The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

  “What’s up with my appetizers?”

  Bonnie didn’t answer and neither did Steven. Both were waiting for the other to speak up and take the first blow.

  “Hey! Bonnie Evans. I’m talking to you.”

  “It’s your fucking goof Christian’s fault,” Bébert cut in in a nasty tone. “He hires incompetents who don’t do their prep.”

  “Did I ask you? I’m not talking to you. Flip your pans and don’t make me come do it myself.”

  Bébert kept working, ignoring her. He was stone-faced and there was violence in his movements.

  “Hurry up, people!”

  She smacked her palm down on the stainless-steel pass-through shelf and strode furiously off. Even after she had disappeared you could still hear the echoes of the sharp ping her ring made when it hit the steel. Bébert’s cheeks were scarlet.

  “Fucking bitch!” he said.

  He turned to me, already almost calm, and said:

  “Help us with the focaccias, it’s not that hard. Steven, what you got for focs?”

  Bébert kept right on tending to his pans. Steven looked up from his salads. He wiped his forehead and scrutinized the tickets in front of him.

  “Uh. Chicken foc, goat cheese foc, and . . . yeah, just three. A basil foc too.”

  “Good. Dishwasher’ll make them. You do crostini and salads. Everything’s gotta go out right fucking now.”

  I felt dizzy, as if I’d been tossed several feet in the air. I took a deep breath and focused on Bébert’s instructions. Now I was sweating almost as profusely as Steven, and I too had to wipe my forehead at regular intervals. Bébert pointed out the ingredients for each focaccia with his tongs, while sautéing pastas. He threw tuna steaks on the grill and turned the smoking veg in the pan with his bare hands. He’d given me a plastic bucket of tomato sauce, to ladle over the chicken focaccias. Bonnie was prepping the plates, with expressionless eyes and lips clenched tight as if she were choking back tears.

  I made the focaccias as best I could while Bébert barked out instructions. Bonnie elbowed me out of the way and grabbed them to throw into the pizza oven. In an attempt to scoot around Bonnie and the oven door that was about to open Steven bumped into Bébert, whose tongs held an osso bucco dripping in sauce. It did in fact seem to fall to the floor in slow motion, in some kind of bullet time, while the four of us all stood around in a freeze-frame. The osso bucco hit the dirty kitchen floor with a muffled slurp. There was a moment of stunned silence in the kitchen, broken only by the growl of the hood vents noisily sucking and the roar of the crowd in the dining room. Bébert kicked the osso under the oven, without even swearing. In a single movement he leaned over his fridge and took out another one. He pulled the meat from its sous-vide and threw it in the microwave. The servers were already leaving with the other plates for the same table. He told them two more minutes for the osso. With some chicken stock he extended the sauce left in the pan from the first osso. He took the meat out of the microwave, felt it, seemed satisfied it was tender enough. Then he said, between clenched teeth, as if talking to an imaginary diner in a snotty, disdainful tone.

  “It’ll still be better than if Renaud made it. And you won’t notice a thing all coked up like that, will you. Fucking chump.”

  He dropped the meat into the makeshift sauce, added a splash of tomato sauce, then asked Bonnie to plate it up.

  “Yo Bébert. The osso coming?”

  “Nick, bring me a beer.”

  “Bébert . . . I . . .”

  “Beer, motherfucker. And yeah, your shitty osso’s coming, Bonnie’s plating it.”

  With smooth, quick movements Bonnie had placed the meat on an angle, over a curl of linguini, doused it all in sauce, and planted a sprig of thyme in the marrow of the knuckle, before wiping the rim of the plate.

  Bébert turned toward me.

  “Go to the walk-in and bring me the blue cheese sauce. It’s with the other sauces in a bucket like this, under the lettuces. If you’re not sure, taste it.”

