An Adventure of Sorts: Five Jobs and Three Moves in One Year

By Steve Western

In An Adventure of Sorts, readers once again meet up with Steve Muncie, the main character of Steve Western's previous tale, "Why Do We Have to Learn This Crap?": Twenty-Five Days in the Life of a Basic Math Teacher. Wayne's "adventure of sorts" is Wayne's story, told in Steve Western's style of wry and understated humor of an educated kid, wandering aimless but pointed in his observations on the passing scene.

At age 26, Wayne Muncie is adrift. after teaching high school social studies for five years, his pedagogical clock has wound down. So he moves to Greeley, Colorado, home of his alma mater, where he rethinks his succession of low-paying jobs with a review of a graduate-school catalog. A masters degree in history, though, would land him right back in the high school classroom. So to cut expenses, he moves to Denver and into his parents' basement. "My parents didn't hang a banner welcoming me, but neither did they hand me in effigy, so I don't think they mind that I'm back."

In Denver he finds another temporary work as a skip tracer. Unexpectedly, a plum long-term substitute teaching position is his. When that position ends, he's found his enthusiasm for teaching again and is ready to move on. Although his future is uncertain, he's pretty certain he won't be attending his ten-year high school reunion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543940992

Book preview

Spring

EB IS SEEING RED . P LATES of pancakes and eggs and hash browns wait under the heat lamps to be picked up. Shirleen, twenty years old and maybe a hundred pounds, is standing in her waitress uniform, a goldenrod dress with a white apron, by the swinging doors to the dining room. She doesn’t have a pillow, so she’s crying into her hands. Reb will be out of plates if I don’t go into the dining room and retrieve a bus tub from behind the counter. I would, but whenever a door swings open I see Professor Robbins. He’s sitting at the counter reading the Greeley Tribune and drinking coffee. If he has an early class this morning, he’s missed it.

Professor Robbins was my inspiration for becoming a history teacher. I didn’t realize until I became one that I don’t have his gift for extemporaneous speaking, that preparation for the next day’s classes is a chore, and that grading assignments is tedious. So each year I showed more movies and gave fewer assignments than the year before so I’d have less homework. After five years teaching high school in Hoyton, Colorado—my only teaching job—my pedagogical clock had wound down. I moved to Greeley, the city where I had gone to college, in early June. I could, I suppose, have taught a quarter-century more, but every day of it would have felt like a sentence. John Null did his time. He taught science at Hoyton High School. In the faculty lounge on the last day of school a year ago last May he looked at me, his eyelids two fleshy awnings shielding his tired eyes, and said, Hell, if I had killed somebody I would have been out after twenty years.

Reb is down to one plate. He’ll soon be barking, an apt verb for a man who looks like a bulldog, at me. I make sure my apron is cinched behind my back, then stride out of the kitchen, my paper hat—if I folded it in half, I could use it as a wallet—low on my brow. I pick up the nearest bus tub and stride back in. I take the plates out of the bus tub, scrape and spray them, then place them on a rack and send the rack through the dishwasher. The plates emerge steaming. I stack them, using only my fingertips. I saw a cook, when I was sixteen and washing dishes, reach into a pot of boiling water and lift out a potato. The ordeal by boiling water was used in the Middle Ages to determine the accused’s innocence or guilt. The cook, had he been alive then, could have gotten away with murder. Anyway, I deliver the stack of plates to Reb. He grumbles something, but I don’t think it was Thank you. Shirleen, sniffling—her boyfriend must not be big or tough enough to have Reb in tears—carries four plates of food to the dining room. If the plates were smaller, or her arms longer, she could carry six.

