“Keep stirring this for me,” she said calmly. “I’ll be back in thirty seconds.”
She climbed upstairs at full speed, footsteps clacking loudly on the iron step covers. Upstairs the hum was swelling into the roar of a full restaurant, almost loud enough to drown out the sound of Bébert laughing and Renaud talking.
In exactly thirty seconds Séverine was back, in a percussive storm of high heels. She sent Jonathan upstairs to help Bébert get ready for the mains.
“You have to do everything yourself. You always have to do everything yourself. Unbelievable.”
Maude came back to the prep room.
“It’s all good, Séverine. People are relaxed, no one’s really noticing the delay. They’re drinking a lot, having fun. All good.”
Séverine kept me by her side to help serve the bisques. Renaud came back with the scallops. They looked like a bunch of little yo-yos sizzling in the big pan. It smelled delicious. With a pitcher of pink liquid in each hand, we were filling up the bowls in which Renaud had placed a single scallop. Maude loaded the trays and they disappeared upstairs on the servers’ shoulders. The assembly line was so engrossing I stopped thinking of anything else and occupied myself pouring pink bisque into the white bowls, like a robot dressed in stinking rags. As soon as the last tray of bisques had been whisked upstairs on Maude’s shoulders, Séverine asked me to clean the tables we’d used and then see if Renaud needed help.
Five minutes later a similar assembly line had formed in the service kitchen for the osso bucco and ravioli. Jonathan’s mood had changed, he was going even faster, as if he and Bébert had been swept up in the same whirlwind. Only Jason was still stone-faced as he sorted garnishes for the final plates. Renaud was putting up orders on the hotside, with help from Maude. A lock of oily hair plastered to his oily forehead made him look like a rockabilly swell who’d grown old a touch too fast. He was organizing tickets by table. It was Maude who had to make sure everything went out in the correct order, to the right people.
Greg was touring the kitchen from one end to another, peering through the pass-through where they were heating plates for the osso, asking whether “it was working.” I wondered what he meant.
“Hell yeah!” answered Jonathan.
His soprano was even shriekier than usual, and he looked like he’d jammed two fingers in an electrical socket. Greg winked at him. Renaud turned toward the team.
“Okay, ladies, focus. Table 50, seven ossos, nine pastas. Table fifty-one, three ossos. . .”
I let them get on with their orders and went back to attack the empty bisque and salad bowls already piling up on the rack.
A little before 11:30, Bébert came to find me in the dishpit and handed me some leftover osso bucco with a double portion of linguini. Between my fight with Carl and the subsequent rush I’d failed to notice how hungry I was. Now my stomach almost cramped up at the sight of the food. There was nothing worse than working surrounded by leftover foods when you were starving. The meat was so perfectly cooked it almost melted in my mouth. I scarfed down my meal in a few scorching mouthfuls, then got back to work.
It was around one a.m. when I finished up my mop. Bébert and the others had changed and were having their staff beer at the end of the bar. Silence had descended on the kitchen again, but the group was still partying away in the dining room. The music was pulsing and deafening, pierced only by the patrons’ voices. Séverine was giving the bartenders a hand while the other servers cleared the places of other customers who, one by one, were abandoning their seats to walk around the restaurant chatting or head to the bar for more drinks.
I finished cleaning the kitchen, and took a moment to peer through the pass-through. The crowd looked straight out of a fashion magazine or an ad for a dating site. Handsome men, beautiful women. My soaked, grease-stained clothes suddenly bothered me. I imagined that I’d never be part of their world, just as none of them would ever find themselves on all fours with their arm down an overflowing grease trap, or scrubbing pots until the wee hours, face spackled with food. But what did I know about it, really? I snapped out of my reverie and finished closing.
As this interminable shift neared its end and the kitchen and dishpit grew cleaner, I started fantasizing about one possible end to this night. Visions of combinations slotting into place stole over me, sending long shivers of anticipation shooting through my body, while another, much number part of my mind ordered me to go straight back to Vincent’s after work. But somewhere deep inside me plans were already being laid, preparations drawn up for the only possible outcome of all I had just suffered through. I feared the moment I would close the back door behind me and find myself out in the alley with all my money in my pocket. It was the ending that I was dreading while doing everything in my power to hasten its arrival.
