236 Pounds of Class Vice President

by Jason Mulgrew

  But when the Philadelphia Eagles come calling, you drop whatever you’re doing and run to them. Fast. Hell, if they’d asked him to drop out of school, I’m sure David would have considered it. David had to leave Mick-Daniel’s, and he needed a replacement to take over his dishwasher/bar-hanger-outer job. So he asked me.

  On the one hand, it made a lot of sense. I was still delivering papers, but now that I was in high school, it wasn’t an ideal gig. The papers had to be picked up right after school and delivered by 3:30 p.m. When I went to elementary school in the neighborhood, this had not been a problem. But now I went to high school in North Philly, which meant I had to take a bus home every day, which meant that the earliest I could get home was 3:30 p.m.

  Because I had been working the paper route for years, my boss, Franny, allowed me to deliver a little later than the other paperboys. But the job still left me no flexibility. I wasn’t going out for football, nor was I planning on joining any clubs. But what if I wanted to stick around and do homework in the library? What if I wanted to hang out after school and shoot the shit with my new friends? What if (gasp!) I got jug? I could do none of these things with the paper route.

  If I took Floody’s job at Mick-Daniel’s, I could drop the paper route and would only have to work the busy Thursday and Friday dinner hours and cleanup (from 4 to 10 p.m.). Just two days a week instead of five. Also, I’d make more money and have more flexibility. And me working at Mick-Daniel’s! (!!!) Um, yeah, I might have been interested in that. More money, more free time, and an immeasurable boost to my cool factor. Yes. Yes, please.

  I must pause for a moment to clarify the reason my friends and I thought working in a bar was cool. It was not because it brought us closer, if only geographically, to drinking alcohol. Some of us had started to drink at that point, but drinking took place under the bridge, in the schoolyard, or in other barren places with dark shadows. There were no thoughts of stealing drinks or being able to drink with the staff: both were out of the question. We were thirteen years old. This was Second Street, not Russia.

  And though many of my friends had been in the bar before, it was to eat with their families. To work there meant you’d be there alone, unsupervised by a parent. And it meant that you were also contributing to the bar. You were a vital part of an organization that employed a select group of people and relied on those people to keep the business running successfully. That this organization just so happened to serve alcohol was a bonus.

  While some bars could be dreary, depressing places where hopeless men and women measured time by each well vodka-rocks until death came knocking, Mick-Daniel’s was a magical place, a wonderland where people came for one of two reasons: to get happy or to keep the happy going. To work there was to be a part of this happiness, to actively contribute, even in a small way, to this happiness. Being an employee at Mick-Daniel’s would offer the same job satisfaction as, say, an elf working in Santa’s workshop has, knowing that the toy he was working on would bring great joy to a child somewhere in the world.

  I took the job. But before I could start, I had to quit the paper route. I told Franny that I had to leave to pursue another opportunity and thanked him for six years of a good job, telling him that I appreciated the opportunity and that I hoped our paths might cross again in the future. After I finished my little speech, he said, “You got a brother?”

  “Yeah, I have a younger brother.”

  “Can he do it?”

  I thought about my brother Dennis, then in fifth grade. It wasn’t a demanding job. You needed a basic understanding of math and geography, as well as the ability to walk a few blocks with the somewhat heavy bag of papers over your shoulder. But Dennis was at the peak of his morbid obesity. When hanging out at my house, my friends and I would make Dennis sit in the middle of the couch in the living room and ask him to get up from his seat without using his arms. Try as he might, he could never do it: his fat ass would be stuck in the middle of the couch, unless he pushed off with his arms. If he couldn’t sit up on his own, I had reservations about his ability to carry a heavy bag in mid-July.

  “Oh, no. No, he can’t do it.”

  Dennis. Built for meatball eating, not paperboy-ing.

  My five-year connection to the Philadelphia Daily News now over, I reported for work at Mick-Daniel’s that Thursday. But before I was allowed to work on my own at the new gig, I had to shadow Floody for two shifts. He told me to meet him at the bar at 4 p.m. I requested that we meet at his house and walk to the bar together. While I’d been there before, I’d never walked in without an adult.

