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Kitchen Inconsequential Part 1:
BOUNCY CASTLES

by george vincent

I never had any desire to be a chef. Even the title of ‘chef’ makes me wince, I can’t really call myself a chef, though I was, technically, when I started working as a KP at a restaurant in the seaside town of Whitley Bay on the eve of my 18th birthday. The summer prior, which had just passed, I worked as a bouncy castle attendant at a playpark in Tynemouth. That was my first ever job. £3.20 an hour.

The park had been there for decades, once part of an elaborate Victorian seaside holiday destination. There was a small pond on the far side where people could paddle swan-shaped rowing boats. A little cafe in the middle whose only customers were the same OAPs who went every weekend for their tea and cake and crustless tuna sandwiches. A mini golf course which was Jurassic-park dinosaur themed and which had an audio recording of annoying cawing pterodactyl sound effects playing on a loop all day long. And a pirate maze, which was just a shit maze covered in plastic grass, with a treasure chest in the middle of it, far too easy to locate.

The bouncy castle section was where most of the casual staff worked. We were all teenagers working for a pittance to save up towards booze or weed or MDMA pills; that’s where my money went, anyway.

The routine every morning was simple: take the wooden benches off the tarp which was covering the slides, roll back the tarp, grab the blower machines and stick them in the arseholes of the bouncy castles, blow them up, Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt, job done. Some of the slides had Velcro steps which needed to be attached, and if it had rained, you’d have to dry the slides down with tea towels. But that was pretty much it. You’d be done in half an hour, waiting for the kids to come pouring in promptly at 10am.

There were four bouncy castle structures in total, each with its own special name. The BIG GREEN was, you guessed it, the biggest, greenest, slide. On the back there was a climbing structure where the kids went up, if they didn’t get scared or occasionally piss their pants, leading to a vertical drop slide on the other side. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have to push the kids down the slide when they got to the top and didn’t like the height. There was a good bit of drama one day when my first girlfriend – we worked together, how cute! – pushed an autistic girl down the slide and she got rubber burns on her face because she freaked out and went down and landed awkwardly. The girl’s mother posted about it all over Facebook, saying the park had it in for autistics and it should be shut down. Our boss, who was a miserable cunt, but also quite funny in a cuntish way, laughed the whole thing off and called the mother and her child, affectionately, spakkers.

Another slide, the GRINDER, was just that, a meat grinder for the snot-faced toddlers to flail through. There were these rubber beams they had to crawl through to get to a slide on the other slide. The main job there was to control the flow of them so the middle section didn’t get congested. But it was great because if you were in the middle bit you were out of view of the gaffer and could just sit down and enjoy the sun, if it was out. That summer of 2016, the summer of Brexit and the Scottish Referendum and Trump, those o-so trifling political affairs, was sunny as fuck in the UK. I was young and skinny and had just lost my virginity and I could drink as much beer and red wine as a motherfucker, and without a hangover. I say ‘as a motherfucker’ and it sounds tough, when in reality those days it only took me half a bottle of wine or a few cans to get pissed. I have a memory sweet as cherry wine of that time, being in the middle section with the sun in full beam shining down on me, the hot smell of rubber, the chaos of screaming bairns, the deep green sycamore leaves dangling overhead covering the metro line, and the knowledge that in just a few hours I’d be in my girlfriend’s bed playing with her boobies and smoking a joint out of her attic bedroom window, dropping a pill and then getting all sweaty and yucky with LOVE until 6 in the morning, to sleep for an hour, then be back in, blowing up the slides. O! to have been alive and young, to have felt such perfect gleaming happiness; ALAS!, long lost to the bittersweet bastard PAST.

The boss liked me. Or at least, didn’t hate me. I was quiet, borderline mute. I was trying to be like Cool Hand Luke, silently scoffing and smirking at an absurd world of RULES AND REGULATIONS, which was the perfect act to mask my crippling adolescent insecurities and social incompetence. But I got on with the work, and because I didn’t speak much, I never said anything in front of him which would have betrayed my stupidity. There were a few occasions where I witnessed him unleash his important wrath on a handful of unlucky buggers, one of them a dear friend of mine, who had been on his bad side from day one. He had worked there long before me. There was one day where BOSS had decided the hut on the boating lake needed to be repainted. He set my pal off on the task with a bucket of green paint and a set of brand new brushes. He did a good job, I saw it myself, only he left the paint brushes in the paint bucket at the end of the day. BOSS asked him where the brushes were the next day and he had to bring them back over, green-stained and unsuitable for further usage. He went ballistic, made my pal cry, and then docked his wages for the damaged brushes. He sacked him at a later date because he found out he had applied for a job somewhere else mixing cocktails. In front of everyone, he told him, a 36 year old man to a teenage lad, to ‘get your shit and fuck off.’ My pal just said, ‘Sound.’

He was a sad bastard, BOSS, Alan was his name. His mother and father owned the whole park. He hadn’t been able to find his way in life and so had worked for them, as BOSS, of the little park kingdom. He’d get furious over nothing, like if it rained and he had to close the bouncy castles for a bit while everyone dried them with the tea towels. One day it kept raining on and off, and everyone was in this cycle of: deflate the slides, dry them, inflate them, deflate, dry, inflate. He got so miffed he punched the staff hut. All of us teens were just standing around, unsure whether to laugh or go faster.

