Tales of Duke's, Part 1: Oooh! Yuck! Gross! ... Cool!

It is good for a child to have the experience of working at a "fast food" restaurant; in some respects, every job thereafter will be easier in one way or another.  My daughter did a stint at the local Wendy's (making hamburgers) and my oldest son recently started working at Iceberg Drive In (he grills hamburgers and makes milk shakes).  I'm thrilled that they can count such work in their histories, and I hope all of my children will eventually have such experiences.

My bias here can be traced to my "fast food" work experience.  I worked at "Duke's Charbroiller" and gained a wealth of great experiences and stories.  There are many to tell, but I'll start with just this one....

Theo was a new employee, about 30 years old.  He had just come from Greece, spoke passable English, and was to be a chief cook and have managerial responsibility over us teenage boys who worked there.  Theo was quite short (if memory serves right, just a little over 5 feet tall), so he had several inches of stature to make up for in the eyes of us young bucks.  He did it, though.  To start with, he had incredible muscle tone in his arms.  I remember him flexing his biceps — they were round and hard like apples.  With this muscle tone was great strength — he could out-wrestle any of us, including Big Jim.  He also had a very daring personality, which played well with us easily impressioned youth.  He would dare us to make things (food items, from ingredients in the restaurant) that he could not eat.  Naturally, such a dare provoked a great outpouring of creativity.  We all joined in the fun.  Among the things I made were (1) a hamburger with soft-serve ice cream between the patty and the bun, (2) a barbecue-sauce milk shake, and (3) a hot yellow-mustard sundae.  All of these were easily consumed.  In retrospect, I don't remember anything that we made that proved to be the least bit challenging for him.  It made us wonder what kinds of things he had eaten before we knew him — what kinds of things were so much worse that nothing we could make would cause him to flinch.  We never got a complete answer to that lingering question, but we did get a clue on one very special day.

Theo decided to take us boys down to the pier to do some fishing.  We piled into his large, tricked-out and raised shiny black truck, and the adventure began.  I believe Theo's goal was to catch more, bigger fish (and sooner) than any of the rest of us could do.  I had been salt-water fishing with my Dad since I was five, so this was very familiar territory for me.  And, consequently, I caught the first fish.  From the first "Zzzzz" of my reel as the 15" fighter took my lure and tried to get away, all attention was centered on me, and I rather enjoyed that.  Theo's plans were in jeopardy.  He had to react quickly, and so he did.  As soon as I had the fish reeled in, he grabbed the angrily flailing prize with his strong hands, brought the fish up to his face, and ... BIT the fish right on the top of its head.  There was a brief crunching sound that we all heard.  The fish instantly went limp.  I still remember scales on his lips and some unidentified fish liquid (brain juice?) dribbling down his chin as he emphatically said, "You have to kill it — right away!".  We boys were stunned by what we had just witnessed — to the point of having our already weak and immature vocabularies reduced to long-drawn renditions of "Oooh!"  "Yuck!"  "Gross!" and, after a short pause of palpable silence, "Cool!".  And with that last word, Theo's victory was confirmed.  He had won the respect of these young boys, and working with him at the restaurant was forever changed.  We no longer saw him as short, or poor at speaking English.  No, Theo was a force of nature.  We knew that he was capable of doing things that none of us had ever before considered, and that put just enough fear into us that we never questioned his authority.

Oh the things that impress teenage boys!