“Whatever, Steven can handle it.”
“Steven?” Maude asked, unconcerned that the man in question was ten feet away. “Are you fucking with me?”
“It’s my day off, Maude.”
Renaud pulled a smoke from his pack.
“When you do as much as me around here, then we’ll talk. Until then, have a good night. You kids’ll be fine.”
Maude’s face clouded over. I thought she was going to slap him. Renaud gave her a little wink on his way out and then slipped between a party of five on their way in. Maude watched him go, wide-eyed. Greg came back toward the bar.
“No stress, honey. I’ll handle Bébert.”
I heard the backstory a few days later. It all started the previous night after I left the Roy Bar for the casino. Their night took a turn for the worse, too. After putting back three forty-pounders of St-Leger whisky, Bébert and his crew started popping speeds to keep the party going. Then Nelly, one of Bébert’s exes, showed up and started playing mind games with him. She figured it was a good time to introduce her new boyfriend, and also make out with Bébert a little whenever the guy went to the bathroom for a piss or a bump. Doug wasn’t amused. He ended up pulling them both out by the scruffs of their necks, with Nelly kicking and screaming like an elf yanked from her den. They popped a few more pills, and closed the Roy Bar. The saga continued at Aria, followed by a friend’s house, where Nelly came back for more. This time not even Doug could handle the situation. When the dep opened first thing in the morning the crew came back with a couple of two-fours of cold beer. Bébert had disappeared with Nelly sometime between noon and one. No one had heard from them since. His shift started at 3:30. It was almost 5:00.
Greg put on his coat and headed off. The moment he walked out the door customers started pouring in, as if every fridge in the neighbourhood had simultaneously emptied and everyone had decided that dinner at La Trattoria was the perfect remedy.
The first orders caught Steven and Bonnie off guard. They just couldn’t nail their timing down. Steven was as shaky on the hotside as Maude had predicted. He was going table-by-table, instead of grouping his orders by menu item. And Bonnie was more irascible than ever, with dark circles that seemed to have spread down to her cheeks. She was trying to steer Steven in the right direction, but he categorically rejected any instructions that came from her. Because Bonnie was incapable of explaining anything calmly, Steven’s pride kept him stubbornly heading in the wrong direction. In need of an outlet for her rage, Bonnie was slapping down the pans she’d prepped for Steven and winging them toward him, while handling the coldside, cursing up a storm, and solemnly swearing to ditch this job the second she had the chance.
Everyone was freaking out all around me, but I was immune. Their panic bounced right off my back. I thought back to one of the first things Christian told me: it’s just a restaurant.
Maude was trying to establish a semblance of authority by giving Bonnie and Steven directions over the pass-through. To no avail.
The tables themselves weren’t helping. There weren’t only a lot, they were also unusually demanding. And new customers kept pouring in. There was practically a line-up. Denver was everywhere at once, laden with dishes and breadbaskets. Every time he came back to pick up an order he’d fix his hair. Then, with furrowed eyebrows and a clenched jaw, he’d try to parse the orders Bonnie was carelessly tossing out onto the pass-through, almost as if she was going out of her way to make the worst possible mess the better to blow this night up as quickly as possible.
Eventually Greg got back. He rolled his coat into a ball and tossed it behind the bar, then jumped back into the fray, as if he hadn’t missed a beat and he had the whole restaurant under control.
Bébert sauntered in ten minutes later.
He came in through the front door. Maude’s eyes never left him as he limped through the dining room. Later he explained that he’d gotten glass in his foot, though he couldn’t say how. The hood of his winter coat was up, shadowing his eyes. In his hands he held a brown paper bag with the neck of a bottle poking out. He took a pull, right there in front of all the customers. Foam from the beer gathered on his hand. Maude glared at him.
“He’s here, y’all can chill,” Greg said, as he watered new tables.
