Harry Flammable

by Frank O'Keeffe

  “And how did you make out, Harry?” Mr. Shamberg was asking.

  “Uh. Okay, I guess. I just went to the personnel office yesterday. I have to meet the chef today and I think I’ll probably start at The Ritz tomorrow.” I knew I didn’t sound too enthusiastic.

  Mr. Shamberg noticed. “It’ll be fine, Harry. You’ll probably really enjoy it. Chef Antonio has a great reputation.”

  * * *

  I didn’t know much about Chef Antonio’s great reputation, but I quickly found out he had a terrible temper. I had stopped off at security on the second floor like Ms. Capstone had directed. There they’d snapped my picture and laminated it onto a security tag and pinned it on my jacket. Then they directed me to the kitchen.

  I pushed open a swinging door and I found myself in the middle of a fierce argument. A big man with a bright red face, wearing a chef’s hat, was yelling in French at a much smaller man. He punctuated each explosive phrase by flinging a handful of prawns into some bowls. (I didn’t know they were prawns at the time. On my first day at The Ritz, I couldn’t tell a prawn from a perogy.) Several other chefs or cooks were busy cutting or chopping vegetables, stirring pots on huge stoves and going about their business, trying to ignore the tirade that was going on.

  The chef’s voice rose almost to a scream, and a particularly violent fling sent prawns bouncing out of a bowl and onto the floor.

  The small man said something in French, which brought another howl from the chef, who looked like he was ready to kill. I noticed one cook hastily move a collection of knives further away from the chef. Quickly grabbing up the bowls of prawns, the small man beat a hasty retreat through another swinging door as the chef flung one final handful of prawns at his retreating back.

  I was still standing partway through the door into the kitchen, wondering if I should also retreat and come back later, when the chef turned and noticed me. His face changed quickly to a normal colour, like someone had turned off a light bulb inside his head.

  “Yes?” he asked. “And what would you like?” He spoke English but with a decidedly French accent. I was relieved. This couldn’t be Chef Antonio. Antonio was an Italian name, not French.

  “I’m Harry Flanagan,” I stammered, pointing to my security badge. “I’m looking for Chef Antonio. I’m from Crestwood High. I’m with the work experience program.”

  “Okay. You’ll do. I am Chef Antonio. Be here tomorrow at 2 p.m. sharp.” He strode off across the kitchen but turned just before I backed out the door and his voice boomed across the room. “But first get a haircut.”

  5

  NO ONE WAS HOME. I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and shaved my head. I figured that I had nothing to lose. My hair was a mess and everyone was staring at me in school anyway, so having a bald head wouldn’t produce any more stares than I was getting now, and the bald bits on my neck wouldn’t stand out anymore. And nobody at The Ritz would tell me to get a haircut.

  I gaped at myself in the mirror. I hadn’t realized I would look so different. I rubbed my hand over my smooth head and it felt weird. But there was nothing I could do about it now.

  I unlocked the bathroom door and walked into the kitchen.

  “Oh my,” Mom was saying to herself, “Aunt Phyllis is coming to stay and she’s arriving tomorrow.” She looked up from the letter she had in her hand. Then she let out a shriek and flung the pages of the letter into the air.

  I bent to pick up the pages as Mom collapsed onto a chair. “Oh Harry! It is you. You gave me quite a turn. I thought you were an intruder or burglar or something. What happened to your hair? You haven’t been playing with fire again have you? I thought you had got over that stage long ago.”

  “No Mom. I just got fed up with everyone telling me to get a haircut. Does it look that bad?”

  Mom studied me for a moment. Then she smiled and stood up and gave me a hug. “It’s different. I’m sure I’ll get used to it very quickly. When you were a baby you didn’t have any hair and I thought you were beautiful. I used to kiss you on the top of your head. You’re too tall for that now.” She squeezed me harder. “But you’re still my handsome little boy.” She laughed. “Aunt Phyllis will no doubt have something to say and you’ll have to put up with your father’s comments. But you won’t have him telling you your hair is too long and you look scruffy.

