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.

Not working 9 to 5

This column originally ran in April 2015, but the topic of work and the impact it has on my life have been on my mind recently.

It was an early June morning. The rising sun was burning away the damp from a night of light rain as I made my way down a long gravel driveway meandering through the woods near my house. At the other end of the drive were dozens upon dozens of long, corrugated-roofed sheds that housed thousands of mink.

I was 13 years old and on my way to my first job.

The butterflies that flitted along each side of the road were matched by the ones in my stomach. I was young, but not so young that I didn’t recognize this as a major milestone: the first day of work, a preliminary step down a long road that would fill most of my waking hours until some far-flung day when, luck and genetics willing, I could enjoy a healthy retirement. Just like that, my life was fixed on a course much straighter than the path my feet were following.

The summer before, the man who owned the mink farm — and also the apartments where my family lived — had stopped by to ask my mom if I wanted a job. I didn’t. Instead, I hid in my bedroom and relayed my answer through the closed door.

Afterward, Mom told me it was okay to do nothing for one more summer, but then I had to start doing (ital.) something (end ital.). After all, I would spend the rest of my life working, and I might as well get used to it.

So the next summer, determined not to disappoint a second time, I relayed an affirmative answer through that closed door, donned an old set of clothes and a new pair of boots, and prepared to join the workforce.

It was a dirty, smelly job. Mud and the feces would splash over my boots and ooze down and around my toes. I dragged hoses from shed to shed and filled water troughs three and sometimes four times a day. In between, I poured dry feed into a wheelbarrow and went from shed to shed, pouring pellets from an old coffee can. I made $1.25 an hour.

If the point of the job was to raise my aspirations for something other than manual labor, it worked. I escaped the first summer I turned 16, landing a job in a restaurant where I worked throughout the rest of high school and college. In the last 30 years, I’ve seldom worked fewer than two jobs and have often worked three.

Like most people, I have a love/hate relationship with work. I love what I do, most of the time, but periodically mourn that work takes me from activities like reading and writing that are more enjoyable. (I’m fortunate to have found occupations that allow me to blend avocations and vocations, at least part of the time.)

Almost every day, I make a list on an index card of the work I need to accomplish. I cross off each item with great relish. A successful day is one where I complete everything on the card with enough daylight and energy remaining to do something more pleasurable — go for a run, read a book, or plunk a little on my guitar.

Recently, however, I’ve been taking stock of how much work defines who I am and dictates what I do. I’m a people-pleaser — my greatest strength and weakness — so when somebody gives me a new task, I accept it mostly because I don’t want to disappoint. Seldom do I consider the consequences it will have on my personal time.

It’s not surprising, then, that some of my favorite fictional characters buck the nine-to-five routine. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, hero of seventeen or eighteen wonderful mystery novels, asserts that traditional old age is hardly guaranteed based on actuarial tables, and he therefore takes retirement four and five months at a time, in between cases. Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, from the short story of the same name, one day ceases to copy documents given to him by his boss and eventually ceases any work at all, answering every request with the cryptic line, “I would prefer not to.”

A slightly skewed work ethic has no discernible ill effects on Mr. McGee, but I sadly note that such is not the case for Bartleby. After preferring not to work, he prefers not to be fired and not to leave the premises, forcing his boss to move his entire law practice to a new location. The new tenants have Bartleby arrested as a vagrant and thrown into debtors’ prison, where he dies. (Sorry to spoil the plot of a 162-year-old story.)

Would Bartleby’s life have been markedly better if he’d worked harder, or would he have ended up in a different kind of prison? The text is silent.

What I’m starting to realize, somewhere in the middle third of my work career, is that I want to cross fewer things off my work list each day and more things off my personal list. In other words, I want to be more like Bartleby but with the results of McGee. I’m not sure how to accomplish that, but I think it involves stepping off the path more often and finding my own way through the woods.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter