By Tom Collins
Arizona Daily Wildcat
May 6, 1998

I was a teenaged grill cook

When I was 18 years old, I wanted to be Hunter Thompson or Jack Kerouac and tell stories of America-the stories that need to be told. The tale's of ne'er do wells and highway criminals. The tale of Oklahoma trailer moms and busted biker drug deals. But I was in Tucson, starting college, all but broke and out of sorts.

If I wasn't here I was hiding at my parents' place in Chandler watching "CHiPs" and pro wrestling.

At the end of my freshman year at the University of Arizona, I flew to New York. Didn't go to the big city, but to Poughkeepsie, home of Vassar College. You can read all about the school in the Spin magazine that hits stands this week. It's an empty, arrogant little private college where getting drunk and screwing are the primary goals of each incoming freshman.

I know. My high school sweetheart had enrolled and when I went out there she was all about smoking a bowl, drinking too much vodka, "hooking up" and listening to Phish. Me, well, I didn't have much to talk about.

If you want to be writer you've got to tell stories, so stories I told. Stories based on my major extracurricular activity my first year- working the grill at the Memorial Student Union's Fiddlee Fig. Indeed, if you ordered a steak sandwich or an omelet four years ago, chances are as good as not that I made it. In later years, I was even recognized by a student who missed my mean Rueben sandwich (I cooked the sauerkraut and the corned beef together).

Those were the days.

There was nothing quite as exciting as making a chicken sandwich for some freshman with a fraternity T-shirt. They were always so polite. I always felt good about calling them "sir."

But when I went up to Vassar, and, hell, when I went home for the weekend, or out with my friends, it was all about working at the Fig. Defeating the lunch rush with this guy Mark who used to work there. I think they canned him for being late too many times, but when it came to clean efficient midday sandwich service, we were the slickest team since Trammell and Whittiker.

I could and would share physics theories on the weighting of spatulas, how a light one was good for eggs, while a heavy one was better for chicken and steak. I could deliver 20-minute extemporaneous speeches on the best way to clean the grill.

Every morning I worked I talked to Annie, who worked the desert counter, I said. We'd talk about life and back pain. She was working in Louie's last time I checked.

There was Harris and about 10 other students from Malaysia who worked at the Fig when I was there and we talked about Ramadan and the monetary struggles of international students, how difficult it was to get off-campus work. Talked about their wives.

For those students, that $4.25 an hour was the difference between eating and going to school and not.

I could always go back to Chandler.

At night, I hung out with Pima Community College drop-outs down on Benson Highway. A bunch of 21- to 27-year-old burnouts whose idea of fun was stealing beer, whose idea of intellectual stimulation was boxing matches over NFL teams. Oh, and off roading with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and none on the steering wheel-the stuff of mind tricks.

These were among the stories I spewed for my sweetheart's college buddies, the stories of real America: the working poor, the desperate, the disconnected. "The tales that need to be told right now." That's how I put it. That's how I've always put it: from lonely Janice, the old retarded woman left in the nursing home with nothing but a foam ball, to Rob, the veteran burnout with the witchcraft wiles and the unfiltered smokes. Our places.

And there is an edge to individuality of Harris or Rob. They walk this American tightrope with no net.

To walk the streets of South Tucson at night and to see the girders on the windows and hear nothing but the highway in the dark. To hike away from Ft. Defiance and into the desert of the Navajo Reservation to be greeted by ten years of smashed liquor bottles. These moments, there is clarity and no necessity for battered Chevy driving.

I return to Chandler tail between legs from time to time filled with diatribes on this failure or that wrong; my father looks at me and says: "You've got the world by the balls."

And I look at him. I look out the window of my car. Listen to sound of the highway beneath the radio, hands on the wheel.

Tom Collins is editor in chief of the Arizona Daily Wildcat