  Together, Floody and I walked through the hallowed portal and then right into the kitchen. There I met the waitresses, his mom Eleanor, and Sherry, a friend of my mom’s whom I’d known for years, as well as the prep cook, Karen, and the chef, Matt, all of whom made me feel at home by immediately making me do shit.

  David showed me how to wash the dishes and his little tricks for doing them more quickly, took me to the walk-in freezer to show me where the mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, and beef for the cheesesteaks were kept, and demonstrated how to empty the grease from the grill. An hour after taking me through the basics, David left. An hour and two minutes after David took me through the basics, I was rooting around the walk-in freezer because the kitchen was out of onion rings.

  Over the course of the next year, I became a master at the art of washing dishes. I would do the menial stuff like filling up ketchup bottles and washing the floors after the kitchen closed, but eventually, I was given greater responsibility, like prepping dishes for the chef or helping the short-order cook and even grabbing cases of beer for the bartenders when they asked me to.

  The dinner hours would fly by. I’d get in at 4:00 and the next time I looked at the clock, it would be 8:30. But it was after the dinner hour when the bar really came alive. The lights dim, the bar full, the voices and the laughter loud, I’d sweep the kitchen floor, peering out like I used to watch David do, mesmerized. So that’s what you did after you grew up.

  Once the spring turned into summer, the owner of the bar, Mike, asked me if I wanted more work. With a summer full of nothin’ planned, I told him sure, I could use more hours.

  It was more hours, yes, he said. But it was a special assignment, involving long days, and would not be easy. As a matter of fact, it could be pretty scary, even dangerous. Was I still interested?

  The truth was that no, I was no longer interested. I liked working and liked money. But I did not like the sound of “not easy” or “scary” or “dangerous.”

  But it would be difficult to turn him down. Mike was a pillar of the community: owner of the neighborhood bar, friend to all, good guy. Also, an intimidating dude, one around whom it would not be appropriate to admit fear. He was also the same generation as my dad and knew him well.

  My dad being such an animal in his younger days did not make it easy on me growing up (and I use the word animal as lovingly as possible). Though I never saw him act like a madman, I knew all the stories. There was the time “downnashore” when he was seventeen, and he jumped head first off a pier into the bay and broke his neck, but he was so drunk (etc.) he didn’t learn his neck was broken until the next day, after which he spent the rest of the summer in the hospital. There was the time when my mom first laid eyes on him: he had been stabbed and was bleeding, but he was too drunk (etc.) to notice (and no, my mom was not a nurse or medical professional). There was the time when . . . well, you get it.* While he often told the story of his broken neck, happy to show the long scar to any listeners, the other tales I heard from his friends. These friends would volunteer stories about my dad shortly after meeting me and asking, “Who’s your father?” (Because of the large family, there were a lot of kids with the last name Mulgrew, and you had to place them with the appropriate Mulgrew parent to size them up.)

  My dad the multitasker: spending time with his toddler, going for a walk, and getting drunk as shit all at the same time.

 
The stories that I’d hear about my father from his old friends were so similar to each other that they could have been Mad Libbed:

  “Your dad is Dennis? Oh, man. I remember this time I was out with your dad, and he pooped in a shoe and then we found a bag of industrial-grade Demerol in an abandoned baby stroller and went to a Bad Company concert, where he fought a brown bear. He lost badly and took more pills, and then we stole an ambulance. Man, we had fun back then.”

  That was my dad. And then, there was me.

  A representative but noncomprehensive list of things I was afraid of would include: bugs, the garbage disposal, the dark, balloons, people with dreadlocks (yes, even the dorky white guys), that loud noise when you close a heavy hardcover book really fast, any member of the horse family, heights, sharks, the ocean, the sun, staplers, and the usual (ghosts, werewolves, vampires, mummies—all monsters, really). It is perhaps no coincidence that although I was the firstborn, it is my younger brother, the second child, that is my father’s namesake.

  INT. HOSPITAL ROOM—JULY 1979

  A DOCTOR, having just delivered a BABY, hands it over to the PARENTS.

  DOCTOR

  Dennis and Kathy, congratulations. It’s a boy!

