Tales from the Underpaid: The Slicer
Welcome to my 2025 newsletter, where I tell raucous and memorable stories from the lousy jobs I’ve had in kitchens, retail, and one phone sex hotline.
Today’s story is one of my all-time favorites, about a bloody revenge that I didn’t have to lift a finger to exact.
My very first real job that issued me a printed paycheck instead of a ten dollar bill at the end of a long night of babysitting was in a mom and pop pizza place in Idyllwild, CA. Mom was a short, quiet woman with curly hair whom I hardly ever saw. Pop was a retired cop who stole wages and made our lives miserable. Let’s call him Wayne.
Wayne only ever came into the restaurant when he needed to feel powerful. The kitchen was run (as many kitchens are) by single mothers and students who needed a job and couldn’t be picky. I was fourteen when I started there as a dishwasher, using industrial dish soap to break up olive oil on my feet for ten hours a day without a work permit and without having yet read Marx.
When Wayne explained that I didn’t work ten hours days; I worked an eight-hour day and two “bonus hours” on the following morning, I didn’t understand that he was stealing overtime pay from a literal child. I understood only that at the end of this fortnight, I would get a check for $200 that would buy groceries.
I also understood, crucially, that I got a free small pizza of my very own during every shift. I used to eat it (white sauce, extra cheese, pepperoni, cashews) in the walk-in freezer, my sore heels propped up on a beer keg.
We were a tight crew, looking out for one another in a place with a very hot oven and a lot of knives. I bussed tables that kids had puked on, combed gnawed crusts out of the ancient carpet, and slipped in puddles of grease so often it’s a wonder I can walk at all. When Wayne would come in, all that would go to hell.
He’d tear the place apart looking for infractions, remaking pizzas and unstacking clean dishes to look for one that had remained oily so he could bust someone’s balls. He’d park out in front of the shop in shades (but a highly identifiable car) to make sure we didn’t lock the doors ten minutes early. He’d yell at someone until she cried with such regularity that we just started coaching each other to think of something sad the minute he began, to get it over with.
Wayne needed something. He needed control or to feel important; maybe he missed the thrill of carrying a gun. I don’t care what it was; I hope he never found it.
One memorable he came in early, around noon, announcing he was going to stay until close. We turned the radio off, we stopped speaking. Everyone became a small, efficient machine in an effort to escape notice. We were slow during the day, especially if the weather was bad. One mile high Idyllwild gets a lot of snow and at that time had one plow. Dissatisfied with our hustle, Wayne set us to busywork: wash the front windows, empty the sinks and disinfect them, wipe down the walk-in. Whatever. We didn’t argue. We did it.
I could see him getting more and more frustrated by our compliance. He didn’t want obdience. He wanted to feel something breaking beneath him. I was young, but I understood that. I kept my eyes cast down. After I disinfected the sinks, I filled them again with sanitizer and soap, I went back to washing out the tubs that held our dough while it rose overnight.
You know that way that some people have of completing a chore with such wordless violence that you understand it to be a threat? Wayned was doing that, slamming doors and dumping objects on the floor, pouting his way toward a full tantrum. When his eyes lit on the deli slicer, I felt a thrill of hope. A deli meat slicer is a circular saw with a taste for flesh. It wouldn’t put up with a tantrum. It wasn’t like the women and children who needed this job. It was a predator.
Wayne took his sharpening stone to this Hobart HS6N-1 13" Heavy-Duty Manual Slicer with it’s one half horsepower and went to work on the blade, running it at top speed. Grumbling, impatient, he worked against the machine, trying to show it who was boss.
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. I was watching, looking at Wayne for the first time that day. Another employee, a teenage girl like me, walked into the back with a tub of dirty tools from the kitchen. She handed them to me and the look that passed between us was that of stab Caesar.
When Wayne’s two-fingered grip on the whetstone let go, several things happened at once. Propelled by the motion of the blade, the stone clattered against the ceiling and then hit the floor. Wayne’s fingers went down on the blade, and I heard it squeal as it hit bone. Blood ringed the circumference and then spun out, spattering up the wall and splitting Wayne’s face in half. I saw drops go into his mouth as he began to scream.
Someone gave him a clean towel. Someone called his wife to drive him to the hospital. When he was gone, we were too cowed to laugh out loud. But the radio came back on and we went about our work with airy chitchat gusto. I bleached out the blood of my enemy with a smile on my face.
Wayne did not come back into the shop for six months.
(Idyllwild Pizza Company, still extant. 1998-1999)