Getting a summer job on The Cape (1964), with odds over hundreds:1!

THE DISHWASHER’S LIE (1964)

At the end of my sophomore year in college, my friend Matt invited me to visit him in Boston. A nice pipe-dream, I thought. But when my father surprised me with a $500 gift back home, for bringing up my grades––a solid B in Engineering from low Cs. I immediately took off, heading for New England in my ‘58 Plymouth by way of Pensacola, Florida, where another friend was in the service. After pressing hard just to get to the edge of Texas I was amazed the it took two days just to cross that wide state. Finally, I reached the coast of Florida, and rolled into a Pensacola beach area where heavy-duty rock and roll was blaring out from a large pavilion right there on the water. The all-black blues and rock band was in high gear, rocking the place to bits with one hit after another.

While a large group of Navy midshipmen in their dress-whites tried to pick up the few girls present on the dance floor. I spotted a very attractive female teenager, perfectly dancing her assets as she performed steps of ‘the swim’ and ‘the dog’. Everybody’s eyes were on her, drawn to the grace and style of her moves. At some point, I cut in and danced with her for half a song. Then I asked her for her phone number, which she proceeded to bestow. Somehow I had beaten out forty-plus attractive and immaculately dressed Navy flyers-to-be, probably because I was (1) from California and (2) had a cool car. That’s the American hierarchy, isn’t it? Pop culture has always reigned over content. And so, I was the fortunate one! She told me that when I picked her up for the drive-in movie date to tell her parents that I went to her high school. So, I told a big lie to her parents and got her out of the house.

At the movies, we didn’t really neck or anything (I guess I wasn’t in the mood to be that aggressive), but at our parting about one-hundred feet from the front of her house she laid a huge kiss on me, pressing and wiggling the lower extremity of her lovely body into mine at the same time. She was probably all of 16, and had I remained around there I certainly would have been headed for some forbidden fruits, not to mention ’statutory rape’ as defined by the conservative Floridians (10-12 years in a chain gang was actually a possibility in that state!). In any case, she was certainly the embodiment of ‘a hot chick.’

At the motel where I spent some of my father’s gift money for lodging, the owner took a liking to me and asked if I wouldn’t mind grabbing him a six-pack at the liquor store. I said, OK, took his five-spot and walked to the corner store. Returning, I handed him the bag and he suddenly looked me over more carefully, scrutinized me a bit, and asked, “Rick, are you 21?” When I said, No, adding “19,” he kind of jerked with a recognition to the illegality of it all, just shaking his head at the inadvertent mistake. Soon after that––the following morning––I gassed up my Plymouth and threaded my way up the East Coast without a map, just keeping myself running due north until I crossed into Massachusetts.

Two weeks after I’d left California I was off sailing around Cape Cod for five days with Matt and his father, who fed us fresh lobster every night. He bought the crustaceans from local fishermen ($2 each!). While on our grand voyage we explored the surrounding islands, including the tiny Cuttyhunk. There we spotted some wild turkeys, gave chase to the large, full-feathered things. We watched them flap wings like crazy to propel their heavy bodies up over the island brush, lifting themselves barely ten feet off the ground at most. The only time I’d ever seen a turkey before was on a dinner table jammed with stuffing.

We docked at Martha’s Vineyard, and then later Nantucket, to buy more lobsters and play tourist; taking in sights of Victorian buildings, fishing rigs and great views. I remember witnessing one exceedingly lovely sunset as it overtook the small harbor, the kind of enchanting moment which keeps people returning to such New England locations.

After our enjoyable sailing trip and a night or two with Matt in Boston I decided to return to Cape Cod and try to find some sort of summer job. It was still early summer (late June) and I wanted to spend the rest of my trip around there. I drove out alone, arriving in Hyannis Port where I located an employment agency on the main street. Without an income I’d be broke soon and have to immediately head back to California. But entering the employment office and spotting over a hundred other teenage hopefuls, all trying like I was to secure work, it looked particularly hopeless. First came a couple of hours filling out forms, followed by hanging around and breathing stale air.

After a while I needed to use the bathroom, but found the men’s side occupied. So I headed across the street to the Hyannis Inn, maneuvering my way past the registration desk as quickly as I could, ducking into the men’s room before somebody discovered I wasn’t a hotel guest. On my way back out through the front lobby I heard a tall, older man with scowling face complaining about a dishwasher. He had obviously just fired the guy (Got rid of the bum!), and was completely pissed off that dirty lunch dishes were piling up. I immediately saw my opportunity and piped up.

“I can do it,” I said, speaking up boldly, after suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Taken aback for an instant, he swiveled his glance from the desk clerk to me and asked if I had any experience. I looked into his eyes, frightened a little by the intensity of his gaze, and said, Yes. It wasn’t a complete lie. I had washed dishes a few times in my life, just not ‘commercially!” He immediately responed, “OK, get him back in there.”

I was quickly ushered back to the kitchen and handed an apron, then quickly shown the ropes by a young worker (“Nothing to it,” he said as he raised and lowered the countertop dishwasher’s sides, pushed a button for the hot water spray). Whatever the case, the owner was too desperate to allow himself any doubts about my dishwashing skills.