  “Well, I’d better get busy and tidy up the spare room for Aunt Phyllis. She didn’t say how long she is going to stay. You know how she just arrives at a moment’s notice and disappears just as quickly. Your father won’t be too happy though.” Mom bustled off to the spare bedroom.

  Aunt Phyllis is Mom’s aunt. She’s in her late sixties. She usually visits us about once a year, and it’s a trying time for everyone.

  * * *

  In the huge kitchen at The Ritz, my guide, Kin Woo, studied me for a moment and then grinned. “How come you Caucasian guys all look the same? Old Chinese joke. First you need uniform. Come.”

  He led me through a door off the kitchen into a hallway and from there into a small locker room.

  “What size are you? Medium, I guess.” Kin rummaged in a cupboard in a corner of the room and pulled out a pair of white pants and a jacket. “Here. Try on these pants.” Kin was a pretty good guesser. The pants were a perfect fit. The jacket buttoned up to the neck. Kin told me the first thing I had to do each day was to change into my uniform and wash my hands before coming into the kitchen.

  “They fit okay, Harry? Good. Now you remember the number inside the jacket and pants. That will be your number from now on. You must check for your number when you come in. The laundry people hang all the clean uniforms here and you have to find your own.”

  “What about a hat?” I asked.

  “No hat needed, Harry. Only if you have to work in dining room where customers can see you.” Kin grinned. “Anyway, no chance of you getting hair in the soup. Maybe I give you Chinese name. Chan Yat Mao.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It really means One Haired Chan. But in Chinese it’s a way of saying bald.”

  It turned out only Chef Antonio and the two sous chefs wore real chef hats. It was too bad because a chef’s hat would have covered most of my bald head and, after the ribbing I’d taken all day, I was feeling very self-conscious.

  It had started at breakfast. Dad hadn’t seen me the night before. He’d been working late and I was in bed when he got home. I’d planned on leaving early before he got up, but Mom wouldn’t let me leave without some breakfast. I was gulping down some cereal when Dad came into the kitchen.

  “Holy Toledo! You get your head caught in the chicken plucker at The Ritz, or is there a bad case of head lice going around your school? Wait a minute. You’re not turning into one of those skins heads or rocker punks or whatever they’re called. I won’t put up with that.”

  “Oh George, leave Harry alone,” Mom scolded. “He’s not turning into a skins head. It’s skinhead, anyway. You’ve been bugging him to get a haircut for months and now he has.”

  “I didn’t mean he had to go and look like that dead actor, what’s his name. He was in The King and I. Yul Brimmer, that’s it.”

  “His name was Brynner, Dad,” I said. “Not Brimmer.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Aunt Phyllis is coming,” Mom announced. I knew she was trying to get Dad to leave me alone and mentioning Aunt Phyllis was a sure way to do it.

  “Aunt Phyllis! Not again. Wasn’t she here only a month ago? Why is she coming so soon? Can’t you talk her out of it? You know how she drives us all crazy. And she’s crazy to begin with.”

  “It’s been over six months since she was here,” Mom said. “And she only stayed four days.”

  “It felt like six months to me,” Dad grumbled.

  I finished my cereal and hurried off to brush my teeth. Dad was still complaining about Aunt Phyllis as I waved to Mom, slipped out the door, and headed for school.

  It was true Aunt Phyllis did drive us all a
bit crazy, but it was Dad who really felt bugged by her the most. I usually found her just funny. Mom tolerated her, although she was always giving Mom unwanted advice about Mom’s singing career. Aunt Phyllis had grown up in musical theatre and, although she’d had bit parts in a number of musicals, she always made them sound like leading roles. For years she’d been pushing Mom to get professional voice lessons and audition for some of the major roles in the musicals that came to the city. But although Mom loved the musicals, she didn’t want a career on the stage. She was perfectly happy being part of her amateur trio. No matter how many times Mom insisted she was perfectly happy being part of her trio, that didn’t stop Aunt Phyllis. She would carry on about how Mom was wasting her talent in such amateur productions and would claim some famous opera star or actor had only gone on to fame and fortune because they’d heeded her advice.

