I did want to go out with some style, though, which I thought to accomplish simply by vanishing without saying goodbye.
My parents were, to say the least, disappointed by the way things had turned out. I’d been sort of teetering on the edge before, but now I was a full-blown loser: an unemployed college dropout with no money, no prospects, nowhere to live, and no plans for remedying any of these sad situations, either immediately or in the foreseeable future. Sitting there with them in the living room discussing my future a couple days after my slinking retreat from Ithaca, I was also all twitchy and sweating and short-tempered, unable to take a sip of coffee, light a cigarette or complete a sentence without breaking down into some foulmouthed rant about how I was going to have my revenge on those who’d done me wrong.
(This was not the drugs talking. This was the very distinct lack of drugs talking. Something that hadn’t really occurred to me at the time: once I left Ithaca, I was also leaving behind my dealer and only dependable connection for chemical accelerants. I’d never learned how to cop in my hometown, and though at the time I probably could’ve figured out where to go and who to talk to if I tried, there was also a part of me—a small and easily bullied part of me—that didn’t really want to. I mean, I wanted drugs. I wanted them quite badly. And if, at that moment, the Meth Fairy had twinkled in through the window, scattering little glassine bags and those old-fashioned McDonald’s coffee stirrers in her wake, I would’ve been just as pleased as punch. But since I had no money and no motivation beyond the maddening itch of dependency, and since I hadn’t yet been gut-hooked so solidly on the junk that I was sitting there mentally calculating the street value of Dad’s stereo or Mom’s collection of antique plates and silver, I’d simply been riding out the lack, having spent most of the preceding forty-eight or seventy-two hours doing little more than lying in bed, shaking, chain-smoking, playing Nintendo and watching the lizards crawl in under the door.)
The folks seemed only bemused by all of this, letting me go off on whatever weird jag occurred to me and nodding quietly until I’d settled down again, found another cigarette, found my lighter, my coffee, whatever. They allowed me to exhaust myself against the bulwarks of their patience, let me blame everyone I could think of for everything that’d gone wrong, let me rationalize and scheme, plot my comeback, list all the people who were going to be sorry when I was rich and famous and powerful (or at least able to walk from my bedroom to the bathroom without falling over), and when all that was done, they laid down the new plan.
I could move back in and stay for one month. I was to wake up at a reasonable hour, read the newspaper (paying particular attention to the help-wanted ads), and drink two pots of coffee on the couch like a sensible person. I was to find a job. It didn’t matter to them what job I found so long as it had regular hours and a paycheck. I was also to look with some seriousness into enrolling at Monroe Community College.
At the end of the month, we’d talk again. If I’d accomplished anything in thirty days, we would discuss future arrangements. If not, we’d have nothing to talk about.
I felt this a rather cruel and abrupt way for them to be dealing with their prodigal son. I thought maybe I ought to explain everything—about the drugs, the poetry, the attempts at experimental film-making—but when I tried, it all came out wrong.
“Thanks” was what I actually said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Inside of a week, I was back in the restaurant business.
CHINA TOWN WAS OWNED BY TWO BROTHERS, who we’ll call Barney and Jake. The place wasn’t actually called China Town. The brothers weren’t actually named Barney and Jake. And I’m not even sure they were brothers. But I’m changing the names out of consideration for the real guys and their real restaurant because I liked the two of them quite a lot.
China Town was known for many things. At one time, by reputation, anyone could drink at the bar there, provided they were able to come up with some form of identification. A driver’s license was fine, of course. Passport. Library card. Video store membership. An old baseball card with a picture of a player on it who looked vaguely like the customer presenting it.
Needless to say, this open and generous policy at the bar had gotten the bar in Dutch with the cops on numerous occasions, though the charges never stuck. Lucky for them, they had among their coterie of semiregulars my uncle Rick, the lawyer. Rick had defended the house in court before, mostly against complaints of serving underage patrons gigantic umbrella drinks full of rum and tropical fruit, so he ate free in their dining room. He drank top-shelf scotch from the bar. And when there came a day that his broke, dumb-ass college-dropout nephew found himself suddenly in need of quick, no-questions-asked employment, Rick was right there.
