Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  And they all came to the diner, descending on our front door in a shambling rush, in a stumbling horde like Coors-drunk zombies in white Stetsons and stack-heel boots. Adding to this were the bar crowds from every other dive and strip club and neighborhood tapshack within reasonable driving distance because we were (I think) the only place in the area open all night.

  So from midnight until 5:00 a.m., in a dining room limited by law to 225 seats, we fed them all. What killed us was logistics. In a fine-dining restaurant, part of the duty of the maître d’ and hosts is to seat the dining room in staggered waves: to set a new table, open a new ticket, about once every four or five minutes when the floor is fully committed and to bunch these tables into flights staggered by fifteen minutes or so. This is why, when calling for reservations at a nice restaurant, you might be told, sorry, but the house has nothing available at seven, perhaps seven-fifteen? This does not necessarily mean that someone arriving at seven would see no open tables, but that the floor was maxed-out on seatings for the seven-to-seven-fifteen time slot; that any more seatings just then would be likely to back up the kitchen and impede the quick and coordinated delivery of dinners.

  There is an art to the smooth running of a floor, to the seamless flow of orders between the dining room and the kitchen, and a hundred different little tricks that a good floorman will have at his disposal for regulating the speed of service, the dispersal of customers, the turning of the floor, and the tide of orders coming into the kitchen and orders going out.

  We had none of this sanity, stability or composure on our floor. What we had were two massive rushes: pre-bar at midnight and then bar at about ten minutes after last call. Both came all at once and were seated all at once, the dining room going from virtually empty at eleven forty-five to fully sat with fifty or a hundred more customers backed up at the door by twelve-fifteen. In our best hours, four of us—occasionally five of us, but most often four—would turn the dining room twice: 450 short-order meals served start to finish. And for an hour like that, we were paid, on average, eight dollars each.

  With the wheelman’s position came a bump to something like $9.15. A new guy started at six dollars. On my third night working, I’d watched a kid, just days past his eighteenth birthday and working his very first job, plunge both hands to the wrists in four-hundred-degree fryer oil.

  He’d started work on the night crew right before me. No one had figured he was going to last, but he’d been trying. Hard. He was working with Juan on the fryer station, dunking french fries, in a panic of sweat and fear. He was way behind, so deep in the weeds he was shitting dandelions, and at some point he’d knocked something off the sheet tray that Juan kept balanced between the two big double-bay Frialators—a pair of tongs, maybe Juan’s bowl of salt. On pure reflex, he’d made a two-handed grab for whatever it was, reaching right into the oil.

  Juan had been the one who’d screamed.

  The kid had burned himself so bad it didn’t even hurt. At least for a few seconds. All business on the line stopped and we all watched him standing there, hands held up in front of his face, panting, saying quietly, almost to himself, “No. It’s okay. It’s not too bad. No. It’s okay.” Because the pain hadn’t come yet, he was still hoping for that one-in-a-million stroke of luck, that miracle where you stand wide-eyed after an accident, wondering how in the hell you managed not to ruin yourself.

  But his skin had melted. That’s what we all thought at first. Like that Nazi guy in Indiana Jones who gets his face burned off by the magical Jesus lasers. It looked just like that—all white and runny—which would’ve been cool as hell except that, here, it was real. His hands were like claws, fingers stuck together, creamy goop like chicken fat deliquescing and rolling down his wrists. Juan crossed himself, muttering. The rest of us shuffled back away from him—stunned but unwilling to look away; reduced to a bunch of dumb, gawping children. Amazed, like seeing blood for the first time, like seeing real hurt.

  It was so quiet. Until the shrieking and vomiting started. That part I barely remember. The quiet I’ll never forget.

  911. Ambulance. Sirens. Silver shock blankets like perfect aluminum foil, the kind I’ve always dreamed about being available in kitchens; a kind that can drape. We were still smack in the middle of our bar rush, tickets still coming in. Nothing stops the hit.

  The kid was moved off the line, a third of the kitchen shut down. We’d lost five minutes to the horror of watching and now danced like the motherfucking Bolshoi to catch up, a manager (not Lucy, someone else) pulling out the mats and sluicing in water to wash the puke off the tiles; everyone dropping salt on the floor for traction while we spun. Something almost superstitious about it now.

