(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)
I was fifteen and this job would mean living away from home for the summer, so washing dishes for The Brook and Bridle Inn was a big deal.
The Brook and Bridle was a summer resort on Lake Winnipesaukee. The Inn was old style; situated on beautiful grounds, there was the main building with a dining room, eight or ten cottages, a private beach and a beautifully kept Chris Craft speed boat. Back in the day there were stables of horses. Some of the guests, entire families would stay for the summer. It was a lovely place, although fading. For this crowd there was a shift away from ensconcing one’s self at a grand old inn towards having a house on the lake.
The staff also spent the summer, room and board were part of our pay. There were two dormitories across Robert’s Cove Road from the inn, men’s and women’s. The women’s was a lovely house with a broad porch and stately old growth pines all around. The ground floor had a big co-ed living room and upstairs were the women’s rooms. Next door was a cottage for the men. I shared a room with the grounds guy Rico. It was the only double occupancy room, but with it we got our own small screened in porch. It was a sweet set up.
Clayton the chef and my boss, and was a raging alcoholic. He was short, rotund and had a florid round face punctuated with intense blue and bloodshot eyes. I washed dishes and my co-worker Mike was the pots and pans guy. I felt for Mike because Clayton was always burning things and he had to deal with the aftermath. Clayton was a nice enough guy, but was just keeping it together. He could be a little unpredictable and screaming raging fits were not uncommon. On top of his problems the pastry chef either quit or hadn’t shown at the start of the season and was never replaced. This meant Clayton did the baking and while he could put a meal on the table, his baked goods were awful. Mike and I would work as a team three meals a day fives days a week, and the other two days one of us would handle the whole thing while the other was off. Those two days could be brutal.
The salad girl Amy I had a crush on, but alas, she was sweet on Rico. I think they were doing it. But I still had a crush on her and we had some fun together among all the madness. A dozen at a time she would prep heads of ice burg lettuce. Amy had a neat trick to remove the stems from the heads by holding them like a ball with both hands stem pointing downward and whacking the nub of it on the countertop. Every time she would scream, HII-eee-YAH!” like she was Kung Fu. Sometimes I would help her with this and other salad prep. To this day, when I’m fooling around with lettuce I experience the distinct desire to kiss someone.
Washing dishes could be intense. The bussers would come wheeling in with big trays heaped with dirty dishes, glassware and silverware. I would scrape the various gnawed on bits and pieces off the plates into the trash, rinse them, run them through the old Hobart and as soon as they were out get them back to Clayton and Amy. At this point they were hot enough you didn’t want to have contact for long. Carrying a heavy stack of steaming hot dinner plates across a floor, wet and slippery as hell to a screaming chef while more trays were coming in and piling up - this is the life of the dishwasher. Egg yokes were my nemesis. The tiniest amount not removed from the plate before it went into the Hobart would cook on more or less permanently. A hammer and chisel would have been handy. Ragtag as it all could be, we were a team and by the end of the night we felt good about the minor miracle of pulling it off.
My hours were such that I’d be in the kitchen before and after the meal time rush to help with prep and clean up. The prep could be fun, at least when it had anything to do with salads. One morning before lunch however, Clayton pointed me in the direction of a giant kettle of hard boiled eggs. He wanted them peeled, he wanted them nice - they were for deviled eggs – and with his big ruddy face in mine he wanted them, now. These were farm fresh eggs. Peeling a hard boiled farm fresh egg without a lot of the white breaking away with the shell is almost impossible. There are a few tricks, which I was ignorant of. This set of circumstances could be used as torture, but would probably be considered a grave breach of The Geneva Conventions. By the end of it, I was a wreck. To this day, when I peel hard boiled eggs I have a short temper and tend to move on to the lettuce as soon as I can.
You take a house full of young single women and put it next to a house full of young single men and tell them there’s no visiting after 9 pm and provide no means of enforcing that rule and what do you think will happen? Well, some parties happened, and some cross pollination happened, and although it was before my day for the latter I had a great time, some of which I can actually remember. It made up for a lot of the dishwashing part of the summer. There was an old bathtub in the living room we would fill with ice and beer and there were other intoxicating things and we would party. And then we’d sneak to the beach and go skinny dipping and someone would usually hide our clothes, or we’d pile into the accountant Andre’s old Mercedes and go to the neighboring cheesy tourist trap town and play miniature golf. When you’re stoned with your buds, this is big fun.
Part of my objective for the summer was to save money for a 35mm camera. By mid-August I had enough and ordered it from one of the big mail order places in New York and when the box arrived I was excited. I got some film and started taking pictures and never stopped. The end of the summer rolled around and we all went our separate ways. Later that fall my sister who was old enough to drive and I went to a New Riders Of The Purple Sage concert at Plymouth State. Amy was at school there so we got together and partied in her dorm room with her pals and went to the concert which was all very grown up and cool. This was my first big concert and the opening of another chapter.
Gordon Bunker
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