“Wash,” he said without looking at me. “Run the machine.” Then he made some strange stacking and lever-pulling motions with his hands, which were what passed for operating instructions for the dishwasher—a large, loud and (I assumed) expensive piece of industrial equipment full of spinning arms and harsh chemicals and boiling hot steam, which I was now expected to operate with some degree of expertise.
Again, I did my best, and again my best amounted to very little. I was quite pleased that I was even able to get the machine started, since I didn’t even know how to work our dishwasher at home and most of my dealings with unfamiliar machinery (such as toasters, microwave ovens, my dad’s Betamax or the lawn mower) involved pushing buttons or flipping switches at random until something unexpected—like a fire—happened. If nothing happened, I would get frustrated and resort immediately to violence, as if the toaster were deliberately trying to ruin my sandwich or the record player purposefully refusing to act as a centrifuge for the G.I. Joe action figures I’d taped to the turntable. Later, when my mom would demand to know who’d kicked the door off the broiling compartment of the oven or heaved my dad’s good power drill up onto the patio roof, I’d pretend I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d tell her it was probably Bren, then calmly go back to smashing my old cassette player with a rock.
Anyway, I was considerably less pleased when, within minutes, I’d managed to flood the entire kitchen. Probably pounds of unscraped dough had swollen in contact with the hot water inside the machine and found their way to the drain screen. At the first sign of trouble (which announced itself in the form of a stinking geyser of drainwater shooting up from the machine’s well), I panicked, jerked open the loading door in the side of the machine, and got a face full of superheated steam.
Natalie came to my rescue, indelicately muscling me aside and killing the machine with a quick stab at the big red button marked STOP that I’d entirely failed to notice. No one else in the kitchen even slowed down. Ignoring the floodwaters lapping at their boots and what I’d guess was probably a high and girlish screeching coming from me, they simply soldiered on, deconstructing fresh peppers, slicing pepperoni and throwing crusts with a focused concentration I initially took to be an intentional snub.
It wasn’t. It was just that cooks—good cooks, in the middle of a solid hit—are monstrously single-minded creatures. When the rush is on, a cook cooks. He puts his head down and just burns. A flood ain’t nothing till it gets so bad that it starts wetting his prep.
“Is okay,” Natalie said to me, touching her fingertips to my chest, my arms, gently tapping and trying to calm me or something. “Is okay. Try again.”
So I did. I ran the dish machine for the rest of the night, overflowing it at least twice more and kicking at its legs when no one was looking, but slowly figuring out its intricacies and what it could and couldn’t do. It could wash an evenly spaced and carefully arranged load of sheet trays provided it was coddled along and not put under any sort of undue stress. It couldn’t be made to work faster or better no matter what names I called it or how many times I hit it.
I found and cleaned the drain screen, familiarized myself with the machine’s proper loading and unloading, played with all the buttons and switches, whose labels and settings had worn off ages ago. I was ready to walk out after the first disaster, but I was no quitter so figured I’d at least hang in until the end of the night, when I would no doubt be summarily fired.
EVENTUALLY IT WAS NINE O’CLOCK. My fancy, pointy shoes were ruined. I’d run out of obscenities to yell at the dish machine. I was hurting and exhausted and frustrated, soaked with sweat and dishwater from the top of my head to my kneecaps. I was embarrassed at how bad a job I’d done, sorry for repeatedly flooding this nice couple’s kitchen, and I smelled awful. As the night wound down toward closing time, Natalie had shown me where the mop and bucket were kept, and I’d spent the final hour of my first day as a working man hopelessly trying to repair some of the damage I’d done. The combination of water from the dish machine and the flour that covered everything had coated the floor in a sticky, gloppy plaster, and my pointlessly swirling the mop around on the cracked cement floor was doing little more than moving gooey wads of gray-brown crap from one place to another.
One by one the cooks filed out, without a word, until just me and Ange and Natalie were left. I’d managed to corral most of the gunk near a central drain cut in the floor and was picking it up with my hands and depositing it in a garbage can because I couldn’t figure out any other way of getting rid of it when Ange called me over to the back door. I went. I assumed this was it and told myself that I would be a man about it. Ange stepped outside onto the back stair. I followed. He held the door open for me. For a minute, he did nothing but look at me—squinting through the smoke from the Marlboro that was forever hanging from his lip. I remember how great the cool night air felt on every inch of me that was sore and steam-burned. I remember how much better everything smelled than me.
And I remember Angelo smiling, lacing his fingers behind his back, stretching his whip-thin frame until his spine cracked, and saying, “You’re still here.”
Now over the years, at the conclusion of many other bad nights, I’ve returned to that line in my head. I’ve never been sure if he meant that as a question (as in “What the hell are you still doing here?”), as an expression of his frank disbelief (as in “After what you did, I can’t believe you’re still here”) or as a sort of existentialist’s comment on the nature of really bad first days of work, like “Even after everything bad that’s happened tonight, you are still here.” Personally, I’ve always preferred the philosophical translation because it makes me seem somewhat heroic just for not giving up. And it makes Angelo seem like the sort of man who appreciated the quiet heroism of fifteen-year-olds too dumb to work a mop but also just too fucking stubborn to quit.
