When you are a fourteen-year-old boy whose mom and dad recently divorced and you are offered the princely sum of $2/hour to work as a bottle bitch and gas monkey, you say "yes" without much hesitation. And so it was in the summer of 1985 that I started my first job. I wouldn't say it was my most favorite job -- that was to come later -- but it rarely felt like work, I laughed every day, and I worked with great people. Most folks don't get to say that about any of their jobs, so I knew that it was special even while I was doing it.
Evergreen Park Grocery in Higgins Lake, MI, is a short three minute walk from the north side of Higgins Lake. There's a bakery and deli inside, and a Dairy Queen is essentially attached. Three Associations and a marina are within a mile radius, which meant that every summer was an explosion of downstate expats and up-north regulars, all rubbing elbows and assholes as they enjoyed the seasonal fruits of northern lower Michigan. My dad and mom both worked there when they were younger, and I couldn't wait to start my tenure at EPG, which lasted eight straight summers.
My first gig was the aforementioned "bottle boy" job title, which meant that I was the work horse -- I pumped gas, stocked the shelves and coolers, swept and mopped the floors, dusted and cleaned, and so on. After a few years, I was able to jump into the bakery and deli, where there was more human contact; as I recall, there was one July where I worked every day but one. Once I was of age, I settled behind the register, where I sold booze and smokes and began in earnest the crafting of a public persona as an outlandishly inappropriate and boorish asshole. (Still working on that persona, BTW.)
As this was my first real job, there were a lot of firsts during those years. The owners were the Tieppo family -- Dave, Karen, and their three daughters (and various family members on both sides of the genetic aisle) -- and I discovered that slightly odd equilibrium of having a "work family" where I was both an employee and not-just-an-employee. I figured out that when my dad and Dave came back from a night of golfing, there was a good chance that I'd be asked to fire up a pizza. (Golfing gave them the munchies for some reason, you see.) When we had the right mix of employees, we'd play basketball together after our 11pm close. And if a mistake was made at the DQ, well, you didn't have to throw it away, right?
Each memory from working at the store could warrant a post of its own, but here are some fragments:
-- having the painful saturation of a crush that only a fourteen-year-old boy could have in my first summer (Dawn Weatherly, one of the register girls, if we're naming names for posterity)
-- grabbing people from inside the cooler as they reached in to grab a soda or beer (but only people who looked like they could take it)
-- digging through dirty baby diapers and dead snakes and live bees and everything else that people put in their bags of returnable bottles and cans
-- seeing my Grandpa's station wagon off in the distance, coming in hot while his dentures skidded across the front dashboard
-- selling people bags of ice, then sneaking around to get into the ice chests so that, when they opened the door, I'd pop out and hand them their ice
-- scraping my first dead raccoon (but not the last) off the pavement right in front of the store at 8am
-- watching the slow-motion break-up of my first real relationship from the fog of my own depression
-- getting up at 5:30am to be to work by 6am, working in the bakery in the morning and the deli in the afternoon until 3pm, getting off work and heading straight for the lake to take a nap in the sun and work on the tan, going home to take a shower and hang out with friends until after midnight, grabbing a few hours of sleep, and doing the whole thing over again the next day
Heavens knows there are more moments to remember, but maybe it's better that some of those times have faded into opaque wisps of feeling rather than clear snapshots of precise recall. Regardless, for a first job, I could have hardly asked for better. Where else could you work for two dollars an hour, even in the mid-'80s?
Evergreen Park Grocery in Higgins Lake, MI, is a short three minute walk from the north side of Higgins Lake. There's a bakery and deli inside, and a Dairy Queen is essentially attached. Three Associations and a marina are within a mile radius, which meant that every summer was an explosion of downstate expats and up-north regulars, all rubbing elbows and assholes as they enjoyed the seasonal fruits of northern lower Michigan. My dad and mom both worked there when they were younger, and I couldn't wait to start my tenure at EPG, which lasted eight straight summers.
My first gig was the aforementioned "bottle boy" job title, which meant that I was the work horse -- I pumped gas, stocked the shelves and coolers, swept and mopped the floors, dusted and cleaned, and so on. After a few years, I was able to jump into the bakery and deli, where there was more human contact; as I recall, there was one July where I worked every day but one. Once I was of age, I settled behind the register, where I sold booze and smokes and began in earnest the crafting of a public persona as an outlandishly inappropriate and boorish asshole. (Still working on that persona, BTW.)
As this was my first real job, there were a lot of firsts during those years. The owners were the Tieppo family -- Dave, Karen, and their three daughters (and various family members on both sides of the genetic aisle) -- and I discovered that slightly odd equilibrium of having a "work family" where I was both an employee and not-just-an-employee. I figured out that when my dad and Dave came back from a night of golfing, there was a good chance that I'd be asked to fire up a pizza. (Golfing gave them the munchies for some reason, you see.) When we had the right mix of employees, we'd play basketball together after our 11pm close. And if a mistake was made at the DQ, well, you didn't have to throw it away, right?
Each memory from working at the store could warrant a post of its own, but here are some fragments:
-- having the painful saturation of a crush that only a fourteen-year-old boy could have in my first summer (Dawn Weatherly, one of the register girls, if we're naming names for posterity)
-- grabbing people from inside the cooler as they reached in to grab a soda or beer (but only people who looked like they could take it)
-- digging through dirty baby diapers and dead snakes and live bees and everything else that people put in their bags of returnable bottles and cans
-- seeing my Grandpa's station wagon off in the distance, coming in hot while his dentures skidded across the front dashboard
-- selling people bags of ice, then sneaking around to get into the ice chests so that, when they opened the door, I'd pop out and hand them their ice
-- scraping my first dead raccoon (but not the last) off the pavement right in front of the store at 8am
-- watching the slow-motion break-up of my first real relationship from the fog of my own depression
-- getting up at 5:30am to be to work by 6am, working in the bakery in the morning and the deli in the afternoon until 3pm, getting off work and heading straight for the lake to take a nap in the sun and work on the tan, going home to take a shower and hang out with friends until after midnight, grabbing a few hours of sleep, and doing the whole thing over again the next day
Heavens knows there are more moments to remember, but maybe it's better that some of those times have faded into opaque wisps of feeling rather than clear snapshots of precise recall. Regardless, for a first job, I could have hardly asked for better. Where else could you work for two dollars an hour, even in the mid-'80s?
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