We walked out into the blue sky of falling night. The smell of the first cold snap tickled my nostrils. Alex said bye and disappeared into Berri Metro station. I came back up Saint-Thimotée toward Ontario, and stopped at a phone booth. I hung up and waited a few seconds, then dialled Malik’s number. He didn’t answer. Then I called up my old boss. I left a message asking if he had some work for me. The next second, still holding the headset, I felt my soul leaving my body. I was powerless. In a sweet moment of relief and disappointment, I gave up. Dead leaves tumbled down the street or lay rotting in piles next to the gutter drains. I set off alongside the low-rise apartment buildings, housing co-ops and tiny, abandoned parks of the Centre-Sud neighbourhood. Looking discreetly over my shoulder, and sticking to the side streets, I went back into the credit union on Plessis and Ontario. Three or four years later, it turned into a Subway, but its physical disappearance would do nothing to erase the memory of the acts I committed that day. I took out three hundred dollars and went to Brasserie Cherrier. I walked in without looking at anyone, and pulled up a stool next to the machine that looked like the best bet.
It was October 5. I didn’t know it yet, but three weeks later the entire two thousand dollars from Deathgaze would be gone. Three weeks religiously playing the machines and skipping every second class. I wish I could say that was when I pulled myself together, that the spiral of denial and loss had reached its nadir, but no one would believe me. By the beginning of November I was totally broke. I owed Marie-Lou almost six hundred dollars, which I’d borrowed to pay my roommate August and September’s rent, but gambled away instead. The last few weeks at the apartment were tense. I scrupulously avoided my roommate: I’d memorized his and his girlfriend’s school schedules to know when I could spend time at home in peace. I’d stopped visiting my parents and going for beers with my friends from school.
When I realized I would never make rent for October or November, I moved out without saying goodbye. I filled a bunch of plastic bags from the art store with clothes and books and a box of drawing supplies, and shoved it all in the trunk of a taxi one night when my roommate was at his girlfriend’s. I camped out at Marie-Lou’s for a few days, said I’d got in a fight with my roommate. In the meantime, Vincent, one of the very last Longueuil friends I still saw, offered to put me up. He didn’t ask anything in return. “You can crash in the living room for a few months. Between my girlfriend and school and soccer, I’m almost never here.”
Chapter 3
You could see in through the glass panes of a garage door. On a sign above it, the restaurant’s name was written in an elegant sans-serif: LA TRATTORIA. I pushed open the door and walked into a spacious slate-grey hallway. It wasn’t what I expected. The fanciest place I’d ever eaten was Saint-Hubert BBQ chicken, my dad took us there all the time when I was little. But La Trattoria was nothing like Saint-Hubert, or the Normandin in Trois-Rivières or the Georges in Longueuil or any other family restaurant. It was nothing like the diners my friends and I hung out at after class or a night out. I was expecting some greasy fast-food joint. This room with its shimmering glassware felt more like an art gallery.
I tried not to think about it, told myself again that I was doing the right thing. At this point I didn’t have a thousand options. The way Dave put it, there was no way they’d turn me down. No one took a job washing dishes unless they were desperate. I was desperate as hell.
I went into the hallway and pushed open a second glass door. From outside, the dining room had seemed cavernous and dark. Now I saw it was bigger than I’d thought, and even in the dim light everything looked polished to a shine. The chairs weren’t normal restaurant chairs, more like what we had in the drafting studio at my Cegep, the junior college where I studied graphic design. The lacquered wood tables looked clean enough to eat off. The walls were exposed brick, with mortar oozing out of the joints as if someone had gone out of their way to botch the job. Two massive, ultramodern light fixtures hung from the ceiling like diamond-encrusted radar antennae. The dark wood floor made me feel like I should take my boots off before walking on it. A long, padded leather partition divided the rectangular room into two sections. Next to it stood a large wall of wine bottles stacked to the ceiling, at least fifteen feet high. There weren’t any customers yet. My hands were sweaty. I dried them on my pants.
