Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

It didn’t.

A couple months later, I finished my second year at San Diego State. During my sophomore year, I had played on the baseball team and spent fifty-plus hours a week practicing, playing, attending classes, and studying. That didn’t leave much time for a job, so when summer rolled around, I had to make all the money I’d need for the year. On the first day of summer break, Dan and I drove around in his Mazda putting in applications at every restaurant, retail store, and hotel we could find. As we drove home from the last hotel just before sunset, we stopped at a stoplight near the beach. Directly in front of us, hanging from a blank storefront in a strip mall, was a giant banner:

“That’d be funny, if we applied to a Hooters,” Dan said as the light turned green.

We drove along quietly for a few moments.

“We should apply there,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Dan said, suddenly turning the wheel hard and making a screeching U-turn in the middle of the street.

We parked out in front of the banner and went inside. The restaurant was still being built, so the inside was filled with construction workers and raw materials. In the corner were two men sitting at a desk: a big Korean man in his twenties, and a five-foot-tall, grizzled white guy in his midforties wearing a Hooters T-shirt and hat. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he hadn’t killed a man himself, at least must have buried a body somewhere along the way. We approached them tentatively.

“Hi, are you guys taking applications?” I said.

“No. We just like to put a big-ass sign out front for shits and giggles and then sit around and talk to every dipshit that walks in here,” the little man said in a raspy voice that suggested he’d been smoking since birth.

Dan and I stood silently for a moment, unsure if we were supposed to laugh.

“I’m busting your balls. Here’s an application. I assume you’re applying to be a cook. I’m Bob. This is Song Su,” he added, pointing to his colleague.

Dan and I introduced ourselves, filled out the applications, and left.

For the next few days we continued to hunt for jobs, but later that week I got a call from Song Su.

“You guys got the job. Tell your tall friend that’s pretty like a girl so I don’t have to make two calls. Orientation is Monday,” he said.

“That’s awesome! Thank you!” I said.

“Don’t get excited. The job sucks and you make minimum wage. I think. I can’t remember. Whatever it is, it’s terrible pay. See you Monday,” he replied.

I didn’t care how terrible the pay was going to be. I was going to be surrounded by women eight hours a day, five days a week. For the entire summer. I would literally be forced to talk to them. Maybe, just maybe, I was going to have sex.

A couple days later, I sat alongside Dan and eight other guys in two rows of chairs in a room at the back of the recently finished Hooters, covered in fake street signs and orange, as Song Su and Bob stood before us. Bob wore a mesh tank top and sported a mustache that would make any 1970s baseball player proud. He slowly puffed at a cigarette as he addressed the male members of his newly assembled staff.

“I know what you’re all thinking. You’re going to get some stank on your dick with one of these waitresses, that’s why you took the job.”

“’Cause the job sucks,” Song Su added.

“Yep. Job sucks,” Bob nodded.

“Well, let me be the first to tell you,” Bob continued. “That’s probably going to happen. You’re probably gonna nail one of them. I nailed one. Then I married her,” he said.

“Whoa, no way,” said a guy in the front row.

“Yes way, shithead. I took one down. Married her. She had my babies, the whole deal. Anyway, just do your work and don’t piss me off, and you’ll have a good time,” Bob said, before spitting on the ground.

After his speech, he gave us a tour of the kitchen and the walk-in freezer, which he said was “an awesome place to get a hand job if you’re not in the middle of a dinner rush.” He finished up the tour by handing us black T-shirts with the Hooters logo emblazoned on the front. Then he welcomed us to the Hooters family, which transitioned into a bizarre tangent about his time in the military, where he warned us about “the kind of scum that fuck a man’s wife when he’s overseas in the shit.”

As we drove out of the parking lot an hour and a half later, Dan made a comment that was hard to ignore: “Dude. I don’t want to put any extra pressure on you, ’cause I know you’re all weird about this virginity shit. But if that Bob guy can have sex with a Hooters girl, you have to be able to.”

I agreed. I could barely contain my excitement. Sex had seemed so elusive, but now I felt like I was mere days away.

Two days later, Dan and I walked into Hooters for our first shift wearing our tan aprons and Hooters hats. We realized two things really quickly: 1) Song Su wasn’t lying: the job definitely sucked; 2) the majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems. Even if I knew how to talk to women like that, or wanted to—neither of which I did—the work day was so jam-packed with cleaning, scrubbing, wing-battering, and Dumpster-emptying that I didn’t even have a chance.

One day I was washing dishes in the back when Bob poked his head in. “Skippy,” he said. (Bob never remembered anyone’s name. Nor did he bother to cover up this fact.) “Skippy, today is not your day. I’m going to tell you a story. Guy walks into a Hooters, gets drunk, pukes his fucking guts out up on the balcony. You clean it up, and afterward I buy you a beer and tell you you’re a swell guy. The end. What do you think?”

“I hate that story, Bob,” I said.

“Maybe it was in the telling,” he said, handing me a mop and a bucket in tow. Even though the balcony stood fifty feet from the ocean, the stench of vomit overpowered the smell of the sea. I had found the mess and started scrubbing when I heard a woman’s voice.

“I am super sorry about that. I probably shouldn’t have kept serving him beers,” she said.

I turned and saw that the voice belonged to a waitress named Sarah. She was tall and thin, with short blond hair, and her breasts were tucked into her Hooters uniform in a way that created a shelf below her chin that she could probably set her car keys on if she needed free hands. She had been fairly quiet in the month that I had worked there; my only interaction with her had been a week before, when she asked me if we were out of baked beans. But she did so politely and with a pretty smile.

“It’s no big deal,” I said, suddenly realizing how impossible it was to look cool while cleaning up vomit.

“I’ll buy you a beer afterward. Actually, I have a six-pack in my car. We can drink them at the beach if you get off soon,” she said.

After Sarah went back to work, I ran downstairs to Dan, who was up to his elbows in batter, lathering up raw chicken wings.

“Guess who asked me to drink beers with her after work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But Bob just handed me my paycheck. Eighty-three hours, after taxes, guess how much? Two hundred and forty-two dollars. For eighty-three fucking hours, dude. I almost cried. I seriously almost cried. I hate this fucking job. I blame you,” he said, pulling a chicken wing out of the batter and hurling it against the wall.

“Are you still mad, or can I talk now?” I asked.

“I’m done. So which girl asked you to have beers?”