My nephew Henry reports that he has found a job for the summer. Seems he is going to run music camps (band, choral and orchestral) for one of our local universities.
Now, I love Henry and am proud of him. But this kind of gig doesn’t really qualify as a summer job.
If my experience is any guide, a summer job needs to be halfway dangerous, monotonous, and your co-workers need to be one step away from incarceration or an involuntary guardianship. Or, as I texted Henry, “You call running music camps a summer job? That’s nothin’. Why, let me tell you about the kinds of jobs I had when I was your age.”
Here are some of the more memorable ones that I related, completely unbidden, to the boy.
I washed dishes at a diner on the Pulaski-Saline County line. The night cook was also named Henry and wore a Beretta in a holster as he slaved over his stove. Henry wasn’t so much prefiguring the “open-carry” movement insomuch as he was unfaithful to Mrs. Henry on a sustained basis and tended to carry on with ladies who had a likewise expansive view of the marriage vows. Be that as it may, you would be surprised how well a man can concentrate on frying chicken while frequently looking over his shoulder.
Ah! Memories! One night during my shift some women came in for dinner from the hotel next door. Henry, who I figured knew whereof he spoke, allowed as how they were working girls, if one catches my drift. He wouldn’t let me look out on the dining room to catch a glimpse of such exotica because, as he put it, “Ol’ Henry ain’t gonna be the one to get you started, boy.”
Of course, an easy interpretation of this statement was that such a task was better left to other role models in my life, which could not possibly have been his meaning. Maybe he just thought that I didn’t need to wind up like him, cooking in a greasy spoon with a sidearm.
The most dangerous job, by far, that I ever had was when I worked for a tire factory off 65th Street. Guys were always getting hurt there. I saw burns, cuts, fistfights and virtually unregulated drinking on-the-job, the latter of which I kind of understood after about two weeks in that hellhole.
I was nearly electrocuted by a machine that wasn’t grounded during that learning experience. The shock threw me across the room. The foreman and I were the only people in there at the time. Once he had ascertained that I wasn’t, well, dead, he bought me a Coke.
He also offered me 10 bucks if I wouldn’t report it for fear that OSHA and the union would get in his grill. Being the high-minded sort that I was even back then, I took it.
I have delivered pizza in a Ford Pinto. I clerked for a law firm at which it was not unheard of for payroll checks, drawn upon any of the five accounts it maintained for this purpose (a red flag not fully appreciated by me until I studied the Uniform Commercial Code and/or practiced law in Louisiana), to bounce higher than a giraffe’s chin. I operated a gas-powered forklift inside boxcars. How I didn’t become acquainted with asphyxiation is beyond me to this day.
In between bouts of consumption on this job, I had to load the mail truck. The guy that drove the truck was a member of the Nation of Islam named Johnny X. He used to share his Nation of Islam newspapers with me. Being a Methodist, I read them on breaks. One day, out on the truck with Johnny X, a hubcap flew off and killed a cow out on Frazier Pike.
You cannot make any of this stuff up, Henry.
But my favorite story, if you can call it that, is one that perfectly symbolizes my degrading and surreal summer job experiences, and took place at another factory in southwest Little Rock that manufactured overhead doors. The foreman was named Vince, a melancholy sort who was not given to small talk. However, he would come chat me up occasionally as he felt that I was “the only person here with any damn sense.” This is a sentence that has not been uttered in recent memory.
He came over one day and leaned on my machine. He lit a cigarette.
“I fired somebody today,” he said. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well, I found Johnson over there screwing around with an arc welder while he was on break. He had it in his mouth.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Vince said as he looked at the floor and shook his head. “But I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘Don’t put that arc welder in your mouth again.’ So I fired him.”
So, Henry, unless your job subjects you to danger on every shift, unless you work with armed yet oddly moralistic philanderers and unless you are in the same building where perfectly good and useful arc welders are abused by peckerwoods, it ain’t a real summer job.
Your generation is soft. With all due respect, boy, you couldn’t find Frazier Pike with a GPS.
Oh. One other thing. I’m deeply ashamed that I let that foreman at the tire factory out of Dante take advantage of my youth and inexperience after damn near getting zapped into Kingdom Come that night.
I should have held out for $20.
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Arthur Paul Bowen is a writer and retired lawyer living in Little Rock.