Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Love it,” said Tanker. “I started doing ’em because nobody else ever wants to, and they ended up being one of my favorite things.”

  “I don’t care what we have to do to get this guy,” G-man said to Rickey. “We gotta have him.”

  “See?” said Tanker. “That makes you want me. How come? Why does everybody hate salads so much?”

  Rickey and G-man looked at each other, shrugged. “I don’t know,” said Rickey. “Salads are just weak. You got somebody who can’t do anything else, you put him on salads.”

  “Yeah, and you get crappy salads.” Tanker brandished his creation. “Hire somebody with talent, you get ones that look like this.”

  “We’re trying to hire you,” Rickey said. He was a little tired of Tanker’s waffling, but the guy was such a good cook that Rickey was willing to play the game. He’d already confessed to Tanker that Lenny was backing them, just so Tanker would think he was an up-front kind of guy. Tanker hadn’t seemed too surprised. “How much do you want?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  After they ate lunch, G-man made a batch of bread dough studded with green and black olives that had been soaked in gin. If it worked, it would be a sort of ultrarefined version of the martini muffuletta. Rickey and Tanker got very involved with a recipe for orange-fennel osso buco from the Union Square Café Cookbook. Tanker’s idea was to replace some of the orange juice with Grand Marnier. They started making a gastrique sauce, and soon the kitchen reeked of hot vinegar. G-man left his dough to rise and took the elevator up to street level.

  Downstairs, it had been about as noisy as a kitchen with just three cooks can be: their trash talk, the Ramones blasting on the boombox, ambient sounds of pots and utensils, gas jets, motors. As soon as G-man walked onto the gaming floor, though, the kitchen seemed like an oasis of tranquility. Slot machines jangled, played music, simulated explosions. Dealers chanted numbers and raked in chips with their long canes. Gamblers parked their meaty asses in front of the machines, chattering to each other in strange accents. It was peculiar, G-man thought, how most New Orleans tourists were thinner than the locals, yet the tourists who came to the casino were so often fat.

  He headed for the first exit he saw, which took him out onto Tchoupitoulas. An elderly husband and wife in shorts and multiple strings of Mardi Gras beads passed him on the casino steps. Eyeing his check pants and white apron, they said, “Evening, Chef.”

  “Evening. Where y’all from?”

  “Nashville.”

  “Well, have a good time. Be careful.” As he spoke, he wondered why so many otherwise degenerate locals reflex-ively urged such tourists to be careful. It was just that they seemed so helpless, at once thrilled by the city and completely out of their league. And they insisted on wearing those damn beads, which might as well be signs around their necks reading PLEASE ROB ME. They were innocents in a strange land, and G-man hated to think of anything bad happening to them.

  “Can you recommend a good place to eat tomorrow night?” the man asked. “Something fancy?”

  “Sure, uh, Commander’s Palace is real good, you’ve probably heard of that, and if you want to go a little more casual there’s Poivre up on Prytania—”

  “Are those in the French Quarter?” the woman asked. “We were thinking of the Quarter. We want to see the real old New Orleans.”

  G-man hesitated, then went ahead and recommended Lenny’s. They would probably like it better than any of the other places he’d mentioned.

  “Lenny’s!” said the man. “We already tried to get in there. They were booked for the next two weeks.”

  “You really want to go to Lenny’s?”

  “Oh, we’d love to,” the woman said. She smiled, and beneath her sensible cap of tightly permed gray hair, her face took on a dewy teenage glow.

  G-man pointed to the cell-phone antenna sticking out of the man’s shirt pocket. “Let me see that thing.”

  He dialed the front-of-the-house line at Lenny’s. The phone was answered by Helmut, a young maître d’ who had eaten at the Apostle Bar several times when Rickey and G-man were still cooking there. G-man chatted with Helmut for a few moments, then said, “I was wondering if you could find me a deuce sometime tomorrow night.”

  “Sure! That’s for you and Rickey?”

  “No, it’s for these two nice people I just met. They’re from Nashville, and they said they had trouble getting a table when they called before.”

