When I said in Part 1 I
was “proud” of having worked at Playboy, I was writing from a somewhat cruder
perspective in first drafting the entry, and then after I’d posted it and
thought about what more I could say, not really wanting to backtrack on any of
the important points, I thought better of how to state the issue of pride. It
made more sense to say I was not ashamed
to have worked at Playboy, but not proud of it in the sense I would be of my
most important achievements, such as college (including membership in Phi
Beta Kappa), getting things published in nationally distributed publications,
and so on. (I would hope my readers largely understood this.)
I leave the “proud” note in Part
1, as it seems OK there in the context, but is best supplemented with reference
to this entry, with its saying more
about a phase of my life that now seems very old and really the student phase,
where you worked at what jobs you could.
One funny little story about my
Playboy tenure is as follows. I first tried to get in there in spring 1979,
with my friend Joe Coles. I remember we had to get physicals from a school
nurse, or some such thing, as part of the job-application process, but it
wasn’t as if we had to get working papers, since we were already at least 16.
Then, as it turned out, he got a job
there, but I didn’t. So he started working at the Sidewalk Café (where we had
both wanted to work), for the summer of 1979. Not in the Playboy fold myself, I
had to make do with jobs like lawn-mowing in my community and, for one young high
school girl, being a tutor in history for a few weeks (I was paid by her
father).
In August 1979, I think it was,
I got a call from Charlie Czetl, who was a friend of both myself and Joe (Charlie
was a school year older than we were). Charlie had an opening to alert me to,
at the Cabaret in Playboy, where Charlie worked. (See Part 1 about the
Cabaret.) The way he talked to me on the phone, it was almost like getting an “in”
to an exclusive arrangement, by a special “confidential” connecting-with by a
friend…hard to describe, but it was like getting a foot specially in the door
as if in getting to a privileged position…or a little like getting into a
speakeasy after you said the password.
The Cabaret was slightly more
“high-class” than the Sidewalk, but I didn’t really care what the level of
class was; I had wanted to work at Playboy. Work started for me in September
1979, coinciding with the school year for my senior year in high school. (This
was not my first payroll job; I had worked at Hidden Valley Ski Resort, in
Vernon Township, from December 1978 through March 1979, as a parking lot
attendant.)
I didn’t entirely like my job at
the Cabaret. As a busboy, you wore fancy reddish blazers—you looked somewhat
like a high-toned waiter. Meals for the clientele were of three sorts—chicken,
fish, and beef, I think; and orders were taken from customers (by Playboy
Bunnies, serving as waitresses) for one of these three dishes for each customer.
There were courses (served in rather strict order) of salads first (all were
the same); then the (selected) entrés; then dessert (all the same). We busboys
got the cold and hot food out of their respective tall, wheeled transporting
“boxes,” and served it to people at the tables. It was a fairly regimented
arrangement for a supposedly “tony” restaurant (subsection of the hotel
complex), but it was a supper club situation.
The Playboy Bunnies also took
drink orders and ferried around drinks and such with their own round trays. We
busboys had to bus away all the dinnerware, before the show started. I was
rather socially inept then, and this didn’t help where I had to exhibit taste
and delicacy asking people if they were done with their plates.
Then, once the show started, we busboys
could line up in back of the big room, in the dark, and watch whoever was
entertaining (people like Buddy Hackett, or whoever of that ilk was still alive
and working, and making the Catskills-like club rounds).
There was something demanding
about this Cabaret situation that didn’t entirely sit well with me. We had to
wear bowties, I think, along with our blazers (itself not so bad, but added to
the other stuff, contributing to a stuffy setup). The thing that I disliked the
most was that one or two of us busboys (from among the larger number that
worked on a typical night), I think on a rotating basis, had to stay late for
the “disco” phase of the Cabaret’s functioning (which was only Saturday night,
if I recall). Tables would be moved out of the way on a lower level of the room
that fronted on the stage, and the setup was transformed into a dance floor setup.
There was a mirror ball…and, once the festivities began, loud disco music. I
always remember Michael Jackson’s album Off
the Wall (the song of that title, in fact) as characterizing what that
cement-mixer thump-thump disco scene was about. (Not that song’s fault, I feel
the song is tainted for me by that association with that rather grimy-for-me
scene.)
You had to stay really late as a
busboy for this. A lot of it was standing around (quite unlike the usual
dinnertime situation). Occasionally you went out into the dining room area from
a back room, and took up drink glasses that had been left around. It was
drearier, more desultory busboy work than we had during the regimented
dinnertime. I think I stayed until 1:30 a.m. or so whenever I did the disco
work. I disliked this. (It happened on the weekend, so it didn’t intrude on my
school-week schedule, but I didn’t take well to that kind of late worknight
then; I could better handle late hours in college.)
I disliked the Cabaret enough
that I looked into working somewhere else entirely. Outside the Playboy setup, I
spent one night at a place called Jorgensen’s Inn, in Stockholm, N.J.,
which has since had restaurants of different names there over the years. It was
definitely a smaller-scale place to work as a busboy (though, if you were
dining as a customer, it would have seemed nice). A high school classmate who
worked there as a hostess, named Audrey Toth, counseled me that I shouldn’t
give up my Playboy gig; she seemed to know, as if it was perfectly obvious to
anyone who worked in the general restaurant industry in that area, that Playboy
would mean better money (and hours, probably) for me.
