by Mike Wehner
“I’m so sorry, yes, I’m Alex. I’m really nervous.” I said to explain the sweat and silence.
“Don’t be, if you can’t find a job it’s not like it gets cold enough to freeze to death,” she snorted at her own joke.
I thought about trying to fake a smile but couldn’t manage. It was all too weird. It was like some horror movie was playing through my eyes, none of what was happening had anything to do with Alex Ross. I’d known myself a long time. I hated cooking. I hated confrontation. I was compassionate. I didn’t like violence. I was responsible. I was living the exact opposite of everything that I thought of as me. I felt disembodied, taken over, an avatar for some other consciousness, one that was mean and vindictive and hateful.
I was uneasy about my Pacific Coast transformation too. New haircut, hip glasses, my first sun tan. My hair had always been buzzed, now it was the giant mop of a man without intentions. Hair so long I didn’t know where to put it so slung it over the top of my head in a piled part. If she’d ever seen a photo of me with John she’d have seen office Alex, but the meet-your-parents Alex was overwritten with a distorted imposter. How could she recognize me? When I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize myself.
Grief Journal
DAY 1
When I picked up the phone I thought I heard static. That the whooshing sound in my ear was wind gushing into an open car window or the diesel cloud of a city bus swirling around the person on the other end of the line. I leaned in to find the voice underneath, sifted through the fuzz, who’s under there?
It wasn’t static, it was the Doppler effect of wails and panic from the mouth of a courageous young girl as she shifted the phone from ear to ear heaving whatever air her mouth could find. My handset hissed with each suck and blow. When her lungs could take no more Lily said it. Those words are still banging around inside my head like a typeface screen saver that bounces each time it hits edge of my skull while it searches endlessly for an ear hole to escape from and warble on towards the rest of everyone else.
“John was shot, over and over, I don’t know how many times. He was dead when the cops got there. She shot him Alex. That girl, the one who can cook,” his little sister said coming together for each sentence and then falling apart again.
I hung on the line and breathed into the mouthpiece with the receiver flipped upside down, unable to listen to Lily’s staccato bawl but needing to let her know I was still there.
I’d never see upright John again. A week later I’d be at a private viewing for horizontal John. I went because I was invited not because I wanted to, it seemed disrespectful to not go. When your best friend’s mom calls and asks if you want to see the body you go and see the body, it doesn’t matter how many holes it has in it.
According to various local news outlets there were five holes, but the only one I could find was on his head, right on his brow line. A fresh metal cow lick. The mortician did a good job trying to conceal it, but the skin changed texture there and became shiny like a fresh asphalt patch in a worn out road.
I imagined that was the one he thought about most as he lay dying in his living room, as blood welled up into the carpet beneath him. A narcissist even in death, he was worried about how his hair would look in the coffin. Hoping the bottom of the part wouldn’t do that thing where it ran the wrong direction like one of those stupid ridgeback dogs. Thankfully it had been trimmed last week so the color was even, the early seasonings of middle age that cropped up above his ears snipped away. Obsidian hair that bent and stuck, he was twenty-seven years old.
Every time I close my eyes I see his body and his holes. Sometimes it’s a smile with no eyes on his belly. Other times I don’t remember.
I’m not that smart but I’m smarter than almost everyone I meet. John was an exception, his offhand comments were more insightful than my revelations. He’d tell me that my certainties were what kept me from being an intellectual. That kind of smart. The kind of smart that makes you double check your driver’s license the next time you type your name. Or investigate a career in shoveling compost after getting a bit of shit on your hand wiping your ass. He kept me humble and I loved that about him.
We met in undergrad. We had the same friends. We were interested in the same girls (all of them). He lived down the hall our freshman year and one day he started sleeping on the futon beneath the cheap pine planks of my lofted bed. It happened organically, he wasn’t there and then he was.
After school we followed each other to Chicago, my homeland. I started my career as an engineer because I was willing to do anything to pay off my massive student loans and John got his MBA because he didn’t know what he wanted to be. After he graduated I stayed put and he moved back to Virginia where he’d grown up. I thought that once I made it to the big city I’d never leave. There is real magic in Chicago to someone from its suburbs. Peering down the shoreline on beach day with Mom I’d want to know what each one of those shapes were in the distance. How could they be taller than the clouds? What kind of voodoo did it take to own one of the windows that looked down upon the sky?
I only visited Virginia once, but we kept in touch. We didn’t talk on the phone but we communicated—trading selfies from public toilets and critiquing online photos we found of girls we used to date who either looked much better or much, much worse. We never said anything about the people who stayed the same. The toilet-selfie is all about composition. The best ones are always from toilets that have mirrors facing the stall door. You need long arms and to understand the rule of thirds to get a compelling shot. John sent me one where he was mid-poop, his red face half-winced and half-grinned. I used it as a conversation piece, hey do you think this guy is really taking a dump? What men we were.
True friendship is trading photos from toilets. It’s a willingness to be vulnerable and stupid and irreverent in a way that other people can’t accept and that you can’t accept from other people.
