Kicked Out of the Nest

The last year of my apprenticeship was totally different than the first two and a half years. Suddenly, everything had changed. Hodgi started to deal coke more and more at work. He got John, the director of food and beverage, hooked so bad that he was outside the hotel in his BMW waiting for Hodgi to get off every single night. John had a master’s degree from Cornell in hotel management. What a waste. He got fired and a couple of years later he decapitated himself in a single car accident flying down a canyon going to get just a little more from Hodgi. Hodgi was fired shortly after, and within a couple of years he was pulled out of a lake with a bullet in his head.

The Line Brigade

When I got back to the hotel Roget had already put the word out to everybody to not say a single word to me in regard to the food show. He could be kind like that sometimes. I guess he had figured that I had been embarrassed enough for one day. It didn’t last long.

A couple of days later Dorothy Hamill was in the Hotel for Ice Capades. You would have thought she was Mick Jagger by the way Roget was going off. She ordered a Seafood Louie salad. You don’t see it very often now, but in the seventies that salad was on every menu.  Roget had told me to make a perfect Louie. Tom quickly jumped on my station to try to hog some glory. Roget had gone to his office to get this book that he had famous people sign whenever he fed them. When he got back to her table with the book, we had already served the salad. Right after she signed it, she took a bite and quickly spit it out. We had served Dorothy Hamill rotten crab! Roget calmly walked back to the line.

My Exit Strategy

I had spent my spring break and my seventeenth birthday constantly working.  I hadn’t been home in a week.  I decided to go home since I had school the next morning.  I remember thinking on the way there that all I wanted for my birthday was more than three hours of sleep. 

When I got home, there were some birthday cards on the kitchen table and a film container filled with pot from my oldest sister, Kris.  I noticed that there were also some suitcases in the living room.  I wondered who was there. 

Candy

The year was 1977, and this new job just rocked my world.  Not only was my world changing, but everyone’s world was changing.  There were gay people proudly waiting on every table.  There was a new drug on the street called cocaine, and the Rolling Stones (my favorite band) had just sold out to this new kind of dance music called disco with their new album release Some Girls.  Everything around me was different, except my home.  It was the greatest summer of my life. 

Every day, all six apprentices would take our break at exactly 4:30 PM, marching out of the kitchen in a single file line.  We walked right past security to go sit in a van that was parked right in front of the Mormon temple.  We would smoke out, listening to the Grateful Dead.  I loved my new friends, they were all in their mid-twenties and they treated as if I was as old as they were.  I tried as hard as I could to act the part, thinking about every word before it came out of my mouth.  This, in turn, led me to say very few words at all. 

Sandwich World

It wasn’t until a year after I first started smoking pot, in the summer of the eighth grade, that I found some friends my own age to smoke with.  Mike was my best friend.  We would score a joint and ride the bus from Bountiful to Salt Lake to go to this park that had an empty swimming pool.  We climbed on the roof of the changing room, and hopped down on the inside to ride our skateboards.  Walk-Mans hadn’t even been invented yet, so we would just sing our favorite Kiss songs out loud as we skated. 

I got us both jobs at Sandwich World.  Microwaves were the new big thing, and this sandwich place would slap some cold meat and cheese on a bun and zap it.  People thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.  One time when we both were all stoned, Mike forgot to put a bottom bun on a hamburger and the guy burnt the shit out of his hand when he picked it up to take a bite.  He was about ready to slug us both in the face, but we couldn’t stop laughing. 

I’m a junkie…

Today is March 19^th, 2006. March 11th was my youngest son’s birthday, Todd Cody Hall. He’s been dead for quite a while now, but I still celebrate his birthday every year, silently in my heart. On January 28^th, 2006 (my middle son’s birthday), I was riding motor-cross bikes with my son Parker, nineteen, and my son John, the birthday boy at seventeen. There are few things on this earth that give you a rush like the one you get flying across the beautiful Arizona desert at eighty miles per hour, clamped down on a CR 450. Suddenly, I found myself flying through the air without my bike. I landed on my head and back. Then, when I came to, I couldn’t breathe. People have accused me of having a death wish, but, believe me, at that moment there was nothing more important to me than being able to gasp for air and stay alive.

Both of my boys were right on my tail when I bit it. They were both trying to figure out how to help me, taking off my helmet and goggles. The look in both of their eyes was shear panic and distress. I remember thinking, “They love me so much. Just look how worried they are.” I thought of how much I love them as well. It seemed like an eternity, but I was finally able to gasp for air, and the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m alright. I’m alright. Just settle down.” Simply hearing my voice telling them what to do, made them both feel a lot better.