  I ran down to the basement, four steps at a time. Another surprise awaited in the prep kitchen: I hadn’t noticed earlier when I’d gone for the backups, but Carl hadn’t cleaned the steam pot. The strips of meat had been baked onto the walls of the pot, which was overflowing with chicken carcasses. For a few seconds I seriously contemplated fleeing through the staff room emergency door. It would be ten minutes before anyone noticed. I heard Bébert from upstairs, bellowing to hurry up. The stairwell amplified his voice like a megaphone. I heard him stocking up on pasta bowls. If I took off, the evil forces within me would win again. I took a minute to calm down, then went into the walk-in.

  I couldn’t tell the cream sauce from the goat cheese sauce from the blue cheese sauce. I may as well have been looking at three buckets of white glue. The only way to figure it out would be to taste them. Other than industrial cheddar, Kraft Dinner, and Pizza Hut mozzarella, all cheese grossed me out back then. The prospect of tasting a cheese sauce, let alone a blue cheese sauce, turned my stomach.

  I picked up the two buckets I thought looked about right and brought them up to Bébert. I told him that not even by tasting could I tell the difference. I waited for him to lose it. But he didn’t say anything. He could tell them apart by looking.

  “That one’s the blue. See how the chèvre always has a crust on top.”

  Nick had brought him a pint. The smile returned to his big cheeks, and he sent me back to the dishpit. He was having fun teasing Steven, who was checking out the focaccias I’d made. We had weathered the storm. It had now moved on to the dining room.

  Chapter 13

  Jade came back with a beer while I was digging my way out from under the mountain of kitchen dishes. She didn’t look remotely rattled by the end of her night, seemed as fresh as she had been at the beginning of the shift.

  “Not so bad, out front?” I asked.

  “No,” she said sweetly. “They’re a lot of fun. I like when it gets a bit crazy. Otherwise it’s boring.”

  I saw her heading for the rack of clean cups, and tried to pick it up for her. We gently bumped into each other. She burst into a laugh, with her hands on my shoulders, as if ready to push me out of her way.

  “Drink your beer. And try not to break anything.”

  She went back to the dining room with the rack of cups. The porcelain chimed in time with her footsteps as she headed away from the dishpit. I took a sip of beer. It was sweeter than honey. I was probably bright red to the roots of my hair.

  When I came up from the basement to clean up Carl’s mess I found Steven and Bébert scrubbing the steam pot. They were attacking it with gusto, as if it were another of their jobs to be dispatched as swiftly as possible. I stuttered out my heartfelt thanks, feeling a gratitude akin to being given a heart for transplant. Bébert laughed.

  “How about less talk and more taking out the garbage?”

  I took the garbage bags upstairs, then went back down as Bébert polished off his second pint. He pounded the bottom of his glass on one of the prep room tables. Steven was washing off his arms with the powerful fluorescent green degreaser in the prep sink. That’s what I should have done myself from the beginning, instead of trying to fold myself up like a contortionist in the miniscule staff washroom.

  “Where we drinking?”

  Bébert was unbuttoning his chef’s coat.

  “How about it, Steven? Gonna man up and come for beers?”

  The new guy unrolled his sleeves as he mulled it over, as if Bébert had given him a trigonometry problem to solve. Bonnie was coming back from the staff room. In her street clothes she looked ready to climb onto a stage somewhere and scream into the mic. Her purple locks poured forth from a burglar’s toque and her unbuttoned army jacket revealed a tatty Ramone’s sweatshirt. You could see skin through the holes. A king-size smoke was clenched between her teeth. She told
Bébert anywhere but Roy Bar was fine. She didn’t want to go back there. He asked why. You could tell from his cocky smile he already knew the answer.

  “I’m getting tired of that place,” she said in English.

  “Yeah right, Bonnie,” he answered in her language. “Sam told me what happened.”

  He laughed. She rolled her eyes. I remembered the bartender who’d held her in his arms, last time.

  “But don’t worry,” Bébert said, “he’s not working tonight.”

  She gave him a punch in the shoulder.

  “Fuck you, Bébert. I don’t wanna go there.”