Rick called me up at my parents’ house, told me to find a clean white shirt, a pair of black pants and a tie, put them on and meet him in front of the place in an hour. This I did, and when I got there, he was already waiting.
“Okay, here’s how this is going to go . . . ,” he said.
We went up the long, narrow, steep flight of stairs to the bar/restaurant on the second floor. It was quiet and smelled like old beer, sour breath, smoke and flowers. It smelled like kung pao chicken. At the landing, we pushed through a heavy door and stepped into China Town proper—big, ornate dining room to the right, surprisingly large and well-stocked bar to the left, cavernous kitchen in the back. The dining room was like a leftover movie set from some flashy seventies chop-socky movie—something right out of Quentin Tarantino’s wet dreams, all deep, plush booths, red lacquer, curling dragons and furry whorehouse chandeliers—and the bar looked like the kind of place a man went to be killed for disappointing his Triad masters.
The place was unoccupied except for an old Chinese bartender, two men playing go at the far end of the bar by the TV, and Barney and Jake (both Chinese; Barney small and thin and tidy in an immaculate tuxedo; Jake tall and fat and sweating through a silk shirt, its collar wilting under the pressure of his jowls), who sat at the first table in the dining room, counting a huge stack of receipts and hissing angrily at each other like two mismatched cats.
They both bounced to their feet when they saw Rick come in, though. They bowed, snapped fingers at the bartender, who stirred reluctantly to life and wordlessly poured four tiny glasses of plum wine.
We drank. Rick introduced me. I dutifully shook hands and said nothing. Then the three of them headed to the dining room’s farthest corner.
“Wait at the bar,” said Rick, the defense attorney who represented this place in court against charges of serving minors, to his then nineteen-year-old nephew. “Have a drink. Relax.”
I sat. The bartender asked what I’d like. Actually, he just grunted, inclining his head slightly toward the bottles ranked in tiers behind him—least possible expenditure of effort—but I got the idea. I asked for a gin gimlet, two limes. He stared silently out at me from beneath thick, expressive eyebrows, giving me a look like I’d just asked for three fingers of what-the-fuck.
“Beer,” I said.
He nudged open a cooler with his foot, set a cold, unopened Tsingtao in front of me, and shambled off, panting and apparently exhausted by the effort. I popped the top with my lighter and nursed the beer while I waited. It took a surprisingly long time. I just tried to look cool, like I belonged in this place where I most assuredly did not.
After a while, Rick shot me a quick glance and cut his eyes toward the door. I nodded, rooted around in my pocket, and slipped a crumpled five across the bar for the beer. It was all the money I had. Rick was laughing, joking with the guys, shaking hands as they bowed reflexively like those toy birds that drink the water. I’ve always loved those things.
I stood waiting for him on the sidewalk beneath China Town’s front windows with the sweet-and-sour scent of the place still clinging to my skin. Finally he came out.
“Five nights a week,” Rick said. “Sundays and Mondays off, okay? They’re going to pay you eight hours a night
out of the register, five an hour, which should get you on your feet. Plus whatever tips you make. If it’s slow and you don’t make any tips, Barney’ll give you a little extra for being a good kid. Also, they do some parties and things here. Private stuff. That’ll be good for a few bucks, too.”
I nodded. “When do I start?”
“You started twenty minutes ago. First thing you gotta do is go upstairs and tell that bartender you’re in charge of the bar now.”
“You mean fire him?”
“No . . .” Rick shook his head, recoiling and looking hurt, almost offended at the notion of putting me in such an uncomfortable position right off the bat. “Jake’ll find something for him to do, I’m sure. But that’s your bar now. You’re in charge.”
