Introduction to Happy Thanksgiving!
From a dark closet in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this is “Don’t Remember Me Like This.” I’m Nathaniel Barber.
Don’t Remember Me Like This is a homemade, nonfiction podcast and diary thing. Every episode I’ll read a work of nonfiction (and occasionally, some non-non-fiction). All episodes are written, produced, and performed by me (for better or worse).
This week’s episode is a very special event because after a long time, a lot of work, and a learning curve that is much longer than I care to admit, I’m officially kicking off this podcast. This has been a labor of love and I hope you like it enough to come back for more.
And if you don’t like it then I hope we can remain on speaking terms.
For our maiden episode I’m reading a nonfiction story about one of my favorite holidays, titled Happy Thanksgiving. It’s about how the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Only three days as a busboy at the Lynnwood Red Robin and I was already looking for a new job. It’s not that I was above the work of a busboy. It was good, hard work that paid reasonably well. With the right attitude, your head down and mouth shut, the work could actually pass quickly.
As a busboy, I was not the lowest on the totem pole. That was the dishwashers who were either on a work release from some correctional institution or on a tightly regulated stay from Mexico. Then came the kitchen staff and their intricate subcategories of merit. Then the bus staff, food expediters and waiters in training. Finally, there was the wait staff, who were basically royalty, having scrambled up this disheartening gauntlet. They’d been worked like dogs, long and hard, to secure the coveted positions at the very tippy-top of the restaurant’s social pyramid. Their rank was hard won and shamelessly flaunted.
With the rewards of their royal status came a notorious drowsy spell capable of derailing a job from a means to an end to an end-all. Waiters abandoned their schooling mid-degree. Those who were saving for amazing travel plans saw their earnings somehow morph into rent and bills. For many, becoming a waiter at the Red Robin was reaching a summit, and they would ride it out for as long as possible. Hopefully it was not their only peak, but their comfortable, enviable rank and the social currency it paid wove a tender trap.
My manager Linda reminded me often, “Work long enough, and hard enough, and someday you too may become one of our waiters.”
Whether this was a promise or a threat was hard to discern.
Mind you, all this played out in a burger emporium whose whole schtick was the carnival gayety of happy times and gourmet burgers presented by a team of campy cartoon bird mascots.
Here the waiters didn’t just offer a polite “happy birthday.” They gathered a crowd, took a chair, and climbed up on the chair to shout and clap out the “Birthday Song” to anyone who couldn’t scramble away fast enough. The menus were 25.5 inches long by 14 inches wide and listed a selection of entrees presumably named after the rides at Disneyland:
Whisky River Barbecue Burger.
Red’s Nantucket Seafood Scatter.
Mountain High Mudd Pie.
What did I want with a job like this? To be swept up in this grim procession of candy-ass suck-ups who openly ached and pined for their own claustrophobic spot at the top? This was, small time. This wasn’t for me. I’d always imagined I would go out there and make a difference. I would do good, amazing things and eventually end up on the cover of National Geographic, humble but earnest, maybe cupping a clump of rich earth, the root ball of a redwood sapling.
Little did I know how soon I would get my big break.
It was the night before Thanksgiving and I was a twenty-year-old busboy.
Half through the evening rush, I ordered a burger for dinner with extra steak fries. To wait for my food, I stepped out to the garbage dock and was just about to light a cigarette when I heard a faint whimpering, soft and sniffling, coming from behind the dumpsters. I followed the sound, around the corner. Hiding next to the dumpster was a little girl. She saw me and frightened back, crying harder.
I put the cigarettes away.
She was clutching one of our red-checked food wrappers, someone’s half eaten burger and fries. When I came closer, she dropped the food and wedged herself further back, between rancid barrels of fry grease.
“Hey—” I said, low. “Hey, are you okay?”
She shook her head.
“Are you hungry?”
She shook her head again.
“Where are your parents? Are you lost?”
“I lost—” she said.
I came a step closer.
“Are your parents around?”
