New Orleans Fairgrounds

            My  childhood best friend, Debbie, and I had been separated when my family had moved from NJ to NY when I was twelve years old, but we had stayed fairly close, so I was not totally surprised to bump into her on the streets of New Orleans.  She was just passing through, but decided to stay a while after we’d found each other, so we looked for work together.  Through the transient grapevine, we learned that there were openings over at the Fairgrounds, working with horses.  As this had been Debbie’s childhood dream, we had to check it out, and were hired immediately.

            Our official title was “Hot Walker” (I still have my ID). Our job was to walk the horses around and around the stable to cool them down after the trainer was finished with them.  This may sound easy, but it wasn’t - we were dealing with  thoroughbreds,  and they had plenty of personality. Some would try to bite you, some wouldn’t settle down, and some would just stop walking.  I didn’t trust them at all. We also had to pitch hay, and help get the horses ready on race days. The folks running the show there gave Debbie and me a good-natured hard time about being from New Jersey, especially when we were up to our ankles in horse manure.

            We were supposed to arrive at 5 am and were late every single day.  Every morning I’d wake up at 5 to Debbie banging on my window, every morning  I would insist to Hans that “I quit that job yesterday” and he’d say sternly in his Dutch accent: “You must work” and then I’d wake up and run out the door, so we were always a little late. At the track, I consumed black coffee and doughnuts and Camel cigarettes, like everyone else.  The French Quarter seemed a million miles away from the bucolic sunrise over the stables; it was like a daily trip out to the country, and our quitting time was at about the same time the rest of our friends were just waking up.

            There’s a whole, huge, subculture around horseracing that we just scratched the surface of.  The guys in the stable would gamble on anything-cards and dice when the horses weren’t running.  The racing season starts in New Orleans and then moves up to Hot Springs, AK, so we knew our jobs were temporary, but after a horse that Debbie had been working with won a race, she was bitten hard by the racing bug and suddenly wanted to go on to Hot Springs.  Either the stable owners didn’t believe her or they weren’t willing to wait, because when she got back to the track with her belongings, the entire operation had moved on without her.  She ended up leaving town soon afterwards, and I looked for an indoor job.

           

           

Pahaska Tepee

                  In the summer and fall of 1975, my friend Shawn and I went on an epic hitchhiking trip across the western US and Canada.   We started out from Denver headed north and west with the intention of spending as much time as possible as far away from civilization as possible. The backcountry of Yellowstone offered the vastest and most varied opportunities for getting really, really far away from it all. We had both had a fleeting taste of the place previously and wanted nothing more than to really get to know it.

                  Before we headed into the wilderness, we had a civilized breakfast at one of those all-in-one tourists traps with a café, gift shop, horse rides, and Buffalo Bill’s lodge called “ Pahaska Tepee” near the eastern entrance to the National Park. The waitress was kind to us; a kindred spirit, letting us hang out and drink as much coffee as we wanted. We asked her what it was like working there and she said the manager was very nice and also that there was a lot of turnover, which got us talking about trying to get jobs there after our big hike. That morning we had done some math and realized that we only had $2 each to spend per day, and then promptly blew more than that on breakfast.

                  Getting hired at Pahaska consisted of a brief interview with the manager, who looked deep into our eyes and made us promise to stay until after Labor Day, as it was late August and many of his employees were headed back to college.  Shawn got a job in the coffee shop; she had waited tables before; and I got a job working the cash register in the gift shop. We were given a room in the dormitory, payment for which would be coming out of our meager paychecks, and it was kind of nice to have beds, toilets and electric lights again.

                  It took about half a day to feel right at home at Pahaska. The employees were all young and intriguing, from all over the US and Europe, drawn to the pristine beauty of Yellowstone. My job alternating between being so boring that I’d take out all of the most expensive turquoise jewelry and try it on, just to entertain myself, to being so busy, when tourist busses showed up, that I could barely ring up their absurd purchases fast enough.  I was amazed at the crap people would buy: ashtrays, key chains, and spoons, rocks-anything that said Yellowstone or Buffalo Bill on it. I was even more amazed to learn that when busloads of seniors filled our aisles, they would shoplift this crap!