WALKING BACK UP THE STAIRS, I’d thought maybe there’d be violence. I figured that Barney and Jake would have to back me up, but when I walked back into the bar, they were nowhere to be found. It was just me and the bartender, Michael, and the two regulars, who’d prudently taken their game into the dining room.
Michael had been working at China Town a long time. There were things he understood that it would take me years to. So when I laid things out for him, he just shook his head and asked if he could stay for the rest of the night—offering to show me where the glasses were and how to work the cash register and so forth. Having been expecting incredulity, yelling demands for explanations I was totally unprepared to give, I told him I’d appreciate that. But oddly, telling him he didn’t have to bother coming back tomorrow was like punching a baby in the face. He went down without any fight at all.
THERE HAD BEEN ONE CLASS at Ithaca that I never skipped. It was a night bartending course concerned mostly with the rote memorization of about two hundred common cocktails and the practice of a perfect, unjiggered one-ounce pour. In this, I’d graduated top of my class. You know who came in second? That girl who could put both her feet behind her head. We’d each missed one drink on the final test, but she’d missed the woo-woo and I’d missed the pink squirrel, and because the woo-woo was the more common of the two (and the simpler to assemble), I’d decided I was better than her and named myself valedictorian.
That night, Michael and I worked four hours together. We served a total of maybe half a dozen customers. The first drink I poured was an Alabama Slammer for an old man wearing a scarf and small rimless glasses who sat with a young, silent Asian girl beside him, drinking Cokes with lemon. I messed up the slammer but he didn’t seem to notice. I suspect he was just fucking with me anyhow—pulling the most obscure drink he could think of out of his ass and asking the new kid to make it. But who cares? He left a ten-dollar tip.
By ten o’clock the dining room was dark and the seats at the bar all empty. Out of nowhere, Jake suddenly appeared, standing at the far end by the TV and back stairs, leaning heavily on the rail. Michael poured him a plum wine and walked it down to him. Jake sipped it, and when Michael leaned over and started speaking in hurried, hushed Chinese, Jake dismissed him with a hiss, waving his hand toward the door. Michael slunk off without another word.
To me he said, “We’re closed. Go home. Be back tomorrow at five, five-thirty, whatever.” He reached into his jacket with one hand, knocked back the rest of his drink with the other, and came up with a thin fold of twenties from an inside pocket, which he pushed across the bar to me with one thick finger.
“Here,” he said. “Now go.”
It was eighty dollars—five an hour for eight hours, of which I’d worked four, plus the promised little bit extra. Counting my few tips, I’d made more than a hundred bucks for doing little more than standing in one place and not falling asleep on my feet. Not bad considering I’d walked in just a few hours ago with my last five-spot in my pocket.
I tucked the cash into my shirt pocket and took the bottle of plum wine down from where Michael had left it on the back bar. I poured Jake a fresh one. “I’ll see you tomorrow, boss.”
He nodded, his head down, pouchy eyes tracing the grain of the bar. He ran a finger around the rim of the glass, then picked it up and drank without comment.
I left him there alone and went out to celebrate.
FROM THE START, the waitresses refused to give me their drink orders in English. As at Ferrara’s, I thought this was a snub, some sort of clannish disinclination to accept me, the sole white kid on staff, into the family.
And again, this (mostly) wasn’t the case. The truth was, none of the waitresses spoke English. This complicated things at the bar. They would come up and start rattling off calls in Cantonese and I would just stand there, staring through them, thinking about boxing or television or pie. For me, it was like trying to make sense of a cat describing a seven and seven or taking instructions from one of the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. For them, it must’ve been like talking to a wall, like trying to get a two-year-old to make a passable gin and tonic.