Back then I didn’t know a thing. Were there twenty, a hundred and twenty, two hundred and twenty seats? I couldn’t have told you. In fact the room held seventy diners, plus fifteen at the bar that stretched pretty much the full length of the room.
A handful of employees in black were gathered for a talk at the back of the room, next to the wall of wine bottles. They stopped for a minute and looked in my direction, then started talking again. A young woman was finishing up the table settings and bread dishes. When she saw me she put her little pile of dishes down on the corner of the bar and walked toward me. Her hair was blond and very short. She was also dressed in black: a skirt and a top that left her shoulders bare. She had prominent collarbones and pale skin. She said hi. I mumbled hi back.
“Yes?”
She spoke clearly in a tone that made it known I was an unwelcome intrusion. Obviously, I wasn’t a customer. I stuttered that I was here for a training shift as a dishwasher. She sized me up in a second. I tried to appear determined and outgoing, as I’d learned at private school. She looked five or six years older than me, maybe seven.
“Next time, go around the back and ring the bell. The address is on the door, you’ll see it.”
I followed her through the dining room. Every single table was perfectly set. The cloth napkins were identically folded. I’d never set foot in a restaurant to do anything but eat.
The employees sitting around talking looked over at me as if I’d disrupted an important ritual. Only one of them dignified me with a nod. My nerves were starting to get the better of me. Everyone was blurring together, their faces somehow out of focus. The guys were all different ages, with the same chiselled features and GQ style, kicking back in fitted shirts and well-cut pants. The sound of the soles of my work boots on the hardwood echoed through the whole room. I felt like someone banging a hammer in a church.
The waitress led me through the front kitchen. The contrast with the dining room was stark. It was a kind of narrow rectangle, lit more brightly than a gym, with large growling hood vents above the ovens. A massive pizza oven was built into the back wall, throwing a dry, intense heat even through closed doors. Around the oven’s legs a motley collection of receptacles had piled up: plastic buckets, buspans, and greasy containers that must have been chucked there during the lunch rush. The kitchen was divided into two stations by shelves stacked high with dishes. A cook was kneeling in front of the open fridges, writing on an aluminum pad with a black marker. He didn’t say a word to me.
We passed a staircase down to the basement. The stairwell walls were painted a cheerless turquoise and covered with red, brown, and green splotches of sauce. The odd fly buzzed around the fluorescent lights above the stairs. I was getting hot in my coat. A strangely soothing smell wafted up from the basement. It took me a moment to place it: chicken broth.
The waitress stopped in the doorway of a room lined with shelves full of dishes. It was pretty big, maybe ten feet by twenty.
The left side was stacked with clean dishes; the right with the dirty ones. Between was a battlefield where the remains of the day’s lunch lay in agony. A tall, grimy metal shelving unit was covered with piles of splattered plates. Pots stained with burnt tomato sauce harboured twisted ladles, tongs coated with unidentifiable sauces, plastic inserts with soggy julienned vegetables and viscous marinades, baking sheets spackled with fat and strips of scorched chicken skin. On the dishpit’s long steel counter piles of crusted frying pans leaned precariously next to a dishwasher from which small puffs of steam emerged. At the bottom of one of the overstuffed shelves a mountain of cutlery soaked in a bucket
of grey water. The tiled walls were filthier than a high school cafeteria after a food fight: knots of overcooked linguini, brown shreds of lettuce poised to come unstuck, unidentifiable lumps, soup splatters, and squirts of sauce covered the wall with a layer that grew thicker as it neared the ground, where it coalesced into a seam of sodden, oily black gunk. A large garbage can rose in the centre of it all like a sacrificial well, its black bag overflowing with what the lunchtime hordes had rejected, like the entrails of an animal with rumpled, slimy skin. The area smelled like disinfectant and something else I couldn’t put my finger on, a greasy, fetid odour that filled my nostrils. A small hood vent was noisily sucking up the humid air that had long ago had its way with the ceiling.
Two cooks were hanging out at the back of the dishpit next to the open back door. Their black pants were stained with soup and the fronts of their white shirts were smeared, as if every kid at a daycare had wiped off their hands after an especially gross snack. They were smoking and speaking English. One held his rolled-up chef’s hat in his hand.
