Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  Slim shrugs, stammers and backs around the corner.

  Hero plates four egg orders: bang, bang, bang, bang. He leans in close to me. “Call in the runners, man. We can clear this.”

  I look across the dupes on the slide, check the three in my hand, the clock, the condition of my troops. I do some quick math in my head. Hero is right. A couple of runners who can get all this food out of the pass and onto people’s tables might be enough to put us ahead of the curve. I see a patch of daylight and run for it.

  “Two minutes,” I tell Hero. “I’m calling them in. Pass the word.”

  Hero tells Freddy. I tell James, tell Wendy to put everything he has on plates, like, now. “My hand, Wendy. Everything.” Then to the line: “Fire it all. Let’s dig out. Go.”

  Everyone puts their heads down, quickly memorizing everything they have on the board. I take a deep breath, clear my head and start re-calling everything on the slide, factoring in the new orders in my hand. Before I’m even halfway through, James and Hero and Freddy start calling back to me—repeating everything I say out loud in their own order, their own slang, which helps everyone remember, helps them focus when they’re mapping twenty burgers onto the grill, forty orders of pancakes, two dozen egg orders, whatever.

  “Blow ’em out,” I finish. “Wheel down for two.”

  I sprint off the line, collect two busboys and two dishwashers who have to strip out of their disposable plastic aprons. These are my runners. I herd them ahead of me out into the trench and start loading them down with trays, sending them out in two squads of two to deliver food to waiting tables—anything I can lay hands on, clearing my pass for more food coming.

  The instant the servers see runners on the floor, they freak out and come at a sprint. My using runners means that they are not waiting on their tables. Their tips go down. They get inundated with sudden requests for bottles of ketchup, straws, refills on water or coffee—all the things that the runners don’t carry with them. Management gets complaints from angry customers who were ignored by “that little brown feller with the dirty fingernails” or cursed at in Spanish for requesting napkins, a spoon. This all makes the servers’ jobs harder for a few minutes, means they bring home a few less dollars at the end of the night.

  But ask me how much I care about the servers’ tips right now. Go ahead. Ask me.

  TWO A.M. Ten minutes till the bar rush arrives.

  The whole dining room is fed. The rail is clear. We’re dug out and back on top, catching our breath. That’s when Freddy decides to slug Hero.

  Sucker punch, actually. Hero’s back is turned. And it isn’t hard and Freddy is laughing—just joking, really, payback for the hose thing earlier—but Hero takes it all wrong, spins around and lays Freddy out; hitting him with a solid, straight-arm punch in the chest. Hero has been having a bad night. He’s just in no mood.

  A fight on the line is dangerous. There are lots of knives, boiling oil, long, pointed forks, any number of things that would make excellent clubs or cudgels. It’s some seriously medieval shit. You could kill a guy with a ten-inch chef’s knife, easy; cave in someone’s skull with one of the heavy pig-iron weights we use for bricking well-done burgers and steaks.

  But Freddy chooses none of these things. He hits Hero with a fish.

  More accurately, with a handful of fish, a big wad of it clawed up out of one of the pans full of poached haddock and batter. He struggles to his feet and crams it right in Hero’s face.

  Blinded, Hero flails. The fish pan gets knocked to the floor. The two of them grab each other and they both go down. Somehow, Freddy ends up on top, smearing chunky fish and batter into Hero’s hair, humping his back, moaning at him, “Oh, yeah. You like that, don’t you? You looove the fishies, don’t you?”

  It’s like hockey. No one is so dumb that they’re going to get between two guys fighting in such cramped quarters until they hit the ground. Hero is still flailing, trying to get his hands on Freddy, but James steps in and grabs Freddy by the hair and collar. I plant my boot in the middle of Hero’s back and kick him down. Separated, both of them bounce to their feet, covered in fish chunks, batter, whatever disgusting detritus had stuck to them while they were on the floor. They look like trash golems, panting monsters brought to life out of the fetid crap left over at the end of a hard rush.

  James stands between them, holding out his hands like a traffic cop. “Stop!” he yells. “You’re scaring Wendy.”

  I’ve got my hands on Hero’s shoulders, but he shakes loose of me. I’m wearing some of his fish on my T-shirt. Freddy’s bent over now, massaging his chest where Hero hit him. Both of them are giggling.

  “Go get cleaned up,” I tell them. “And no hitting. Be nice.”