  That same manager (the only one thinking clearly, but then, he hadn’t had to see it) pulled Juan aside. Told him to drain the offending fryer. Turn it off and dump the oil. Why? Because some of the kid was probably still in it.

  What made the whole thing worse (as if it could’ve been worse) was that the kid had been wearing gloves—those stupid, cheap rubber gloves that everyone in kitchens is supposed to wear all the time but no one ever does. The gloves were now a more or less permanent part of him. This only occurred to us later, sitting around, talking about it. It’d been the gloves that’d melted, not his hands. But then, the gloves had melted to his hands so who knew if that was better. We all tried to imagine what he’d do once he healed, how he would jerk off, where he would work. Freak show was the best we could come up with. He’d be the guy with the lobster hands, lurching around, scaring all the kids.

  Truth is, none of us ever saw him again. We were busy. We hadn’t even noticed the paramedics wheeling him out the back door. A replacement came in the next night. Didn’t last. Another replaced him. Didn’t last either. I don’t remember anything at all about those guys—not their names, their habits, their skills. But Lobster Boy became part of the lore, a story we all got to carry forward with us, an almost guaranteed winner anytime a bunch of cooks got together and started talking about the worst kitchen injuries they’d ever seen.

  Crippled for life for six bucks an hour.

  TEN-THIRTY.

  Freddy rolls in a couple minutes after the half hour, stands to babysit while I duck out back for my first smoke and beer of the night. Hero joins me a couple of minutes later. To announce himself, he rams his car head-on into the Dumpster corral, blocking the door, then clambers out, climbs to the hood, pokes his head over to look down on me where I stand, cigarette in one hand, bottle in the other. “Motherfucker, you better have one of those open for me.”

  “Take mine. I spit in it special for you.”

  Scrambling over, he drops crookedly into the trash midden, stands, snatches the beer out of my hand, drains away what’s left. He clucks his tongue. “Oh, sweetheart. Now what will you drink?”

  I flick my cigarette at him and it bounces off his chest in a shower of sparks. “You ready for tonight?”

  “Friday night. We’re gonna get fuuucked . . .”

  “Hard, baby. Bent-over, broomstick fucked.”

  “Sandpaper. No lube.”

  “Not even the decency to spit on the tip.”

  Hero shakes his head. “So impolite.” He scrounges out a cigarette from the pocket of his ridiculous multicolored leather jacket. “We’re five-on?”

  “Four-on.”

  “Five-on, darling. Check the schedule.”

  “Juan is gone, man. We don’t even have five.”

  Hero shrugs. “We’re five-on.” He smashes the empty beer bottle against the side of one of the Dumpsters with a hollow, resounding boom and tinkle of shattered glass, looking back at me and giggling at the noise. “I’m going in. How bad is it?”

  “We’re okay. Freddy’s on the line.”

  He leaps, catches the top of the stockade fence, hauls himself up and over. What he neglects to do is move his car. I can hear him laughing all the way to the back door. I have to pull myself up on the lip of the Dumpster and jump.
<
br />   I unscrew his antennae and take the blades off his windshield wipers to square things, throw them in the backseat of my car. I would’ve pissed on his door handle, but didn’t have to go. Oh, the joys of being a boy.

  • • •

  INSIDE, I CHECK THE SCHEDULE. Hero was right: we’re five-on.

  That makes no sense. We’ve been undermanned for a week, Juan off somewhere doing whatever it is that Juan does when he’s not humping my fryers. Humping something else, I’d wager. It’s been just the four of us every night, racking up overtime, ten hours or better trapped in the little steel box, getting flakier and rougher around the edges as the days pass. Four on a Sunday or Monday is fine—overstaffed, actually, with two or three cooks getting sent home shortly after 4:00 a.m. Start of the week is quiet. Relaxing. Closest thing there is to a vacation without actually, you know, taking a vacation.

