Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Liquor,” Rickey said.

  “Liquor? Dude, I know you’re upset about getting fired, but c’mon. Every place in the city serves liquor.”

  “But no place has a menu entirely based on it.”

  “You’re really losing me.”

  “New Orleans loves booze. We love drinking it, we love the idea of drinking it, we love being encouraged to drink it. You think all those drive-thru daiquiri stands in Metairie are just serving tourists? Tourists don’t go to the suburbs. Locals are drinking most of those daiquiris, and they could get ’em anywhere, but they love getting ’em at the drive-thrus because it makes them feel like they’re doing something naughty. We could open a place that does the same thing on a much bigger scale.”

  “A whole menu based on liquor.”

  “Picture it, G. A nice dining room—looks like, say, a cross between Commander’s Palace and Gertie Greer’s Steakhouse. Big bar in the front, mirrors, three hundred bottles—every kind of liquor and liqueur, every brand you could name. But that’s just the beginning. The real draw is that we use liquor in all the food. Oysters poached in whiskey. Tequila barbecue sauce. Bourbon-glazed duck. Even goddamn bananas Foster. And that’s just the obvious shit. There’s not a recipe in the world that we couldn’t find a way to stick a little liquor in it.”

  “You think that’d even be legal?”

  “It’s New Orleans. If you got enough money, anything’s legal.”

  Rickey gave G-man his biggest smile. All his life, people had remarked on Rickey’s smile—its warmth, the way it lit up his intense blue eyes, its power to beguile a person who had no intention of being beguiled. “Gawgeous!” G-man’s own mother had pronounced it once, when she’d been trying to punish them for some infraction and Rickey had turned its full force on her.

  Though G-man knew its charms well, he had long believed himself impervious to its manipulations. Now, for the first time in as many years as he could remember, he wondered.

  Mostly sober and far less cocksure now, Rickey couldn’t sleep. He’d swallowed some Excedrin PM, an old habit from his CIA days, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his idea. He still thought it was a brilliant concept for a New Orleans restaurant. He just didn’t see how he could pull it off. He was great at starting things, but not always so good at finishing them.

  Rickey’s parents hadn’t sent him to cooking school out of any belief that he was destined to be a great chef. Mainly they had wanted to get him out of New Orleans and—more to the point—away from G-man. Rickey’s mother had concocted the plan with G-man’s parents, then convinced her ex-husband to pay for it. Apparently it was OK for a couple of boys to spend all their time together at age nine, but not OK at seventeen. Rickey still cringed at the memory of how easily he’d been manipulated, and their actual time apart had been so terrible that neither liked to recall it.

  Even so, he sometimes wished he had been able to finish the two-year curriculum instead of getting kicked out after four and a half months. He could have learned a lot about cooking. As it was, he and G-man moved into a crappy little apartment on Prytania Street. Though the apartment was a dump, Uptown seemed luxurious, with its giant oaks and its proximity to the St. Charles streetcar line. G-man already had a decent job at a seafood place downtown. Rickey got hired as a PM salad guy at Reilly’s, a restaurant in one of the formerly grand old hotels that still haunted Canal Street like maiden aunts not quite far enough gone to send to the old folks’ home. A few months later, G-man quit the seafood place and came to Reilly’s too. Soon they were both working on the hot line. Despite the name, Reilly’s claimed to serve classic French cuisine, which apparently meant small dry cuts of meat or fish mired in stiffening yellow sauce. It was seldom pretty, and sometimes it was actively disgusting, but it was where they learned the skill of volume: making and putting out vast amounts of food.

