The Peacock
A high school hangout and community hub, for better or worse
Story written and narrated by: Glenn Vanderkloet
Tunes in this episode:
Hazlehurst - Pale Cricket
Unknown Legend and Vampire Blues - Neil Young
The Peacock
Supper time was far from a formal affair at our house while I was growing up. We didn’t own any fancy dinnerware or cutlery and we never once thanked a deity for our food. Hell, we didn’t even eat at the dining room table save for the rare occasion. Most nights, my mom would yell for my dad and I to “come get it while it’s hot” and we would shuffle into the kitchen like the zombies we were after a long day at the factory and in the classroom, respectively. My brother and sister were much older than me and moved out of the family home when I was still quite young so the suppers I remember with any type of clarity included only my folks and myself. Once in the kitchen, Dad and I would grab our standard-issue dinner plates and proceed to load them up with chicken strips, green beans, and mashed Yukon Golds or something akin to that combination. We would then take our heaping plates into the living room where we would plop ourselves down - him on the couch and me on the loveseat - and flip the channel to the most scintillating hour of television a person could ask for. The Simpsons followed by Seinfeld.
After allowing Dad and I to grab our food and get settled, my patient and selfless mother would fix herself a plate, grab the local newspaper, and sit either at the table or in the living room with us. As we devoured our food and laughed at the antics of Homer Simpson and George Costanza, mom would quietly eat her meal while scanning the paper for stories that interested her. After finishing with the main section, she would move on to Ann Landers to get her daily dose of the legendary advice columnist before concluding her reading with the obituaries. If mom came across an obit of someone she had known, she’d comment aloud how she knew them. “Such and such a person died,” she’d say. “Dad used to deliver milk to them,” referring to my grandfather who was a milkman most of his working life. This would invariably spark a conversation between my parents about friends or family members of the deceased they may have also known. We lived in a small community so connecting the dots wasn’t difficult. Anyway, these conversations would bore me to tears as I hadn’t a clue who they were talking about and I would often tell them to lower their voices so I could hear the television. However, now that I’ve reached middle age, I have found myself perusing the online obituaries from my hometown paper. I’ve become curious, as my mother was before me, as to who I might know that has recently died. And the older I get, the more people I recognize. A former teacher or doctor. A parent of an old friend. A baseball coach. The other day, I came across an obit for someone I hadn’t thought about in many years. It was the waitress from my regular lunch spot in high school. Her name was Jo, short for Jolante, and she was a legend. She had passed away at 76.
This regular lunch spot I speak of was called The Peacock and it was one of two restaurants in the village where I did my secondary schooling. Being one of only two options in town, The Peacock tried to be everything to everyone. It billed itself primarily as a Chinese restaurant but also served Canadian food as well as having an extensive Italian menu. With no pub in the village, it was also the neighborhood dive bar. Furthermore, it was the place where people went to celebrate birthdays, graduations, or professional achievements. Because of its potpourri of offerings and no doubt benefitting from a lack of competition, the restaurant drew an eclectic clientele. On any given day around lunchtime, you could find a table of high school students shoveling french fries into their mouths next to a lone farmer taking advantage of the all day breakfast. A table over from the farmer might be a daughter and her elderly mother enjoying their chinese combination plates and over at the small bar which doubled as a payment counter, you may have found a trio of down on their luck day drinkers nursing their beers and watching their cigarettes burn down in the ashtrays in front of them. Yes, you could still smoke inside restaurants when I was in high school. All of this amounted to the collected aroma of egg rolls, poutine, pizza, cigarette smoke, stale beer, and cow shit. The shit smell emanated from the farmer’s clothing and boots in case you were wondering. Country top 40 radio blaring from the overhead speakers and checkered tablecloths brought the ambiance home in one of the strangest voluntary gathering places I’ve ever inhabited. And holding this mish-mash of people and culinary options together was the main character of this story, Jo.
This is just a guess but I’d estimate that Jo was a waitress at The Peacock for nearly 30 years. My sister, who is 11 years older than me, used to talk about her when she was in high school and when I entered grade nine, Jo was still slinging hash. She was going stronger than ever when I finished grade 12 and for years after when I would order takeout from the restaurant, who else but Jo would come speed walking out of the kitchen with a bulging paper bag full of chow mein, chicken balls, and almond guy ding. I’m not certain she ever took a day off either. Whether it was a Monday afternoon or a Saturday evening, she was always there. I don’t think I was ever there when she wasn’t. She was part of the furniture.
Her disposition was sweet and kind but if you messed with her, as some students and the occasional drunk periodically did in part because she was hard of hearing, she could fly off the handle in a stern and almost comical way. She wasn’t trying to be funny but one couldn’t help chuckling a little. Regulars, especially smartass students, were aware of her short fuse and would deliberately try to ignite it. Sometimes, they would leave pennies for a tip and Jo didn’t take kindly to this. If she noticed in time, she would hurl the worthless coins at the students as they were walking out the door. There was another time when a classmate of mine claimed to have found a hair in his food. He stormed back to the kitchen to show it to the restaurant owner and head cook and tried to blame Jo. When the owner confronted Jo about the complaint, she called bullshit on my classmate and told him it was a bean sprout, not a hair. An argument ensued ending with my classmate getting his money back for the meal but it also resulted in Jo refusing service to him for the remainder of his high school years. And she never backed down from that position. What I’m trying to illustrate here is that Jo was a mild mannered and beautiful soul but she did not take shit from anyone. If you were an asshole or a smartass like a good number of students and other rednecks were in that village, she put you in your place fairly quickly. She was only about five feet tall and quite slender but I witnessed her put the fear of god into many dipshits who thought they could have a laugh at her expense or take advantage of her in some way.
Jo’s personal life was a mystery. She never talked about herself. She just worked extremely hard making sure every customer had what they needed and stopped only for the odd drag off her cigarette. There were rumors that Jo’s husband wasn’t a very nice man and perhaps that’s why she was a bit hardened. I can’t corroborate that of course but I can say with certainty that Jo left a positive impression on a ton of people, myself included. She was kind, hard working, funny, and cared deeply about customer satisfaction. Unless you were being a pain in the ass like my classmate.
So pour one out for the real ones like Jo tonight. Folks who will give you the shirt off their back but who also have a low tolerance for fools and smart alecks. And if there’s a person out there who brought meaning to your life in a serendipitous way like Jo did for me, give them a ring or send them a note before you read about them in the obits.