By T.S. McAdams

Featured Art: Will O the Wisp by John Sabraw

Whether Todd Schultz ever ate cold refried beans for baby food, I don’t know. That’s something people said. I didn’t think his family was all that poor. He drove to work, so I guess they had an extra car. He said Goblin Hills had turned him down the year before. In a suburb with a big amusement park like that, it’s everyone’s first job. They always needed people, and your application was pretty much your address and your grades. You knew kids were tanking at school when Goblin Hills didn’t want them, but Todd got in the next year, at seventeen, and luck or some good or bad fairy godmother got him assigned to Casa Picante.

His first day, he put his hands into hot oil. We made fresh tortilla chips, not from fresh tortillas, but we cut them up and fried them. We put them in the oil in these cheap wire baskets, and the handles sometimes came off. Albert told us, “Guys, this is Todd,” and Pat said, “Hold on, where are the tongs? These fucking chips are burning.” Todd reached in, lifted the basket, held it while the oil drained, and dumped it in the chip bin. His hands were a little pink, that’s it. He told us later his hands weren’t fireproof at home. He didn’t have superpowers outside of Casa Picante. Not that Food and Bev was his first choice; no one had to tell me that.

Everyone’s first choice was Ride Ops. They wore Doc Martens and sat pulling levers at Caliban’s Coaster or Tamlane’s Twirl. “Who wants to go faster?” We wore black safety shoes that ate your first paycheck if your parents wouldn’t buy them, and we got them dirty. We had those fryers to clean every night. We had a huge meat cooker to scrub leaning over the rim with our feet off the ground. Dishes to the ceiling, coated with cheese sauce. We had to push a dumpster three quarters of a mile to a collection station, empty it, and haul it back to Casa Picante for hosing out. Everett scheduled an hour for closing, and it always took three. You got paid eventually, when the hours fit so they weren’t overtime.

Other Goblin Hills employees only thought they were working. Todd’s second or third week, this security guy came into the kitchen. That was another easy job. They had to be twenty-one, but they didn’t carry guns, only long flashlights. He asked which of us was Todd, and then he said, “Let me see you stick your hand in the fryer.” Todd said, “Let me see you pull your head out of your butt.” Dean and Manny and Brick and I just kept rolling burritos, like that was how we talked to security guys all the time. When he left, we all high-fived. Even Everett liked that one.

#

The thing about Everett was, he was irrelevant, “managing” a restaurant where higher-ups ran everything through salmon-colored memos. He rode a desk in back, near the fridge and the dishwashing sink, and the main thing he did was bother us about the radio. Cooks listened to a lot of Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe. We weren’t fanatics. We’d listen to a new guy’s music and trash it in a friendly way until he came around. I like how we picked that to bond over. It beat the trust falls RE/MAX had us do a few years ago, when I ended up with stitches and the guy who didn’t catch me stole my commission while I was out. None of our cooks would have done that.

Anyway, Everett liked country, and he said we could play that or nothing. Not even mariachi or something that would have made sense. He said customers were complaining, which was a lie. We kept it low. I’m not sure who made up Everett’s theme song, maybe me. But it was Todd who started singing it every time Everett walked through on his way to the front, looking for the underage counter girl he was grooming. It was only one line, not a theme song, more theme music. In movies, they call it “occasional music.” The lyric was: “Yeehaw little dogies, shaka laka pardner, giddyup.” Any tune was fine as long as you sang it in a country accent.

After a while, Everett threatened to write us up for being disrespectful, and we said we were playing country music like he wanted, turned way down so all he heard was us singing along. We told him the song was a top-ten hit. When Everett asked what it was called, Todd said, “The Jailbait Song.” We kept straight faces until Everett asked who sang it, seriously arguing, like he would win something if we admitted the lie, and Dean said, “the Taco Boys.” We saved Everett’s ass, though. He had nothing much to complain about.

