I’ve been employed for 23 years. Since I was 14 years old. Thank God not at the same job, though on some level I feel like I’ve circled back to where I started.
My first job was working at Dondi’s Deli in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Picture that deli in the Soprano’s and then get rid of all of the glamour. The Brookdale Bakery next door was where all the ‘hot’ girls worked and Dondi’s was for me. My co-workers were the guys who came to work in wife-beaters. They spent their non-working afternoons revving up the resting idles of their IROC-Zs and changing the colors of the neon floating lights underneath. Really, why drive a car if people three towns away can’t hear you coming.
The girls at the bakery wore make up and got their inch long nails done up with glitter and air brushed pictures of rainbows and kittens. Their hair actually feathered just like Heather Locklear’s, though they’d start the day with it sprayed to stand up two to three inches off of their heads. My combination of crazy, natural curls and a mother who knew nothing about fashion or consumer beauty made me worship Jenny D, Jenny K, Kristi and Tiffany with all of the zealousness of a Nike wearing Kool-aid drinker.
Fortunately they never abused their power over me, unless you count Jenny K asking me to do her summer school homework. I was reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream for pleasure, not that I would have ever admitted that to the girls. She was reading it, or, more specifically, not reading it, for tenth grade summer school.
In eighth grade we’d read Romeo and Juliet and that summer I was on my way to becoming a pretty big fan. Shakespeare ranked somewhere between Billy Joel and Sweet Valley High books on my list of favorite things, but I was cognizant of what was definitely not cool, even if I didn’t always understand or have the ability to emulate what was.
I wrote the paper and, as a thank you for helping her pass the class, she died my hair a color blonde that should be illegal for people with my skin tone. I looked like a scurvy victim, but at the time I loved it. I felt like I looked like I fit in, even if I never would.
I went on to graduate from college, be an usher at Lincoln Center, a talent agent and the business director of a theater in Los Angeles. I taught doctors about incorporating alternative medicine into their practices, toured with a company that produced AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer Walks, helped a woman try to get her movie produced, and was a camera woman for a local TV station. Now I find myself serving customers once again.
I’d love to say that 23 years of professional experience makes me better at helping humans decide how they want their dead animal flesh prepared, but, other than a significantly higher salary, tips at the locals’ bar in a ski town are way better than under-the-table 14 year old wages, I’m not sure much has changed.
I still notice the grammatical errors in my customers’ speech, but I no longer dumb-down my own language or dye my hair a ridiculous color to fit in. I still get talked down to by arrogant idiots who think that my job somehow defines me as less then they define themselves. My favorite comment came from the editor of one of our local A-Town papers, who said to me a few years ago, “who would have thought the girl behind the bar had a brain.”
And perhaps the biggest similarity, which I didn’t realize when I was young and trying desperately to fit in, is that the two jobs are about making money while doing something else. At 14, I was focused on high school, getting into college and boys, definitely not in that order. Now I’m working on a novel, still interested in boys, though I prefer them to be in their thirties or forties, and decidedly more interested in doing turns down a mountain than improving my margarita recipe. As much as I’d like to have a career where my entire life is about what I’m doing, it’s nice to know there’s a job out there that I can fall back upon in tough economic times and between adventures. And that I stumbled upon that safety net when I was just 14 years old.