  They’d been at Reilly’s for a couple of years when a cook from the old seafood joint, now a sous chef at the Peychaud Grill, offered G-man a dollar more an hour to be his sauté guy. The Peychaud was smaller than Reilly’s and more hardcore. Once G-man had nailed down his position, he lobbied for Rickey when another line job opened up. That was their first experience being part of a crew that was tight in every sense of the word: smooth in the kitchen, close-knit, and more alcohol-drenched than any group of people Rickey had known before or since. New Orleans kids learned to drink young; Rickey and G-man had been able to hold their liquor since their early teens. The Peychaud crew, though, put them to shame at first. They came in at three, prepped up for dinner service, cooked their asses off for four hours, broke down the kitchen, and dragged themselves to the bar, where Dionysian challenges were made and met. There was a pot-smoking area behind the ice machine, a long series of razor scratches on the bar where somebody had scraped up lines of cocaine, entire cases of nitrous oxide chargers that never got turned into whipped cream. Once there was a bottle of ether in the reach-in. It was kind of a dangerous place, but it was also fun. Rickey and G-man partook of everything available. They were intoxicated not just with liquor and drugs but with their status as part of a culinary pirate crew, slashing and burning and taking no prisoners.

  They stayed at the Peychaud Grill for nearly five years, but never rose higher than sauté because there was no turnover among the kitchen staff. The Peychaud was a prestigious place to work, and once you had a job there, you hung onto it. Still, those were pretty good years all in all: they were making enough money to move from the crappy apartment to a little shotgun house on a shade-dappled block of Marengo Street, and they were cooking some great food. Chef Paco Valdeon was a prodigious cokehead who’d learned to cook in France. Though he was usually incoherent by two in the morning, he could answer any food question and discourse on any food subject as long as he remained conscious. Some people considered him a thug, but he was a culinary genius.

  Toward the end of this time, though, G-man calculated that they had worked an average of ten hours a day, six days a week, 312 days a year. And they’d spent most of the rest of the time partying. They had no time to see their families who lived just a few miles away, much less to think about hazy concepts like “vacation” or “health insurance.” Not yet twenty-five, they felt like broken old men. But they couldn’t quit. They’d come up at the Peychaud and imprinted unhealthily on it; it was their gang, their abusive surrogate parent, their hell away from home.

  Rickey sometimes wondered what would have become of them if the Peychaud crew hadn’t imploded one night in a marathon of apocalyptic drunkenness. No one remembered much of this night, but by the end of it, two cars were totaled, the sous chef and the bartender were in Charity Hospital, the chef was in jail, and the grill guy’s wife was filing for divorce. The owner decided to close the place and they found themselves jobless. Rickey guessed this kind of thing was known as a “wake-up call.”

  They had spent the past couple of years jumping from restaurant to restaurant, taking whatever job paid best, working together when they could but never getting all that tight with any kitchen crew. Sometimes they had a few drinks after service; mostly they just went home. Life wasn’t bad. In a lot of ways it was better than the constant soul-grinding revelry of the Peychaud Grill. But Rickey had put off being disappointed with himself after he left school because he was so glad to be back home with G-man, living the life they had wanted to live since they were sixteen. Then the Peychaud years kept him from thinking too hard about anything. Now that he wasn’t drunk all the time and he and G-man were as comfortable as an old married couple, he sometimes felt that he had given up too easily. Given up what, he wasn’t sure. He’d never really burned with ambition to be a head chef; most of them worked harder than anybody else and didn’t make all that much more money.

  And yet … once upon a time he had been truly curious about cooking. He’d wanted to know everything about it, to be the best cook possible. That was why his folks had been able to bribe him with the CIA. Even now he hadn’t completely lo
st that curiosity: he read Gourmet and Bon Appétit, watched the Food Network, had a big cookbook collection. And he took pride in being a roller. He knew faster cooks and better cooks, but few who were faster and better.

  Still something gnawed at him. Something always had, really; it was not in his nature to be content. Usually G-man was content enough for the both of them. But right now their situation was bad, and their bitch session in the park had excited the gnawing thing. Liquor: his thoughts seized on that idea and would not leave it alone. A restaurant based on liquor, but not too gimmicky. A really good menu, so people would keep coming back after the novelty wore off. Rickey had spent nearly half his life observing the New Orleans restaurant scene, and he felt certain that the place would be a hit.

  But what difference did it make? You needed money to start a restaurant. If you didn’t have money, you needed collateral. If you didn’t have collateral, you needed rich friends who could invest. And if you didn’t have any of that, you at least needed a credit card. Rickey and G-man had exactly none of the above.

