I WAS GOING BAMBOO, slowly but surely, my body becoming acclimated to the distinctly Asian rhythms of the place—to the hours, the smells, the background chatter of a language that was not my own. I’d grown to feel comfortable and at ease at China Town—behind the bar and in the dining room, passing through the kitchen to get to the coolers to retrieve limes, lemons, oranges and pineapples for garnish; spelunking through the dark basement corridors to get to the liquor room. Now, when it was my turn to watch Jake’s or Barney’s back, I adopted the same casual squat of the kitchen crew: loose-limbed, elbows on my knees, cigarette in my hand, staring flat and dead-eyed across the dark parking lot. I learned, out of necessity, to use chopsticks at China Town. And though to this day I still hold them wrong (as would a clumsy child or, worse, snapping away like some kind of retarded lobster, with quickness but no grace), during staff meals I could hold my own—reaching into the communal pot or platter to snag the best bits before they were all eaten, sucking on chicken feet in day-old brown sauce, eating scraps of pork or beef deemed unfit for public consumption or whole chicken and duck eggs, hard-boiled and tossed in soy sauce. To my gwailo, white-barbarian palate, these were some of the best meals I’d ever eaten.
The cooks at China Town made the best salt-and-pepper shrimp I’ve ever had, even to this day. These were served whole, shell-on, crusted in a crispy, fried paste of salt and pepper, and I would eat them with my fingers—taking them by the fistful from the platter brought out from the kitchen and set on the bar, transferring them to a plate and eating them all night between drink orders until my lips were dry and flaking and my breath terrible with shrimp funk.
For reasons I never understood, the other employees dreaded salt-and-pepper-shrimp day like they were being served hot Super Balls in used motor oil. I, on the other hand, could not stomach their favorite: cold omelets of kitchen scraps that the cooks made by cracking and scrambling eggs into a pot of boiling stock and dumping in whatever they could find kicking around the lowboys—old meat, dead vegetable ends, highly questionable shellfish, cigarette butts, fingernail clippings. It tasted like eating the raft that floats on top of a clarifying consommé, and on those days I would subsist on fortune cookies and the bowls of crispy noodles put out on the bar, dipped in plum sauce.
MY FRIEND STACY drank at the China Town bar sometimes. She was loud when sober, but get two or three shots of well tequila into her and she was like a walking bullhorn with platinum-blond hair, blood-red lips and a crazy streak that bordered on clinical. She was the kind of girl who made a man want to drink whiskey and invest in a tranquilizer pistol, and one night she came rolling into the bar after work to tell me she had a friend I should get to know—a girl who might meet at least some of the weirdly byzantine requirements I’d developed for consideration of serious female companionship after several months of basement debauchery at China Town.
“She’s your dream girl, Jay,” Stacy insisted, smiling and cackling crazily. “Her name’s Samantha and I can’t wait for you to meet her.”
It should be said in Stacy’s defense that Sam did meet many of my alluded-to impossible standards. For example, she owned no Eagles CDs (which was grounds for automatic disqualification as girlfriend material, no appeal allowed), had perfectly normal-sized nipples (which I saw on our first quasi-date at Ridge Billiards, to which she wore shit-stomper Doc Martens and a homespun sundress, nothing else), and beyond that, smoked, drank, fought and fucked like a boroughs-bred hellion—sometimes all at once.
She had a shaved head and two nasty scars, both gotten at the point of a knife wielded in anger and in her direction; a killer music collection (mostly shoplifted) that ran the gamut from CBGB New York punk and hardcore to Lou Reed to drifty, art-rock proto-goth like Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins; and a tendency to strip naked in public, usually while we were walking home together after closing the bar. Together we made an interesting picture: Weegee crossed with Leibovitz, both of us starvation-thin, dark-eyed and sallow, her stark raving naked but for her Docs and piercings, me in some dead man’s tuxedo.
