The Dead Mice Guy

Lessons from My First Job

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works

are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

- Albert Camus

I was fifteen years old and needed a job. OK, I really didn’t need the job, but I did need money. A fifteen year old realizes quickly that washing grandma’s car and delivering the “Shopping News” five days a week just won’t cut it. So, as the story often goes, I had a buddy who had gotten a new job and was about to leave his old one. Word of mouth is a great way to get a job. So, I asked him if there was any chance that I could take over his old spot as dishwasher at Monty’s Grill. As friends will often do, Mike put a good word in for me and got me my first job interview. After I found out what the job was really like, Mike turned out not be such a good friend after all…

Monty’s Grill was a little hole-in-the-wall diner that was attached to a seedy motel along Woodward Avenue, the main strip in town. The place consisted of five small tables and 10 counter stools, with a capacity for about twenty five people. Like most diners, the grill and beverage dispensers were right up front, with storage and a dishwashing sink behind a saloon-type door in the back. This little dive was owned by Monty and Esther, two middle-aged, born again Christians, who drove a rusted out Chrysler minivan with an “I Love My Cat” license plate mounted onto the front bumper.

Monty had greasy, black hair that was always slicked back. His mouth seemed to always be curled up in a sweaty, smirky sneer. He wore a patterned, polyester bowling shirt and black sans-a-belt pants of similar material. For the sake of descriptive clarity, he was the Anti-Elvis.

Monty was famous for suave and debonair expressions like “Smell like anyone ya know?” (when you were mixing the tuna salad) and “Just scrape the turds off of it…its still good” (when the mice had gotten into the frankfurter bags). Ah Monty, a truly sophisticated and professional entrepreneur; a real people person and a man for all seasons.

Now Esther, his wife, was also fond of the polyester look, wearing short-sleeved blouses and slacks that wrapped tightly around her chubby arms and midriff. Her hair was bleached to unnatural blonde perfection and set in a way that it looked like Jiffy-Pop popcorn exploding off of the top of her head. This look only accentuated her dyed mustache and the inadvertent whiskers on her chin (which also had that other-worldy blondish, bleach-white appearance.)

So, this was the scene I walked into on the morning of my interview. Monty was already firing up the grill, while Esther sat half way on one of the counter stools, reading the morning paper.

“You Mike’s friend?” she said, not looking up from her Travel section.

“Yes, I’m Joe Bastian.”

“You have a car?”

“No, I only live a few blocks away.”

“Can you work ‘til 9:00 during the week and all day Saturday?”

“Yes, that’s not a problem.”

“We’ll pay ya $3.50 an hour under the table, so long as ya don’t tell nobody, OK?”

“OK, sure, that’s fine... but…”

“Course, we have to take out taxes and Social Security.”

“Uh, yes, I understand…”

“OK, good, you can start Tuesday at 4:00 pm, See ya then.”

That was it. I left Monty’s with the strange sense that I had just been sold on the black market to some white trash flesh peddlers. I did not have a chance to ask any questions, like what I would be doing, or even negotiate a salary. Esther never made eye contact with me through the entire interview process (if you could call it that), though I could tell she had sized me up before I even got a chance to speak.

As I walked the few blocks back to my house, I ran the entire interview process back through my head. How could she be paying me under the table but still be taking out social security and taxes? Was $3.50 really enough money for this job? What would I have to do in that little place for 5-8 hours a night? Having no interview skills and little negotiating savvy, I was at the mercy of my new polyestered bosses. Slowly but surely, a feeling of dread and foreboding came over me as I pondered on my first day of work and the potential trouble ahead. I realized that I had just agreed to accept the unknown.

The first day of work began on a Tuesday afternoon. My job was to bring the bus tubs from out front to the back room and replace the dirty dishes with clean ones. My training consisted of being shown the Hobart dishwasher with instructions on how to empty out the clean dishes and load in the dirty ones. The job was grosser than I thought it would be, and Monty was no help. He would throw half-eaten food, balled-up napkins, floor sweepings and anything else that was lying on the counter into my bus tub. I was stuck sorting through the filth for dishes that needed to be washed.

