Working Girl
High school became a drag with too many rules and regulations and too much work. I began skipping classes and sometimes even skipped a whole day. In Sam Cooke’s song “Wonderful World,” he sang about not knowing much of what was in the books or the French he took. And how he wanted to be in a world with his love and fortune. Man, I sure could relate to that!
Unlike Jean who was at the top of her class, my grades were never that good anyhow. And besides, I really didn’t see the point of school. I learned how to read and write. Maybe not perfectly, but who cares about grammar and punctuation and silly stuff like that. What difference does it make if I say its or it’s? Loser or looser? Bear bare? They’re, there, their? It all seemed so silly to me. My English teacher, Miss Pricket, said that it makes a difference when you are writing, more so than when you are speaking. My reply to that was, “Well, its not like Im gonna right a book, write?” Although, I can say that I was good at arithmetic. I don’t like to brag though because that’s actually a job requirement in my after-school job. If a customer gives you a $20 bill for an $18 tab and says to keep the change, you have to be able to figure out how much of that is your tip. And you don’t always have time to lay out 20 single dollar bills on the counter and then pick up 18 of them to put in the cash register. Sometimes you just gotta be able to do complicated math in your head. What else about school is there? Nothing.
In one of my high school classes, maybe it was geography or history class, the teacher asked us what countries our ancestors were from. I was adopted and didn’t know my real family roots; I only knew about Jean’s family. Mrs. Buhne always laughed when she told us that she came from a family of hillbillies and coal miners. So, when the teacher called on me, I thought about it and answered “My grandparents were hillbillies and coal miners.” The class burst out laughing. I was horrified.
The teacher then scolded me “Those are not countries “dear.” I stormed out of the classroom, horrified, embarrassed, and mad as hell. I never went back. I dropped out of school halfway through my senior year.
So, I put on some good ole rock and roll music, got myself a Klondike bar out of the fridge, and had myself a graduation party. My mother and father were furious with me. In no way did they celebrate my new freedom. They constantly nagged me about going back to high school, but I was 18 and had my mind made up.
During high school, I worked as a part-time waitress at Scotty’s Diner after school. When I told them that I quit school, they couldn’t have been happier. Actually, they were thrilled! They offered to put me on the full-time shift. My fortunes had turned, skyrocketed actually. Life was good.
Soon I decided that it was time to leave Mayer Lane and my sometimes loving and sometimes mean adoptive parents. I had enough tips saved that I could start looking for my own apartment. The only place I could afford was a basement apartment in Etna. Nobody wanted to live in Etna but the people who already lived there didn’t seem to mind. The North Hills people looked down on Etna. We didn’t even think of it as part of the North Hills. Etna was a very small town that was closer to the city. You could call it a mill town of sorts because it had some kind of small mill or factory named Spangs. I don’t know what they did there but most of the Etna men worked there. The rest of the men and even some of the women worked in the adjacent small town named Sharpsburg, where all of the Italians lived. Sharpsburg was the home of the H. J. Heinz plant before they moved to Pittsburgh’s north side area. They made Heinz pickles, Heinz ketchup, and “57 Varieties” of something or other. The main street in Etna had a Five and Ten store, a hardware store, a beer distributer, a post office, a barbershop, a two-man police department, and six bars. Because Etna was close to the Allegheny River, their basements often flooded during heavy rain storms. But still, when I saw that hardware store’s basement apartment, I knew it was meant to be. It was mine, my new home, all mine and mine alone. I just loved it. To this day, I never went back to my childhood home again. In fact, I never went back to Mayer Lane again.
I always stayed in touch with Jean though. I often called Jean from the hardware store’s pay phone upstairs. We would sometimes have long talks. She sounded unhappy to me. But she never complained and wouldn’t tell me if something was wrong. Maybe because I could never stay on the phone long enough before Chuck, the store owner would start yelling. “Beatrice, you can’t tie up the phone that long. You get three minutes for a dime, and that’s it!” Occasionally Jean would pick me up so that we could go riding around together, looking for boys. But that didn’t happen very often because she went to school every day and I worked the daily afternoon/evening shift at the diner, and weekends too.
