Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  So I’d come home (maybe) at four in the morning, five, six—usually before the sun was up, though I was often racing it. I’d collapse into bed. Sometimes Sam would be there. Sometimes not. She’d taken to sleeping over at friends’ places. Needless to say, the cat box was not getting cleaned. Dishes were not being done.

  But on my birthday? It seemed cruel to me for her to have just forgotten—like something out of a John Hughes movie with me as Molly Ringwald. I worked the night in a lather of frustration, getting angrier and angrier, until finally I decided to talk it through with my guys. Every one of them assured me that she was banging someone else, revenge-fucking for all the nights I’d been away. They’d shrug. It happens, bro. What’re ya gonna do? Not exactly the comfort I was looking for.

  Toward the end of the shift, with just a few tables left in the dining room, one of the waitresses came back and said that someone was at the bar to see me. This was not rare. Friends, owners, fellow travelers—people knew where to find me when they needed me because my orbit was small: kitchen to bar to bar to bar to bed to kitchen. I pulled on my clean jacket, tucked my hair up neatly under the black bandanna I wore, dropped my dirty apron on the board and stepped out onto the floor.

  Sam was there with a cake, candles, the whole nine. Smiling.

  My best friend, David,30 was there with her. Smiling. One hand resting on her shoulder.

  They both shouted, “Happy birthday!” There was applause. Sam kissed me. I loved her fiercely in that moment, all my doubt and fury draining away like water down a hole. I hugged her, opened my eyes, saw David standing there, watching.

  All my doubts except one.

  SOME TIME AFTERWARD, I asked Sam to marry me. Thinking it an excellent excuse for a party, she said sure, why not? We were still a collective mess, but it seemed like the right thing to do after all the years of being messed up we’d already put behind us. Together, we told our parents. And though obviously not overjoyed at the idea, neither did any of them scream, faint or start laying odds on our inevitable failure right there at the table. We took this as an overwhelming endorsement of our nuptials and threw a party for our engagement, where everyone got drunk and hit someone, then set a date about a year off for the actual wedding.

  Here I was, the kid who’d snuck the copies of Gourmet under his bed, the angry little punk, the half-assed junkie, college dropout, loser. Here was the sum of all those scrubbed, pink and manic faces staring out, frozen, from the Wheel O’ Jay—an equation that, when

  Without our consent, without our involvement, without even our knowledge, the owners had hired a chef. Chef-with-a-capital-C. A boss. Matty and I hadn’t heard anything about the chef until the afternoon he showed up in the house, wanting to get a look at his new kitchen and crew. It was as though, in the absence of any executive decision having been made about the operation of the kitchen a year ago, the owners had been happy enough to let Matty and me play around simply because we were the ones who’d shown up. Thankful that the choice had been forestalled, they could sit back, take their time, let us make our mud pies and gumdrop soup, pat us on the head and tell us how smart we were, then shuffle us out the door and bring their own guy in when the time was right. History would start again with him, invalidating everything we’d already done.

  The new chef was tall, chiseled and pretty with too many perfect white movie-star teeth stuck like pickets in his jaw. He arrived wearing his cooking school whites, black exec pants, jaunty blue neckerchief and a probe thermometer in his shoulder pocket. All around him hung an aura of yellow-duckling newness so soft and bewildered that it seemed like a corruption when juxtaposed beside the slick, skeevy, shiny, damp disorder of a working kitchen. He looked like he was dressed for an audition, like he’d seen a chef once in a movie and had gone out and bought all the necessary parts of the costume. Tonight, the part of Chef will be played by . . .

  His dark hair was perfectly combed. The creases in his pants looked like he’d ironed them across the blade of a razor. His hands were as soft and pink as powdered marzipan. I had him pegged as some kind of visiting galley dignitary, friend of the owners. Worse, a consultant. I disliked him instantly, but still, I set aside my knife, dragged my palms across the thighs of the ancient pair of grease-stained check pants I was wearing, and went to introduce myself because that was the polite thing to do. All evidence to the contrary, this business truly runs on the politeness of presumed competency and tribal belonging. Chef was chef, still and all, and he was wearing the white coat.

