209. No Reason to Stay – Garth Brown
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I had no reason to be there and no reason to stay. In the great tradition of painfully naive young men, my journey had been propelled by an inchoate desire for an experience of such purity that it would delineate everything that had come before from everything that would come after.
A busy shift spent over three deep fryers coats hair and skin and clothes with an invisible film of grease. If beer-battered cod features prominently on the menu, the smell of fries will be tinged by a persistent dockside aroma. No one enjoys smelling like a day-old takeout bag washed up on a beach, but the real hazard is the way the scalding oil splashes up when a novice clumsily drops in a chunk of battered fish.
“Fryer bite,” said Chris from over at the salad station when he saw the rising blister on the back of my hand. It was my second week as a line cook at Humpy’s Great Alaskan Alehouse. Under the stress particular to a no-stakes job, I was still moving faster than I needed to, as if something weightier than the dining pleasure of a four-top from Dubuque depended on my ability to stay ahead of the burgers coming off the grill.
I slapped a bandage on the burn and kept working while Chris hummed along to “Cherish.” He had perpetually bloodshot eyes, a goatee, six kids, and a conviction that effective contraception didn’t exist. Somehow he managed to stay ahead of the lunch rush despite his crouching down and peering past his tickets into the dining room, where a dozen Madonnas on a dozen televisions cavorted in the surf.
This was the day’s final cruise ship. Each brought a surge of tourists precisely ten minutes after docking, and I had four baskets of fries bubbling away before any of them had a table. They looked happy, with dissipated smiles from a vacation going as planned, though I didn’t understand why they would trade snow crab and Bloody Marys and the vastness of Alaska as a backdrop for the dim confines of Humpy’s.
Of course, I was every bit as much a tourist, having driven to Anchorage on a whim, arriving after endless days on the ALCAN highway. I had no reason to be there and no reason to stay. In the great tradition of painfully naive young men, my journey had been propelled by an inchoate desire for an experience of such purity that it would delineate everything that had come before from everything that would come after.
Instead, I spent my days frying up frozen corn dogs and miniature crab cakes, and what little I learned came from watching: watching a landlord’s tricks forchiseling free a security deposit, watching the way a two-liter bottle filled with gasoline, when aimed at a fire and jumped on, explodes and turns the jumper’s legs into a torch, watching the way a few bad choices will circumscribe a life.
Toward the end, the only daylight I saw was on my fifteen-minute break. I’d put on my coat and hat and take a mug of weak coffee out back and watch it steam up into the pale sky. I only worked at Humpy’s for six months, but the scar on the back of my hand took years to fade.
– Garth Brown