  As G-man had intended, Helmut understood this to mean They’re a couple of clueless turistas, and I’m taking pity on them. “Can they do 8:45?” he asked.

  G-man relayed this request to the couple, who nodded excitedly. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Shannon Wilson Bell,” said the man, raising his voice and enunciating each syllable as men his age often seemed to do when introducing themselves.

  “Well, I heard that,” said Helmut. “Bell, party of two, at 8:45 tomorrow. Can I do anything else for you?”

  “I don’t think so, Helmut. Thanks a lot.”

  “Are you free for a drink sometime?”

  “It’s been pretty crazy lately. I’ll try to come by with Rickey.”

  “Come without him if you like,” said the maître d’, and rang off.

  The couple from Nashville went into the casino, still waving and thanking him effusively. G-man sat on the steps marveling a little at the fact that he could call one of the most famous restaurants in the city and get a table for two people he didn’t even know. Things certainly had changed a lot for him and Rickey in the past few months. Growing up in the Lower Ninth Ward, then struggling to live on the income from various cooking jobs, G-man had assumed he would always be a broke nobody. That was fine; as long as he mattered to Rickey, he didn’t need anyone else to know his name, and he didn’t care if they lived in a fancy house or a shotgun shack.

  Rickey didn’t want to be broke, though, and he sure didn’t want to be a nobody. “What if we get famous?” G-man had asked him. “It could happen. Lenny’s really gonna hype us.”

  “Then we’ll be famous for something we’re damn good at,” Rickey said. “Where’s the problem?” That was what it came down to, G-man thought. Rickey wanted a car and good knives and meals in fancy restaurants, but most of all he wanted to be acknowledged. He’d worked hard to become a serious cook, and G-man knew he still had regrets about not finishing his program at the CIA.

  G-man was a serious cook too, but he’d never been driven by pure passion for it as Rickey was. He’d gotten into the business because Rickey wanted to, but he hadn’t really been “in the life,” as Paco Valdeon used to put it, until Rickey left. That was when he learned that the grind of a busy kitchen could keep him from thinking painful thoughts, and that sometimes the kitchen is the only place where a cook knows what the hell he’s supposed to do.

  If he craned his neck a little, G-man could see an old vacant building on the other side of the Poydras Street intersection. He was not surprised that no one had bought the building and renovated it, because he knew what horrifying shape it was in. It had once housed the Pirate Lafitte Grill, site of his first serious kitchen job.

  The fall when Rickey left for New York had been the worst time of G-man’s entire life. He was eighteen, directionless, and desolate. He was sure he and Rickey were through; they’d agreed to try and stay faithful, but G-man felt certain Rickey would meet people far more attractive and interesting. He smoked pounds of bad pot, drank oceans of well-brand liquor, quit a crappy lunchtime line job at a sandwich joint shortly before he would have been fired for chronic lateness. His morale was nonexistent, and he took a job washing dishes at the Pirate Lafitte. When it was slow, the cooks made the dishwashers do prep work. The chef soon saw that G-man knew what he was doing and promoted him to the line.

  Chef Irvin was one of those mysterious café-au-lait-colored men who populate New Orleans, their complexions and features unclassifiable by even the most rabid segregationist. After a few d
ays, G-man decided he was mostly black; his speech suggested it, and he used racial epithets more freely than any sane white man would have dared. In fact, Chef Irvin had the foulest mouth G-man had heard before or since, and that was a remarkable superlative in the restaurant world.

  He held another record, too. He was the fastest cook G-man had ever seen, unnaturally fast; at times it seemed like he had six or eight arms. He drove his crew to an insane pitch, not pushing them beyond their limits so much as making them push the limits themselves. Nobody could shuck oysters or put out plates faster than Chef Irvin, but everybody wanted to try. He would egg them on: “You motherfuckin pussy-boy, where’s my seafood platters? I made ten fuckin platters in the time it took you to make that one. You little bitch-ass piece a’shit, you keep cookin like that, you gonna lick out my ass for dessert. Where’s my softshells?” All this was delivered in a rather dry and affable voice, as if he were discussing the ball game he’d seen on TV last night. You knew you were in trouble not when Chef Irvin cursed at you, but when he called you by your real name. He had a nickname for everybody. That was where G-man had gotten his—Rickey had sometimes called him G when they were growing up, but before Chef Irvin, he’d mostly just been Gary.

