Sometimes I feel that I have been lucky as a young man when I consider how my first few jobs just came to me with hardly any effort on my part. It is as if they found me rather than I search for them. Just like my night job as a dry cleaning delivery boy, my second one was also offered to me...I never asked for it. Across our school there was a restaurant called Big Boy’s on the ground floor of a building which had a huge sign that said XEROX. My best friend Hampar and I used to spend some of our lunch breaks at Big Boy’s
One day, around the end of our school year, the owner approached me and asked what my plans were for the Summer. I told him that I had none and so he said, ‘Do you want to work here? You start as a dishwasher and then we will see.’ He did not wait for my answer and added, ‘think about it and let me know’. I was happy that I was given time for making a decision. And I was excited, because finally I would get the real Canadian experience every employer asked for. A day later, I let Ernie Rufas the owner, know that I accepted the job.
The restaurant was huge, I found out. I had seen only one part of it where we used to sit all the time. It was considered the family part. There was also the bar side which I had not been to before and it was quite spacious. The morning I began, Ernie took me to the back and showed me a huge Cafeteria and told me that I had to mop the floor. This was to be my job every morning because the Xerox workers had lunch there every day. I was disheartened because I was hired as a dishwasher and not a cleaner. I had to flip over a hundred chairs over the tables, mop the floors and then arrange the chairs for sitting again. It took me over an hour and I was exhausted. I could not complain because it was my first day.
Next, he took me to the kitchen. All along I had expected to do the dishes by hand. It was the first time I saw a dishwashing machine, like a carwash...you put a rack of dishes on some automatic rollers from one side and they came out clean and dry from the other side. I thought it will be easy until I saw the huge dirty pots and pans that I had to scrape with metal wire before they went through the machine.
Ernie was a very strict and unpredictable boss. He would get mad at any mistake you made and would humiliate you. But half an hour later, he would joke and laugh with you. He was a Macedonian immigrant. He loved talking to me as a know-it-all. As if he was smarter and more experienced than me and he had to advise me about life. Once he found out I was Armenian, he never used my proper name again. He began calling me Ararat. But he pronounced it Arrrarrrattt! I think he liked me very much because he would tease me about Turks and Armenians, girls and boys and my plans in life. His cruel treatment eventually softened. He saw that I was not going to break down. It was like a test for him to be convinced that I was a determined boy. We would argue because I would stand up against his unfair accusations as a boss. Eventually, he moved me from dishwashing to cashier position and soon after I became a waiter in the family section. But the grand prize was when he moved me to the bar section where the tips were quite good. By the end of the Summer, when I quit, I was a good, experienced waiter.
I lost touch with Ernie. Almost thirty years after my days at Big Boy’s, one rainy evening I was rushing somewhere in the Greek neighborhood. I passed a man and two women sheltering from the rain on the sidewalk. They were laughing cheerfully. I glanced at them quickly and I only caught a glimpse of the man. Something familiar struck me in the man’s voice. I continued towards the restaurant but then decided to go back. I was curious about the man. I walked back and looking at him, I said excitedly ‘excuse me! But are you Ernie? Ernie Rufas?’. He looked at me in a questioning way and then, his face beaming with a huge smile, he shouted, ‘Arrrarrrattt? Vay vay vay. Son of a gun’. He was so happy. I was so happy. The two women were happy because we were happy. He hugged me tightly. He kept saying,’ I can’t believe it’. I told him that I had never forgotten him even if he had been a cruel boss sometimes. At the end of an emotional little chat, he turned around to the women and he said, ‘See? This is what they call ‘real success’. If you are a heartless boss and your worker still remembers you after thirty years and comes over to talk to you on the street with respect, that is real success!’
Son of a gun Ernie Rufas! How can one forget you anyways?