English is almost never the primary language of the kitchen, the dish-pit or the dock. On the floor, at the bar and in the owner’s office, speaking English may be an advantage and being able to fake it a requirement, but in the back of the house, it is almost a detriment. Spanish, obviously, is big. French, too. Chinese is handy. Russian. Vietnamese. And on the line, cooks speak a patois that would give any linguist the vapors—a constantly evolving multilingual mish mash of house slang and obscenity, truncated in-jokes, World War II and Vietnam-era military jargon, Spanish, English and butchered Frog, liberally spiced by whatever the prevailing ethnicity of that particular kitchen might be. In later years, I would work in kitchens where the dish room couldn’t talk to the pastry department except through translators, where the floor was virtually incapable of communicating with the chef and the line grooved to its own vernacular as dense and impenetrable as mud—a secret guild cant wherein the knowing of it served as proof of belonging, loyalty and bitter, hard-won experience. I would work in places where the only common language wasn’t even a language at all, but the simplified set of symbols and shorthand that ticked out constantly from the printer: the clock slashes of table position, SPEC-this and VIP-that, abbreviations of complicated names (OE and POIV and XMAS and REO), and always the red letters—FIRE, FIRE, FIRE.
At the China Town bar, we tried pantomime. We tried pointing and yelling. We tried that trick where they’d talk louder and faster and I’d talk louder and slower, really enunciating: “I . . . can’t . . . fucking . . . understand . . . you.”
We settled on a compromise of phonetics, brand recognition and slapdash Chinglish, developed on the spot and poorly understood by all involved. I learned the Chinese words for certain common cocktails, for “another round” and “stupid idiot asshole,” which was more or less my name for my first few weeks on the job. The waitresses learned to parrot back words to me such as Mickey-robe and vodka martini. And whatever that didn’t cover, we handled with charades, educated guesses and a complex system of hand signals that allowed us to communicate simple requests like “up” or “on the rocks” but failed utterly when it came to expressing more complicated, reflexive, emotional phrasing like “This guy would like you to make his drink in a clean glass, please” or “Screw this shit. I’m going home until someone here learns to speak my language.”
One night I heard one of the waitresses speaking pretty good English in the dining room, then coming to the bar and pretending that I was just making up my own gibberish dialect whenever I spoke. She was older than all the other girls on the floor by about eight hundred years, looked like she’d been preserved in cider vinegar and salt and was the only Asian woman I’ve ever seen with a perm. Her head was like a small, shriveled apple crowned with a Texas-schoolmarm Barbie wig, and when I confronted her about having heard her speak English in the dining room, she looked straight at me, furrowed her tiny, fierce eyebrows, and said simply, “I hate you every day.”
Come to find out, she was Michael-the-former-bartender’s sister, so I guess I had that coming.
THE CHINA TOWN REGULARS ca
me for one or another highly personal reason. Gary came to hit on the waitresses and to play epic games of go with Jake that could last for hours. Mary came to have two glasses of wine and spout off about her Baptist faith. We were all heathens in her eyes, and it was her mission to convert us. When that didn’t work, she’d have a bowl of egg-drop soup and talk about growing up in the South, eating pickled watermelon rind and chitlins and barbecue. Whenever she cooked a big meal, she’d bring bags of leftovers in for the other regulars, and for me and Barney and Jake, so we could all sit around the bar of a Chinese restaurant in upstate New York eating smoked pork shoulder, collard greens, okra and beans and cold slices of rhubarb or sweet potato pie.
Mary was a nurse who worked in the geriatric critical-care ward at the hospital down the street. Her job was to watch over people while they died. Food and her faith were her shield against the depredations of such grim business, providing her moments of joy in a life spent lived at the ends of other lives.
Joe the lawyer came to watch the news after work with no distractions. He would sit, drinking Chinese beer in silence, riveted by the phosphorescent glow of the cheap bar TV, then get up and leave. On a good night, not a single word would pass between us.
Tom, on the other hand, came for the conversation. He and I would talk all night if it was slow, our exchanges ranging wildly from sports (about which I knew just enough to hold up one end of a lopsided discussion) to politics to science to cars to women. And if we ever ran out of things to talk about, I’d make fun of his mustache—a big, sandy-blond thing that looked glued onto his babyish face and made him appear to strangers like a creepy seventies porn star on the make.
Cooking Dirty Page 7
