On how Gabe made it so I had to work at Portillo's

Last week I was going through the “drive-thru” (I dislike the word “drive-thru” because “thru” is not a word; also, “donut” is not a word, but the language keeps getting stupider and there’s nothing I can do about it). I was not going through the drive-thru because I was actually about to eat fast-food. I don’t eat fast-food. I just like going through drive-thrus to see what’s up. The drive-thru at Portillo’s is a beautifully-choreographed, highly-complex operation. In case you are from somewhere other than Chicago, Portillo’s is a chain of about 20 fast food restaurants started by founder/hot dog magnate Dick Portillo. By way of comparison, I feel really comfortable stating for the record that Portillo’s is better than, say, Chick-Fil-A, since I have never and will never eat at a Chick-Fil-A.  It just rubs me the wrong way. The drive-thru at Portillo’s does have the typical order box microphone deal, but that isn’t good enough for Dick Portillo, so you will hardly ever give your order into a box and then exchange money for food through a window. Instead, there are actual people standing in the drive-thru lanes, one or two to take orders, another to take your money, and yet another to give you your completed order, with an adequate number of ketchup packets and napkins, and send you on your way. All of these people are also highly-skilled at directing traffic.

I was sitting there with my window down, again, not because I was ordering food, but because I like the fresh air found in the alleyways of drive-thrus, and I overheard one of the order-taker drive-thru girls saying to another order-taker drive-thru girl, “When I get out of law school, I’m gonna come back here and tell that fucker to fuck himself!”

Well, kudos, young law student! With a mouth like that, you’re going to make a fine attorney. But there was another reason why this statement warmed my heart: I too worked at Portillo’s.

The summer before my senior year of high school, I was looking for a job. My timing was really bad because there were no good jobs to be had – all the college kids had already come home and scooped them up. I was pissed off about my situation because I’d had a good job at what was, for a time, the only video store in Naperville. It was called “Visions in Video.” How stupid is that? Everyone just called it “Visions.” Worse, this was so god damned long ago that when I started working there, you could still rent some movies from Visions on Beta. I’m not kidding. Anyway, I shouldn’t have even had to look for a job, but a few weeks before the end of my junior year, I got fired from Visions. It was an unjust termination, but my boss was this crazy micro-managing alcoholic who sat behind a huge pane of double glass that ran the whole length of the back wall of the main Visions store, whilst creepily viewing the real-time security video tapes from his other, smaller store. I worked at the small store, usually by myself, and it was very weird to know that my activities were being surveilled from afar by an intoxicated, but incredibly business savvy, nut job. If Keith didn’t like what I appeared to be doing, in black and white, with no sound, and in 15 second intervals, he’d call me at the store and tell yell, "Face movies!", which means, go around the entire store and make sure that the right movie is behind the right cover, all the covers are right-side up, and all the videos are fully rewound. This takes a heck of a long time. It was much better when a shipment of new releases came in and you had to get the movies ready for rental. This involved screw drivers and lighter fluid, and I won't even tell you why.

I liked that job. I met lots of people and it was decidedly better than working (1) in a Brown's Chicken, where people are always getting murdered in the freezer, or (2) at Centennial "pool", which is actually a quarry filled with filthy water. At Visions, I got to rent movies for free and I got asked out on dates by the public school guys who would come in. I also got to see who in town was renting the porn, and I got to learn a lot about the names of porn movies because I had to alphabetize the titles, and sometimes I even got to see porn when the guy whose shift was before mine would leave one running in the security camera in the break room. So I had a lot of exposure to porn and to dates with public school guys, and now that I think of it, that makes me wish I still worked there.