  Steven took off to change after agreeing to come with us, wherever we decided.

  We heard Nick bounding down the stairs.

  “Yo Nick. You with us?”

  He headed down to the wine stockroom, with a big ring of keys.

  “I don’t even know what time I’ll finish, man. They’re hitting it hard upstairs.” Bonnie said we should go across the street, so Nick could meet us later when he got off. I’d be happy not to see the tattooed barman, though Nick wasn’t my first choice to take his place. Bébert told Bonnie he and Nick were banned across the street. One time, just before last call, Bébert ordered a “Canada” of JD—one shot for every province and territory—and by the time he made it to Saskatchewan he was throwing his shot glasses around the bar as he emptied them. Bébert told the story as if he’d been caught talking too loud at the library. Nick came out of the wine room with a milk crate full of bottles held out in front of him, arms straining under the weight. He put the crate down and locked the door, then put the key ring back around his wrist, bent his knees, and picked up the crate again. It all took around three seconds. He didn’t even seem to be in a hurry.

  “Let’s go to the Zinc,” Bébert said. “You can meet us when you get off. And I’ll kick your ass at pool.”

  Nick said, “Okay, cool,” over his shoulder as he climbed the stair, bottles clinking together with every step.

  Steven came back changed. He looked older. In their whites a lot of cooks looked like overgrown teenagers in pyjamas. I went to wash my face, arms, and chest in the staff washroom, and quickly changed.

  Bébert was in such a rush to get to the bar I didn’t even have time to say bye to Jade. We went out the back door. The cold was biting. I was happy to be changed. Bonnie in her cook’s outfit and Bonnie in her jeans full of holes were two distinct, twin creatures inhabiting parallel universes. Her look reminded me of Marie-Lou when I first met her.

  We walked a while through the snowy alleyways, with curls of steam rising from our heads. An open bottle of wine magically appeared out of Bébert’s bag.

  “You jack that from work?” I asked.

  “What, you think I can afford this Chatêau Asshole? Wait till I’m sous. Then we’ll really get into the good stuff.”

  We shared it three ways, since Steven passed it along when his turn came up. I didn’t usually drink white wine. It tasted like sour apples, but out there in the snow at one in the morning it went down easy. A little touch of warmth rose up in me every time Bonnie passed me the bottle. I had stopped thinking about the twenty-dollar bills in my pockets; my head was no longer playing the highlight reel of every spot I knew in town to gamble. Bonnie was laughing at Bébert’s barbs. He was really going to town on Séverine. Steven followed us in silence, hands in the pockets of his Kanuk parka. Bébert stopped every once in a while to tag a wall with the can of the spray-paint he carried in his backpack. Bonnie told him to hurry up.

  “Move it, Bébert, it’s fucking cold.”

  By the time we got to the Zinc we already had a nice buzz on. I glanced around the room. No machines. The place was exactly what the name suggested: a long zinc bar stretched from the front door to the back of the room. The windows were steamed up. The oxblood walls and low-hanging lamps gave it a cozy vibe, like a grandparents’ basement. The floor was tiled like a shopping centre, and the tables were wobbly. This tavern had been part of the Plateau of the seventies, and the eighties as well.

  Bébert ordered two pitchers and put himself up for next game on the pool table. I wiggled into a booth. Bonnie sat next to me. Bébert poured us all beers and began submitting Steven to a rigorous interrogation. Where did he work before? How did he know Renaud? How had he found the night? Bonnie stubbed out in the ashtray at the centre of the table and looked at me.

  “Hey. So . . . yeah, I kind of yelled at you back there. I’m sorry about that.”

  She picked up her glass.

  “Cheers, man.”

  I clinked my glass against hers.

  “That’s all right,” I said in halting English. “Carl, he leave without doing his job. I was hungry.”

  “Angry, yeah,” she answered after a long swig of beer. “Nah, really, you did great tonight.”

