Tales from the Underpaid: 80 Quarts of Cornbread Batter
“No, what happened was I got suspended and just never went back.” Mike was pouring the dry cornbread mix sent to us by Boston Market’s corporate suppliers into the Hobart HL800-1STD Legacy+ 80 Quart 3 HP Planetary Mixer. Befitting its name, the machine was a gigantic industrial stainless steel monument, with a pot big enough that three witches could comfortably stir it as they dreamt up toil and trouble for the thanes of Scotland. Mike followed up the dry mix with the only other component it needed: water.
“Suspended for what?” I asked him. I was sliding raw chickens onto a V-shaped skewer, four feet long and very heavy when loaded with poultry. The birds had marinated all night in deep plastic bins filled with apple cider vinegar, orange juice, and a proprietary seasoning mix. When one was packed, head-hole to butthole, I racked it in the rotisserie machine the size of a Mormon family’s refrigerator and closed the glass front doors so that would-be diners could watch the golden meat-birds spinning, fat dripping from their crisping skins.
“I built a pipe bomb,” Mike said, nonchalantly.
“How long were you supposed to be out for?”
“Three days,” he said, clicking the toggle switch that would begin the mixing process. The machine did not turn on. Mike began the checklist of reasons why that might be the case.
“You only got three days for building a pipe bomb? Why, was it fake?”
The planetary mixer will not engage unless the safety guard is in place.
“No, it was real. Just black powder and gravel, mostly.”
“Why did you do that?” I don’t know why I asked. What answer would be enough?
“The disrespect, man. The constant disrespect.”
If the machine does not start mixing when switch is in ON position, check the power supply.
“Fucking thing is plugged in,” Mike said. “I don’t know why it won’t go.”
If I hadn’t been trying to make sense of his story, I would have seen it sooner. How had he, a person of about the same age as myself and Kleebold and Harris, gotten a suspension for building a bomb in his high school? How had he not been expelled? Had he, in fact, been expelled and pretended to have dropped out to avoid the shame of it? What is shame to a shift lead at Boston Market?
He and I were dressed the same: black Dickies unbustable work pants, black-soled work boots, and the maroon Boston Market logo-bearing polo shirt. We both stank of creamed spinach and went home every night to degrease our faces with Dawn or its generic equivalent. If Mike had made my rookie mistake of eating the shed skins of five whole chickens on his first night of picking the bones for tomorrow’s pot pies, I didn’t know it. He had two years of seniority on me.
But I was distracted by the bomb, and even after I saw the problem, the odds were against me. The kitchen floor was glazed clay brick and bore the sheen of a constant, thick coat of chicken fat. Black-soled shoes are a safety measure, not a miracle. When I leapt forward to avert one disaster, I caused another. My foot slid away from my body in a Baryshnikov split, and I grabbed at the stainless steel counter beside me to keep from tearing out the crotch of my pants. I succeeded, but I was too late.
The Hobart mixer hadn’t started because the giant witch-pot holding 80 quarts of cornbread batter wasn’t fully locked in place. That was, I’m sure, the next bullet point on the troubleshooting list, but Mike hadn’t gotten that far. Kneeling in a half-split, I was the one to catch the cauldron as it tilted forward. The water had begun to sink into the cornmeal and baking powder, the sugar and salt, and what poured over me was a chunky yellow river of cold cornpone slop.
I couldn’t get my greased feet under me. I couldn’t stand up with the pot in my hands. I couldn’t let go of it and lose all the rest to the floor. I was stuck, and Captain Pipe Bomb was laughing too hard to help me. I pulled a rubber relief mat over and struggled to get the pot into the stops where it belonged. Somehow, we salvaged enough of the mixture and eyeballed how much water it needed to make a lousy half-batch of cornbread.
The rest of it was on me.
It clung to me, a river of it caking down my shirt and inside it, to my intense dismay. I couldn’t leave, of course. There’s literally no reason a food service employee can give to leave mid-shift; you could have enucleated an eyeball and someone would offer you a couple of Advil and band-aid. Instead, I took a bench scraper to my clothes and did what I could before tying a clean apron over the whole mess and working the next five hours with Mike.
Mike was loudly racist and rude. His speech was rich with Inland Empire specific expressions, such as referring to a large number of anything as “a grip” and his underwear as his “choneys.” His stories were all about his deliquency in high school, his luck with heavily tattooed women, and stupid things he’d seen our bosses do.
“I never saw someone take a bucket of cornbread batter to the dome before, though. That’s you.”
Oh, to be unique in a common place.
Mike quit during my third month slinging chicken thighs and meat loaf sandwiches at people who think Taco Bell is too spicy. I took his position as shift lead, due to my powers of literacy and equable temperament. On the day I was first scheduled to open the store with the keys they gave me (I made $7.25/hour) my boss had neglected to supply me with a safe disarm code and wouldn’t answer her phone. I figured tripping the alarm would get someone to answer and give the cops the code word and we could get on with the meat of the day. I was right.
The day of the cornbread batter disaster was one of my longest. I went home and in addition to the degreasing protocol, I discovered that I had to remove hardened fetal cornbread from the cups of my bra, scrub it with a toothbrush out of the teeth of my zipper, and turn twin rings of it, rubbery and turd-shaped, out of the cuffs of my work pants. After that, I washed the whole outfit and went back in at 6AM, to unlock the doors, to spit the chickens, and to make 80 more quarts of that golden fluff that we served with every meal.
I was humiliated and overworked in that job, I was filthy and spoken to with almost no respect by anyone on either side of the counter.
But I never went hungry. And I never built a pipe bomb.
(Boston Market, still extant, 2000-2001)