Spring Broke

The job had come to an end. All the college spring breakers were gone, and all the bars were empty. The lease on the condo wasn’t up for another week so we figured we’d hang out. The final week was big for high school spring breakers, which turned out to be far worse than college spring break. Even immature college freshmen have some idea how to keep it together when binge drinking. High school kids get their first taste of freedom away from their parents for a week and the shit hits the fan. Now I don’t mean to sound like an old man who forgot what it's like to be a drunk high school kid, but the amount of fighting, passing out, and crying was absolutely through the roof and becoming obnoxious. One night while casually drinking on the beach I found myself encircled by a group of high schoolers, one with a gun, threatening to kick my ass if I didn’t give them beer. Panama City Beach got lame and I was ready to get out of there and never go back.

Despite the offers to work in several different cities, I didn’t make any real plan of what I was going to do when work ended. Dan and I decided to go to Miami to work for the head of the South East of the company. She was the most important connection we made in Panama City Beach and absolutely loved us. She said to just let us know if we wanted to come down and she’d find us some work.  I sent her an email and left “The Spring Break Capital of the World” with hopes of faking the Miami high life with Dominican women with cinnamon skin. We were still in northern Florida when I heard that she was unsure just how much would be available and she would get back to me later that week. I also had options of working in Charlotte and Raleigh, but Miami clearly seemed like the best adventure. We eventually came to the conclusion that moving to a city as expensive as Miami without a certain job was just too irresponsible, even for us.

5 weeks of Spring Break leaves you with one hell of a hangover. I forgot that most people on this planet live in places where drinking all day everyday isn’t the social norm. I flew too close to the sun and I was plummeting back down to the real world. I’d had enough fun for 10 lifetimes, and I felt like I never needed to party again. I was sick, I felt like my IQ dropped 50%, and I couldn’t sleep. I was hurting. I was in need of a serious detox. It was one of those points in life where you tell yourself, “this is the swift kick in the ass I need to get my act together”.
             I was seriously considering cashing in my chips and moving back to Rochester to settle down with a sensible job and start the rest of my life. I felt like some serious soul searching in the wilderness was just what I needed. Dan and I hiked around northern Florida and stayed as far away from bars as we could. We hiked through one forest that legend said was home to the "Fountain of Youth." It sounded like the perfect prescription for my hangover, which had now been debilitating me for two weeks. We went to a secluded camping spot in the Apalachicola Forest 8 miles from the nearest paved road. I was about to pitch the tent and make a fire when Dan got a bug stuck in his eye. Some folks just aren’t cut out for roughing it in the backwoods. We drove back to the nearest town where we stayed the night before, Blountstown, and found a cheap motel. I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony that, even in the midst of a detox, no matter how hard we tried to leave, we’d always end up right back in Blountstown.
              We went to some of  the strangest and most random places in northern Florida just to kill time. We drove on to the Florida State campus in Tallahassee then to a beach community outside Jacksonville where Dan finally got his eyeball fixed. It was when I was watching two guys walk down the street dressed up as Roman guards, berating and whipping another guy dressed as Jesus, who was screaming and carrying a cross, when I decided I couldn’t handle being in the deep South anymore.

A little "soul searching" at Little Talbot Island State Park

I found out that part time was the best Miami had to offer. My boss I hung out with almost every night in Panama City had moved to Raleigh to work for his sister, who I also knew, and told me he could get us full time work there. It was no Miami, but I had a couple of friends from Panama City Beach there and knew the two guys we stayed with on the way down South. There was nothing too exciting about it, but it was a young city, with cheap housing, and I’d had fun the few times I’d been out there. The next day we pointed the car north after a long hike on an island outside of Jacksonville.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".
        - Henry David Thoreau

How I Learned That Tomatoes Are a Fruit and Not a Vegetable

           If someone asked me what the worst job in the world was I would’ve thought it’d be something like a Chinese sweatshop worker or an African diamond miner. After living in Panama City Beach for a couple weeks I realized that the worst job in the world is a late night waitress at a Waffle House in a Spring Break destination. The level of drunkeness that these poor women have to endure for minimum wage is nothing short of a crime against humanity. I’ve always liked the saying “If someone is nice to you but rude to the waitress, they’re not a nice person.” At 4 o’clock in the morning at a Waffle House, this rule tends to be forgotten. It was my first time going to a Waffle House. Before this all I had known about the 24 hour restaurant that can be found at almost every highway exit south of Pennsylvania, was that it was the setting for about 40% of all fight videos on the internet. 