Luckily, it wasn’t too hard to figure out dishwashing–– stack dishes in the rack, food-side facing the central spray nozzle, slide them under the canopy, pull down on the large outside handles to close the sliding panels at front and rear, click on hot water jets. It turned out that I was actually pretty fast from the start, whizzing past whatever invisible probationary period the owner might have set in his head. It turned out that I was the only person in that kitchen who was a college student (I got called, Hey, College!” by the cooks, who were maybe all of 24), the rest of the young help being locals who worked there year-round. Anyway, with that amazing stroke of good luck I had earned myself a Cape Cod summer!

Suddenly, I had a job ($51.50/week), free living quarters (in the basement of one of the rental cabins where kitchen help created makeshift bedrooms with sheets hung from overhead beams), three free meals a day (the cook prepared our meals specially for the help), and even potential girlfriends from the Inn’s staff of college-aged waitresses. On top of all that, there was the added bonus of eating freshly baked blueberry muffins at 5:00 AM when I occasionally returned from an all-night date. How delectable that pre-dawn dessert tasted before I hit the sack, snatching a couple hours sleep before the 7 AM breakfast shift.

After about a week of dishwashing I fell into the work groove, and felt pretty confident that I knew what I was doing as a full-fledged member of the kitchen staff. I was soon trusted by the older head chef (a short man in his 50s) to procure different types of meat from the downstairs freezer. I was also given the task of separating live “Chicken” lobsters from the “Maine’s,” told to be extra careful to watch out for their dangerous claws which were capable of snapping off a finger. It took some guts to face those twitching pinchers, picking them off each other, tossing them through the air to their respective crates. And I even did some of the prep-cook duties. He taught me how to cut up ingredients and combining them to produce a day’s-worth of the Inn’s famous New England clam chowder in a big pot.

One image that sticks out in my memory from that kitchen experience is how the head cook always left cigarettes burning on various counters in the kitchen, lighting up new ones before the old ones were out. The butts were scattered all across the room; near the cutting board, along the baking ovens, next to the grill (everywhere!), burning down to the filters. By measuring the length of ash one could have determined the routes he took and duration of pauses, as he charted his way through the kitchen to perform the various tasks required.

Once I was standing next to him when he suddenly remembered the overdone baked potatoes. I watched as he charged over a few feet to the oven, threw open the long rectangle ‘pizza’ door and grabbed a burning-hot tray full of spuds with his bare hands, palm and fingers sizzling as he held his grip long enough to deposit them at a nearby counter. I guess he lived a very agitated life.

As with most jobs, it got a little boring after I got used to the routine. Because I was such a motivated worker (so thankful of getting my summer there!) I was fast at my dishwashing, clean up, and mopping chores. I usually ran out of prescribed work early each afternoon, and began selecting a portion of the kitchen for major cleanup to protect myself from just standing around. And it wasn’t very hard to see what needed done. I scoured under counters, removing loose dirt and bugs, and collected lost utensils. I scrubbed the inside of shelves, scraped off an accumulation of flour from several counter tops, emptied out drawers and dug into places long forgotten about. By the end of July I had pretty much cleared the entire joint, so much so that when I announced that I would be leaving in early August to head back to college, the older boss actually begged me to stay on. He offered to train me as a grill chef, and I have since wondered how that profession would have affected my life, and wrote it up as one of the stories in my 2023 book, Other Lived, Bends in the road, and What-ifs. Anyway, it was nice to be appreciated, but I knew I had to return to regular college life to finish that up.

One particular Sunday evening before I quit I almost got myself fired. While loading some freshly washed dessert glasses onto a front pantry shelf, I heard a strange sound and looked over to see a pretty little girl, age 7 or 8, standing in the corner quietly crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said that she wasn’t going to get any dessert. Well, each Sunday we lowly kitchen help had the privilege of making ourselves a free dessert. So I concocted a fantastic hot fudge sundae; vanilla ice cream piled high, chocolate sauce generously added, a cherry atop of whipped cream, and set the little girl to eating it at a nearby employee’s table. She immediately stopped crying and smiled broadly as she shoveled in the treat, her lips quickly turning chocolate brown. She happily took the tall-glassed sunday and disappeared back into the dining room.

A few minutes later, after the little girl had returned to her family’s table in the main dining room and I had returned to my dishwashing station, the hotel owner came clomping back to the rear of the kitchen, an exceedingly irritated look on his face.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he announced, angrily. When I didn’t respond immediately he added, “We sell food here – don’t give it away! We’re not a charity!”

I tried to stand up for myself, saying something about “my dessert to do with what I please,” but it was obviously a dead issue. After he left the kitchen, the other helpers made their jokes, raised eyebrows, and the waitresses glanced over my way, nodding and smiling. It felt refreshing to take a stand, and inside I chuckled at my mischief as I kept the dirty dishes moving along. What did I care if I lost my job? I only had a few weeks to go.

Once back at U of A it took one more ‘act of fate’ (beyond getting the dishwashing job…) to meet my future wife. If my buddy John, a miner’s son, hadn’t wanted some beer on a hot September night in Tucson, she and I might never have met.

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