When you are a kid living at home you don’t really think about the struggles involved in getting food on the table. It just appears and you eat it. When you need clothes, they just show up. Band-aids? Here they are. When I left for college in Savannah, Georgia long ago I naively didn’t consider how I would survive, I figured my parents would take care of that. When my parents sent me off with a few MRE’s, a box of rusty tools, and a coffee can full of old screws and nails, it started to sink in. If I wanted to eat, I needed to get a job.
The good thing was that there were a plethora of jobs for a kid in a tourist town like Savannah. I had been a waiter for a good four months prior to leaving, I could do that. I got to work pounding the pavement (cobblestones) of historic River Street. I had heard that waiters down there made a sizable amount of money with the overpriced food and droves of tourists. I went into each restaurant and gave them my resume like a confident young professional. I figured I’d be hired in no time, but every place I went turned me away. Come back when you have more experience kid.
Down on my luck, I was approached by a guy that smelled slightly like stale beer and was wearing an official-looking nautical uniform. I don’t know how he knew but he asked me if I was looking for work. I said yes, he asked me a few questions about my experience, and after I paid him my last forty dollars for a skippers uniform I found myself the newest ‘employee’ setting sail on Savannah River Queen.
If you have never had the opportunity to ride the Savannah River Boat or any similar type of touristy River Boat found in most large cities with a body of water, well my friend, you do not know what a tourist trap is. Basically these things are huge pontoon boats with a paddle on the back that I am not convinced actually propels because it’s not on half the time. They have slick brochures that advertise luxurious site seeing trips and romantic dinner cruises but the reality is something rather different.
As an ‘employee’ I started off on the site seeing trips. My job was to restock souvenir glasses at the bar, make sure the bathrooms stayed clean, and hand out life jackets in case of emergency. We would go up and down the Savannah River and look at the ‘sites’ which included some ruins at one end and a pulp mill at the other. A week later I was ‘promoted’ to the dinner cruise. This is where the real fun started.
My job was to assist in bringing the food onto the boat, which was cooked at some other facility. The food was served buffet style. First, we’d put all the salad stuff up. Then I had to gather plates and scrape them off. Then we’d put up the main course which was always a gristly looking prime rib. Then, gather plates and scrape them off. Then desert, gather plates, scrape them off. There was no downtime on the cruises. I was not allowed to listen to the lounge singer playing the keyboard belting out, “I like Pina Colada’s” off tune. No, when we had downtime we were required to do our side work.
Side work is common with most restaurant jobs. In this case, I had a couple of options. I could be the tea brewer. I could be the coffee brewer. I could be the bar runner. But my favorite of them all was the roach killer. Yes. The roach killer. Because what Cheryl and Buck from Vidalia, Georgia, do not know as they cruise past the pulp mill on their 25th wedding anniversary, chomping down on overcooked prime rib, is that they are sitting smack in the middle of the largest bug infestation south of the Mason-Dixon.
In order to keep the creepy-crawly problem down, I got to stand by the prime rib station with a towel, and any time I saw a bug, dispatch it with great velocity. If the colony wasn’t running by the meat that day they were usually by the iced tea brewer or in the plate cabinet where I would perform the same executions. I asked why they didn’t use bug spray or an exterminator. They said they did, these little boogers were indestructible. Not even the fumes coming off the pulp mill did anything to scare them away.
Once I got my first paycheck and saw I could make more money panhandling or selling bamboo flowers on the side of the road, I quit. I’m not saying the job was beneath me but it is incredibly difficult to kill bugs all night and keep your cheesy boat captain uniform white. It was time to move on and up in the world of food service. I got back there on River Street, walked into a fancy restaurant, and when they asked me about my experience...I lied.