English Version -Generation M - #3 - Virginia Beach - 1997
The American dream, for a summer! At the end of June, beginning of July 1997, after my second year of university, I flew to the United States.
One detail struck me: you could still smoke in the back of the plane's cabin. Another era... and even if I'm not sure that it's a great advance, on the contrary, I play the big guy and I'll smoke a few cigarettes in the back of the boeing during the crossing.
I have to say that I don't really know how the idea of going to work in the US for a whole summer came to my mind. Probably an advertisement in the college corridors or a walk in the Latin Quarter inspired me. I must also say that at twenty-one years old, my command of English is quite weak. I've already made the trip across the Atlantic twice, but always to meet someone: a friend, my father. This time, I will be alone and for a whole summer!
I managed to get my visa without too much complication, another time I tell you, when you could go to the embassies for a face to face meeting. Another time...
That done, I landed in New York at the beginning of this summer without really knowing where to go. But I already like to travel this way: left to the unknown, it is there that the best of oneself is revealed.
The New York office of the office that proposed the stay is inversely proportional to my expectations: disappointing. A few offers posted on the window and you're on your own! I was perplexed: what to do, where to apply and how?
My perplexity seems to be communicative. And, it is at this moment that I meet Nicolas, a tall guy with piercing blue eyes and a little younger than me. He made me a proposition: leave New York and head to the south of the country to work. New York, just in housing, will have ruined us in a few weeks if not a few days. Not bad.
Above all, he speaks English, his mother teaches the subject. He suggests going to Virginia Beach, 600 kilometers south of New York, which I have never heard of. But my intuition pushes me to follow him, and I don't have any other plans in perspective!
Nicolas turned out to be the ideal travel companion: funny, always ready for adventure, and armed, like me, with that carefree attitude that lets you believe that everything will work out in the end. He was right.
A few hours later we are on board a Greyhound, those big buses that connect the big American cities. At the end of the day, we are in Virginia Beach on the parking lot and not much further.
Virginia Beach is a seaside resort south of Philadelphia. With its large beaches on the Atlantic, hotels, motels and restaurants it is a popular destination for the local middle class. People come here on weekends for the casinos or for longer vacations.
Direction the main avenue of the city with its restaurants for our prospection. I remind that we do all this before the mobile Internet is deployed. After some tests, a restaurant listens to these two French people who arrive without any plan but who want to work. Nicolas plays the interpreters expressing himself in a perfect English especially for a French, and even more at the time.
Our first employer of the summer will be Baguette and pasta held by a Pakistani family. From memory, there is neither baguette nor pasta. But our profiles interest one of the bosses, so much so that he immediately offers to start the same evening! A celerity which owes much more to a cheap and needy workforce than to our skills. The contract is sealed and we are hired.
It's fast, it's America! In the discussion, I manage to slip in a few details about the working conditions: our hours, and our vacations? Our new employer looks at me astonished. No fixed rest, it will depend on the activity. Available seven days a week. I still remember his surprised look and his questioning: is this how it is done in France with the employees? France, which is preparing to go to a 35-hour week. I can already feel the gap between the two sides of the Atlantic.
The kitchen is run by a blonde, round, Cindy Lauper-like woman, very nice and with a soft spot for African-Americans. This is rare in a country where communities live side by side, without mixing, in a period of mistrust where cases of police blunders are already piling up. People are polite but suspicious.
Nicolas will be in the dining room, as he has to master English, while I am relegated to the dishwasher. In the back kitchen, I spend endless hours cleaning pots and pans and putting plates, cutlery and glasses in the dishwasher without seeing a single customer.
We find a place to stay, and we will change lodgings two or three times. The memory that leaves me these places, where moreover one will sleep there rather little, chaining the hours of work, it is the feeling of film of B. The aged carpet, the faded sofas, the dark light, the whole in houses of plain foot which have everything of a bad motel. We are not difficult, we are young; we will be even in roommate with a couple of young French a little austere, and an Italian Fabio who knows to animate places the few times when we find.
