Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Anthony’s ruddy forehead creased. Innovation worried him. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, and told the bartender to give them each an Abita beer. They had had this conversation many times since G-man started the job.

  Back in the kitchen, G-man made a gallon of blue cheese dressing for the chicken wings. They’d been using packaged dressing mix when he got here. Now Anthony let him make a creamy, tangy fresh version as long as the cheese didn’t cost too much. He was scooping some onto a ruffled potato chip when Rickey staggered in.

  Anyone outside the restaurant business might have mistaken Rickey for a strangely dressed bum. His hair was rank with sweat, his white jacket and houndstooth check pants greasy. In his eyes was a weary thousand-yard stare. He was a walking miasma of food smells, any one of which might have been appetizing; together they were disgusting. His workboots were crusted horrors. He leaned against the reach-in cooler, let his knees bend slightly, and closed his eyes.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” said G-man. Every time he saw Rickey fresh from work, he experienced three conflicting emotions: pity, relief that he himself wasn’t working in some big thankless kitchen, and guilt at feeling relief when Rickey was suffering.

  “Dude,” said Rickey faintly. He had a beer in his hand but did not raise it to his lips, as if even that essential act were too strenuous. G-man took him by the shoulder, steered him out to the bar, and sat with him at a table.

  “Worse than usual?”

  “Kevin didn’t show up.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “Neither did Tyrone.”

  “Jesus.”

  Rickey leaned across the table and laid a hand on G-man’s arm. A small unbandaged cut on Rickey’s second finger was leaking bloody lymph, and G-man resisted the impulse to slide his arm away.

  “You gotta get me out of this,” Rickey said earnestly. “I don’t know how much more I can take. Every morning Mike comes drag-assing in with his nostrils powdered up, and he says, ‘Hup hup! Busy day, crew! Busy day!’ Every fucking morning, G, and all of us standing there with knives in our hands.”

  “Dude—”

  “I fantasize about watching Terrance just pick him up by the head and squeeeeeeeze.”

  “Dude!”

  “I’m going sideways, G. I’m gonna lay down on the streetcar line and let it run me over.”

  “Hey Laura,” G-man called to the bartender, “you got the paper back there somewhere?”

  “I think so. You want it?”

  “Yeah, bring us the want ads and a couple of Wild Turkeys on the rocks, would you please?”

  Laura brought the items to the table. She was a petite, pretty woman with dark Sicilian eyes and straight hair that hung to the small of her back, and she listened to a lot of rude bullshit from male customers, but never twice from the same one.

  “Let’s see what we got here. Drink your drink,” G-man told Rickey, folding the newspaper to the classified ads. “Here’s a new steakhouse opening up. Says they need a grill guy.”

  “Is it Porterhouse Charlie’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard they were drug-testing.”

  “OK, fuck ’em … Hey, Commander’s is looking for a saucier.”

  “I applied for that already, remember? Didn’t get it.”

  “What about Lenny Duveteaux’s Sundae Dinner? ‘Hiring all positions.’ That’s the voice of desperation there.”

  “Yeah, and you know why?” Rickey sat up straighter in his chair. The Wild Turkey seemed to have revived him. “Sundae Dinner is another damn gimmick joint. They make everything into a ‘sundae.’ You order a steak, they cut it in half lengthwise and plate it with three scoops of mashed potatoes so it looks like a banana split. I heard they got a foie gras mousse appetizer, two scoops in a parfait dish with port sauce, some crème fraîche, and a damn maraschino cherry on top.”

  G-man laughed.

  “Exactly. It’s a stupid gimmick. Lenny can get away with it for a little while because he’s a celebrity chef, but it’s gonna go belly-up eventually because it’s a stupid idea. Our gimmick would be awesome.”

  “Are you still going on about that thing?”

  “You know what, G? You’ll be sorry you said that someday, because that thing is gonna make us rich.”

  “What’s gonna make you rich?” said Anthony, who had just come over to the table.