  I was dressed for work in a dishwasher’s jacket open over a sweaty green T-shirt with CHARLIE DON’T SURF screened across the front in big white letters. My pants were held up with a hotel belt—a stretched band of plastic wrap tied with a bow. My pockets were stuffed with cigarettes, the neck of my T-shirt festooned with Sharpie markers. I looked like the poor country cousin of this big-city swell, yet it never occurred to me to read anything into that. I was a chef in everything but name myself. So was Matty. We were veterans now, pros. We were in charge here (or so we thought), and technically this new man’s superior. I stepped up and put out a hand.

  The new chef gave me a thousand-watt smile, a hit-and-run glance and a knuckle-cracker handshake in return. He said to call him Chef.

  Behind me, Matty was straining stock, perched on an overturned milk crate and babying the vital liquid through oversize coffee filters shoved into a china cap. He bit his lip, looked away and didn’t say a word. I laughed it off. I had to. We were an hour and change from the start of the first seating when the guy walked in, and my crew (not one of whom had ever called me Chef) was busy. We had two full turns on the books, plus walk-in traffic, plus the late theater rush we’d get an hour before closing (mostly apps, garde-manger work, desserts), then the trickle of bar orders that would walk in while we were trying to break down and clean. It wasn’t a crusher, but we were anticipating a busy night so everyone was sandbagging—the crew (which had swelled somewhat since opening night) laying in backups for their stations, then backups for their backups, filling fish tubs with ice, arranging their mise en place just how they liked it, squirreling away stashes of side towels, cooking wine in speed bottles, change-out trays. They were centurions preparing for battle; old hands going about their business with a practiced efficiency that might look to an outsider, a civilian, like ease but was really just the habit of long experience.

  I was doing the same, so I smiled, laughed, said, “Good to meet you, Chef,” or something equally noncommittal, gave him a final questioning once-over—noticing that his goofy-ass clogs, too, were brand-new and spotless—then returned to my cutting board in front of the four-burner mini and fell right back into the pleasant, mindless trance of prep, forgetting all about the chef until I heard the long string of Spanish curses erupt behind me, coming from Diego, our champion prep-runner and occasional pantry cook.

  I turned around again. Now I was getting pissed because prep time was quiet time in the kitchen. Jazz on the galley radio. Not much talking. It was time for communing with one’s ingredients, grooving on the staccato tap tap tap of knife blades on the board, the sexy feel of a sharp knife sliding through mushroom flesh, the licorice and pepper smell of chiffonade basil on the fingertips. Distractions annoyed me. Further, they cost minutes that we would all have to make up elsewhere with rushing and shortcuts, which I hated.

  On the other side of the kitchen’s center island, I saw Diego standing with his knife out, and the schoolboy chef in his immaculate whites with his pretty hands held up like he was being mugged.

  In deference to the white coat, to hierarchy and tradition so ingrained in me that it was almost subconscious, I asked the schoolboy, and not Diego, what was wrong.

  The new chef said he didn’t know. I don’t think he spoke Spanish.

  THE HISTORY OF MODERN AMERICAN COOKERY is the history of American immigration. As has often been said, if one day in this nation every working Mexican line cook, Indian porter, Ecuadorian dishwasher, Cuban
busboy, Costa Rican saucier and Russian night baker, legal or no, decided not to come into work, the entire industry would come to a screeching, immediate halt. Everyone would have to stay home and eat cold Dinty Moore out of the can, because the blacks, the browns, the yellows, and all the cappuccino-colored people who’d come from all those funny-shaped countries on the unpopular parts of the map form the backbone of the restaurant world. You know who fills the majority of posts behind the bar at sushi restaurants in the United States today? Mexicans. You know who makes that delicious bread at the little neighborhood French bakery you go to on weekends? Some Frog-trained Cubano hard boy who earned his chops in Miami, in New Orleans, in Atlanta, before working his way north looking for better money and more stable employment.