We also acquire bicycles. I even think of passing my licence, which will remain a pious wish. The evening, after our services which do not always correspond any more, we find ourselves with Nico to the 7/Eleven, we put our bikes, we sit on the sidewalk to drink a soda, to eat an ice cream and to debrief the day. We are slapped. But we hold. At the peak of the summer we will be each on two, three restaurants at the same time!
This bulimia of work allows us to accumulate cash. We open a bank account with a disconcerting facility and the steps to the social security are also easy: America, the country where it is necessary to undertake! We find ourselves with large bundles of money that we pile up in zipped pockets.
We are indeed in the America of the Clinton years, at the beginning of his second term, well before the Lewinsky affair paralyzed the machine. Money was flowing, the economy was booming, and above all America was confident, prosperous and full of innovation. Google, Amazon and others were born from this boom.
The restaurant business is a bit like the food chain: the big fish get to work in the dining room as a waiter, while the little ones have to make do with washing up, just like when I started.
But my English was improving, and having proved myself at Baguette and Pasta, Nico who had entered the Maple-tree a few days before introduced me to this restaurant straight out of the series The Sopranos or the movie Goodfellas. The restaurant is run this time by a Greek family and at its head the austere mother, with a mafia look and silent as her impeccable bun. They serve hearty breakfasts all day long: pancakes, maple syrup, sausages, scrambled eggs...
I'm going up in rank, and here I am a bus-boy! The job consists in going from table to table, pushing a small cart to clear the table after the customers leave, and to bring everything back to the kitchen for the washing up. I'm happy, I'm in the dining room and in contact with the customer!
I don't know when the consecration comes, but it's the case when I join this Seafood restaurant. I am finally a waiter, the elite of the restaurant business! I managed to reach more than 17 dollars an hour, which is considerable for my age, for the time and a small job. This will be used to pay off my growing overdraft in Paris. I already have complicated relationships with bankers before I understand that their generosity, which calls for a line of credit or an overdraft, is only a sign of subservience.
I love this place, with its heavy swinging doors, its view of the ocean through the bay window, its cheerfulness and sophistication. Everything is well-oiled and works like a choreography. The service is impeccable: customers are greeted, served a glass of iced water upon arrival, and the smile, that smile that some consider fake, is de rigueur! For me, it makes all the difference, it is what makes the customer want to stay and come back.
At the beginning, I was hesitant with my heavy and long tray that I had to carry with one hand, breaking my wrist for more stability. A frail-looking colleague shows me the technique, and I quickly get the hang of it, my male pride being at stake. I avoid as much as possible the tables of the few French or Canadians, too stingy in tips! On the other hand, I pamper the Americans. My English is improving and I am now able to hold a conversation.
I'm combining it with the Doughboy. I have Fabio as a colleague. I remember the last day of my service in this restaurant. That's when I realized that a restaurant is a reflection of the owner or the person who runs it. That day, it was literally chaos, the managers and owners were gone, the customers were pouring in, and we didn't know how to handle the situation. Not having been paid for days, by our bosses, each one takes the part of his salary in the box and leaves. The season ends, as well as my American professional experience.
On the last day of August, the news came: Princess Diana had died. On a beautiful summer night in Paris, like so many in August, her car, trying to escape the paparazzi, hit a pylon on the Alma bridge. It's one of those moments, where concerned or indifferent, each of us remembers where we were. I am on the pier a few meters from the ocean, I wonder about the global emotion that causes the disappearance of the princess of the people (to use the word of Tony Blair Prime Minister at the time) gone thirty-seven years.
It was also the summer when Puff Daddy saturated the airwaves with I'll be missing you, a tribute to Notorius Big, who had died a few months earlier, and whose "Mo money mo problem" had the same hit. A year earlier, 2Pac had passed away at the age of 26. Period of revenge, of deadly hatreds, between rappers from both sides of the country: East and West coasts. A talented generation too, with Dr. Dre, with younger ones too who will give the Fugees and then Lauryn Hill.
