Workingman's Blues Part I: You Work 3-7.

I met Krissy on the bus. For a two year period, starting when I was 15, we were best friends. We rode to school together, hung out every day after school, even went to the prom together. And one day, I even dressed up in her clothes and went to work for her.

Krissy worked at the Honey Dew Donuts in Whitman center, and as far as it concerned me, it just meant she wasn't available to hang out Saturday afternoons. She didn't really talk much about it, at least as far as I can remember. But that wasn't really her style. So when she did complain, I knew to pay attention. Her family had been planning a clambake for the upcoming Saturday, and Kris had requested the day weeks off in advance, and had been promised by her boss that she would have it off. But when she went in that Friday to pick up her check, she saw her name still on the schedule. And she pleaded with her boss, told him he had told her that she'd have that day off, and he brushed her aside. "Nobody else could work then."

So she was going to quit. She was going to not even show up, just forget the whole thing. Her boss was an asshole. She wasn't going to miss her family's clambake, she had requested it off. The whole thing was stupid and unfair. It wasn't worth the five bucks an hour. Krissy was going to have to quit soon anyway, because she was spending a month down in Florida with her sister that summer. She was just going to quit now.

"You know what would be funny?" I said. My fiancee hears this phrase now and she gets chills. She's learned that my idea of things that 'would be funny' are usually horrible and crippingly awkward, and she bristles at the mere thought of it. Krissy wasn't quite so squeamish.

So the plan was, I would put on Krissy's pink Honey Dew donuts workshirt, show up at her work at 3:00 and pretend that I was her replacement. I thought it would be really funny to watch her stupid boss squirm at this boy wearing a far too small pink workshirt claiming he was his new employee.

I lived within walking distance of the Honey Dew, so I put the shirt on and walked, in broad daylight, the 1.5 miles to the shop. I think this says a lot about my character when I was a teenager. I wasn't frightened to walk around in pubic looking like a complete douchebag. I walked into the front door, and I got my first glimpse of the manager, Krissy's boss, who I soon knew as Sam the Donut Man. It was the first time I got nervous about my little plan. Sam looked like Manuel Noriega, and I was the kind of erudite kid who knew what the former military leader of Panama looked like. His resting face was a permanent grimace, and if he had ever smiled, I imagine it would have been even scarier.

I told him that I was Krissy's replacement. He squinted one eye and looked me up and down. "You work 3 to 7," he said. He grabbed some cash out of the register and he left me alone in the store. For the afternoon. I had my first ever official job. I was scared shitless.

I have no memory of him showing me how anything worked, but I'm going to have to admit that he must have. But I had no formal training period. I showed up at three o'clock and I was relieved at seven, and for a long time in between then I was alone in the Honey Dew. A bell kept going off that I eventually figured out was someone coming up to the drive through. I had no idea what a regular coffee was, so when people ordered it, I just gave them a black coffee. That first day, these two guys in a pick-up truck who looked and smelled like they had been getting stoned since at least early that morning if not since the mid-1970s came through the drive through not once nor twice but thrice, each time coming up with some kind of new insult to hurl at me. The second time they called me 'miss' and I seem to think that they called me Shirley once. They did however tip me quite well. What that means is something I haven't really thought about, and don't ever really want to.

Between the front of the store and the drive up window was a corridor with the "break-room" which was really just a closet to hang up your coat or put your bags. There was also a payphone, which would ring at random intervals, and I only answered it after it had rung four or five times.

"Why don't you answer phone?" It was Sam the Donut man. I discovered that it was always Sam the Donut Man. I don't know who else would call a Honey Dew Donuts. Customers, wondering if there were any French crullers left? Sam asked me for my Social Security number. I didn't know it off the top of my head, and I still didn't think I was really working there, and I didn't even really know what a Social Security number even really was. He told me to get it, then hung up.

Meanwhile, people were lining up at the drive up and the older folks lining up at the front counter. They wanted coffees that were light with milk, dark with cream, two sugars, three sugars, iced, French vanilla, almond roasted, things I had no idea what any of them meant. But there must have been something cute about how completely inept I seemed, because I made crazy tips that afternoon, at least to a 15 year old. I made over twenty bucks, and when an older woman came to relieve me, I was able to buy not just one, but two cassette tapes from Strawberries (Neil Young's Mirrorball and Warren Zevon's Mutineer) and still had a few bucks left over. And the next Saturday when I went in, there was a check waiting for me for $17.49. It was more money than I could have ever possibly spent. As hard as it is to believe now.

