Summer of my 16thyear I landed my first man job. I was hired to be the dishwasher for the summer at the Fisherman’s Inn restaurant in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. Except for a couple of short summer camps I’d never been away from home, from my doting mother and father. Suddenly I was to be transported 500 miles away from them to the West.
Home was the sedate safety of my father’s parsonage in Wichita. Home was a state of mind. Itinerant pastors family that we were we moved every few years to a different town, another parsonage. We moved about while everything about us remained the same.
Prayer and Christian Humanism followed along, the same worn furniture, the Victorian etchings in heavy frames, same books and phonographs. I felt packaged in my parents enlightened creeds and opinions.
I thought that if I’d shit in the living they’d say “how nice, Jonie,
now let’s listen to Beethoven’s Seventh.’
My course then was set for no more smothering parental love. I was bound for hell to escape from ‘safe’.
At 16 I wanted somewhat inchoately yet most ardently to
break free from the spell of that ephemeral home so ancient and
crumbling.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I’d gotten the job through a friend of a friend of a friend who’d had the same job before me. Best that he didn’t warn me. Hiring was handled, sight unseen on both sides, by mail.
I was sent off by greyhound bus from Wichita in late June. Bob Dilts, my employer, was to meet me at the bus station in Colorado Springs. Bob Dilts, owner with his wife Ruthie of the restaurant. Co-owner and chef.
I’d been in a state of dread mixed with high 16-year-old excitement ever since learning I had the job. The long trip from Wichita to ‘the Springs’, as I came to know it, was the same. As the bus left Wichita I was hit in full by consternation of the unknown.
It swirled in a Dervish skirt distorted by the diesel grime and fleeting images framed by that bus window. On my way at last. I was falling off my flat unexciting earth and tumbling into the Mountain king delirium of a forest fastness.
The 1965 summer didn’t quite deliver on my great expectations. But it did change me radically. So substantively in time that in retrospect of an adult, regarding that palimpsest drawing of himself, I see how pivotal it was.
The people of Kansas frequent Colorado in the summer. It’s their closest escape from heat and humidity. My parents had taken me twice to the Rockies during August. One of my summer camps had been there too.
Such frail familiarity felt deceivingly reassuring. In truth it was no preparation at all for what awaited me.
I remember Bob from that first time. Bob Dilts. Nothing I can write will do him justice. But ‘Scrawny’ is indeed the key word.
I’ve seen no living man more emaciated. Cavernous cheeks and a chin so cleft it looked like someone had taken a hatchet to his skull. That twig of a neck. Those leg bones swimming in trouser legs. He inspired the whimsy that if one pulled off his t-shit, yanked off his pants, he’d in fact be a skeleton.
I’d say now that Bob was somewhere in his late 60s. He smoked obsessively, Chesterfields, unfiltered. For certain he was in end-stage emphysema. Breathing came in a loud Sisyphean task with heavy crackling and wheezing.
Handsome? For sure, good features if rather craggy and dark, not once a smile. I see him in my mind like an Edward R. Murrow type of man just released from a hard labor camp.
He was short too, probably 5 ft. 6 inches. Shortness accentuated by a to-the-quick burr cut, salt and pepper hair, no bald spot.
To me he looked like he’d been shrunk in the wash, surely been a giant before. He acted like one.
Ever after I would see him in the same costume, in spotless white painter’s pants, an immaculate, virgin undershirt, white, white tennis shoes. A white kerchief folded into a crisp triangle draped him, the point at his back.
Bob’s blaring whiteness was in stark counterpoint to the permanent tan of his deeply wrinkled face and neck. To his dark beetling eyes, the unusually thick black eyebrows, to the charred skin on his stalk arms. He dwelled in a chiaroscuro duality all of his own.
Bob Dilts was a highly animated Pierrot, a tragic clown swaggering onto the stage of my life. He’s since been unsurpassed as a picturesque, picaresque character.
