Juan is Mexican, heavily muscled, big, and aggressively pansexual by way of unwelcome assault. He will dry-hump anything—waiters, waitresses, busboys, produce boxes, doorframes. When he wants his fryers to work faster, he mounts them—grabbing their hot, oily flanks bare-handed and gently bumping his dick against the front panel, sweet-talking the equipment in gentle Spanish. Whenever not on the line, he can be located by listening for the squeals of outrage from the staff—Juan pinning a waiter up against the ice machine and molesting him for some presumed slight. This does not do good things for front-of-the-house morale. It does wonders for Juan.
James is an old man. Thirty-two and divorced, father of two. He has a master’s degree in something brainy that he’d never managed to translate into a straight job, and a drinking problem. The problem is, he doesn’t know when to stop, or can’t, or won’t. He started working nights on the theory that nights are when the bars are open and, if he was working, he wouldn’t be at them. Worked great until he started finding bars that opened at 7:00 a.m. Now he works shift and a half whenever he can (doing a full night, then a cooking stretch from eight in the morning to eleven to help out the breakfast crew) and drinks only on the job. This is his idea of self-improvement. Maybe it works. He seems happy all the time even though I believe he’s currently living in his car.
Freddy is a junkie. Hero is a hero. Freddy shoots smack and knocks off every day at 5:00 a.m. to rocket crosstown in his beat-ass, fifth-hand Civic to get to his second job, making bagels at a bakery in the city. Hero is tall, blond, young, good-looking, with blue eyes and a Vanilla Ice flattop like a landing pad for really bad ideas.
Freddy looks like he belongs here—he is most assuredly One of Us. Hero looks like he ought to be wearing deck shoes and crewing a regatta schooner. No one has ever figured out how he ended up here, but he did. The dick-in-the-omelet thing? That was Hero’s idea. The beers out in the Dumpster corral? He started that, too. And he’s fucked every waitress on the floor—will often discuss the relative merits, skills and pet peeves of each, pointing them out as they walk by the pass.
“Fat but kinky. Ready to go anytime, anywhere.”
“That one? Likes it in the ass.”
“That one made me wear two rubbers.”
“What, is she new?”
Hero is my buddy, my backup—as tall and fair-haired as I am short and squirrelly. He comes to work sometimes straight from the strip clubs, wearing sweatpants and slip-on Vans; stripping down to boxers in the middle of the kitchen and changing into his gear. He’d been in the Iraq war—the first one—but doesn’t talk about it except that his language is peppered somewhat more heavily with military jargon than is the rest of ours.
And he has moves—serious moves. Eggs is the toughest station. Straight hit, start to finish, no breaks. It takes the most delicate hand, the most patience, concentration like a Zen master’s. Eggs on bar rush is like trying to build a house of cards in the middle of a street fight. It’s all elbows, yelling, blood and ruckus, but you break one yolk and it blows your whole rhythm. Timing is what matters. And Hero doesn’t have a brain, just a cock and thirty kitchen timers in his head. Once, he’d popped off the line in the middle of a fierce rush—no explanation, his eggs all lined up, swimming in a slick of fifty-fifty oil on the shimmering flattop, cooking away. Less than five minutes later, he came back—swaggering, dipshit grin on his face—and picked up exactly where he’d left off, flipping eggs, plating eggs. He didn’t lose a single order. He’d read the slide, checked the upcoming fires, estimated the time it would take the other stations to assemble, picked his moment, and ducked out into the parking lot for a blow job from a girlfriend he’d spotted in the mob waiting at the door.
And then there’s me, in charge of this motley army, top dog for as long as I can hold on—until I burn out, flake out, lose my shit or die. Starting at ten o’clock every night, I am God of the box, the braindamaged Lord Commander of a kingdom fifty feet by five and made entirely of stainless steel, industrial tile, knives, sweat and fire. I am the wheelman, King of the Galley, and Christ save the peasants.
