Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  In the help-wanteds one day, I found a listing for an institutional cook’s job at Wegmans. It sounded good: forty hours a week and no more, no line work, just production, cafeteria-style, two meals a day. A trained monkey with a sharp knife could do it.43 And considering the condition I was in, I figured I could at least give that monkey a good run for his money.

  After spending months unemployed and unemployable, still visiting the occasional doctor, still having to stand in line in a succession of terrible water-stained and shabby offices to defend my Medicaid eligibility, and still skittish about venturing too far from home alone lest that little black snake in my brain decide to uncoil and knock me down again, I’d started looking through the employment ads in the newspaper, purely as a tonic against boredom. I’d also started doing crossword puzzles, sipping green tea and watching a lot of daytime television. Basically, I was just a crocheted shawl, a pair of bifocals and nineteen cats away from becoming someone’s creepy, shut-in grandma.

  It wasn’t pretty, and as each doctor I saw utterly failed to come up with a reasonable diagnosis,44 the side table in my bedroom started to become crowded with transparent orange pill bottles, every one of them filled with some kind of ridiculous snake oil bought on the tab of the State of New York.

  It upset me, seeing all that money and all the well-meaning (though ultimately useless) efforts of strangers going to waste. Finally, I just flatly refused to see any more doctors. I was no longer bothered by what had gone wrong with me that night in Buffalo, only by its aftermath, and I no longer required any Grand Unified Theory of my fucked-up-edness. Mostly, though, I was just bored. Time to move on.

  So I called Wegmans, sent a résumé, had an interview. Figuring I’d be cooking in one of the warehouse lunchrooms—steaming cheeseburgers and baking french fries for a thousand every day—I didn’t take it very seriously, joked around a lot with the HR people. It wasn’t until they told me I had the job that the job was actually explained to me: cooking for the suits in the executive offices on Brooks Avenue, doing parties for birthdays and retirements, catering business meetings and Danny Wegman’s company jet.

  I did crab Benedicts for breakfast, Italian muffaletta sandwiches and wild-mushroom salad for lunch, finger sandwiches, bruschetta and strawberries glazed in black balsamic vinegar for the plane. I stocked two buffets a day, plus specials, and never once had to worry about food cost or labor because that was all handled elsewhere.

  There were issues, of course. I didn’t exactly fit the mold of the corporate chef. Unshaven, with long hair and the slightly wan and wasted look of showing up to work, more often than not, still blearily hungover, I would walk the halls between the front door and the kitchen door and get looks like I was there to rob the place. For a normal kitchen, I could’ve been considered fairly well put together. I was conscious. Ambulatory. But for this place, I was like the bootblack or chimney sweep in something out of Dickens—purely backstairs help and best kept there.

  In the kitchen it was worse. My boss was a woman. The crew who set up, stocked and broke down the dining room were all women, mostly older, high school cafeteria ladies made good. The dishwasher was a middle-aged black guy who they treated with care and condescension, like they were dealing with a child. And I was like a strange pet that’d been brought in on a whim one day—amusing for a short time but, after that, just a nuisance. I worked the way a cook works when doing deep prep, when stocking up a line. I had the radio on, my head down, my brain full of lists and strategies, pulse ticking down like a clock in my neck set to go off for every breakfast rush, every lunch. I talked the way a cook talks—with a certain obscene flair and curses like commas. People would complain when I got my apron dirty, when I would wipe my knife on a side towel rather than having it washed, when I walked the floor with my chef’s jacket open, Wegmans baseball hat turned backward and the neck of my T-shirt garlanded with Sharpie markers and probe thermometers. When I would stand in front of an oven counting down its last minute and talk to it, saying, “Come on, you cunt. You motherfucker. Cook, you fucker, cook” (which any chef will tell you does make food cook faster because food loves being talked dirty to), it put people real uptight. And when, getting upset over the hideous cooking characteristics of those little portable butane burners, those camp stoves that kitchens with no hoods, no legal ventilation system, are forced to work with, I would occasionally, accidentally, drop one and kick it to death against the door of the lowboy, my fellow employees would avoid my company for hours afterward.