I took a bus to the diner every day and ate all of my meals there. It might surprise you to know that diner food may not be the healthiest diet but it is tasty and I ate a lot of it. Which further enhanced my figure. The Diner was a shiny spot in my life. Literally. It was shaped like a big shiny bus with lots of windows. All metal on the outside, maybe it was made out of chrome or something bright and shiny like that. It glistened in the sunlight. Inside there was a long counter with high stools and all along the side of the room were booths with tables that would seat four customers. Usually, there were two of us waitresses working. Somedays I would work the counter and some days I would work the booths. We would trade off stations whenever we got bored. There were some boxes mounted on the counter that contained a sort of Rolodex sort of thingie. You could turn the thumb wheel knob on the outside of the box and flip through laminated pages of song titles that were numbered and lettered inside of the box. One of my favorites, “Red Roses” was C12, and “Mr. Lonely” was G24. Bobby Vinton was a dream. I could relate to his songs. Maybe it was because he grew up near Pittsburgh that I dreamed I had a chance to meet him someday. What a catch he would be. He was a rock star! His song “I want to be Bobby’s Girl” (H14) pulled at my heart. Customers would choose the song they wanted to hear, press the letters and numbers, and then “put a dime in the record machine.” They put their dime in for one song and sometimes a quarter for three songs. Then the jukebox in the corner of the diner would play the song or songs that the customers chose. I loved that 50s oldies music. Too bad they didn’t have some of the newer modern 60s and 70s songs. But then the music fit the clientele. When the diner was busy, the music played all night long. And I loved the customers too. They introduced me to a whole new language. My vocabulary expanded greatly with a lot of words that we were never allowed to say when we were kids.
A couple of hippies started hanging out at the diner. I liked them even though they never tipped much. But they were funny and always seemed to be happy. They wore the weirdest clothes. Eventually, I would get to know them very well as they opened a whole new world to me. For the most part, the tips were pretty good from most customers and for the first time in my life, I had some extra spending money. I shopped at the Five and Ten for new clothes, baggy clothes like the hippies wore. They showed me how to use colorful dyes in the laundry sink. They gave me flower patches to sew on my shirts and jeans. I even started wearing jewelry like homemade necklaces and bracelets made out of beads. Life was groovy.
As life rolled on, Jean graduated from high school and started dating more and more. Unlike me, she seemed to easily find dates. I was jealous but happy for her at the same time. Kob made a really stupid move by joining the Army, so he was gone. Jean followed in my footsteps and got a job too. But her job was at a higher-class restaurant. I think she did some bookkeeping work there. She was always the smart one, really good at arithmetic.
It wasn’t too long after that when Jean started seriously dating an older man. And I mean really older. Like twice her age. Allen was really an interesting and fun guy. A carpenter like Jean’s dad. And a fun partier too. They loved to have parties on the weekends. Every year, on or about February 2nd, they always hosted the most unusual celebration of all time, a ground hogs day party! What a crazy weird reason to party, but they were some of the wildest parties for sure!
I was happy for Jean when she and Allen got married, but that kind of left me out in the cold, so to speak. Especially since they moved to the South Hills which was thought of as another world to the North Hillers. You would think that the Mason-Dixon Line ran through the middle of downtown Pittsburgh. No one from the North or South Hills ever crossed it that I know of. I thought that I might never see Jean again. My best friend was gone. Lost to a happy blissful marriage. So sad.
Even though I never really seriously dated and my friends were all gone, I was doing okay. My customers were my friends. They were my family. I started hanging out with my new hippie friends more and more. And more and more new music was coming out that we really got into. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and Three Dog Night were just a few of the boom. Life was becoming psychedelic!