That first charge up Ute Pass toward Green Mountain Falls was in silence. I went up in a speeding Ford station wagon, Butch, Bob’s beloved ancient Boxer, steaming and slurping obscenely in the back seat.
Knowing nothing then about exotic people I simply spent the next 10 weeks staring at him in a kind of rapture. Totally bowled over by this eccentric creature who had come my way.
I fell under Bob’s spell. I guess I fell in love with him. Whatever, it got me through.
Fisherman’s Inn was not a large restaurant. It seated 60 at a time at tables and eight at the counter. But in summer it did so continually without fail through lunch times and evenings. A line of people waiting for a table always threaded out the front door. Its popularity had reached a cult status despite not having a liquor license.
Green Mountain Falls had a year round population of less than 500. In the summer it freaked out with a horde of wealthy second home owners from around the country especially from Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City.
The village had nothing much at all except a small general store. And Fisherman’s Inn. Nevertheless it had been a draw ever since P.T. Barnum built his grand house Chipmunk there, a mansion on the mountainside.
Green Mountain Falls centered on a small mountain lake. The restaurant faced onto it with a row of picture glass windows bringing the calendar-photo scenery directly into the restaurant.
A hand written notice inside the restaurant announced that the chef would, for a fee, clean and cook trout fishermen brought in from the lake. I learned he genuinely did so.
The village was no more than a ring of isolated homes, several quite large. They were linked by very steep gravel roads and far too few streetlights. No sidewalks, no lawns. Everything rough and rustic. At night that mountain town lay deserted, so quiet and dark, that I thought of it in perpetual blackout for a dreaded Blitz.
Below the imported wealth, the year round citizens lived in small cabins without plumbing. Lying at 7,800 feet the place was not for the weak. Bob and Ruthie themselves passed their winters in Phoenix.
If Bob was shriveled, Ruthie was a spent husk. She somewhat mirrored him, somewhat, although no one could close to his vehemence and crude passion. Ruthie, short as Bob, also came wiry and brittle, tough and mean. But she could be kind too now and then if apt to plunging the knife into a victim’s back during her delivery of spiteful commentaries.
Ruthie stayed in the comfortable apartment attached to the restaurant. Bob and Butch spent every night in a green pup tent pitched in the raw forest clearing behind the kitchen.
Remembering. I understand why Bob hired high school boys. We were cheap and too dumb to know better. The work was a sentence.
Back in 1965 I earned fifty cents an hour once figure out, with room and board. I worked 9 to 1:30, then again from 4:30 to 9, although I don’t think I ever got out of the restaurant until 10. Sunday afternoons and Mondays were off. Meaning long 60 hour plus weeks. My earnings came to a flat $30 per week.
How many of us ache in pity for our young selves.
No matter to me who knew no better. In taking the job I wanted one thing, to save enough to buy a used car, very used. If I held out for the entire summer. If I saved every penny. I thought I’d have just enough.
For my part the days went thus.
The Dilts put me up in a one room log cabin nearly a couple of hundred yards up above the restaurant. That had me sleeping at around 8,400 feet which didn’t bother me in the least. Sweet Sixteen.
My first task of the day was to check that Bob was up, actually, I realize now, to make sure he hadn’t died over the cold mountain night. I’d stand back from the pup tent and bawl in a faint voice “Bbbob, Mr. Dilts?”
Grumbled curses, “Put a lid on it, you dumbass kid,” and snorts from Butch would indicate that both had endured for another day.
In the kitchen my duties were as follows: take unused baked potatoes from yesterday and roll back their skins with the back side of a table knife then mash them all up for Bob to use for hash browns. That done I set to rolling a couple hundred fresh potatoes in tin foil.
Next came the chickens. A task I didn’t like. I chopped up 100 hens. Supposedly thawed over night these were still frigid carcasses.
Not to gently Bob gave me lessons on preparing chickens. Showed me how to cut the tail bone, hack off the gland at the rear, cut the legs close to the body, saw through the breast bone and slip the entrails out, wedge the carcass open and then with my cleaver maul each side of the backbone to get the breasts loose.