  The Pirate Lafitte Grill was nothing special, just another fried-stuffed-or-broiled seafood joint popular with downtown business types and tourists who wandered across Canal Street. The equipment was ancient and filthy, and there was a hole in the kitchen floor through which you could see the building’s cracked foundation. But it was where G-man got his cook’s hands, his knife-callus and hatchmarks and burn scars. It was where he learned to keep up with an unexpected rush, where the skin of his fingertips toughened enough that he could pick up hot plates and food just out of the fryer. It was where he became a cook rather than a piece of half-assed kitchen meat. When Rickey came home a few months later, he was surprised to find that G-man had gotten an education too.

  Chef Irvin had died of lung cancer a few years ago. When he heard about it, G-man pictured the chef standing at the pearly gates giving St. Peter what-for: “You bitch-ass gatekeeper, how come you think I want to get into your motherfuckin Heaven? I don’t give a fuck about all that harp and halo bullshit. Go on, motherfucker, send me to Hell, all my friends probably ended up there anyway …”

  The afternoon was winding down toward the blue hour when twilight began to settle over the city. There was a breeze off the river and a light scrim of clouds overhead. It was May now, the last spell of temperate weather they were likely to see for many months. G-man sat on the steps for a while, then went back into the casino and descended to the test kitchen. The vomity smell of the gastrique had been replaced by the aroma of roasting fennel and beef marrow. His dough had risen nicely. Just as he was putting the loaves in the oven, Lenny came by with a box of goodies that included some Plugra butter. The four of them sat in the semicircular booth at one side of the kitchen eating osso buco and olive bread slathered with Plugra. The expensive butter had a smooth, sweet flavor that perfectly complemented the marrow they scooped out of the veal bones. “I think I gained five pounds since we set up this kitchen,” Rickey said.

  “You can take it off later,” said Lenny. “Just think of eating as part of your job right now.”

  “I always think of eating as part of my job,” said Tanker. “I never gain a goddamn ounce, though.”

  “Me either,” said G-man.

  “You wait,” Lenny told them. “You’re young yet.”

  “I won’t mind if I do,” Tanker said. “I always been too skinny. Mo says I need malteds.”

  “Malteds?” said Rickey. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Something her grammaw in New Jersey used to give the kids when they’d been sick.”

  “Malteds,” said Lenny. “Malted milk. It’s like a chocolate shake with malt powder. You never had one?”

  The three younger men shook their heads. “Must be some kinda Yankee thing,” said G-man.

  “I ought to take you guys to New York. You need some education.”

  “I already been to New York,” said Rickey. “I didn’t like it.”

  “Yeah, well, New York sucks when you’re broke. Tell you what. Sometime next year, after you start making some money from Liquor, we’ll go up there just to eat. I’ll introduce you around, take you to the good places.”

  “Damn!” said Tanker. “Look at their faces, Lenny. These are a couple of dyed-in-the-wool yat boys. You’re gonna have a hard time prying them loose from New Orleans.”

  “We’re no yats,” said Rickey. “You gotta be old to be a yat.”

  “Bullshit,” Tanker told him. “Here, take my foolproof yat test.” He scrawled five words on a paper napkin—SURE, ALL RIGHT, ROOM, TULANE—and pushed it across the table. “Read that out loud.”

  “Shore. Awright. Rum. TOO-lane,” Rickey read.

  “You’re as yatty as they come.”

  “What’s a yat anyway?” said Lenny. “I know it’s somebody who talks like you guys, but I don’t know why you call it that.”

  “Hey Lenny, where y’at?” chorused the three New Orleanians, more or less in unison.

  Lenny laughed. “OK, I get it. I think you’re trying to change the subject, though. How can you learn about food if you refuse to travel? What am I going to do with you two?”

  “Sign the checks and leave us alone,” said Rickey. “Don’t be sending us to New York and shit.”

