POZZO: “I woke up one fine day as blind as Fortune.” —Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot In 1987, at the age of fourteen, I landed my first full-time summer job. It was so cherry. All my friends endured the usual suburban grunt labour and franchise humiliations, but not me. Five graveyard shifts a week Jason pumped gas, most of it into the monster trucks of beer-sodden cowboys. Among other paranoias, his clientele accused Jason of shooting them amorous looks. Never wipe a windshield too cheerfully. Other friends of mine, countless McFriends, as we called them, manned the front lines of military-style fast-food stations. The brand names had arrived, and they pressured the shrinking farmlands of Langley. Naked parking lots and malnourished strip malls began to pock the landscape. Soon they became a more frequent sight than the old, decaying dairy barns or lush cranberry bogs. But what did we care? We were fourteen and broke. Everything new was ours. Each franchise was a summer job, and each was a place to go, to find your friends on Friday night, if you weren’t working.
