THE PRETZEL VENDOR AND THE STRANGER

When I was eighteen years old, I worked in the local mall at a Pretzel shop called Twisteroos. It was 1982. Many nights I was scheduled to close, and that would entail many less-than-attractive activities including sweeping, mopping, and cleaning out the metal containers of chocolate, cheddar cheese, and caramel sauce that we dipped the pretzels in. Worst of all, though, was using the steel wool to scrub the pretzel oven that had spent all day long carrying long strips of pretzels through the oven as if they were on a giant pretzel ferris wheel. It was grimy, dirty work and I usually left smelling of detergent and old salt.

The only way I got through it was music. Each night I carried a giant backpack to work that contained a boom box and a handful of tapes--personal mixes, long before they were called "mixes"--that had some of my favorite songs on them that I had either taped from my record albums at home (this was almost half a decade before CDs arrived on the scene) or some that I taped straight from the radio.

My strongest memory of that time was of one specific tape that started with Billy Joel's "You May Be Right" from Glass Houses. The sound of that shattering glass and the high energy opening to "You May Be Right" put me in the mood to work through those awful tasks and get the job done after a long shift of dealing with difficult customers, menial labor, and minimum wage. Some of my best memories of Twisteroos--which, all things considered, was a better first job than many other fast food gigs--involve slapping the soapy water around the tiled floor with a mop or scrubbing that oven while listening to Billy sing "You May Be Right. . .I may be crazy. . ." Then Fabiola from Toy Kingdom, Christy from Crazy Shirts, or Laura from Charlotte Russe would come up to buy a pretzel. Then we’d talk. Sometimes I'd ask them out and, every now and then, they accepted.

And then I'd think, ". . .but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for."