The restaurant’s employees are entitled to one free meal per shift. That is in lieu of health insurance and a retirement plan. A sure way to rile Reb is to ask him to cook you something, so when the breakfast rush is over and he’s walked out the back door and is leaning against the dumpster and smoking a cigarette, I stand before the grill and fry myself two eggs and three slices of bacon. When they’re almost done, I put two slices of sourdough bread in the toaster. If I wanted to move up in the restaurant, my next stop would be cook, but the coordination required of a cook when the order wheel has more tickets than a clipper ship has sails would, for me, who spring term of my senior year at the University of Northern Colorado took twenty-one credit hours while working fifteen hours a week in the university’s bookstore, be far beyond my capability. So I won’t be moving up in the restaurant. And I won’t be making the lateral move to bussing. I could never humble myself to refill the water glasses of a table of knuckleheads who, if I had taught school in Greeley, might have sat in my classroom.

I’ve eaten my free meal for the day, so when the lunch rush is over I walk into the walk-in. A box of raised and cake donuts left over from breakfast sits on the top shelf. That prevents pilfering from employees under five feet tall. I help myself. Sometimes you have to make your own benefits.

• • •

Six concrete steps in the back of a white, single-story house lead down to my apartment. My apartment’s windows are small and just above ground, so the only description of a prowler I could give police would be from his knees down. A doctoral student lived above me. He cranked up his stereo at times, but I like most classical music. He moved out at the end of June. Four girls moved in. I can hear their chatter clearly when I’m in my apartment and they’re upstairs, so I know they graduated from high school a month ago—"the class of the Class of Nineteen Eighty-Three, they call themselves—are on their own for the first time, and are boy crazy. I’m only twenty-six, so it wasn’t until the fourth or fifth time I heard the old guy in the basement" that I realized they were referring to me. They no longer wake me up when they come home late at night, since I can’t get to sleep when I know they’ll be waking me up. I have to move.

The landlord is angry when I tell him over the phone that on July 11th I’ll be moving out. He tells me that my head is filled with sawdust. I laugh because I’ve never been told that, and because he, a middle-aged mechanic who has the squashed nose of a pugilist, is miles away. He laughs, too, then composes himself and resumes being angry. I’ve given him short notice, but I never signed a lease, so I don’t apologize. He informs me that he’ll be at the house on the evening of the eleventh to take my key and inspect the apartment. He never asked for a deposit, but if he thinks he did and that I gave him one, he’s welcome to it.

I don’t like confrontation, so after work on the tenth I drive my belongings, which I packed the night before, to my new apartment. The key to my old apartment I left on the end table after I looked again under the furniture and in the closets, cabinets, and drawers. Before I shut the door to the apartment for the final time, I checked my jean pocket because the last thing I wanted to leave behind, besides my forwarding address, was my wallet.

My new apartment is beneath a detached double garage. A breezeway connects the garage and my landlady’s house. My landlady lives alone and seems preternaturally happy. A lifetime of smiling wrinkles the face as much as one spent in the sun. She doesn’t care that her hair dyed black and her penciled eyebrows fool no one.

She didn’t accept me as a tenant until I looked the apartment over and, as we sat across from each other at her kitchen table, she looked me over. Her dog, a Schnauzer, sat a few inches from my left foot and barked at me. She told me that a lease wasn’t necessary, but the first and last months’ rent and a one-hundred-dollar deposit were. As I wrote a check for three hundred eighty dollars with my right hand and fended off the dog, who was lunging at me, with my left, she told me that her husband, the third that she’s buried, built the apartment after removing countless wheelbarrow loads of earth.

I lie in bed my first night in the apartment and pray that the concrete slab above me stays put.

• • •

Karl is an Austrian-born chef. His frame is slight, his eyes pale blue, his hair sandy, and his mustache wispy. I didn’t know what clogs were until I saw him wearing a pair. He’s lived in the United States eighteen years, but, like most non-native English speakers, he will never outlive his accent. He manages the High Plains Hotel’s two restaurants. The hotel is on the east end of downtown and towers over neighboring businesses. Towers over might be a stretch for a four-story building, but lords over is undemocratic. I work in the coffee shop. The other restaurant is The Copper Kettle. It’s open only for dinner. The cost of one meal there would feed a family of four in the coffee shop. Karl cooks in The Copper Kettle, and sometimes—if a cook doesn’t show up, or needs a time-out—in the coffee shop. An article about The Copper Kettle written by a local restaurant reviewer is pinned on the bulletin board above Karl’s desk. The article is full of superlatives, in alphabetical order, so the well the reviewer, who will forever remain local, went too often to was a thesaurus.