  “Aw, Rickey’s got this idea for a restaurant—OW!” G-man shot Rickey a wounded look as he leaned down to rub the spot on his shin where Rickey had just kicked him. “What, I can’t even tell Anthony B? He’s got money. You seriously want to do this, we’re gonna need investors.”

  “I ain’t got much money, G-man. What you telling him that for?”

  “You never wrote me a paycheck that bounced. That means you got more money than some people we’ve worked for.”

  “Well, I ain’t got enough to invest in nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t have to invest,” Rickey said. A fanatical gleam was dawning in his eyes. “You’d just have to let me come work here with G. You wouldn’t have to pay me much. And I bet you’d start making a profit off the food.”

  “Make a profit off the food? That ain’t gonna happen at the Apostle Bar. We make all our money off liquor.”

  “You still would,” said Rickey, and explained the idea.

  Anthony rubbed the thinning hair on top of his head. “I don’t know, y’all. I like running a bar. I never thought about getting back into the restaurant business.”

  “You wouldn’t have to. We’d handle everything. You’d do the same stuff you always do, but you’d have more business.”

  “You really think people care what they eat in a bar?”

  “Look at the wings,” said G-man. “You know we’re moving them since you started letting me make that fresh dressing.”

  “Them wings are good,” Anthony admitted.

  “They’d be even better with some tequila in them,” said Rickey.

  Anthony gave Rickey a long, searching look, then turned to G-man. “You know, you been doing just fine on your own. You don’t need no smart-mouth buddy coming in and fixing up all your recipes with liquor. What I mean to say is, you sure you want this maniac in your kitchen?”

  “To be perfectly honest, Anthony,” said G-man, “I don’t know how I got by so long without this maniac in my kitchen.”

  chapter 3

  Rickey gave two weeks’ notice at Escargot’s. During his time off, he went to work with G-man and they started tossing recipes around.

  They were in the Apostle’s kitchen late one night, a week before Rickey finished serving out his notice, doing prep work and talking trash. G-man was telling a story about his aunt Charmaine. “She was a total hippie. One day she was watching us kids, and right in front of us, she says to her friend, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna smoke pot no more.’

  “‘You’re not?’ says her friend.

  “‘Nuh-uh,’ says my aunt Charmaine. ‘From now on I’m gonna smoke hash!’ And that night my little cousin Raymond, he was just four, he says to our grammaw, ‘Hey, Maw-maw, guess what! Charmaine ain’t gonna smoke no more pot—she’s only gonna smoke hash!’”

  Rickey laughed. “Whatever happened to her?”

  “She got old, got straight.”

  “Just like most people, I guess.”

  “Rickey, don’t you get scared that could happen to us if this Liquor thing works out?”

  “Nah,” said Rickey dismissively. “Nobody in this business is really normal. Even if they quit doing drugs and have kids and stuff, they stay twisted somehow.”

  “I guess mostly. But a lot of the owners seem pretty normal to me.”

  “G, listen to me. We wouldn’t just be owners. We’d be chef-owners. Chef-owners are never normal.”

  “You sure?”

  “I got two words for you. Willy Gerhardt.”

  “Yeah, I guess you got a point.”

  Willy Gerhardt was a German expatriate who had exploded on
to the New Orleans restaurant scene about five years ago. Wildly talented, he debuted as head chef of the Polonius Room at the d’Hemecourt Hotel and soon earned five red beans, the Times-Picayune food critic’s equivalent of stars. When he got deservedly famous for that, he decided to open his own restaurant downtown. With its slick-surfaced decor and Willy’s signature jasmine-grilled lobster, Gerhardt’s soon became the hottest spot in town. Willy decided to open a second restaurant and a gourmet deli. He bought a little scooter that he used to ride between the places. He gave strange interviews in which he spoke of a mystical pyramid of stones he kept in his house. These stones were the balancing factor of his life, Willy said, and if they ever toppled, so would he.

  It was always said that a jealous rival—or maybe just a drunken friend—broke into Willy’s house and tipped the stones over. No one knew the truth. At any rate, Willy’s restaurants all closed simultaneously, and New Orleans never heard from Willy Gerhardt again. Kitchen gossip claimed that he was in Angola Prison, in rehab, in Vegas, cooking for a millionaire on a South Seas yacht, dead of a heroin overdose.

