The bakery, where they called me Muscles

After a while bagging groceries, I got pulled off the front end and put behind the bakery counter, and that is where a lot of my actual growing-up-at-a-job happened.

The move came because I was a good, reliable worker, more reliable than most of the kids I started with, and the customer service manager, Janice, did not want to lose me. The obvious next step up from bagger was cashier, but I was not old enough yet, there was an age rule tied to selling liquor. So when a bakery spot opened, she offered it to me.

I want to be honest about a small, real thing here, because this whole site is me being honest. At the time there was this dumb unspoken idea that a guy working in the bakery was somehow a feminine or gay job, and I was a closeted gay teenager who had told absolutely no one. So I had a knot about it that other boys might not have had, a worry about what people would think, layered on top of a secret I was guarding hard. I asked my dad whether people would see me differently for taking it. He had exactly one question: does it pay more? I said yes. He said take the job. So I did. I have thought about that a lot since. He cut straight through all my teenage anxiety to the only thing that mattered, and he was right.

Muscles

My bakery manager was a woman named Johnny, who is no longer with us. She was maybe five feet tall, she chain-smoked, and she ran the place old-school and hard. I am not going to sand her into someone nicer than she was, and I am not going to make her a monster either. She was tough, she was demanding, and she was entirely herself. Bakery work involves a surprising amount of heavy lifting, hauling product in and out of the freezer and the cooler, and she made a point of always keeping a couple of strong young guys on the schedule for exactly that. Me and another kid I had grown up with, Chris, who started bagging the same time I did, were the muscle. Literally. She never once called us by our names. It was always, “Get over here, Muscles, lift this down for me,” yelled across the department.

The frustrating part was the math of it. She would hand us a list of real tasks, cut the bread, stock the shelves, price the items, and then spend the whole shift pulling us off that list to lift things for her, every few minutes, in between her smoke breaks, which she took constantly because she had decades of seniority and the company still allowed it then. Then at the end of the shift she would look at the half-finished list and ask, with real disappointment, why we had not gotten through it. We had been carrying boxes for her all day, is why. We were union, paying what felt like a fortune in dues out of an eight-dollar-an-hour paycheck, and when a union rep came around and we told him what the days were actually like, he basically shrugged. I am not here to argue for or against unions. I am just telling you what it felt like to be a sixteen-year-old paying in and getting a shrug.

The jobs nobody sees

The work itself I mostly did not mind. On closing shifts I prepped the next day’s cookies and bagels. On mornings, during summers, I would come in early and fry the donuts and set out the bread before the store opened, which is a genuinely nice way to start a day. And then there was the cleaning, the part nobody pictures when they think of a bakery.

The worst of it was the oven. It was a walk-in, and cleaning it meant getting down on the metal floor with a wet mop to soften the crumbs that had baked and welded themselves into the surface, because even switched off the thing held a low warmth for hours. Then you took a metal scraper on a stick and scraped the baked-on nuggets off the metal floor until it shined. I can still feel it in my teeth. After that came the dishes, in a sink the size of a jacuzzi, flipping giant pans through wash and rinse and a sanitizer tank, then stacking them like dominoes on the rack. That part was satisfying, honestly.

The morning the oven filled with smoke

To get a clean mop, you could not just grab the one sitting by the janitor’s cage, you never knew what was in that mop head, soap or spilled soda or flour. So you paged the porter (which is what we called the janitor) over the store intercom, and he was supposed to meet you at the cage and set you up a fresh head and a bucket of nothing but water.

One night the regular porter, a guy I did not get along with who always groaned at the request, told me he knew what I wanted and would just bring it over. The water looked fine. The mop looked fine. I cleaned the oven floor the way I always did, scraped it, dried it, shut the lights, and went home around eight. What I did not know was that the mop head he handed me had been used to clean up grease, and that some of that grease was now smeared across the oven floor in the cracks I could not scrape out.

At three in the morning the baker came in, flipped the oven straight up to baking temperature the way she did every morning, and went about her setup. The grease, already warmed overnight, started to cook, and then to smoke. When she opened the oven door, all the way and fast, which you are specifically trained not to do, a wall of black smoke rolled out into the bakery, the hoods got overwhelmed, and the fire alarm went off at three a.m. I had worked the close and was scheduled for the very next morning, so I walked in to find the bakery manager and the baker and the assistant manager all standing there with their hands on their hips waiting to ask me, in slightly stronger words, what exactly I had done to the oven floor.

The investigation cleared me. I had followed the procedure, paged for a clean mop, and trusted what I was handed. The porter had been lazy and used a dirty head, which was a real no-no. The baker caught a little heat for flinging the door wide open instead of keeping it shut at the first sign of smoke. The only thing that changed for me was that the training got stricter: from then on you had to physically walk to the cage and watch a brand-new mop head come out of the bag and clean water go into the bucket with your own eyes. Trust, but verify, learned at sixteen, in a bakery, at the cost of a 3 a.m. fire alarm.

The geyser

The other one is shorter and dumber. The rinse sink had a long swiveling faucet, and over time it had worked itself loose from people rocking it back and forth. I was always short on time on a three-hour after-school shift, so I cranked it to full blast to fill the bucket faster and walked across the room to prep cookies. Then I heard a crash. The entire faucet had blown clean off the sink, and water was firing straight up out of the hole like a geyser, hitting the ceiling, going everywhere.

The bakery was built to be hosed down, sealed plastic walls and a floor drain, so it could take it. I could not. There was no time to find a manager. I ran straight into the column of water, got under it, and shut the valve off as fast as I could, and came out the other side soaked to the bone, shoes squishing, denim uniform shirt and apron dripping. I figured I would just quietly dry off in the back, finish my last hour, and slip out unseen. And of course, the instant I shut that water off, the customer bell at the counter rang. I had no choice but to come around the corner sopping wet. The person took one look at me and asked what on earth had happened. I explained, apologized about a million times, sliced their loaf of bread, and went back to dripping. Then I finished my shift, left it for the morning crew, and went home.

The bakery is not where my career started, that was the web stuff, and I eventually left the company for good years later. But it is where I learned a job from the floor up, where my dad taught me to ignore what people think and look at what pays, and where, for a couple of years, I was just Muscles.