I was a sophomore in high school, working after school and weekend in the biggest restaurant in our little town.
I had few friends and even fewer dollars, so I didn’t mind trading the unknown, unnamed after school memories I would not be making – for the $1 an hour minimum wage. I worked the job for about a year – after six months, I got a 15-cent raise.
I washed the dishes, cashed my paychecks, and watched the parade of short-timer kitchen characters pass by, one after another until Dave walked through the door.
Dave was a high school senior. I had job seniority, but he was two years older than me, had a car and a driver’s license. He took me for a ride in his green, ‘58 Chevy after work one day. It was a nice one, but only had a six-cylinder engine. He was working and saving enough money to drop a V-8 in that car and show them a thing or two!
Dave was fun and made those dirty dish days pass a little easier.
My job was scraping food from dishes into an industrial rated garbage disposal that could make car parts disappear – loading them into racks, and vigorously assaulting them with an almost lethal, ceiling-mounted high-pressure washer spray nozzle, before dispatching them to the bowels of the automatic dish-washing machine.
Dave manned the big stainless-steel double sinks – hand washing all pots, pans, and other large cooking utensils. I thought his job was a little less frantic than mine. No one ever stood next to him with arms crossed – waiting for a cleaned something they were running out of.
“Hey Dave!” I shouted. “What’s the difference between toilet paper and a shower curtain?”
“Uhhhh…. What?” He so easily took the bait.
“SO – YOU’RE THE ONE!” I laughed out loud. He laughed to, a little.
“Hey, Scott!” he fired back, “Do you know why your parents painted your garbage can brown and orange?”
“Brown and orange?” I questioned.
“So you and your siblings would always think you were eating at the A&W! Haw!” he got me back, almost.
Sparing like that made our working hours crawl by a little faster.
I was robotically going through my washing routine while pondering how quickly food becomes garbage, when Dave looked my way and mumbled a practically inaudible and apparently irrelevant comment.
I turned from my stacked display of stinking dinnerware and asked, “What did you say?”
He’d developed a rather sour mood during our hectic dinner hour. “I don’t repeat myself for idiots,” was his reply.
I asked again, “What?”
He announced almost proudly, “I–Don’t–Repeat–My–Self–For–Idiots!”
I tried to sound only half-interested when I asked again, “Huh?”
Very loudly and purposefully he began to repeat,
“I – DON’T – REPEAT – MYSELF ………”
In mid-sentence, he suddenly slammed the big pan he was washing into the dishwater splashing a perfect six-foot radius before he looked to the ceiling and let out a great moan, UUUUGGGHH!!!
Because…..