We moved back to Ohio right as my junior year kicked off, and I made a choice I still kick myself for. I could’ve walked back in as the kid who’d survived a school ten times our size—five inches taller, driving a car I paid for myself. Some of my old athletic buddies were genuinely happy to see me. Instead, I pushed them away.
Inside, I was still that bench-warmer getting picked on. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that anyone might see me differently. So, I kept my distance from everyone, stuck close with Jason, and let addiction take the wheel. By the time high school ended, I’d done a full circle: long hair, a Metallica jean jacket, playing the part of the self-appointed outcast. For a couple of years, I looked an awful lot like Napoleon Dynamite, and my life bore an unsettling resemblance to his. So much so that when I finally saw the movie years later, I didn’t enjoy it the first time. The quarter ounce of weed was still hidden behind the Corolla’s glove box, waiting to be shared with Jason. We were a good juvenile delinquent team, and I was itching to get back to it. Jason and I started hanging out with the kids who knew how to party. Utica just didn’t have enough of them, so we headed to Newark.
I was stealing again, too. See, a guy who steals things at sixteen is going to steal a bottle of Crown Royal at twenty-eight and won’t even know why. I delivered pizza in Newark for a bit, and two things happened there that basically predicted the next thirty years of my life.
First, I was on a delivery during a rainstorm. I rang a doorbell, and boom—lightning hit the transformer right behind my car. The flash and the noise happened at the exact same instant. I’m amazed I didn’t drop the pizzas or wet myself. There was no way I was going near that car. The homeowner let me use his phone; I called the shop, he called the fire department, and my night was over. I had to leave the car there overnight. Dad picked me up, drove me back the next morning, and I drove the Corolla away.
The second thing happened on my last night there. I wore an Anthrax T-shirt that screamed “Don’t You Fucking Look at Me!” across the back. Looking back, I’m shocked my parents let me own it. I was waving red flags everywhere, but nobody seemed to read them. When the manager saw the back of the shirt, he told me to go home and change. It was a reasonable request. I told him I would… and then I quit instead. A forty-five-minute round trip felt like an unfair punishment, so I just walked out.
I don’t know where the chip on my shoulder came from, but I definitely had one. Told to make a small adjustment, I removed myself from the situation entirely. I’d do exactly that again in Champaign, Austin, Jackson, and Idaho. Every time, it felt like a matter of principle, but deep down, it was just that sixteen-year-old walking out over a T-shirt.
The truth is, I was already drifting. Weed, booze, petty theft. I was learning to numb the discomfort long before I ever learned to face it.
My first real cooking gig started in the dish room of the Indian Mound Smorgasbord in Heath, Ohio. The place was so chaotic it felt mythological—creamed corn shooting out like a fire hose. A smorgasbord is basically an unabated food orgy—think Golden Corral, but made from scratch. It used to be Duff’s, but the new owners bolted a fried chicken drive-thru onto the side, expanding the ways you could clog an artery without even leaving your car.
The second I walked through that kitchen door and hit that wall of steam, grease, and industrial-strength coffee, I knew this made more sense than anything happening in a classroom. The dish machine blasted, cooks shouted, and the dining staff moved like they were late for a flight. It was mayhem, sure, but organized mayhem with rules I could actually understand: Show up, work hard, don’t screw up your station, never run out of fried chicken.
I started as a dishwasher—which means I started at the bottom, where all the good stories and bad habits live. Cartloads of dirty bus tubs lined the hallway, waiting to be slung through a dog-door-sized window and down a roller conveyor to the waiting dish rats. Some days, it was a never-ending stream of dirty melamine and tons of silverware until closing. On the opposite wall stood a massive three-compartment sink for pots and pans. Cooks rolled in carts of crusted, burnt hotel pans and stacked them to the ceiling.
Sometimes it felt like being walled in, like you had to scrub your way out alive. Four to six dishwashers on a busy shift, all soaked and sweating, weirdly proud of surviving it. All for $3.45 an hour.
But if you kept your head down and your hands moving, the cooks noticed. Before long, I was doing prep—peeling potatoes, chopping onions, cracking eggs by the flat—and mostly breading chicken for the pressure-fry cooks. We had a walk-in cooler dedicated to that task, and after slopping around in the dirty dish room all day, tossing bloody chicken into seasoned flour in a thirty-four-degree room felt like a genuine upgrade.
I breaded whole fifty-pound cases of eight-piece cut fryers. Some days, two or three cases back-to-back just to keep up. Chicken livers by the tub, cases of wings. Everything got handed off to the cooks and devoured by the hungry pressure fryers, which belched clouds of intoxicating chicken-flavored steam up through the exhaust hood, perfuming a half-mile radius. An unintended, extremely effective marketing trick.
There were plenty of other fried items on the buffet, but the frozen stuff was cooked elsewhere. Another section was reserved for cold dishes and desserts, where the owner’s family added their personal touches—Grandma’s bread pudding, sweet potato salad, and carrot salad. The hot soup-and-salad bar was always a hit: warm bacon vinaigrette, baked cod, pan after pan of homemade macaroni and cheese, stuffing, enough mashed potatoes to fill the behemoth Hobart floor mixer.
I learned the rhythm of a buffet. The panic before the doors opened. The second wave when the church crowd arrived. The closing cleanup when the last pan of Jell-O salad finally got scraped into the trash. The jokes, the banter, the friendship. And I got to see what impatience earns you.
One of the pressure-fry cooks got in a hurry one busy day and tried to open a fryer while it was still depressurizing. You’re supposed to wait for the hatch to release. He didn’t. The lid blew, and he lost most of the skin from the waist down. His shoes melted. The screams echoed through the building. We shut down early that night. Bad juju.