  Hero gouges some fish out of his eyes and wipes his hands on my shirt in passing, making sure to get plenty down my collar. Freddy locks James in a big bear hug. They head for the back door, leaving sticky footprints on the red tile kitchen floor.

  Clack clack clack clack.

  I tear the ticket free. Ten-top. Just sat. “Here they come again,” I mutter, then shout back over my shoulder, “Make it fast, guys! We got tables incoming!”

  Wendy is staring at the check over my shoulder, puzzling over the computer-printed hieroglyphs.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “Just looking,” he says. “Is it always like this?”

  I hang the check, look at the mess of the fryer station, the fish batter smeared everywhere, the torn french-fry bags, eggshells that missed the trash, dropped toast, greasy handprints, crumbs and sausage links and burger rolls ground into the nonskid mats. Looking out across the pass toward the hostess stand, I can see parties starting to back up again at the door. In the bathroom, I can hear Hero and Freddy having a water fight.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much, it is.”

  THE NEXT THREE HOURS WERE A SCREAMING, stinking, crushing nightmare that none of us thought was ever going to end. The tables, they just kept coming. And coming. And coming. We couldn’t get them off the floor fast enough to chew through the bottleneck at the door, couldn’t fight our way far enough ahead that we could ride the wave of a turn—the lull between seatings where the busboys are frantically clearing tables and the servers taking drink orders. It was just a solid wall of tickets on the slide, a fat stack of them in my hand; panic calls for fries and toast and cakes and burgers and fish and eggs and eggs and eggs: fill the grills, empty them, fill them right back up again.

  In the baking warmth, the fish started cooking on us. Hero was the worst off because no matter what he did, he couldn’t scrub the batter out of his hair. He worked the rest of the night wearing a crown of gummy fish batter, a decomposing meat helmet cooking in the heat rising up off the egg grill.

  Around four in the morning, I started slipping, forgetting my place in the tangled skein of checks and holds and fire orders, the whole line of them blurring out into senselessness. And maybe that could’ve been forgiven under the circumstances. I mean, I’d been lit on fire. There’d been the fish, the fight. This was my twenty-second consecutive night shift.

  But those are all just excuses—rationales for collapse. And even if they were pretty good ones, they didn’t help. You did the job until you couldn’t do it anymore, until you died in the traces like a sled dog in a Jack London story—proud to have held up as long as you did, happy to have gone down fighting and among friends. That’s the deal you make with yourself. That’s the deal we all make together, every night.

  I started slamming Texas speedballs to keep my head together: two strong coffees with a beer chaser, darting off the line every time the grills loaded up, putting holds on checks and running out for the Dumpster corral to pound a longneck and half a cigarette, rotating Hero, James and Freddy out like relay runners, slapping them on the back, giving them two minutes of quiet and darkness.

  When I ran, Hero would spell me on wheel, grinding out tables as fast as he could, assembling checks from spare parts and plates
left on the pass, robbing two tables to sell one. When he ducked out, I flipped eggs—sliding smoothly into his spot, my focus narrowing, cracking and flipping and plating as fast as I was able. But he was doing more of a favor for me than I was for him. All I was doing was standing in his place, splinting a temporary break in the line. He was watching my back, bracing me up, covering for me in my weakness without saying a word. He had every right to call me out of my post, saying, “You’re fucked. Step off.” But he didn’t.

  “You’re my friend,” he said. “Let’s get this night done.”

  And he was wearing the fish hat, ferchrissakes. He smelled like death and the ocean. He was in way worse shape than I was. But he was still in there, still swinging, trying to keep me on my feet and the line together. I loved the fucker for that.

  THE LAST TABLE CLEARED the pass just after five.

  “Trip-waffle—fruit, fruit, dry. OE going bacon, side of three. Order up! Rail is clear. Line is down.”

  We all filed out, through the kitchen, into the back hallway where the morning bread and dry-goods order was already coming in. We curled up on the flour sacks, sprawled on milk crates and empty bread racks. With Lucy joining us, we lay in a pile like corpses, heads on each other’s shoulders, stinking feet up on knees, chain-smoking and scrubbing ice water into our faces, joking weakly, crunching handfuls of ibuprofen in anticipation of the pain that would come when the adrenaline wore off. The night was already passing into memory, becoming part of the lore of the house. Remember that time the kitchen exploded . . . ? Remember the fish fight . . . ? Remember Wendy . . . ?