At the same time, another piece of information went unnoticed at the time, but it did not fail to interest me: Bill Gates' Microsoft was going to bail out Apple on the verge of bankruptcy. This bailout would signal the return of Steve Jobs, and the success of the Apple company a few years later.
It's time to part ways, and Nicolas leaves to discover the north and the Niagara Falls. I will always remember his departure very late at night. His plane taking off at a late hour, there was no way to get to the airport except to call a private company. That's what he does. Except that... when he opens the door, it's a black limousine with its driver in a suit that he's waiting for, while his suitcase has barely been closed, he leaves the place disheveled like an actor out of a Tarantino movie.
With my travel companion gone, I left Virginia Beach a few days later to explore the great cities of the East Coast: Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and New York in two weeks. Chicago and its incomparable architecture, Boston the very WASP, Washington the surprising one with its Georgetown district and New-York always unclassifiable and of which for the moment I can't get enough.
From this stay of almost three months on the East Coast of the United States, which gave me a partial view of a huge country, I loved the simplicity, the incomparable sense of service and this feeling of being alive.
I would like to dwell for a moment on this notion of service which was the heart of my trip, and which constitutes one of the differences between the two continents. I won't go back to the quality of American service, but to what it represents. In Europe, especially in France, and in the south of the continent, we equate service with servility, which have the same root. What we don't understand, and what was explained to me during my trip, is that in the United States, one is in turn the servant of the other: the doctor who comes to eat at the restaurant will be in a few hours your servant for a medical service. And so on... Service does not have this degrading connotation, on the contrary. In any case, I keep the taste of the fire that is specific to the restaurant business, of going towards the other, and an ability to manage tense situations.
I liked my short American experience. And yet, I never formed the project of settling there permanently. I am too much of a European and I am borrowing from what still existed in the old continent, a certain sweetness of life. In mid-September, it was time to return home to France.
One detail struck me: you could still smoke in the back of the plane's cabin. Another era... and even if I'm not sure that it's a great advance, on the contrary, I play the big guy and I'll smoke a few cigarettes in the back of the boeing during the crossing.
I have to say that I don't really know how the idea of going to work in the US for a whole summer came to my mind. Probably an advertisement in the college corridors or a walk in the Latin Quarter inspired me. I must also say that at twenty-one years old, my command of English is quite weak. I've already made the trip across the Atlantic twice, but always to meet someone: a friend, my father. This time, I will be alone and for a whole summer!
I managed to get my visa without too much complication, another time I tell you, when you could go to the embassies for a face to face meeting. Another time...
That done, I landed in New York at the beginning of this summer without really knowing where to go. But I already like to travel this way: left to the unknown, it is there that the best of oneself is revealed.
The New York office of the office that proposed the stay is inversely proportional to my expectations: disappointing. A few offers posted on the window and you're on your own! I was perplexed: what to do, where to apply and how?
My perplexity seems to be communicative. And, it is at this moment that I meet Nicolas, a tall guy with piercing blue eyes and a little younger than me. He made me a proposition: leave New York and head to the south of the country to work. New York, just in housing, will have ruined us in a few weeks if not a few days. Not bad.
Above all, he speaks English, his mother teaches the subject. He suggests going to Virginia Beach, 600 kilometers south of New York, which I have never heard of. But my intuition pushes me to follow him, and I don't have any other plans in perspective!
Nicolas turned out to be the ideal travel companion: funny, always ready for adventure, and armed, like me, with that carefree attitude that lets you believe that everything will work out in the end. He was right.
A few hours later we are on board a Greyhound, those big buses that connect the big American cities. At the end of the day, we are in Virginia Beach on the parking lot and not much further.
