My mom always told me that it didn't matter what work I took on, so long as I was working. Cause a day without work is money lost. "It might only be $30, but that's $30 you wouldn't otherwise have," she'd say. I wish I could tell you that this instilled in me a great work ethic, but I'd be lying. I'm quite content with a pint of Ben and Jerry's, sitting in my boxers all day and binge-watching The Sopranos for a nth time. But her advice has kept me moving and has gifted me with quite a winding career path that led to both love and career as I met my the Mrs. when I was a shift supervisor at an independent movie theatre and fell into arts education because I wasn't hip enough to work as a bar-back in the East Village. But along that road, I have experienced a number of bumps and detours that aren't always worth celebrating. These (mis)adventures include brief careers in dinner cruise photography, managing a video store, wine merchandising, pizza making and catering at Christie's auction house.
The summer after my college freshman year, I told my parents that I wanted to wait tables as friends of mine were known for walking out with their pockets over-filled with cash every night. But despite filling out two dozen applications all over Georgetown and Adams Morgan, my parents hooked me up with a family friend to work at one of his pho restaurants. And not as a waiter, but as a busboy. Not exactly the hipster job I was looking for, but I remembered my mom's advice. At my "interview," the manager told me that everyone working for him was a newly arrived immigrant and that they worked their asses off six days a week and got paid in cash, under the table every night. He added that because I was a close family friend, I would get a special weekly wage plus whatever tip share I was entitled to at the end of the night. My wage was $200-a-week plus tips, averaging $500 a week total. In the mid-90s for a college kid looking for play money, this was more than enough. Except that, as I was soon to find out, there wasn't much time to play.
I went in every morning at 8am and worked until 8pm every day except for Monday. And this was not any pho restaurant, but a pioneer in the Northern Virginia region, known for it's incredibly balanced broth, generous portions and cheap prices. Because of these reasons, its patrons were plentiful and the most diverse of any restaurant. Americans loved our soup, Koreans loved our soup, Africans and Latinos loved our soup and of course, the Viets loved our soup -- which is the most important indicator of a Viet restaurant's quality. Lunchtime crowds would gather everyday beginning at 10:30 a.m. and extending until 3 p.m., which is when staff would take their lunch. Dinner rush would start at 4:30 p.m. and not let up until 8 p.m. when the doors closed. A newbie to the restaurant world, I was not prepared for the volume of people. More importantly, I was unprepared for the nasty eating and social habits they brought with them. You gain quite an education from a busboy's perspective. Never in my life had I had people snap their fingers at me to gain my attention, but this became the norm, especially from the Korean businessmen who frequented the restaurant. Model-thin Asian girls would order large bowls piled high with all cuts of beef, only to leave that hunking pile on the table next to their half empty bowl of noodles and broth for me to clear. The more considerate ones would place it on top of a one-ply napkin. On a regular basis, I was greeted with half empty bowls with one or two cigarette butts soaking in the broth and a one dollar tip next to the bean sprouts. When I first started, clearing a four top was a challenge. It would take me close to ten minutes to dump the uneaten contents into the wet receptacle and sort chopsticks, stack large and small bowls and wipe down the table. But when you have a 4.5 hour lunch rush with 90 seated and 50 in line at any given moment, you need to bus faster. By the end of the week, I gave up on keeping my uniform clean. Speed and efficiency were more important than keeping hoisin and sriracha off my top. And slowly but surely, I clicked over and became one of them. I joined them for staff meals, slurping down huge bowls of tendon and fatty brisket, throwing back an iced ca phe sua da and finishing off with as many 555s as I could smoke before the next rush lined up. I grew quite comfortable with my new Viet restaurant family, my already fluent Vietnamese absorbing their Southern, profanity-laced dialect. I joined in their ball-breaking smack talk and their incredibly un-PC conversations about certain guests.
But it was a short-lived club. I remember paying a visit a couple of weeks after I ended my tour of duty and though they allowed me to sit with them at the staff table, I understood from their once-overs of my collared dress shirt and my well-kept jeans that this wasn't a relationship worth continuing. I was a guest star, a privileged boy from well-to-do family who was temporarily slumming it, I was never one of them. At the end of each night, I'd hop in my hoop-d and trek into the city or to a friend's house to drink my earnings away. They did not have the luxury of such an escape. For the others, it was their livelihood and one that they relied upon to feed their families. I went out with play money while they went back to their government housing and stretched their cash far enough to get food on the table and keep gas in the tank while clothing their kids for American schools. I hustled six days a week and survived because I knew there was an end in sight. I would go back to college and they would still be bussing half-eaten bowls of soup with floating cigarette butts in them. For many of them, it wasn't a means to an end -- it was the end as all they had worked for and sacrificed had earned them a life in the most privileged nation on earth. While there was always the hope that something better would come along, hope was a silly thing to invest time and energy in. It was a better bet to invest in their kids new lives and education so that they could return the favor one day, hopefully before they got too old to enjoy it.
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