It was March the last time we were together. The calendar said spring but the Chicago weather disagreed, dark clouds spat ice and sleet all night. John was there for some business thing and stayed the weekend. I invited everyone we knew, even people we didn’t like so we’d have somebody to ostracize. I don’t know who picked the bar, it was a spaceship decorated as a sports bar and designed for new adults to prove their worth by throwing away money. Each table had a self-service tap with a digital readout. The displays were blocky and had the green backlights of old calculators that were intentionally hard to read—sober you had to squint. A surcharge to self-serve, how apropos.
The music was so loud that everybody talked but nobody had a conversation. Guys conversed by putting their hands up on each other’s shoulders, the girls by giving each other genuine smiles. We were young and beautiful and oblivious and hard to hear but easy to understand.
I know it was I good night because I only took one picture which I still have on my phone. There are about fifteen people in it, a collection of half-crocked twenty somethings and a dad. Charlie’s dad, our old roommate. We called him big Charlie because he was a homunculus like his son.
There’s a pinless moment in our lives, once the motion sickness from the swells of puberty subside that dads become cool again, though they don’t know it. Before they become accepted they regress to tweens at the middle school dance; awkward and unsure of where to be and how to stand. They don’t know if they are one of the tribe or if they should ever show up to one of our gatherings again. But they keep showing up. At tailgates. At birthdays. At get-togethers in bullshit bars downtown because they wanted to see that dapper John fellow from Virginia that came to stay a week each summer and made a mess cutting his own hair the bathroom. John, who made up for it by being the only one in the house with the patience to help his wife with the computer. There Charlie’s dad is on the far right of the photo, couching in with hesitation, unsure if he belongs.
The guys are dressed casually except for John, who was in a well-cut black suit with a crisp, white oxford. A
lways a suit, never a tie. The rest of us are trying to be hip and failing. A fitted sport coat over a T-shirt with a pocket square; a penny loafer with tassels under slim-fitting purple khakis; the tragedy of a gingham ascot. We’d reached the age where the girl’s necklines began to recede from their belly buttons. There was a sense of cleavage but the angle was no longer so severe that light reached the bottom. The darkness there, the mystery in the middle, was elegant and sexy.
The night I heard John was killed I waited a few hours for the news to plague around and infect our friends before I changed my profile picture to that image. I sat up all night leering into my laptop, my nose crept forward, shoulders rounded, mouth opened to breathe and I devolved into a stacked mass of cotton and confusion. A Neanderthal looking at an eclipse, feeling no pain but breaking my eyes forever. I heard it first from his little sister, sweet wailing Lily who suffocated on the other end of the line. When the phone rang and I saw her name I didn’t feel a pang, I didn’t get the sense that the world I hoped I lived in and the one I actually lived in were about to divide and when the atoms split I would have to choose one and be stranded there forever.
Four
Erin held up my resume after digging it out of the mess beneath her hands. A true queen of disaster, she sat tall and dignified over the chaos surrounding her. The ringing in my ears made it hard to hear the lies I’d written as she read them aloud.
“So, you spent two years at the Culinary Academy, very impressive, and worked in the kitchen at Casa de Alma at the same time. Big kitchen, what did you do there?”
I worked there a week before I was fired, not because of the fabricated education, turns out I was a mound of useless shit. They weren’t even paying me, that’s how bad I was. After three months woodshedding at home I got a job to find out if I could hack it in a real kitchen. The answer was no, and not because I couldn’t cook. I didn’t know what the hell anybody was saying which made every job take twice as long as it should have. Cooks use an immense amount of jargon, worse than a friend who comes home from the Army telling stories with dozens of unexplained acronyms. At least you can guess at those, cooking jargon makes no sense. How am I supposed to know the food processor is the Robocop?
After getting canned I sat watching hours of redundant food related syndications and wrote down every turn of phrase so I could practice them on my dog. Zeke sat in the middle of the kitchen when I cooked, motionless except for his fat head—the tip of his nose a compass pointing in the cardinal direction of possible fallen food. I’d let him know if I were behind him with a hot pan like the up-and-coming chef who joined the competition to cook his heart out for the autistic nephew he saw twice a year but sold to the judges as his best friend.
“It was a stage, I had no prior experience so I started as a commis. I did a little bit of everything and eventually settled on roasting and grilling. I’ve never done pastry,” I said, “thought I should be honest.” I forced myself to blink a few times in my best impression of normal human being.
Sounded good, all bullshit. Thanks Internet. What really happened was that my greasy, beyond pretentious boss (who had a tattoo that said Pork Slut) called me into her office on my fourth shift and told me that my time was over, I was too old and too slow. I told her it was good she spaced the letters out on her arm because when she grew up she could turn that tattoo into Park Sleuth and the pig could be the top bloom of an old oak tree. She then suggested I have sex with my own anus and when I asked her for instructions she threw a spatula at me. The kitchen is full of colorful and inventive language.
“None of that brigade shit here,” Erin started, “we’re small and focused. Three on the line at lunch, four or five at dinner. The servers plate most of pastry, except for the fried apple pie.”
“I love those radioactive, goo-filled ones from the gas station, guilty pleasure,” I said.
“Gross, but I shouldn’t knock it until I try it.”