                  After a hard day of tending tourists, we’d spend some of our earnings at the bar that was part of the Pahaska complex. The irony of this wasn’t lost on any of us, but there was no place else to go. The bar was in the same building as Buffalo Bill’s lodge and was rustic and comfortable and with so many young people from around the world, it was like a party every night, and Shawn and I both found romance.

                  We didn’t stay through Labor Day.  When we woke up one morning to snow on the peaks around us, we decided to cash our paychecks and head for the woods before it got too cold. The mountains were beckoning us. Sorry, nice Mr. Manager.

Selling Flowers in New Orleans

New Orleans Flower Vendor

            I moved down to New Orleans in January, 1975, with a group of friends, based entirely on my friend Eric’s recommendation that it was cheap and happening.  And it was incredibly cheap.  A place to crash on the floor of the Head Inn cost a dollar, and for a mere 15 bucks a week, you could rent a room there. You could get an excellent bowl of red beans and rice for 40 cents at Buster Holmes’ legendary restaurant, and a hamburger with everything cost less than a dollar at the Port o’Call, which had a great juke box.

            Although I had travelled many miles at that point, I hadn’t worked at anything but childcare, so I needed to find a job that required no skills or experience. I managed to land a gig as a street vendor, selling flowers on Royal St. from a colorful cart.  Every afternoon, we vendors would set out over the cobblestones with our buckets of roses and carnations to locations determined by our boss.  My spot was on Royal St. and I was glad it wasn’t Bourbon St- Royal was wild enough.  On Bourbon, folks couldn’t get though the crowds to make a purchase.

            It wasn’t enough to just stand by the cart and look cute; you needed to have a shtick or a gimmick. Being from NY, I harassed people with my catchy rhymes, like “Don’t be sour, buy a flower!” and “Flowers are beautiful, Flowers are fine, Buy some of my flowers, so I can buy wine”. The only vendor who consistently outsold me was Agnes, who was Belgian and had long blond hair and a sexy accent and wore a long, flowing skirt.

            Having a cart to stand by was the best way to watch the pre-Mardi Gras madness of the French Quarter. It gave me an anchor, an excuse to be on the street all evening, and it gave my friends a good rendezvous point. I met all sorts of people by my flower cart, including a Dutch guy who ended up moving in with me. One night as I was standing there, I spotted my childhood best friend from NJ stumbling down the street hanging onto some guy I could tell she’d just met.           

            Our shifts ended at midnight and we’d wheel our carts back from our various locations and collect our pay and often head over to the Café du Monde for some (cheap) chicory coffee and hot, sweet, greasy beignets.   

            The down side of standing by a cart in the French Quarter in the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras was the amount of police brutality I witnessed. On the Saturday night before Mardi Gras, I watched the cops beat a fellow up for no apparent reason, and when he hit the ground next to my cart, I decided that I really didn’t want to be out there any longer.  Despite my boss telling me I was a fool to quit just before the biggest event of the year, my flower-selling career ended that very night.  It was the right choice, because after that the streets became all but impassable with Mardi Gras madness, and I was free to go play in it.

Mikawa Japanese Restaurant

Mikawa  Japanese Restaurant

The very first job I had that wasn’t babysitting was as a shoe check girl in a Japanese restaurant. The owners had spent a lot of money to put in real tatami mat (straw) floors and wanted to protect them from muddy boots and pointy stilettos, so when customers entered they surrendered their shoes and were given a ticket and some paper slippers. We also checked coats when the weather required it.  It was a silly job, but it was part of the atmosphere the owners were trying to create; they’d built a coatroom, so someone had to be there to take the coats. Or the shoes. I got paid a couple of dollars an hour, plus tips.