  Although I’d wanted to leave the house early and escape from Dad, I decided it would be best if I arrived in school just as the bell rang. Then I wouldn’t have to face the questions and questioning looks of every kid in the hallways. I’d get into class at the last minute and play it cool. That way I’d get most of the questions over with in one go.

  I had a list of smart answers and was practising them in my head, like I was captured by aliens and they shaved my head because they experimented on my brain, or I’ve just been selected for the Olympic swim team and my coach said if I shaved my head I’d be sure to knock at least one second off the world record in the 400-metre freestyle.

  Just as the bell rang I suddenly remembered the first class that morning was math with Ms. Cranshaw and it was unlikely that I’d get any of my witty answers off. Instead I’d be faced with a lecture on the evils of tardiness. I rushed in and dropped into my desk as Ms. Cranshaw was calling attendance. There were a few giggles and someone behind me hissed, “It’s Sinéad O’Connor.” I knew Sinéad O’Connor had let her hair grow back. Someone else whispered, “He’s from Star Trek.”

  Ms. Cranshaw was staring at me. “Ah, a new student. I’m afraid you can’t sit in that desk. It’s Harry Flanagan’s. Please come and sit here.” She indicated a desk next to Celia Spendlove.

  Was Ms. Cranshaw putting me on? Surely she knew who I was. I felt myself blush and I was sure even my bald head turned pink.

  “Come forward, come forward,” Ms. Cranshaw snapped. “We haven’t got time to waste in this class. There’s a lot to get through before the end of term. What is your name please?”

  Ms. Cranshaw wasn’t joking. She never joked. I noticed that today she was wearing her contacts instead of her glasses, something she rarely did. We all knew she couldn’t see nearly as well with her contacts by the way she held the textbook close to her face. She really didn’t recognize me.

  She was waiting, still pointing to the desk beside Celia. Before I’d shaved my head I’d have given anything to sit next to Celia. The class was breaking up with laughter and Ms. Cranshaw was losing patience.

  “Silence!” she yelled. “Now sit here and give me your name.”

  It was no use arguing. Ms. Cranshaw was obviously not going to wait for any explanation.

  “It’s Harry,” I mumbled.

  “I assume that’s Harold.” Ms. Cranshaw was carefully printing in her attendance list. The class was in hysterics behind me and I could see Celia was grinning like crazy. “And your last name?” Ms. Cranshaw went on.

  “Flanagan.”

  “We already have a Harold Flanagan.” Ms. Cranshaw was now peering at me. “What tomfoolery is this?” She’d finally recognized me.

  “He’s not Tom Foolery. He’s Harry Flanagan,” some wit howled from the back and the whole class shrieked with laughter.

  Ms. Cranshaw slammed her text on the top of her desk. “Stop this at once,” she hollered. “Turn to page seventy-nine. I want the entire page completed before the end of the period and, if there are any more outbursts, I’ll assign another page for homework.”

  There were a few groans as the laughing stopped.

  “As for you, Harold Flanagan,” Ms. Cranshaw snapped. “I don’t know what you are up to but I won’t stand for any nonsense. I have my eye on you and I’ll be watching you closely. In fact, this will be your desk for the rest of the year. Get your books and begin working, now!”

  There were a few laughs when I stumbled over someone’s foot on the way back to my old desk, but they were silenced by a glare from Ms. Cranshaw. I grabbed my books and dropped back into the desk beside Celia.

  I kept my head down most of the period but a couple of times I glanced up to find Ms. Cranshaw was staring at me as if to make sure I really was Harry Flanagan. When she was satisfied, she set to work to carefully remove the name Harold that she’d added to her attendance list. Besides disturbances in class, Ms. Cranshaw’s other pet peeve is to mess up the neatness of her attendance list.

  Still, I guess things hadn’t turned out all bad. I was sitting next to Celia. I sneaked a glance at her. She had her head down, working on one of the math problems. She stopped writing in her notebook as she sensed me looking at her. She kept her head down but turned it slightly in my direction. I could see she was smiling. Maybe it was a smirk of derision at my new appearance, but I hoped it just might be a friendly grin instead.

