Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  And Ange, he takes a long drag off his cigarette, then he sighs—the kind of sigh only a man who’s been working every night for three hundred years can utter.

  “Yeah,” he says. “And the peoples got to eat on weekends, too.”

  The peoples got to eat. That pretty much summed up how my life was going to go for the next fifteen years.

  AFTER A FEW WEEKS, I finally figured out that when Angelo said, “Come back tomorrow,” it wasn’t an order. It was a negotiation. If I needed a day off (provided it wasn’t a Friday, Saturday or Sunday), all I had to do was ask or say, “No, Ange. I’ll see you the day after. I got some stuff to do.”

  And by the time I’d figured that out, I wasn’t just scraping trays and washing dishes. Rather than rolling in at a leisurely 4:30 or 5:00 in the evening, I was coming directly from school. I’d be at the back door by 3:15, having smoked two cigarettes on the way. And now I’d walk right in. With all but one of the ovens cold, the kitchen would seem downright chilly. Without the phone ringing and the cooks working and the pizzas coming and going, it felt almost placid—the antithetical calm of the house-not-yet-awake.

  In these soft, cozy moments either Ange or Natalie would further my education by instructing me in my new duties. I would be told, for example, that from the way I used a mop, I’d apparently been raised in a barn by brain-damaged hillbillies. I just couldn’t get the whole figure-eight swirl down no matter how many times Natalie showed me. When I mopped, it took almost an hour and the floor looked worse when I was done than when I’d started. When she mopped, it looked like she was dancing. She could do the whole floor, front and back, in about eight minutes, and when she was done, the floor wasn’t just clean, it looked as though she’d laid and sealed new cement in her wake.

  In frustration at my mopping abilities, Ange would send me off to fix the toilet in the bathroom. Which was funny because I knew less about plumbing than I did about mopping and I’m fairly sure I was the one who’d broken the toilet in the first place. The first time Ange had sent me in to see why the water wouldn’t stop running, I’d taken the top off the tank, jiggled the little floaty thing, and the chain had snapped. I fixed it with a bent paper clip and never told Ange about it. After that, it broke once or twice a week, and every time I refixed it, Ange would look at me like I was some sort of toilet savant.

  Actually, he looked at me like I was a walking coupon for $89 off a plumbing-service call, but whatever. A new chain costs about five bucks at any hardware store, but I kinda liked there being at least one thing I could be depended on to do right.

  Ange taught me to turn the dough every afternoon—to take the young trays of first-risen dough from the cooler, scrape off each ball, and work it inside out with my hands. I remember him showing me how it was done, standing behind me (towering over me, all corded with hard muscles like beef jerky), then taking my wrists and making me do it myself. He would turn my hands just so when they needed to turn, training them with surprising delicacy to do a thing that his own hands knew to do without him even thinking. I remember the flour that dusted the dark hair on his forearms, the smell of his cigarettes, and the feel of the cold, leathery skin of the dough being slowly turned back inside itself; the strength of it, the elasticity, the chalky smell of flour cut by the bloom of the yeast, then the damp shininess of a finished ball set back on the tray, showing its newest, best skin to the world while it rested.

  Natalie taught me how to assemble pizza boxes and would race me for fun. We would take a hundred boxes each—first one to finish wins—and she’d promise that if I ever beat her, she’d give me a raise. I would tell her I didn’t need a raise. She would laugh, knowing she was in absolutely no danger of ever having to pay out. She’d regularly beat me by forty or fifty boxes (even when she had to stop in the middle to answer the phone or go to the store to pick up tomatoes), and even then I had the feeling she was going easy on me.

  One day, Ange called me over to the prep table. He set down a flat of buttons (a box, low-sided and long, holding about ten pounds of mushrooms) and a knife on the cutting board and asked if I knew what to do. I’d been watching the cooks, so I said sure. I took out a mushroom, held it between my fingers, picked up the knife and went to town.

  Ange stopped me after one, laying a hand on my wrist and tenderly taking the knife away.

  “I just see a thing,” he said. “I see that’s a very bad idea, I think. Why not you go fix the bathroom.”