The way I got fired was really unfair. First of all, I was a fine employee. I’d worked there since the day after my 16th birthday and I never called in sick, and I worked really hard, except when I was managing my social life in the form of flirting with the public school guys. I knew all the customers by name and they didn’t even have to give me their membership cards. When they came up to the counter, I rang them right up and that really made them have a nice feeling about things. I saved movies for my favorite customers and I got to give recommendations. A few families would just come in and say, “What do you have for us to watch this weekend, Jules?” I would pick out a movie for them (not "Cadillac Man") and they would be pleased. I was really proud of the job I was doing at Visions. I was influencing the lives of the VHS movie watchers of Naperville in a positive way (not so much the Beta people, who had probably made bad bets in many other aspects of their lives and therefore did not deserve my respect), I was babysitting the latch-key kids from the apartment complex across the street who loitered in my store every afternoon, and I was not divulging what I knew about the alarming number of fathers who were renting the porn.

But one day in May, Keith called me up to the big store and I had to go into his lair where he was sitting in the dark surrounded by tiny TV sets showing every angle of every corner of his video stores. The ice cubes were clinking in his glass of scotch as he called me over. He remained seated in his big leather chair and I stood in front of him not knowing what was going on. We rarely saw Keith, even though he was always up in his scary video room. He frightened me because he was always sort of drunk and he had a really off sense of humor, especially for having a crew of employees who were predominantly tall high school girls. He swore a lot in regular conversation. That’s where I learned to talk classy like I do today. The other place I learned to talk classy was from my mother, who is a long-haul trucker.

Keith said, “I’ve been watching you.”

I said, “I know.”

He said, “You’re stealing video tapes.”

“What? No I’m not. What are you talking about?”

“I’ve seen your friends with the trench coats. You’re letting them steal movies.”

This was not true. It was true that some of my friends were indeed goth-y drama kids from the public high school who thought they were Robert Smith. They wore eye liner, and yes, trench coats, but there was no video stealing, certainly not as far as I knew. Even so, Keith was convinced that a recent rash of missing video tapes (“rash” = two) had something to do with my alternative friends, and so he fired me on the spot. I didn’t argue with him because it didn’t occur to me to defend myself. He told me I wasn’t getting paid for my last week of work to make up for the videos I’d supposedly let my friends steal. I’m sure that when Keith sobered up, he didn’t know that he’d fired me and wondered why I didn’t show up for my shift, but I went home and felt really terrible for getting fired from my first job and for a totally stupid reason that wasn’t even real. Now I didn’t have any spending money and I’d have to find a new job to tide me over till I went to college, and it totally sucked.

So that summer, when school got out, my best friend, Jason, and I, went out looking for jobs. At that time, Blockbuster didn’t even exist, so I had no transferrable skills. We started at the banks and the food places in downtown Naperville. We thought maybe we could be money changers or upscale waiters, but no one wanted us because we didn’t have any experience. We spent two days driving around, putting in applications, but no one was hiring. Late on the third day of our job search, we went through the drive-thru at Portillo’s on Ogden to get milkshakes. It was an off-time, so there were no employees working outside in the drive-thru. It was just the usual drive-thru box. Jason was driving, so he ordered the milkshakes and I, feeling slap-happy, leaned across him and screamed into the microphone: “and give us two applications for Portillo’s employment!” As it turned out, the person taking our order was not just any Portillo’s employee. When we pulled up to the window, the man standing there said, “I’m Frank. I’m the General Manager.” He may as well have had a sheriff’s badge and a six-shooter on his hip the way he was talking to us like we were a couple of hooligans hopped up on “the milkshake”. “Are you jokers serious? Do you really want jobs?” Even though I was willing to act like an asshole to a drive-thru microphone, I wasn’t able to follow through when this very real adult human being was glaring me in the face with an official-looking drive-thru microphone on his head, so Jason and I both lied, “Yes.” Frank said, “OK. Park your car and get in here.”

I’m not really sure why we thought we were beholden to the Portillo’s General Manager. We didn’t want to work there. We could have just driven away. But we were such good kids that we didn’t even see that as an option. An adult told us to do something, so we did it. Plus, he was holding our milkshakes hostage and we’d already paid for them with money we needed more of in the form of the least embarrassing summer jobs we could possibly find. Portillo’s was not one of those jobs.

