Summertime--And the Living is...Brutal!

Hope you’re keeping cool in here, I said as the teen girl handed my dry cleaning over the counter.

Not really, she said. They won’t let us turn on the air conditioning anymore.

My first inclination was to think of her boss as sadistic, brutal, and mean. Then I remembered the new taxes which had just kicked in, causing business owners statewide to turn off air conditioning and trim costs wherever they could.

I also started thinking back to some of the summer jobs I had when I was the same age as that young lady.

I remember my dad coming home one evening and telling me there was a Help Wanted sign downtown in a local pizza shop.

You should apply, he said.

I knew next to nothing about filling out job applications and even less about making pizza. Still he was my dad and he told me to go downtown and apply for a job, so I did.

The pizza shop was run by a Greek family, some of whom spoke no English. It took me weeks to figure out who was married to whom and how each was related to the other. The owner sat in the dining area and chain smoked. He said little, but often stared at me with his dark, scary, Greek eyes as I was trying to figure out how to do my job.

I was trained by a college student whose boyfriend delivered takeout orders to the nearby campus. She taught me how many slices of pepperoni to place on each pizza and the correct number of meat slices to fill a grinder. My trainer seemed to find perverse pleasure in pointing out everything I got wrong, grabbing orders from my hands, huffing and saying, How many times have I shown you how to do this? I overheard her asking the owner how she was doing in training me, assuring him she was being especially mean to make sure I got it right. Several weeks later, she and her boyfriend were fired when the owner realized they were skimming money off delivery sales.

Although air-conditioned, the heat in the pizza shop was brutal. With my back turned toward industrial-sized pizza ovens, the air conditioning provided little relief. Usually only one oven was fired up at a time, unless there was a special event in town or on campus and we knew demand would be heavy. The town’s local street fair was one such event, and it usually fell during the hottest week of the summer. I remember emptying one of the ovens, filled with searing hot pans full of pizza, just as a crazed, knife-wielding street fair patron chased a woman into the shop, past the ovens, through the kitchen, and out the back door.

I did all of these things for less than minimum wage, paid in cash.

Being Greek, the shops owners celebrated a number of Orthodox Christian holidays. I worked alone the weekend of Orthodox Easter as the family observed the holiday. Running low on pepperoni, I went down to the basement freezer to get more. As I opened the freezer door, I found the two blue eyes of a goat’s head staring directly back at me.

I guess goat is a traditional Eastern Orthodox holiday entrée.

Gradually, I got to know the owner and his wife. I worked hard, and they became friendly. The wife and I usually split a pizza during each of my shifts. She joked with me about my high school boyfriend being one of their best customers during that summer, referring to him as “Mr. Pizza.”

I trained another teen girl to take my place before I left for college in the fall, trying very hard not to frighten her. I knew the owner’s dark stare would be intimidating enough. When I came home from school on break, I always stopped by and ordered a pizza or ham grinder for old times’ sake. My pizza shop served the best pizza in town.

The shop has been gone for a number of years now; it burned down when the hot dog shop next door caught fire which spread.

My son has a job this summer, mowing a hayfield in the blazing heat. I think about him and I think about the young woman working without air conditioning at the dry cleaner’s. I smile and give thanks that I’m not a teenager anymore.

But every time I make a pizza, I count the pieces of pepperoni as I place them.

Next week: Cleaning the beauty salon

(Just for fun, I’ve decided to spend a couple of summer Fridays reflecting on jobs I had as a teenager. How about you? Any fun summer job stories you’d like to share? Any you’d like to forget?)