  Tuesday it gets busier. Wednesday, with the line dancing on, is worse. Thursday, worse again. Come Friday, we go all-hands—doubling a man on fryer/half-grill (usually Juan, doing his normal fryer work plus taking half the acreage of the slatted charcoal grill for steaks and prefires) and cutting out a man, usually Freddy, to do nothing but toast and pancakes.

  With four-on, we’ve got room to move. To dance. With four-on, you can put a little flair in your game—hip-bumping the cooler doors closed, spinning plates down the rail to position. No one is climbing on your back, bashing past you, taking up your valuable inches on the cutting board or crowding you at the coolers. Five-on is crowded but cozy, like on one of those nature shows where they show the big knot of weasels or whatever, all sleeping together in their weasel hole. Five-on and you’re in the slot. All you do is spin. Nothing more than a reach away.

  I’d had no doubt that we could’ve done a Friday with just four-on. Was kinda looking forward to it, actually: wall-to-wall action for five or six straight hours, almost wanting the bad hit just to see if we could take it. It would’ve been something to be proud of, and guys like us don’t get to be proud of much.

  But without Juan, five on the schedule doesn’t make any sense.

  Somewhere deep in my head an alarm starts ringing. Softly. For the moment, easy to ignore.

  AT TEN MINUTES TO ELEVEN, I find Lucy in the office. She’s not alone.

  “Hey baby. ¿Cómo estás?” She smiles, big and terrible.

  Lucy is nominally in charge of this circus, this recurring nightmare. An ex-server, she’s a five-foot-nothing Puerto Rican tornado who got conned into managing nights and took to it like magic. Oddly, being management, she is welcome in the back of the house because she can outtalk, outfight and probably outfuck any two of us degenerate pricks without even breaking a sweat. She is badass, and unquestionably on our side, unquestionably One of Us: in the same boat, in the same bad position, cut off with no hope of relief or rescue.

  I ask, “Five-on, Luz? What’s this shit?”

  “You love me.”

  “No.”

  “You know you love me. You love me so much it hurts.”

  The guy sitting in the office with her has a fan of paperwork spread out in front of him. Taxes. ID. Company forms stamped with company logos—the same losing hand we’d all been dealt on day one. He’s blinking, goggle-eyed, wearing a brand-new company polo, black pants, sneakers, twisting the brim of a brand-new company baseball cap in his hand.

  I close my eyes. “This is not happening.”

  Lucy turns to him. “Dan, this is Jason. He’s in charge. He’ll tell you what you need to do.” She speaks slowly, in uncomplicated sentences, the way one would to a child or someone who’s just suffered some sort of traumatic event.

  I talk like a man anticipating a traumatic event coming, squinching my eyes shut against seeing its swift approach. “You are not doing this to me, Lucy. Not on a Friday. Not tonight.”

  “Loco, you shut up now. Dan is five on the line. Use him. Put him ...” Her voice trails off.

  I open my eyes. “Yeah? Where?”

  She makes a quick cutting motion with her finger, purses her lips as if to spit. “Your problem.”

  Petulant, I actually stamp my foot. “Lucy, it’s Friday! We are going to get murdered.”

  She shoos Dan out of his chair. He steps past me sideways, out into the tiled reach of the kitchen, cramming the hat down sideways on his head and affecting the pose of a kid who is ready for anything—a pose I knew well once upon a time. The two of us together, we look like a before-and-after picture: him the fresh-faced newcomer in his company gear trying to look cool in the face of the unknown, me in my stained black pants, disgusting work boots, Misfits T-shirt and black bandanna covering the fuzzy wreck of a Mohawk, my hands covered in burns and scars, my skin gray, my eyes hung with big, dark bags looking like . . . something else.

  “Go,” Lucy says. “I’ve got paperwork.” She means me, but Dan thinks he’s still being spoken to so he starts walking toward the line. I turn to call him back, and when I do, Lucy pushes the office door closed with her foot. I say bad things to the closed door, which would look ridiculous to anyone who hadn’t seen what came before. Probably it looks ridiculous anyway.

  I yell to Dan, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Dan shrugs. “Dunno.”

  Dan points. “Up there?”

  “No.” I say. “No, you’re not. You ever cook anywhere before?”

  Dan says he has worked at the Wendy’s down the road. Three months.