We skulked into the Portillo’s. Frank was sitting at one of the tables with our milkshakes and two applications. He started to do a joint interview of me and Jason, and we didn’t get that far into it when Gabe, a guy we’d gone to grade school with, walked by. He was a Portillo’s employee. He said, happily, “Hey, guys!” Frank said to Gabe, “You know these jokers?” I didn’t like that Frank kept calling us jokers. All of a sudden I felt like I wanted to be taken seriously. I didn’t want the job, but I was very conflicted between my desire to behave respectably and be hired, and my desire to NOT work at Portillo’s. Gabe said, “Yeah. We went to school together.” Frank said, “Can you vouch for them?” I hadn’t seen Gabe in three years. He knew nothing about my food-preparation skills. He had no business helping me get this stupid job that I didn’t want. But Gabe didn’t know that. He said, “Yeah!” and he walked away. Frank said, “OK, you two jokers are hired. Fill out these applications and come in tomorrow at 9 a.m.” Jason and I started drinking our milkshakes. I said, “I don’t want to work at fucking Portillo’s!” Jason said, “Why the fuck does Gabe have to work here?” But we filled out the applications and showed up the next morning for our training.

Training at Portillo’s is a very serious thing. You have to learn the abbreviations of every item on the menu and you have to know where to write what on the bag and what order in which to announce the food items over the microphone to the food prep line. It’s like rocket science, but with hot dogs.

The way Portillo’s works is, there is no assessment of your skills. The work that you do within the four walls of a Portillo’s is based entirely on your gender and race. If you are a girl and you are white, you work the cash register. If you are a boy and you are white, you work the drive-thru. If you are a boy and you are black, you work the oven and the fries. If you are a girl and you are black, you work the milkshake machine, the soda fountain, and “push” (where they collate the food and the drinks and call the orders out for the customers to pick up). And finally, if you are Mexican, you make the hot dogs and the beef sandwiches and you do every other task that you could possibly imagine happens in a fast food restaurant, all of which are degrading. Mexicans are paid half as much as everyone else because they are, all of them, and no one even acts like this isn't the case, illegal and being paid under the table. They work at Portillo’s 11 months out of the year, and for one month each year, they go back to Mexico to be with their families.

At Portillo’s all of the Mexicans are referred to as “amigos”, and they are interchangeable to the managers, who just yell out, “An amigo needs to get over here and mop this Coke up off the floor,” and an amigo comes right away with a mop. Those amigos were the hardest working fellas I ever saw. To this day, I have never worked anywhere that was better-run than a Portillo’s. It is a beautiful symphony of food-making -- racist and illegal in many many ways, if that bothers you -- but very organized. You’re not going to have any trouble getting your food timely at a Portillo’s, unless it’s a day when all the amigos run out the back door to hide in their Buick because of some indication that their illegality is being sniffed out. This didn’t happen a lot, but from time to time, 15 guys would just bolt, and the rest of us had to pretend to know how to make hot dogs in their absence.

My favorite thing to do at Portillo’s was work the milkshake machine, because you had to put your hip into it and it exploded milkshake all over you, which made you look like you were doing some serious fast-food preparation. There is something so satisfying about having a really dirty apron. Although I never once touched a french fry or a sandwich -- that was strictly black/amigo territory -- I got to make Gina Portillo’s Famous Chocolate Cake. I was standing at the cash registers one day making fry boxes with Carrie, who was 18 and seemed to me to come from some alternate universe, because she was pregnant with her second baby. It wasn’t busy, and Frank called to me from the big kitchen behind the food prep line, “Joker. Get in here and frost this cake.” It disappointed me to learn that Gina Portillo’s Famous Chocolate Cake was actually two round cakes made from Duncan Hines box mix and frosted with Duncan Hines chocolate frosting out of a plastic tub, the same stuff you can buy at the Jewel. Frank told me to use two tubs of frosting, which is an EXTREME amount of frosting, but I did what he told me to do, and from then on, it was my job to frost the cakes... cakes that had nothing to do with Gina Portillo, who, I believe, wrongfully attaches her name to just regular Duncan Hines chocolate cake. Still, that’s a tasty cake, because of the generous frosting.