Virginia Beach is a seaside resort south of Philadelphia. With its large beaches on the Atlantic, hotels, motels and restaurants it is a popular destination for the local middle class. People come here on weekends for the casinos or for longer vacations.
Direction the main avenue of the city with its restaurants for our prospection. I remind that we do all this before the mobile Internet is deployed. After some tests, a restaurant listens to these two French people who arrive without any plan but who want to work. Nicolas plays the interpreters expressing himself in a perfect English especially for a French, and even more at the time.
Our first employer of the summer will be Baguette and pasta held by a Pakistani family. From memory, there is neither baguette nor pasta. But our profiles interest one of the bosses, so much so that he immediately offers to start the same evening! A celerity which owes much more to a cheap and needy workforce than to our skills. The contract is sealed and we are hired.
It's fast, it's America! In the discussion, I manage to slip in a few details about the working conditions: our hours, and our vacations? Our new employer looks at me astonished. No fixed rest, it will depend on the activity. Available seven days a week. I still remember his surprised look and his questioning: is this how it is done in France with the employees? France, which is preparing to go to a 35-hour week. I can already feel the gap between the two sides of the Atlantic.
The kitchen is run by a blonde, round, Cindy Lauper-like woman, very nice and with a soft spot for African-Americans. This is rare in a country where communities live side by side, without mixing, in a period of mistrust where cases of police blunders are already piling up. People are polite but suspicious.
Nicolas will be in the dining room, as he has to master English, while I am relegated to the dishwasher. In the back kitchen, I spend endless hours cleaning pots and pans and putting plates, cutlery and glasses in the dishwasher without seeing a single customer.
We find a place to stay, and we will change lodgings two or three times. The memory that leaves me these places, where moreover one will sleep there rather little, chaining the hours of work, it is the feeling of film of B. The aged carpet, the faded sofas, the dark light, the whole in houses of plain foot which have everything of a bad motel. We are not difficult, we are young; we will be even in roommate with a couple of young French a little austere, and an Italian Fabio who knows to animate places the few times when we find.
We also acquire bicycles. I even think of passing my licence, which will remain a pious wish. The evening, after our services which do not always correspond any more, we find ourselves with Nico to the 7/Eleven, we put our bikes, we sit on the sidewalk to drink a soda, to eat an ice cream and to debrief the day. We are slapped. But we hold. At the peak of the summer we will be each on two, three restaurants at the same time!
This bulimia of work allows us to accumulate cash. We open a bank account with a disconcerting facility and the steps to the social security are also easy: America, the country where it is necessary to undertake! We find ourselves with large bundles of money that we pile up in zipped pockets.
We are indeed in the America of the Clinton years, at the beginning of his second term, well before the Lewinsky affair paralyzed the machine. Money was flowing, the economy was booming, and above all America was confident, prosperous and full of innovation. Google, Amazon and others were born from this boom.
The restaurant business is a bit like the food chain: the big fish get to work in the dining room as a waiter, while the little ones have to make do with washing up, just like when I started.
But my English was improving, and having proved myself at Baguette and Pasta, Nico who had entered the Maple-tree a few days before introduced me to this restaurant straight out of the series The Sopranos or the movie Goodfellas. The restaurant is run this time by a Greek family and at its head the austere mother, with a mafia look and silent as her impeccable bun. They serve hearty breakfasts all day long: pancakes, maple syrup, sausages, scrambled eggs...
I'm going up in rank, and here I am a bus-boy! The job consists in going from table to table, pushing a small cart to clear the table after the customers leave, and to bring everything back to the kitchen for the washing up. I'm happy, I'm in the dining room and in contact with the customer!
I don't know when the consecration comes, but it's the case when I join this Seafood restaurant. I am finally a waiter, the elite of the restaurant business! I managed to reach more than 17 dollars an hour, which is considerable for my age, for the time and a small job. This will be used to pay off my growing overdraft in Paris. I already have complicated relationships with bankers before I understand that their generosity, which calls for a line of credit or an overdraft, is only a sign of subservience.