  Wendy. We never saw him again after that first night. That’s probably no surprise. There are easier ways to make six bucks an hour.

  But the rest of us? Eventually we peeled ourselves off the floor. We scrubbed down the line, bricked our grills, cooked a few early-riser tickets while we stocked up for the breakfast shift (a far less odious collection of fellow travelers than were the dinner crew) and hauled our trash. By 8:00 a.m., we were headed out to our cars. The sun was up. It was Saturday morning. In just a few hours, we were all due back to do it over again.

  SOMEONE HAD SCRAWLED FUCK U across the windshield of my car in fish batter. It had dried in the morning sun to a hard crust. I climbed in, lit a cigarette, turned on the engine and hit the wipers.

  Someone had removed my wiper blades.

  Hero roared up next to me in his car, gave me the finger and punched it out of the parking lot, laughing the whole way.

  I drove home, squinting through the smeared batter, trying not to fall asleep. When I woke up, I told myself, I would take Hero’s wiper blades out of the backseat, screw them onto my own car’s wiper arms. When I woke up, I would clean the windshield. When I woke up, maybe I would talk to Sam, take a shower, have something to eat, dress last night’s wounds. When I woke up, I would pretend, for a couple of hours, I had something on my mind other than fryers, fish, egg plates, numbers and the countdown toward midnight when the next rush would come.

  I lost the wheel shortly after. I don’t remember how long I hung on, exactly. Maybe another month. Probably less. But when I did finally go down, I did it in style: in a storm of curses, finger-pointing recriminations and whining, too drunk even to stand at my post, too burned out to care, tired beyond what I thought to be my capacity for exhaustion. By the end, I wasn’t even calling checks anymore, just random combinations of menu items—frantic transmissions from my frontal lobes, garbled requests for fries, cakes, sandwiches, anything. Shouting them out of some panicked, lizard-brain reflex, calling them because something needed to be called, and just hoping that I would somehow hit that magic sequence of orders that would fix everything, lift me out of the hole I’d gotten myself into.

  All I needed was five minutes. “Just gimme five minutes. Five minutes is all I need. I’ll be fine.” But I needed so much more than that. When neither Hero or James could talk me down off the post, someone went for Lucy. I was already heading slowly for the floor by the time she got there.

  Luz walked me out the back door. I apologized the whole way—between explosions of incoherent fury—and she just nodded her head. “You’re done, baby. You’re done.” As was my habit, I blamed everyone I could think of—my guys for conspiring against me, the management, the customers who would just not stop coming.

  Outside, she sat me down against the back wall and left me there. Like trash. A piece of ruined equipment. At that point, it felt okay to stop fighting. I’d done as well as I could for as long as I could, had eventually failed as every machine eventually must. For the past couple weeks, I’d been dreaming about work every day while I slept. Nothing weird, just work. I would do my time on the line, come home, crawl into bed, close my eyes, then do another full dream-shift in my sleep, waking tired and sore a few hours later to go and do it again for real. It’d been so long since I’d seen a night without work that the dark felt strange, the quiet foreign.

  From where I sat, I could hear cars coming and going from the parking lot. I could see their lights. Orders were still streaming through my head. Lists of things that needed doing, stock levels that were running low inside. It was a busy night, but not a killer, and if I felt bad about anything just then, it was only leaving my guys a man down and missing out on all the fun. I fell asleep sitting by the back door, waking only once to stagger over behind the Dumpsters and throw up. Once my head was clear enough to drive, I went home and slept for two straight days.

  James took my place at the wheel. As fads are wont to do, country line dancing quickly faded in popularity. The bar across the street briefly became a teen nightclub, I think. Or something like that. The county probably uses it to store snowplows today.

  In any event, things were never really the same. I feel fortunate now that I’d been there for the good times. I know that I was lucky to have been witness to (and a willing participant in) the madness that went on there, to have learned the kind of things I learned—the tricks, the moves, the style. I was tough now. I had no fear. I’d earned my stripes in the box, and the scars I walked away with were enough to prove my worth to anyone. Some people feel blessed to have been in the stands when the Red Sox won the Series or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when the tech bubble burst. Some people think that the best, most important days of their lives were the ones they spent at war. Me? I’m just glad I was cooking when “Achy Breaky” was huge. When silly hats and big belt buckles were all the rage.

