During the winter of my senior year in high school, a sign appeared on the corner of my rapidly expanding neighborhood strip mall: “Opening soon: Einstein Bros Bagels.” I was ecstatic about this new development. It was 1997 in Salt Lake City, where bagels with coffee still counted as semi-exotic cuisine. Warm discs of condensed carbohydrates, served sweet or salty depending on one’s mood — can there be a more perfect food? My friends and I were already regularly leaving school during lunch to hit another nearby Einsteins. For $1.20, we could buy two cinnamon sugar bagels and ice water laced with 20 lemon slices. Undoubtedly this new Einsteins would be hiring and I was their biggest fan. They had to give me a job!
At the time I was working as a “courtesy clerk” at the Albertsons across the street, which meant I stood at the end of the checkout lines and stuffed groceries into plastic bags, or dragged rows of carts through several inches of snow during a blizzard, or responded to “clean-up on aisle 9” and hoped what I was heading toward was shattered spaghetti sauce jars and not vomit. The grocery store paid me $4.25 an hour and it was not a good job, even if $4.25 was the equivalent of seven bagels. But what if those bagels could be free? On Jan. 27, I walked into the empty store at the advertised hiring time and submitted an application. They hired me on the spot.
“I was so happy I was dancing circles,” I wrote in my journal.
I started my job training a week later. I was given a T-shirt but told I would need to bring my own hat to work. I owned no hats, so my friend and I went to the mall and found a “Lollapalooza ‘94” baseball cap for 99 cents.
We opened up our store on Feb. 15 to a raucous crowd. My manager put me on register, undoubtedly the best position. All I had to do was punch buttons and count cash. By Feb. 19, the brand new bagel oven temporarily broke down, a stack of paper bags fell into the toaster oven and caught fire, and I sliced my thumb with one of the enormous sandwich-cutting knives.
On Feb. 22, we had the rush to end all rushes. From open to close, customers were lined out the door, shivering in the winter morning air because there was no more room inside. The entire bin of cinnamon sugar bagels emptied just seconds before a disgruntled customer finally made it to the counter. She declared she had been waiting for a half-hour, and could she just have a dozen cinnamon sugar bagels already? We had one left, so I told her as much.
“Unacceptable,” she replied. I tried to placate her by offering the single cinnamon sugar bagel in a paper sleeve. She was so angry that she chucked the bagel at my head. Bagels are surprisingly dense, and she really put some power into her pitch. The projectile left me with a faint shiner around my right eye. I froze in stunned silence while she stomped out the door. The 12-year-old boy who had been waiting behind her said meekly, “Um, miss, are you okay?” I nodded, and he continued. “So, um, are you out of cinnamon sugar?”
Life and bagels come at you fast.
The job did lend some opportunities to explore my creativity. Once I was trained on the espresso machine, I experimented with various syrups and creams to create custom drinks that would make the Starbucks marketing team proud. It was 1997 and I was before my time with my strawberry banana mochaccinos, I’m confident. A few months into the job, I switched from front counter to baker, a prestigious position even if it did require 4 a.m. alarms on Saturdays. It was my duty to ensure we never ran out of cinnamon sugar bagels, and I thrived in this role — a combination of math equations and accurate forecasting; I was rarely wrong. Plus, I didn’t have to deal with customers.
As a baker, I was able to develop creative substitutes for bagels. My most successful creation was to take two bagels, roll them out into a flat strip of dough, twist the strips together, and absolutely drench the braid in cinnamon and sugar. The “cinnamon twists” came out of the oven gooey, golden, and delicious. They sold like hotcakes at $2.95, a significant markup from two 60-cent bagels. Despite the brilliance of my innovation, the regional manager shut down my operation within a week.
“Corporate won’t allow off-menu items,” my manager sighed.
Capitalism … what a crock.
At least I had good co-workers, managers who let me blast ska music while closing, and yes, free bagels. I had transitioned from idealism to realism to something like nihilism. I embraced the chaos of the restaurant industry and chose to find joy in the dough (by which I mean, the meager paychecks I was earning.)
In early May, the student editor at my high school newspaper, Mike (no relation to Homecoming Mike) invited me to the Senior Dinner Dance. In Utah, at least in the ’90s, a popular tradition was to both ask and answer potential dance dates in the most elaborate ways imaginable. Think “Instagram-era gender reveal parties” but with teenagers: Dozens of ballons, rose petals strewn all over a bedroom, three dozen cakes with the name of boy doing the asking baked into the middle of one. You get the picture. Mike asked me to the dance in a subdued way that I don’t really remember, but this would be my last high school dance, and I was determined to go out with a bang.
Each night after closing, Einsteins employees dumped all of the unsold bagels into a plastic bag and hauled them to the Dumpster outside. At one point we did give these bagels to the food bank, but the food bank soon became so overloaded that they requested no more drop-offs. We were allowed to take the bagels home if we wanted, but otherwise, they were trash. It was my job to close for several nights in a row, so I bagged the bagels and stashed them in a back corner of the store where I hoped no one noticed or cared (incredibly, no one did.)
After three or four nights, I had several bags of what were likely more than 200 bagels. My friend Liz picked me up from work and we took the bagels to her house. With two other friends, we spent several hours tying the bagels into long strings with yarn. At 1:30 a.m., the four of us drove to Mike’s house, parking several blocks down the street so they wouldn’t suspect anything. Creeping around the yard like burglars, we trimmed all of the trees with strings of bagels, lassoed them over the fence, draped them across the grass, and tossed around a few rolls of toilet paper for good measure. At the time, “toilet papering” was a thing, so I would tell friends, “we bageled Mike’s house.” I thought it was about the most beautiful prank imaginable.
This is the part where I acknowledge that if I submitted this stunt to “Am I The Asshole?” Reddit, the answer would be yes. Was this a crime? Also yes, but probably a misdemeanor at worst. Along with the elaborate bagel vandalism, I placed a chocolate cake on the doorstep with the word “yes ❤️ Jill” written in blue frosting.
Doubtlessly, Mike’s parents were horrified and flabbergasted to wake up to hundreds of stale, soggy bagels strewn across their yard. Mike later told me it took them most of Saturday to clean up the mess, and his parents made him do the bulk of the work, but everyone in his family ate a few of the bagels and they were still pretty good, and anyway, it was actually kinda funny. A few weeks later, I would go to pick up the photographs Mike and I had taken at the dance (which I haven’t been able to locate, sadly), and noticed a single string of bagels still dangling from a high branch of a tree, out of reach.
Bagels: An unbroken circle of pleasant blandness and incoherent mayhem.