  KATHY

  (taking baby)

  Oh, Den! Look at him—he’s beautiful! Should we name him “Dennis”?

  DENNIS

  (a beat, takes drag from cigarette, peers at baby)

  Eh, I got a bad feelin’ about this one. Let’s wait for the next one.

  So when Mike presented the not easy/scary/dangerous job opportunity, I couldn’t say no. I had to prove I was Dennis Mulgrew’s son, goddamn it, even if I wasn’t named after him. I could manage not easy/scary/dangerous with my eyes closed.

  When I said that yes, I was still interested, Mike yelled back to the chef and said, “Hey, Matt. I think we got our new crab man.”

  Many of the bars in the neighborhood had crab nights in the summer. For ten dollars, you could get all-you-could-eat crabs for a few hours. Mick-Daniel’s was no exception. Thursday nights were their crab night, and it was a big social night out. For one, it was cheap and you could eat until your heart stopped, two things Philadelphians just love. Also, many people took Fridays off in the summer, so the crab night was the start of their weekend. Go out with some friends, drink eight pitchers of beer, eat a hundred crabs—what better way to kick off three days of summer fun?

  I myself didn’t eat crabs. I thought they were a lot of work for little reward. Hadn’t we evolved enough as a species that we didn’t have to crush the exoskeletons of our food and eat their meat with our bare hands? There’s all the smashing and the pieces of shell flying everywhere, and you use newspaper as tablecloth (are we homeless?) and you get shit caked under your fingernails. It was barbaric. And I won’t even get into the whole mustard-poop thing. No thanks.

  But I didn’t have to like crabs to be the crab man. Actually, it would behoove me to dislike the crabs, since the crab man was really the crab executioner.

  The crabs were brought in at 11 a.m., when the bar was not yet open and was eerily empty. I came into work that first summer Thursday to find the five rickety crates teeming with life stacked on top of each other in my area near the sinks. They stopped me in my tracks. The stack of bushels was moving, for chrissake, full of hundreds of crabs aware that the clock was ticking, the end near. The chef, Matt, cigarette dangling from his mouth, came over, patted me on the back, and said, “Well, they’re all yours!”

  Matt explained that he would make the broth and cook the crabs, but I had to prep them. This meant putting the crabs into an induced coma. Matt walked me through it: fill up the big kitchen sinks with ice water; take the live crabs from the bushels, and, using tongs or rubber gloves, plunge them into the ice water, thereby knocking them out. Then, when he gave me the signal, I had to put the iced, comatose crabs into a large bus pan and take them over to the big pot that Matt would drop them in. After they were cooked, Matt would give them to me to get ready for the customers.

  It seemed like a lot of hubbub for the result: live crabs became cooked crabs. Why not cut out the middleman and just take the crabs directly from the bushel and drop them into the pot, I asked Matt. Was the ice water coma a sort of anesthesia, an attempt at being humane?

  “Nah,” Matt said, smoking the same cigarette. “If you drop ’em in when they’re alive, they flip the fuck out, and when they cook, their claws and legs and all the shit drops off. Then you’re pulling just crab bodies out of the pot, and all the limbs sink to the bottom. You ice ’em up so they don’t flip the fuck out and they stay whole. People want the whole crab on their plate, not the crab and a pile of claws and legs and shit.” Matt walked back into his kitchen.

  “Fuckin’ anesthesia,” he laughed. “They’re fuckin’ crabs!”

  I took the lid off the first bushel. A single crab scooted over his brothers and sisters, escaped, and fell to the floor, making a loud cracking noise. “And don’t let them drop!” Matt yelled from the back of the kitchen. “We don’t want no broken shells!”

  I quickly put the lid back on and regarded the wounded escapee, crawling around the floor. I used tongs to pick the crab up and place him delicately in the empty sink. The clickety-clack of its claws and legs against the sink echoed through the kitchen, over the Dire Straits song playing on the small radio above my head.

  I put the escaped crab back with its brothers and sisters. Then I filled the sinks with ice water and reopened the lid of the first bushel. The crabs were indeed scary. They were bigger than I’d imagined, they stank of the ocean, and there were dozens and dozens of them, all claws and creepy little legs and antennae, squirming and crawling. And there was the noise. Thousands of little clicks, clacks, and scratches, clicks, clacks, and scratches, clicks, clacks, and scratches.