NO ONE IS HIRED AS WHEELMAN. You have to earn it. It’s a hereditary title here, passed down from man to man within the galley family. I inherited it from Jimmy, who’d freaked out one night, hit a waitress, and was subsequently beaten stupid by all of us in the kitchen,12 his former praetorian guard. Jimmy had inherited the post from Kyle, who just didn’t show up one night and was never heard from again.
When I got the wheel,13 I was literally knighted on the spot—a whip-quick consensus decision made by the crew. I’d been doing eggs (though I was a real good egg man, Hero is still better), and suddenly there I was, kneeling down on the filthy mats in the middle of a crushing bar rush amid all the eggshells and trash while the ticket printer chattered away like a machine gun. James (who, by seniority, likely should’ve taken the position himself, but passed) touched me on both shoulders with the long, burnished wheel spatula that’d once been Jimmy’s, and when I rose, I was showered with yellow shredded cheese like rose petals thrown by all the other guys on the line. We were all laughing like hyenas, cracking our bruised knuckles. I’d stepped to my new post so proudly I thought I would pop, while, behind us, Jimmy lay on the floor of the kitchen—cast out, forgotten, still screaming and bleeding into a floor drain.
That was about three weeks ago. I haven’t had a night off since. But I’m twenty-two years old, juiced on the high of command, on pride at doing a tough job under demanding conditions with no rules and a mercenary army at my back, so I’m happy with that. Really, I am.
NOW IT’S TEN O’CLOCK on the button. I step onto the line, and as expected, the dinner crew drops everything and walks off without a word.
The slide is empty, the dining room quiet. I start going through the hundred small things that must be done to prepare for the first serious hit of the shift, due in around midnight. I check coolers, temps and doors. I rotate supplies, catalog all the things the dinner crew was supposed to do but didn’t. I make a list in my head. They didn’t strain the fryer oil. Motherfuckers. The mats are disgusting. The hot boxes are nearly empty. Deep prep looks good, but basic supplies are running short everywhere: cheeses, warmed eggs, oil, bacon, sausage, thawed burgers, lettuce, tomatoes. There’s an hour’s work here at least just to get things ready for the midnight rush and two hours to do it in. Cinch. Except that the line is still running and every time the printer chatters, it eats into the clock. Right now, it’s just math: time remaining divided by number of arriving crew multiplied by possible amount of checks that will need to be cooked between now and zero hour. But in about an hour and forty-five minutes it’s going to become much more personal as everyone starts to scramble.
I start pulling up the nonskids, folding them double so they’ll fit into the big machine in the dish room. I run the machine myself—stepping away only when the printer tells me I must cook two cheeseburgers/fries, roll an omelet, heat-to-serve a hot turkey sandwich. On a flat rack, you can stack two mats, cram them in, and just get the door shut with enough clearance for the machine to run. Company policy expressly forbids the washing of floor mats in the dish machine. Last time someone mentioned this to us, we ran the company handbook through the dish machine, too.
Don’t talk to me about policy. I know exactly what an industrial dish machine can and can’t do. God knows I got enough practice back in the day.
ALL THE FREE REIN WE HAVE, all the shit we don’t catch, all the looking-the-other-way done by the bosses—we’ve earned that. On our best nights, me, Hero, Freddy, James and Juan do just one thing that makes all the difference. We do the job.
But here’s the trick. The job? The job’s gonna fuck you up. The job’s gonna wreck you. We all knew that coming in. We were warned.
“In the last six months, the average cook I’ve put on C-trip14 has lasted less than a week. Most of them were gone after two days. A lot never made it to the end of their first shift.” That’s what I was
told when I applied, by the restaurant’s general manager, who, himself, had never worked a night shift and couldn’t figure out why his turnover was so high. “So are you sure you want this?”
It was like a bad war movie.
No, it was like a good war movie. Like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now: I asked for a mission and, for my sins, they gave me one.
And I don’t remember exactly what I said to him. Fifteen years gone, I don’t recall the specifics of our negotiation. But I know myself and I know a twenty-two-year-old me would’ve given only one answer to a question like that.
“Yeah,” I would’ve told him. “Yeah, I want it. Bring it on.”
