In the Bear

The worst Dress Code I ever had...

I recently attended the birthday party of my childhood friend, Mark, where I was introduced to some of the attendees as the birthday boy’s “oldest friend.” I tried to get him to switch it to “longest-tenured friend” or “most long-standing friend,” but I guess it’s just easier to say “oldest.” It’s also not technically wrong.

The point is, we go back a long way. We even worked together at my first real, paying job when we were seventeen. It was at a family-style restaurant in our town called Grin and Bear It. The place was basically a Chuck E. Cheese clone (maybe “wannabe” would be more accurate), except they replaced the mice with bears. There were games, pizza, screaming kids, and yes, people dressed in bear costumes who entertained said kids, and sometimes got mauled by them. Several of my classmates worked there, as well as Mark, and I think I can say without fear of being mistaken that most of us hated it.

Just imagine a restaurant that almost solely employed 17 year-olds to entertain and cook pizza for small children. And since it was the early 90’s, most of us were paid $5.00 an hour - which was slightly above minimum wage - and were treated rather poorly by the managers, who were pretty stressed out themselves. The reliable employees, Mark and myself included, were constantly asked to work overtime. Not the kind of overtime where you would get paid time and a half or anything. In fact, you would have been considered lucky to take home a free pizza at the end of your shift. So, you can just imagine all of the fucks that we gave.

I started at Grin and Bear It a few weeks after it opened in the Summer of 1992, and for my entire junior year, I pretty much worked every weekend. As one of two busboys in the place, my schedule usually was Friday nights, 5-9 (usually ended up being 10:00), Saturdays, 12-8 (which also usually ended up being 10:00) and Sundays, 12-5 (Sundays were a little slower, so 5:00 was mostly accurate.) And since I was taught to work hard for your money - or I was just a wuss - I never said “No” when I was asked to stay late and close.

Side-but relevant-note: I was only a busboy because I failed so spectacularly in the kitchen. Technically, they only hired kitchen help, party people and a couple guys who primarily wore the bear suits. My friend Brian was a great bear, but he was also a hormonal teenager and would occasionally try to hit on women while in the suit, which oddly worked a few times. Eventually, however, a young mother complained that he was spending more time with her than her kids, and he was removed from the role. There were definitely consequences to that, which I will get to in a moment.

Anyway, at 17, I didn’t really know that life could be better, and since my parents had been pushing for me to get a job for a while before this one came along, I figured this was it. The idea that I should just find something less stressful and annoying didn’t occur to me at all. So I spent my formative junior year working every weekend. The interesting thing was that I basically had no time to spend the money I was making, so I would just deposit my whole check into my savings account, so even only making $5.00 an hour, I actually had more money than I have ever had in my entire life at seventeen.

But that didn’t really make me any happier. Like I said, the managers were pretty stressed and didn’t really know how to treat teenaged employees, (or anyone else for that matter). There was one guy, Frank, who lasted a few months and then I assume moved on to greener pastures. But there was another fellow who was a bit of a problem. I doubt he’ll ever read this, so it wouldn’t be a big deal if I named him, but I’ll just say that if there are any old-school Marvel fans reading this, he looked a lot like this guy, so I’ll just call him Sikorsky:

Now, I didn’t know anything about… anything at that age, so I assumed Sikorsky was an angry, middle-aged man who just lived to boss us around (He was probably in his 30’s, but to me, that was middle-aged.) After Frank left, Sikorsky was the only real manager, so he was the one who worked us to the bone, the one who would bark, “Matt, you’re closing tonight!” at me every week, the one who yelled at me to fix the games when they broke, and worst of all, the one who at the last minute would yell, “Matt, get in the bear!”

If you have been to a restaurant like this, you probably know how it works, but just in case, this is how it went at Grin and Bear It: every birthday party included a certain number of game tokens, some pizzas, and of course, cake. When the cake was served, naturally everyone would gather around the child and sing “Happy Birthday,” including an employee in a bear suit. As you might expect, there were three suits: Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, none of which were cleaned very often. Some kiddies loved to dance and hug the bear, and some were extremely frightened. Either way, it was Hell for the person in the suit.

Like I said, there were a couple of regular bears, but after Brian was kicked out, and when the other bear wasn’t working, someone had to fill the role. So if I was unlucky enough to walk into the kitchen when it was time to bring the cake out, Sikorsky would see me and bellow for me to put on the suit.

I wish it were anywhere near as cool as that.

