Taco Slinger

Toward the end of 1966, I turned fifteen, living with my family in a cheap cracker box in Garden Grove, California. Truth be told, it wasn't bad. There were a lot worse places then and even more now. I still weighed less than a hundred pounds but had recently grown a few inches, shaved about twice a week and could now pass for older than eight. After my birthday, my father took me out in the driveway and made sure I knew what all the controls were for on our old '53 Ford Mainliner, then gave me the keys and told me to drive it around the block for a few hours. Sounded good to me. After a week or so, he asked me how my driving was going. I said OK, I guess.

He got in the car with me then and we drove around town for a while. He gave me some pointers, not too many, and he said I drove alright, considering. Later, he made it clear that the Ford was not my car and I couldn't take it anywhere or even ask to take it anywhere, but if I happened to get a job, it would be OK if I drove it to work and back, as long as I stayed off the main drags. I had to pay for the gas. Eighteen cents a gallon, at the pump your own, independent stations. The Ford was no longer our only car. In 1963, he had bought a new Rambler Classic 440, Motortrend Magazine's, Car Of The Year. When you owned a Rambler, a reliable second car was a necessity.

At that time, I had a paper route with the Orange County Evening News. It required a couple hours a day, more on Sunday mornings. Then I had to make collections every month and spend a couple of evenings soliciting new subscriptions as well. I was lucky if it brought in $30. If you can't count, that's $360 for a years work. In those days, if you showed up for work in a car, it put you into a whole different league than a kid peddling a bike. The first place I worked was a Jack in the Box on Brookhurst, a little South of Garden Grove Blvd. They needed me to tell them that I was eighteen and in Junior college. It turned out not to be a good fit. All the other guys there went to Bolsa Grande High School and I went to Rancho Alamitos. There were some school rivalry issues. It was also open 24 hours and while my parents didn't really care or even notice that much, pulling all nighters isn't that good when you're a sophomore in high school. I only lasted a few weeks but it was good experience. It was clear to me that fast food was well within my range of capabilities.

I quickly transitioned to a Taco Bell on the North side of town, Gilbert and Katella. Kinda seedy. South, there was a big block of cheap apartments. North, across Katella in Anaheim, was the toughest barrio in the County. The denizens called it La Colonia Independencia. We all called it Crow Village. The work was better than Jack in the Box. Just prep, assembly and working the register, scullery when it slowed down. No grill. No drive thru window. The other guys that worked there, were mostly from Rancho and I knew them from junior high and even grammar school. They didn't hire school girls but they did have a couple of young adult women that worked days. You could hire them dirt cheap in those days. One of us high school guys would come in 4 to 8 then two more would come in 6 to 10, when they closed. The ladies worked 10 to 6:30, so one of us would be there with them, during the the evening rush. I loved it. They were greasy, sweaty and worn out by the time I got there. We flirted, jostled and bumped hips in the confined space. If they bent over I could see down their dresses. If I bent over, I could see up. They didn't even pretend to mind. Powerful stuff for a fifteen year old. I loved working at Taco Bell.

The people that owned the Taco Bell were rich. They owned the strip mall that the Taco Bell was in and ran businesses in it, when they couldn't find renters. Vacancies don't look good, especially in a part of town like that. They owned four other Taco Bells in more little strip malls and probably other stuff too. It was a man and his adult son. He was the circulation manager of the LA Times and his son was the circulation manager of the Orange County Edition of the same newspaper. Must have paid pretty good to put together that kind of Capital. Their wives, Rosella and Vivian, managed the real estate and businesses. They were real cheap. They didn't want or need me to be eighteen. They only needed me to be sixteen. California had a special "training wage" of $1.05 an hour, that you could pay a high school student for the first six months and after that, capped out at $1.15, still less than the $1.25 minimum wage for adults. The truth is, not many high school employees stayed longer than six months and they didn't encourage them to. They always had 4 or 5 of us high school guys on the payroll. Kept costs down. A penny saved is a penny earned. The Law said students could only work 20 hours a week and only until 10 PM. It beat delivering newspapers on my bike and was a lot more fun.