  6

  “THIS WILL BE YOUR station,” Kin said. We were standing at what looked to me to be an ordinary counter with a sink.

  “You know how to turn potatoes?” Kin asked.

  “Sure. Roast potatoes. I get a big spoon and turn them over in the roasting pan when they’re brown on one side,” I said confidently. I’d seen Mom do it lots of times when we were having a roast surrounded by roast potatoes. I’d even done it a few times myself, when Mom asked me because she was busy getting dessert ready or something. The only trick was to make sure you didn’t get splashed by the grease when you reached into the oven.

  “Not that kind of turning.” Kin grinned. “I show you. Back in a minute.”

  While I waited for Kin to come back I looked around the enormous kitchen. I hadn’t expected so much noise and hustle and bustle. The whole place seemed to be in a state of mass confusion. There was so much going on, I wondered how anyone could keep track of what was happening. A waiter would suddenly appear, yell an order at no one in particular as far as I could tell, and then disappear, while others arrived to whisk away plates of steaming food or fancy desserts. A telephone seemed to ring constantly in the background.

  At stations on either side of me, cooks and kitchen workers were chopping food or running giant electric blenders. Behind me, another group stirred hissing pots on the enormous stoves. At one end of the kitchen, huge dishwashers sloshed away and there was a lot of clatter as bus boys darted in, carrying dirty dishes.

  “First you peel, then you turn.” Kin plonked a huge box of potatoes on my station counter. “Like this.” He whipped a potato out of the box, gave it a quick wash in the sink and, in a couple of swift strokes, it was peeled. “Now we turn. Turning means to give the potato a new shape. This way.”

  I watched carefully as Kin shaved off a bit here and a bit there and handed me a potato shaped like one I’d never seen before. It had eight sides. It looked easy enough.

  “Now you try.”

  I grabbed a potato, washed it in the sink, peeled it and started in on the potato carving. It was much harder than I thought. By the time I got anything resembling an eight-sided potato, there wasn’t much of it left.

  “Okay. I show you again.” Kin took another potato and I studied each cut as closely as I could. Then I tried one again. It didn’t turn out much better than the first.

  “Okay, you practise. I come back later. Gotta go and prepare sauce for special.”

  Kin was a first cook and had been with The Ritz for fifteen years. He’d told me Chef Antonio’s real name was Antoine, but he preferred the name Antonio, as he thought it was a more fashionable name for a chef. I’d learned that the chain of command in the kitchen, after Chef Anton
io, was the two sous chefs, then the first, second, and third cooks (I wasn’t sure how many there were of each), then the kitchen help, some of them part-timers like me. In another section, away from the main kitchen, a smaller group handled outside catering for big private dinners or wedding receptions that weren’t being held at the hotel.

  I gritted my teeth as I tackled another potato. I wondered if it would take me fifteen years to learn how to turn potatoes like Kin. Why couldn’t the potatoes just be washed and peeled? They weren’t going to taste one bit better by hacking them into weird shapes. If potatoes were supposed to look like this, I thought, some agricultural experimental research station would find a way of growing potatoes that looked like that when they came out of the ground.

  My third effort looked bigger and a bit better but when I counted the sides I found it had only six instead of eight. But what was the big deal anyway? I couldn’t imagine anyone saying, “Waiter, take this back. This potato has two sides missing.” Who would notice something like that?

  Chef Antonio, that’s who. He loomed over my shoulder, reached into the sink and grabbed one of my miniature potatoes, then tossed it back with a resounding clunk. “Marbles we don’t need! Potatoes with nice shapes, yes, we can cook. But The Ritz cannot serve marbles. And hurry. These are needed right away!” He stomped off and then started yelling at someone at another station. “More salt, more salt.”

  I tried to speed up. I peeled and washed about half the box of potatoes and then tried again at turning them. I was slow, but I got better and a little faster. Kin came back to check on how I was doing. “Okay, Harry. Not to worry. You soon get the hang of it. Here. Another box.”

  I groaned. “More?”

  “I do a few to help you out.” Kin grinned and proceeded to whip through what was left of my first box.