  Consequently, a chef who can’t speak Spanish31 is not much of a chef because he is unable to speak to a large portion of his staff in the language with which they are most comfortable.

  Most conversations in any galley are held in a mishmash patois of English, Spanish, French and lyrical, heavily inflected pop referentialism as dense and fluid as cockney rhyming slang, with each kitchen and each crew developing their own uniquely obscene linguistic cocktail over time. One needn’t be fluent (Christ knows I never was), but a chef with no Spanish at all is the equivalent of an orchestra conductor who has never heard a violin before.

  I CHECKED MATTY’S WATCH, which was sitting on the rail between our two stations, and saw that we now had just fifty fucking minutes before the start of service. Confounded, I turned to Diego and asked him (in Spanish) what’d happened and why he was about to commit premeditated murder at the garde-manger station.

  “Motherfucker tried to touch me,” Diego said, not lowering his knife.

  Fixing my attention back again on the new chef, I asked, “You tried to touch him?”

  “His hand,” the schoolboy stammered.

  “And why were you trying to hold my man’s hand, exactly? Do you love him? Are you going to ask him out on a date?”

  “No!” said the chef, his face twisting into a mask of equal parts revulsion and fixated horror. He’d no doubt been through some cooking school’s crash course in butchering and breakdown. He knew precisely what that thin-backed, eight-inch Global that Diego was holding could do to a chunk of soft meat.

  “Just back up off my guys, Classroom,” I said. “And, Diego, remember our rule? No stabbing.”

  The schoolboy stepped away. Diego shrugged and went back to turning big piles of ugly, lumpy, useless vegetables into beautiful little piles of mirepoix. And that, I figured, was that. I took a breath, cleared my head and addressed myself once more to dicing stiff, cold red-skin potatoes.

  Prep angry and your food will feel it. Prep bitter and that sour taste will be conveyed to each plate you cook. Work with love, with a calm head and a full heart, and the food will know. It will behave for you. Everything you touch will taste better. 32

  But Mr. Bigshot? He couldn’t leave it alone.

  “It was his knife,” said the new chef, walking around the island to my side of the line. “He wasn’t holding it correctly. To make an even chop, I mean. And in my kitchen, knife skills are very important. He should know how to do it right.”

  I looked up. The new chef stood straight as a ladle, his arms folded, looking down at me across the ledges of his cheekbones. Across from him, Diego was cupping a fistful of sweaty nuts through his Chefwear and telling the schoolboy to suck his dick. In Spanish, of course: Chupe mi piñon, Jefe. And don’t spare the tongue. All eyes were on me, everyone waiting for me to take this bed-wetting dick-faced pinche güero cocksucking dipshit bonito motherfucker’s head clean off for his offenses against the dignity of the family and the calm of the house.

  Why it was my job, I don’t know. But I was the one standing there.

  “Who in the fuck did you say you were again?”

  “I’m your new chef.”

  “New cook, you mean.”

  “No. Chef.”

  I DIDN’T NEED TO SAY ANYTHING. I didn’t need to do a thing. I felt sure this guy wouldn’t last sixty minutes in a real kitchen. Not thirty. He was about to not last ten. The first night under fire would break him like a two-bit punk, and his one night in our kitchen would just become another funny story for the rest of us—the lifers, the mercenaries and serious professionals among whom I’d hoped and intended to spend the rest of my working days. Something we’d talk about at the bar, a tale told over and over, passed around until it became old and soft and faded, until this “Chef” became like a face on a trading card: something we all owned.

  And I tried to do that. I really did. With forty minutes left, I tried to get us back in gear.

  “Look,” I said. “Whoever you are, you’re in the way. You want something to do? Make rice, okay? Four hotels, steam-table prep.” In my view, I was being gracious—ridiculously, archingly, obsequiously courteous to this nobody interloper jerk-off who was taking up my time and fucking up my routine. Fully within my rights under the schoolyard rules that governed the bully sociology of any kitchen to throw this new guy out on his ass or give him a poke in the nose for talking shit about one of the family (for talking at all, truth be told), I had instead offered him a warm handshake, a hot bath and a blow job from my sister. I was giving him my time, my consideration, my respect.