Karl’s charm is that he is uninhibited. You know what he’s thinking because he tells you. He likes the hotel’s assistant general manager’s breasts. If she were less confident, his comments and leers would deter her from stopping by the kitchen, or at least stopping by so often. He knows there is a line he can’t cross, so he leaves the waitresses alone, but it’s always open season for female employees who don’t work under him—a double-entendre he would appreciate. He accepts that no means no, though a woman may have to say it nine times.

• • •

I set my paper hat on a shelf in the dish room and put my apron in the hamper by the time clock and punch out. Karl looks up as I walk out the back door. The sun is on the other side of the hotel, so we’re in the shade. He’s carving from a block of ice a fish leaping out of water. The world’s greatest sculptures may end up not in museums, but as puddles. He asks me to wash dishes tonight at The Copper Kettle. He says its dishwasher called in sick. I like Karl, but I don’t want to work another shift. Before I can say no, he smiles and says, I’ll make you dinner. Anything you want.

I’ll be back at five, I say.

I shower, then lie on my bed with my eyes closed for almost an hour before I return to the hotel.

The Copper Kettle’s waitresses are prettier, its tableware nicer, and its dining room dimmer than the coffee shop’s. And now it has a dishwasher with a college degree. In the coffee shop I can see most of the kitchen as I wash dishes, but in The Copper Kettle I work in a room by myself. There’s not even a radio to keep me company. No bus tubs have been brought in, so I amuse myself by slowing a cockroach on the tiled floor from a skitter to a trudge by spraying it with caustic. The cockroach is like the little train that could, and would, if not for my shoe.

The busboy finally enters the dish room and sets a bus tub on the dish table. He parts his long dark hair on the left and wears aviator glasses. He’s gangly, so his busboy’s jacket, maroon with black piping, is too large in the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. Some people you just don’t like. I, in his eyes, am one of those people. He tells me, as I take the plates out of the bus tub, that I’m slow, that I won’t be able to keep up with him. And then he raises his right foot like Bruce Lee and places it under my chin. If I were still teaching, I’d call the principal. But I’m on my own here. I wish my shoes were much larger. I ignore him.

The busboy returns forty minutes later and sets three stacked bus tubs on the dish table. He watches as I carefully remove the one on top. He could have brought in a bus tub every ten or fifteen minutes, but he has to prove that I can’t keep up. If I were ultra-competitive—a triathlete, for example, or a Little League coach—I would accept his challenge and rush to empty the bus tubs, but I don’t care what he thinks of me. I work at half my usual deliberate speed. He mutters Motherfucker and leaves.

When he next enters the dish room—he’s not carrying a bus tub, so he’s here to torment me—I’m sitting on a folding chair, as far from the dishwasher as I can get, and eating my dinner: filet mignon, twice-baked potato, asparagus, and a wedge of Yorkshire pudding. He glares at me, his hands clenched, so his dinner must have been a cheese sandwich.

Karl and I are friends, I say. You’ll be lucky to have a job after I talk to him. I don’t have much leverage with Karl, but the busboy doesn’t know that. He goes limp, like he’d been kicked him in the stomach. He won’t give me any more trouble, so, as he leaves, I mutter Motherfucker.

The rest of the evening he’s as regular as a second hand with the bus tubs.

• • •

Early Saturday afternoon I drive to Denver to visit my parents. I’ll stay the night since I don’t have to be at work till Monday morning. My car is a Challenger. I keep it clean and waxed, so it doesn’t look its age, eleven, which in human years is seventy-seven. The Challenger was Dodge’s answer to Ford’s Mustang and Chevrolet’s Camaro. No automaker bothered to answer East Germany’s Trabant. I park in front of my parents’ house, then take my duffel bag out of the back seat and carry it inside. I like to travel light. The move to my new apartment was completed in one trip. That’s because a lot of my stuff is in my old bedroom in my parents’ basement. My parents have way more stuff than I do. If they move to a smaller house, they’ll have gotten rid of much of it, or it will have gotten rid of them.

