your lucky day

Here I am reading some guy's stories about being a midnight street sweeper and all the crap he runs into, when I realize that: I too have a blog, and I too have had a shitty job. Alarm bells start going off in my head as a flood of memories from my sometimes retarded, sometimes scary life overwhelms me.

So I'm thinking I gotta get this stuff out there. Living the life of a kinda open-minded, very reckless, often stupid southern boy can be pure torture - or pure entertainment. We'll see which is which as I've found a something new to add to this blog: life stories.

Since I'm on the topic of work, I'll start with this little gem from my days as a line cook at a sport bar and grille in Columbia, SC:

When I was 16, I got a job with my sister's boyfriend at a steakhouse. I learned how to cook there - work the fryers, bake potatoes, and the holy grail of the kitchen - work the grill. Cooking 40 steaks to temp at once is a science up there with spinal surgery in difficulty. Anyway, I took my skills to a sports bar and grill when I was 18.

Being a cook at a place that serves alcohol is a special thing. Special in the fact that when the kitchen closes, the beer starts flowing. Special in the fact that almost all of the staff is made up of alcoholics, drug addicts, and lots of people whose parents had boundary issues.

The beginning of the afternoon is comprised of doing 'prep work' before the evening rush. This means making salad, cutting meat, cooking big pots of rice, cleaning the fryers, etc. Part of the ritual of all those doing prep work is to first go out back by the dumpster and get high. It's mind numbing work and a numb mind is necessary. So one day, like every day, we went out back to get high. This day we got really high. My first job as we got back in was to clean the fry vats.

Fry vats are those big stainless steel deep fryers that you can see over the counter at fast food joints. All restaurants have them. They are filled with vegetable oil, and heated to 350 degrees. They are gas powered and run all day long. When you have to clean them, you have to empty out the oil from a gasket in the bottom, and run it through a filter, or dump it and put in new oil. This day I was putting in new oil.

The first step is to turn off the gas heat. Then you have to drain the oil. I know a lot of guys who have spilled super heated oil on themselves and lost serious amounts of skin. It's a really dangerous job. Hot oil vaporizes human skin on contact. I constantly had little red blisters on my arms from getting splattered by hot grease. So, I give the fryers the respect they deserve while I am draining the oil.

This day, something was wrong. The gas didn't turn off when I cut it, or the whole thing was overheated, or something. When the oil drained out, the bottom of the tanks started drying out and popping, obviously getting too hot. A little bit of residual oil caught on fire. I double checked the gas gage, and it was set to 'off', but still something was going bad here. I'm still freshly cooked off the weed and I run get Brent, one of my coworkers, to help.

"You're too high," he says. "You're over reacting." He gets some water and dumps it in the vat, thinking that will cool things off. It vaporizes instantly with a hiss, sending hot steam up at our stoned faces.

"Holy Fuck," one of us says, as we jump back. We're both really baked, and wondering what we've done wrong, knowing that our present state of mind must be to blame. We're also afraid to go get the boss, since he'll know we screwed it up being stoned.

"Let's pour oil in it," I suggest - thinking that the oil can take the high temperature and it will just go back to being a full oil vat at cooking temperature. Not so.

By this time, the vat is smoking, popping and crackling. I'm really getting scared, but thinking it's just the weed getting to me, and try to act cool. I grab a 5 gallon box of vegetable oil and prop it up on the edge to pour it in the vat. I start pouring, but at the temperature this bare metal has cooked up to, oil is just fuel.

I'm reminded of the song American Pie, the part that goes "flames climbed high into the night, to light the sacrificial rite." Satan may have laughed with delight, but we sure ran out of the kitchen screaming. I can only imagine what those few customers in the dining room thought.

The boss came back, looked at the flaming fry vat and turned off the gas line behind it. "Lines must be stuck on. Don't use that one tonight," he says, and just walks out nonchalantly. Brent and I stare at one another as the flames burn themselves out. After that, it was work as usual - but I sure was rattled the rest of the night.