“You coming?” Bébert asked, popping into the dishpit.
“Depends. Where you going?”
“Somewhere fun.”
I finished putting away the dishes.
“Okay, why not.”
A wave of relief surged over me. I almost had tears in my eyes. I started piling up the empty racks.
“You okay?” asked Bébert. “You’re making a funny face.”
Greg appeared in the dishpit. He had changed as well, into a basketball team t-shirt under his leather jacket.
“C’mon, kid. We’re out of here.”
A joint trembled in his lips while he talked. He crossed the pit and opened the door with his back. When he sparked the joint a skunky odour filled the space between us. Bébert followed him outside, and Jonathan, too, almost skipping.
“Okay, I’m coming,” I said, turning off the dishwasher.
I changed even faster than usual and set off to catch up with them. When I went to punch out Renaud was at the end of the bar, finishing his staff beer. He called me over. Jason was next to him, smoking in silence, forearms crossed like a big cat after a meal.
“You’re off tomorrow, but the day after we’re gonna need you for the day shift and the night too. I’ll try to find a new dishwasher as fast as I can. But in the meantime we’ll need you to fill some holes.”
I nodded, as I punched my employee number on the screen.
“Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”
I waved bye and took off.
In the alley a black Monte Carlo was purring, with Greg at the wheel. I could see the rings on his fingers, gleaming through the tinted windows. The bass shook the whole car. The passenger door was open, and there was no mistaking the loop from Biggie’s “Big Poppa.” Bébert breathed out a milky cloud of smoke.
“Fuck, man, take long enough? What’d you have a book to finish?”
I got in and we drove around ten minutes. It felt like I was in a rap video. The guys were yapping over the beat. Jonathan was telling the story of the bisque, on the edge of his seat, almost losing his shit, even more cranked up than earlier. He was leaning forward, with his hand on the driver’s headrest, wearing a fresh white bandage that gave him a Mickey Mouse hand. He seemed to be pointing at something outside, in the night.
“You should have seen the boss’s face.”
“I’d have rather seen Renaud’s face,” Greg said, as he passed another car. “Dude must have shit his pants.”
Bébert said that was it: Christian’s days were numbered. You could hear the scorn in his voice. Greg said we wouldn’t be any better off with Renaud.
“Two-faced rat. You can smell it a mile away.”
“Hey Bébert, is it true Christian drinks cooking wine?” Jonathan asked.
“Yeah, man. Mixed with Coke.”
Bébert moistened the joint, which was burning too fast.
No one brought up my fight with Carl, and that was fine by me. I played the episode back in my mind, with an ill-defined but unshakeable sense of shame. My next
shifts would be haunted by the fear that he’d pop up out of nowhere to exact his revenge. Sure, I could tell he was just a two-bit low-level dealer, but he must know some bigger players capable of messing me up just for the fun of it.
Greg turned down a side street, and passed a double-parked taxi, calling the driver a monkey.
“What time’s your friend’s set?” asked Bébert, holding in a toke.
“We missed it. But the other guys are pretty good.”
“Check it. There’s a spot.”
The doors of the Monte Carlo opened in unison like black steel hindwings. We got out. It wasn’t too cold. We headed up a side street and came out on Rachel. The street was bathed in light from cars and restaurants, reflecting off the wet asphalt. Greg and Bébert were walking toward me, while Jonathan chirped away behind them like a comic book version of himself. Greg whistled at chicks on their way to the all-night poutine spot, and joked around with Bébert, his deep, cavernous laugh taking its place in the nervous chorus of car engines and horns. Greg was talking about the three girls he was seeing. Bébert said he couldn’t find one who could keep up with him. It felt like the bad kids at school had brought me into their crew, it reminded me of when we used to sneak out and go to the Exclusif in Longueuil, with the Hubert brothers and their little goons who no one dared look at funny.