At times though, life wasn’t all peaches and cream. Petey the diner owner started bitching about the way I dressed at work and about my attitude. I replied, “What the hell Petey! You’re acting like my parents now! Stop acting like a bald-headed jerk! Just lay back and get cool man.” The diner fell silent. I felt bad about the way I spoke to Petey that day, but I was no longer happy there and I knew that it would soon be time for me to seek a happier life. I worked a few more months and saved all of my tips before I announced to my customers that I was quitting. The diner fell silent again. People were shaking their heads in disbelief. Then I heard a guy whisper to his buddy “Oh no Joe! Say it ain’t so!” And then I heard a quarter drop into the juke box. Roy Orbison started singing “Crying.” That song got to me. I ran out to the bus stop and stood there crying. That was the end of my highly successful waitressing career at Scotty’s Diner. The bus came and took me back to my dungeon. I stayed alone and isolated in my basement for a week.
For $10 I bought a used black and white tv that someone had traded in on a color tv at the hardware store. Chuck even threw in a used pair of rabbit ears with it. I settled into my retirement home (basement) and became the ultimate couch potato. I even set up the TV on the coffee table close to the couch so I didn’t have to get up and walk across the room to turn the channel changer knob. My life now consisted of watching my stories and munching on junk food all day and all night. It wasn’t too long before I ran out of money. I had to go on welfare and then was able to get food stamps too. The government food stamps allowed me to buy more junk food than I could eat. Life was depressing. I just wish I could go back to the diner and press the jukebox number F14 “I’m so Lonely.” Unfortunately, the sad depressing lifestyle that I was living went on for quite a long time.
Every once in a while, I would call Jean from the payphone to get caught up. One day she even came to visit me. And she yelled at me! “Beatrice B. Goode, you’re a mess! What the hell are you doing here! You can’t live like this! Get up off your ass and let’s get out of here!” Wow, I didn’t see that coming. I started crying and Jean gave me a hug. “Come on, get showered and get dressed up, she said, we’re going out. I have a friend I want you to meet.” I apologized to Jean for being such a mess. I was so depressed and feeling sorry for myself. From my point of view, it seemed like Jean had everything and I had nothing. She was married to a cool older man and had a nice house, a car, and a Mexican chihuahua dog named Consuela. And I was living in the cellar all alone accomplishing nothing more than gaining weight.
Jean straightened up my apartment while I showered and got ready to go. We went up the steps, through the hardware store, and out to her parked car. She drove us up Route 8, letting me know while driving that we were going someplace new. We drove past Scotty’s diner. I loved that shiny place. And then only a few miles farther she turned left into a newly paved parking lot and I couldn’t believe my eyes. In front of us was a brand-new shiny diner with a big neon sign, “The Venus Diner!” Jean said, “Come on in, I want you to meet someone.” The inside of the diner was beautiful. Everything was new. We walked toward the back corner booth where I saw a man sitting, looking over some papers. He saw us coming and waved at Jean.
“So happy to see you!” he said.
Jean replied, “It’s great to see you too Frankie. I want you to meet the girlfriend I was telling you about. This is Beatrice B. Goode.”
Frankie shook my hand and said, “So nice to meet you. Jean has told me all about you.” Oh no, I thought. “Sit down ladies.” Frankie was so nice. We talked and talked and I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering. Frankie, why do I know that name? Then it hit me. Frankie Avalon of course. I loved his music. What other man is there named Frankie? How fitting, a diner named Venus and an owner named Frankie. And maybe I can be Annette in this dream. I need to get control of my fantasies! I nodded back into reality when Frankie asked me if I might be interested in a new job opening that he had? I was stunned. “Jean tells me that you have a lot of waitressing experience.”
I replied, “Sure do, and I am a great waitress.”
He, said, “I’m sure you are, but what I need is a great cook.”
”Far out man,” I said. He laughed and, in the end, I was hired as his new cook in his brand-new Venus Diner. A dream job comes true. I shook Frankie’s hand and hugged Jean. Life was wonderful!
RUCKSACK GRUNT - A Vietnam Veteran's Memoir 