My parents make no more fuss over me when I enter the living room than when I was a boy and returned home after playing with a friend. They don’t ask me how I’m paying my bills, so I volunteer, after we’ve talked awhile, that I’m washing dishes. My mother raises an eyebrow. I don’t tell them that I researched library science programs, because I lost interest when the librarian I spoke with said that her job was even more boring than it looked. And I keep to myself that I considered, but decided against, law school, because after paying for three years of tuition, books, and living expenses, I couldn’t afford, upon graduation, to buy a scanner to monitor ambulance calls. I wish I were resolute, or established in a career, or rich, so I wouldn’t have to be resolute or established in a career.

After dinner I phone Jeff. We’ve been friends since eighth grade. He still lives at home. I ask him if he’d like to go out tonight. Sure, he says. So I drive the two and a half blocks to his mother’s house. I walk across the front yard and ring the doorbell. His mother answers. Her graying bouffant adds four inches to her height. But she’s still short. She asks me if I’m teaching. I say no, but I don’t elaborate. Jeff isn’t working. He’s told me that he’s unemployed by choice—that is, he could get a job, but he prefers not to. That distinction must make him feel superior as he watches commercials for bartending and truck-driving schools on weekday afternoons. We say good night to his mother. He wasn’t an easy child for her, a single parent. His curfew when he was sixteen was 10:00 p.m. With good behavior, it increased one hour each year. His behavior wasn’t good, but—his mother’s parenting was consistently inconsistent—it increased anyway.

Jeff sits in my passenger seat and directs me to The Twilight. It’s inhabited by nocturnal creatures, most of whom know Jeff. He doesn’t introduce me. I feel like a younger brother who’s tagged along. We sit at the bar and order beers, though I don’t like beer. I wish the blender behind the bar was for milkshakes. I was seventeen the first time I drank. I walked to the party, but had to be driven home because my head was spinning. I had the foresight, before I opened the front door, to throw up in a neighbor’s yard.

Jeff lights a cigarette from the pack he removed from his shirt pocket. If his shirt didn’t have a pocket, he would have to set as many cigarettes as he could behind his ears. He’s smoked as long as I’ve known him. In tenth grade he learned to expel smoke through his nose. Perhaps now he can expel it through his ears. We usually talk about high school, but not tonight. It would only remind us of how little progress we’ve made in the past nine years. He tells me that he drinks because it makes time go faster. Before he knows it he’ll be seventy, which may be fine with him.

Jeff asks a woman to dance. The dance floor is no wider or longer than a king mattress. He, unlike me, who’s moved by music but whose body isn’t, dances well. A man built like a shipping crate and wearing a plaid sport coat sits beside me. He nods. I nod back. He orders a whiskey sour, then sighs and drops his head, as though the weight of the world were on his shoulders. Now he knows how his stool feels. Jeff tells me that he and the woman are leaving. Okay, I say. I’ll see you next time I’m in town. I could nurse my beer until closing time, but six hours sitting here would be an eternity.

My parents are watching television in the living room when I return home. Mom is, anyway. Dad is sleeping in his chair. Had easy chairs been available and affordable in the nineteenth century, the West never would have been won. I smell like I’ve been smoking, so I say good night and go downstairs to my bedroom. I’ll read Steve Martin’s interview in Playboy, if Miss January will let me.

• • •

I phone Miriam Sunday night. We dated in our senior year of college.

How did you get my number? she asks.

Your mother gave it to me, I say.

I haven’t thought about you in months.

That hurts, but I deserve it. After we graduated, we went to opposite corners. She moved to Cortez, in southwestern Colorado, to teach third grade, and I moved to Hoyton, in northeastern Colorado. We agreed to correspond, but I didn’t keep up my end. Now she’s come out fighting. I don’t know what to say.

Don’t call me again, she says.

That really hurts. I would hang up on her if she hadn’t already hung up on me.