  • • •

  HERE’S ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS about working in restaurants: in the annals of career-ending food-service freak-outs and high-speed kitchen meltdowns, my little tantrum barely even moved the needle. In the real world, you show up at the office one day in a shitfaced lather, waving a knife around and accusing your coworkers of a clandestine conspiracy against you, it’s going to be a problem. Stick with the act long enough and it’s probably going to land you on the evening news.

  But when hanging out with chefs, I don’t even tell that story anymore. It’s just not worth it. In a high-stress, high-pressure business like the restaurant industry, heavily populated as it is by egotistical perfectionists, knife-wielding manic-depressives, short-timers with often highly dubious histories and unstable sensualists of every stripe, jobs get quit and careers get tarnished all the time. When sitting around with the lifers telling tales of crews deserted and positions abandoned, it’s really assault-or-better to open. Being shown the door in the middle of a drunken snit? That’s not even enough to cover the ante.

  According to legend, when a young Bobby Flay burned out on the Manhattan restaurant scene, he had a friend get him a job as a clerk on the American Stock Exchange. When I tried to find my path out of the industry, I got a job working the night shift at a porn store thanks to a friend in Rochester whose dad managed a chain of them. I guess what they say is right: it’s all about who you know. Anyway, at least I was comfortable with the hours.

  After a couple months, when I soured on selli
ng cheerleader-gang-bang videos to skulking old men and inflatable sheep to drunken frat boys, I ended up delivering magazines (normal ones) door-to-door. That lasted roughly two weeks. Right up until my car—a fifth-hand Dodge Aspen with a bad carburetor and no radio, bought for three hundred bucks to replace the Caprice Classic that’d taken me all the way to California and back and to work at the diner every night—died from the stress and shame of being used to haul hundreds of pounds of Ladies’ Home Journals around the neighborhood.

  IN THE END, I always found my way back to the kitchens. Year after year and city after city, restaurant after restaurant after restaurant. Nowhere else in the world did I feel in control of my life. Nowhere else did I feel so strong.

  Plus, I honestly did love the food. I found it completely fascinating—the power of artichokes, the history of salt, beef’s marbled topography and the secret language of shallots dancing in the pan. I studied a lot on my own time, reading books, experimenting in the cool and quiet of Monday night, pre-hit, or mornings when the kitchen was still gentle and everyone was trying to work mindlessly through their hangovers. At home, I watched PBS cooking shows, devoured cooking magazines for the pictures and for the writing of people who seemed even more fascinated by tuna, by saffron, by salt, than I was.

  I even read a couple cookbooks, though found no help there. The cooking described in nearly any commercially available cookbook has about as much in common with the cooking done in professional kitchens as I do with Julia Child. Cooking times? Measuring cups? Five hours of prep time for a dinner for two? You must be kidding. Cookbooks (with a few, rare exceptions)17 are porno for kitchen hobbyists and well-meaning amateurs. In my world, when recipes existed at all, they read like brilliant little haiku, like hieroglyphics—an alien tongue far removed from any natural language, pretty gibberish to all but those on the inside of the cult that produced it. Pull chix. Pound chix. Roll chix. Brown chix. Hold. That was one of my favorites—prep instructions for making chicken roulade, written out on a cocktail napkin and hung above the station of a part-time banquet prep cook at a hotel kitchen in Rochester. Not too long ago, I spent a day with a good friend in his kitchen in Denver. He’s a brilliant cook, a young chef who came up the same way I did. Sitting with him at the bar in the morning, he showed me the plates he was going to be working up for the night’s tasting menu by pulling a wrinkled sheaf of papers from his pocket, smoothing them against the rail, and tapping them with a capped Sharpie marker. One plate per page, and on each page not a single word of direction, not a breath of ingredient lists or cooking times—just a sketch showing plating, a scattering of letters and numbers, cryptic reminders to himself scrawled in the margins: grape cav, whipped bals, nitro, olive dust, clean office. This would be what he and his crew would be working from that night, what they would use as their prep list, their map for navigating the night’s service. Even after years off the hot line myself, I still understood the language, the cant of the professional. Had my buddy dropped dead from a heart attack right there on the floor ten minutes before the first seating, I would’ve been able to step in and help. A little, anyway. I wouldn’t have been completely lost.