            Even though I was just a teenager, I could tell that the owners had gone a bit overboard in their pursuit of ambiance. The bar was made out of an actual boat; there were private rooms with siding shogi screen doors, hibachi tables, and a huge banquet room. The owners were a Chinese-American engineer and an Italian-American contractor/carpenter. I don’t know why they decided to open a Japanese restaurant in a shopping center in Oyster Bay, NY, but I am glad that they did. It was the first time most of my friends and I had encountered Japanese cuisine.

            The chefs and waitresses had been brought over from Japan and the tempura chef had been specially recruited as a high master of that art. The waitresses all wore kimonos and obis and those little toe socks and sandals, and I too had to wear a kimono and obi and little toe socks. I never could master those platform sandals they wore, though, so they let me wear Chinese slippers.  In that costume I would pass the hours sitting in the coatroom, reading, writing, and sipping miso soup, which was kept in a big vat just inside the kitchen door, from a teacup.

            What I learned from this job was not to lump all Asian people together, that the Chinese and Japanese had a history that often made them enemies, and that I loved Japanese food. The best part of the evening was after the last customer left and the chefs whipped up dinner for the staff. The men and women ate separately, and I had to learn to use chopsticks in a hurry. Most of the women ate daintily, just a few little bits of this and that, but I was a hungry American teenager and I devoured everything I could get, and it was all good.  The Japanese staff was amazed at my ability to consume- they knew enough English to tell me, and I was too hungry to be embarrassed about it.   I went crazy for daikon pickles and tempura. That chef really was a master, or maybe it’s just because it was my first, but I’ve never tasted better tempura.  The most amazing tidbit they fried up was a kind of fritter made of all the shrimp bits too small to sell, mixed with shredded carrots and onions.  It was like eating a crispy, delicately flavored cloud.

As I write this, I realize it is the second posting that focuses on a little piece of fried shellfish. I don’t think it’s going to be a theme or anything, but if anyone knows where I can get a really good tempura fritter, I’m interested.

            Mikawa stayed open for many years, but I think they ditched the coatroom early on.

A Yeshiva in Queens

 A Yeshiva in Queens

            After a year or two of substitute teaching, I finally got my first “real” job in the education field, at an Orthodox Boys’ Yeshiva in Queens. I was desperate for work, and I guess they were desperate too, since they hired me in August, just a few weeks before the school year was to begin.  My assignment was to teach the entire 2^nd grade curriculum to 18 little boys, between 12:15 and 4:00, after their morning was spent on religious instruction. I was given no guidance, no mentor, and the other 2^nd grade teacher was out sick for the first part of the year, so I was completely on my own. It was, “Here’s the room, the books, the kids. Now-Teach!”

            I shared the room and the desk with a 300 lb. Rabbi who spent the mornings rewarding the boys with candy for their correct answers.  The desk drawers were sticky from Twizzlers and Jolly Ranchers, the boys wound up from a sugar high that had them crashing right about the time I was trying to teach.  There were also additional Hebrew lessons a couple of times a week that further reduced my instructional time, and everyone left early on Fridays.

            One of the things I didn’t know about 2^nd grade was how much of 1^st grade children forget over the summer; I had to teach some of them to read all over again.  This was something I felt unqualified to do, except in the most theoretical way.  I’d done all my student teaching in the sixth grade and had thought I had been clever to get out of doing the required Primary placement, but that experience might have helped. As it was, I just tried not to ruin anybody’s life.  I’d been deeply traumatized by a bad 2^nd grade teacher, so I was very sensitive to their self-esteem issues and gave them plenty of praise, and discovered that I hated doing assessment.  Poor little Eliezer did poorly in science because I did it at the end of the day, and for a seven year old, it was a very long day, and he would fall asleep. How could I give him a bad grade when it wasn’t his fault? This sort of question kept me awake at night.