I love this place, with its heavy swinging doors, its view of the ocean through the bay window, its cheerfulness and sophistication. Everything is well-oiled and works like a choreography. The service is impeccable: customers are greeted, served a glass of iced water upon arrival, and the smile, that smile that some consider fake, is de rigueur! For me, it makes all the difference, it is what makes the customer want to stay and come back.
At the beginning, I was hesitant with my heavy and long tray that I had to carry with one hand, breaking my wrist for more stability. A frail-looking colleague shows me the technique, and I quickly get the hang of it, my male pride being at stake. I avoid as much as possible the tables of the few French or Canadians, too stingy in tips! On the other hand, I pamper the Americans. My English is improving and I am now able to hold a conversation.
I'm combining it with the Doughboy. I have Fabio as a colleague. I remember the last day of my service in this restaurant. That's when I realized that a restaurant is a reflection of the owner or the person who runs it. That day, it was literally chaos, the managers and owners were gone, the customers were pouring in, and we didn't know how to handle the situation. Not having been paid for days, by our bosses, each one takes the part of his salary in the box and leaves. The season ends, as well as my American professional experience.
On the last day of August, the news came: Princess Diana had died. On a beautiful summer night in Paris, like so many in August, her car, trying to escape the paparazzi, hit a pylon on the Alma bridge. It's one of those moments, where concerned or indifferent, each of us remembers where we were. I am on the pier a few meters from the ocean, I wonder about the global emotion that causes the disappearance of the princess of the people (to use the word of Tony Blair Prime Minister at the time) gone thirty-seven years.
It was also the summer when Puff Daddy saturated the airwaves with I'll be missing you, a tribute to Notorius Big, who had died a few months earlier, and whose "Mo money mo problem" had the same hit. A year earlier, 2Pac had passed away at the age of 26. Period of revenge, of deadly hatreds, between rappers from both sides of the country: East and West coasts. A talented generation too, with Dr. Dre, with younger ones too who will give the Fugees and then Lauryn Hill.
At the same time, another piece of information went unnoticed at the time, but it did not fail to interest me: Bill Gates' Microsoft was going to bail out Apple on the verge of bankruptcy. This bailout would signal the return of Steve Jobs, and the success of the Apple company a few years later.
It's time to part ways, and Nicolas leaves to discover the north and the Niagara Falls. I will always remember his departure very late at night. His plane taking off at a late hour, there was no way to get to the airport except to call a private company. That's what he does. Except that... when he opens the door, it's a black limousine with its driver in a suit that he's waiting for, while his suitcase has barely been closed, he leaves the place disheveled like an actor out of a Tarantino movie.
With my travel companion gone, I left Virginia Beach a few days later to explore the great cities of the East Coast: Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and New York in two weeks. Chicago and its incomparable architecture, Boston the very WASP, Washington the surprising one with its Georgetown district and New-York always unclassifiable and of which for the moment I can't get enough.
From this stay of almost three months on the East Coast of the United States, which gave me a partial view of a huge country, I loved the simplicity, the incomparable sense of service and this feeling of being alive.
I would like to dwell for a moment on this notion of service which was the heart of my trip, and which constitutes one of the differences between the two continents. I won't go back to the quality of American service, but to what it represents. In Europe, especially in France, and in the south of the continent, we equate service with servility, which have the same root. What we don't understand, and what was explained to me during my trip, is that in the United States, one is in turn the servant of the other: the doctor who comes to eat at the restaurant will be in a few hours your servant for a medical service. And so on... Service does not have this degrading connotation, on the contrary. In any case, I keep the taste of the fire that is specific to the restaurant business, of going towards the other, and an ability to manage tense situations.
I liked my short American experience. And yet, I never formed the project of settling there permanently. I am too much of a European and I am borrowing from what still existed in the old continent, a certain sweetness of life. In mid-September, it was time to return home to France.
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