  I remember him standing at the prep table on the slow afternoons before the first dinner hit would come in; standing and swaying gently back and forth with a pack of Marlboros rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt, a cigarette hanging from his lip, ash dangling precariously over the cutting board. Without looking, he could cut anything. His hand and his knife would move impossibly fast, the tok tok tok of the blade against the cutting board like a triple-time metronome, unwavering and sustained. And the whole time, he’d be smiling, singing quietly along under his breath with the never-ending song on the kitchen radio—a duet with the lisping Italian and his accordion-playing monkey.

  I wanted, someday, to be that good with a knife. I wanted to be Angelo-fast. I wanted his hands, and though I didn’t know where he went in his head when he sliced mushrooms or cored peppers, I wanted to see that place for myself, too.

  Though it was apparent to Ange that I couldn’t be trusted with a knife (at least not if he wanted to be able to send me home to my parents with all my fingers still attached), the job of shredding mozzarella did eventually fall to me.

  The cheese came in ten-pound blocks shrink-wrapped in thick plastic covered with seals and declarations of its Italian heritage. The wrappings had to be split and peeled off, which I did with a butcher’s saber—because when a kid looks to be in imminent danger of doing himself harm with an eight-inch chef’s knife, the obvious solution is to arm him with a curved, hook-bladed, twenty-inch machete designed for the swift deconstruction of whole sides of beef.4 I would joyously hack the cheese logs into manageable chunks, strip off the plastic and shred them through the attachment that screwed to the front of the massive floor-mount Hobart mixer.

  My negligible fifteen-year-old’s weight was barely enough to force down the handle that introduced the cheese to the shredding die, necessitating that I stand on tiptoe and actually muscle it through. I got big at Ferrara’s thanks to that cheese, my own arms and shoulders growing muscled and hard as if they were carved out of pale, freckled wood.

  Which was handy when, a couple months into my stint with Ange and Natalie, I was cornered by some older teenagers in the alley/parking lot that Ferrara’s shared with Giehl’s Deli next door (called Cooper Dell by generations of students who’d passed through Dake Middle and West Irondequoit High School just down Cooper Road in my hometown of Rochester, New York) and asked to remove my coat.

  It wasn’t a mugging, just play—just the bigger, stronger and older preying on the younger, smaller and weaker as if Cooper Dell, the alley, this whole stretch of glass- and cigarette-butt-littered real estate on the corner of Cooper and Titus was just an extension of the schoolyard and hallways down the road. Which was more or less the truth.

  “Nice coat, Sheehan. Why don’t you let me see it a minute?”

  The biggest guy took a step closer. His friends were sniggering into their fists in the background, though I was only peripherally aware of them as an audience.

  I said no. Not defiantly, but incredulously, disbelievingly—like why would I take off my coat to let someone else see it? I grinned at the joke of it. A smile that no doubt looked like a challenge to the older boy’s authority on this particular stretch of pavement.

  “You saying no to me, Sheehan?” the older guy asked, spitting my name now and advancing another step. He was maybe a head taller than me, had long, thick arms, was wearing a shiny black jacket with a flaming muscle car silk-screened onto the back, and had random patches of stiff black hair on his face sprouting from amid fields of volcanic acne. He sme
lled like mayonnaise. I remember that, too. “Gimme that coat.”

  He pushed me then, palms popping flat into the hard softballs of my shoulders. Only then did I finally realize what this was. Every fight I’d ever seen (and the couple amateur tussles I’d been in prior to this moment) had all begun just like this. The push was like a flirtation before the main event. Like foreplay. My job, as I understood it, was now either to push the other guy back if I felt I was up to it, or to cry. To give in.

  Instead, I skipped all reciprocal back-and-forth and any pretense at showmanship and just punched the guy in the head.

  Frankly, it surprised both of us. I felt the bones in my hand crackle as I tagged him high on the cheek or forehead, then did it again, right ahead of the pain, and caught him in the eye and the bridge of the nose. My third punch was ineffectual as the older boy was already falling, staggering back from the point of impact, but my wild hook grazed his mouth, the bony knuckle of my ring finger catching on his protruding front teeth and splitting open like I’d punched a knife. The blood went everywhere.