Working on the bodies I gave them names–Petunia, Grace, Lola—to make the macabre more silly, less scary too.
My left-handedness got in the way of these operations. For this Bob would damn me to hell. Blast me with running comments about my ass and genitals. I soon learned that he’d do so at about anything I did. It didn’t matter and I came to take it in stride.
Stoicism, a gift from my Parents, was very useful.
After the breakfast rush I’d have a Pike’s Peak of dishes to do. It was even worse at lunch. In the evenings the insane flow of dirty dishes from the dining room left me near to tears.
I labored over two huge sinks, one with soapy hot water, the other of cold clear water with a dosing of bleach. Beside these there was a big industrial washer for me to fill. In my sleep I’d hear the rumble and sloshing of its cycles, a monster gobbling up bad children.
No matter how I raced I still struggled to barely keep up. For me it was like being Mickey washing dishes in Fantasia. Instead of to Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice, however, I labored to the music of Bob’s running profanity and demonic gutturals as he spun and whirred close by, a windup satanic doll trapped in punishment forever between grill and oven.
His little being of lap dog spite and animosity transformed into a towering lord of smoke, lightning everywhere, Etna eyes.
We made for quite a couple. Gaunt, short, pristine, old Bob dashing around in a blaze of white heat. Jonathan still with his baby fat and downy beard towering a foot over him permanently blushing and sweating in the heat of the moment, in the hell of the kitchen.
No work harder than in an under-staffed, over-achieving kitchen.
“God damn it, kid. Don’t you ever go into my dining room. You hear me! Never! You’re the dirtiest dishwater I’ve ever seen. You’d make the customers puke!”
This referring to my apron which by mid day I admit displayed the Fisherman’s Inn’s entire menu. I’d also be wet from head to shoe from slopped cruddy eater. Maybe with a permanently dismayed expression on my face too. I’m sure of that.
But to see Bob work was a lesson in virtuoso cooking. He could juggle 20 orders at a time, from trout and chicken to steak and swordfish. He was the reason for the line at the door. And he knew it. An arrogant tyrant.
The job was my own personal hell of dishes. Yet soon enough I got into the pace of Bob’s kitchen. Ruthie began to look quizzically at me, saying. “Why Bob likes you I don’t know. You’re so sweet. But he sure does. Most boys we have here don’t last the season, or if they do they end up hating his guts, and saying so.”
After the rush Bob would sit on an upturned lard bucket gasping for breath and inhaling Chesterfields between coughs.
That was when I heard his stories. Seeing it now it was like I was invisible, sitting there like a child before him on my own bucket. He’d talk on and on, never addressing me directly or looking at me. He kept his grizzled head slumped down. His monologue was to the sawdust on the floor. In that way he’d talk until shortness of breath forced him to pause.
Bob had run away from home when he was my age, to play the trumpet professionally. That was in Wisconsin where Bob grew up, the son of a wealthy family who’d sent him off early to a private school.
He’d left to join Ringling Brothers. He’d risen to play first trumpet in the Circus band.
After a few years of that he somehow got into the restaurant business in Chicago, owning a few ‘joints’ until in time he ran a 400 seat establishment. That was when he got to be chummy with Al Capone.
When Capone began his businesses in Florida, dog tracks and a hotel co-owned with Meyer Lansky, he brought Bob along and set him up with a “class act” restaurant in Miami Beach itself.
After Capone went off to Leavenworth Bob had had several more restaurants along the way before ending up breathless at Fisherman’s Inn in Green Mountain Falls.
Bob had also been married four times. There seemed to be kids but that part was vague. He’d met Ruthie, a receptionist, at one of his Miami places.
Ruthie and Bob shared a very strange relationship. They were in a constant, bitter feuding, often with alarming fights that erupted several times every day over anything, all things or mostly, nothing at all. For me these were abrasive. My short life had passed in the decorum of a parsonage, a ceremonious world of quiet reflection where all violence was denied. Even the thought of my parents screwing alarmed me.
