The Bosses of Summer
August Men's Room
My first job was at a friend’s aunt’s pizzeria during the summer of ’85. She was a good boss, but on weekends, her redneck brother, Regis, ran the place. He’d show up foul-mouthed and hungover, his body off gassing Jim Beam as he barked orders. Apparently, making a skinny honors student scrape muck from the floor gave a dropout like Regis a special thrill.
Regis was just the first in a long series of bad summer bosses who I resented at the time, but who served a valuable purpose in my life. I didn’t realize it then, but the universe was sending me a warning through these deeply flawed middle-aged men: No matter what, do not end up like these losers.
Tom, the lunch manager at the French restaurant where I was a busboy during the summer of ’88, also came to work sweaty and hungover, but unlike Regis, he was friendly. Too friendly. Especially his fondness for describing his previous night’s drunken tryst in anatomically-explicit detail as we sliced lemons for iced tea. My relationship to citrus fruits has never been quite the same.
After lunch, Francois replaced Tom for the dinner rush. At first, I was naive to the purpose of Francois’ frequent bathroom trips or why he always grew more hyper as the night wore on.
He’d fire staccato commands in broken English then storm off if asked to repeat himself. After a busy weekend in August, Francois cleaned out the restaurant safe and disappeared. As we sliced lemons on Monday, Tom speculated that Francois had fled back to France. Apparently, he owed the wrong guys a lot of money.
Francois’ volatility and penchant for nose candy was matched only by the head waiter, Lake. Lake was charismatic and handsome in a daytime-soap-star-with-a-mullet sort of way. We didn’t get along, but after a busy dinner rush, Lake, wide-eyed and wired, insisted I join him in his cherry red IROC-Z as he blasted “Welcome to the Jungle” and played violent air drums. I’ve never been more desperate to get out of a car. I have a vague memory that Lake was later arrested for corrupting a minor. Or maybe that’s just the trajectory I imagined his life was on.
During the summer of ’89, I worked the late shift at a call center. The manager, Alex, was so obsessed with his black Porsche 944 that just in case any female employees failed to notice it parked in his reserved spot, he had a huge poster of an identical Porsche tacked up behind his desk. Killing himself to make the payments, Alex looked perpetually sleep deprived and deeply disappointed that buying the car of his dreams hadn’t fixed his life.
I had other summer jobs, folding jeans at a SuperGap, counselor at a day camp, data entry at a law firm, but I don’t remember my bosses. My guess is they were competent and mild-mannered and, therefore, forgettable.
It’s a strange irony of life that it’s often the biggest idiots who leave the deepest mark.
Dylan Patterson is a writer and filmmaker who teaches English at Cape Fear Community College.
To view more of illustrator Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com.