The other jobs I learned at Monty’s Grill included watering down the fresh-squeezed orange juice, scraping mouse turds off of the “swankie-frankies”(uncooked hot dogs wrapped in raw bacon) and general pest control. Of these tasks, general pest control was probably the most disturbing. Monty did not believe in using conventional mousetraps to catch the typical restaurant vermin. Instead, he used to like to wait with butt end of a broomstick by the soda fountain dispenser. It seemed that the mice frequented the black, no-skid pad under the beverage syrup canisters, where the sugary substance would leak out onto the floor. The mice would congregate and lap up the syrup and soda that had spilled over during its constant use. Monty would wait for these unsuspecting creatures to gather and then ram his broomstick handle squarely down upon their heads. Most of the mice were killed upon the first blow, but some required a second bludgeoning to end their convulsing. After each massacre, Monty would chuckle to himself, flip his broom over and sweep up the carnage into his dustpan, glowing in the spoils of victory. Now came the worst and most disturbing part. Monty would place each dead mouse into a large cardboard box that he kept on a shelf in the back room. I had to stand back there and wash dishes, knowing that a box of dead mice was setting only a few feet above my head.

I could not imagine why Monty kept these deceased animals instead of just throwing them in the dumpster. Then one day, the answer finally came. As I was going through my regular routine of scraping out bus tubs, there came a knock on the back door of the building. I went to the door to find a shabbily dressed older man standing there, looking at me intently. In a gravelly, worn voice he asked,

“Does Monty got any dead mice for me?”

At first, I did not know what to say. How did he know about the mass cardboard grave on the back shelf? Hesitantly, I went up to the front grill and quietly inquired to Monty about the man at the back door.

“Yeah, give him the box.” Monty grumbled to me and shooed me back away from his grill. The rumpled, haggard man seemed very excited as I slowly took the box off of the shelf and brought it to him. He thanked me with a grin and scurried off around the back of the hotel and then disappeared. I could only guess what he was going to do with those things. I humored myself at the time, thinking that maybe he would use these carcasses for science or medical purposes. Perhaps, he was collecting them on behalf of the local institutes for a small stipend? Yet still, the darker side of my brain half expected to find him in the back alley with a rotisserie and spit, roasting his catch over an old oil drum.

The “Dead Mice Guy,” as he came to be known, showed up every week to collect his box of goodies. In retrospect, Monty stayed true to his nature by not letting good meat go to waste while providing a bit of nourishment to the less fortunate. Secretly though, I would have wagered that he was making some sort of illicit profit on the side through the resale mouse tails and whiskers.

It was not too long before I realized that my time at Monty’s was to be short-lived. Between the dead mice, cramped quarters and Monty’s attempt at humor every time I had to mix the tuna salad, I knew it was time to leave. Eventually, Monty’s routine grumbling, the overpowering smell of Esther’s VO5 hairspray and the general drudgery of job became too much for me to bear. The funny thing was that I was afraid to quit. I had never quit anything in my life. For the first time, I had to tell someone that I was leaving, moving on and never coming back--but how?

Well, after a few days of mulling it over, I decided I should treat quitting like jumping into a cold lake; it was a lot easier to jump in all at once than wade in gently. Frankly, I just wanted to get it over with and move on. I went in on my off day and told Esther that I

had found another job and would be leaving after the following week. Surprisingly, she was pretty gracious. She thanked me for the work I had done and wished me well. As I walked out the door, I could not help feeling that, for the first time, she was actually treating me as more of a human being than an indentured servant. Maybe she thought she could do that now that I was no longer going to be working there.

My last week went by quickly and was pretty much uneventful. I left without any hoopla and started my new job soon after. It was another dishwashing gig at a more upscale restaurant downtown. The vacancy I left at Monty’s Grill was filled by another unsuspecting classmate who would soon learn the joys of short order dining with its warm hosts, Monty and Esther.

So What Did I Learn?

My first job experience at Monty’s Grill taught me the importance having good negotiating skills. You need to know what your skills are and what they are worth on the open market. If you don’t know what your services are worth (even if its minimum wage) going into an interview, you are at the mercy of your future employer. So, do your research on what the market will bear before you agree to sign up for your new gig. I also learned the importance of proper training and respect for the individual worker. I learned this from Monty and Esther because they provided me with neither. If I had been treated a little bit better and instructed on what I was to be doing, I would have been more productive with a much more positive attitude.

Also, it is important to exit a job gracefully. You need to know how to quit in a way that is inoffensive to your employer. Remember, you never know when your paths might cross again. Once you start working out in the real world, you begin to build a reputation. This reputation will precede you wherever you go. So, make sure that you are known for good things like politeness, punctuality and hard work. These things will give you a red carpet to your next successful career move.

I also found out that honesty and fair play were not always on the forefront of peoples’ minds in business, despite their evangelization of Christian ethics and virtues.

The last thing I learned was to be careful what you eat when you’re out. Despite what your doctor says, fried foods may be your safest bet when it comes to killing germs and bacteria. Oh, and always use a straw in your drink; you never know who has been lapping up the Coke syrup.