by MJ Post
“Got to get inside,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re from down South, right?” asked Salvatore.
“Oxford, Mississippi.”
“I’m from Brooklyn, myself. You should come there. It’s much more family-orientated. The big city can be a little cold and impersonal, know what I mean?”
“Okay,” Toby rumbled. “Sure, just — give me a little time to take it in.”
“Sure, pal. I know you down South types like a slower pace. But you’ll adjust. If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. Take my card.” Salvatore passed one back to him. “Need a ride, need a tour, need someone to taste your new recipe, call or text me.”
Toby stuffed the card in his jeans pocket. Was this fast-talking guy a typical New Yorker? Was everyone in the city so pushy?
The car pulled into a tower parking lot on 10th Avenue. “Couple blocks that way to the piers, that way for the train.” Salvatore’s hand gestures were meaningless to Toby. “Let me call Herschel, tell him you’re here. Hey, I hope I didn’t freak you out, buddy.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Hey, you single? My sister would absolutely love that country accent.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, really. She ain’t fat since she got her stomach stapled. She’s got some bazoombas like you wouldn’t believe.”
Toby stood by his luggage, leaning on the car, till Herschel Singer arrived with a tall black man in a sport coat. The casting director paid Salvatore while the tall man took charge of Toby’s large duffel.
“I got it,” Toby said.
“Don’t worry,” Herschel explained. “Ozzy has absolute integrity. Right, Ozzy?”
“I sit at night and polish up my halo,” said Ozzy. Toby heard an accent.
“You a southern man like me?” he asked.
“Marietta, Georgia, born and bred,” Ozzy explained.
“Nice to meet you. You like down home Southern cooking?”
“Damn skippy I do. Eat it by the ton.”
“I’ll make you something when I get a chance.”
Ozzy cracked a grin. “I love working for the Kitchen Network.”
When they got out of the elevator, Toby said, “Herschel, get Lillian a pass or whatever so she can get in to see me.”
“Sure, but only till shooting starts. Then you have no outside contact with anyone unless you earn it in competition. I’ll give Lillian the emergency number in case of bad news, but you’re just about living in a bubble from day one till the series wraps.”
They were in a wan hallway, institutional yellow paint, rough industrial carpeting, and a plastic wall placard that read “MQCS Dorms” with an accompanying arrow. Ozzy led the group, produced a key and unlocked a metal door. Beyond it was a brightly-lit living room with numerous white leather sofas, a white wicker coffee table, and a large wheeled TV camera on a ramp rising to one corner where it could command the entire room. A dining room rose a few steps from the living room, about level with the camera, and to the right of the dining table was a kitchen, visible only partly over a bar. The aroma of frying food came only seconds after the sound of sizzling.
“I’ll drop your bags in your room,” Ozzy explained. He tilted his head back. “Damn, that smells good.”
“Sure does,” Herschel put in. “Alia, is that you, young lady?”
“Yes,” a woman called from the kitchen. She showed her face over the bar top: a black woman in her late twenties with delicate features and deep dark eyes, her hair covered by a violet hijab headscarf.
“Have enough for us?” the casting director asked. “Ozzy’s drooling.”
Toby had been a little slow to catch the scent, so nose-blind was he from the stink of exhaust and burnt nuts in the street, but now it was coming to him. Rice and beans, catfish.
“I’m drooling, too,” he announced. He hadn’t eaten since some crap at the Joyce Kilmer stop of the Jersey Turnpike.
Alia’s face appeared again, offering a lightly pleased smile at the two men. “I’ll set you guys up, and Ozzy, too.”
Soon the slim young woman, wearing an apron over a modest blouse and jeans, brought plates to the table for the three men and herself. A pitcher of sweet tea followed.
“Alia Kamara.” She shook Toby’s hand. “Here to compete, I assume?”
“Yep. I’m Toby Brutus. This smells amazing. I haven’t even smelled soul food this good since —” He thought about Chef Boris Winfrey’s ham hocks and hoppin’ john. “Well, since my days cooking on the line.”
