Main St. Deli

            I’ve always loved the way “Out of Africa” begins: “ I once had a coffee plantation, in Kenya.”   My own version goes like this: “ I once had a deli, in Texas”-not quite as arresting, but it does have a certain ring to it.

            I was in the business with my friend David, who had come up with the concept and found a wealthy backer and dazzled him with spreadsheets and projections, but he had no experience in food service, so he needed me to seal the deal. All of our mutual friends warned me not to go into business with David, but I didn’t listen; I just asked him to please eat breakfast every day so he wouldn’t get wired and weird, but he also didn’t listen.

            Our backer had just sold his software business for millions of dollars, and was blowing it all on Bastrop.  He’d bought a huge, Victorian house and moved his trophy wife in; he backed several downtown businesses besides ours, and his most expensive folly was moving some historical shacks to a more historical location. That project took years, and is all that currently remains of his short-lived empire.

            We took over a former carpet store on Main St. and scavenged dead and dying restaurant equipment from all over town, including one place that looked as if the kitchen had been abandoned in the middle of a shift- it was filthy.  The whole set-up process was arduous and dirty, but after about six weeks, we were ready to open.

            I loved being a small-town businesswoman; loved watching the homecoming parade go by and buying yearbook ads. I learned how to make real chili, and our breakfast tacos were a big hit. We got to know all the local characters, like Sidewalk the dog, and a pair of older twins who refused to speak to one another and would sit facing away from each other on our well-travelled turquoise booths. Every morning I’d leave Austin around sunrise, stopping for bread, bagels and croissants on the way. Working in Bastrop was fine, but I wasn’t about to move there!

            My favorite part of the job was hiring, training and working with our young staff: Kyle, who had a drawl so thick even he couldn’t understand himself sometimes, Terri, who stuffed her over-sized cowboys boots with paper towels and claimed to have cooked in the army, and Dawn, an excellent home cook who aspired to bigger things. She’s the one whose chili recipe I still use.   Teaching them to prep and cook made me decide that even though I’d hated school, I might enjoy teaching.

            The driving and long hours meant that I barely got to see my toddler, so I bailed after a few months.  Soon after, the depressed Texas economy of the mid-eighties made investments in places like Bastrop a losing gamble – one couple I knew walked away from their mortgage, long before that became fashionable. And our backer? Last I heard he had to go back to work as a professor at UT. I never found out if he got to keep his trophy wife.

           

Ben's Kosher Deli

            In 1986, the Texas economy kind of collapsed, and the only people I knew who kept their jobs worked for the government. It was a bad time to be in the restaurant business, which at the time was the only business I knew. I was also a single parent, and rather than stay in Austin and raise my child in poverty, I headed back to the place I had sworn I would never return to:  Long Island.  

            My plan was to finally finish college, attending Adelphi University, where my father’s position as a professor meant free tuition for me.  Teaching people to cook had made me realize that I liked teaching, and it just made sense to aim for having the same schedule that my daughter would have, once she started school herself.   For various reasons, I wasn’t able to start at Adelphi immediately, so I needed a job, and even though I was an experienced chef, I found no kitchen opportunities. Long Island was way behind Austin in that regard, so I had to go back to waitressing.

            Ben’s Kosher Deli is still going strong and is still in the same location. Working there was so stressful that after my first night of training, I took up smoking. The counter guys yelled at me for saying “Please” and “Thank you” to them because “it took too much time”.  The customers, well, it was the North Shore, many were rude, and some of them were people I had gone to school with.  Most of the other waitresses were great people, but knowing them firmed my determination to go back to school. There’s nothing wrong with being a 50-year-old waitress, but it wasn’t for me.

            Before working at Ben’s, I hadn’t eaten a hot dog since I was fifteen and read an article about what was in them, but those grilled Hebrew Nationals were the perfect breakfast. Even now, I almost always include a stop at Ben’s on my tours of the North Shore.  It is still hard for me to decide whether to have brisket or pastrami, even though I know that both are (or at least were) cured in something called “Prague Powder” which is pink and full of nitrates-there were giant sacks of it in the storeroom. 

            What I learned from Ben’s?  To not skimp on foot ware- like one waitress told me, ”your feet are making you money, spend money on your feet.“ To look for a more expensive restaurant next time I needed a waitressing job- it just didn’t make sense to bust one’s ass for such small check totals.  And also to smoke and eat hot dogs- Thanks Ben’s!

Samantha's

            My first waitressing job was at a restaurant called Samantha’s on Decatur St. in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  I got hired because I knew one of the bartenders, but I knew little about waiting tables, and had to learn almost everything the hard way. I didn’t know about balancing a tray, so when I approached my very first table with two large glasses of iced tea, I sent one of them flying across the room when I handed over the other.  A mistake I didn’t make again.