#

What I wonder about is Todd’s car. I don’t remember what it was, exactly. I saw it in the parking lot a few times. The cool car to us then was a metallic red or silver Trans Am. None of us had anything like that. Todd drove a blue sedan. Four tires and four doors. Someone must have noticed it eventually, had it towed. There must have been questions. I wish I could run into Pat or Dean or Manny or Brick. Albert, even. We might not recognize each other now, but I’d love to hear any one of them tell the story, their version. Or we could go to Denny’s for onion rings like we did sometimes after work. Just sit late at a Denny’s off the interstate, with a strip of scraggly boxwoods and palmettoes outside the windows and a blazing gas station across the street. I’d settle for that.

#

Todd was a master of wrapping burritos and doctoring meat. We were all good at wrapping burritos. Even now, if I saw you roll a burrito and leave the ends open, I’d take it from you and fix it. You have to fold the sides first, using the flaps to smooth out the filling, and then roll it up. Todd did it like a card trick. We made him do it slower and slower, and all we ever saw was, Todd waved one hand over a tortilla and fillings, and it was wrapped up tight enough to drop in the mail. That was a trick any good magician might have learned. What he did with meat was voodoo.

Everett didn’t order our supplies. There was a purchasing department that ordered supplies for the park and allotted some to us. They bought meat in fifty-pound packages, and they hated throwing them out, so when meat spoiled a little, they transferred it to Casa Picante. We seasoned our meat anyway. We could always season it more. We got a lot of gray meat from Puck’s Burger Barn. First, we’d open the cardboard box and see how bad it was. Then we’d unwrap the plastic, and someone up front would hiss to get rid of it before they smelled it in line. Everett would put his hands in his hair and his elbows on his desk and say, “We’ve got to use it.”

Todd would say, “Add a spoonful of Diet Coke.” Or whatever. Something different every time. Maybe three tortilla chips, a scoop of beans, or two breath mints. If Todd said it, it worked. If Todd was on a trash run, and you tried one of his past fixes, it would fail, but he could fix that too. He’d sniff your mess and say, “a handful of lettuce.” You tossed it in, and the nasty smell went away. No one ever got sick that I knew of. Cooks celebrated Todd’s wonders by cranking up the radio and playing air guitar until Everett yelled at us to stop.

#

The first dozen times you walked across Goblin Hills, you thought there were walkways crossing the grass. Really, there were mounds of grass dividing the pavement into walkways so it didn’t feel like a parking lot. We decided those were the goblin hills. When closing got to the point of everyone calling dibs on a last job, if you finished yours first, you sat on a goblin hill behind Casa Picante to wait for the others. The outdoor lamps would still be on. The blades of grass were thick and sometimes ragged and yellow at the top where a mower chopped them off.

There were thinner stems too, with little branches at the top—spikelets is the real word—like jacks. These weren’t used-up dandelions; dandelions had thicker stems and little buttons under the fuzz. This thin grass had runners, so you’d pull it up and it had more roots nearby and more after that, and you had to stop before the whole lawn came up in one string. Grass still grows like that, I guess, but I never see it. The Kincaids next door have artificial turf, every nylon blade the same, and no one had a clue until everyone else’s lawn died in the drought. It would take an artist to fake the grass I remember. More detailed times. As a realtor, I’d rather sell this neighborhood, but still.

When the other cooks got through, they’d come out and sit next to you. It might be going on two in the morning, and your canvas cook shirt would be soaked with dishwater and grease. The grass might be damp too. But it was summer, and we were young. We sat on the grass. It’s hard to imagine things turning out much differently than they did. I got the impression Todd wasn’t on track to graduate high school. What was he going to do, stay at Casa Picante forever? He didn’t need the practice. Hans should still burn in New Wave Hell.