The Taco Bell had a full time manager. His name was Mike. He was 20 and a UCLA dropout, not apparently worried about the draft. He was smart as a whip and one weaselly little fucker. We got along from the start. I had never had a friend anywhere near that old. He had his own apartment nearby. Turns out he was fucking one of the young women that worked there and she lived with him and even chipped in on the rent. They never mentioned it at work and came in separate cars. Blew me away. I really felt like an adult, knowing and working with older kids, out on their own, doing as they pleased.

Soon, I learned there were other ways to make money at Taco Bell. Mike, the manager worked pretty hard. He opened every morning. He closed every night. He did the books. He made the bank deposits. He worked the lunch rush, the busiest time of day, with the girls. In those days all the preps were done in house. We grated lettuce and cheese, chopped onions, bagged it all up and stored it in the reefer, making sure that the stock got rotated. We cooked and seasoned the taco meat 25 pounds at a time in big pans, transferred it into smaller steam table pans and stored it in the reefer. We cooked the dried pintos in huge pressure cookers with lard, water and salt, fifty pounds at a time. We even had a little machine that poured hot sauce into tiny cups and heat sealed cellophane over the tops. About every five minutes it would go out of sync and spew little unsealed cups of hot sauce all over the place. The scullery quickly piled up with used pans caked in baked on beans and meat. No automatic dishwasher. It was Mike's job to make sure that everything got done in a timely manner and the place remained spotless, in case the health department came for a visit. I don't know why he did the job. He made more than me but it still wasn't shit. Guys his age were either in college or Vietnam. He could've done better. Turns out he was a coreligionist and distant relation or acquaintance with the owners and they were promising him bigger and better things to come. Maybe he wasn't so smart after all. Even I could see through that one and only fifteen years old.

There were a few other things that the manager was responsible for. One was the night janitor work. The floors had to be hot mopped. The slops had to be hauled out to to dumpster. All the stainless steel surfaces had to be wiped down with red oil. This had to be done nightly. All the grease traps and filters had to be steam cleaned at least a couple times a week and the walls washed and wiped down. The windows had to be washed, inside and out, as well. Outside, all the trash needed to be swept up and cans emptied, then washed out with disinfectant chemicals and turned over to dry. Then the whole outside area had to be pressure washed. This took a couple hours or if you cut corners, maybe an hour. You couldn't cut too many corners, too many times in a row though, or the smell and the flies would start to get thick during business hours. The trick was to rotate the things you didn't do each night and never not do them two nights in a row. Another thing Mike was responsible for, was frying tortillas. In those days, you couldn't get pre fried shells or maybe they just cost too much. We got cases of fresh tortillas in on Friday. On Saturday morning they all needed to be deep fried until crispy, either in a fold for tacos or flat, for tostadas. Thousands of them, or at least it seemed like it. Then they got stacked together in stainless steel boxes, sealed and placed in the store room. You never knew exactly how much you'd sell in a week and there was breakage. You had to make a lot. You had to develop a routine and work fast. It was hot. You got crusted in grease fumes and it got into your lungs. You got grease burns and blisters, even when you were good at it. When I got hired, there was nobody else currently willing or able to do either of these things and Mike was doing them himself. The last guy who had done these jobs was Brent Jones, a near legendary character at my school, at least in my estimation, a couple years ahead of me. Brent was a known druggy and miscreant of the highest order, who had been incarcerated in Juvenile Hall. Vice principals reached for the Pepto Bismol at the mere mention of his name. I knew I had to have his old job. I would never be like Brent but a boy has to aspire. We bargained out a deal. I did the janitor work every night I worked late, which immediately became every night I worked. I never pulled a regular shift on Saturday again, instead coming in that morning and spending about five hours on the fryer. I got paid by Mike, in cash, about twice my regular wage. Piece work, so it was even more if I worked quick. I thought I had made a good deal. I was never sorry.

At fifteen, I was driving to work. Doing a real job. Brent Jones' old job. It was exhilarating. I thought I was making pretty good money. I saved most of it. What a dope.

Maybe more on Taco Bell later. Writing about this was fun.