            Samantha’s was in a beautiful old brick building with an antique bar and real gas lanterns  mounted in the walls that  you had to light with a key and torch, just like in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” It was popular with both tourists and locals, so the lunch crowd was lively and the money pretty good.  The kitchen was ruled by a big, brilliant Creole chef named Cecelia whose mission in life was to fatten me up, a project that I wholeheartedly endorsed.  Everything she cooked was delicious, and I ate her bread pudding as often as I could. A single bite of that would probably send me into a sugar overload today. There was also an excellent salad bar; and after nearly starving for several months, I needed those green vegetables.  Restaurant work saved my life.

            Samantha’s was the first place where I experienced how quickly a restaurant job can take over your life. When I wasn’t working there, I was hanging out there; the other waitresses became my friends and I started dating a bartender with a lot of tattoos named Tony.  Tony stole steaks and shrimp and bottles of alcohol- it was also my first exposure to how much theft goes on in the hospitality business.  

            I only worked there for six weeks, but at that point it was the longest I had kept a job. I quit as soon as I had made enough money to get out of town, escaping the Gulf Coast just as the Spring was turning to steamy Summer, in early May, heading north to have Spring all over again.

After-school cooking class

           

            When my daughter was in second grade and I was making a living as a substitute teacher, I was recruited by the PTA to teach an after-school cooking class at her school. I assumed I would be working with the older kids, grades 3-5, but when the flyer came out it listed the age range for the class as  grades k-2. I had no idea what kind of cooking one does with kindergarteners so I called a friend who taught kindergarten for ideas. She had a lot of good suggestions, and I planned to use them all.

            One unforeseen problem in teaching a cooking class at Landing School was that there was no kitchen for us to use, so the PTA president got permission for us to use the teacher’s lounge, which had a stove, on the condition that we cleaned up thoroughly after ourselves. My daughter and her best friend were among the 10 or so kids who signed up for the class.

            First, we made English-muffin pizzas- a success. Pudding painting got a bit messy, but the pudding stayed on the table. The Halloween popcorn balls didn’t stick together, but the carmelized popcorn was delicious.  And then, we made rugalach. The recipe that I have is very labor-intensive, and I figured it would keep those little fingers busy. The dough is rolled out on powdered sugar, and then sprinkled with more powdered sugar before it goes in the oven. It didn’t occur to me that five and six year olds would be unable to stop licking the powder sugar from their fingers, and they would also wipe those sticky fingers all over the chairs. A lot of powdered sugar also made it’s way onto the floor, which was carpeted. When they finally headed home with their little baggies of yummy cookies, I was left with a colossal mess.  The entire teacher’s lounge was thick with a layer of spit and sugar, and soap and water didn't begin to clean it up. I did the best I could, left a note for the custodian and went home.

            It was early the next day that I got a call from the PTA president. Everyone was furious at me. The teachers and the custodian were angry about the condition of the lounge, and she was understandably angry that I made the PTA look bad. The room had to be professionally cleaned by an outside firm, and I have to tell you, they did a great job. Not surprisingly, I was not invited back to teach any more after-school classes, but the lounge looked so great when the pros were finished, a couple of the teachers later thanked me.

Apple-picking

            After camping in the Canadian Rockies, my friend Shawn and I hitched out of the mountains in a rainstorm. Our ride ended at the same time that the rain stopped, which was in Kelowna, BC, nestled in a valley lined with orchards. It seemed the perfect place to enact our plan to make some much-needed cash as migrant laborers. We found our way to the farm labor office to apply for jobs as pickers and blithely made up fake Canadian Social Security numbers as we filled out our applications.  We’d decided to pretend that we were from Toronto, since Shawn had spent some time there and we could fake it.

            I felt like a true hobo as we rode the bus out of town to a crossroads and then walked the rest of the way to the farm, passing squawking geese, ragged children, tumbledown shacks and crate after crate of perfect McIntosh apples. The couple who ran the place, the Masons, showed us to the army tent in their backyard that was to be our home for the next week or two, however long it took to bring in the harvest.  I could tell that we weren’t their usual migrant laborers- they were very solicitous, almost apologetic, that we had to sleep in a smelly old army tent.

            Early the next morning, we all went out picking. The way it is done is that you climb up a three-legged ladder wearing a canvas bag attached to your chest that has a metal frame at the top to keep it open. The bags untie at the bottom, so that after you’ve filled it up, you can easily pour the apples into the bin that you are filling, which is enormous. It didn’t seem possible that those tiny apples could ever fill that much space. Payment is by the bin, so there’s an incentive to pick quickly.

            It was on my very first tree, in my first half-hour of work, that I reached for an apple that I should’ve left alone. It was just out of reach, and no one had told me never to stand on the top rung of a three-legged ladder. I leaned out for the apple, and then I was flying though the air, landing with a splat on my apple-bag. I tried to make a joke, say “Oh no, I made applesauce”, but the words wouldn’t come.

            The next thing I remember we were all in the car on the way to the hospital-I’d broken my right wrist- and I had no idea where we were or who anyone was except Shawn.

            “Where are we?” I asked

            “Kelowna”, Shawn answered nervously. This did not ring any bells.