  And then it was done.

  I walked away, shrugging the coat around my shoulders and turning toward the yellow glow of the streetlights at the alley’s mouth, trailing blood from my hand.

  Six twisting residential blocks away, I cut through a parking lot and hopped a fence into the playground of my old elementary school. I climbed up onto a splintery wood fort that looked as though it’d been constructed out of massive Lincoln Logs, lay down and chainsmoked three cigarettes until I got dizzy. Then I inspected my hand. I spat on my knuckles and smudged some of the caked blood away, finding the place where the tooth had cut me—a flap of skin lifted away from the bone as cleanly as if it’d been done with a scalpel. I pressed it into place and held it there until it stuck, then went wide-eyed at the pain when I tried to make a fist—two of my knuckles popping grudgingly back into place with a sensation unlike anything I’d ever felt before. A bone in the back of my hand buzzed uncomfortably. I wouldn’t learn the name for that until years later: boxer’s fracture. And by that time, I would’ve had plenty more.

  When I got home, my mom cleaned and bandaged my hand. I told her I’d cut it at work and had been sent home early, even though it was late. I hoped she wouldn’t call Ferrara’s to check on my story, but Ange and Natalie spoke such broken English that they made the perfect alibi for almost anything.

  ONE DAY, I QUIT. I don’t know why except that maybe I’d finally just caused enough damage to these poor people and their business and was feeling bad about it. Or maybe the charm of my being the new guy had simply worn off and I was starting to actually be blamed for the things I was doing wrong.

  After nine or ten months, I still hadn’t learned how to toss a crust (which was only ever done for show anyhow) or, more usefully, how to stretch one across the lightly floured work board, mauling it with knuckles and fingertips until it thinned—more like sculpting than cooking. The only pizzas I’d ever been allowed to assemble were my own, and they were universally awful: too wet, too heavy, lopsided, unevenly risen—just bad in every conceivable way a pizza could be. There was an art to it, and if Angelo had the hands of an old master—a Monet or a Michelangelo—then I was just the kid drawing mustaches on the girls in the Freedent ads and crude pictures of stick figures humping.

  Recently I’d graduated to occasional lessons from Ange on the proper implementation of the pizza stick—he no doubt seeing the advantage of having someone to watch the ovens for him in slow moments when he wanted to duck out for a smoke or to answer the phone, and me taking to it like a baby with a barbecue fork. Whenever the opportunity was offered, I would charge the ovens, plant myself squarely before their open, blistering maws and shuffle pizzas like crazy until someone made me stop.

  But it wasn’t enough. There was a hierarchy in the Ferrara’s kitchen, one that valued things like talent and practice and skill and seniority over pure, blind desire. First there was Angelo, then Natalie, then the cooks, the family members who came and went with incomprehensible irregularity, the sporadic new hires who’d work for two days, a week, then vanish forever. And then, all the way at the bottom, there was me: dough-scraper and toilet-fixer, second-string cheese-shredder in my jeans and T-shirt.

  The system at Ferrara’s was not unlike that of a Japanese sushi kitchen run in the traditional Edo style, where one’s potential value is based as much on patience and absolute loyalty as it is on desire. When training to become a sushi chef, a young apprentice might spend two or three years making rice. He’ll never touch a fish. He’ll never pick up a knife. Just rice, for month after month after month, until he knows rice like he knows his own pulse, his own breath.

  Probably that apprentice will be washing dishes and sweeping floors and fixing the toilet, too. Probably he will carry a lot of tea. But rice—that’s the important part. He will cook rice and scrape rice, carry rice, touch and taste and smell rice until rice becomes his entire world. He will live not just with rice, but in rice; in a universe made of grains. And rice will, at first, be fascinating because it’s rice and rice is pretty cool stuff. It’s finicky, fickle, as varied in its individuality as stars or snowflakes are, and does not brook idiocy or lack of care.

