The Salad Garden (Remnants of VH)

I always associate the Van Halen split with sliced roast beef. If I tune into a classic rock station and hear “Why Can’t This Be Love” or “Best of Both Worlds” or David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose” I instantly smell my Rax Roast Beef uniform. Sweat, roast beef and the remnants of my once favorite band on the stereo. It was summer, 1986.

I was too young to use the slicer. That was okay though. I was too young to earn minimum wage as well, and I guess you really should be making at least the minimum your employer can possibly pay you if your limbs are at stake. I was willing to smell like a roast beef and cheddar to finance my tape collection, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my fingers before I even get to my sophomore year of high school. Besides, I just started smoking and was quite fond of the way a cigarette fit between my index and middle fingers.

My responsibilities included busing the tables and stocking the salad bar. Instead of having large receptacles labeled TRASH with a little shelf on top where you could put your tray when you were done with it, Rax thought it would enhance the dining experience if they hid them. Only the bus boys knew where they were. So after years of being conditioned to dispose of their own food wrappers, our customers would stand at the door with trays in hand completely dumbfounded. “Oh, let me take that,” I’d have to say and quickly dispose of their hideous messes of catsup stained French fries and half eaten sandwich buns.

High class dining extended to the care of the salad garden as well. We didn’t want people to think of it as a salad bar. No, that was far too Mickey D’s. We wanted people to think of this as a garden. You start out with iceberg lettuce and you pick some frozen peas and cauliflower and top it off with some bacon bits and a little dressing we brought in from the ranch. Rather than exposing the garden for what it was, we covered up the ice that was packed around the containers with tough plastic lettuce. Or something that sort of looked like lettuce. It was actually a real plant. Kale. Years later when I found out it was edible, I was horrified.

We stored it in 5-gallon pickle buckets filled with bleach and water. Everyday I’d ring the solution out of that stinky weed and put it out on the salad bar. As the days and weeks went on the stuff started to look less and less green. It was soggy, slimy and its stench started to smell more and more like rotten trash. But a job’s a job, and they wanted their salad bar to be a garden.

One day I’m sitting in the break room, flicking my Marlboro Light into an aluminum foil ashtray and nursing a Mr. Pibb. Jason, the fry guy is bitching about his new Triumph album. Apparently there was some slip up at the manufacturing plant and even though the cassette was labeled correctly, when Jason put it his car’s deck it played the previous Triumph album. So much for the magic power. I guess even the band realized their better days were behind them.

So anyway, I’m back there enjoying the final moments of my smoke break when the assistant manager tells me to come out to the garden. Apparently there was something wrong with the salad bar. I get out there and see this older lady wrinkling up her face and holding her nose. Her plate is pushed to the far edge of her table and she’s looking back at the garden in horror. Her husband looks at me and says, “that’s the stinkiest salad bar I’ve ever seen”. I wanted to correct him and tell him that it was actually a garden and that sometimes gardens didn’t smell so good, but I resisted.

I look back at the assistant manager and he’s got a bucket. Only this one doesn’t have bleach in it. He starts grabbing the kale and frantically pulling the weed from the garden. I go around to the other side to help out. I grab the slimy stuff and start to throw it in the bucket and in a few minutes we’re done.

He runs in the back looking for fresh kale and I try to look busy by collecting all the miscellaneous pieces of lettuce, egg and cottage cheese that had managed to slip under the guard of the kale. When I looked over at the old woman she instantly shoots me another look. That’s when I took a whiff and knew that the kale had spewed its nasty stench far beyond its bleach stained exterior. The ice, the containers and even the food were all victims of its fowl menace.

The assistant manager comes back empty handed. He’s sweating profusely. His uniform is now wet under the pits and he’s adjusting his visor to keep his hair out of his face. He must’ve ripped open every box of produce we had looking for the kale only to find out it’d been months since someone had thought to order it. He tells me to get more ice and make it look nice. I keep thinking of the older lady though. But I don’t need to tell him. He gets close and realizes the whole garden has been compromised. He starts to dismantle the thing and tells me to tell the cashier that the salad bar is closed.

I get in a little scuffle with the cashier. I try to quietly tell her that the garden is closed but she keeps shouting at me that she has customers. When I get a little louder she doesn’t believe me and starts to shout for the assistant manager. He’s furious and looks over at me and shakes his head. Slamming a German potato salad down on the garden’s counter he shouts, “the salad garden is closed”.

As I walk back from the register I see the older lady again. She’s standing where she thinks the trash bin should be. I walk over to her and say “let me take your tray ma’am.” It was the least I could do. We were a classy joint.