(Image courtesy Kahh-poww at Deviant Art)

NONE OF US KNEW WHAT, but something had crawled up Dutch’s ass sideways and started banging on his solar plexus from the inside. The staff got daily updates on the status of his discontent. He berated waiters, told the cook the food was disgusting and boring (well, he may have had a point there, but frozen meat patties are not famous for their versatility) and asked me why I used so much dish washing liquid.

“What do you do, drink the stuff?”

Looking back, I wish I had said: “Well, perhaps you like owning Cherry Grove’s only greasy spoon, Dutch. However, cute as that expression is, no one wants utensils so sticky they feel like sex toys.”

The French have an expression for it: l’esprit d’escalier. Does it apply to things I wish I’d said forty years ago? I held my tongue for a change, but wondered if I’d made the right move leaving The Front Porch. There I could call myself a cook; here, back on Fire Island, I washed dishes again at the Nelly Deli, as I had last summer. It seemed a reasonable price to pay for living rent-free in an expensive resort.

We soon found out that Dutch’s twenty-something nephew was the instigator. We were only one month into the season and over the first hump, Memorial Day, when the nephew announced that George, who rehired me on the spot when I showed up unannounced at the end of April, had “left” to make way for “new management.” The nephew saw more promise in the Nelly Deli than anyone else could and announced that he intended “to make my first million before I’m thirty.” He swanned around with his handsome, bodybuilder boyfriend, and introduced the “new management”—a middle-aged, southern gay couple. One oversaw the day shift; the other took the night. They looked alike, dressed alike, were tall, thin, bitchy in a polite, pseudo pleasant manner and smiled all the time.

“Well I guess I never knew how hard it was to properly wash a dish!” one said while chuckling and holding up a plastic plate, angling it under the fluorescent light, clearly seeing something invisible to me but that no competent dishwasher, human or mechanical, would have left. Appearances were their main concern as not much could be done quickly with the décor, menu or the quality of the food. They made things miserable for anyone they didn’t like and wanted to get rid of, and the kitchen rumor mill (all five of us) churned with the names of the new managers’ unemployed but very cute young friends. Cuter than us anyway.

They were very good at it and we were all unhappy soon enough. The waitress Maria was the first to go. She came up to my chin, had caramel skin, a halo of tight black and grey curls, and was so clearly butch I almost found her sexy. I envied her mouth. She talked back to the nephew, and up and at the managers. Maria also had a girlfriend who could take up the slack if she quit, which she soon did. To date she is the only person I’ve ever heard say: “You can take this job and shove it.” Her more colorful version was “Fuck you and this fucking job. Who wants to work in this shithole anyway? I’m outta here.” And out the door she went.

I missed her and her sanguine approach to most things, including her relationship. When a couple she knew broke up, I asked her if she ever worried about that herself. Nope. “Well, if she falls in love with someone else, that’s the ballgame isn’t it?” She laughed, winked at me and went back to the dining room where her banter with the guys earned her excellent tips.

“And what are you sluts having tonight? Will it be Beef in Bondage or Chicken in Chains?”

“Ordering for a Bitter Party of One!” she shouted into the kitchen loudly enough for the “party” to hear. She’d find another job easily. The new managers, to no one’s surprise, had a handsome young friend waiting and eager to take hers. He appeared the next night looking like he was moonlighting (or maybe just auditioning for) The Sea Shack. Tall and muscular in the restrained manner of a dancer, he wore pressed chinos and a starched white shirt. His neatly parted hair looked like it had been just combed with water—an effect that lasted his entire shift. I had a ponytail that reached to my shoulder blades, two pierced ears, and wore a tank top, shorts and flip-flops. My days were numbered.

I hung on through the first week in June, but fortunately had taken precautions. I’d saved everything I earned in May and right after Memorial Day had gone back into the city to sign a lease on an apartment—an odd y-shaped tenement on the corner of E. 10th Street and 1st Avenue. I gave the landlord $220–two months rent—and planned to work on it all summer long on my days off. I looked forward to the end of the season when I could move into a freshly painted and decorated apartment all by myself. I was sick of roommates. A month away from my twenty-third birthday, poor, not quite homeless, I lived in the same damp, moldy room under the Sea Shack I’d had in the fall. This time I shared it, with a noisy, radio playing Latino waiter whose deep respect for restaurant hierarchy made it even more unpleasant—as the lowest man on the shortest totem pole in all of Cherry Grove (even the boy-maids at the Cherry Grove Inn had their own rooms), I came last. He demanded I vacate the room whenever he had a “date.” I spent more hours outdoors than I wished to, but my primary pleasure was reading, and ocean waves as background were preferable to grunting, heavy breathing, Spanish dirty talk, and disco music.

To no one’s surprise, new management soon found my dishwashing skills wanting—and predictably they had a superior candidate lined up, one who would be as sparing of liquid soap as I was profligate. I suspected what they actually found wanting was any desire to socialize with them, still less to sleep with either, but they may have assessed my performance accurately. It’s hard to put your heart and soul into scrubbing aluminum pots, plastic plates, and tin “silverware” while subsisting on tuna, PB&J and the occasional cheeseburger. I’d been expecting this from the moment they arrived, and was amused to remember that only seven months ago I’d enjoyed the job. Another useful French expression comes to mind: I was trying to reheat a soufflé, or, given the milieu, re-scramble the eggs, since a soufflé was the last thing you’d ever find on the menu at the Nelly Deli.

The apartment in the city was my escape route. Within a week, I surrendered. I announced one morning that I wasn’t coming in, packed a single shopping bag each of clothes and books and took the next ferry to Sayville. By mid-afternoon I had moved back into Manhattan.

I quickly found a job at the Fourth Avenue Bookstore, around the corner from The Strand. When most of my first week’s paycheck went for a hardcover edition of The Complete Works of George Eliot, I realized I couldn’t keep that job if I hoped to pay my rent. Yet again salvation arrived, this time in the form of my second baking job. An ad in The Village Voice led me to Ananda East Bakery, on West Fourth Street, near Sheridan Square.

I’d baked at Paradox Bakery, cooked at The Front Porch, and washed dishes at The Nelly Deli: I grandly viewed myself as an experienced kitchen worker. Ananda’s owners, two former Boston Irish-Catholics who had morphed into devotees of an Eastern religion I knew nothing about, happily agreed. They knew Paradox Bakery and I had no doubt I could make Bonnie’s Carob Brownies and Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. I mastered the job quickly—and we were all happy for the first week. They didn’t pay much—not as much as I really needed even with a low rent: $110/month. I hoped I could negotiate a small raise once I’d proved myself. Then one morning, my fingers greasy with cookie batter, I dropped a large mixing bowl onto my sandaled feet.

Next Up: “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti!” How to Use Prayer Words to Piss off Your Employers at the Ananda East Bakery-1973