Tonya's Roadhouse

Some people are very good at getting themselves employed. Naturally there's more to this than simply brandishing a snappy résumé or an efficiency of manner. In high school, I'd marvel at the kids who seemed to secure gainful employment effortlessly, as if through osmosis. H., unsurprisingly, was one of those people. She was a police matron in high school. Police matron? How does that happen?

My theory is that it's their sense of direction: some people know where, as well as how, to look for work. When it comes time for them to find a job, one realizes that they've been laying tracks all along. They've met people along the way; they've noticed possibilities; they've weighed their options.

I'm not one of those people. I've always had enormous difficulty finding work. I chalk this up to a poor sense of direction. This, in fact, is one of the reasons I chose a "career." A career, you see, has a path. All it requires is for you to follow it. But even this has proven something of a challenge.

As a teenager, my method of looking for work was one step short of hoboing. This step, I should add, was fairly substantial: privilege, for one. And a car. So it was really nothing like hoboing at all, save for the chronic waywardness.

Though earnestly keen to sweat and toil, I spent many days driving from local business to local business, knocking on doors. I didn't have a script. "Uh, do you have any openings?" would have been all I'd have said. One of the jobs I eventually landed-- through a temp firm-- involved loading doors onto trucks: in that instance openings were at a premium. Of course, so too were closings.

Despite its almost unerring failure, this practice continued for many years. The result is an employment history that reads like a litany of the banal. My first gig, at age 14, involved "landscaping" for a Texaco station in my town. This involved clearing trees and brush from what I remember to be an exceptionally large and dense swathe of forest. I had poison ivy for weeks.

None of this, of course, had anything to do with food. But the summer following my high school graduation brought about a change of scenery and a new set of businesses to solicit. That summer, I lived on Cape Cod. On a sailboat. Tough times.

The first businesses I called upon were those near Mashpee harbor, a little village halfway between Falmouth and Hyannis. Failing that, I hit up all the shops in the then-developing Mashpee Commons. There was an upscale pizza restaurant in the plaza, in which I felt a glimmer of possibility. No dice. But the idea of working for a restaurant began to take hold, and I started cruising all the local restaurants.

I recall visiting an upscale French restaurant with a name that sounded impressive, but was really only an everyday word translated into French. Let's say it was "Mushroom." I spoke with the owner (or so he claimed) about washing dishes and, at his request, wrote my contact information in the logbook. Next to my name I added my job description: plongeur.

But I was going to college. Surely I could embellish this even further. So I added: extraordinaire. They never called me. This is perfectly understandable: who wants an extraordinary dishwasher? Dishwashing is one of those fields in which ordinariness is an ideal characteristic. Dishes need to be cleaned, not embellished.

But the restaurant idea had now taken on the allure of the inevitable. Just down the road was a sprawling surf n' turf restaurant called Tonya's Roadhouse. It was the first establishment I'd visited in which the service entrance actually brought you near the manager's office. So rather than braving an awkward chain of encounters with prep-cooks, sous-chefs, dishwashers, and stock-deliverers, I walked right in and spoke with the restaurant's manager.

That summer I became a dishwasher. Eventually, I graduated to stocking the salad bar. The following summer, I graduated one step further to fry cook. I learned just enough about working in a kitchen to develop a lifelong complex about it.

Yeah, I was a line cook. But not really.