Bébert punched in, then limped back to the dishpit to find me. He laboriously extracted a smoke from his rumpled pack of Export As. His every movement seemed to be in slow motion, as if his brain had to double-check the route before approving it. He wasted half a dozen matches lighting his smoke. Peering at me through bleary, half-closed eyes, he beckoned me over. I was less than a foot away. He dug through his pockets and liberated at least twenty bucks in loonies and toonies, dropping his keys in the process. The corner of a torn-up baggy was in with the coins. He held out the handful of change.
“Go to the store and get me a twelve-pack of Heineken. Or Blue if they don’t have it,” he said slowly and deliberately.
He dumped the coins in my palm. And dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pill, which he washed down with a sip of beer.
“Don’t forget. If they don’t have Heineken . . . Blue.”
He set off to the kitchen. I threw a rack through the machine before jogging over to the dep on Mentana, between Mont-Royal and Villeneuve.
I had enough for a twelve of Heineken, but bought the Blue instead. It was five bucks cheaper. I spent the difference on scratch-and-wins, idiotically convinced I would win back my fortune. I set my case of beer down between my work boots and scratched the tickets right there. Nothing. Not even two dollars for another ticket.
When I got back the cold dishpit was exactly as I’d left it. The buspans were overflowing with floor dishes, but I knew I could burn through them. In the kitchen, Steven had crawled back into the garde-manger that was his hole and was mechanically working away in silence. He looked like a wounded animal. Bonnie was on the pass, seething away and carelessly tossing up orders that were never quite complete. Bébert was back in the land of the living, mysteriously possessed of an otherworldly vigour. He was handling the pans with a firm hand, perhaps to offset the clumsiness of his movements. When he saw me he gave out a victory yelp. Steven turned toward me. He saw the case of beer, and cradled his face in his hand. Bébert opened a bottle before setting the case under the steam table.
Greg came by the kitchen.
“So Burt, my Tylenols working?”
Bébert replied with an ursine growl. He was stumbling through the rush with the efficiency of a quadriplegic. It was like watching a tragedy unfold while the unwitting protagonist just keeps cracking jokes, cockier than ever. Every ten minutes Steven’s face turned a new shade of pale. Bonnie was rapping her fist on the counters, swearing in English as sobs of rage took form in her throat. She looked like a maniac. I was almost scared she might grab her knife and stab someone.
Bébert was dropping full pans as he cooked them, and knocking over the ones Bonnie prepped for him. He was sending out the wrong pastas with the wrong sauces, and blithely rolling dirty pans under the oven as if the kitchen were a bowling alley. He never stopped hounding Steven, asking whether he knew how to flip a pan or if Renaud moved him up because he gave good head. He dropped the bottles of white wine and oil, knocked Bonnie’s water pitcher into the insert of tomato sauce, dropped his beer in the cream sauce. On the other side of the pass-through the room kept getting fuller. Bébert was fixing his mistakes with a childish, defiant laugh. When Bonnie got fed up with his drunken shenanigans and told him to fuck off he just laughed louder. He was cracking barely passable jokes about Sam, asking if he knew she got it on with coworkers when he didn’t call her back. Bonnie just kept saying the same thing over and over, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” She had tears in her eyes. And she too was knocking over everything in her path. Maude was literally tearing her hair out. The customers kept flooding in. At no point did she regain comp
osure. She was yelling at Bébert, who responded with a finger and a bratty smile on his droopy face. The servers hustled around the room, trying to keep everyone happy as they waited for orders Bébert was having to start over twice and even three times, when he didn’t forget them outright.
I stuck to the background. I wanted no part in this gong show—as far as I could tell, it wouldn’t affect the stacks of dishes I’d have to wash or the messes I’d be left to clean up. It felt like I was floating above the melee, flying high above it all. I’d already met my Waterloo. There was little that could phase me now.
Bonnie stormed into the dishpit. She was angry as ever, her eyes full of tears and her face a deep red.
“Yo Steven, where the f—”
She turned to me.
“You seen Steven?”
I answered nonchalantly that I hadn’t, as if she’d inquired into my opinion on the colour blue. I threw a rack of pans through the machine and asked why she wanted to know. Without answering, she ran back to the kitchen, where the cacophony was growing louder by the minute as pizza sheets rained down on the oven and the pans jockeyed for position on the elements and the microwave door slammed shut.
