As a young, married mom, in 1989, I took a job at a taco restaurant.
The couple who owned the restaurant were very nice, my coworkers were mostly teens of the nice variety, and it was not a boring job. I had a great time getting to know the regular customers and chatting with new ones. I wasn’t making a lot of money, which seems to be the recurring theme of my life, but it was enough to keep us ahead of the sharks.
One of the kids I worked with was [Coworker]. She was sixteen, very sweet, and very small. She just cracked me up. She blushed easily and went out of her way to be nice to everyone.
[Coworker] usually worked in the drive-thru window of our little restaurant. For some reason, she could interpret the “wah, wah, wah” that most of us heard from the tinny little speaker the customers spoke into better than the rest of us. It was easier to have her work there than to say repeatedly, “What? Could you repeat that, please?” and have the customers scream themselves into a hemorrhage.
One night, a man drove up in a Jeep with a top but no doors. [Coworker] handed his order out the window and then turned back into the kitchen, blushing bright red and nearly hyperventilating.
Owner: “[Coworker]! What’s wrong?!”
She was speechless. Once she recovered a bit, she said:
Coworker: “That man in the Jeep didn’t have any clothes on!”
Of course, he was long gone. We couldn’t get a license plate number or a description. We figured we wouldn’t see him again, but we were wrong.
At least once a week, he drove through naked in his Jeep. We called the police, and they told us that as long as he made no threat to anyone, did not say anything of a sexual nature, and stayed in his vehicle, he was not breaking any laws. Almost every time he visited, [Coworker] was working the drive-thru. I really think he did it on purpose just to see her blush. I’m sure the perverted b*****d got a real thrill out of it.
We all learned to recognize his voice over the speaker, and we tried to make sure [Coworker] wasn’t at the window when his order was ready, but out of some strange sort of pride, she usually said, “No, I will do it.”
I got tired of him doing the same stupid thing. I really liked [Coworker]. She had a sense of humor over the whole thing, and it was sort of funny, but d***!
One afternoon, I went out to the overgrown weedy lot behind the restaurant and picked a bunch of desiccated plant stalks. I brought them in, arranged them a bit, and wrapped a burrito wrapper around the bottom, sort of how they wrap bouquets of flowers. I taped it, stuck on a bow I’d found in the trash, and waited a few days for the perv to show.
He finally did, about a week later. [Coworker], of course, was working the drive-up. When she turned away from the speaker to put the order up, I grabbed the weeds and exchanged places with her. The perv drove up to the window and looked surprised to see a different face.
Me: “Hi!” *Hands him the bouquet of weeds* “We had a contest, and you won first prize for your dried arrangement!”
He looked surprised, then shocked, and then embarrassed. (Haha, “bare-a**ed”… Oh, my gosh, I crack me up.) And he drove away, squeaking his tires and leaving without his order.
He never came back, at least not while I was working there.