  Soon, though, rice will become dull to the apprentice. Common. He will grow bored with rice, come to hate the rice because the rice represents the entirety of his labor. Then, one day, the rice will simply cease to be. It’ll be just a thing, an extension of the apprentice’s consciousness, requiring no thought or consideration. He’ll be able to work magic with it then without even trying.

  At which point he’ll be handed the knife, shown the fish, and the practice will begin all over again.

  The great sushi chefs, when they make hand rolls, the number of rice grains in them never varies by more than a few. They all point in the same direction. The chef knows how long he can and can’t hold the fish because he knows the temperature of his blood and how quickly the warmth of his palm will start to cook the fish. A great pizza man will portion the dough by eye, rarely being off by more than a quarter ounce, one ball to another. His crusts will all stretch to the same circumference. They will rise with a precision that borders on legerdemain.

  This knowledge and skill, this almost meditative expertise, is what is bought by the sort of dedication demanded of kitchen apprentices everywhere. Japanese, French, Italian—it’s all the same. Desire is good. Desire is important because desire is all that you’ll have to get you through the rough patches. Hard work? Also important. And the work will be impossibly hard sometimes because as much as apprenticeships are about training, they’re also about weeding out the pussies, the bed wetters, the casual amateurs. Being a chef is the greatest job in the world—better than being a candy-taster, a Ferrari test-track driver or Santa Claus. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would be one. So it’s not enough to give only your time or your muscle to the job. That’s just a given. Of course you’re going to give that. It’s not enough just to want it, because everyone around you will want it. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be there, wherever there might be.

  Most of all, the job requires your patience. First, scrape the trays. Run the dishes. Mop the floors. Turn the dough. First, make the rice. Everything that comes later—all wisdom—will come of these simple acts. And if you do right—if you learn your lessons, take your lumps, dedicate yourself to something larger and finer than yourself—in return you get perfect, beautiful crusts. You get red sauce that is the model of all other red sauces and a neighborhood pizza joint in the suburbs of a dying rust-belt city, a family restaurant that’ll someday be turned into a chain pizzeria after you’re gone and forgotten. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more promised than that. There are no guarantees. You might end up in The Bigs with the heavy hitters, the name guys on TV and in the bookstores. But probably you won’t. You might end up like Angelo Ferrara, remembered fondly by some smart-mouth fuck like me, elevated, perhaps, beyond his due just because he didn’
t fire me when I deserved it.

  MAYBE I’M OVERROMANTICIZING my time at Ferrara’s—remembering it as better, sweeter, more moving and affecting than it really was. But I don’t think so. I look back now from a distance of about two decades and I can still see the flour on Angelo’s arms, the glasses pushed up on his forehead, the shine on the balls of freshly turned dough. I can still hear Natalie’s voice in my head—her standing at the counter and trying to calm an irate customer whose pizza is taking too long, saying, “Sorry, we have a new Jason working today. Is okay. Go. Sit.”

  I can remember the heat—different from the heat I’d come to know as my natural environment in years to come, wetter and more fierce because it was so new to me—and the smell of the stone ovens working. I can remember blood on my hands and the milky-sour taste of good mozzarella (chunks of it pulled right off the damp blocks and popped into my mouth whenever I was hungry); the smell of yeast, alive and everywhere; accordion music and the supernal calm of winter nights on the back steps with cigarette smoke rising up like breath through the falling snow. Ferrara’s is long gone now, replaced by a goddamn Domino’s, of all fucking things. And I’m long gone from that time and place, too, replaced by just an older and marginally wiser version of that kid who dressed like Lou Gramm on his first day of work. But I remember it all like the live electricity of a fresh wound.

  And that’s what love is, isn’t it?

  I got work as a cashier in a neighborhood grocery store and was fired shortly after for gross incompetence and for stealing. I wore a bow tie and a cummerbund and sold videos at the mall. I finished high school and painted houses with a bunch of pot smokers, burnouts and scam artists who were constantly on vacations courtesy of workmen’s comp. Granted, they didn’t really go anywhere, but would just take two weeks’ pay on a bogus (but hard to disprove) back injury and sit around their dumpy apartments in their bathrobes watching game shows and tending to the marijuana plants in their closets.