When we got to the bar there was a short line. The doormen said hi to Greg, had a little chat, and we were in. The place was hopping. It was a far cry from the Zinc or the Roy Bar: the lounge was full but the lighting was dim and the vibe was smooth. You could see silhouettes gathered in plush booths over low tables that held bottles of liquor or Champagne. Lamps like science-fiction fireflies emitted cool light. A central bar bisected the room. In front of bottles that shone like rockets, the bar staff floated in a bluish haze of light misting down like vapour. Customers gathered at the bar in clusters that formed and then dissipated. They looked like younger, more chilled-out versions of the people who ate at La Trattoria. I followed Greg and Bébert who were shouldering their way through the crowd. I apologized to every third person, sweating all over. Jonathan, who was even more awkward than me at pushing his way through the crowd, was falling behind, with his bandaged finger pointing in the air in front of his face. I almost bumped into a waitress with a tray of twenty-dollar drinks. I felt clumsy and filthy, like someone parachuted into a foreign land with unfamiliar customs and an incomprehensible language.
Greg was saying hi to people who must have been fifteen years older than me, in his element like a cool kid in the high-school cafeteria. He shook hands with the bartender, who looked like a Minotaur who took the time to pluck his eyebrows. Greg kissed the two barmaids on the cheeks. They looked thrilled to see him, like groupies with Lemmy Kilmister’s arm around them. He ran into two other girls he knew, chatting at the bar: slender beautifully dressed visions with come-hither smiles. They seemed to greet Greg with a languorous slowness. Never in a thousand years would I imagine that girls like that might talk to me. He said a few words first to one, then to the other, with his hand still on the rib cage of the one who’d just kissed his cheeks. He hugged five or six black guys chatting at the bar. We went to a booth. Some friends of Greg’s were already there, with three girls. Greg leaned over to kiss the girls’ cheeks, then shook hands with the guys. Greg gave me and Bébert a sign to take a seat here, then continued on his rounds toward the DJ booth. He seemed to know everyone in the club. He’d already said hi to three times more people than I had in my address book.
The low table held two bottles of Champagne on ice. I almost knocked one over with my boot when I moved to cross my legs. Jonathan served as a sort of wall, protecting the girls from my garbagy odour. They said hi to Bébert and shook hands with Jonathan and me, without really asking our names. I started feeling like I might die there, and couldn’t help thinking that the cost of a beer in a place like this would ruin me.
Bébert was chatting with friends of Greg’s with his arms straddling the back of the booth, relaxed as can be, as if this place was his kitchen. One of them, a two-hundred-eighty-pound Haitian guy named Ziggy, held a miniscule gin-and-tonic in hands the size of baseball mitts. The other guy, Kasper, was Haitian too. He wore diamonds on his wrists and ears and a whole lot of cologne. It was probably enough to overpower my own smell. Bébert seemed to know them pretty well. They were talking about the end of a recent night, some guy named Rick who’d gotten what he had coming.
Greg came back, threw his coat over the back of the booth, and went to sit in the middle of the group of girls. A waitress emerged from the crowd with a bottle of Belvedere vodka in a bucket of ice, and put it on our table. Greg poured it over ice in little glasses. Jonathan kept looking around in amazement. He drank down his first glass in one shot. Bébert, who’d been running around like a maniac all shift, finally seemed relaxed. It might have been all the weed. He and Ziggy were talking music. Greg was chatting with Kasper and the girls. He even slipped in the odd word in Creole. Bébert eventually turned toward me. I was holding onto my drink like a life buoy, making myself small and invisible. He asked if I was so quiet because of the fight with Carl.
“No, no. It’s not that.”
He took a sip of vodka, without taking his eyes off me.
“Think he’ll come after me?”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “That guy won’t even have the balls to pick up his vacation pay.”