Alia nodded. “Thank you. Inshallah, I try my best.”
“I’ll make dinner,” Toby offered.
They sat to eat. It was just about the best fried fish Toby had ever had, and not just because he was hungry, either. The meal finished, he and a short-sleeved Ozzy cleaned the dishes while Herschel, after voluminous thanks, excused himself to report to the show runner.
The taste of the fish lingered. Overcome suddenly, Toby set down a wet plate and withdrew along the corridor. He coughed into his sleeve. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. He’d been away from home for three days, was determined not to go back, and had never been so alone in his life.
Well, he’d be busy soon enough not to have to worry about it. Toby scanned for his bag in a room with four beds, each accompanied by a bedside table with a prominent digital alarm clock. A big-bellied man in his twenties with thinning brown hair was snoozing on one bed. Wearing shorts and a sweat-stained V-neck t-shirt, he snored with the force and pitch of a Kodiak bear. The athletic bag at the foot of his bed displayed a Philadelphia Eagles logo.
The orange-walled room had no windows, a single bulb overhead, and on one spot on the wall, a gray projecting hemisphere that could only be a camera. No privacy here, then. A shut door seemed likely to lead to a bathroom. Toby went through, scanned again. No camera, thank God. He sat on the seat, put his head in his hands, let a few tears go. He WOULD make this work, he was determined. It had been right to leave Oxford, but New York was loud and fierce. It stank, it deafened him, it crushed him with its confining walls and its heavy hanging air.
Toby stayed till the wave of sorrow passed. He didn’t want the cameras in the men’s dorm room to record him in that mood. He washed his face and hands and returned to the bedroom, lay down and took out his phone. A text from his mother read:
Miranda: You can come home, son.
Toby: I’m not. Anyway I have a contract.
Miranda: Bonne chance!
Good luck. He knew her: she meant it, in her way, but she was also dismissing his decision with contempt. Doing something stupid? Bonne chance!
He tapped a text to Lillian to check on her, closed his eyes, heard stirring. The heavyset man on the bed across from him had sat up and was tapping on an iPad.
“Hey,” Toby said vaguely. He introduced himself.
“I’m Buster,” the other man said. “Come look at this.”
Toby got up and went to sit on the bedside and watch. The YouTube video showed a restaurant kitchen where a man in his thirties was dispensing a foam onto a plate next to a reddish gelatinous globe.
“He’s the best in the world,” said Buster. “That is fucking awesome. That foam tastes just like buttered bread, and that jello globe is made from venison. When I win this show, I’ll set up my kitchen like that. I’ll have a store front right on Rittenhouse Square, and you can come admire my handiwork.”
Toby shrugged and got up. He’d met fans of Modernist cuisine, aspirants to the field of molecular gastronomy, plenty of times before. They were the flavor of the month in the culinary world, but when it came to cooking without specialized equipment, they weren’t better than anyone else. “Bonne chance,” he told Buster, and returned to his own bed.
Chapter Seven
Is That Camera On?
That evening, Kacie and Jinwoo arrived in the neighborhood by train and walked several blocks to the building. A bored-looking man in a security booth, watching
videos on his phone, checked their names and then buzzed them in. “Just security’s here now,” he said. “TV people went home. Find Ozzy. He’ll set you up in your room, Miss.”
They rode up in the dingy elevator. Alone in the drab hallway, they heard voices through a doorway and entered there. Kacie, used to small living spaces, appreciated the high-ceilinged room. Jinwoo went and flopped on a white leather sofa.
Clinking and clanging from the kitchen accompanied a glorious smell of food. Kacie stood next to her wheeled bag and took in the aroma of garlic, pepper, and shellfish.
“This is a sweet living room,” Jinwoo pronounced. “Hey, is that camera on?” He peered at it, spread his arms wide. “Jinwoo Kong here, restaurateur and owner of Koryo Burger, home of the best burger in Queens, and I want to celebrate my cousin Kacie on her upcoming win on this TV show. And if you’re a Korean-American millionaire, hey, she’s single, too.”