While the image of Bob and Ruthie doing it came clearly, their worn-out bodies jerking along as howls were torn out of them.
Besides washing dishes I spent that summer reading. I put all my unspent youthful passion into turning pages. Brothers Karamazov, Fathers and Sons, Ulysses, War and Peace, Sons And Lovers. I read every night. I read when I could at work. I read on my days off—straight through from Sunday after lunch until Tuesday morning.
All works of genius they filled me to over brimming with wonder and new thoughts. That summer my mind began to stir.
After work, in the mountain dark, to get back to my books I had to make my way up 600 feet alone to my ink black and cold cabin. Ruthie told me to bang garbage can lids as I went to scare off the bears. Still I’d see some now and then. She warned me to look out for a cub because then the mother might be near and I’d be in trouble.
I feared those journeys, especially the part where I’d come into my tiny cabin and need to grope blind for the pull string to the one-and-only ceiling light bulb, a bare low watt bulb that when lit in a rush would careen back and forth like a Psychonightmare (a 1960 movie that I’d only recently been allowed to see).
Then after reading most of the night I’d be awakened first light by the eerie clumping of the old woman next door. A one-legged lady she came stumping her way to ‘our’ outhouse up the narrow walkway between the two cabins.
I named her the phantom of the shitter. Although my only neighbor and sharing the intimacy of that space we never met once. This ghostliness made her most vivid to me. Was she made entirely of wood? Her face a horrible mahogany? She passed me in the dark like so much else that summer. Intimations of complexities I had never supposed possible.
Over the summer I worked with Sue, Dee and Lou (Louise Romero). The three were waitresses. They were also cheerleaders from Pueblo State. Sue was a woman to me. She made my checks turn red whenever she spoke to me. A very beguiling, real woman with long blonde hair and kind blue eyes.
Dee was hilarious her black cat hair parted in the middle and tied in braids.
Two other waitresses came along, young Swedish women touring the US of A. Working and fucking their way west. Saucy teasers. They stayed a month, Greta and Ulla.
Greta was beautiful. Once she said “I meet a man at The Antlers, that big hotel in the town. He takes me tonight to The Garden of The Gods restaurant. That is good, right? I wear my black crap dress.”
‘Black crap dress’ became a crew motto for us, something that bound us together in hilarity.
Ulna was not pretty. She had bad teeth and skin. But my callow fantasies played in and upon her robust figure.
Above all, Lou, the youngest of the cheerleaders, was my favorite. Although even she seemed far too mature for me. She was quite pretty, dark, short. I found her Mexican-American accent, so charming that it too made me blush. But with Lou at least I could talk, jabbering away so proudly that she should be taking an interest in me.
Lou, who I soon enough had a crush on, was the real discovery of that summer. Sitting here in reverie I realize what I was too green to see then, that although she was older she was drawn to me.
Mainly we two talked books, she majored in English. I think part of her interest in me was that I had read more than she had.
One night she got me drunk for the first time in my life, on gin. It made me so sick I couldn’t drink gin again for many years. We sat under the single bare bulb of my cabin. Soon enough I felt daring and took off my shirt. She laughed and clapped her hands.
Another time she drove me down to the Springs in her old Rambler. We were listening to “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” the hit of that summer, when the brakes gave out. We were soon hurtling down toward Manitou Springs. US 24, then a two lane highway, had a 7% grade.
We were on our way to see “Ship of Fools”, which we never saw. Out the door Ruthie threw us one of her gloomy manic-depressive warnings, “beware an early snow.” Instead of snow we found free fall.
Lou saved us. She drove inspired and stopped us at last by pulling the car on two wheels into an escape. Rambler went half way up the escape embankment. That brought us braced for impact to stasis in a sheering crunch of the car’s underbelly.
Then, the radio played “Help Me Rhonda” another summer hit.