However he meant it, though, I looked back at him and repeated, “I’m still here.”
Now, I thought. Now he’ll fire me.
He nodded once, reached into the breast pocket of his T-shirt, took out a cigarette and forty bucks and handed both to me.
“That’s good,” he said. “Tomorrow, same time, okay?”
If I’d had a glass of water handy, I would’ve done a spit-take. “Really?”
He shrugged. “Tomorrow will be better.”
I put the cash in my pocket and the cigarette in my mouth. He lit it for me with a battered Zippo. And then the two of us stood there, not talking, just smoking and feeling the cool night air.
I was in love. If I had to make a list of all the best moments of my life, then that one—standing there in the dark by the back door smoking a cigarette with Angelo—would be high up on the inventory. Maybe not at the top, but close. I swore hard that I’d do better tomorrow, and better than that the day after. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let this guy down, ever.
And I did, of course. A hundred times in probably my first month alone. But at the end of every night, I was still there.
On my first night, though, anything was still possible. All the small successes and failures of a highly checkered life were far, far away just then, so when I was finished with it, I flicked the butt of my cigarette out into the dark and stepped down onto the gravel of the alley. I started walking away.
“Hey,” Angelo called after me. “Where you go? Finish the floor first, huh?” He jerked his shoulder back in the direction of the kitchen, back toward the clots of wet dough around the drain and the wreck of the dish machine.
I laughed, shrugged, and slunk back in past him. He stayed on the steps, lit another cigarette off the stump of the first, and stared off into the dark while the radio played quietly and Natalie counted out the day’s receipts on the glass of the front counter. I picked up the mop again and heard Angelo from outside, yelling at me.
“Tomorrow, wear better shoes.”
At this point, I would love to be able to say something along the lines of
“And it was after this first inauspicious day and these encouraging words from my lifelong friend and mentor Angelo Ferrara that I knew for certain I wanted nothing more in my life than to become a chef.”
I would then settle comfortably into a straight retelling of my smooth rise into the ranks of American über-chefs; how I struggled against some sort of externally presented adversity, overcame it with the help of Jesus and a good woman, then went on to get my own Food Network show, my own line of retail sauces and marinades and my own restaurant with two Michelin stars and a reputation for otherworldly excellence totally out of line with its location on a small Pacific island accessible only by hovercraft.
I’d love to be able to tell that story because that story would be familiar. There would be a clear beginning—a first day of work (very much like the one I have described), some words of encouragement from a trusted elder that would kindle my love affair with food. This would be followed by a juicy middle, the ubiquitous training montage; a breakdown, or a shark attack; and a scene in which I collapse, weeping, in the rain, then am found and comforted by a beautiful woman. After that, I am healed. My path becomes clear, and I follow it steadily toward ridiculous success. As with all tales like this, it would end with my best girl and me riding magical dinosaurs off into the sunset.
These kinds of stories are comfortable, recognizable, easy to follow. They’re the kind of stories people like to read.
This is not one of those stories.
I feel like it’s my responsibility as the teller of this story to say that if you’re looking for some four-star confessional, for the cooking secrets of master chefs or some effervescent, champagne-and-twinkle-lights twaddle about bright knives, foie gras and sweaty love among the white jackets, go find another book. Plenty of other books out there deal with the glam end of cooking in what has become a grossly celebrity-driven industry. Books about food obsessions that come from clean, clinical and intellectual places. About cuisine that isn’t born of pain and damage. About chefs who don’t have any scars.
I know a lot of kitchens out there operate not at all like the hot, cramped asylums and dens of terrible iniquity that I came up through. I understand there are chefs who are true gentle geniuses. But I never knew any of them. I didn’t work on their lines. And I can only tell my story and the stories of my guys—the ones I knew and worked beside, fought with, loved better than brothers (and the occasional sister), labored under, and eventually left behind like some kind of miserable, slinking Judas for a desk job, a byline and health insurance. My guys named their knives the way rock stars do their guitars, got butcher’s diagrams of broken-down pigs tattooed on their asses, and went to jail for assaulting police dogs. They slept and screwed on the flour sacks in the basements of a thousand different restaurants; lifted waitresses (and sometimes customers) right up on the stainless and knocked the cutting boards loose; prepped cool, fat-slick lobes of foie gras with the skill of surgeons in restaurants where they never could’ve afforded to eat. They weren’t pretty. They weren’t nice. They smelled bad almost all the time. They weren’t the guys you see on TV. They were the guys who make the guys on TV look good.
They were the guys who cook your dinner.
And after that first night at Ferrara’s, I was one of them. My real story and the imaginary story I would like to tell may not have many similarities, but they do have one vital detail in common: love. I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to get back into that kitchen. Like the guy who ends up staying forever with the girl who mercifully unburdens him of his virginity, I’d found true love on my very first try.
Just like my mom had said, you never know what can happen on your first day.