“Shut up,” Kacie said huskily. “I’m not going on TV to meet millionaires, jackass.”
“Okay, sorry.” He lowered his hands, then refocused on the camera. “If you’re a Korean-American lady millionaire, I’m single too.”
“So am I,” called a black man in a sport coat. Opposite the entrance, a few stairs rose to a small dining room next to the kitchen. There was a plain table easily accessible from a kitchen where three or four could work together. The black man rose, came down the few stairs from the dining room. “I’m with you, kid. Lady millionaires, hit me up on my cell phone.” He smiled down at Kacie. “I’m Ozzy. They should have buzzed me downstairs that you were here, Miss Lee.”
“You know me?” Kacie asked.
“I got pictures of all the contestants. I’m dorm security and unofficial greeter. Hey everyone, this is, um, Chef Yook Lee.”
“Kacie. Chef Kacie Lee.”
“This is Chef Kacie Lee.”
Some noises of acknowledgment came from the dining room.
“They should have buzzed me.” Ozzy was a little drunk, Kacie realized, but his friendliness seemed real.
“We came up on our own. I know our names were on some list, but maybe they thought we were the cleaning crew.”
“Ouch,” said Ozzy. “Well, you couldn’t be more welcome. TKN is like a big family. If you make friends, they’ll keep you around, I promise. I’ll take your bags to the women’s dorm. Watch out, there’s cameras everywhere except the bathroom. Go have some dinner.”
Jinwoo clambered off the sofa and followed Ozzy and the luggage down the adjoining corridor. Kacie went up the steps to the dining-room table, where she found the table already occupied and cluttered. Ozzy had been sitting at the end with his back to the entrance. Besides his seat, and one that was unoccupied, she saw a black woman in a hijab holding a glass of lemonade; a man with a big gut tapping at an iPad; a place setting with a half-consumed cocktail; and a woman in her forties speaking Cantonese into a Samsung phone. Kacie had studied only Mandarin in high school, and couldn’t understand the woman at all, but talking that loudly in any language was obnoxious.
She took the remaining seat, facing the kitchen, and got a look at the young man working there.
He was close to her in age, tanned from outdoor work, perhaps six feet tall, with long black hair tied back and a face that had missed a few shaves from its strong jaw. His sinewy hands worked both his spoon and his spatula at once as his dark eyes flicked from pot to pan with absorption. She watched his jumpy motions, his obvious energy, and the rest of the room faded from her awareness. Her full focus was on the young man.
The woman in the hijab touched her arm. That broke the spell. Kacie hoped no one had noticed her staring. She was ashamed. Staring at a man, especially at a man she didn’t know and could never really expect to know, was embarrassingly stupid. As if he would ever look at her that way!
In short order, Kacie had met Alia, who spoke little but kindly, and Buster, who barely looked up from his tablet, and Maryann, who was still on the phone but absently shook her hand. Ozzy returned, and Jinwoo plunked into the seat with the half-finished cocktail.
The chef came out of the kitchen with a sizzling pan and dispensed steamed mussels onto their plates with a slotted spoon. The aroma was stunning: her own culinary school teachers had never done better. He then withdrew for a moment and returned with his pot, which contained a spicy rice dish with sausage.
Alia declined, but he said, “Don’t worry. It’s chicken sausage.”
The young man’s voice had the depth and richness of the actor Gregory Peck, whom she had seen in the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird back in high school. Paired with his strong Southern accent, that deep voice was like the sweetest music to Kacie, but she scolded herself. Guys like him, hot white guys, never noticed a little Korean-American girl. He probably had a blond cheerleader back home.
Lost in thought, Kacie didn’t realize right away that he was talking to her.
“Want any more?” He met her eyes, and held them. “Sorry, hands are full, I can’t shake. I’m Toby Brutus.”
“Kacie Lee. I’ll take seconds if I have room. Looks good.”
“It is. Right back.”
He retreated to the kitchen, came back with two wine bottles, both California white. “What do you guys think?”
“No thanks.” Alia demurred.
