WICHITA, KS-

Once upon a time, I was going to be the next bestselling author of deep meaningful stuff that everyone would grok and say, “Oh, NOW my life makes sense” and the world was going to be a better place for it. I was going to write with the humor of Douglas Adams and the depth of John Irving. My writing was going to resonate like Truman Capote’s and captivate like William Goldman’s, and have just a sprinkle of the meaningfulness of Camus and Raymond Carver. I was going to get my degree in English Literature and become a great writer, and nothing was going to get in my way.

Alas, I got a summer job at a truck stop.

It was a brand new truck stop, still smelling of fresh paint, a $4 million facility, I later learned, with a full service restaurant and a drivers’ lounge with a pool table, and coin-op laundry, and showers, and a big convenience store, and a whole lot of people who didn’t want to do much work or take any responsibility. Except for me, because apparently I didn’t know any better. So, I started falling up. I went from night shift fuel desk clerk to convenience store manager in two weeks.

I barely had time to figure out how to do that job before the owner discovered that I knew how to use spreadsheets. This old oil man with his hollow face and chunky gold rings and the smell of dollar bills on his breath says, “What are you doing running the goddamn convenience store? Anybody can do that. We need you to do the bookkeeping.” He eyed me with one of those guarded stares for a moment, probably contemplating how cheaply he could have me, or if I too had a taste for dollar bills in my morning cereal. Finally he asked, “Can you put together a profit and loss statement?” and I, struck momentarily senseless by his faith in me, heard from my own mouth the very confident word “Absolutely.”

I spent the next several days alternately arm-wrestling Excel and scouring the Internet to find out just what exactly a “profit and loss statement” was supposed to consist of. As luck or fate would have it, this man was in his 80s and I think anyone who knew how to work one of those newfangled computers and make it generate useful information was viewed by him as something akin to a seer. So, I just kept working at it and I became very close with his personal accountant and the accounting forums online. Within a few months I was able to discover where all of the old man’s cash was going, and let’s just say that there was an abrupt job opening for general manager of that fancy truck stop, and I took it. So I put off my English degree for the higher calling of managing a truck stop.

And it was fascinating—scary, extraordinarily stressful—but fascinating. Poor old Bill Burner (name changed to protect the guilty) never really recovered from the ride he’d been taken on. When I took over, he told me to run it as long as I could that he was looking for a buyer. He expected to have one in six weeks. Three years later, the place sold.

It’s funny how life takes you on some unexpected rides. Kind of like the comedian who talked about being afraid of dying in a plane crash. He said people used to tell him that when it was his time to go, it was his time to go, so he shouldn’t worry about it. But his response was, “Well, what if it’s the pilot’s time? I’ll be standing up in heaven and God will ask what I’m doing there, and I’ll just feel real stupid saying, ‘I dunno; I had a ticket to L.A.’” I don’t know what I was doing managing a truck stop; I was supposed to be getting my English Lit degree. But it was interesting, and I kind of felt bad for old Bill Burner being taken through the wringer in the whole deal. He was kind of pitiful in his gruff, spitting-mad, goddamn-this and goddamn-that way. He said goddamn a lot, in that peculiar way that old men say it, as if it is the most horrible swear word they’ve ever known in their long lives and now that they are old they have every goddamn right to use it.

So I stayed on with Bill Burner of Burner Oil and I managed that crazy place, and slowly I started to discover that old Bill didn’t give two shits what I did with that truck stop as long as I paid the bills (particularly his fuel bills). I believe I can safely say that we were most likely the only truck stop to ever host a poetry night or the screening of independent films. We also had a small honor-system library for the truck drivers. And we held other nerdy events whenever the mood struck me. It was seriously like owning my own business. I planned the menus in the restaurant, I decided what merchandise we would carry in the convenience store. I made all of the decisions.

And one day it struck me: it would be really cool to own my own business. So, to make a long story less long, the truck stop sold, I got my accounting degree (as a back up plan), hoarded my student loan money, got approved for about eight credit cards and opened Zoomdweebie’s Tea Bar, where I have been working for over a year and haven’t been able to pay myself yet: the joys of business ownership indeed. But we do have poetry night and chess night and we show films and local artists’ work and I am surrounded by fellow nerds, one of whom posted a link to TNB on her Facebook profile, and here I am, wondering if maybe I have found an outlet for my mad musings. Hopefully the quality of the writing here won’t suffer too badly.

Tags: Introduction

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Accidents, Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.