Since he didn’t hate me as much as the rest, I got some special jobs. One day I was given a sledge hammer and was told to smash up all the old rotten wood benches as they were getting new ones. What a day that was. Another time he gave me a hose pipe and some suds and told me to scrub the underside canopy of the cafe as it was getting repainted and renovated into a fish and chip takeaway. That was the morning after I popped my cherry, in fact. I stood there on a ladder with the warm soap suds dripping down my arms, the experience of my first orgasm inside a real female vagina still so fresh I could smell it, like the bloom of fruity flowers in the spring air. He gave me most of the de-weeding and watering the plants responsibilities. And I just took my darn time with those. The others would be stuck on the bouncy castles on boiling hot busy summer days, kids and parents screaming incessantly, and I’d be sauntering round with my trowel and bin bag, just having a blast.

The boating lake was probably the best place to work. Because it was located on the opposite side of the park to the bouncy castles, you were completely out of sight of BOSS, and even when he did wander over to check you hadn’t been diddling the till once a day, you could see him coming a mile off, and had plenty of time to look like you were busy. In the mornings the first thing you had to do was bring all the boats out of the lockup and get them to the jetty on the other side with a set of wheels to drag them on. Once you had them there, you had to put the waders on and get into the pond and tie them around a buoy so they didn’t drift off. After that you were sitting cushty. If there were no customers, the order was to take one of the boats out on the lake and start rowing it about, to show the public we were in fact open for business. Round and round you’d go, enjoying the exercise and feeling pleased with yourself and the fact that you were getting paid to do this!

It was also a good place to endure those speedy pill comedowns, in the little hut with shades on, napping behind them. Melancholy and the infinite sadness watching the clouds roll over the sky. You always worked in twos there. Lots of times I’d be on with the footy lads, Ryan and Rory, and I had nothing to say to them. Then one day this Indian kid, I can’t remember his name, started working and I was on with him, suffering a hellish comedown off 2 yellow DEFCONS. He chatted all day about how he’d read the whole Quran and didn’t agree with it, that he drank booze and had sex and he didn’t care. I liked him, I let him natter on, now and then replying, ‘Far out man, fair play like.’

Most of the staff were teens. There were however a couple older folks who had worked there for a long, long time. Too long. Nigel, a hulking 30-odd-year-old who had a wide chin and a grin like Popeye. He worked offshore for most of the year and then would return to the park in the summertime for spare cash. And Gay Wayne, who would turn up to work on M-CAT comedowns which had him fucked for days on end, who made frequent trips to the bin shed to take hits on his humungous vape pen. I don’t know where Gay Wayne ended up, but Nigel now is the manager of a pub, just along the road from the park. He pours a good Guinness. He also doesn’t remember me.

Of that time the things I remember most vividly are the warm weather, the sense of personal freedom, and the feeling that I had life by the balls finally, and not the other way round. I almost felt like things were already complete, at 17. What more could the future offer me? What kind of other job could I want? I still had sixth form to complete and then to consider the choice of which university to go to. And this is perhaps one of the biggest regrets of my life. If only I had just chosen to work, got on a good apprenticeship, I wouldn’t be sitting here today with two useless degrees which I have no intention of ever doing anything with and 60 grand’s worth of student debt hanging over my neck like the proverbial guillotine. I used to sit in the hut on the boating lake watching the council gardening men planting flowers or mowing the grass thinking they were the happiest cunts in the world. I know of course now after working jobs of an equally banal, monotonous nature that isn’t true. Still, it’s an impression that’s stayed with me, a frivolous romanticism, which counts for something at least.

I feel a lot of sentimentality for that job. Melancholy and nostalgia also. The girl, the absence of responsibility, the youth. I was so stupidly happy everything after was sure to be disappointment and compromise. Hollowed out by a profuse, unforgiving sunlight, blinding in the daytime, mellow and warmly glowing, like the fires above the heads of saints, in the evenings. It was a time when nothing mattered. When the pleasures of life were abundant but also you were detached from them, very zen! Even then, I knew that things were not to last.

The summer swiftly passed in a sun-and-drug-and-booze-induced haze. By September BOSS had issued P45’s to the majority of the staff. He kept me on to help out at the occasional birthday party. He also mentioned to me that there might be an opportunity to work in the cafe washing dishes. I said yes, of course, then I’d be just like George Orwell! The last day I worked was a kid’s birthday party. I was the only one there and had to inflate and deflate all the slides myself. It was a humid evening and the first pallid leaves of the tired sycamore trees had started falling on the ground.

The next week I was home and opened what I thought was a letter containing my payslip, which instead contained my P45. My first official sacking. Ouch.

Luckily I wasn’t a bum in Paris or London, so I didn’t have the hotel rent to worry about. And it didn’t take me long to get another job, about a couple weeks, when one pill-buddy of mine got employed at a small mezze-style restaurant, THE ANCIENT LEOPARD, washing dishes, and I begged him to put in a word for me.

He did. There was no interview, just a trial shift, and I was there for the next four, tumultuous years of my life.