(Submitted to LitUp’s “Take This Job and Shove It!” essay contest.)
I was almost done scrubbing the tables. I hated table duty. The crusty sponge only got slimier with every wipe, staining my finger tips with the smell of mildew for days. The final touch of Simple Green didn’t help much; it just gave me the spins. Lunch tables couldn’t get filthier than the ones at Paramount’s Great America. But I just had three more to go till I could return to my shift at the cash register.
And then I saw it — a red Dixie cup. And I knew my life would never be the same.
*
When I was 15, my group of high-school friends told me there was a mass recruit happening at Great America, and they were all going to get jobs there. “Sure, I’ll join you guys!” I chirped. Young and clueless, we were excited about the idea. What could be better than a group of friends working together at an awesome amusement park that we went to every weekend anyway? We’d get free admission to the park, cuts in line for the Top Gun rollercoaster and all the free junk food we want. And maybe if I was lucky, I could meet a cute girl after an intimate bumper-car encounter, or something.
Six of us one Saturday crammed into a mom’s minivan and headed to Great America’s mass recruit. When we got there — a large, dim room that looked like a warehouse — the recruiters gave each of us ticket numbers as if we were at the DMV. When they called my number, it was my turn for a two-minute interview asking the basics: How old are you? Why do you want to work here? Where exactly would you like to work? And most importantly, are you OK with earning $5.75 an hour?
Then we lined up to get our waists measured, and they handed each of us a navy belt with a bronze buckle, a royal blue polo shirt and a matching Great America baseball cap. We had to buy our own khaki pants (I still don’t understand why) and they couldn’t be baggy or saggy, even though that was in style back then.
Our dreams started falling apart when the recruiters assigned each of us a number for our work stations. No, we wouldn’t all be working together in one place. We were being split up randomly at different restaurants and rides throughout the park. I drew the short straw. I ended up at a burger joint in Kidsville.
So not only did I not get to work with my best friends. I also didn’t get to make eyes at a single cute girl. I served burgers and gave change to parents who couldn’t even fathom the idea of paying $30.75 for three hamburger meals with fries and sodas.
“Are you kidding me?” a huge black man said to me. “That much?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled quietly.
“That’s ROBBERY!” a chubby white mother yelled.
“I know. Sorry.”
Little did these people know how much money I made. I’d have to work two hours just to eat one of those burgers.
And no, we didn’t get free food. Our managers forbade us from taking food home, even though we had at least 20 extra burgers left at the end of every day. All leftovers had to go in the trash.
Over a month, I became close friends with a Filipino boy named Sean who worked at the Dippin’ Dots cart in Kidsville. I was delighted when Sean helped me to a free serving in a paper Coca Cola cup.
That same day though, a manager somehow caught me gorging on this delicious Ice Cream of the Future during my lunch break and reported me. I received a formal written warning and a lecture from my manager Tina, a 22-year-old Asian woman with a pony tail, pale skin and puffy cheeks.
“I hope you learn from this. I’m disappointed because I see you on track to becoming a future manager,” she told me.
I didn’t understand why she’d think that. Tina seemed to scold me whenever the opportunity arose, and I wasn’t particularly good at anything. I remember the first time I wrapped a hamburger with tinfoil — more like crumpled it into a ball until it loosely covered the buns — and Tina never let me do it again. I was just a quiet cashier who could endure verbal abuse from parents, perhaps because I was raised by a Tiger Mom.
During slow hours when the lunch lines died down, Tina made me change the Kidsville trash bags, sweep the floors and scrub the lunch tables. In other words, I was unofficially a part-time janitor. Those were the heaviest trash bags I’ve ever lifted; they would always be leaking an acidic combination of ketchup, meat juice and melted Icees as I hauled them to the dumpster. Sweeping the ground wasn’t so bad — I did this very slowly to avoid more tasks from Tina. But scrubbing the tables was by far the worst, because it was guaranteed that a culmination of filth, grease and germs would come in contact with my skin.
Which brings us back to that fateful summer day that changed my life forever. After I returned from 45 minutes of broom duty, Tina asked me to wash all the tables. I was eager to finish the job quickly. Humming an Usher song to keep myself motivated, I scrubbed each table, circling between them gracefully like a swan in a poisoned lake.
I came to my third-to-last table. There was a red Dixie cup left behind. I scrubbed around it first, and then I picked up the cup to take it to the trash. I looked inside.
It was filled, almost to the top, with vomit.
Some stupid brat kid couldn’t make it to a bush or the bathroom, so he resorted to barfing in a cup. And his parents couldn’t even bother to throw it in the garbage.
My eyes glazed over as I went into stimulus overload. When I carried the red cup to the garbage can, I caught a whiff of it and almost threw up in my mouth.
I had two more tables to clean, but I couldn’t go any further. I walked into Tina’s office. I could see on her computer screen that she was IMing friends on America Online.
“Hey, Tina?” I said quietly. “I’m sorry, but I wanted to tell you I’m quitting.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I’m failing school. I have a D in Algebra.” I lied because I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
She had me sign a form and told me to drop off my polo shirt, baseball cap and belt at the central employee station. That evening, as I strolled through the parking lot in a t-shirt and khakis to my parents’ car, I felt like Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption when he climbed out of a sewer and was showered in rainwater.
The nightmare was over.