The second week I came into work, Sam wasn't there. There was a morning girl, who left when I came in. I was kind of relieved that I didn't have to see Noriega that I nearly crapped myself when he pulled up to the drive-up window. "You told me you were 17!" he yelled at me. "You lied to me!" I thought maybe he had me confused with someone else, because I hadn't really said anything to him at all the week before when he had left me alone to mind his store. Cars started to line up behind his, so he just shook his finger at me, telling me again that I had told him I was 17, and then he drove off.

And so the summer went. I would put on my pink shirt (I was given one that fit eventually) and I slowly learned how to make coffee, how to accurately use the register (before I just looked at the price on the menu and did the math in my head and hit the no sale button, which gave Sam no idea how much money was supposed to be in the drawer after my shift, so I could have robbed him blind, but it never really occurred to me.) And each week the phone would ring and it would be Sam, asking me some question about something I had no idea about. Tara hadn't come in (I had no idea who Tara was.) I didn't know when the last batch of iced coffee had been made (I didn't even know we made the iced coffee there.) And the same few old people sat there all afternoon, and the same few people came in through the drive-in.

A few weeks in, I started to get comfortable enough to get my swagger back, so I came to work dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and a lei, and told the customers it was our "Tropical Island" weekend, but when they asked what kind of specials came along with that, I had to admit I had just made it up. I tried to come up with some catchphrases to say when I rang people up, but most just confused the customers and none of them ever stuck. I think the last thing you want to hear the 15 year old boy making your coffee say is "Shazam!" when he hands it to you.

The only really exciting thing that ever happened was a phone call one Saturday in late July. I answered it, assuming it was Sam, only to hear a woman's voice. She was looking for Sam, and when I told her he wasn't there, she said okay and hung up. She called back ten minutes later and asked me for a favor. She told me her name was Michelle. Sam owned the apartment building next door, and she rented one of the flats. "There's a man inside my apartment," she told me. "I need you to go over there and tell him to answer my phone."

At the age of 15 I would've done anything a woman told me, so I climbed out the drive-up window (I don't know why I did this, other than I didn't want the people in the front seeing me leaving the shop unattended) and I walked next door to this woman's apartment. There were a lot of things swimming through my mind when I rang the buzzer, especially the phrase "There's a man in my apartment." Not my husband, not my boyfriend, not my brother. A man. There's a man in my apartment. The phrase sounded familiar.

The man in her apartment answered the door, and looked at me with derision. Who was this boy in a pink shirt ringing the bell of the apartment that he was in, that belonged to some woman who had an unknown relationship to him? There was a tiny dog yipping at the crack in the door. "What?"

I told him that Michelle had called. "She wants to you answer the phone." I could hear it ringing over the dog's yipping.

He seemed kind of groggy or stoned (I had gotten used to what that looked like, working the drive up window) and confused. "What?"

"Michelle," I said a little bit louder. "She wants you to answer your phone."

The dog was yipping more ferociously until the man in Michelle's apartment kicked it, and it scurried away whimpering.

"Who are you?" he asked. With everything quiet now, I was able to explain who I was, and how I knew that Michelle wanted him to answer her phone. He said okay and closed the door. I heard that dog whimper in my dreams that night.

But otherwise, it was what ever teenage job ever was. Boring, repetitive, and eventually, once summer ended, over. I gave my two weeks that October and never saw Sam the Donut Man again.

It wasn't a very exciting job, and when I talk about my working history, I usually skip over it like one skips over that girl you "dated" for three days in sixth grade when talking about your romantic life. Krissy came back from Florida and we slowly kind of drifted apart, as she grew more disillusioned with life outside of the Sunshine State, and as I began dating her best friend. Her next job was working at a local restaurant as a waitress and she complained about that job at lot more. Whether it was more difficult, or that it was just one other thing that was making her unhappy I don't know. I tried to make a joke about waitressing, and about how there were probably worse jobs to be had, and she looked at me a minute like she was about to say "Why don't you try walking a mile in my shoes?" before she stopped herself and realized that I kind of already had.