 

            This was one of my first nights going out with my boss in Panama City Beach. Before this I had pregamed with him a few times, while he drew up charts and graphs on napkins about his hook up schemes and talked to me like he was some sort of pussy Jedi and I was his young Padawan. Every time we went out to the bar he would disappear in the first 5 minutes to chase unsuspecting college freshmen. On the job I had kind of viewed him as a hard ass that wouldn’t let us capitalize on his friendship while working. The logical solution was to get him as fucked up as possible and make him do some embarrassing shit in front of us. Naturally, Dan and I got black out drunk with him and brought him to Waffle House. We walked by the police officer at the door and got escorted to a table by some poor waitress at the end of her rope who looked like she was ready to dive head first into a deep fryer just to bring her miserable late night Waffle House shift to an end.

 

I was really hoping for this type of entertainment while I enjoyed my 

pancakes. That was 22 "DAAAMMNSS!" if you were trying to keep count. 

             Dan and myself ordered our food, and then it came time for our boss to order. He asked for an omelet and inquired about what vegetables he could get in it. The stressed out waitress looked at him with tired eyes and responded with a straight forward “onions, peppers, and tomatoes”. This is when I heard one of the most out of line statements ever spoken to a waitress. “Tomatoes are a fucking fruit not a vegetable you fucking moron!” he exclaimed with the utmost cockiness. 

My jaw hit the table in shock as I muffled over my words in an attempt to apologize for what she just heard. She left the table and we all agreed that there was no way our food wasn’t going to be fucked with. He tried to justify what he said by saying that a Waffle House waitress should know enough about the food she's serving to know that tomatoes are a fruit. We got our food and our boss fell asleep with his face in his omelet half way into his meal. Dan and I cleared our plates and I picked around my sleeping boss to get to his hash browns. I woke him up when it was time to leave and laughed as he picked up his face covered in egg, peppers, onions, and of course, those fruity tomatoes.

It was a strange bonding experience, but ever since then he was our best friend in Panama City Beach. He became a really fun guy to go out with and he had no problem playing favorites with us at work. It’s a shame that an innocent Waffle House waitress had to be treated like garbage to seal a friendship, but I guess you've got to crack a few eggs if you want to make an omelet.

  
“I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”
- Abraham Lincoln

5 Weeks of Spring Break

Four days before Dan and I arrived in Panama City Beach, I landed us some jobs doing promotions through an ad I found on Craigslist. I had absolutely no information about what the job was until I got to a meeting I was told to attend. I learned that we would be handing out drinks in front of a stage on the beach at the 2^nd biggest club in Panama City Beach, and helping out at various events for the next four weeks. This was by far the most intense promotion going on there. The bosses made it clear that they wanted us to "uphold the image of the brand" by having a good time with spring breakers and flirting with girls while giving free stuff to the hottest ones. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was a challenge I was prepared to undertake.

It seemed like all the pieces started falling into place. I found a condo on the beach just two doors down from where we worked for a great price. The only thing between our building and the 2^nd biggest club in Panama City Beach was the 1^st biggest club in Panama City Beach. It was an old, small, dirty apartment that was decorated by a Christian grandmother. It was perfect. Our first move was to take all of her little glass trinkets, crucifixes, and figurines and store them in the closet, because we both knew they had a minimal chance of surviving the next month, and we didn't want Jesus or The Immaculate Mother Mary witnessing the sins that were to be committed in that apartment.

