“Hey cutie” he said, grabbing the ties of my apron from behind and pointing to his coffee cup.  It was the fall of 1972 and the last fateful day of my waitressing career. I was working the breakfast shift at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge and Restaurant in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Nothing much riled me up back then, except assholes.  So the morning had already started off on the wrong foot.  I graduated from high school in Tampa the year before and moved to the beach, enrolling in Brevard Community College part time, but mostly skipped classes to surf if the waves were good, except for the Sunfish (personalized beach-launched sailing dinghy) class on Tuesdays.

The HoJo’s breakfast shift was the worst waitressing gig on the beach and I was a subpar waitress at best with a terrible attitude.  It was a tourist spot and customers were notoriously cheap tippers.  A family of five, ordering full breakfasts, with chocolate milk for the kids and individually pared grapefruit halves, might leave me 50 cents. We bussed our own tables back then and it was fairly tricky to find my tips under the tornado strewn tables. One of the other waitresses, Arlette, a gorgeous French woman, was notorious for chasing after customers and handing them back their scrawny tips.  “Non merci, you must need this more than me”, she would insist in her French accent. I greatly admired her and never understood why she worked there.

On top of that, our uniforms were cringe worthy blue and white plaid with puffed sleeves, and a ruffled apron. For some strange reason, the male customers seemed to like the apron strings. The only saving grace was the fact my best friend and surfing buddy, Linda, worked there with me. Our shift started at 6 am, so at 5:45, I would be in the parking lot pushing her red AMC Hornet from behind while she popped the clutch. Then I would run and get in, apron flapping. When we got home dead tired, stinky and mean, we would throw all the change from our grimy pockets into the middle of a huge unframed waterbed and count it. It was pitiful.

Thank god Linda had a family pass to the commissary at Patrick’s Air Force Base. We would spend approximately 9 dollars a week on groceries, and fill up when we could at Howard Johnson’s. I did like their pecan pie and blueberry toasties. Sometimes we would fill our pockets with individually wrapped brownies and sneak them home to share with our apartment mates, Jeff and Janet.

The morning cook at HoJo’s was another surfer and a friend of my cousin’s. His name was Jim and he liked me.  He was charming, tall and good looking, but a little cocky.  I admired his entrepreneurial spirit, however. In addition to being a short order cook, he also sold knife sets out of the truck of his car and marijuana to the surfing community.  He had a black belt in karate and would show us his moves in the kitchen while prepping food.

On this particular morning, I had a table of four businessmen in a booth.  Their newspapers were spread out over the table and I was having a hard time setting it up. Once I finally did, I asked, “What can I get for you?” in my fakey, waitressy voice.  Without looking up, one of them tapped on his coffee cup.

He freakin’ tapped on his coffee cup without looking up.

At that moment an alien took over my body. I grabbed the spoon out of his hand and threw it across the table making contact with a few of the coffee cups, porcelain chiming, ding ding ding and in the process knocked over a water glass in one of their laps. I untied my apron and threw it at them too, and walked into the back of the restaurant where Jim was frying eggs. Linda, who heard the commotion, walked over and gave them a piece of her mind too.  Lucky for us, the manager was out that morning.

In the end, the businessmen left me a huge tip. It must have been at least 4 dollars. I did not think of myself as a feminist at the time, but I didn’t understand the demeaning of women or anyone else for that matter, so maybe I was. It was 1972 after all. We’d lived through the 60’s and we thought things were a changin’.

I also knew that the service industry was not my calling and my skills as a waitress were poorly lacking. The wonderful customers who dined at Howard Johnson’s Travel Lodge and Restaurant deserved so much better, so I quit.

Years later, while studying journalism at the University of Central Florida, I ran into Jim, the short order cook. He had become an engineer and was creating solar energy systems for the Florida Solar Energy Center.  We ended up living together for three years, but that’s another story.