  Still, I showed up on time every morning and worked late every night I was allowed to. I did my work, then did extra work whenever I could because working, still and all, was better than not working, and because I liked being the guy that could be depended on to knock out apps for thirty at the eleventh hour for a retirement party that’d been forgotten about until Friday at quitting time, or doing something special (prosciutto and melon balls, crab tartiflette, cold sausage with port-wine jelly) for the plane. Something in it—its simplicity and lack of stress—felt comforting, like therapy. And something else felt like I was clawing my way back from somewhere bad in a kitchen padded with foam, with all the rough, sharp, dangerous edges taken off. The orders that I took in would be massive, brought straight to the loading docks from the warehouses, and I liked walking through them with a clipboard, feeling officious, making sure that everything I was getting was the best, the absolute best, that Rochester could provide.

  And it was fun, in a low-impact kind of way, until my boss decided that I needed another boss and so brought in another girl to run the galley, who was, near as I could calculate, a billion times more wrong in the head than I was. She had a terrible, thick Jersey-girl accent and a long scar that ran across her throat from one hinge of her jaw to the other—the only smile I ever saw within fifty yards of her face. One afternoon, after screwing up an aglio e olio that she swore was her mother’s recipe (the aglio e olio sauce already being done as an apology for screwing up an unbelievably simple pasta salad the day before), she planted her ass on a cutting board, took all the knives in the kitchen, and systematically ruined every one with a diamond steel.

  She was fired shortly after that.

  Then I believe she killed herself.

  But the upshot was, she didn’t take any of us with her. So, you know . . . good timing.

  A few months later, Laura called to tell me Colorado was too small a state to share with her ex. She said she was leaving for San Diego, where she intended to eat meat loaf at the Antique Row Café, hang out in Balboa Park, temp and wait for me to come to my senses and join her.

  I told her I’d think about it, then didn’t—until a few days later when a postcard from San Diego and a California State lottery scratch-off ticket arrived in the mail. The world traveler, she’d actually left the afternoon she’d called me, figuring on arriving by morning so as not to waste any time.

  I scratched the ticket and won a hundred bucks. I’d never won anything on a scratch ticket before. The only complication was, it had to be cashed in California.

  I called Gracie and asked if he felt like taking a drive.

  “Sure. Where to?”

  “California.”

  He waited a couple beats. “Okay. Let me pack some stuff.”

  I quit my job at Wegmans. Gracie quit whatever he was doing. Though not quite so impulsive as Laura, we were on the road in less than a week. Unlike my first trip cross-country with Sam, where everything was looked on with scorn, or my subsequent trips, which were seen through somewhat different eyes, this time around I was enthralled with everything, wanted to see and smell and eat it all. We chewed chicken dumplings and drank watery coffee at sundown in a small mining town in West Virginia where the entire population seemed to cower in the shadow of the smelting machinery on the river. In Memphis and Graceland was everything that was wrong and beautiful in the American character—an entire city of sex and barbecue and sex and booze and sex and poverty and velour jumpsuits. In A
ustin was a bastion of sensibility amid the overwhelming Texasness of Texas and a real good place for pancakes. We found a Greyhound station somewhere in the Middle West that serviced no buses but still had an operating lunch counter and looked like a church for those involved deeply in the worship of soft angles, neon and chrome. In Arizona, we hit the state fair with the express purpose of stealing a life-size cow made of butter and, in Kansas, accidentally stumbled across America’s only surviving atomic cannon, rusting away on a hillside. In Vegas, I won forty dollars in nickels at Circus Circus and, not knowing you could cash them in for actual folding money, walked my four buckets of silver down the street to a gas station and used the coins to buy microwave burritos and cigarettes.

  By the time we reached California, Laura had gone missing. Depressed, she’d walked off one day, crossed into Tijuana, and tried to renounce her citizenship in trade for a couple six-packs and a used Ford Galaxie. There were no takers, and in a snit she’d gone off the radar.