  “But we don’t want to end up like that,” G-man said.

  “I could live with the yacht option.”

  “I never did believe that one.”

  Rickey put down his knife and looked over at G-man, who was dicing celery as if he’d be content to do it all his life. Maybe he would, Rickey thought; maybe G-man just didn’t want any risks in his life. The thought made him feel mean, but now that he was so stoked about his restaurant idea, G-man’s placidity sometimes got on Rickey’s nerves.

  “G, aren’t you sick of being broke? Aren’t you sick of busting your ass to make money for people like Jesse Honeycombe?”

  “Sure, but what else can we do? We’re just a couple of slobs on the line.”

  “We’re not either,” said Rickey. “We’re gonna be running this kitchen soon, and someday we’ll be running a kitchen bigger and better than this one.”

  “You really think so, huh?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I know so. I got a genius idea and I’m gonna find a way to make it happen. We can do this, you hear me? Liquor is gonna make us free.”

  Rickey went in singing on his last morning at Escargot’s, the Monday after Christmas. He wasn’t singing “Massa Got Me Workin” any more; today it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Ever since the year Rickey went to cooking school and had to stay in New York for the holidays, he and G-man had hated Christmas, but they’d had a pretty good one this year thanks to G-man’s father. Elmer Stubbs’s best friend from high school now worked in the Saints ticket office, and Elmer had snagged them an unsnaggable pair of tickets to the December 30 game against the despised St. Louis Rams. Normally Saints tickets weren’t hard to come by, but this was a playoff game, the team’s first in seven years. It also turned out to be their first-ever playoff victory. With less than two minutes to play, the Rams receiver fumbled a punt and the Saints pounced on it. Euphoric fans spilled out of the Superdome and swarmed down Poydras Street hollering, dancing, guzzling drinks, even crying as golden fireworks blossomed in the winter sky. People stuck in the parking garage leaned on their horns or set off their car alarms, not out of spite but just to add to the celebratory din. Some fans had suffered with this team for thirty-four seasons, so Rickey couldn’t blame them for getting emotional. He was a little hungover himself, but the game had left him in a good mood.

  He made a big pot of rice and took out some chicken to thaw. Later he would fry it up and serve it with greens for a special staff meal. Everyone who ate the staff meals had been loudly lamenting his departure, recalling the dreadful concoctions of the last saucier and speculating on those of the next one. The new saucier was a young guy from Texas who seemed OK, if clueless about the evil ways of Mike. He’d learn.

  At lunch, the dessert ladies grabbed the best pieces of chicken and crumbled cornbread into their greens. The oldest one, Mrs. Sondra, said, “Lord, Rickey, I wish you’d teach my grandbaby how to cook. Her fried chicken greasier than Popeye’s.”

  “You got that right,” said Terrance, who had briefly dated Mrs. Sondra’s grandbaby. Mrs. Sondra glared at him, but could not argue since she had broached the subject herself.

  Mike failed to make the day difficult in any of the ways Rickey had expected. In fact, he stayed in his office most of the morning and all afternoon. Rickey was coasting through his last hour when the hostess came on the kitchen intercom and said, “Phone call for the saucier up front.”

  Well, that was weird. Even if somebody had mistakenly called the front of the house trying to reach him, the hostess could have transferred the call to the kitchen. Rickey washed his hands and walked through the empty dining room to the hostess’s station. She covered the receiver with the heel of her hand and said, impressed as hell, “It’s Lenny Duveteaux.”

  Rickey took the phone, trying to look slightly bored, as if celebrity chefs called him every day. “Hey, Lenny,” he said.

  “Hi, Rickey, how are you?”