I went down to the basement to pick up the prep room dishes. Steven was pouring white pepper on a cut, dressing his wound as he repeated over and over that he’d fucking had fucking enough of fucking working with that fucking madman. When he saw me he said, in a serious tone, that there was no way we’d make it out alive tonight.
“He’s off the fucking rails. Crazy bastard. I’m not going back up there. No way!”
It was more than just an impression: Steven’s voice was trembling. He was choking back a sob. Bébert bellowed at him from the top of the stairs.
“Get up here, faggot, we’ve got orders. Want me to cut you up for real?”
Something kicked in then, an instinct to make it through this shift and out of this madhouse alive. I took Steven by the shoulder.
“I’ll do garde-manger. Take care of the prep kitchen and dishes, okay?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran up with my baking sheets piled high with inserts of sharp-smelling vinegars and marinades.
I strode into the kitchen like a boxer entering the ring. Bonnie looked at me, almost with disdain.
“Fuck you doing here, man?”
I got right to the point.
“Simmer down. I’m here to help.”
I was getting a handle on Bonnie’s expressions, enough to throw them back at her once in a while.
That seemed to calm her down. At any rate, she stopped fighting me over everything I said. She was drying her tears on her sleeve and sorting order tickets as they spat out of the printer. I read the tickets on the garde-manger rack and, remembering Bob’s advice, began by getting everything straight in my head.
I started by clearing out all the appies together, then moved on to the salads ordered as second courses. I was so focused that Bébert’s bullshit and increasingly spectacular accidents didn’t even register. Bonnie also seemed to be getting a hold on herself. She was working through her orders more steadily than I’d seen in weeks, and even finding some energy to manage Bébert, who was driving straight off the cliff with his foot on the gas. He was spitting out snatches of Eazy-E, “Mothafuck Dre, mothafuck Snoop, mothafuck Death Row . . . and mothafuck this Osso!” He was tossing burned pans under the pizza oven. Once in a while he’d snag a pan prepped for the hotside on the shelf over the range, which knocked over the rest of them in a cascade of broccoli bits and prosciutto slices and cherry tomatoes and bell peppers. By this point some customers were giving up and leaving before their food showed up. It made no difference; new ones were standing by to take their places. The racks overflowed with orders. At one point Bébert lost his shit. He threw all the order tickets in the garbage and made an executive decision: Fuck it, everyone was going to have linguini carbonara. Everyone froze. Denver, Maude, me. Bonnie slunk off to the dishpit. I heard her hammering something and screaming in rage. Just above the dessert pass-through, I saw Maude’s face wrinkle up like a dehydrated mushroom. Her eyes were wide as snooker balls. I gave up. I ignored Bébert’s decree and kept making appies and salads, orders I remembered and knew how to make. There was no other way to make it through this nightmare.
By ten Bébert had killed his case of beer, and Greg had discreetly brought him back a pitcher to keep him from crashing. That was when Maude had the bright idea to close the kitchen. She had aged ten years and sweated out what looked like ten litres of fluid.
End of the night. The service kitchen looked like it had been ransacked by the Huns. Bébert disappeared after dumping all his dirty dishes into the pit in a random heap of pans, ladles, and tongs. Bonnie cleaned the service kitchen as best she could. Steven helped me finish the dishes. Just when we thought it was over, we saw that Bébert had fallen on his way down the stairs with the buspan full of sauces. The bottom steps were soaked in rosé sauce. He’d left everything where it fell and disappeared into the night. We never found out where.
Maude poured me my staff beer. She thanked me for helping her out in the kitchen, and promised to tell Séverine how I’d stepped up. Her features were softer now, she had regained her usual “heroine of the future” look. I could tell I’d been promoted to the category of people she held in high esteem.
