The first thing you should know about cleaning out a restaurant grease trap with your bare hands is that you shouldn’t. The second thing is, if you DO have to do it, at least make sure you’ve got some grease-cutting soap around before you start. 

I’m scrubbing my hands for the umpteenth time with a half-used bar of Dial  in The Industrial Sink in the back, next to the piles of dishes waiting for me, when The Boss saunters past and pours himself a drink from the bar. He doesn’t mention the brand new ankle monitor, but we all see it.

“We’re down a driver” Shooter pants, straining to flip about 150 pounds of fresh, sticky pizza dough out of The Mixer. 

“You’re gonna have to do the deliveries today kid” He tells me, before screaming with rage and thrashing with The Mixer in storeroom closet they keep it in.

I’m used to it; Shooter is prone to fits of mania; maniacal laughter one moment, rage and paranoia the next. He talks to the flys. 

Oh yeah, they’re not up to code. Never. What they are up to is one step ahead of the Health Inspector. 

It goes like this. You’re slogging through another shift, making minimum wage and shitty pizza, when all of a sudden the phone rings. It’s either The Boss, Shooter, or The Boss’s Wife, but the message is always the same no matter the messenger.

“We just got the tip, the Health Inspector is coming today” They’ll whisperscream into the receiver of a payphone somewhere.

That’s your cue, you and whoever else from the rotating cast of fuckups and down-and-outs is working that day.

There’s Lon, a soft-spoken guy who stands slightly hunched in a way that suggests Life kicked the shit out of him and he never walked right since. He’s got real sad eyes and goes through smokes end-to-end, one after another, although he’ll always bum you one. His car is endlessly overheating, so often that he’ll pull up out back in-between deliveries in a plume of steam and exhaust while I bring him out more water for the radiator. 

There’s Big Tim, a virulent racist, sexist, misogynist and homophobe who heaves the pizza dough up into the air like he’s competing in a shot-put tournament. When he catches it you can hear the dough go splat against his huge, sweaty, musky, hairy forearms.

There’s Osama, or at least that’s what everyone calls him. He’s from The Middle East, you see. A highly skilled cook, he’ll work faster and harder than anyone, including me. He’s got a sincere laugh and always insists that I set aside the raw gizzards from the frozen chickens that I’m tasked with sawing in half for BBQ orders; he takes them, does some kind of magic with spices, olive oil  and the microwave and wolfs them down. He never directly answers questions about his past, no matter how trivial.

Finally there’s Mick, a five foot nothing Irish woman about ten years older than me who drinks like a fish and wishes her boyfriend wasn’t a shithead. She can sling the pies in and out of the industrial oven with surgical precision and has the burn scars to prove it.

Once The Call comes in, we all must spring into action. Flies are unfairly assassinated in cold blood, rats are chased away. Anything with an expiration date gets tossed, odds are it expired before any of us started. The stacks of dishes in the back from three days ago are thrown in the Industrial Sink, hidden behind the flour bags, or get a temporary vacation in The Garbage Dumpster out back. All the forever-malfunctioning appliances get triage; The Industrial Oven gets its months of soot scraped off, The Freezer That Doesn’t Freeze gets its coolant leak duct taped, The One Toilet gets unclogged and bleached, and The Grease Trap gets cleaned for the first time since the last time. 

After all that, the Health Inspector usually eats his free slice, drinks his free Diet Coke, gives the place a fresh “C” certificate and fucks off. We then modify his ruling with the “A” from the One True Certificate, the one from way back when the place first opened.

This time it’s different though; no way The Boss is wearing an ankle monitor for a Health Code violation.

I’m too young to legally drive, but I already know how. Lon is out, which means I’m on delivery, which means I’m driving Osama’s car; he’s the only other person working, and he’s gotta stay to make the orders. His car is an ancient, beat-to-shit land yacht of some obscure variety that stalls if you put it in first gear. That means it’ll croak at every stoplight unless you let it idle and then crack the drivers’ side door, pushing with your left foot until you get enough momentum to drop it into second. We are not known for our delivery time.

I don’t care. I’m too young. This is all romantic to me. I drive with one hand, smoking with the other, radio cranked through the one busted speaker. The summer wind is in my hair and I smell like marinara sauce.

Years later I learn that the place was a money laundering front for an illegal grow-farm up in Mendocino.