Haywood's

The summer i turned fifteen, i took my first hourly wage job at Haywood's, a fried chicken restaurant converted from an old Red Barn. The minimum work age was sixteen, but there was a loophole which allowed fifteen year-olds to work, as long as they didn't go over a certain number (thirtysomething?) of hours a week. Minimum wage was $3.35 an hour, but because of my age they were allowed to pay me $2.75. I remember being excited that summer when i got the first raise of my life, to $2.85. My sister had worked there before me, so i was introduced to everyone as her little brother. She must have been liked, as i was treated okay.
Haywood's was fun. There was a bit of the "this idiot place" to the mood, but the workers liked each other, hanging out after work and such. Being so young, i didn't do much of that, but a couple of the oldest guys, brothers named Steve and Rick whom everyone respected, took me under their wings (haha) a bit. In retrospect, they may have been happy to have the chance to score points with my sister, but they were genuine too. Everybody jokingly called the place Bobo's Burger Barn, because the owner Boris was maybe the tiniest bit creepy. The manager was a really cool guy named Chuck. He had a nice sense of humor and kept the place running well, if not always by the book. I remember one time i spilled an entire rack of freshly-cooked chicken. He looked down at the mess, then out front to see if any customers had noticed. He looked back to me, and gestured to put the chicken back on the rack.
Most of the girls worked at the counter, and most of the boys in the back. I ended up doing lots of cleanup and food prep, most memorably dislocating innumerable chicken thighs and scooping glandular yellow goo out of them. I loved sneaking chicken salad out of the walk-in fridge, especially when Steve made it.
I also gained points with my peers and managers one day by volunteering to clean the bathroom, in which a drug-addled customer had voided machine-gun diarrhea over the walls.
One Sunday morning Rick told me to come in extra early to help him open. It was the first time i'd seen a cook do the open, and it was a little impressive. After firing up the grill, he flipped a few eggs on it, and made us a very tasty breakfast. Somehow, eating that meal was maybe the most grownup i'd yet felt in life.
There was one girl who worked in the back. She was cool, funny, and not at all snooty. She was a couple years older than i, and one night while we were finishing up after closing, she gave me the first sexual proposition of my life. I was cutting tomatoes and she backed me up against the table, asking me whether i'd like her to fondle my tomatoes. A part of me wanted to say yes, but i wasn't at all sure. I croaked out some attempted joke, put a tomato in her hand, and beat a hasty retreat.
The coolest thing that happened that summer was being electrocuted. We were operating some appliance with an ancient, frayed extension cord, which was lying on a metal table. Steve was touching the table, and dropped a wet dishrag into my hand. A jolt of current suddenly travelled from the cord to the table to Steve to the rag to me. I felt my senses scramble into complete incoherency, then into an insensate state. I woke up some seconds later, with Steve looking down at me like i might be dead. The current hadn't affected him at all. I was up and joking within a minute.
Looking back, i realize that at that time in my life i was close to making the life decision to not drink alcohol. I had been drunk once, at Erik Berger's bar mitzvah, and hadn't cared for it. For additional teen identity crisis reasons, i was soon to put alcohol and other things out of my life altogether. Drinking was a part of the Haywood's scene. My youth had kind of excused me from that, but i think i realized that next summer, my non-drinking might set me apart. Because i liked the people there, leaving instead of being different may have suddenly seemed preferable. So at the end of the summer, tired of smelling like a days-old french fry and determined to make my way in a place not blazed by my sister, i set my sights on the Friendly's ice cream shop across the way.