Only the worst kind of person wouldn’t have tasted a gas station apple pie, the ones for a buck on the end cap. I figured that’s what she had in common with John, an obsession for the finer things. On first meeting her she didn’t seem like his kind of girl. There was a crudeness and a nonchalance that was unusual for him to appreciate.
“I’d offer to bring you one but there are more apples than candy bars in gas stations around here.”
“It’s the weather, people like being alive,” she said. “Where are you from?”
“Chicago suburbs. Corn, football, shoveling snow.”
A twisted knot of terror pumped around my body with my blood. When my gut calmed it shook my arm, steady the arm and the thigh would spasm. I did my best to maintain eye contact and be pleasant while I chased my mind around my body.
“Nice, I didn’t grow up here either,” she said.
There was a soft misery in her voice that made me feel better. Erin looked back down to my resume and her lips shifted to the left side of her face.
“I don’t know how to say this without being rude,” she paused, “but why are you here? You look about my age and you have a degree in electrical engineering which means you’re smarter than me. I’m sure you’ve had other jobs, good jobs, ones that have health insurance. Why food?”
Moron, stupid, idiot. I started with my actual resume and left the engineering part on because I was too lazy to rewrite the bullet points. Those invented little quasi-statistical accomplishments that hiring managers adore. I should have been an art history major that worked as ultrasound technician but rerouted my life because I was pathologically afraid of the unborn.
Worst of all, a place like this, a place full of free and creative minds would be in dire need of tech support. The thought of taking a look at someone’s computer after a shift made me pick at the ribbon around my knives.
“Oh it’s not rude, this is like a second life for me. I’m starting over,” I said to coax sympathy. I took in a deep breath. “I needed a change. Call it a quarter-life crisis. The educated and overpaid crybaby isn’t happy with having every advantage in life so he turns his world upside down to cook eggs on the other side of the country,” I said and laughed.
The bigger the lie the more likely people are to believe it. Lies have a way of manipulating themselves into truths. Devoting your life to food seemed so meaningless to me when a ham sandwich was easy to make and tasted just fine. How could a life dedicated to worshiping turnips and bones make anyone feel like anything but a fraud? My grandma knew how to extract goodness from the scraps to stay alive, not garner a decent review. Then there was all the pageantry and pretension that went way beyond respecting dead animals and into the realm of delusion. I figured it wouldn’t take too many comments from Erin about foraged mushrooms to get up the rest of my nerve and end this experiment. Fungus is always foraged just like corn chips are always gluten free.
“Good for you. You have no idea how much I get that, pushing the reset button,” she said.
In my fantasy resetting my life meant clicking the little menu at the bottom of the screen. When Erin wanted to shake things up she ripped the cord out of the wall and then told everyone that the wall made her do it, that it humiliated and hit her. You aren’t functioning properly Erin, I think you need to be reset.
“I know I don’t have the years of experience you’re expecting but I feel I make up for that with familiarity with your food.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve watched the menus since the position was posted and it’s like we had the same Oma. My mom’s parents were both German immigrants, with the accents and the lederhosen and the whole deal. A lot of your dishes are riffs on things I’ve eaten since I was a kid. I think it’s brilliant the way you are re-imagining those old foods, honestly.” I leaned in to that last word, wrapped it around her like the arms of a loving boyfriend picking you at the airport after two weeks apart. I think you’re brilliant.
“That’s great,” Erin said, “my family is similar, not the boat and the accents but my
roots are to Ireland and Eastern Europe so I was trying to pay homage to the past. My last restaurant was refined, complex cuisine. I wanted to get away from technique driven food and do a comforting and approachable menu. We haven’t been open that long but people keep showing up so that’s a good sign.”
She was happy with her life. Her grin was a punch to the belly and her laugh a slap on the cheek. The back and forth drug on, I made up answers to her questions and she fidgeted in her chair like she was there to kill me.
“Enough talk, let’s see you cook,” she said and wall walked around the tiny gap between her desk and my legs. The back of her knees washed past the front of mine like our patellae were natural spoons. She reached back through the doorway and snapped up my hand so fast I didn’t have time to feel sick to my stomach. She led me upstairs with leaps and hops.
A small, middle-aged man worked at a side table in a spotless white apron. He slapped a whole sea bass on the counter and filleted it with a few flicks of a knife with duct tape on the handle. The meat went into a tray and the body into a white bucket.
“Make me a memory,” Erin said, “but one that fits the menu.” She walked around inspecting the prep work at different stations, prodding and squeezing to make sure it was up to her standards.
“Miguel will help you find whatever you need. The walk-in is back by the stairs, there are reach-ins and a few drawers with seafood and other proteins. Don’t go crazy, a bite is all I’ll need to know if you’re my guy. Bring it down to the office when you’re done.” She shimmied off in black slacks so tight they looked painted on.
Instinct forced me to gaze at her ass, the mammalian brain was immediately superseded by the vicious reptile below. A snarl flew from my mouth and two thunderclaps of FUCK and YOU leapt out. I knew she’d be pretty, pretty I was prepared for, but sincere was a different kind of animal to bait. Miguel barely noticed my snort, men are hard to alarm when they’re holding weapons.