  “Wendy’s? You serious?”

  Dan nods.

  “Wendy’s.”

  Dan nods.

  “Turn your fucking hat around straight.”

  Dan turns his fucking hat around straight.

  I see James stroll in through the back door with one hand stuck down the front of his greasy chef pants and a graying T-shirt with a picture of crossed AK-47s on the front. He’s smiling. He’s always smiling. As far as problem drinkers go, James is as gentle as mashed potatoes. I wave him over.

  “You have a new friend,” James says, nodding to Dan.

  “James, this is Wendy. Wendy? James.”

  “Dan,” says Dan. He giggles and I want very much to punch him.

  “Morning, Wendy,” says James, then to me, just a raised eyebrow.

  “Wendy is our fifth man tonight, James. Isn’t that fantastic?”

  James’s other eyebrow starts racing the first, the two of them making a slow-motion dash for his receding hairline. “Smashing,” he says. “Just smashing is what that is.”

  “He used to work at Wendy’s.”

  “Really.”

  I nod. “Wendy’s.”

  “A fortuitous development.” James has read a lot of books. He likes big words. “That makes him an expert then, doesn’t it?”

  “Take him up and show him around, huh?”

  “Are you going to yell at the door some more?”

  “Just do it. Please?”

  “Pleasure.”

  James drops an arm over Dan’s shoulder and starts force-marching him toward the line. “Oh, Wendy, what a night we’re going to have. We will gird our loins and sharpen our knives and have ourselves a great adventure . . .”

  BACK IN THE OFFICE.

  “I never said it was a good idea,” Luz tells me. “Juan is not coming back. You ever want a night off, we need another guy.”

  “What happened to Juan?”

  She shakes her head, curly hair swirling over her collar. “Drop it. He’s just not coming back.”

  When she wants to, Lucy can cook alongside the best of us. She always wears a hairnet, just in case. This makes her look like a school lunch lady, or like someone who is carefully trying to grow a second head, hair first.

  “Fine, but Wendy’s? Seriously?”

  “Believe it or not, Jason? He’s the best we had.” She hands me her cigarette and I take a seething drag. Usually, a fifth man will be some day/breakfast cook with his nuts up, someone who thinks it would be cool to be on the pirate ship. Freddy had
been a breakfast cook. Kyle, too, I think. Sometimes it’s a friend of a friend, sometimes a total stranger like I was. But it’s never a rookie. Never someone totally green. It’s going to screw us up with him getting in the way, asking questions, breathing our air. Only so much air on that line during a hit. Not enough to share.

  “Why tonight?”

  “Why not tonight? He was available tonight, so he’s here. Have him make toast. Split out James and Freddy on the grill and have him drop bread all night. It’s fine. It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not worse than nothing, papi. If he lasts the weekend, I can probably sell him down to day crew on Monday and trade for a fryer cook.”

  From outside the tiny office I hear Hero’s voice: “Galley is eighty-six. No checks. None.”

  I bounce up, already imagining the worst. “We’re gonna get killed.”

  “We were already going to get killed. Just go deal with it.”

  ELEVEN P.M. Sixty minutes before the first rush.

  On the line, they’re lighting everything. Fryers are being superheated, burners roaring. The four front flattops and the two in the back—the cake grills—are being cleared and wiped clean of oil. Sheet pans are being laid over the grills, double-stacked, and even the ancient gas four-burner is being coaxed to life. Usually it remains covered with a thick, custom-fitted plastic cutting board, used for storage, as a shelf on the already overcrowded line. There’s nothing on the menu we can’t do on the grills, in the fryers, in the two nukers bracketed to the wall above the cold table. It’s faster not to use burners.

  Only now, the cover is popped and all four rings are blazing merrily away, bleeding flames across the grated top because the gaskets are worn and the gas lines leaky.

  “Why are we eighty-six?”

  I get icy, pissed-off stares; quiet wrath. Nothing. I’m going to kill Lucy. I figure this is all Wendy’s fault somehow; you don’t just bring someone new into the family without asking.

  “Look, guys. If this is about him”—pointing—“I had nothing to do with it. I just—”