The second time I frosted a cake, it was morning time before the restaurant opened. DaWayne came by and slapped me on the ass and said, “Look at Betty Crocker go!” From then on, everyone called me Betty Crocker instead of Joker. DaWayne, impressed with my cake-frosting skills I guess, followed me home from work that day. He parked his Fiero in my driveway and walked up to the front door and asked me if I wanted to go out. We were both still wearing our black Portillo’s aprons and visors and bow ties. I said, “I’m not allowed to date 25-year olds.” He said, “So, you’re not allowed to date black guys?” He looked really pissed off. I said, “No. I’m pretty sure it’s that I’m not allowed to date 25-year-olds.” (Especially 25-year-olds who follow me home from work after smacking my ass all day long.)

One day I was out in the parking lot picking up garbage in the rain. This was an amigo’s job, but I was being punished. I’d gone into Frank’s office and asked him if he could maybe say something to DaWayne about all the ass-slapping. Frank said, “DaWayne has worked here longer than you, and you’ll quit and he’ll still be here, so no, I’m not gonna say anything to DaWayne. Put on a rain coat.”

All of the amigos, except for Alonzo, were constantly hitting on all of the girls and it made me feel gross because most of these men had wives and children in Mexico, they were much older than me, and I was half a foot taller than all of them, except for Alonzo. Sadly, Alonzo never hit on me. I waited for that day, but it never came. Alonzo was young and tall and svelte and single and he was taking classes at COD and was apparently the only one of the amigos who had a green card and who didn’t come to work with the rest of the amigos in the one car. Also, I once saw Alonzo imitating Michael Jackson in a very competent way, and so I knew that he was out of my league. But all five-foot-two of Nacho would often sidle up to me and make me feel weird.

NACHO: You have boyfriend?

ME: No.

NACHO: No?! Why?

ME: I don’t know.

NACHO: You don’t like boys?

ME: I like boys.

NACHO: I can be your boyfriend.

ME: I have to go make fry boxes.

Nacho would ask me if he could be my boyfriend almost every day and you’d think that he would grow discouraged when I ignored him every time he asked, but that little dude had cajones. What did he think we were going to do? I’d finally say yes and then he’d pick me up with his carload of Mexican roommates and we’d all eat for half-price at Portillo’s? Also, Nacho was married and was probably 30, but he didn’t see the language, height, age, and marital status disparities between us as obstacles to us dating. So every day that I went to work at Portillo’s, I had to get my ass slapped and dodge the advances of the amigos. My life was so hard.

I wondered how it worked with these amigos. They lived somewhere in Mexico and they’d heard about Dick Portillo? Did young Mexicans dream of someday crossing the border illegally, and making their way to the freezing suburbs of Chicago to put pickle spears on hot dogs in the Chicago fashion and mop floors for less than minimum wage? Could they really support an entire family in Mexico on the money they made at Portillo’s? How could they only see their wives and children once a year? Did they even like their wives and children, or did they just prefer living in Naperville and sharing one Buick and an apartment with 30 of their amigos? Were their circumstances in Mexico really so bad that this was the logical best solution? Did they feel really strongly about hot dogs? Hadn’t anyone clued them in about the far more lucrative drug trade?

Luckily, part-way through my senior year of high school, I got a part in a play and rehearsals were after school, so I quit my job at Portillo’s. I’m sure DaWayne found some other ass to smack.

Incidentally, whereas I worked there for 6 months, Jason quit after two days, and he would come in with his friends in their trench coats to mock me and then go next door to Baker’s Square to smoke and eat pie and write poetry on paper napkins. It’s OK. Jason’s dead now, so I’m glad he didn’t spend part of his short life working in a Portillo’s. Because of Gabe.