  He lay in bed thinking about this until the sky began to brighten, but none of it mattered in the least, because he was broke and he had to start looking for a new job tomorrow. They both did. Probably they wouldn’t be able to work together for a while. Rickey smoothed his pillow, closed his eyes, and tried to resign himself to a spell of crappiness. As he did so, G-man rolled over in his sleep and threw an arm across Rickey’s chest, and Rickey fell asleep thinking that maybe things weren’t that bad.

  chapter 2

  It was a rare luxury in the kitchen, knowing there was always one person watching your back, one other cook whose habits and motions you knew as well as your own. It was a luxury Rickey didn’t have any more, and it was making him crazy.

  Weeks behind on the rent, they’d had to get separate jobs. G-man had an easy-ass no-brainer of a gig making bar snacks at a watering hole on Tchoupitoulas, within walking distance of the house. Rickey had snagged a position as saucier at Escargot’s, a Tourist Creole restaurant in the Hotel Bienvenu that went through staff almost as quickly as the manager went through cocaine. After Reilly’s he had sworn he would never work in another hotel restaurant, and he hadn’t until now.

  Being a saucier was hot, heavy work. He handled the bulk prep for the whole kitchen, made stocks, sauces, and demi-glaces with enormous veal bones in stainless steel vats, and worked all the banquets and private parties, making for frequent eighteen-hour days. His one bright spot was cooking the staff meals, which were no challenge but upon which everyone complimented him: apparently the last guy had been a real scrub, slinging ground chuck and week-old vegetables into a pot with rice or dead pasta every day.

  Rickey caught the streetcar to the French Quarter at 6 a.m. G-man worked bar hours, four in the afternoon till four in the morning. Not only were they not working together, they hardly ever saw each other when they weren’t working. The house was filthy; they hadn’t cooked at home in weeks; Rickey ate his own staff meals, G-man grabbed sandwiches at the bar, and they both ate a lot of cold cereal. Fortunately a twenty-four-hour corner grocery up the street stocked milk, beer, and liquor, which was all they needed.

  Rickey arrived at Escargot’s one day, the sour early-morning smell of the Quarter assaulting his nostrils, his bloodshot eyes hidden behind a pair of G-man’s shades. “Kevin ain’t here yet,” said the porter by way of greeting.

  “Aw, shit.”

  Kevin, the production guy, was supposed to arrive before Rickey and get the morning prep rolling. If he flaked, Rickey was automatically in the weeds. He stowed the sunglasses in his knife bag, tied a bandanna around his head, and turned on the oven, cursing under his breath the whole time.

  As he hauled fifty-pound sacks of bones out of the freezer and smashed them on the floor to break them up, he began to sing. “Massa got me workin … workin in this kitchen … Ole kitchen sucks so bad …”

  Terrance, the 280-pound dishwasher, joined in from the other side of the kitchen. He’d grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward, and though they had not known each other back in the neighborhood, he and Rickey had soon become friends at Escargot’s.

  “What’s the good word, Terrance?”

  “Ain’t none that I know of. I been saying bad words since I got here.”

  Rickey scanned his produce, deciding on a soup du jour. The cauliflower looked good, so he cooked it down in butter and dumped it into a Lexan container with several pints of cream. He looked for the puree wand on its usual shelf, but couldn’t find it. “You seen my wand?” he asked the sous chef, who was making notes about the day’s specials.

  “Nope. Maybe Kevin’s using it.”

  “Kevin flaked on me again.”

  “He gets here, you gonna send him home?”

  “Don’t know. I guess it depends on how far behind I get.”

  “You gonna tell Mike?”

  “I’m not telling Mike shit,” said Rickey. Mike was the manager. He seldom arrived before 10:30, and no one ever told him shit.

  Rickey looked for the wand in the pantry area, the sinks, even the refrigerator. It was a large, expensive tool and he couldn’t imagine how it might have gotten lost, but eventually he gave up and dug out the food processor. He pureed the soup in small, tedious batches, all the while invoking dire curses upon Kevin.

  As he was whirling the last batch, Terrance called, “Hey, Rickey, what’s that smell?”

