Cake

Kylie Fernandes 269292

1

Cake

It was another stain on the floor. Spluttering air-conditioners in the room over barely take the edge off the forty-degree day as I stared at the chunky mess of half digested pizza, chips and cake on the floor. Soft drink painted the concoction a vivid pink. The offender, a greasy-fingered boy who was looking much perkier now that his lunch was out of him, barely looked at his little mess or at me.

“Are you alright?”

He shrugged, apathy hinting at a yes. Not exactly helpful. It was a practised drill, tell the kid to let someone know if he felt sick again and then send him back into the game. There wasn’t much else you could do. His next shrug was more excited and he high-tailed it down the stairs after the other kids, vomiting escapade forgotten. Stuck up there for the rest of the day I turned back to the problem, nose wrinkled. I could almost visualise the little stink waves floating off the slowly spreading pile, like rubbish in the cartoons. It was time to clean up.

It was my first proper, paid job and it could have been worse. Pride had kept me from the fast-food and check-out industries leaving a slim picking of employers who’d even read the carefully constructed resume I’d made myself. Experience was needed. A difficult task when no-one felt like giving said experience. Running children’s birthday parties not only sounded fun and excited, it kept me well away from the supermarkets and left me in the middle of something I loved: The Laser Game. After the honeymoon period of enjoying the work, it became obvious why they took people without experience. The job was simple. Lay down plates, pour soft drinks, contend with hyperactive, sugar-fuelled children and their parents and then clean up the aftermath, ready to do it again. We ran twenty parties in eight hours both Saturday and Sunday, with the legal half-hour break if you were lucky. Pay was around twenty cents over minimum. That was alright. It was only once a week.

The laser game place consists of four main areas. The kitchen is the best place to be if you don’t feel like dealing with anyone or anything other than shoving junk-food through an oven and pouring liquid sugar into flimsy paper cups. The foyer and front counter come a close second. They’re open, they’re clean to a certain degree and the air-conditioners work. Working the till and managing parents are a minor detail until you mess up the timing. Timing is crucial. Parties are run in two-hour blocks that overlap each other. Arcades, game, food, arcades, game. A brilliant set up unless you’re running late or forget to move a group from one activity to another, then it’s the Party Girls who have to are left to make up the time. Parties: a full day in the renovated offices upstairs. Forty minutes with each group to feed them, cake them and somehow keep them occupied. We were supposed to play games with them, old favourites like celebrity heads, if they became restless. Celebrity heads does not shoot other people, lacks the flashing lights and moving pictures of an X-Box or Playstation. They weren’t interested. Spitballs and food-fights were the trend.

At least you were out of the fourth and final area. Marshalling meant an entire day inside the laser maze, enforcing the rules as blasting music repeated and you inched down the narrow black corridors and avoided the children that barrelled past. The game was simple enough; armed with a vest of targets and a ‘phaser’ you walked briskly around the dark, pounding maze and aimed to ‘tag’ other players to accumulate points. Running was prohibited, gun was a naughty word and to say you killed another player might just upset someone. It’s fun when you’re playing, not so fun when you’re trying to enforce that no running rule. The main killer was boredom.

Party Staff roughly translated to Party Girls, the two shoved upstairs to deal with the customer service side of the deal. I never really understood how Jason, the boss, decided which new staff-member was going where but any new guys were never stationed upstairs. The same way girls never began working downstairs at the till and in the kitchen. It sounds sexist but really, we didn’t want them up there with us. Unimpressed with the move the boys tended to hang around, talk a lot and not get a lot done. You began hoping your partner for the day would actually turn up so that you wouldn’t be left doing all the work yourself, or that it would be Bam who’d cover for them. He was the only guy there who actually appreciated the chance to work with the kids, having spent most of his five years on the staff working at the front counter. There may have been a ‘boy’s club’ working downstairs but it was equally as biased up the top. Party staff had dibs on all food that came through their area and if there was cake left over, cake that we wanted anyway, the guys downstairs would be lucky to see it. Dieting be damned; working with rampaging children entitled us to snack on cakes, chips and lollies all day if we wanted to.

Whenever describing my workplace to someone, the reply was almost always something to do with how hard it must be to work with the children. Children are relatively easy to understand and if you have to, you can yell at them. You can’t yell at the parents. Something about a child’s birthday party often brings out the worst in parents, particularly mothers. Some simply sit there while the kids begin throwing food, spitballs and harassing other parties while others freak out about us not providing chips and food other than pizza. It was written quite clearly on the invitation, along with the party room limits. It was a winter’s evening, just before we were about to start clearing the upstairs rooms, when our last party of the day turned ugly. It was a family of Greeks and we’d been told there were ten children; a nice, small number who would fit nicely into party room two. We hadn’t anticipated on them inviting the extended family along. Almost twenty-five people crammed themselves into our smallest room with another fifteen taking over the parent’s lounge, letting babies and younger children run past as we attempted in vain to see everyone. Bringing the birthday cake in left me elbowing through people to the far end of the table. The candles were lit, Happy Birthday was sung and as I was about to ask who didn’t want cake the mother struck.

“I wanted the table cleared before we did this.” Her tone was snappy, the type where no matter what you said to pacify her, she was going to get angry.

“I’m sorry, the kids were getting restless and I didn’t really have space to go and clear everything. Would you like me too now?”

I don’t remember exactly what she said, something about me making her child’s birthday party look like a rubbish dump, before an uncle lead her back out to the lounge. As I began to cut the cake, a friendly hand descended on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry about her.” A friendly aunt, cousin or in-law smiled at me, taking the sliced cake to hand around. “She’s always like that.”

I was glad it wasn’t just me.

We had three vomiting issues the last summer when I was on shift. It’s amazing it hadn’t happened before that with the heat, the sugar and the adrenaline pumping through the building. Children don’t quite understand that it’s a volatile concoction. The parents that accompany them don’t seem to care until the child throws up. This summer was particularly hot, the pizzas we fed them were perhaps especially greasy, and management had changed the forgiving blue lights in the foyer to white. Every stain was visible and it was embarrassing and it was a blessing when they eventually pulled it up and replaced it with lino. It didn’t come soon enough. In some moment of inspiration it was decided that Parties should also make tea and coffee for parents. We never got the tea or the coffee but we were graced with a plastic container of milk which sat in the fridge for a few months. Opening the door one morning I was greeted with a most distinct aroma of dread and long-forgotten used-by dates. The milk had burst and left the bottom draw of the fridge awash with a stench that wouldn’t fully disappear by the time I left. The task loomed as the day wore on, and the last party left. I didn’t, couldn’t breathe as I poured it down the sink, the hot water running. Bam was vacuuming until he smelt it.

“You need a hand? God damn, that’s nasty!” I didn’t have to turn to see his hand fly over his mouth as he got a good, long look at what I was tangling with. The bathroom door slammed and I could hear him vomiting. The wuss, I thought with a smile, and I just kept pushing chunks of off-milk down the sink with a spoon. It wasn’t that bad.

Word Count: 1 557

Synopsis:

I was inspired by Luc Sante’s Plastics to write a piece about my former workplace as it’s something that’s stuck with me ever since I quit. As my first job I wasn’t aware how it compared to others at the time, only really realising how bad it was there when I compared it to my new job, when it came to how the staff were treated by both management and patrons. I didn’t intend this piece to come out perhaps as negatively as it has but on looking back at this period of my life, sadly it’s a reasonably accurate depiction.

Word count: 101