The catastrophic rush we’d survived gave me a new perspective on my night in the casino. I thought about Alex, and Marie-Lou. Malik and Vincent. It wasn’t too late to dig myself out of this hole. But I had to act fast. I needed money. I took a long sip of beer. There must be a solution, a way to convert ten cents into two bucks. The date I’d given Alex was fast approaching. I could still get my hands on the money. All I had to do was push my luck a little further. I heard Greg’s high-pitched voice.
“Wassup, fighter. Not too tired?”
He laid his smoke in the ashtray next to my pint.
I turned to him, startled, like when your teacher catches you daydreaming. I always felt the same particular combination of nerves and curiosity around Greg.
“I heard you talking to Renaud earlier,” he said. “What, they’re not paying you enough?”
I took another sip of beer.
“No, it’s not that. I’m in a bit of trouble.”
His hand was resting on the bar. He had a gold pinkie-ring.
“Were you serious, the other night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Serious.”
He wasn’t smiling. I squirmed on my stool.
“Okay,” he said, taking his smoke. “I may have a little something for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe. How much do you make every two weeks?”
I gave him the figure from my last cheque. He smiled. If his smile had revealed fangs in place of eye teeth, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all.
“With me you could make that much in one night.”
My face lit up. His smile didn’t last long.
“But it’s not just a quick buck. I don’t need a guy who’ll leave me hanging after a week. I need someone I can count on.”
I said I could handle whatever he had.
“Good. I’ll just have to make sure I can trust you first.”
“No problem, Greg.”
Maude came in and asked Greg for a drag of his smoke. He turned to her.
“I told you it was a bad idea to bring him in.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” she said, exhaling a puff of smoke.
“Get Séverine to make the rat bastard stay.”
“Renaud didn’t care. He didn’t want to stay.”
“Séverine would have twisted his arm. That’s for sure.”
“Anyway,” she said, leaning in toward me, “good thing you were there. I was sure Bonnie was gonna bolt halfway through the shift.”
I didn
’t know what to answer. I shrugged my shoulders. Greg checked the time on his flip phone.
“C’mon, man, finish your beer. We’ve got stuff to talk about.”
Chapter 33
People like Grégoire Normandeau don’t go around doing people favours. Nothing comes free. But back then I was too green to know better.
I got in the passenger side of his black Monte Carlo. If there was one car I’d like to own in my life, that was it. Public Enemy was blasting. Greg broke the ice by asking if I’d heard their songs with Anthrax. A metalhead like myself should know that shit, right? The two beers I’d had at work loosened my tongue. We got to talking about the “Big Four” thrash metal bands, Anthrax, the Metallica–Megadeth rivalry. He kept saying he couldn’t believe a kid my age knew all the music he’d been into as a teenager. He told me about the Slayer show at the Verdun auditorium. I just couldn’t picture Greg at fifteen or sixteen. I wiped the steam off my window and shivered. The car interior was humid, the Monte Carlo hadn’t had time to warm up.
We drove down Rachel, then parked next to the lounge we’d been at a few weeks earlier. The bar was smoky and hopping, every booth packed tight with well-dressed, perfumed yuppies in their early thirties. I followed Greg around like a lapdog. Young women were clustered at the bar drinking martinis, lips shiny in the dim blue lighting. They saw me without seeing me, like a mailbox or a fire hydrant. When people saw Greg, though, they greeted him with unabashed joy. The guy seemed to be loved. But he played his cards close to his chest. The sharper edges of his personality, his quick temper and authoritarian side, lay dormant beneath a veneer of friendliness. He always looked cool and laid back, always had something smooth to say in French or English, always made you laugh. I watched him interact with people like a star with inside knowledge of the way the world worked. It was hard to credit the stories Bébert had told me. The violence that coursed through him at the restaurant seemed to have dissipated. I tried to understand what he did to keep all eyes on him and inspire such extravagant admiration. Everyone felt blessed to be in Greg’s company. He was like some kind of modern-day nobleman. No one noticed the scars on his scalp. Bébert had told me a guy from the Bo Gars gang broke a bottle of champagne over his head at some club, maybe the Orchid. It ended in a knife fight. I never heard how the other guy made out.
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