There’s a new rock and roll band called The Beatles.
I like their music. I think they might do well.
GRACE’S DIARY
That summer I worried a lot. I worried that we’d live in that crummy neighborhood forever, and I worried a lot about the approaching school year. I had heard stories about inner-city schools and I lived in terror of what it would be like to go to one.
I also worried about money, or our lack of it. Every now and then Joel and I would try to earn some, combing the neighborhood looking for work. We’d mow lawns and do other odd jobs, but it was a poor neighborhood so we never got paid much. Once we helped Mrs. Poulsen, a two-hundred-year-old lady who lived at the end of our street, clean out her garage. That place hadn’t been touched for decades, evidenced by the yellowed GERMAN STORM TROOPERS INVADE POLAND headline on a newspaper we threw out. It took an entire day, leaving us dirty and exhausted. When we’d completed the job she gave us each fifty cents. I stopped Joel from throwing his quarters at her door after she shut it.
In spite of the wasted day, two good things came from that project. First, we acquired an old fruit dryer. It was a square plywood box with window-screen trays that slid inside, which Mrs. Poulsen had us carry out to the curb for garbage pickup. We dragged the dryer home on the back of our wagon and put it in our clubhouse. It actually worked and we began drying apricots into fruit leather, which, to us, tasted as good as any store-bought candy.
Second, we spent our day’s earnings on milkshakes, which led to my job at McBurger Queen.
McBurger Queen was on State Street about six blocks from our home. The name of the restaurant was my boss’s genius. My boss, Mr. Dick (that’s not meant to be derogatory, it was his actual surname), believed that by combining the names of the most successful burger joints in America he would capitalize on thousands of dollars of free advertising and make himself rich. The Queen, as we employees called it, was one of those places that had more items on the menu than a Chinese restaurant. It had sixty different kinds of malts, from grasshopper to caramel cashew (my personal favorite) and almost as many food choices, from fish burgers to soft tacos. My boss also sold water softeners and Amway products, and we were required to keep a stack of brochures for both on the front counter near the cash register.
Mr. Dick trusted no one. He believed John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the Pope belonged to a secret organization conspiring to rule the world. He also believed that all his employees were thieves bent on eating his inventory, which was sometimes true but not as true as Mr. Dick believed. Once one of my co-workers saw him in the parking lot across the street spying on us through binoculars. The very week I started working at the place, Mr. Dick hauled three of his workers off to take polygraph tests. I don’t know if that was legal or not, but in those days kids our age pretty much went along with everything adults said.
I knew about the tests because Gary, the assistant manager (a forty-year-old guy with chronic, maybe terminal, dandruff), showed me the actual test results from the lie detector machine with its accompanying graph. The interrogator asked questions like: Have you ever stolen money from the till? (No spike on the report.) Have you given away free food? (Small spike.) Do you eat French fries without paying for them? (The spike went off the chart.)
After the inquiry, one of my co-workers never returned; I still imagine him languishing in a gulag somewhere. Of course the shakedown was meant as intimidation for the rest of us and it worked reasonably well. So, for the most part, we rarely ate on the job, even the mistakes, like when someone ordered a hamburger with no ketchup and we put ketchup on it anyway. At least not without looking over our shoulder a few times before wolfing it down.
What made Mr. Dick’s actions more ridiculous was that we were paid like sixty cents an hour. I later discovered that Mr. Dick hired kids because minimum wage laws didn’t apply. He eventually got in trouble when someone turned him in for making us pay our matching Social Security payments.