Dispatches From a Dilettante Read Free

also an excellent guitar player. Even worse this allowed him to seduce members of the female staff and at least one guest, while I spent my brief sojourn at Lake Minnewaska quietly seething with jealousy and resentment.
    On the third morning Howie was so stoned that he allowed me to drive. We were loaded with laundry and had been asked to take three freshly baked apple pies from the kitchen in one hotel on our journey round the lakes to be delivered at the other. These were placed carefully on the front bench seat between us. The journey was less than a mile but involved a couple of steep hills. I was quietly and somewhat smugly congratulating myself on getting the hand of this truck driving lark when three hundred metres in, on my driving debut, we approached the first downward slope. A skunk shot across the road in front of us and I instinctively hit the brakes hard. Howie, who had been barely conscious, shot forward and hit his head on the windscreen. He remained barely conscious. This was of no consequence when compared to the fate of the apple pies which had slid off the seat and now resembled a Jackson Pollack portrait on the floor of the cab. I was moved off laundry truck duties and downgraded to dishwashing in the kitchen.
    This move proved to extremely beneficial from a linguistic point of view. Never before, as a callow youth from England, had I heard the words ‘motherfucker’ or ‘cocksucker’. Later on my first day in the kitchen I was to hear them both in one sentence and directed at me.
    The menial duties in my new workspace were exclusively done by black staff. The waiters were all white as were the chefs. In my innocent life to date I had never seen a divide writ so large. It was an accepted division by both parties and all the more repugnant because of that. Minimum wage was better than no wage and even this seasonal casual work was a foot on the job ladder. I quickly became the novelty act in a heaving, hellishly hot, noisy and always overstretched kitchen. Rapidly I came to understand what hard and grindingly repetitive work was like. Huge scorching hot and greasy metal trays were dumped in the sink that I had been assigned to and I washed and scrubbed them…minute after minute and hour after hour. Catering on a mass scale obviously means washing up of a similar volume.
    After three hours solid I went outside for a breather, which was a big mistake. The conveyor belt system had been interrupted and when I got back a mountain of unwashed utensils had spilled on to the floor. At that moment Kenneth B. Phillips Junior came into the kitchen on a rare visit, possibly to see how his English employee was doing after the apple pie truck disaster. As he entered the washing up area so did the chef who, seeing the carnage caused by my unauthorised break turned to him and said, “Kenny… get that motherfucking, cocksucking limey outta my kitchen.” Even Kenneth looked slightly askance at the brutality of this but ‘chefs rule’ and as Kenneth walked off he said in a rather brusque way, “Paul we gotta talk in the morning.” The summer of sixty nine wasn’t turning out the way I had dreamed it and having been relieved of two jobs in four days the next day’s ‘talk’ did not seem to be a meeting that I could look forward to with confidence.
    Feeling vulnerable and a long way from home I arrived next morning for the appointed ‘talk’ and miraculously left it with a new challenge. I say challenge because what transpired as my next assignment could in no way be called a job. Kenneth’s opening question was to enquire whether I played soccer. I confirmed with him that I did, which was the truth. Kenneth went on to explain that in settlement of a bar room argument with the Greek American owner of a similar resort in the Catskills called Lake Mohonk, a soccer match was to be played in three days time between the staff of the two resorts. There was $500 riding on the result and the Greek American had