            The only reason that I was allowed to teach at a boys’ Yeshiva was that there  weren’t enough male teachers, and it was kosher because the boys  hadn’t had their Bar Mitzvahs yet. There was so much I didn’t know about Judaism; I was lucky to have an observant friend who tried to keep me informed about the various rules, observances and holidays. We tried to keep me out of trouble, but it was hard for me to find and wear skirts that went down to the floor, and when I saw another teacher in ¾ sleeves, I figured that it was okay. It may have been for her, but probably wasn’t for me, because she was an established teacher and I was a floundering novice.

            On the very last day of the school year, the principal called me into his office and told me that the person who had filled my position before me would be returning, and that I was being let go.  I was nearly knocked over by my mixed feelings:  Shock- Fired from my first teaching job! Relief- I don’t have to drive to Queens or dress like an Amish woman anymore! Resentment:  with the lack of support I got, I felt that I had been set up for failure. 

            I never taught in an Elementary classroom again. Elementary Libraries, yes, but not the classroom.

            . 

Jake's

Jake’s

            Jake’s was the first job I found when I moved to Austin in 1975.  I’d answered an ad for a Barmaid and was assured that no actual drink-mixing was involved- Jake’s was strictly a beer joint. From the outside, it was an odd shade of green, tucked into an obscure corner of downtown, among the used car lots. From the inside, Jake’s was dark, long and narrow, with a shuffleboard table running the length of the barroom and the sticky vinyl booths arranged along it.  Above the shuffleboard table was a design in pink neon on the ceiling  that brightened the room up a bit. The other distinctive decoration that I remember was a sign that said “Jake’s” made entirely out of interesting pens.  It was a Texas temple to neon, beer and grease.

            The man who ran Jake’s was called Pee Wee, and he lived above the bar with his wife Marie . I felt very lucky that Pee Wee wanted to impress me with  

what an excellent  cook he was.  He fed me my first fried oyster. It was steaming and crisp, contrasting perfectly with his tangy homemade tartar sauce. His fried chicken was so good that my hippie friends would risk bodily harm to obtain some- Jake’s wasn’t the kind of place you saw a lot of long hair in. He tried to get me to try his chicken-fried steak, but that was where I drew the culinary line, back then.

            The waitress who tended the tables while I tended the bar with was a tattooed biker chick- and this was before a lot of women had tattoos. She told me wild stories about her family- her daddy was a preacher and mama was a barrel-rider. Working at Jake’s was my like my personal Texas immersion program.  I liked being a bartender- having the bar between me and the action on the floor made me feel somewhat safe and protected.

            There were mainly two groups that hung out at Jake’s. The afternoon crowd was the quieter set- Government workers and guys from the car lots who’d have a couple of beers and a game or two of shuffleboard before heading off to wherever it was that grown-ups lived.  Later in the evening came the frat boys from UT, including some whose fathers owned those car lots we were surrounded by. Getting drunk at Jake’s was a rite of passage for them and they worked hard to get it right.  The jukebox played “Blue Eyes Cryin in the Rain”, “In Heaven there is no beer” and “Are you  sure Hank done it this way?”

            One afternoon a grizzled patron sat at the bar and issued an order that I could not understand.

“Puh!” he said, “I want a Puh!” I wracked my brains and looked at my selection and decided that he was trying to say “Bud”. I opened a Budwieser and placed it before him.  He looked at it, and me, with utter contempt.

“That’s a Budwieser!”  he sniffed.

“ Well, what did you want?”

“PUH! PUH!”

Finally, the light went on. Oh, Pearl. I’d forgotten about Pearl.  I think probably everyone has forgotten about Pearl.  They tore down Jake’s and really, truly put up a parking lot.

           

My Employment Odyssey

I've been looking for a job for a couple of months, and as I do, I can't help but reflect on all the different sources of income I have had through my life.  So, I've decided to start a blog where I can share stories about my checkered career as I try and figure out the next step.