Indian Mound was my first kitchen tribe. Guys and gals who’d done time, mothers working doubles, lifers who’d been there since the Carter administration when Duff’s was still the name on the door, and dead-eyed managers wishing they’d chosen a different career. Nobody cared about your GPA. They cared if you could keep up, if you’d show up Sunday morning after a Saturday night, and if you’d help when someone else’s station went up in flames. Messy, loud, relentless—I loved it. That was the first place I ever felt the addictive satisfaction of keeping pace with chaos.
Kitchens attract a certain kind of person: outcasts, misfits, adrenaline junkies, people who don’t fit neatly anywhere else. People like me.
Out in the parking lot, my other education was underway. The Corolla had already lived a full life before I got my hands on her, and I treated her like a race car and a bumper car simultaneously. I wrecked her several times in high school. My dad would help me patch her back up, and each time I swore I’d be more careful, only to prove that teenage boys and empty back roads are a bad combination and a hell of a lot of fun.
I’d finish a shift smelling like fryer oil, chicken, and food garbage, then bomb down the back roads of Licking County with the windows down and the radio up, convinced nothing truly bad could happen to me because nothing truly bad had happened yet. We crashed bonfire parties, pulled all-nighters, and fished in the Licking River. Sometimes I’d sneak the car down the driveway on a moonlit night, pop the clutch, and drive to nowhere. Church parking lots, gravel pull-offs, hidden spots in the woods—anywhere we could drink cheap beer or smoke whatever we’d scored.
Those spots turned out to be useful for something else, too. My drinking was already outpacing everybody else’s, and the dark was where I kept that fact. I lied about how much I’d had before anyone showed up. I finished what they left behind after they’d gone in. One version of me was laughing around the bonfire; the other was doing math. I told myself nobody noticed, and for a while, that was true.
Required Credits
Not much stands out about my final year of school. I hesitate even to call it my senior year because I’d already disengaged completely. My academic requirements were nearly done—only Economics and maybe a math credit remained. So instead of taking more classes, I signed up for the work program and managed to be out of the building by ten every morning.
I was supposed to work part-time in my mother’s art studio. Since it was hers, I didn’t always go. I started stealing more. I had extra free time and didn’t use a single hour responsibly. I drove the back roads of Licking County for hours on end. Then, not long after graduation, I spent some money on hard liquor and wandered into the Meijer on North 21st Street after midnight. They were open twenty-four hours back then. I tried to walk out with so much merchandise stuffed under my clothes that I looked ridiculous, like the scene in Animal House where the freshman loads his clothes with meat and the gum-chewing clerk lets him walk. My real-life version wasn’t funny. I wound up in jail.
This was bad news, and bad news for reasons I didn’t fully understand until later. I had already passed on my father’s military service. I chickened out.
The Navy had offered me nuclear training and a shot at Officer Candidate School. My ASVAB score was the best in the school, which came as a shock—I distinctly remember struggling with every section of that exam, while my SAT and ACT scores came back perfectly average. The Marines came calling first, but for them, there was no chance. I couldn’t hack football two-a-days, and I couldn’t fathom Parris Island. The Navy’s offer interested me. I really did want to please my dad. But I dragged my feet.
Marijuana is what stopped me from signing, if I’m honest. All I could see in my future was Leavenworth. I knew drinking would be acceptable in the service, but I drank a lot, and I got in trouble when I drank. So, I flaked on the Navy. He must have been so frustrated with me.
Then the Heath Fire Department advertised for applicants. The department was expanding, looking for future leaders. Recruits would get a leg up on the volunteer force through advanced training and a full-time salary, with the expectation that they’d eventually become lieutenants and captains running newly planned firehouses. An extraordinary opportunity.
My grandfather had retired from the Chicago Fire Department. My father was a retired military man. My ASVAB score made me a shoo-in. Except for the shoplifting. My father was crushed again. I felt that one too. It was laid at my feet, and I blew it. Tragic is the only word I’ve got for it.
I pled guilty. Probation and eighty hours of community service. They sent me to the Goodwill facility. I sorted donated clothing, crushed aluminum cans, and ran cardboard through the compactor. I also stole from them. Copper wire. I sold it at a scrapyard and spent the money on drugs.
I was serving a sentence for shoplifting, and I stole from a charity while I served it. Nobody caught me. That was the only part of it I actually took with me.
Scholastic Intervention
Once every other plan had failed, my mother and Chip’s mom conspired to get us into the Antonelli Institute of Art. Both had been watching us drift, deciding that if we wouldn’t choose a path ourselves, they’d at least stand us at the starting line.
We found a second-floor apartment in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati. Old and drafty, with a single mother and three little dinosaurs living above us. It was ours.
Back when we still had the orchard, my parents bought not one but two Pontiac Phoenixes at the same time. A very early-eighties American Dream move. Matching cars, like they were buying a his-and-hers future. My dad’s was a silver four-speed sedan; my mom’s was a white hatchback. Those two cars were among the few things to survive the bankruptcy.
By the time I was packing for school, the Corolla had taken all the hits she was going to take. My mother handed me the keys to the white Phoenix. So, I left Rainrock Road for Cincinnati with a car my parents had bought for a future that never happened, and a vague idea that I was going to become something. An artist, maybe. A grown-up. Somebody who didn’t smell like old food and fryer oil.
Cincinnati didn’t know me. It didn’t know the anxious kid from Utica or the misfit from the dish pit. It didn’t know my habits, my screw-ups, or any part of my history. That anonymity felt like a breath of fresh air. My first geographic solution.