Stealing Tom's ideas or My first job

My first real job was a ski/golf resort in Cedar, MI called Sugar Loaf. I worked in housekeeping as a houseman. I had never heard of a position called the houseman until I applied for it. I did this job starting, I think, late in my sophomore of high school. I remember wanting to get a job after a few friends and I went to a pizza parlor after baseball practice and I had no money to play video games with the rest of them. I was, like, "Man, I need a fucking job, I feel like a little kid."

It was a minimum wage job and the duties consisted mostly of picking up dirty linen that the maids bagged up while cleaning the rooms and delivering clean laundry to them as they needed it. Another major duty was delivering roll away beds to rooms. Also, each of the three houseman split up the evening duties. That consisted of emptying the garbage cans around the place when you first got there and then just patrolling the area and cleaning up spills and barf when required.

Sugar Loaf was a place where a lot of kids from my school hung out. Many of them skiied but not all of them. A few regulars just came to play video games in the lounge and hope to find someone that would buy them alcohol. I remember there was one particular game in the room that would give you free credits if you kicked it in the right spot with a ski boot. The catcher from our high school baseball team, Anthony Hayes, was especially adept at racking up phalangeal credits.

One of my favorite activities was spending time with these middle aged ladies of Polish descent who worked in the laundry. They smoked a lot, played bingo and liked to talk. My favorite was the mother of a one of my classmates. I had a huge crush on her daughter and her mother knew and liked to say to me, "you'd be perfect for my Veronica." Since I knew I wasn't 'cool' enough for Veronica it used to amuse me to tell her what her mother said since it embarrassed her. That was a close as I knew I was ever going to get to making Veronica blush.