TRUTH: I was fifteen years old when I went to work for Ange and Natalie, but I didn’t do it because I had any love for food or for cooking. The same is probably true of the majority of my peers—regardless of how their PR-spun bios might read. I know one who took his first kitchen job at sixteen because he had a crush on a waitress two years older than him. Another started washing dishes at fifteen because his boss let him keep a radio at his station and play heavy metal all night. Another did it to get off the family farm (where he now returns two or three times a year to clear the place out of expensive mushrooms and sugar beets and to fish the streams clean of trout). Another because it was either the corner diner or eventually taking his place beside his father at the factory where the old man had been working for twenty years.
I took my first cooking job for the basest of all possible reasons: because I needed money. I threw my lot in with Ange and Natalie just because Ange and Natalie were the first people I’d found who were willing to accept my fudged work permit and hire a fifteen-year-old kid whose only real skills were jerking off and quoting verbatim from Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Blazers and certain books on sailing and wilderness survival.
I didn’t want to be a chef. I was fifteen years old. If I wanted to be anything, it was a pirate or, failing that, a rock star (that I couldn’t play guitar and was hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean notwithstanding).
Still, by the time I was done with my first week as a working man, I’d at least gotten a feel for the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the job. I could actually go an hour or more without anything terrible happening. In that hot, cramped, hectic kitchen, I was serving a purpose. Without me, sheet trays wouldn’t get scraped. Dishes wouldn’t get done. I liked to imagine that without me at my post, things in the kitchen would slow down, that the smooth operation of a crew who could, on a good night, serve out a couple hundred handmade pizzas would suffer.
Granted, without me there would’ve also been fewer messes, fewer catastrophic floods, fewer mushroom clouds of yeasty steam belching out of that damn ancient dish machine when some molecule of unscraped dough caused it to puke its guts up all over the floor and cease working for a half hour. I was becoming a skilled operator. I was becoming important. And if not important, at least it was nice to be expected somewhere.
Professional kitchens on the high end of the industry are staffed by small, private and extraordinarily well-trained armies and organized (in the best cases) along military lines. There are gods and generals, lieutenants and foot soldiers, all with vital jobs to do. But on the low end, kitchens are run like machines with people there only to serve the process, to carry out the necessary steps of fabrication whereby a bunch of produce, meat and dry stock is put into one end and, in short order, is turned into a pizza (or a cheeseburger or a churro or a sandwich) at the other. There is very little thought involved. No deviation from the process is allowed. At Ferrara’s, dough was made the way it was because that was the way dough was made. Sauce was strained because the sauce needed straining. Beautifully circular logic, pat and simple.
And yet, those who work to service the machinery of production are not mindless automatons. Just the opposite. To be useful, you have to be a smart automaton. You have to be adaptable and always prepared to acquire new skills—sometimes in a very large hurry. Everything you learn today is based on something you learned yesterday, on the utilization of skills and reflexes hammered into you over weeks and years.
So I learned and I adapted. I became a better dough scraper so that the dish machine would upchuck with less frequency. With the dish machine upchucking less, I made less of a mess of the floors. With the floors less messy, I had more time for scraping trays.
See? A beautiful system.
Now, when the dish machine chugged to a stinking, sweaty halt, I could diagnose the problem with authority (gunk in the thingamajig), decide on an effective course of action (first, kick machine; second, yell at machine; third, clean thingamajig) and effect repairs with expediency.
Being better at my job also gave me more time to escape the clamor and stand on the back step smoking cigarettes with Ange and the other cooks. Being outside got me, at least temporarily, out of the heat of the kitchen, and that was a big motivator. It also got me away from the kitchen radio, which was forever tuned to a stati
on that, near as I could tell, played only one song that was twelve hours long, sung by a gay Italian man who’d recently been punched in the mouth, and prominently featured an accordion being played by a spastic and tone-deaf monkey.
After my first week’s work at Ferrara’s, a surprising thing happened. There was a second one.
And I don’t mean that there was a Friday, followed by a couple beers with Midge and Jimmy from accounts payable, a nice weekend of relaxation spent lounging on the couch, then a slow drift down into another Monday-morning commute.
No, there was Friday and Friday’s work (differentiated from my first four days by its being as busy in one night as it had been in the last four all put together) and Friday’s smoke on the back steps with Ange, and then, just like every previous day, there was Ange saying, “Come back tomorrow.”
I remember thinking that perhaps the old man was addled. It was hot in that kitchen, after all. It’d been a very busy night. And Ange was, to my teenager’s eyes, about three hundred years old. I thought maybe he’d forgotten it was Friday.
If I close my eyes now, I can actually see that little whelp of a fifteen-year-old me standing there on the back step beside Ange, about to utter six of the stupidest words he’d ever said. In my head, it’s a black-and-white photo, the tall and ropy flour-dusted master in his white T-shirt and glasses towering, exhausted and despairingly, beside the pubescent apprentice with his stained tank top and over-large apron hanging down to his ankles—a picture not unlike the kind one might find hung on the wall of some midcity Italian theme restaurant serving unlimited breadsticks and Alfredo sauce from a bag. I can see me thinking, chewing carefully over my words, not sure exactly how to say what I’m about to say, until gently, stupidly and not without a little chiding humor in my voice, I simply spit it out: “Ange, it’s Friday. Tomorrow’s the weekend.”
Cooking Dirty Page 3