#

Hans was an assistant manager at Burger Barn who used to snap his cooks with a towel. They were always bragging about it. They thought that was hazardous duty. Our assistant manager, Gerry, used to come after us with a chef’s knife. Whenever the kitchen fell behind and he had to help us catch up, he would yell at us in Spanish and hit us with the flat of the blade. Gerry was the second-fastest kitchen worker, after Todd. He wore the same uniform we did, blue pants and a corn-colored shirt, and he never tucked his shirt in. Everett didn’t say a word, but you knew he wanted to. Everett wore a white shirt and the same tie every day.

Gerry would stand watching us the first hour of his shift, until it was time for Everett to leave, and then he sat behind Everett’s desk and pretended to sleep. He seemed drunk a lot of the time. That might have been an act. We said he was crazy. Manny told us a lot of his yelling, especially before Todd, was about lazy white boys. If they let him bring his kids in, the kitchen would never fall behind. Manny didn’t know about the rest of it. He said he couldn’t understand Gerry’s paisa accent. Nights the kitchen stayed caught up, we played Motörhead and Molly Hatchett as loud as we wanted. If counter people bothered Gerry to complain, he’d yell at them. The only things we couldn’t do during Gerry’s shift were fall behind on orders or talk shit about Gerry.

Under assistant managers were leads: cooks, counter people, or ride ops with red lettering on their nametags instead of black. They made thirty cents more per hour. Most places, leads were our age, but they were honor students or athletes, “leaders.” There wasn’t anyone like that in the kitchen at Casa Picante. We weren’t stoners, either. We weren’t anything. Most of us had stepfathers we didn’t like; that’s sort of a type, but there weren’t cliques based on that, and we weren’t concentrated enough to make that a thing. We went to three different high schools. Our suburb was big enough to have that many.

Our lead, the one I remember, was Albert. He was a few years older, and he’d been kicked out of the marines, supposedly, for being gay, which is something they used to do. Albert never told us whether he was gay or not. He had curly hair and a mustache, but he was tough. A cook from Burger Barn pushed him too far and found that out. Albert rubbed salsa on his shirt where the guy bled on him. Albert didn’t want to fight, though. He just wanted friends who didn’t call him “homo.” Todd did what he could for Albert, which was this: When he heard someone talking behind Albert’s back, Todd would say, “Nah, Albert’s cool.” I mean, we were kids. I’m not trying to act like everything was better back in the day.

#

That last summer, Burger Barn cooked the freshest meat first, letting the rest spoil on purpose, lying about what they cooked and what they sent to us, saying meat a week expired was a day past its date. Sabotage. That came out later. Hans was telling some manic executive they should turn Casa Picante into another burger place. We knew that part. Hans would manage it, of course. They would call it Hob’s Hamburgers. It would better fit the theme. Hans’ executive stood in our kitchen, sweating in a sky-blue suit, frowning when Everett said there was no grill. What would a burger place do with a steamer that heated pans of refried beans without crusty edges? But he bobbed his head like a parakeet every time Hans used the word “volume.”

That’s why they were considering Hans’ plan. Customers are guaranteed at a theme park restaurant. They don’t let people bring in their own food. The way to make more money is, move more people past the register. You could charge more for a tostada than a limp Puck’s burger, but they cranked out burgers exclusively, burgers and fries, and hamburgers are vertical, you know, stacked, assembly-line food. Even cooks listening to Culture Club and Spandau Ballet could turn out enough burgers, if you whipped them with towels, to outperform a restaurant with a real menu. Usually, they could. Too bad for Hans this was Todd’s second summer, and we were at our absolute peak.

We shoved random ingredients at Todd, and he shoved them through the window as tacos, burritos, and nachos before counter people could ask. He was full of miracles. Once, he fixed the meat with olive juice, but it had half an hour to cook, and we couldn’t wait, so he made a guitar-solo face and went: “Nah na-na-nah na-na-nananah, nah na-na-na nana-nah-na!” Boom, done, cooked by a few chords of Dio’s “Holy Diver.” Gerry started doing Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” laugh all the time and slapping us with his knife in an encouraging way. Everett talked about turning Puck’s into a Mexican place and asked us what to call it, and Manny said Mierda Frita, but Everett figured out what it meant. At the end of August, Puck’s got desperate.