  I was overcome not with fear but with a sense of the responsibility of my mission. I was the last person these crabs would see alive. If they could, in fact, see. It looked like they had two beads or whatnot for eyes, so I imagined they had some eyesight. Again, not a big crab person.

  What I had to do was important. I was going to kill a few hundred living things. Though I was neither vegetarian nor hippie—the very sight of cows made my mouth water—the least I could do was make their journey from bushel to sink to pot as comfortable and quick as possible. So I pushed my fear aside, put on the gloves, grabbed the tongs, and started gingerly loading the crabs into the deep, icy water in the sinks. Seconds after being immersed, they were “asleep.”

  “That’s it, Jay, you got it,” Matt yelled from the kitchen. “Drop ’em on in. Keep going.”

  Over time, I got better and more efficient at being the crab man. I got braver, too. I ditched the tongs and would use only the rubber gloves. I eventually lost those as well, and would grab the crabs quickly with my bare hands, moving back and forth from bushel to sink, bushel to sink. The few times I got pinched did not hurt so much. And these were war wounds, battle scars, proof of a tough job done well.

  About a month after taking on the new job, I was flinging the crabs into the sink sans tongs and gloves when Mike walked into the kitchen.

  “Look at him, Matt. He’s a natural. No fear at all!”

  In a few months, I was going to start my sophomore year. I was still afraid of bugs and people with dreadlocks. But, aside from David, I’d spent more time in a bar than any kid I knew. And I was a fearless crab man.

  philadelphia’s finest

  Every single night growing up, my family would eat our “treats.” As the oldest child, I was charged with walking to one of the corner stores, Hennessey’s, which was also a lo-fi ice cream shop. I say “lo-fi” because there were no colorful banners with cartoon characters or ice cream cakes available for purchase, or sundaes that came with fancy toppings like shaved chocolate truffles or crumbled butterscotch brownies. Along with your gallon of milk and your paper and your roll of toilet paper, you could get a cone of ice cream or a milksha
ke or, if they had enough of the ingredients around, maybe a banana split.

  We all had our usual orders, which included a main choice and a back-up, should the preferred ice cream not be available. For my dad, it was a double dish of banana (or strawberry). For my mom, a cone of her beloved chocolate marshmallow (or vanilla fudge). My brother and I were the same: a cone of cookies ’n’ cream or vanilla, though sometimes I changed it up, making a game-time decision once I got to Hennessey’s. My sister, seven years younger than me, would carve out a spoonful or two of my mom’s treat.

  This was not for special occasions or an every Saturday night thing, but, as mentioned, every single night. When we moved to my grandmother’s house a few blocks away while my parents settled the whole divorce thing, we continued the ice cream tradition, going to a place called Bell’s instead of Hennessey’s. From the time I was five until just about the start of high school, I ate an ice cream cone right before bed every night. And those motherfucking cones were not small.

  So the treats were strike one. Strike two was that I did not have a vegetable that was not a potato, corn, or prefixed by “creamed” or “cream of” until college. A salad was something that came with dinner when you went out to eat and which you pushed to the side after you picked the Russian dressing– doused croutons from it. I’m not going to play the “poor urban white” card and say that fresh produce was not available to us. It’s not like there were multiple local organic farmers markets, but, Jesus Christ, we could have had some celery or a goddamn tomato every once in a while. I’ve since tried to get more vegetables into my diet, but it has been difficult. As an adult, I dated a girl whose family owned a farm, and when we went to visit her family, they would hold up a vegetable and make me guess what it was. Then they’d break up laughing when what I thought was a carrot was really a radish. However, I’m happy to report that my family is broadening its horizons in the veggie department somewhat; at our most recent Thanksgiving, in addition to the mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, whole corn, creamed corn, broccoli with cheese sauce (from a microwavable bag), and creamed spinach (also from a microwavable bag), we had green beans. They were in a casserole, loaded with cheese and onion rings, but it’s a start.