  Tanker blinked. “Harsh, man.”

  “Aw, they say that sort of stuff to me all the time,” Lenny assured him. “I’m used to it. Is there any more olive bread?”

  G-man got up and unwrapped another loaf from the nest of clean towels keeping it warm. Rather than slicing the loaf, he just stuck a knife in it and set it in front of Lenny. With the knife’s handle sticking straight up, it looked like something Hagar the Horrible would order. “There you go,” he said. “It won’t be any good tomorrow, so knock yourself out. Tanker, you wanna take some home?”

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “We been eating so much of our own cooking here, we don’t eat at home any more. There’s nothing in our fridge but some old jars of mustard and a bottle of vodka.”

  “You could make a dinner special with that,” said Lenny.

  “Fuck off,” Rickey told him, unmaliciously, without looking up from the last shreds of meat on his osso buco.

  “You like that,” said G-man.

  “I think it’s one of the best things I ever made. It was mostly Tanker’s idea, though. I’m telling you, we gotta get this guy.”

  “You hear me arguing?”

  Tanker tapped his fork on the table to get their attention. “It just so happens I been thinking about this,” he said. “If I come back from Colorado, and if you still want to hire me, I’d like to work with you. I like the way you cook. But I’m tired of being on the line. I want to do something totally different. Make me your pastry chef.”

  “What?” said Lenny. “You really are nuts, Tank. You want to go from chef de cuisine to pastry puff?”

  “Yeah, yeah, you big-dick badass chefs, you always gotta rag on the dessert guys. I got talked out of going to pastry school for that exact reason, and I still regret it. I love desserts. Never outgrew ’em.”

  “You got any dessert experience?” said Rickey.

  “Just at home. I got a nice hand with the pie crust—that’s a rare thing if you ask me—and I learned to make ice cream last year. I can do dacquoise, meringue, Lady Baltimore cake, baked Alaska—”

  “You made baked Alaska at home?” asked Lenny.

  “Sure.”

  “I’d give him the job if I were you.”

  “What about our salads?” said Rickey. “I thought you were gonna make us these gorgeous salads.”

  “I’ll make you some salads,” Tanker assured him. “I won’t be able to help it—the ideas just come to me once in a while. I’m a fucking prima donna about salads.”

  “Somebod
y needs to be,” said Lenny, “most of the ones you get in this city.”

  “And I guess New York is the goddamn salad capital of the world?” said Rickey.

  “Well, not quite. You want great salads, you ought to check out California wine country.”

  “Forget it.”

  “What do you have against traveling?” said Tanker. “Don’t you know there’s things out there you’ll never get to eat unless you go find ’em?”

  “Yeah, but I told you, I already traveled. I didn’t like it.”

  “I bet you were just homesick.”

  Rickey shrugged.

  “And I bet you didn’t eat anything good.”

  “Well, some of us went into the city one weekend. Me and my friend Dave Fiorello and a couple other people from Skills. We were all poor, and we heard you could eat real cheap in Chinatown. There was this fish …” Rickey’s eyes took on a faraway look. “Some kinda cod. I didn’t think I’d like it—I mean, it wasn’t a Gulf fish. They took it right out this tank in the front of the restaurant, steamed it, and brought it to the table still on the bone, with the head and everything. Didn’t do much to it—just some soy, ginger, and scallions—but they didn’t need to. I had some good fish in my life, but I never tasted anything else that fresh.”

  “He wrote me a whole letter about it,” said G-man.

  “See?” said Lenny. “I know you love New Orleans. I understand that. I came here once and never left. But you have to broaden your horizons.”

  Rickey and G-man got up from the table and started clearing the dishes.

  “Better leave it alone for now, Lenny,” said Tanker. “They aren’t listening any more. All they see is that Greyhound Scenicruiser going down the highway into the heart of darkness, and they don’t want any part of it.”

  chapter 18

  Rickey parked behind the building—he was actually starting to think of it as Liquor—and walked around to the Broad Street side. He usually entered through the kitchen door, but the renovations were far enough along that he wanted to see what the place looked like coming in the front, as diners would.