• • •

Today is slower than most Mondays, so Reb has had fewer annoyances. He may have an internal annoyance tally counter. Once the counter clicks a certain number—probably in the mid single digits—watch out! His shift is almost over. It started at 5:30 a.m. and will end at 2:00 p.m. He stands behind the steam table, his hands on his hips, the towel he used to wipe off the cutting boards resting on his left shoulder. If he were posing, the picture painted could be titled Satisfaction, maybe Serenity. Shirleen slips into the kitchen, then sidles along the wall like a frightened mouse. I soon know why. Her hand trembling, she places a ticket on the order wheel, then a second ticket, then a third. "Goddamnit!" Reb bellows. He takes a few deep breaths—he must have attended an anger management class—then, as he strides red-faced to the time clock to punch out, he throws down the towel, his paper hat, his apron, and his cook’s jacket. He probably would have thrown down his checked pants if he could have gotten them off over his shoes. Karl, composed as always, steps behind the steam table. He takes the first ticket off the wheel.

A tall man with thinning blond hair and wearing a gray suit and red tie enters the kitchen through the swinging doors. He has the carriage of a U.S. Marine. Maybe he was a Marine. If he stripped down to his undershirt, I might see SEMPER FI tattooed on one shoulder, the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor emblem tattooed on the other, and, if he took off his undershirt and turned around, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima tattooed on his back. Or maybe he’s stiff because his white dress shirt is so heavily starched that if he bends it’ll break.

You the dishwasher? he asks me.

Yes, but I have a bachelor’s degree in history, and I taught high school for the past five years.

Then you’re the dishwasher.

My mouth opens, but my brain doesn’t provide a rejoinder. He leaves through the back door.

"Who was that guy?" I ask Karl.

"That guy, he says, signs your paychecks."

Angus Stewart signs my paychecks. He’s the hotel’s general manager. I’m just a dishwasher.

• • •

Robert is the coffee shop’s dinner cook. He punches in at two, so our shifts overlap an hour and a half. He’s about my age. With his swarthy good looks and strapping physique, he might be in the movies now if he had been a Hollywood gas station attendant or had found his inner Marlon Brando in his elementary school’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He uses the F-word freely, but he doesn’t direct it at anyone. Only he and Karl can rib Reb, then turn their backs without fear of being cleaved or run through with a carving knife.

I spent last night in a sorority, Robert tells me as he pours water from a stockpot into the steam table. Have you ever had a woman in bed go crazy over you? I assume his question is rhetorical, so I don’t answer. He tells me that he hasn’t gone two weeks since high school without getting laid. Mmm, I say. Guys like him are why guys like me go without. We’d be happy with one chicken in our pot, and so should they.

• • •

I drive to Gunter Hall after dinner. It looks like a medieval cathedral. Once you walk through its front doors and down the hallway lined with pictures of young men in football and basketball uniforms, and step into the gym, you realize that the god worshipped here is the college athlete. A new field house, seating almost three thousand spectators, was completed in 1971, so the university’s basketball teams haven’t played in Gunter Hall in over a decade. You don’t need a university ID to enter Gunter Hall. Anyone can show up and shoot baskets or play in a pickup game. But you need to bring a ball and, if you throw elbows when you rebound, a mouth guard.

A freckled, short-haired woman in her early twenties is shooting by herself at one of the four side baskets outside the main court. She’s wearing a tank top, gym shorts, and tube socks that extend to her knees. Her shooting form is good, so I ask her if she plays on the university’s team. She says no, but she played four years in high school. I ask her if she would like to play H-O-R-S-E. She says she would. She tells me her name is Brenda. I tell her mine is Wayne. She doesn’t have the strength to shoot accurately beyond eighteen feet, so I don’t shoot beyond her range. And I don’t attempt trick shots—behind the backboard, for example, or dunking the ball after a double somersault off a mini-trampoline. She’s attractive, in a cute way, so I’m in no hurry to end the game. She tells me that she’s studying speech pathology. She asks me what I’m studying. I tell her that I have a bachelor’s degree in history, and taught high school for the past five years. I say that I’m between careers, so, to pay my bills, I’m working