Memories of a 'muscle-seller'

I was talking over the weekend with a former co-worker who made an intriguing observation: Short-order cooking was one of the hardest jobs he’s ever had.

I thought about that for awhile. He and I worked together at Ponderosa Steakhouse decades ago, when Alliance had fewer restaurants, especially of the chain variety. With limited choices for steak along State Street, customers often ended up in one of two places: Bonanza on the west side, Ponderosa on the east.

Consequently, both restaurants were busy. At Ponderosa, it wasn’t uncommon to have a line of customers stretching from the cash register to the sidewalk outside.

Cooking shifts were marked by intense heat and cramped space. Above our heads fluttered a line of handwritten slips for T-bones, porterhouses, ribeyes and a handful of other cuts, all ordered to various degrees of doneness. (Medium rare, by the way, is meat the way nature intended. Other donenesses are either too bloody or too scorched.)

Ours was sweaty work with a quick turnaround. Customers had to have their meals delivered 12 minutes after they ordered it. Otherwise, they would gobble up too many profits from the all-you-could-eat salad buffet, sending the bean counters’ heads spinning.

I don’t disagree that short-order cooking is hard, but it is also satisfying in a way that almost no other job I’ve had since has been. This is because no matter how hot and sticky the shift, when it was over, it was really over.

I never went home agonizing that I’d ruined somebody’s meal. If I did, it was fixed on the spot with a new steak or a refund.

I never went home concerned about the next day. Somebody else was responsible for ordering food and supplies and creating the schedule. Those were their worries, not mine.

I never went home feeling like I needed to practice. Short-order cooking can be overwhelming, with hundreds of dollars of meat sizzling away at one time, but the mechanics are simple — flip, turn, flip, remove — with just enough nuance to keep it interesting.

As one moves further along in a career, regardless of the field, a consequence is a dwindling sense of freedom at the end of the day. When I was in sales, I was constantly agonizing over the next presentation, an occupational hazard of the profession. As a teacher, I’m always pondering lessons to improve and papers to grade. Even in the summer, when teachers allegedly work less – although I’ve seldom met such creatures, as most of us are still schlepping away at one job or another in the warm-weather months – I can’t turn it completely off.

From such standpoints, then, short-order cooking was one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had. Not that I could still do it physically today, in my mid-50s, with the same reckless abandon.

Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrated this in “Nickel and Dimed,” the chronicle of her attempt to wind back the clock in middle age and work for both the same wages and at the same level of physicality as many in the hospitality industry.

She describes her brief waitressing experience as “the perfect storm” of filled tables and demanding customers, the particulars of the shift “lost in the fog of war.” She eventually walks out of a job in the middle of a shift, feeling “an overwhelming dank sense of failure.”

Another American writer, Jack London, reached a similar conclusion earlier in the 20thcentury when he wrote about “the colossal edifice of society,” with laborers at the bottom, offering “muscle, and muscle alone, to sell,” and “brain sellers” at the top. In the middle was a vast population of merchants, politicians and representatives of the people, selling footwear, manhood and trust, respectively.

“Shoes and trust and honor had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable stocks,” wrote London. “Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew.” He was disillusioned early in life by his attempts to scale the tower of capitalism through physical work alone (a common lament even today) and eventually turned to study. And then to socialism. Coincidentally, Ehrenreich, too, is a socialist.

I’m still mired in capitalism, myself, having experienced no London-like epiphany from my few years as a muscle seller.

All I can say is that I respect the hell out of all people who make their living through physical labor. If one small fringe benefit is to turn off thoughts of the workday from one shift to the next, then nobody should begrudge them.

My guess, however, is most workers don’t have that luxury, that plenty of other concerns rise to the forefront. My recollections of a carefree life as a so-called muscle seller likely stem from my age at the time. The biggest concern I had in my late teens was filling the gas tank and having money left over for concert tickets.

That cloud over the grill is more than just smoke and heat. Some of it is the haze of nostalgia.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.