“Renaud!”
They turned toward us. The waitress pointed her thumb at me.
“I’ve got a new one for you.”
Her tone was even sharper than before. Her voice cut through the noise and the music coming up from the basement. This girl could have made herself heard in the mosh pit at a grindcore show.
Renaud clenched his cigarette between his lips and looked me up and down. His chef’s hat fell over his oily forehead. Small grey eyes were set above bony cheeks. The way he had closed them to keep the smoke out of his eyes painted a mocking smile on his face. I couldn’t say exactly how old he was, but he must have been at least ten years older than me. The waitress had snuck off unnoticed. The other cook pushed open the door with his hips and spat outside. The cold night air sent clouds of condensation drifting in. For a second I was tempted to slip right between the two cooks and run away into the dark alley. I checked myself. Because I was paralyzed by shyness, and because I knew that within an hour I’d find myself sitting in front of a video-poker machine. And then there was my cousin’s warning, still ringing in my ears.
“So you’re Dave’s buddy.”
I nodded. He looked at me without saying anything, as if waiting for the punch line.
“What’s your name? We’re not gonna call you ‘Dave’s buddy’ all night.”
I introduced myself. We shook hands.
“I’m Renaud. That’s Jason.”
The other cook was tall with close-cropped ginger hair. A very short goatee made him seem a few years older, and he looked like a red-haired Chris Cornell. He said hi with a little nod.
I rummaged through my bag and pulled out my resume. Renaud took a last puff of his smoke, and as he breathed out he said:
“Fuck that, give it to Christian. For your contact info. I don’t give a shit.”
He rolled up the sleeves of his chef’s coat, tied his blood-stained apron back on, and headed down the stairs to the basement.
I followed in his footsteps. Once we got down we went into a noisy U-shaped room with fluorescent lights. Three other cooks were working away under a low ceiling criss-crossed by pipes. One was washing bunches of parsley in a large stainless-steel sink. The prep counters along the concrete walls were a jumble of plastic inserts of sauces and ingredients. Another cook, who I’d taken for a guy the first time I saw her, was methodically placing inserts into buspans, then carrying them upstairs to the front kitchen. A net contained purple hair too voluminous to tuck into her chef’s hat. She was chewing a lettuce leaf and humming a song that definitely wasn’t the Ice Cube blaring from the ghetto blaster tucked on a shelf between the spice jars, protected from flying sauces, vegetable juice, and clouds of flour.
A third cook was leaning over a big machine that reminded me of a table-saw, transforming big hunks of dried meat into thin slices he laid out on waxed paper. Another emerged from the cooler, slamming the door behind him. His apron was overflowing with eggplants and zucchinis. It was the guy I’d seen squatting in the front kitchen. He almost bumped into Renaud, who was making his way down a hallway with boxes full of tomatoes and big containers of vegetable oil. I followed him, stepping over further piles of dirty dishes: cake pans, fat-splattered baking sheets, cutting boards turned red from ten thousand nicks. The cook with the eggplant gave the leaning tower of dishes a kick in a vain attempt to restore balance, but it continued to collapse around the legs of the stainless-steel counter. I went back to see Renaud. At the end of the hallway we came to the staff room. It was fairly big, but the ceiling was even lower. In the middle of the room you could just make out a wooden table, like the ones in the dining room, buried under piles of empty cigarette packs, scattered newspapers, and crushed energy drink cans.
“Leave your stuff in the corner. You can change here, or in the bathroom over there.”
The bathroom door was sandwiched between an ice machine and a shelf of steel scrubbers, clean rags, paper towel rolls, and boxes of soap. Beside it there were three other doors. One of them opened onto a dry storage room and the other some kind of boiler room from which issued a warm fermented smell like ammonia. On the wall across the hall there was a single door, identified on a plaque: OFFICE. It was slightly ajar. I could hear two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. They were arguing.
“It’s okay, I’m ready to start,” I said, relieved to finally take off my coat.
