Real World Jobs

I have written here about my childhood work in the berry and bean fields of the Willamette Valley. But the fields were not my lone source of spending money every year. The harvest season lasted from June to the beginning of the next school year in early September, which left me seven months of free time to find other jobs to contribute to the scarce income my mother and I received from Social Security, benefits paid to us in the name of my deceased father. One should not wonder why my mother then was an old- school Democrat and Progressive Era sympathizer.

The New Deal saved America, despite what we hear these days from backward thinking Republicans and other reactionaries who would love to see the clock turned back on progressivism in general and the New Deal in particular. Without Social Security my mother and I would have been homeless and likely died. That is not an exaggeration.

The Bush administration's scheme to privatize Social Security in 2005 met a well-justified and quick death. If you need a barometer of how far out of touch Dubya was, think about that. Of the many asinine ideas he dreamed up, that one was perhaps the most asinine of all. I had to applaud the American people at the time. They effectively stuffed a sock in Dubya's mouth for once and spoke in his stead.

I had a paper route when I was a kid, but not the conventional kind. I sold Grit door to door, earning ten cents per fifty-cent sale. The newspaper/magazine was published weekly and my stack was delivered to my house on Saturday mornings. Weekends, I would hit the neighborhood hard selling in a long and wide sweep of the area around Langmack Airport, where many middle-class families lived. By scouring the area with my papers in a heavy-canvass tote with Grit lettered on it in bright, bold red, I managed to build a regular clientele. I became adept at picking the right house to approach for a sale. I looked at the front lawn first. If it was green, well-kept, manicured to perfection, clean and fresh, I'd approach the house and ring the doorbell. Generally, the woman of the house would answer the door and look at me like I was the cutest thing in the world, which I may have been.

"Grit, ma'am?" I'd say.
"Of course," she'd say, and I'd pull a Grit out of the bag, pass it to her, open my palm, and take the money. At times it was ridiculously easy, but at other times I guessed wrong. I had my share of contemptuous assholes to deal with, like we all do.

I made decent cash every weekend, enough to buy a steady diet of junk food and the magazines I favored, including hunting and fishing publications, hot rod magazines, Mad, and an assortment of teen music magazines that I would read to learn the lyrics of popular songs, especially the ones I heard on the radio by the Rolling Stones, whom I could never quite decipher without the text in front of me as I listened. Many people loathed the Stones because Mick mumbled when singing. I just looked the songs up to figure out what he was saying and then tried to sing along. I must say I was often surprised by what I read and how it juxtaposed with my first impressions of the lyrics.

Such is art.

I submitted my own lyrics to the magazines--they were always having "contests." Inevitably a letter would come saying I had real songwriting talent and that for a mere $50 I could have my lyrics published and presented to the stars and possibly have them sung on a record. My mother nixed the idea, of course, which didn't bother me at all because I knew a scam when I heard one. I think I took pleasure in resubmitting one song after another, always receiving a variation of the same lame return letter extolling my talent. It became something of a game I played, just to see how they would express my greatness each time.

When I wasn't selling newspapers door-to-door I worked in a restaurant for a family with a nearby eatery. Patrick's Cafe sat on the side of the road on Highway 20, just west of Thompson Lane. I don't recall whether laws prohibited kids from working like I did in that restaurant in the late fifties and early sixties. Perhaps they did, but I managed to get around them, and I became the official weekend potato peeler. That was my one and only job. I stood at a sink counter on a little riser and peeled a hundred pounds of potatoes, a morning's worth, and dropped them into a pot of water to be cleaned and diced by someone else before they were passed to the grill and precooked, or blanched, for morning prep.

I used to laugh when some hotshot kitchen manager would ask me if I ever worked in a kitchen as I filled out my application. I had the standard old-timer's line in waiting. Kid, I thought, I've forgotten more about kitchen work than you've ever known. The kid asked a harmless question and it's a harmless thought-reaction, but explaining oneself gets old every time.

I still have a difficult time with all the would-be Bobby Flays in Portland who think they're the shit. I could cook circles around most of those assholes if I wanted to, which I don't because I despise restaurateurs, having met few capable of telling me anything I don't already know. Anything I didn't know by age-ten.

The exploding food cult in Portland also sickens me like a food-borne disease. Nothing about food should make one as rapturous as some of these "foodies" claim to be after eating at the current great restaurant in town. Food is a charade now, a status symbol, like a car. Why not just eat and shut the fuck up about it, okay people? People are starving all around you. Respect that I don't care about your $50 plate.

Most phonies like this couldn't tell a Fly Agaric from a Morel if their lives depended on it, which they might. The Fly Agaric is poisonous.




TS