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.

           

           

Sweetish Hill

            The first place that I lived in Austin was a vegetarian co-op house a couple of blocks from campus, and it was there that I really learned to cook large quantities of food.  When given a choice of chores to do, I always chose more cooking. We all read  Diet for a Small Planet, a book that advocated getting off of the top of the food chain and presented detailed charts and recipes that combined grains and legumes in order to create complete proteins, and many a culinary crime was committed in pursuit of achieving this balance.  My palate will be forever haunted by memories of whole-wheat noodle casseroles, among other atrocities.

            I took this background and used it to get hired at a new French restaurant that had recently opened called P. S. Sweetish Hill.  The owners had first opened up a bakery and sandwich shop over on the East Side, and this new location was to be their full-service restaurant, and the first time, to my knowledge, that haute cuisine came to Austin. Patricia, my boss, had trained in France and, in turn, trained me. Sweetish Hill was my Cordon Bleu, and I learned whatever fundamentals I didn’t already know in that job, cranking out pate, hollandaise, coquille St. Jacques, etc.  We even had to make mayonnaise by hand, with a whisk; Patricia insisted that the texture was so much better that way.  A friend of mine actually got fired for sneaking it into a food processor.

            I worked the night shift, and it was very slow going at first- I was glad that I wasn’t waiting tables, depending on tips. I worked with a woman named Helen who was also new to the trade, and we became good friends. She’d just returned from a long trip through Central America and had wonderful stories to tell.  She was also a strict vegetarian, so I  “had” to taste the scallops and the steak tartare, pretending to be disgusted.

            When they started serving brunch, business finally picked up, and on the weekend nights we’d poach dozens of eggs in advance.  But I didn’t think it would be enough to keep them open, didn’t believe that Austin was ready for haute cuisine.  Fortunately, I was wrong.  When I got back from my own trip to Central America,  many months later, I had to wait in line to get a table for brunch.  All I had to do to continue my culinary career was say that I’d worked at Sweetish Hill, and I was hired immediately.  I kept at it for another decade or so, with breaks for school and travel.

            Sweetish Hill is still open, but they moved to a smaller location and it’s more of a bakery and sandwich shop- as it started out.

The Landing Bakery

            I didn’t realize it when I lived up the hill from it, but the Landing Bakery is a National Treasure; one of the few food venues that I worked in which is still in business and relatively unchanged.  It was started in the late 50’s by a wonderful man named Henry who’d learned how to bake in the Old Country, and his rye bread, rolls, babka and coffee cakes were so perfect that when I first lived in Austin, I’d fill up a suitcase of goodies before heading home –you just couldn’t get bread like that in Austin. For those of you who are reading this wondering what about the layer cakes, the linzer tarts, the giant chocolate chip cookies? I kind of lost my taste for the sweeter stuff when I worked there- having to stack dozens of cookies will do that to you.

            Working at the Landing Bakery was, and probably still is, a rite of passage for girls growing up in the neighborhood known as The Landing.   I didn’t get around to it when I was in high school, but I did end up there after a trip to Europe when I was 22. I didn’t return to the States until I’d spent every last cent that I had, which meant that I was too broke to get back down to Austin right away and needed to find a job in my home town in a hurry.  The bakery was hiring and was in walking distance of my house, so I was glad to get the job.

            I worked the morning shift, which started really early; I’d walk over there in the dark. All of the baking was done by Henry, his son Kevin (who now runs the place), and a guy named Bob who did most of the cake decorating and the teasing of the counter girls. The Kerns had a couple of big dogs, and my favorite was named Fritz, a huge white Shepherd who’d walk me home most afternoons at the end of my shift. You had to keep an eye on Fritz in the bakery because he loved butter; I sometimes wondered if that’s why he was butter-colored.

            When you work in a neighborhood bakery, you really get to know your neighbors, and our regulars taught me how to say hello, goodbye and thank you in Polish, Greek, Czech, Russian and Serbo-Croatian. I learned all about stollen and other Christmas treats; I even helped with the gingerbread houses.

            After I’d saved up enough money, I quit and headed south, just as winter was beginning, as planned. To this day, however, given the opportunity, I will fill my car with Kevin’s  bread, rolls, coffee cake and babka. It’s how you honor a National Treasure.

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.