  “No, that’s all right,” said the new chef, shrugging, waving a hand dismissively. “You all just keep on with what you’re doing. I’m not ready to cook tonight. I just stopped in to see how my cooks look while they’re working.”

  I just stood there, dumbfounded at this strange creature standing before me, talking gibberish, smiling like he owned the place. No doubt he thought he was doing well. Potential stabbing aside, he probably thought he was making friends.

  My favorite dishwasher broke the silence, yelling, “The fuck you got that costume on for then?” over the grumble of the dish machine. Matty laughed like a donkey and almost spilled the stock.

  “Five minutes,” I said. “Everyone. Smoke break.”

  They filed out into the back alley without a word. I walked out in the other direction with Matty following, out through the swinging doors and into the dining room, where one of the owners sat, at the bar, balancing the previous night’s receipts in the company of a half-drunk bottle of wine. I lit a cigarette, stood waiting to be acknowledged, and, when that didn’t happen, said quite plainly, “You can’t hire this guy. Just can’t,” adding that if he’d already been formally hired, he must be terminated immediately—preferably with a shovel to the back of the head, though simply showing him the door and making sure he went through it would be enough, provided it happened, like, now.

  “We don’t need him. We don’t want him. And he’s going to fuck everything up anyway,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but please, God, just get rid of that stupid, pussy bastard before he jinxes the whole fucking place.”

  And the owner (a good guy, a food guy and former cook himself who Matty had known for years and I’d known of, at least, since my first days in Buffalo) only shook his head. He didn’t even look up at us.

  “Can’t,” he said, and as we stood there, he laid it all out for us—explaining why Matty had never been asked to be chef, why no one had been hired up until now, why, finally, we’d ever been allowed to run the kitchen in the first place. The new guy, he said, was the nephew or the cousin of one of the other partners. Related, somehow. His chefdom (as well as an ownership stake, if I remember correctly) was a foregone thing and had been for a long time. No one had wanted to tell us because we’d been doing okay. Things had been running smoothly. Everyone was happy, everyone was making money—us a little, them a lot. Had they told us, he figured we would’ve left right away.

  “This has been coming since the day the kid signed up for chef school, Sheehan. Believe me, there’s nothing I can do.”

  He stole a drag off my smoke and handed it back. Behind his steel-rim reading glasses, his eyes were rhe
umy, lit and swimming in a misery that I would remember and mistake for commiseration for a long time. He had been a cook once, a real cook. Maybe he understood.

  “Him?” he said, tilting his head back toward the kitchen in wino slo-mo. “That’s the future. And maybe it’ll be okay. All that school, he must’ve learned something.”

  “Guess you’re gonna find out,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I walked back into the kitchen, full of misguided but stately purpose.

  The crew, hearing me come banging back in through the swinging doors, poked their heads in from the alley. I collected my gear, had a brief, whispered conference with Matty down at the fryer end of the line, pulled off my apron, dropped it on the mat and walked out the back door. I didn’t say anything to the new chef, even though I wish I had. I just walked out into the alley and the afternoon sun, into a future full of chefs with pretty hands, nice teeth, spotless whites and no Spanish. As happened every time I walked out of a kitchen, I felt a knot of tension the size of two balled fists suddenly unwind in my back. I felt light, unburdened. Suddenly, there wasn’t anywhere in the world I needed to be.

  I went the only place I knew to go when I wasn’t working. I went to the bar.

  I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED at La Cité after I left. Of course I’d like to believe that the whole place took an instant nosedive. I’d love to be able to say that my guys followed me out, throwing down their own aprons, shouting curses over their shoulders and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down on their way out the door. I wish I could say that we then all went off somewhere and started a restaurant of our own and lived happily ever after.