks I got the feeling that all of them considered their jobs only temporary until their princes arrived and sat at one of the tables in their sections and pulled this slipper, this magnificent glass slipper, out of their alligator skin briefcases.

There were exceptions though.

Roseanne liked to play games with the guys. She could be a supreme bitch when she wanted to, but if you played along with her she’d let up some. She’d come up to you at the end of the day and wrap her arms around you, with a little moony smile, telling you she wanted to be friends, and you knew what that meant, and knew also that no job in the world was worth that, as she crooned in her uncharacteristically soft voice, “How ‘bout taking Rosie for a little drinkee poo?”

Roseanne, being a lonely sort, did this to every male employee she could get her hands on. Amazingly, some of them went along with her...for the drink at least. They didn’t like to work their asses to the bone for a lousy $3.25 an hour.

Roseanne was not an attractive woman. She had a baggy, saggy backside, a face that was badly scarred from adolescence and long stringy black hair. In her purse she kept a ready supply of bats’ wings and cats’ tails.

She’d make me do things twice or three times that needed to be done only once. She’d make me wash the ceiling and the windows Any little dirty job she could conjure up I’d get stuck with.

She must have really been mad for me.

And I, I had it real bad for Jackie. After that night of almost-confessions and Margaritas, she’d been very nice to me, coming back to chat with me whenever she could, carefully avoiding any of the things we’d talked about that night. Roseanne saw the two of us chatting in the back and started to push Jackie extra hard. After a while Jackie’s visits were not so much to exchange a few pleasant words as to escape Roseanne’s wrath and blow off some steam.

In short time Roseanne had ruled the kitchen off limits to the waitresses when they weren’t getting orders. This didn’t go over very well with the guys in the back. Seeing the girls every now and then made for a much happier ship.

I went up to Tom.

“Tom, we gotta do something about that bitch.”
Tom put his finger to his lip. “Shh! Not so loud. Are you crazy? She could be coming back here any second!”
“I don’t give a shit when she comes back here! Now listen, Tom...”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Well, you are the kitchen manager. Go to Rodgers about it. What are you afraid of? You afraid you’ll miss a nickel raise in 1984?”
Tom was staring at his Hush Puppies.
“Why do you guys put up with it? I don’t get it. Do you know she made me wash the same dishes three times this morning just because she found a hair on one of the glasses? A black hair, too. If I was you, man, I’d go out and find real jobs, where they don’t push you around like you’re a little speck of dirt.”

Tom looked close to tears. He was too soft for his own good. A buddy of his, Shawn, who had just started working there came to his aid.

“What the hell do you know about it, Tyler? You’re a big talker, but you’re working here too, aren’t you? You know how tough it is to get a job in a college town like this when you haven’t even graduated high school? When everybody at college is looking for bread and the locals pay the wetbacks a dollar an hour for sixty hours a week and they still keep smiling? Sure, it’s easy for you. You been to college. But you’re just gonna wind up an old bum like my old man was. But not us, Tyler, not me.”

I looked into Shawn’s raging eyes. I felt calm. I didn’t feel sorry for him. I’d worked at more jobs than he had years. Bad jobs too. Like the twelve hour days at the cat food factory, packing little boxes into cartons, never being able to slow down or the shoots would overflow, and you’d have cat food all over the floor. Twelve hours of being a piece of a machine and not one English voice to talk with.

But even that wasn’t bad compared to what could really happen to you. I had gone to one or two interviews dressed in my brother’s gray three piece. I’d played the role of energetic young go-getter but then after two days on the job I’d stripped off the tie. I wasn’t ready to donate my soul to the Corporation; I wasn’t fool enough to rip my heart out and send it special delivery to the CEO of the Corp., all the while singing a continuous Muzak drone to myself while I smiled and blinked.

I was a different kind of fool. Creditors didn’t own me, mortgage people didn’t own me. They could kick me around a bit, and they had, but I didn’t have to stand there and take it. My life wasn’t neatly filed and sewn up in their banks or computer files.
I wasn’t that kind of fool. But what kind of fool was I?

“You’re gonna be a bum just like my old man, lying in the gutter by the time you’re forty, begging for a quarter, for another bottle. Wait and see. But I’m gonna be something.”

I looked back at the boy, nodding at him and smiling. “You’re right, Shawn. You’ve got your head on straight. Grab on to what you got and don’t let ‘em take it away from you. Hang on tight to it and squeeze. But it’ll be your own neck you’re squeezing and you won’t even know it till there’s hardly any air left to get through.”

He looked at me like I was nuts. He didn’t understand, but he had an excuse. He was only nineteen.

After work I knocked on Rodgers’ door. He seemed to be in good spirits as he counted the afternoon’s take.
“What can I do for you, Martin? How’re things doing in the kitchen?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s Roseanne.”
“What about her?”
“She’s a hard ass bitch, that’s what. You’re going to lose some good people because of her.” I stared at the bills as he counted. They were hundreds.
“There’s nothing I can do about it, Martin. It’s out of my hands.”
“What do you mean, out of your hands? You’re the manager here, right?”
“Not after tonight.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear? They’re transferring me to Corpus. Tonight’s my last night. They’re sending a new assistant out here, but Roseanne will be your new manager.” Rodgers didn’t look up, but continued to count the money. I stuck out my hand. “Congratulations, Will.” I didn’t dislike him that much. After all, he’d gotten me the job there and he’d saved my job once, whatever that was worth. He looked up at me and smiled.
“You know something, Martin? I’m going to miss this place. God knows why. I guess a place just grows on you.” Sort of like sores on your privates, I thought. He looked about ready to cry. Then he snapped out of it and walked back to the green metal cabinet behind him. “Here, I know they’re in here somewhere...”

I didn’t know why but suddenly I was sick to my stomach with the smell of nine years of dirty dishes, the thought of all the authoritarian little nothings playing soldiers in their dirty little jobs, kicking people below them to make their lives seem a little more important, to make the company its profits. I was heartsick for Jackie and for all the women I’d had and had let slip away. For all the women I knew I’d never have. I was tired of the cheap, roach-ridden apartments, the paper thin walls, the loud music pounding through those walls at all hours of the night, the treeless streets where I always wound up living in cities full of trees. And there were the cracks. It always seemed funny to me that whenever the paper reported that the city crews were out fixing the cracks in the streets somehow they never got to my street, where the real cracks were and where the real cracks remained.

It made you real mad.

I stared at the stack of hundreds, just sitting there waiting to be grabbed, to be stuffed in my pocket — how many cracks would that fill? — just as Will Rodgers turned back around.

“Here they are.” He was smiling again. He was reaching toward me, holding a cigar in his pudgy hand. I wondered if it was loaded. I imagined him drawling, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” And, I imagined it was probably true.

I grabbed the cigar, gave my thanks, and closed the door on William Rodgers.