In the first year, Sam would make two serious attempts on my life and dislocate my jaw (accidentally) in a fight over who starred in Are You Being Served? on the BBC. Five years later, I would come within a hairsbreadth of marrying her but end up in the hospital instead, with her and my best friend, David, standing, concerned but not exactly grief-stricken, by my bedside. She was, at that point, in love with David. But I’ll save that story for its proper place.
After being introduced by Stacy, Sam and I managed a few weeks of near normalcy, living first in her attic room on Dartmouth Street atop a sort of punk-rock commune, then for a while in a studio apartment off Goodman, on the first floor of a house otherwise occupied by a mostly deaf German woman who was impressed, I think, with my wearing a tuxedo to work. This arrangement lasted several months and might’ve gone on longer if only Sam and I had managed to pay the rent. When this eventually came to a head, we moved again—packing our things into bursting cardboard boxes and trash bags, slinking out under the icy Teutonic gaze of our landlady, and hauling our few pathetic belongings down the street to the old Hungerford building.
In a thoroughly toxic part of the city, the Hungerford Building had, in former incarnations, been a shoe factory and a fruit warehouse, part of Rochester’s lost industrial infrastructure, but was now being rented out piecemeal to artists, sculptors, young computer programmers, playwrights, dancers and bums—not one of whom could admit to living there even though nearly every one of them did. Eighty dollars a month secured us a large, airy, squarish space on the third floor, accessible only by a groaning freight elevator, with cement floors, huge windows, hastily erected walls made from bare drywall, and no running water. We had rights to the communal bathroom down the hall and sporadic electricity. Phone service was the battered public telephone across the parking lot. My car was broken into twice in our first month there. The first time, the thieves politely smashed only the little triangular demi-window on the back passenger’s side and took my toolbox, pool cue and an eight-inch sheath knife I kept tucked into the springs under the driver’s seat. The second time, with nothing much else to steal, the fuckers smashed in the windshield and took my dress shoes and half a sandwich I’d left on the front seat.
CHINA TOWN IS GONE NOW, replaced by God-knows-what during one of the periodic gentrifications of downtown Rochester. I don’t know what became of Barney, of Jake, of Vietnamese Hitler or any of my regulars.
At the end, Sam would come in and we’d drink Molsons and watch TV like we were at home, close the place, buy a bottle of peppermint schnapps out of the register, get loaded and end up down on the beach, swimming naked, walking beneath the creepy shadow of the Jack Rabbit—one of the oldest still-operating wooden roller coasters in the country, a holdover from the days when Rochester’s Seabreeze Amusement Park rivaled Coney Island as a playground for East Coast swells.
But finally, I’d had enough. “This is it, Jake. My last night.”
I wanted to explain to him that I had plans, things I wanted to see and do; that this was supposed to have been an interim job—just something to get me back on my feet, put a little money in my pocket. I’d come in hoping to work a few weeks, tops, until something better came along. That had been more than two years ago. Nothing better had come. Not that I’d been looking . . .
Jake just told me to leave, paid me out, slumped down at the bar and turned to watch the TV.
A couple of days later, I was back to pick up a few things—books, a pair of boots, stuff I’d left behind. I walked up the long flight of stairs and into the bar. Barney and Jake were both standing there, talking with the customers, laughing and raising their drinks. Everyone was having a great time.
When Jake stepped aside, I could see behind the bar. Michael was there in a tuxedo, bow tie done tight, polishing a glass like he’d never left. He smiled when he saw me—a vicious, murderous, hateful smile that spoke of years of patience, of waiti
ng. He was back; I was gone. To him, that must have seemed like victory.
I turned and walked out without my things. On the street, I took a deep breath that smelled nothing like kung pao chicken and had a feeling that I’d escaped something, and just in time.
When the alarm goes off, it drags me out of a dream of potatoes. Nothing weird, just potatoes. Peeling potatoes, shredding potatoes, ricing them, running them across the naked blade of the mandolin.
Mandolins11 have always scared me. They’re dangerous contraptions, terribly unstable, bloodthirsty. Slip on the mandolin and you won’t just nick yourself. There’ll be a nice waffle-cut piece of your palm lying on the cutting board, an inch-long piece of skin dangling from the blade.
