A few weeks back, we caught the movie Adventureland. It was billed in Apatow-esque fashion, with an 80’s-mustached Bill Hader spouting one-liners and Freaks and Geeks star Martin Starr getting a real role after his hilarious but mostly silent Unibomber-beard dude in Knocked Up. The experience didn’t live up to the billing though, which was a really nice surprise. There were definitely funny moments, but instead of hearing yet more ad-libbed “Know how I know you’re gay?” lines, we saw a story of a kid getting his first real job, experiencing all of the crazy bullshit that I imagine happens to everyone when they get their first menial job. I know it happened at mine.
Adventureland is an amusement park in Pittsburgh, where our overeducated and unskilled protagonist finds work when his parents can no longer afford to send him to New York for the summer. My first job was at Ponderosa in Oaklyn, New Jersey, where, at the age of sixteen, I would learn to grill 200 steaks an hour during the weekend dinner rush. I would be paid $3.15 for that hour. Pre-tax.
The managers of Adventureland, played by Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig of SNL, are quirky, comical, and ultimately, concerned about their employees. When they find our hero at his game booth red-eyed and stoned, they let him take a break, assuming he’d been crying. Of course, they also rig the games, prompting a cheated guest to nearly pummel an employee, but Hader chases the thug off with crazy eyes and a bat. Bob, the manager that hired me at Ponderosa, generously gave me an unheard of “quarter bump” at my six month review, rocketing my hourly wage from $3.15 to $3.40. He was also rumored to share his cocaine with the older high school graduates. Karen was a wonderful born-again Christian that kindly sought to save my soul, although I do vividly remember the face she made whenever I splashed a hand with hot oil or seared my forearm with an overloaded oven rack – the furrowed brow and tight grimace that singularly communicates “Can you still close tonight?” And I can’t forget Cindy, who once turned a corner to witness an irate, profane customer threatening me, and immediately inquired if the guest wanted to file a complaint. I worked there for 15 months. I called out sick once. When I arrived to pick up my last paycheck, Cindy held the envelope, explaining that I needed to return my extra apron to get it.
A first job can yield some interesting friends. In the movie, Martin Starr plays a pipe-smoking intellectual, studying Russian literature and philosophy while running various game booths. He is the extreme version of the main character, the embodiment of supreme mental potential lacking the focus or confidence to do anything truly useful - a fact that the character knows too well and eventually comes to realize. Another friend from the main character’s elementary school days works at Adventureland, taking sole pleasure in delivering surprise nut-punches. At Ponderosa, an employee named Mark gained nearly legendary status by accepting absolutely any shift that anyone asked of him – cooking, doing dishes, busing tables, double shifts, seven-day weeks – he accepted any offer with a smile. Rumor had it that he was at the top of his class at Rutgers Law, but his parents cut him off after finding amphetamines in his backpack, forcing him to work his way through school. I heard he had two other jobs. I heard he slept one hour a day. I heard on a cold, misty night, he once killed a man. Another guy, coincidentally also named Mark, would take tremendous pleasure in hiding in the freezer, surprising unsuspecting grill cooks with his bare buttocks. I wish I still talked to those guys. I think one of them is on a car dealership billboard on I-95.
I continue to be amazed by the inverse relationship between job stress and compensation as I get older. I have never performed tasks as menial or experienced the levels of near exhaustion as I did making $3 an hour. In this regard, I have the movie beat by a mile. Granted, a ring toss booth operator may occasionally face a cheating boy and his knife-wielding dad, but he will most likely never need to dig through trash cans of discarded slop to find a customer’s lost retainer, or jump on dumpster trash to buy the company an extra day before they have to pay for a pickup. He may need to scrape gum from beneath his counter, but he will never find himself sliding across a greasy floor carrying a 5-gallon vat of hot cooking oil. He may find himself sweeping the booth floor prior to closing up, but will not watch in abject sorrow as two octogenarians sidle through the door five minutes before closing, ruining his chance to join his friends at Burger King across the street. Today at work, I was annoyed that the upstairs bathroom was out of service, forcing me to walk an extra 50 feet. At one point, the printer jammed.
Finally, at the heart of every first job, whether fictional or real, is love, unrequited or otherwise. For all of its quirky characters and insightful comedy, Adventureland is a love story, albeit a complicated one. Sure, the troubled, beautiful female lead takes an interest in the male lead, and sure, he falls hard for her. But how does his inexperienced love navigate her sordid past, and really, her sordid present? Love is complicated, and rarely clean, and to the movie’s credit, Adventureland treated it so. My first kiss ever was on the night of my junior prom, as I walked my date (a coworker) to her door at the end of the night. Romantic, huh? I was too chicken to ask her myself, so another Ponderosa cook asked her for me. She dumped me a week later and quit a week after that. I heard she hooked up with him at some point. Actually, I heard she hooked up with anyone willing to lead her into the woods with wine coolers. I, alas, had no wine coolers. Then I caught a break. The troubled, beautiful new girl at work slipped her number in my pocket. She had a past, and really, a present. But we got through that, and I started my long trip up the learning curve of women. Just like the characters in Adventureland, we eventually ran into problems and took a break. Unlike the characters in Adventureland, she started dating an Italian kid and began blaring their song, “It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right”, from her dorm on a daily basis. To this day, I hate that song. But I miss working at Ponderosa.