She nodded, pointing to the grease-slick stairs leading up and around the back of the dumpster where I could hear rustling and voices coming from inside the dumpster. She picked up another package of food from a torn bag, opened it and started poking around inside.
I climbed the stairs slowly and spied over the edge of the dumpster.
A man was waist deep in torn black bags, spilling several days of food waste. A woman was in there with him, but they didn’t look up. They’d torn through almost all the bags in the dumpster and were looking through each wadded-up pouch of red-checked parchment.
Before they saw me, I backed away from the filthy edge of the bin, back down the stairs. The little girl didn’t look up, just kept picking through another cold pile of food and sobbing quietly.
In the break room, a gathering of bussers and waitresses were spending their lunch break captivated by Guy Jessie, our bobblehead bartender with a molester moustache. He was a popped-collar hotshot, trash talking a group of guys who’d stiffed him on a huge tab. He was convinced they were Mexican.
I interrupted his rant, “Did you guys see that family? Out on our loading dock?”
Guy still had his hands in the air, mid-illustration. He scoffed, shocked I’d had the gall to interrupt his story.
“There was a little girl, and her parents were—”
“So, what?” said Guy. His face, squinched-up like a ferret. “Newbie.”
Some of the waitresses giggled.
“They were inside the dumpster!” I said. “Her dad, maybe he was up to his waist in food and trash.”
Guy turned to Nancy, a cocktail waitress. Everyone knew they were sleeping together even though Guy was dating one of the hostesses and Nancy was engaged to one of the waiters. He flipped a tuft of his thick, luxurious hair and said, “Maybe you should just mind your own business?”
Nancy laughed and said, “Yeah, like, they’re trying to enjoy a nice Thanksgiving dinner.”
Guy and Nancy thought this was super hilarious. They laughed and laughed, pawing at each other aggressively.
“That’s not funny,” I said.
Guy spritzed his fingers at me. “Oooohhhh. The newbie doesn’t think I’m funny?!”
“You know what?” I said. “I’m going to have my dinner wrapped up. Yeah! And I’m going to give it to them.”
He swatted the air. “Well, lah-dee-dah.”
“No,” said another waitress. “He’s right. I’m going to give them my salad.”
“Stacy. You can not be serious,” said Nancy.
Trevor, another busser, joined in, “I’m going to give them my burger! And my fries!”
Three against two!
Guy put up his hands, “Fuck off anyway. Do-gooders are full of shit.”
Together, Trevor, Stacy and I, would go hungry for the night. Together, we had the line cooks wrap our dinners to-go with an extra serving of steak fries and plenty of condiments. One of the line cooks wanted to know what was up, and when I told her about the family, she was so excited she threw in a Tango Mango Tiki Chicken Salad with almost a whole loaf of Garlic Naughties. I wrote on their bag with a big, thick pen— “HAPPY THANKSGIVING!” with a smiley face and sealed the steaming bag shut.
It must have been fifteen pounds of food in there.
Outside, on the loading dock, the little girl was still there, still crying in a larger pile of wrappers.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Hey girl. C’mere.” I waved her over.
She looked to the dumpster.
“It’s okay. C’mere. Quiet.”
She put down the wrapper and came over to me and Stacy and Trevor, but stopped just beyond a reach, sniffling.
I offered the huge bag of hot food on a milk crate between us. I told the girl Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, which it was. I told her, I hoped she and her family had a happy Thanksgiving, as much as possible. I said I hoped she would be okay and that they’d find somewhere warm to spend the holidays.
Stacy even whispered, “God bless you, little one!”
Backing away from the girl, we shut the door behind us.
Lunch break was over, Guy and Kathy were making out by the time clock.
“Hey Lancelot,” said Guy, lipstick smeared. “Did you save a life tonight, Lancelot?”
I punched in my employee code. I gathered a bleach rag and a rotten bus bin and, chin up, returned to the restaurant floor.