I think Hans was fired over it. I think I heard that. I can’t say for sure. It was my last day. We all quit to go to college. Not Ivies, obviously, but we found schools that would take us, all except for Todd. And Brick was going to be a plumber. His uncle was a plumber. Bet you anything Brick is driving around in a Tesla now. What Hans did was, he sent us three boxes of meat—that’s a hundred and fifty pounds—so old Todd couldn’t save it. I don’t think it had been refrigerated, either. It was green in places, and there were splotches that changed color when you looked from different directions, like street puddles after the first rain.

Everett told Pat to take it back to Puck’s and throw it in their dumpster. Pat was big. He could carry two boxes. Albert offered to carry the third. I hoped someone at Puck’s would try to stop them. We didn’t understand our own feelings. Whether people bought their food from Casa Picante or walked across the square to Puck’s, the money went to Goblin Hills. And if it didn’t, so what? It was never about Goblin Hills. Todd climbed on the meat cooker. It was like a trophy, with a square base and a heating unit in that, and a giant steel bowl on top. There was only room on the base for one of Todd’s feet when he turned towards us, so he stood on one leg, hanging on to the bowl with one hand. He said, “I know this is stupid.”

Todd said, “It’s just, Taco Boys rule, you know?” I guess we looked at him like idiots. He said regular seasonings would be enough. Then he made devil horns with his pinky and pointer finger and rolled into the pot. He crumbled into ground meat. Not so greasy as we were used to. I fished out his cook shirt and visor—we all wore these cotton visors, better than the elf hats ride ops had to wear—and they weren’t any greasier than mine were. I did something with his clothes, maybe put them in the bag with the soiled kitchen towels, and we got back to work. Like cooking Todd didn’t faze us. Teenagers always have to act all, “whatever.”

When the smell drifted out, customers left Puck’s to line up at Casa Picante. Hans sent counter workers out to give burgers away. No one wanted them. Burgers overflowed the trash cans. We put heavy lettuce on tacos, and our burritos were mostly beans. We used more meat than they trained us to because the hell with them, but still not much. Todd went a long way. I didn’t try any. I should have, maybe, but I don’t think I did.

At closing, our counter people said they’d made a shitload of money. We didn’t care. We went back and grabbed our music, ours and Todd’s. There was a fenced trash area in the back, and we always stashed cassettes behind the dumpster on our way in. Albert had store-bought cassettes, but the rest of us recorded from vinyl to high-bias TDK tapes. We used ninety-minute tapes because an album would fit on a side, and two-hour tapes got tangled. Everett was long gone by closing, so we blasted AC/DC, ZZ Top, Metallica, and Cheap Trick. Albert played Duran Duran, and we let him play that one Flock of Seagulls song, the good one. We scrubbed and sang along, and we somehow finished on time, the only time that ever happened.

We hung around a while without talking much. No exchanging phone numbers or anything. We went through Everett’s desk and found a rejection letter from the state school I was going to. We left Todd’s tapes pushed to the back of a high shelf, all except for one with Too Fast for Love on one side and Shout at the Devil on the other because Dean wanted that. And then we left. Sometimes, after a dinner party or just a family thing, passing the new grandkid around, I’ll tell my wife, go on upstairs, I’ll get the dishes, I used to be a professional. I get Pandora on my phone and set it to Quiet Riot or something. I hum along, but I could sing. I could sing every word. It’s crazy what you remember.

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T. S. McAdams lives in the San Fernando Valley and has plastic grass for reasons. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Santa Monica Review, Pembroke, Faultline, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Exposition Review, Bayou Magazine, South Carolina Review, and other fine periodicals near you.