            “Where’s that?”

            “In the Okanagan Valley?” She tried. I looked out the window at the unfamiliar landscape.

            “Where’s that?”

            Shawn kind of sighed and said, “Pauline, we’re in British Columbia”

            “British Columbia?! We’re in Canada? When did we cross the border?”

            “Oh!” said someone in the front seat, “You’re Americans!”  Poor Shawn; she was so worried that we’d be in trouble for lying, and now her travelling companion was an amnesiac.

            Thanks to Canadian socialized medicine, they set my arm at the hospital, put me in a soft cast for a week, and even though I had worked less than an hour, I was eligible for worker’s compensation, $50 per week.  I spent one slightly sedated night in the hospital, and while I was there the Masons’ invited Shawn to stay in the house in their daughter’s old room, and when they picked me at the hospital the next day, I moved in there too.

            I felt pretty guilty that next week, as Shawn filled bins and I wandered around the orchard and the town waiting to get my hard cast put on.  I arranged to have my Worker’s Comp checks sent to our destinations in California, so at least I’d be contributing down the road. The Masons practically adopted us; we ate dinner with them every night and all were teary-eyed when we rolled on out of there, me with my fresh white cast.

            Then there was then a postal strike in Canada; I didn’t get my Comp. checks for months.

The Texas Memorial Museum

            Probably my favorite job ever was at the Texas Memorial Museum, on the University of Texas campus, a job that featured a grand old building, historical and geological artifacts, and a broad range of job duties, from the most menial to the highly academic.

            I was a student at UT at the time; it was a work-study job. I’d lasted exactly one night doing food service at the student union.  It was fast-food service; I was used to actually cooking, didn’t have a clue about fast food and after squirting pink milkshake all over the floor, I went back to the financial aid office and begged them to find me a different position.

            They sent me over to the TMM. Even though I’d lived in the neighborhood for a couple of years I had never noticed it.  It’s up a grand staircase, past a magnificent statue of galloping mustangs, surrounded by big old trees. Inside, it’s got a classic high-ceiling museum lobby which used to contain a big mosasaur fossil, and of course, a gift shop.

            As a work-study student, I got to help out in every aspect of that museum. Since there was actual research and publishing going on, I got to do some copy-editing and helped with the index of a scientific treatise.  But, I also had to do stuff like stick those little round reinforcements on dozens of volumes of loose-leaf archives. Once a month, each of the students had to wash all the glass in the building, four stories of exhibits, using a chamois cloth and a bucket of ammonia water. We also got to dust the fossils using a special air-puffing brush. I loved telling people that I had a job dusting dinosaurs.

            The most exciting thing that happened there on a regular basis was the arrival of busloads of children from all over the state. There was no Texas History Museum then- some of the artifacts now on display there were at the TMM, making it a required stop on most school trips to the Capital. Usually, they’d want to hit the gift shop immediately, and it was “all hands on deck” -scholars would emerge from their offices to hand out trinkets and make change. It was a pretty great gift shop; I still have mineral samples that I bought there for 50 cents. After the gift shop, the kids would usually head straight up to the third floor to see the shrunken head. The glass was always extra dirty up there.

            The TMM is still going strong, you can go see the mosasaur, which is in the basement now, and they’ve added a model of a 40-ft pteradon. It seems smaller somehow since all the historic exhibits have moved up the street. As its mission has changed over the years, focusing only on the natural history of Texas, it seems that they have put away all the random oddities from around the world. I wonder where that shrunken head is now?

The Golden Slipper

            After my job at the Fairgrounds ended, I was hungry- it was probably the only time in my life I was actually malnourished, living almost entirely on beans, rice, candy and booze. My two housemates were both using their feminine wiles to stay fed, getting men to take them out for dinner, but they couldn’t always bring along a friend, and I just wasn’t comfortable playing that game. Renee’s favorite trick was to pretend to be French and giggle and smile a lot as men from other places bought her drinks and food.

            I don’t know where Renee found Snake, but surely a name like that should have been some kind of a warning.  Snake had just gotten out of “The Pen” and was re-opening his dive on Rampart St, known as the “Golden Slipper”, complete with a yellow neon high-heeled shoe spinning around on the roof. He needed a barmaid and cook; I could sort of cook and was his girlfriend’s friend, so he hired me. He showed me how the fryer worked, and I mostly hoped that no one ordered any food.

            My duties weren’t limited to the bar- one night we “catered” a private party, which meant mixing drinks and opening bottles and lighting cigarettes in someone’s basement in the suburbs while the men gambled. Renee and I even got to blow on the men’s cards for good luck.

            Snake was a crook and a tyrant and I lasted about two weeks before we got in a huge argument and I stormed out in a huff. But I learned an important lesson from that job: to avoid starvation, work where the food is. One of our regulars tended bar himself at a busy restaurant on the opposite end of the Quarter, and he let me use him as a reference, so something good came of it.  Like Scarlett said, I would never be hungry again.