Dr. Lou Who?
forty dollars apiece, but the owner said each one
was worth over
four-hundred. The next seven weeks I had
different High School
photos: football games, girls, homecoming queens,
accidents.
They loved 'em and now I could get a 305 Honda
Super Hawk.
But by the second week of that Dog N Suds job, I
would be
slicing cheese wondering what it would be like to
have the rest
of my summer vacation off. I mean, I didn't have
to study this
summer. I was starting to make enough money with
the photos.
I had a new bike. Look at all these people
playing pinball and
the drive-in theater was next door. After all,
this is the summer
of love. I had long hair, people were starting to
smoke joints in
public, and in six weeks I'd have to start my
second year of high
school. This was Monday and I would have to open
up with the
owner every afternoon, Monday through Friday. He
just bought
the place. I was stopped cold in my summer
fantasy and told to
go downstairs and fill the five-gallon bucket
with condensed
Root Beer. Each gallon cost eighty-dollars back
then; five times
eighty is four-hundred. I had to bring the full
bucket upstairs
and dump it in the trough, where it's mixed up
with tap water for
that Frosty Mug taste. On top of the last step, I
tripped and
spilled it all over the workers floor. The other
guys were
furious--they had to mop it. I was sent down for
another batch.
By this time it was like a comedy. When I got
upstairs I slipped
on the wet mopped floor. Eight hundred dollars of
concentrate
on a forty-dollar a week, forty-hour job--gone!
Hell!, he could
have just paid me a few hundred not to work
there. He fired me
instead. The next afternoon at opening time, I
was sitting at
home and we all heard a big explosion. We thought
it was
probably one of the factories nearby, the place
was two miles
away. The next morning when I delivered the
papers the
headlines said the Dog N Suds blew up. Apparently
when he
fired me, he was short one employee to shut the
gas off the next
afternoon. I was usually there to open the place.
He opened the
Page 24
|