By midnight, most the staff was out in the parking lot, binge drinking and waiting for the late crew to clock off and drive them to wherever the party was.
I finished my side work and finally clocked off as well, tagging along with the line cooks who needed help picking up beer. Outside, a crowd was shuffling around Guy Jessie’s hot IROC-Z, but nobody was cheering or shouting as usual.
There was the little girl, standing with them. Her parents were there too. They were caked in food and sauce, the three of them.
The little girl was still choking on wet sobs, holding one of our white to-go boxes. Her mother looked at her feet, or looked away. The man, presumably her father, was shouting and shaking the bag of food at Guy Jessie who was draped over his pathetic muscle car, peeling with laughter. Guy nudged this furious man with a longneck bottle of beer and said something, pointing me out.
“Hey-O! Here’s Lancelot now, asshole.”
The man came at me, steering the little girl in front of him. His lips peeled back, gleaning a handful of sour teeth.
“You!” he yelled. “Yeah, YOU!”
The line cooks, the rest of the group, backed away from me.
“You think we need this? This— shit?”
His breath was a fume of red onion and heavy alcohol. He held up the bag for me to see.
“HAPPY THANKSGIVING!”
He tore the bag in two, slopping the still-hot mess at my feet and kicking the food at me.
“You think this is funny? You want us to have a happy Thanksgiving? Is that right?”
I braced, ready for a punch to the mouth, for a fight, but nothing came. He just kicked the food around and kept shouting insults and names and drunk-ass nonsense, still holding onto the little girl’s hand. When that got old, he let her go and spat at my feet and turned and steamed away, leaving the little girl and me there on the sidewalk.
The bag read, “HAPPY TH” and “ANKSGIVING!” and had been stomped into the wet pavement.
The girl, still holding a white to-go box, opened the small box and held it out for me to see.
I took a peek inside the box.
Inside was a small pink blob. I craned in closer to get a better look at the tiny pink gnarl of wire and plastic.
“I lost—I threw it away,” she sniffled. “My only retainer.”
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Don’t Remember Me Like This.
Happy Thanksgiving is a bit of an anomaly for this podcast since it was originally published in my book, Luck Favors the Prepared. I didn’t plan on including any stories from the book but, what with the holiday and all, it just made sense.
I love Thanksgiving, it is probably my favorite holiday.
As its name implies, it is a time to give thanks, to take stock of all that we’re lucky enough to have and for the people in our lives. That sounds simple. But Thanksgiving is never that simple. It can be a highly nuanced holiday, full of contradictions and fraught with turmoil. I think this is common for any holiday or place in time when we’re supposed to feel something. We’re supposed to feel thankful, but many people are not, and for good reasons.
Families are supposed to feel togetherness, but Thanksgiving is notorious for family blowouts—which reminds me, if you haven’t yet seen the fabulous movie, Home for the Holidays, directed by Jodie Foster and starring Holly Hunter, go out and see that movie right now. Jaclyn and I watch it every year. And every year we think this will be the year we get sick of watching that movie. But we were talking about it the other day and how we’re due for our annual viewing. And we were both mutually amazed at how that movie—aside from one scene where people are eating leftovers and making out which we both find intolerable—that movie holds up year over year. Every time.
Although, now that I think about it, I’m not terribly fond of the song during the opening credits: Rusted Root’s cover of Carlos Santana’s Evil Ways (gross). Buuut, aside from two small blemishes that are easy to fast forward, Home for the Holidays is a solid flick that not only stands up to the test of time, but evolves with every viewing.
If you’d like to learn more about me and my work visit me at (I mean, you’re already here) where you can either peruse my obnoxiously extensive portfolio of photography or pick up a copy of my book, Luck Favors the Prepared.
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If you’d like to donate to the show, you can send me money either at Patreon where you can find me at Don’t Remember Me Like This or direct through my website at nathanielbarber.com. Your generous support helps keep this podcast going. Thank you for listening. Until next time remember, please, don’t remember me like this.
Photo: Gwyneth Barber
