Mihran’s offer to me to become his dry cleaning delivery boy for London Cleaners was a lucky streak for me as a newcomer in Toronto. At the age of fifteen I began earning more than enough money to enjoy my youth. That first night of work was hectic because on top of acquainting myself with the customer list, delivering and picking up clothes for dry cleaning, I had to introduce myself to all the regular customers. That was monotonous because I kept repeating the same line as a new delivery boy. Some of the customers I had seen before in the elevators, but I had never spoken to. Now I was meeting them in person. In a way, it was interesting to get to know them a bit more from their laundry, the smells that came out of their apartments as they opened their doors to my knocking, as well as the little furniture or house decoration I could see through the open doors as they went to get the money to pay me.
That first night at my job was like winning the jackpot. The 25% commission I was promised turned out to be more than thirty dollars. And that was for the three hours of work I had done that night. Imagine living in a city where the minimum hourly wage is around two dollars and you have a job that brings in more than five times that amount! No doubt, my classmates were working as hard as me at their jobs, but I was rewarded so much more. Very unfair when I think about it. And the more I think, I feel that those classmates and everyone else should have been paid as generously as me. After all, we were doing the main work from which our bosses benefitted. London Cleaners would not have made any money in that building, had a delivery boy like me not been there.
The job was physically tiring because of all the walking I did in the long hallways of our twenty-floor building which had 18 apartments on each floor. So eventually I began taking short breaks by going home and resting. The 5-minute breaks turned into 10 and then 15 and …eventually I discovered a sitcom show called Happy Days which all my classmates raved about. They all loved Fonzy. So, my Tuesday night breaks lasted half an hour timed with the beginning and ending of Happy Days. I was not lazy actually. It’s just that everyone watched and loved the sitcom so much that I felt left out. The breaks were actually refreshing and I would go back to work as soon as the show ended.
The most interesting thing about my job was the customers. My introduction to Canadian social skills began there. My customers liked me I think, because I was hard-working and attentive to their requests and complaints. Some of them were talkative, due to friendliness or loneliness. Sometimes they would hold me at the door for too long making conversations. I would listen thinking it would be rude not to. But mostly, I also liked talking to them. I met the first Chileans and East Indians from Uganda working…The Pinochet and Idi Amin horrors had begun those years of 73 and 74. Canada and our building were full of new refugees. My first encounter with a conceptual artist happened there. So did one with a gay designer and one with a political activist. She was a Jamaican immigrant with a beautiful baby…one day she gave me a thick book about colonialism, and she told me to read it because it would open up my mind.
That first job lasted more than two years. Over time, the customer list got longer. I canvassed and got many more customers in my building, and I earned more as business grew. The superintendent of the building also let me know every time new tenants moved to our building. Once, around Christmas, I remember pocketing seventy five dollars…the sales that night totalled 300 dollars. Eventually Mihran and his brother Magar offered me another building, about 15 minutes away from my home. So, I began doing four nights a week and it was a bit hectic. Because of me also, my best friend Hampar started working for them in his own building next to mine. Over the years he became a manager for London Cleaners and many years later he bought the whole business with its many stores. Myself, I continued working for the cleaners throughout my high school years, even when I got a job in a hamburger restaurant where I worked a whole Summer before graduation. That’s another story about hamburger joints. Come to the University time, I complained to Mihran and Magar that I had to concentrate on my studies, and I would not be able to continue working for them. So, I found a replacement for me in our building. He was a young Armenian from Beirut. But he turned out to be lazy and irresponsible. In six months, the business in our building went down so badly that London Cleaners decided to close down its operation there.
As I began my first year of university, Mihran and his brother assigned me to a new building in downtown…I could go to work two nights a week after my classes easily. It was convenient, but my heart was not in it, and I quit after a few months. My studies were more important than the money I was making. My dry cleaning career ended like that.