I was sipping my drink, fighting off the shivers it gave me. I couldn’t place the taste. It actually didn’t really taste like anything, beyond alcohol. I hoped that if I got drunk quickly it would get easier to swallow. Jonathan wasn’t pacing himself at all, he was really throwing it back. Greg let him serve himself, he was too busy with the girls. One of them looked like Lauryn Hill, and it took a conscious effort not to stare at her too much. Jonathan started talking in a voice that was somehow both rapid and limp, saying whatever popped into his mind, like a highlight reel of his life in fast-forward, spinning out of control like a drunk with ADHD. He’d grown up in Val d’Or and he was finishing cooking school and he made his own Styrofoam weapons for the re-enactment battles on Mont-Royal on Sunday mornings, he was into Rush and Eminem and Radiohead. As he spoke his eyebrows formed little chevrons over his wide eyes. From time to time he scratched the back of his head, ruffling his greasy light-brown hair. He just kept jumping around like that for twenty minutes or so, barely taking the time to catch his breath. Then he was onto The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, which were coming to the theatre in a few weeks. I brought up the first film adaptation, Bakshi’s 1978 version, but that drew a blank. He looked at me for a few seconds with his hangdog lip, then polished off his vodka and poured himself another. He’d tap on the chest and interrupt me, which made me stop talking, and then he was off again, telling me all about his re-enactments and the coat of chainmail he’d assembled, one link at a time. I had nothing to add and was only half listening. I could hear Bébert discussing ounces and pounds. He looked chill and talked loud to be heard over the slow, sensual beat, some kind of reggae with no words, swirling in bass and echoey sounds from outer space. I envied Bébert for being so comfortable with such a slick crew. His Cleveland Indians cap covered his eyes, his scruffy beard made him look a few years older than he was, and his Everlast t-shirt and spray paint-splattered jeans wouldn’t pass muster with any dress code in town.
The sharp smell of tobacco mixed in with the sugary vodka and coated my mouth. The girls got up to go dance. Ziggy and Kasper too. Jonathan turned toward Bébert and started telling him all about who knows what, he was even more skittery than before. I remembered his pissy mood at the beginning of the shift, and wondered what had happened. I leaned over toward Greg, who was listening to the messages on his cell, covering his other ear with his palm. It took a good two minutes to screw up the courage to ask him my question.
“So what was it like? The Slayer show?”
“The Slayer show?”
Greg poured himself a vodka and threw two ice cubes in the glass, splashing a little on his hand.
“Yeah, you know, uh. The one you told me about. Verdun Auditorium.”
Greg was about to answer but his phone buzzed. He flipped it open, got up without excusing himself, and disappeared into the crowd. I was left feeling stupid.
One of the girls came back to sit on the booth across from me. She smiled at me and smoothed out her dress in one seamless motion. I had a nervous reflex, fortunately not acted on, to give her a little wave, like when you see a friend in the metro, across the tracks. I felt my face going crimson. The heat didn’t help. I was keeping my flannel shirt buttoned up over my t-shirt, to keep the foul odour of the dishpit contained. I was dying in all that clothing though, soaked like a mop.
“Nah, nah, man,” Bébert was telling Jonathan, making the same “cut it out” gesture over and over again. “Listen, dude. Shut up and listen for a second. You can’t let her walk all over you. Give her a yard and she’ll take you for a ride around the block. Calm down, give her a couple days, then try to patch things up. And quit bugging her with your stupid stories about foam swords and forts. She’s a skater, man.”
Bébert had taken Jonathan’s shoulder in his massive hand. Pretty soon Jonathan was looking bummed out again. His big bandaged finger lay in front of him, gleaming white, and his head stooped like a man defeated. He was leaning over on his knees, his body gone limp, equal parts groggy and drunk. They might have been talking about Bonnie, but I couldn’t be certain.
I pretended to watch the dance floor. People were moving as if swept along by the same hypnotic wave, under subtle lighting that bathed everything in a sapphire glow. I decided I didn’t totally hate trip hop. I almost thought I caught a glimpse of Marie-Lou in the crowd, hair spilling over her cheeks, but it wasn’t her after all. I told myself that I absolutely had to call her. Greg was at the bar, doing shots with a tall thin guy whose biceps bulged under his jacket. He looked like a boxer in the twilight of his career.
The Dishwasher Page 18