In my dream, I’d been running a sack of potatoes through the mandolin, cutting them finer and finer. Had I kept at it, I knew I would’ve ended up hurting myself. In my dream, I hadn’t been able to stop. Only the bleating of the alarm had saved my dream-me’s knuckles.
I’ve got a cigarette lit before my eyes are even open. Sam reaches over and sets our heavy clay ashtray on my chest.
“You awake?” she asks.
“No.”
“Ten more minutes?”
I think about it while holding my breath, first drag held deep in my lungs.
“No,” I decide, huffing out an angry storm front of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. “Better not. How long was I asleep?”
“About an hour. You going to take a shower?”
“No.” I set the ashtray aside and sit up, groaning, my back and legs still sore, my feet burning. I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. My boots were outside. They smell like death, my boots—like I’d taken them off a corpse, and not a fresh one. My boots are no longer allowed inside.
“Hungry?”
“No.”
“You should eat.”
“No.”
“Really, you should.”
As a compromise, I take four ibuprofen and swallow them with a mouthful of warm Mountain Dew. I light another cigarette. Sam has retreated to the corner of the futon bed—our only piece of furniture—and is watching a BBC comedy, Are You Being Served?, on PBS, on our twelve-inch black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears and the missing volume knob. The TV sits on top of a milk crate. She’s going through the laundry stacked on the floor. I’m staring at my feet, wondering why in the hell they hurt so bad. It’s ten minutes after nine at night.
“What?” I ask.
“What?” Sam repeats.
“Did you ask me something?”
“No.”
Shrugging. “I gotta go, baby.”
“I know. See you in the morning?”
“I’ll try not to wake you.”
She turns. “No, Jay. Wake me, okay? Just wake me up. I won’t mind.”
I smile, know she’s lying. “Okay. I’ll wake you.”
I stand up, strip off my T-shirt, change into my black one with the faded white Misfits skull. To get my blood moving, I jump in place, swing my arms, crack my neck. My feet are killing me. I roll my shoulders and the joints make popping sounds like squeezing a roll of Bubble Wrap. I kiss the girl and head for the door.
It’s the most we’ve talked in a couple weeks. I’m feeling good.
AFTER I LEFT CHINA TOWN, Sam and I had hit on the idea of a road trip, a big, no-holds-barred, high-speed cross-country romp, conceived in the Kerouacian mode (which is to say, drunk), and executed with little planning, less money, and absolutely zero understanding of what was waiting for us out there in the great, wide whatsis. We’d bummed our way through many states, slept in the car, picked fights, begged for change, gone all the way to California, to Mexico, to California again.
Now, we were back. Sam was working days, I can’t remember where. I was working nights in a roadhouse diner just down the hill and around the corner from her folks’ house, where we were staying in a barely converted one-room apartment/solarium. It was not an ideal situation, but it was lovely. We were living, more or less, in a glass house, looking out over nothing but wooded slopes and a small stream that burbled with a placidity completely lost on me. Neither of us had anything like a plan for moving on.
I SHOW UP AT THE RESTAURANT a half hour early for the start of my 10:00 p.m. shift, and the dinner crew is already anxious to clock out for the night.
I am precise to a fault about clocking in, always showing up twenty or thirty minutes early and performing all the necessary preshift investigations: making sure the bread racks have been pulled around close to the kitchen door, that the stock in the coolers has been moved into night positions, that all the inserts in the cold tables have been topped and backed up and that at least a dozen cold beers are hidden under the trash bags out in the little stockade enclosure behind the restaurant where the Dumpsters live.