  While Steven and Bébert were hashing out their past jobs and trading gossip about people they knew, I got back to our talk about Maiden, under more propitious circumstances. The scent of her shampoo was discernible over the smells of tobacco and cooking grease.

  “So you’re a diehard Maiden fan, right?”

  “Yes, I do!”

  “Tu peux parler français, you know. I understand it well enough. Can’t speak it for shit though. But you already know that, right?”

  She pushed a lock of purple hair back behind an ear riddled with piercings and held out her pack of smokes. I declined; she lit another. She threw her pack of matches on the table. The Café Chaos logo was printed on the front.

  “Oh. You know that place?” I asked, still trying my English.

  “Yeah, why? What do I look like, a tourist?”

  She gave me an insulted look, until I turned red and stuttered some semblance of an apology. Then she burst out laughing and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Just kidding!”

  She laughed, with her other hand over her mouth. I smiled and took a sip of beer.

  “I really like that bar. It’s one of the only places I know that plays metal all night long,” I said, switching to French

  “My friends and I always go Mondays. That’s the best night.”

  “Tu y vas lundi prochain?”

  “Next Monday? No, I work. But we can go some other time.”

  She threw a cardboard coaster at Bébert, who was still chatting with Steven. He shot her a middle finger, without looking at her. She let out a little laugh, and threw another at him. I took another sip of beer and watched them. She turned back to me.

  “What else do you listen to,” I asked, “other than Maiden?”

  “Plein de choses. Older Megadeth and Metallica. First band I saw live.”

  “Oh yeah? When?”

  “Lollapolooza ’96. With these fuckers.”

  She showed me her shirt. My eyes widened.

  “You still have the shirt?”

  I didn’t really know the Ramones. She took a puff of smoke.

  “One of the best shows I’ve ever been to.”

  “Ah lucky you. I was too young to go there.”

  “You know Suicidal Tendencies? Man, the guitarist is such a babe!”

  She said it in a low voice, eyes turned heavenward and hands clasping an imaginary version of the dude in question. I tried to visualize him. I’d heard a couple Suicidal Tendencies songs. It sounded a bit like Anthrax, or maybe Slayer.

  “You like Slayer?”

  “Some tracks are okay. I’m not so into their heavier stuff.”

  I must have looked a little surprised.

  “I know I dress a bit like a metalhead, but . . . je suis une hippie inside. I listened to metal . . . à cause de ma big sis. She always made fun of me for the stuff I listened to: Pat Benatar, Heart, Fleetwood Mac, CCR, Jefferson Starship, shit like that.

  It reminded me of the songs that played on CHOM
FM in my dad’s car when he’d pick me up after primary school. Bonnie pulled the pitcher closer to her glass and then took up a new position in the booth, to get herself another. A look of concentration came over her face as she poured beer, a long cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. It foamed up and she spilled a bit. She giggled as she wiped the table with her coat sleeve. She stayed there a minute, zoning out, then said:

  “I was born two decades too late.”

  I smiled, without her seeing. I told her that the hippie part of me loved Neil Young.

  “Oh, my mum is such a huge fan!”

  Her mum used to listen to Neil nonstop at home, when Bonnie was little. On vinyl, on an old turntable. I tried to imagining her childhood, growing up in a bungalow in suburban Ontario. Her dad was great, she said, he liked everyone, could fix anything. Her mum was an old hippie, and was actually at Woodstock, or at least that’s what I think she said. I wasn’t catching it all. But I came away with a series of images in the faded colours of eighties photos. An eight-year old Bonnie with bowl-cut hair and grass-stained knees, riding a BMX in an empty lot or running around with her brothers and sisters and the neighbour kids.

  “She would put on After the Gold Rush or Everybody Knows . . . and sing all those songs while she cooked.”

  Her mum also listened to Janis Joplin, “when she was feeling bluesy.”

  I started getting wrapped up in the story. I said there was more intensity in Janis’s voice than in any metal guitar solo. She talked about Freddie Mercury, and the Queen songs she used to sing at the top of her lungs in the shower.