The next month of my life was a complete and utter blur of amazement. I met so many great people that I’ll never remember. I made best friends with people for a week at a time that I’ll never talk to again. I was making decent money, I always had time to party, and there was never a shortage of people looking to do the same. I spent every day on the beach and every night in the VIP.
            They say if you love what you do you never work a day in your life. I couldn't imagine a more fun job and it turned out I was a great at it. Being a hard working northerner surrounded by my lazy southern coworkers made me feel like how a black guy must feel in a shower full of white dudes. I would put forth normal effort at work and all the bosses would praise me like I just developed a cure for AIDS. There were days I would literally receive a standing ovation from my bosses in front of company executives. My superiors were giving me offers to work all over the South East.  It looked like my mentality of saying "go for it" for every life decision and my refusal to sign anything that resembled a long term commitment finally worked out in my favor.

I spent a lot of time thinking about all the different ways my life could’ve gone. I had managed to graduate college a semester early and with a better GPA than almost all my friends. Sure, I could've had a more serious job, a stable living situation, and a good idea of where I would be in life a month later, but I loved the idea that anything could happen.  I could've been waking up early every day to an alarm, trying not to bust my ass on ice on my walk to work, and sitting in a cubicle making phone calls and reciting a sales pitch. Instead my alarm was the music from the nearby stage, I walked through sand instead of snow, and my biggest issue with a customer was explaining that they didn't have to pay for the drink I was handing them. I would just laugh to myself thinking that if my life had gone as planned I’d be missing out on all of this; that it wasn’t the good successful times but all the shitty and desperate times that landed me in this position. It was all the times I refused to settle for good pay and a mediocre lifestyle. It justified every respectable job I'd ever turned down because I knew I wouldn't enjoy it.

My Spring Break office. The row of blue umbrellas is the beach in front my condo.

            Every day I woke up at 10 o’clock, walked along the beach to work, and spent my days hanging out with crazy spring breakers from all over the country. On the really tough days I would be asked to recruit competitors for the “Miss Spring Break Bikini Contest”. This involved walking through the crowd in search of “10’s and only 10’s”, and asking them if they were interested in being in a dance competition on stage for some huge prize. While I will admit that not every girl is thrilled at a stranger’s offer to shake her ass in front of thousands of people, most were flattered at the invite. Every now and then there'd be a girl that was totally into it until her pile of muscle of a boyfriend showed up to put his arm around her with clenched fists and ask me what the fuck I wanted. There was nothing to do but just roll my eyes behind my sunglasses, give him a grin, and walk away. More often than not there would be a friend of the 10 that all the others would agree would be way better at using her body to get hammered frat boys riled up. The slutty friend of the group I presume. There are few things that give a man the confidence of repeatedly telling 9’s that are literally begging to dance like whores that they can't because they aren’t 10’s.
              By the end of the promotion all the guys had a daily 5 dollar pool to see who could recruit the day’s winner of the “Miss Spring Break Bikini Contest”. Before the competition I would pull my candidate for "Miss Spring Break" to the side of the stage and deliver inspirational pre-dance speeches reminiscent of Herb Brooks' pregame speech from Miracle. You know, if you just change the words "skate" to "shake" and "hockey player" to "spring break bitty" I'd imagine it went something like this:

                                 

           We would all gather above the crowd on the roof of the bar and watch our handpicked girls on stage do whatever they could to get cheers from shitfaced spring breakers and win us money. Misogyny at its finest. Now I can understand if girls read this blog and think of what we did as sleazy; that I am someone who objectifies women; that gambling on a woman’s ability to use her body to get cheers from a crowd of drunks is wrong. But in my defense,…. (I caught a terrible case of writer’s block here and that’s why it took 6 months for this blog post). Go watch Magic Mike, read 50 Shades of Grey, and get off my case, lady! I’ll grow up someday…. 

"Left a good job in the city
Workin' for the man every night and day
And I never lost one minute of sleepin'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been" - Creedence Clearwater Revival