  Concerned for her safety and well-being, Gracie and I did what we thought was best: retreat. We stopped in Blythe, just over the California border, cashed in the lottery ticket, bought two bowls of chili and a tank of gas, drove up to Barstow (for the scenery), and fell back to Tucson, where we stayed for a week with a friend who bowled a lot and had a band that played very loud music in some very suspect bars. With no word from Laura forthcoming, we withdrew again for Santa Fe and set up a bivouac in Mikey and Ronnie’s living room.

  Two weeks after entering Mexico, Laura was escorted back across the border by two federales and asked not to return. She reen-tered Los Estados with nothing but the clothes on her back and a white plastic Corona hat that she’d won dancing on a table at some subterranean expat bar in the American quarter popular with bikers and renegade dope smugglers. She called from fifteen feet inside the country, at the first pay phone she found.

  “If those fuckers don’t want me in their country, I guess this one is stuck with me,” she said. Then she told Gracie and me to stay put because she’d meet us in Santa Fe by morning.

  LAURA’S STILL NEVER TOLD ME what she did to get kicked out of Mexico, always insisting that it was just “a misunderstanding,” but saying it in such a way that it is absolutely clear that whatever she’d done, it’d been quite deliberate.

  We’ve been back to Mexico a few times since, but never to Tijuana. And the Mexico story has become one of the central mysteries of our suspicious, distrustful, secret-filled and enigmatic relationship.

  I think we still have the hat somewhere, too.

  LAURA WAS IN SANTA FE in time for breakfast, tan and happy and sexy as hell. I felt faint when I saw her—through the front windows of a diner on Camino Consuelo, parking her car, stepping out of the driver’s side into the sun—and for the first time in a long time, it didn’t have anything to do with the faulty chemistry in my head, just blood following instinct and gravity to more southerly environs and the thoroughly wholesome biology of lust.

  We hung out awhile with Mikey and Ronnie. I cooked steaks slathered in whiskey cream sauce, penne in a Gorgonzola béchamel with potatoes, and we all ate crusty French bread with chèvre and drank terrible, cheap red wine fit only for hoboes and teenagers, but perfect for that place and moment. I told Laura that this was all I wanted out of my life anymore—a few good friends, cheap wine, crusty bread, some good cheese. I told her that we could stay together forever if she was cool with our never wanting for anything more than that, and she agreed.

  Afterward, the three of us—Laura, Gracie and me—continued on into Colorado again, where Laura rented us a one-bedroom, off-season ski chalet for a long weekend spent mostly soaking in the hot tub while floating an expensive bottle of tequila back and forth, watching Sid and Nancy, Buckaroo Banzai and The House of Yes on TV and wandering around the Front Range. I told her to forget about the cheap-wine-and-cheese thing, that I could live quite happily like this, too, if she was willing, and she just smiled and passed me the bottle.

  For the entire trip to this point, I’d offered Gracie the better bed wherever we were. I was always the one sleeping on the pool table, the folding chairs, the floor. I was fine with this. It was the least I could do since, with my license still suspended, he was doing all the driving.

  But for a couple nights in Colorado, he had to sleep on the couch. I felt bad about this, but not so much that I considered even for an instant offering him the bedroom with the soft mattresses and the locking door that I was sharing with Laura.

  I’m pretty sure he understood.

  WHEN IT CAME TIME TO LEAVE AGAIN, we stalled. Made excuses. Had a long lunch and went to see a movie—anything and everything Laura and I could think of to buy ourselves a few more minutes together. When we finally couldn’t stall anymore, driving away felt like getting my heart pulled out through my throat. I hated leaving her now. No matter what direction I ran in, it was wrong.

  But this was rubber-band time for us—a love affair for the permanently geographically dissatisfied. We kept bouncing, stretching and rebounding; connected, but perpetually in flight. She’d go to California, I’d be in New Mexico. I’d chase her to Colorado, she’d surface in Philadelphia. All we were living for were the collisions—in hotels, on friends’ couches, in off-ramp Mexican restaurants whenever our roads crossed. There was another New Year’s Eve, another party, this one in Ashtabula, Ohio, with a cast of characters similar to the last, a house out in the middle-of-midnight nowhere. Everyone was supposed to bring something, so I showed up with about forty pounds of steaks that I’d taken out the back door of a friend’s restaurant in Rochester, and Laura brought a bottle of ridiculously expensive tequila that she’d paid honest money for. She’d also bought me a beautiful Celtic knotwork pin that I stuck to the lapel of my black jacket, going around the party loudly announcing to anyone who came close that I was “the sheriff of party town,” literally yelling in their faces because I was blind drunk already and because, having had so little experience with holidays as a civilian (I was always at work), I had no idea how to behave myself other than how I’d behave when surrounded by cooks.