My last adventure with her came when we went out to dare ourselves with a night hike in the mountains. We went along the creek. Talked quietly passing along the empty village. Then without warning car lights caught is the eyes, blinding lights racing straight for us. It seemed unbelievable but soon it became clear the lights were after us, those lights like beast eyes coming for us on a dark and desolate road.
We had to run for it. Again it was Lou who kept her head. “Jump for the creek, Jonathan. Do it now.”
We did so just as that inimical car of doom veered onto the shoulder in a spay of lacerating gravel. We landed in a creek of mountain ice.
More than the water left me trembling. I’d had my first lesson that evil actually existed.
Lou died at age 58. The news left me feeling desperate. I learned too that she was in fact only two years older. Also, without a shred of surprise, I read that in life she’d become a high flying lawyer. And stayed single. Probably too indomitable to resign herself fully to another.
Wonder where she got that gin?
But no, I go off the tracks. It was Bob who truly starred in the summer of my 16th year. He’s in my head under a spotlight in a one act, one man, one ring, Ringling Brothers show. In a trumpet solo he’s playing the Ringling Brothers Grand Entry Fanfare.
Bob reigns indelible, incredible, in my potage of memories.
Absolutely, he starred at Fisherman’s Inn where he performed thrice daily for the entire dining room. This was possible because a large rectangular window had been cut out of the wall between kitchen and dining room.
It showed off Bob in the glory of his lickety-split cooking. It gave customers full access to his gyrations and impressive vernacular.
He went at the carousel of orders in hyperactive frenzy, skin and bones producing plates fast enough to keep the six waitresses running. The Swedes, the Colorado State cheerleaders, plus Madge on the weekends, a woman from town.
The service window also allowed the dining room to hear Bob’s running commentary, a babble of opinions and obscenities aimed at Ruthie, the waitresses and the paying customers. His invective was a jazz rendition. It syncopated to his viscous banging of knives and skillets.
“God damn son of a bitches!” Bam. “Cock suckers!” CA boom. “Assholes!”
Bob also threw crockery. He tossed plates, soup bowls, cups and saucers. These were aimed at Ruthie and the girls—never at me. Somehow Bob calculated his bombardment so that his missiles always landed safely off target. It was left to me to sweep up afterwards.
The one time Bob directed his wrath at me was when in complete innocence I cleaned off his grill. “You snot nosed hick! You dumb shit! Don’t you ever touch my grill again or I’ll cut off your fingers! I’ll scramble your balls! You worthless shrimp dick!”
What really set Bob off? Women in general, including his wife. Most of all drunks in his dining room—more than a few times the wizened little guy chased out drunks far bigger and bellicose than him. And woe be the customers who came in to order pancakes at lunch time or a cheese sandwich during the dinner rush.
Wham! – “Cocksuckers! Who the fuck cooks pancakes at noon!”
His most vivid performance erupted my last night of work. Madge, the dim but jocular local who subbed waitressing, with big tits and dumb cow eyes, made the mistake of giving him an order for a BLT just at closing time and after a bruising dinner rush.
He took one look at the check and ran after her with a plate in hand of what he’d just been cooking, a trout almandine handsomely browned. He caught up with her in the dining room delivering meals to a large group.
Swooping upon her, eyes lit, he shoved her face into what he was carrying. He mashed and swiveled the plate.
“Fucking Stupid Cunt!” roared Bob chasing her among the tables.
Some guests were walking out in a huff. Madge quit sobbing hysterically in amazement while tartar sauce dribbled from her hair. Bob retreated to the kitchen from whence he brayed expletives upon the quick and the dead.
Ruthie cornered him there. She pushed him off his lard bucket throne. Butch lapped his doggy rear and then shuffled over to lick Bob’s face.
For my part, I had a swift exhilaration of a mirthful loving of it all, of them all.
Yep, I went up Ute Pass a boy. I came down it what? A man? Hardly, although somewhat nearer. A better-read boy for sure. Also, for a life time to come I’d learned how to curse with the best of them.
Bob is dead for many years. I think of this and feel there is”a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”