[Note - After fighting with myself in The Chair yesterday, I have decided that I am going to name names within my stories where appropriate. If you are one of the individuals that crossed my path, got mentioned, and didn't want to be - just drop me a note and I will edit you out. There are so many great people who I was lucky enough to know that I felt that not mentioning them by name was a disservice.]
How I Met My Good Friend Susan...
After my behavior blew up my first marriage (I am still so sorry JET), I was working at the Town & Country Tennis Club. I swept courts, kept the reservation book, and greeted players coming to play. When I wasn't "on the clock", I was on the court playing tennis.
After a few months of working there, I noticed that a new shop had opened next to the movie theater - The Video Adventure. At first, I just thought it was a videotape rental store, but one day I actually walked by the store to discover that it was a video game & computer software store. It didn't take long before I started hanging out there during my off-hours. The Manager seemed to be pretty cool (since she let me hang out there for hours without buying anything).
I would discover that her name was Susan (Manley), and we started to become friends (or at least "Manager & Regular Customer"). During one of my play sessions of Grid Runner, Susan asked me if I might be interested in working there on the weekends. I said "yes!", and she handed me an application. I went home, got out my crayons, and filled out the application. In spite of my poor penmanship and hideous interviewing skills, she still hired me.
Now I had two jobs at the same time where work wasn't "work" - Playing tennis during the week, and playing games at night and on the weekends.
Susan introduced me to her then boyfriend - the late great Jay Stevens (who worked at HES at the time), and other "regulars" came into the shop who also had a significant impact on me (like Estelle & Eugene). It was just so great a time, that one just had to know that it couldn't last...(it didn't)...
The Video Adventure was opened by the gentlemen who owned the Commodore Computer Center just around the corner and in the same building. When they started having major financial issues, so did we. The stores ended up closing due to these issues.
We parted ways for the time being - although I was renting a house with my high school friends Debbie & Moses Navarro right around the corner from where Susan lived at the time and we continued to hang out for LaserDisc Movie Nights.
Bullwinkle's was like Chuck E. Cheese (except that we served food)
When "Two Jobs" Turns To "No Jobs"...
A couple of weeks after The Video Adventure closed, the Town & Country Tennis Club got new ownership, and I was let go (as was all of the previous staff). I had to go out and get a new gig!
One of the places I applied to was Bullwinkle's Family Food & Fun in Santa Clara. They had an arcade, and I had worked in a restaurant previously (albeit only for a few months), so working there interested me. In spite of the numerous crayon doodles on my application, and inability to string two coherent sentences together during the interview process, I was hired as a "Front-of-House Supervisor".
The hours were crummy, and the pay wasn't too great (but it was enough), but the people were great. The job had the added benefit of never being the same thing twice - due to customer load, and different staffers working during any particular shift, every day was its own supervisory challenge.
For those of you who had never heard of Bullwinkle's Family Food & Fun, it was a family restaurant with a (primitive) audio-animatronic show featuring Bullwinkle, Rocky, and other characters from Jay Ward Productions. There was also a "dancing waters" fountain show that played in synchronicity with a musical track at times when the animatroic characters didn't appear (they belonged to a very good union which limited the number of shows they would have to do during each day).
I know that this all sounds like "Chuck E. Cheese with different characters", and to a point it was, but there was one huge difference - Bullwinkle's served pretty darned good food. The pizza didn't taste like it had a cardboard crust, and the fried chicken & waffle fries were great! The only thing I didn't like about the restaurant was one particular menu item - The Seafood Pizza - the smell that emanated from the pizza oven any time one of these was being cooked was so profound, that it garnered its own nickname - "The Stinky". In spite of the smell, I understand that it tasted quite good (I never tried one...just didn't even sound appetizing to me),
A few months later, Susan came in and was also hired as a Supervisor. It was wonderful to have a friend around the restaurant (although we rarely worked the same shifts). She was, as you might expect, better at her job than I was trying to do the same thing. Everything was going swimmingly until...
"You Know They Put Those Things There For A Reason?"
Since one of my hair-brained, pie-in-the-sky, dreams was to someday play tennis for a living - playing or teaching (still a "game" but not a "video game"), I would train during my time away from the restaurant. Part of my training included riding my bike around Santa Clara County.
During one of my evening training rides, I saw a 240Z heading towards an intersection that I was approaching at the same time. He was slow-rolling towards the intersection, and I had just long enough for the thought to go through my head, "If he doesn't see me, this could get 'bad'!". At just that instant, the driver popped the clutch and accelerated...
There was no place for me to go. He plugged me in the intersection. I did a 2 1/2 gainer over the top of his car and into the pavement after being hit (I seem to recall the Russian judge giving me a 4.9 for my dive...no protest was filed...).
Other than the pain, and the fact that I was still alive to feel the pain, my only other clear memory was that after the driver stopped and got out of his car, the first thing he said to me was, "It's your fault!". My scrambled brain and aching body tried very hard to make sense of his exclamation - Sure, it was night time...yes, the light on my bike wasn't the brightest...but he did run a STOP sign to hit me (I guess he thought it was merely a "suggestion").
In any case, an ambulance was called, I was carted off, and the driver left. In spite of the Good Samaritan who heard the impact, and saw me lying in the street getting the license plate number, the driver left the scene and was never charged.
I was unable to work at Bullwinkle's anymore. My life consisted of doctors' offices and pain pills (why does that sound so familiar???) for the better part of a year. I could barely walk, let alone work.
When I was coherent, I watched a lot of LaserDiscs, and played a lot of games on my Commodore 64. There was no way for me to know at the time that all of this would lead to the most lucky of lucky die rolls from The Great Dungeon Master In The Sky...
...(but that is a story for another day)...
As always - thank you for reading!