THE PROBLEM WITH HIRING MERCENARIES IS THIS: As management, what you’re looking for are guys who can do a tough, ugly job under bad conditions and survive long enough to make a difference. You hope for things like personal leadership, capability under fire, independence, guts. But when you get right down to it, what you’re hiring are killers. People who like to kill other people. Staffing a kitchen is not a lot different. What you want are guys who can do the job. What you get are guys who like doing the job. And at the low end—in the quarter of the business where I was currently residing—what that’s going to guarantee you is a line full of fucking lunatics, right off the bat. Guys who never rose through the ranks or never wanted to. Guys who want the job precisely because it is so punishing, because so many others have failed at it and because they want to be king of the dregs. Guys who hear “suicide mission” and say, “Sign me up, boss.”
Jimmy had held on to the wheel for three months before cracking up—which wasn’t a record, but it was a long time. Kyle had lasted three weeks. I think the guy before him went two days. In the time that I’ve been here, we’ve torn through countless other cooks, in a variety of positions, and whenever one went down, went AWOL, just threw in the towel and said, “Fuck this shit. I’m going home,” Lucy, the night manager, has plugged up the holes in the line with the next guy whose name was flagged in the stack of applications and marked WWN: Will Work Nights. The average life expectancy of the Cherry, the Virgin, the FNG, is measured in days—few enough to count on one hand—and the only reason we keep ’em coming on is because we have no choice.
Full-body hard. That’s the phrase we used to describe new hires who we knew would probably make it okay, join the family and take their places as regulars on the night line. And it meant just what you think it means: a guy who was a straight-up, toes-to-top boner in those last couple minutes before the rush came in; stiff as wood and just so goddamn excited to see what was coming that if you breathed on him wrong, he would’ve popped.
Me and the other guys now in the night brigade are the ones who stuck, the ones who loved the heat and the noise and the pure adrenaline high of doing a difficult job under impossible circumstances. We were (and are) totally hard for it. And though we all might like to think of ourselves as some kind of super-badass immortal legion of short-order night cooks, the truth is, my guys keep coming here night after night for the same simple reasons I do. We do it because we have to, because to not come—to be a no-call/no-show, chickenshit, lazy-ass, fucked-out slacker—would be letting down the team. We do it because most of us—myself included—know that this job is all we got. We’re lucky. Without the work, we’d all just be mooching off friends, wives, parents. And while we might actually all be a bunch of bums, junkies and head cases, this way at least we’re bums, junkies and head cases with jobs—with a reason to get up off the couch each day, put our pants on, fish our sunglasses out of the toilet and get out in the world.
We do it because, here, we’re part of something. We’re expected, which is only a big deal to people who understand what it’s like not to be expected anywhere.
Kitchens are the last true American meritocracy. If you can do the job, nothing else matters. No one cares about your past or what you do on the outside. Color, creed, sexual orientation, personal tastes, politics—who cares. Can you cook? That’s all anyone cares about. Can you do the work? You can be an illegal immigrant, an ex-convict, a Satanist, a Republican. You can spend your downtime smoking meth and consorting with prostitutes, plotting the overthrow of the government, eating dead babies for breakfast. Doesn’t matter. Just show up on time and keep it together on the line.
Also, we do it because it’s fun. Real, serious, big-time fun. There’s fire and big knives and loud noises, danger everywhere, the potential for crippling injury at every turn. Every conversation that isn’t about the job is about cock and pussy. Every moment that isn’t spent on the line, in the weeds, under fire, is spent talking big and behaving badly.
By any rational accounting, we all should’ve been fired twenty times over—if not for minor infractions like drinking on the job or simple insubordination or occasionally locking a waiter or busboy in the coffin freezer, then for the much more serious stuff like shooting heroin on the job or punching people or forgetting that we’d locked one of the waiters in the coffin freezer for, like, twenty minutes. We should’ve all been thrown out and never, ever allowed to return. Most of us should’ve been in jail.
But that hasn’t happened because no one else can do the job, and more to the point, no one else wants it.
QUARTER AFTER TEN.