I check the stock levels in the walk-ins and freezer, look at pars and paperwork that I’m barely able to read—spreadsheeted portion breakdowns and prep lists prepared for and by managers but containing, I believe, some arcane wisdom just slightly beyond my ken. Frustrated, I turn away from the clipboards and weigh back stock and breakouts by eye and experience, by a simple comparison: knowing what a full cooler looks like at the beginning of a night, knowing what a wreck of one looks like at the end of one. After just a few months on this job, I can judge an entire walk-in at a glance; know almost without looking where we are going to be short, where we are long. It’s all about supply lines and dispersion of supplies. Who will need what, when, and in what quantities. I do the grunt math in my head and, inevitably, find our stock lacking. Not wanting to be caught light, I razor open cardboard boxes full of brown, waxy bags of frozen fries, pull fifty extra pounds of burger patties, forty dozen more eggs, a flat of frozen steaks out to thaw. It’s a Friday night and it’s going to be bad. They all are.
Only after all this business is done (plus various odds and ends) do I clock myself in and punch the cards for all my guys. Most of them will roll in sometime in the next half hour; straggling in one at a time, coming from wherever they go when they’re not at work, from whatever they do when they’re not here—which is not stuff any of us much care to talk about. Stumbling drunk, sometimes bloodied, stinking of beer and skank and the kind of troubled debauchery that only the very desperate or very creative can find before Letterman’s opening monologue is over, they come because they are mercenaries: well paid for doing a job no one else wants.
But it’s my responsibility to have them all here on time, and under my watch they’re never late. At least not on paper.
I’VE LEARNED NOT TO STEP across the border separating the line proper from the rest of the kitchen until I have to. When I do, the switch flips—turning the house over from dinner shift to night shift. And I am careful in timing my move onto the line because—at least until my boys start rolling in—I’m alone here.
As soon as I step in, the dinner crew will walk off. Immediately. No matter what they’re doing. They could be in the middle of a hit, halfway through flipping an egg, whatever. They walk, and the line becomes mine. So I must be cautious: make sure a party of ten didn’t just get seated, make sure there’s not more than a couple of easy checks on the slide, make sure nothing is on fire.
The dinner crew has good reason for their peevishness. I mean besides their all being a bunch of pussy little bitches who wouldn’t know a hard night’s work if it snuck up and fucked ’em, they’re mostly company men—loyal guys who’ve been in this galley a long time, who’ve clawed their way into this sweet two-to-ten slot through years of responsible, dedicated labor. They believe that this ought to make them characters deserving of some respect, and they often take spiteful offense at the night crew’s complete and total dismissal of them.
When working, they look like bored extras cast in some kind of industrial training film about the joys of teamwork and proper food handling. They all have to wear these totally gay polo shirts, hats, hairnets and latex rectal-exam gloves. We wear whatever we want, whatever
we wake up in, and look, for the most part, like the infield crowd at Talladega or the crew of a hip pirate ship—all tattoos and earrings and boots and long knives and gold teeth.
They have to actually show up on time. Because I have faith that, unless dead or in handcuffs, my guys will all arrive eventually, they get here when they get here. As I was once trusted when I first started this gig, I now trust them. We don’t let each other down.
The dinner crew is expected to be clean, sober and presentable while working; to restrain their more base impulses and behave, at all times, in a polite and respectable fashion. As for us, we have a twelve-inch-long, heavily veined, and anatomically improbable foam dick that we keep in a box and slap down onto the omelets of customers who, for one reason or another, piss us off. We have our own sched ules, ashtrays in the kitchen, beers out by the Dumpster, and beyond even the usual restaurant-industry friction between front of the house and back of the house, crew and bosses—the sometimes genial, sometimes abrasive back-and-forth about who has the harder job, who’s smart and who’s dumb—we have an unmitigated disdain for anyone who’s not One of Us. It’s a tribal thing: Us versus Them. And Them are anyone who ain’t Us: customers, waitstaff, management, dinner crew.
FOUR COOKS ARE NOW permanently in the night brigade; four guys who rotate a single night off a week, then me, who gets none. In the beginning, I was part of someone else’s night brigade, but turnover in this galley is high, so now it is my kitchen, my crew. There’s Juan, who runs my fryers. James is my roundsman, my jack-of-all-trades. Freddy usually works the grill. Hero does eggs on the flat.
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