I’d come here in the work pants from my labouring job last summer, made of a fabric only slightly more flexible than sheet metal. I figured they’d be good for a job like this, was proud of my foresight. I hadn’t counted on just how uncomfortable this material would get once it was soaked through.
“You’ll need these.”
Renaud handed me a clean white shirt, an apron, and two rags.
“It’s all over there, next time you need it.”
He pointed at a rod, with fifty or so shirts hanging from it.
“If you get too soaked during your shift, go ahead and change your shirt. It’s hot in the kitchen and cold in the dishpit. Make sure you don’t freeze.”
A tall thin woman darted out of the office, ignoring us. She wore elegant clothing and her jet-black hair was up in a chignon. Her high heels hammered the floor and her key ring jangled in time to her footsteps. Her eyes were cast down, intent on her flip phone, and without slowing down or looking around she shouted, probably at the person still in the office.
“And Christian, tell your staff to pick up their shit. This isn’t a hockey team locker room.”
She disappeared down the hallway, gracefully sidestepping boxes of cans and vegetables. This woman exuded natural authority. She was thirty or thirty-five, not much older than Renaud at any rate. I heard her snap at the cooks I’d just walked by, and then hurry up the stairs, each footstep resonating on the metal steps.
A stocky man with a ruddy complexion came out of the office. His hair was dishevelled and greying at the temples, and he was dragging his feet like a guy getting out of bed at noon on his day off. In his right hand he held an empty beer glass. He walked over to his locker, with glassy eyes and a smile on the corner of his mouth.
“Hey Chef,” Renaud said. “Did you do the Noreff order? If you want the bisque ready for the forty-five next week, it’s gotta be done by Sunday.”
I decided this must be the chef, and his name was Christian. He started unbuttoning his shirt and turned toward us, as if he had just noticed me. His beer belly was hanging out. He set his empty beer glass next to another one on top of his locker.
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” he said. “We’re fine for Sunday.”
I caught a glimpse of Renaud rolling his eyes. The chef took off his work pants and hung them up in his locker.
“Ever wash dishes?”
The chef asked me the question without looking in my direction.
“No,�
�� I said, surprised someone was actually talking to me. It was as if even I had forgotten that I was there.
“No worries, it’s not rocket science. You’ll see.”
He kicked off his work shoes, which looked sort of like rubber clogs, and put on a pair of jeans and a faded shirt. You could still read the words, FORT LAUDERDALE, but barely.
“Anyway, Dave should be here soon. He’ll show you the ropes.”
“Dave’s not working tonight, Chef,” said Renaud.
“Who’s the second dishwasher then? Carl? Eaton? Aziz?”
“Aziz left a month ago, Chef.”
Christian was looking for something in the depths of his messy locker.
“You didn’t schedule a second dishwasher,” Renaud went on.
He nodded in my direction.
“He’s on his own,” he continued, not even trying to hide his annoyance.
The chef finally located his hat and slowly put on his winter coat.
“Whatever, get Bébert to train him. Make him earn that raise,” he said, without looking at Renaud.
He came toward me and grabbed me by the shoulder. It was a weird version of a hug, as if he were knighting me.
“It’s gonna be okay, man. Remember: It’s just a restaurant.”
He winked at me, then took his mittens off the table and walked off the way we’d come. You could hear him saying bye to the team before climbing up the staircase heavily.
“Okay, come on,” Renaud said, cuffing me on the shoulder. It may be a little rough, if you’re all alone tonight. We’ll get you started on the mise right away.”
I followed Renaud through the prep hall, more nervous than I’d been on my first day of school. I narrowly avoided tripping over a box. We walked by the person who’d been washing parsley. He was on his way to the staff room, taking off his chef’s coat without giving us a second look. The cook who was there earlier was getting ready to go upstairs with a final pyramid of backups—I’d learn later that any container with ingredients or sauces for restocking the line was called a backup. The pyramid looked like it weighed as much as she did. The only person left downstairs was the cook I’d seen coming out of the cooler. He was draping aluminum foil over a huge roasting pan full of big hunks of meat, still on the bone, with little bouquets of fresh herbs and chopped carrots and onion. He moved quickly and confidently.
The Dishwasher Page 4