Roy Fittes

In 1995, a local farmer named Silas Landwirt teamed up with entrepreneur Craig Walden to convert his old barn at the corner of Highway 151 and Mt. Vernon Road into a successful fast food venture. They intended to rival the surprisingly successful Panchero's upstart in Iowa City, so they created a restaurant called Taco Barn, serving the residents of Cedar Rapids, Marion, and outlying towns for many years. The Taco Barn was, at first, wildly successful, piggybacking off the college-town business model of Panchero's by appealing to students at Coe College in Cedar Rapids and Cornell College in nearby Mt. Vernon. Staying open 24 hours a day allowed them to further capitalize on the market; students who got baked or pulled an all-nighter but wasn't in the mood for Perkins would invariably find themselves at the Taco Barn.

Unfortunately, the success was short-lived. In early 2001, mega-Mexican chain Taco Bell moved into town. At first, its Cedar Rapids locations posed little to no threat. It was only when Taco Bell built a location in Marion that the Taco Barn began to suffer. Customers dwindled and eventually disappeared. The dingy barn atmosphere couldn't hold a candle to Taco Bell's cleanliness and relative lack of obvious health code violations. As the customers disappeared, so did the profits. This led to insane sales, combo deals—anything to bring in pinchpenny college students. Nothing worked. Soon the Taco Barn reduced its hours. By late 2004, when I started managing the Taco Barn, I had one employee working under me. We saw, on average, 10 customers a day.

In the summer of 2005, my employee—a girl by the name of Regina Palmberg—quit with no notice. She said she wanted to go to college, as far away as possible. I hired a quick replacement, a frail wisp of a thing called Sequoia Hermann. I don't know what it was about her that brought in customers; she wasn't particularly attractive, what with her greasy skin and sunken eyes and rotting teeth, and for some reason her near-obsessive desire to clean ovens with an odd, homebrewed solution left the entire place reeking of sulfur—but our customer base got ridiculous. We were able to return to 24-hour operations, and we got so busy I had to hire a second employee.

Enter Girth McDürchstein, who first darkened the Taco Barn's doors in late November of 2005. I'd been having so much trouble finding a second employee that I spelled out on the marquee, "DESPERATE -- NAME YOUR OWN WAGE." This lured a lot more potential employees, but none of them were desirable in the least. Most of them seemed like hardcore meth addicts. I didn't think they'd be reliable at all. Girth came in for an interview with the strongest resume I'd seen. He had no work experience whatsoever, but the man had a philosophy Bachelor's from Coe and—even better!—a Master's in 19th-century British Literature from Gudger College. It didn't matter to me that he hadn't had a single job in the eight years since his Master's. I knew anybody who could achieve such a level of education would be a reliable employee...or so I thought.

I, myself, was fairly busy doing work for the National Honor Society, as well as taking a lot of AP classes to make sure I'd be able to really impress people when I went away to college in a year. I knew I'd need a strong right-hand man, and I thought Girth would provide that even more than Sequoia, who always showed up for her shifts but seemed pretty apathetic about the job. Girth was a real go-getter. In the interview, when I asked him where he saw himself in five years, he emphatically stated, "Working at the Taco Barn!" I offered him a job, and though he named an outrageous sum as his wage—$37/hour, plus benefits—in the yes-man fashion I was looking for he immediately reduced his salary requirements to what I was willing to pay: $7.25/hour plus free sodas.

He started as a model employee, but a few days later, he showed up in my office with the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She wore a gorgeous, red dress that pushed her tits up into the kind of cleavage not even a diamond could cut. Her black hair tumbled over her shoulders. Her lips pouted as she arched her back against the doorframe, making her tits appear to defy gravity in the best possible way. Girth came in and announced this was her fiancée, Margo Atwater, and she needed a job, too. I hired her on the spot.

Margo was immediate trouble. When we had a pretty big lull on customers, she forced me to close early—an egregious violation of company policy—so we could go out and have fun. Margo, Girth, Sequoia, and I all went out for an evening on the town, engaging in such puerile and juvenile activities as spray-painting pornographic images on the walls of Kennedy High, egging and T.P.'ing houses, and tipping cows. I only went along with it because I was captivated by her beauty and, I hoped, she would at some point take my virginity.

I had to fire Girth a few short days later. Again, Margo was the ultimate culprit. Apparently the two had had a fight, and when Girth came in for his shift he declared to Sequoia that the two should run away together. When she resisted, he sexually assaulted her. Of course I had to fire him and Margo. They simply weren't right for the Taco Barn.

To add insult to injury, Sequoia was so angry and humiliated by the experience, she quit with no notice. When she left, so too did the customers. When the customers left, again we tried our new strategies. Landwirt and Walden accused me of foul play because, apparently, Sequoia disappeared after quitting and—unknown to me—they had some sort of business deal with her. They were incredibly angry at her mysterious disappearance, especially angry at the money she was costing them. I was angry myself. Without an employee, I had to do the duties of a service technician as well as my managerial duties, working excessive hours without additional compensation.

I never found another employee, but I never had to. Just after the start of second semester, Walden called me up and told me they were closing the Taco Barn for good, and I was fired, and I wouldn't receive a good reference or letter of recommendation from either him or Landwirt. That was it.

I didn't ever see Girth or Margo again. I was actually sort of surprised when I was contacted by Mr. Janofsky to write about my experiences for the site. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but the loss of that job and my inability to find another means I can't go to college for probably another year, if that, and the stress of working such long hours made me blow most of my AP tests and really fucked up my grades for the whole year. Yeah, I know the Taco Barn got closed for second semester, but I had to find a job on top of all my school duties. It just couldn't be done, and everything I tried to do suffered as a result.

I felt, and still feel, like a failure. Eventually I got a job working as a custodian at Quaker. I'm hoping I'll have enough to go to college soon, but it won't be as good a college as I thought. I don't have the grades for a scholarship or a great school anymore. My whole life is probably fucked, and it's all because of Girth McDürchstein and Margo Atwater.

As a postscript, in July I ran into Sequoia Hermann. She seemed a little edgy about seeing her, but I came up to her and told her I didn't think she was responsible at all for ruining my life. It was all Girth and Margo. Maybe it was the time I had spent away from her, or maybe unemployment had simply done her good, but I could finally realize what so many customers had seen in her, physically. She had put on a healthy amount of weight; she no longer had that sunken, skeletal quality I found so distateful. No bags around her eyes. Her hair and face no longer looked shiny and grease-littered. Her eyes sparkled, whereas before they had been so dull and lifeless. I asked her out on a date, but she turned me down.