  Before the night was done, I’d picked a good-natured fight with someone’s brother or cousin who turned out to be an all-state college wrestler. I held my own for about twelve seconds, until he got his hands on me, at which point he completely wiped the floor with my dumb ass until I cried uncle. Laura found me on the stairs dabbing blood from my lip and laughing. I asked her if she’d seen it and she said yes. I asked her if she’d been impressed, and she said no. But she took me to bed anyway, and waking the next morning, I felt bad about what an asshole I’d been so apologized the only way I knew how. I made everyone breakfast.

  If we’d been richer, the map of my and Laura’s tumbling for each other might’ve been more cosmopolitan, more intriguing: finding each other under gas lamps in the Marrakech night market, a whitewashed pho shop in Saigon, amid the clattering pachinko machines of the Ginza or the worshipful quiet of the main floor at Taillevent.

  But I liked the course we charted, the Americanness of it and its unique, dirty glamour. Through snowstorms and over mountains, in the steamy heat of Chinatown bars, in lobbies and interstate rest stops, motels, taquerias so bright they bled neon like a wound, and over plates of chicken croquettes in scuffed chrome diners where even the air was antique, we earned every minute we had together, and no matter where she was, going to her was always like going home.

  She was my best girl and I loved her.

  • • •

  OF COURSE, I neglected to actually tell her this. I thought, considering the circumstances, it was one of those things that went without saying.

  That was, to put it mildly, an extremely unwise assumption on my part. If I’ve learned anything since I was fifteen (and probably I haven’t), it would be that nothing ever goes without saying.45 But when I finally asked her to move in with me in Rochester, my reason was not “because I adore you,” not “because I don’t want to be away fro
m you anymore.” It was “Think about how much money we’ll save on gas and phone cards and hotel bills.”

  “Well, sure,” she replied. “When you put it that way, it would be stupid of me not to move in with you, wouldn’t it?” And the whooshing sound on the other end of the line was me totally missing the sarcasm in her voice—hearing assent and giddily ignoring everything else.

  But because Laura is a sweet, forgiving, understanding and angelically patient woman, she came anyway. I found us an apartment that afternoon (taking Misha’s old one-bedroom as a sublet, sight unseen, because she’d found a bigger place across town and was looking for a way out of her lease), and Laura showed up the next day with everything she still owned packed into the backseat of her used Chevy Celebrity. We met at Gitsi’s on Monroe Avenue, had lunch, giggling all the while like a couple of kids eloping, then, together, we went home and locked our own door behind us for the first time.

  BECAUSE LAURA IS A CRUEL, vindictive, capricious and psychotic screw-head, she dumped my punk ass that night—after about six hours of our living together.

  I talked her down. She came back inside and stopped screaming at me in the middle of the street. We smoothed things over.

  Then she did it again the next day.

  On our third day living together, she managed to dump me twice—which was no small trick because I had to work and was gone from seven in the morning until well after midnight.

  Thanks to my being able to put something like “Wegmans Corporate Chef ” on my résumé, I’d gotten myself a slot as an executive sous at one of the downtown hotels. We had a fine-dining restaurant, bar, lounge, 250 rooms with a full room-service menu, meeting rooms and conference rooms and ballrooms and banquet space for a couple thousand. The kitchen was enormous. The dish room alone was bigger than some restaurants I’d worked in. And on a busy night, I was like Patton at the Kasserine Pass, with an army of about seventy-five people working beneath me (including cooks, prep and pantry, captains, bartenders, floor, dish and support staff) and only two above: the executive chef and the hotel manager.