  Rickey and G-man had never met Lenny Duveteaux, but they knew a lot about him. He was a huge and inescapable force on the local restaurant scene. He’d been sous chef and head chef at a couple of high-end places around town before opening Lenny’s, a classically beautiful space in the French Quarter that had become a national dining mecca. Crescent, his place on Magazine Street, was trendier and more local. Lenny was from Maine, but he knew New Orleans food as well as anybody. Fame was the problem. Some chefs could handle it and get on with their cooking. Lenny seemed to have fallen in love with being famous. He had his own line of spice blends; he’d done the Playboy Interview; he appeared regularly on Leno and Letterman; now he had this embarrassing new venture, Sundae Dinner. It was whispered around town that his trademark restaurants had suffered as a result of all these frills. He hired good cooks, but you could only let other cooks run your kitchens for so long before somebody else’s vision took over.

  “I’m OK,” said Rickey. “How you doing, Lenny?”

  “Pretty good. Busy. I just got back from Vegas, you know, I might open a place out there—”

  Just what you need, Rickey thought.

  “—but we’ll see. Anyway, you put in an application at Crescent a couple of weeks ago? For a hot apps position?”

  “Yeah, but it turns out I’m going somewhere else.”

  “Right. I heard you’re opening your own place?”

  Christ, the rumor mill never let up for a second. Rickey had no idea how this information had gotten out, or whether the talk bore any resemblance to his actual idea. “No, I’m not opening a restaurant. I’m just gonna cook at the Apostle Bar with my friend G-man.”

  “Right,” said Lenny again, not sounding as if he believed it. “I wasn’t exactly calling about the job. We hired somebody else last week.”

  “OK.” Rickey was really confused now.

  “But I know you’re a good cook. I’ve heard good things about you from people I trust.”

  Rickey wondered which of his acquaintances had Lenny’s ear. He’d begun to build a good little reputation for himself at the Peychaud Grill, but most of his coworkers from those days had left town. “So how come you called?” he said.

  “Well, I was checking references on those applications, and yours said it was OK to call your current boss.”

  “Right.” The barest whisper of paranoia was beginning to creep into Rickey’s mind. “I told Mike I needed more money and he said he couldn’t give it to me. He knew I was looking around. He was fine with it.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Why? What’d he say?”

  “I tell you, Rickey, it made me really uncomfortable. I know Mike Mouton. I know he only has that job because his father’s on the Downtown Development District board. I know he’s a shiftless little weasel who cares more about his nose candy than his employees. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Not really.”

  Through the receiver he heard Len
ny sigh deeply. “Mike said you were screwing up on the job, which I know isn’t the case because Chef Roger is a friend of mine and he says you’ve done just fine. So I asked Mike how come he didn’t fire you, and he says, ‘I’m going to, soon as I find another white boy who can do the job.’”

  “Jesus!”

  “Yeah, and that’s not the end of it. If it was, I wouldn’t be calling you. Look, I really think you ought to hear this conversation for yourself.”

  “How I’m gonna do that?”

  “Well, I tape all the calls that go in and out of my office.”

  “You do?” Rickey was dumbfounded. He’d heard people call Lenny the Nixon of the New Orleans restaurant world, but he hadn’t known they meant it literally.

  “Yeah, that’s between you and me, OK? But I have the tape at home. You free this Sunday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come on over around three. Bring your friend, what’s his name?”

  “G-man. Gary Stubbs.”

  “Yeah, bring him if you like. We’ll put some ribs on the barbecue.” Lenny gave Rickey directions to a posh neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain and hung up. Shaking his head in bewilderment, Rickey returned to the kitchen.

  Mike caught up with him near the walk-in. “You’re staying to work the New Year’s Eve banquet tonight, right, Rickey?”

  “No, I’m going home in thirty minutes,” Rickey told him. “I been here since seven o’clock this morning. I got you all set up for dinner.”

  Rickey wasn’t slacking off because this was his last day. He had already stayed to work two banquets this week, neither of which he’d been scheduled for. Mike was always springing banquets on people. Rickey could have used the overtime pay, but he needed to get home and talk to G-man about Lenny’s phone call. “Sorry,” he said when Mike asked him a second time. “Like I said, I just can’t do it.”

  “You know, that really disappoints me, but it’s typical. You never put in much effort here. I might have known you’d be one of those types who’d lay down on the job once he gave notice.”