  Rickey sniffed the air and realized that it was acrid. The odor was like a concentrated version of certain miasmas that used to settle over the Lower Ninth Ward in his childhood, when a lot of chemical processing was still done out there: something cooking that shouldn’t be.

  At his station, the sous chef began to cough. “Rickey,” he called, “you burning something?” Rickey checked the stove burners, found nothing wrong. Remembering that he had lit the oven, he got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He snatched open the oven door. Foul smoke billowed out. There was his puree wand, its plastic handle partially melted onto the top rack.

  “Who the fuck left this in here?” he yelled, knowing it was futile, that one of the PM guys must have done it during cleanup and there was nobody he could take it out on now. He grabbed the wand with a pair of tongs, ran over to Terrance’s sinks, and dropped it in. It lay on the wet stainless steel like a Dali sculpture, totally useless. The porter passed through the kitchen and wondered aloud, “Who farted?”

  It was 8:30 now. Rickey went to the bar and fixed himself a screwdriver. Orange juice, he figured; it was good for breakfast.

  The wand incident set the tone for the rest of the day. He didn’t mind everybody in the kitchen making jokes about his limp wand, but the loss of the tool itself slowed him up considerably. Kevin was never heard from, which meant Mike would fire him, which meant Rickey would have to fill in for him until they hired a new production guy.

  Just to make things symmetrical, one of the banquet crew flaked out as well—his wife called to say he was in jail, which might or might not be true. Mike pissed and moaned about it for a few minutes, then told Rickey to ask the purchasing manager to stay and help. Rickey was almost sick enough of the job to say “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” but he thought about the rent and forbore. Instead he headed for the purchaser’s cubbyhole of an office, dreading the trapped and hateful look he knew the man would give him.

  While Rickey and the banquet crew were clearing up the remains of steam-table jambalaya, rubber shrimp Creole, and gumbo boiled to a pot-crust by a Sterno flame, G-man was sitting in the Apostle Bar eating a quesadilla and reading a copy of Big Easy magazine somebody had left in the men’s room. Big Easy’s restaurant reviews weren’t long on culinary daring, he noted. In a feature on the Ethnic Hideaways of the West Bank, the writer recommended a certain Chinese place “only if you’re in the know about what to order,” then went on to tout the egg rolls and lemon chicken.

  The Apostle Bar was a moderately successful watering hole owned by Anthony Bo
nvillano Jr., with whom Rickey and G-man had once worked at a St. Charles Avenue restaurant built from leftover parts of the Eiffel Tower. Like Rickey and G-man, Anthony had been in one kitchen or another since his teens, but he’d always wanted to own a bar. When Big Anthony died, he left his son enough to open a little place, stipulating only the maintenance of his annual St. Joseph’s Day altar. St. Joseph had once saved Sicily from famine, and local Italians—most of whose families hailed from Sicily—often built altars in their homes and businesses for his feast day. Every March, Anthony brought out his father’s tall plaster statues and placed them on a three-tiered altar near the video poker machine. Bonvillano sisters and cousins sent over an array of food to heap at the statues’ feet. The family took out a classified ad saying what days the altar would be open so the public could visit. Visitors usually contributed a few dollars and took home a small bag filled with Italian seed cookies, a piece of bread, a prayer card, and a lucky fava bean, which symbolized St. Joseph’s aid since it had thrived in Sicily when other crops failed. No one ever seemed to question whether Big Anthony had really intended for the altar to be in the bar, and no one was offended by its being there. St. Joseph was also the patron saint of workers, and everyone knew that workers needed a drink now and then.

  Anthony was just coming in now. The sight of his cook sitting at the bar caused him no visible distress. That was one good thing about working for an ex-line cook: he understood that when there was nothing to do, there was no point in staying on the line. “G-man, where y’at,” he said.

  “Anthony B,” G-man replied.

  “Much business tonight?”

  “Not yet. Let ’em drink a little more and they’ll start ordering.”

  “Maybe you ought to put out some snacks, huh?”

  “Anthony, I told you before—you put out snacks, this crowd will eat ’em and not order anything. You want to sell more food, you gotta let me cook a little bit better stuff, bring in a different crowd.”