Kacie looked at the bottles. “The Pinot Grigio.” She’d learned wine pairings in a class at culinary school.
“The Chardonnay,” said Buster. He set down his iPad and reached for the bottle. “I’ll open it.”
Toby pulled the bottle back. “Lady’s choice,” he said.
“Only if the lady isn’t a dumbass,” Buster snapped.
“You can have your choice if you can pull the cork out with your teeth, big man,” Kacie fired back. “Or bite the end off. You look hungry enough.”
“Oh, good one,” said Buster. “Hey, I just looked you up. Best burger in Queens, huh? Who cares? That’s like being the best rat in the sewer.”
“Couldn’t be. You ate that one.”
Buster snorted. Toby laughed. “I think she’s got you, son.”
“Okay, maybe, but she’s no competition for us. She’s been a chef for only three months and never worked for anyone.” He lifted his iPad again, showing where he had gotten his information.
“I’m figuring,” said Toby, “that no one is here by mistake. Even you, Buster.” He looked at Kacie, met her eyes. His look was querying: he wanted to know if she was okay. Kacie nodded.
“I’d like a little of each,” Ozzy suggested.
“Me too,” said Jinwoo.
Kacie had to admit to herself that Toby hadn’t ignored her; she’d made him laugh, and she’d scarcely ever made anyone laugh except her mother and one or two high school friends now gone from her life. Maybe she’d been too hard on him in her thoughts; all the same, there was no way she was going to let herself fall for a guy like that.
Buster followed Toby into the kitchen, where they fussed at opening the two bottles.
Maryann was finally off the phone.
“No one does a takedown like my cousin Kacie,” Jinwoo told her.
Maryann shrugged. “You haven’t met me yet, have you, kid?”
Chapter Eight
“There’s This Girl”
Lillian was buzzed in about 9 PM and texted Toby that she was on her way up to see him.
After dinner and clean-up and two more glasses of Pinot Grigio, Toby had spent some time web-browsing on his phone. A few more cast members had arrived, but Toby had closed his eyes and, freighted with alcohol and dinner, drifted toward sleep. He would have time later to size up his competition. Through a nap-induced haze, he had heard the other two men, Louie and Vegas, come in and set up the space around their beds while chatting. He had heard the voice of the final competitor, a woman named Eloise, in the hallway, but he had let all the conversation go by unheard. His mind was on something else.
Toby met Lillian in the living room with his jacket on. “
Let’s get out of here for a while, Light.”
“I thought the city was freaking you out,” his sister said. “I could read that on you from the moment we got into the tunnel. You feeling better already?”
“What do you think of New York?”
“It’s scary, I admit that. But I’m an optimist, Dark. I know I’ll make the best of it. So will you.”
“Okay, let’s walk.”
Alone with his sister, eager to share his thoughts, and somewhat rested from his nap, Toby felt some fresh energy. They got out to the noisy street. Fortunately, a coffee shop was in sight about two blocks away. They settled there with cheap tea and two servings of low-grade apple pie a la mode.
“There’s this girl,” Toby said.
“Holy shit,” said Lillian. “I can’t remember the last time you said that to me. Never since Amanda.”
“I’m serious, Light.”
“I know you are, but don’t forget why you’re here. Compete and win if you can, but if it looks like someone else is going to win, make as many friends as you can that you can use later.”
Lillian’s cheerful professionalism didn’t fit Toby’s mood. “Shit, can I talk or not?”
“Talk, Dark. Whatever you need.”
“Okay, look.” He had already pulled up the Times restaurant review with her picture. He brandished his phone at Lillian.
“Chef Kacie Lee. Yep, she’s gorgeous.”
“And she isn’t even smiling in the picture. I saw her smile for like half a second, it was just the sweetest thing. Then she bit her lip. But it’s not really about looks. This other guy, Buster, he has a big mouth. He was trying to bully her, and she just brushed him off like he was nothing. I was going to be a gentleman, like Momma taught me, and help out, but she didn’t need my help at all.”
“A tough girl?”
“Good head on her shoulders. Made me laugh.”