Can I Help You?
Patricia Mulcahy
Word Count 932
One job has never been enough. Sometimes I’ve had two, even three.
This is what I learned growing up the oldest of six in an Irish Catholic family: You have to earn your keep.
Like a character in a Dickens novel, I got “working papers” at age sixteen, which enabled me to get my first “real” job in an upscale Swiss-owned toy store in a local shopping center. I stocked shelves, making sure there was a steady supply of toy windmills, wooden trains, and dolls with long blonde braids. I didn’t last long after the proprietors asked me to trail Black customers who were uniformly suspected of lifting the goods.
My often-rambunctious energy was better suited to restaurant work. In my first gig at an ice cream parlor, I wore a stiff polyester uniform with a ruffled apron and nurse-like white shoes, always soiled. I hated the look, but I loved bantering with customers, especially lonely old bachelors who always dined alone.
Working the tables, I cracked wise and told dumb jokes. My snappy patter was appreciated and validated by an apron-full of cash at the end of every shift. I relished my little role on the stage-set every good restaurant aims to be.
To pay for living expenses in college, I worked in the school bookstore and delivered lunch to laid-up students in the infirmary, eating all the meatloaf and mashed potatoes I could handle from Pearl, the infirmary’s motherly cook. My fellow workers were exchange students from Turkey and China. I had never before seen someone eat with chopsticks.
In summers between college semesters, I waitressed at an upscale cricket club, though tennis was the main draw. The club’s members were the height of WASP-dom. The nadir of my service was spilling red wine on the dress of a woman who wrote a YA novel about Johnny Tremaine, a teenaged silversmith in Boston who gets involved in the American Revolution.
After college graduation, short of cash and unsure how to begin my envisioned newspaper career, I waited on tables for a year at a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant owned by a trio of brothers. I saw it as a waystation: If I couldn’t yet be an investigative reporter, at least I was learning to be a keen observer.
The brothers were gruff, but fair to everyone except the Puerto Rican dishwasher with a gimpy leg. They treated him like a slave, sometimes denying him the breaks mandated by law when the dishes piled up. The other waitresses and I would often sneak Sancho food to keep him going. Decades after I watched the sweat from his face drip onto his soiled uniform, I remember the exact contours of his mouth, always slightly agape, as if he were sucking air to get from one work station to another. It was my first glimpse of the petty cruelty of which seemingly “normal” bosses were capable.
One night I waited on a group of insurance salesmen, up from the South to train at company headquarters nearby. When one of them asked for a hamburger in a syrupy accent, I told him with a smile: “McDonald's is right down the street." I wanted him to know that this was a classy establishment, with purely Italian cuisine.
After they left, I found a note scribbled on a paper placemat on top of the white tablecloth: "If you want a tip, grow bigger tits.”
When I moved to New York City with my then husband, I found no openings at newspapers or magazines. “I’ve heard that the book business employs more people,” my marketeer dad advised. Finally, I stumbled upon a job as an editorial assistant, aka secretary, in an esteemed publishing company. Little did Dad know how paltry the entry-level salaries were in book publishing. My husband was just as disdainful, but it turned out that I was well-suited for the work. I had my foot in the door; I was learning and watching. Many jobs later, I’d climbed to the top of the literary food chain as editor in chief of a major publisher. Yet something was amiss: In my corner office overlooking Times Square, I operated essentially as a functionary, albeit a better-paid one.
To balance corporate life, I opened a coffee bar in my Brooklyn neighborhood, looking for a way to connect to grassroots arts and community as well as make an investment in a place where I felt truly at home.
In the shop, each sale felt like a triumph. On weekends I often worked behind the counter with the staff. When we had dispatched a long line, smearing bagels with homemade garlic-and-herb cream cheese, filling medium-sized and large cups with coffee, and ringing up purchases with what seemed like flying fingers, the assistant manager Don would turn to me and say with a triumphant smile: “Handled it.”
One day as I stood in front of the store on a break, an African American man passing by yelled over, “What you have on this corner, you can’t bottle.”
I was back in the rough and tumble, but on my own terms.
After I was fired from my publishing job in a corporate shake-up, I spent even more time in the coffee shop organizing literary events showcasing local writers. Eventually I also started a freelance editorial consulting business from home: Words on the page, from the ground up
As it turns out, if I’m not scratching my way out of a corner, I barely feel alive. Every job I’ve ever had taught me this: Handle it. Some things will work out; others won’t.
Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.
She is the co-author of It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year –Old Woman, by Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson (Penguin, 2010) and Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS by Rebecca Eaton (Viking 2013). Her writing has appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, and in the anthology Brooklyn Noir 3 (Akashic Books). A member of the editorial collective 5E, she now lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York