I lean across the pass and tell the first waitress I see that the flat grills are down. I need to make twenty pounds of bacon in a hurry.
“Twenty minutes,” I say. “Tell your friends.”
The very next check that comes in? Three egg plates, hash browns and a grilled cheese—all off the griddle-tops. I tear the dupe off the machine, wad it up and throw it out into the server’s trench.
“Not cooking this!” I yell to no one in particular. “Flat grills are eighty-six.”
Nobody listens.
AFTER COMING BACK FROM CALIFORNIA and elsewhere, I’d gone immediately back to work. Restaurants were easier to slide back into this time, and I’d bounced around some—slopping breakfasts at a family restaurant in the suburbs, working briefly in a place where the guy next to me on the line showed up one night with a nasty running head wound and worked his station one-handed, pressing a side towel against his skull with the other so he wouldn’t bleed on the Moons Over My Hammy.
I ran the kitchen at a roadhouse bar where the only thing I ever had to cook was chicken wings, the only thing I ever had to order was more chicken wings, and the entire crew consisted of me and an older Mexican dishwasher who I’d have to wake whenever the bus pans started stacking up. The guy had three jobs: construction of some sort during the day, the bar at night, and off-loading trucks at a grocery warehouse for a couple hours every day before dawn. Far as I knew, the only sleep he got was sitting in a gimp-legged chair with his head resting on a rack of cleaning supplies, drifting off to the mingled stink of bleach, rancid grease and industrial solvents. Most of the time I just did the dishes myself.
It was shitty work. But I’d needed something and, lucky for me, kitchen employment was plentiful for a boy of little morals and less expectation. And it’s funny the way things work out: I’d actually ended up at this place because my last gig (the roadhouse with the sleepy Mexican) had been too boring. I’d stopped in for a cup of coffee late one night after a particularly dull stretch spent dunking chicken wings for the dozen-odd neighborhood stiffs who’d shown up to watch the owner’s cousin’s or brother-in-law’s cover band mumble and thrash their way through the greatest hits of Southern-fried rock and started in complaining to Lucy (whom I’d actually known for years prior to working with her, from back when she was a night-shift waitress at a different all-nighter in the city and I was a customer who used to spend altogether too much time hanging out in her section with my no-account high school friends). And Lucy, in the style of an expert army recruiter or the person whose job it is to entice wayward young girls into lives of service to God, had listened sympathetically, nodding and commiserating and carefully sneaking in questions about my situation.
The ne
xt thing I knew, she was instructing me to mark the top of an application WWN. The general manager called me the next morning. I met with him early that afternoon. I started working that night. About five months later, I took over the wheel. And now, three weeks after that, I’m about to have the worst night of my life.
Which is really saying something. I mean, you’ve been reading this stupid thing. I’ve had some pretty bad nights already, right?
Just wait.
FULL-BODY HARD.
Seriously. From day one. I would, in the future, experience worse hits, heavier rushes, busier restaurants and longer days. But never again would I feel them so viscerally, brutally, or with such destructive force as I did here.
The reason was just a simple quirk of geography. Several months earlier, a few months before I was hired, a forty-thousand-square-foot country-line-dancing joint had opened just a stagger away—across the street, across a massive parking lot—and it drew a huge and diverse crowd from across several counties. This was 1990-what-ever, when line dancing, “Achy Breaky Heart,” and the unabashed wearing of mullets were all indescribably, inconceivably popular. So at eight or eight-thirty, every Wednesday through Saturday night, the bar would take in thousands of urban/suburban cowboys, men in ridiculous hats, women with enormous permed hair, dudes and ranchers, young men in tight jeans, young women wearing more sequins than the cast of a Busby Berkeley revival. These were actual farm folk from the rural areas surrounding Rochester, fans of country-western pop music, and normal people who thought it stylish to pull on a snap-front western shirt and a big white cowboy hat, then dance like morons while drinking watery beers and comparing the size of their belt buckles. And at the end of each night, the bar spit all these people back out again—riled up, hot, drunk and hungry for pancakes.
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