I always chose Mama Bear because it was the most comfortable one. Like the story goes, Baby Bear was too small, and Papa Bear too big. In fact, his head was so tall that you didn’t see out of his eyes, but there was a small opening on his neck that you could kind of see out of. But Mama Bear was the right height, so I would put on this smelly pile of hair and then sit in the freezer for a few minutes while they prepped the cake, often grabbing a slice for myself if one was available (this was pre-Diabetes, but maybe even a cause now that I think about it.) Then I would go out and pat the birthday kid on the head and dance around for a few minutes until I could get away without seeming like that was all I wanted to do.

As much as I hated bussing the dirty tables sloppy with half-eaten pizza, and having kids yell at me because the Whack-a-Mole had eaten their token, I despised the bear suit more than anything. I don’t know if anyone has ever had a job as a mascot, or a Disney character, or any kind of job like this, and hated it as much as I did. I’m not sure if it was because I didn’t feel comfortable acting goofy around the kids, or I was afraid I would step on or hurt one of them, or if it was just not the job I was hired for, but I just fucking hated it. I didn’t like this job near the end, but I hated that bear suit.

By the Spring, the staff was mostly tired of the mismanagement and we all signed a petition to have Sikorsky reprimanded for all manner of offenses, possibly even sexual harassment, although I must admit I personally never witnessed anything like that. All I know was he was loud, obnoxious and very cruel to Brian after the whole bear suit-removal debacle. But mostly I just was mad that I was overworked and always had to be the bear. Whatever the reasons, I remember Mark surreptitiously calling me into the basement one night to sign the petition, and it felt like a very grown-up thing to do. Mark and some of my co-workers then took it to the owners of the restaurant, and Sikorsky was promptly fired. The staff was pretty happy, until a couple months later, when Grin and Bear It would close for good. I remember it was Father’s Day 1993. I worked the lunch shift, and then all the employees were invited back after closing for a goodbye shindig. Even though many of my fellow employees were my classmates, a lot of them I never saw again. We weren’t exactly friends, but we all bonded over surviving this terrible job.

The thing is, I’ve worked a lot of jobs over the subsequent 30-plus years, and I don’t think any of them were as bad as Grin & Bear It, but I’m not going to put the blame on anyone. Like I said, I was only the busboy because I was total crap in the kitchen, and I was only told to get in the bear because they needed a warm body. Sikorsky didn’t have it in for me. He might have been annoyed at his current status, managing a kid’s restaurant at that point in his life, probably not making much more than we were, so who can blame him for being angry? I remember him bringing his kids in once, and I was surprised to see him in that context, supporting a family with a job like that. I was also surprised because apparently someone had actually had sex with him at least twice.

But I was a dumb teenager who was being paid to do what he said. Sure, actually scheduling people to close the place every Saturday would have probably made everyone less angry, but I could have just said “No” more often. I could have told him that I had plans, or just made up any old excuse, but for some reason I thought it was important that I stay when asked. Part of it was to help my fellow employees so that they wouldn’t get stuck doing more work. Part of it was because I was raised by hard-workers who instilled in me that you do the job until it is done. Or I was a wuss.

Whatever the reason, I now realize that I still do a lot of these things at my job. Obviously, I’m not asked to wear a bear suit (yet), but I still try to help out people even if it’s not in my job description, or stay late until the job is done, and I still don’t like it, mostly because of my Grin and Bear it experience. Over 30 years later, and if I have to stay 5 minutes later at my job, I get really annoyed. And I still don’t like doing things that are technically outside of my job description. It’s kind of amazing how much I let that job fuck with me mentally. I actually went to ChatGPT for a term to use so i could write a joke about it (One term that stood out to me was “Boundary Trauma,” but that probably doesn’t apply.) and ended up going down a job stress rabbit hole. It was actually an interesting read, although excuse my typos. It’s still only ChatGPT.

We’ve all had crappy jobs, and all we can control is how we handle them. This one will always be my crappiest, but it definitely informed my work ethos and how to tackle certain aspects of every job I’ve had since. So I guess, for that, I can appreciate it. But writing all this, I realized Office Space was right. Work sucks.

Thanks as always for reading. Please like, subscibe, share and consider becoming a paid subscriber. If that’s too much around the holidays, consider donating a bit or two at Buy Me a Coffee. And there is still time to buy gifts from me at my Etsy store or my eBay store. It’s mostly the same stuff, but it’s good stuff. And if I don’t get a chance to write anything for the rest of December, happy holidays to you all.