But no. Most of my guys, they had families, mortgages, bills to pay. And with the kitchen suddenly a man short, they were in a position to ask for massive raises, shaking the owners down until nickels fell out. That was just business. I was involved in something much more personal.
From what I understand, Matty hung in for a few days, then packed it in. I heard that the bar manager and the best server took off for Hawaii. Slowly, the family slunk away in shame. I heard rumors that the owners were forced to pick up a second address next door, knock down a wall, and throw in a gourmet pizza counter just to keep the place viable. I heard that two of the owners—the ones I liked, Vince and Maura—sold their stakes after the new chef took over, and that, later, there was a mysterious fire.
But who cared. I was gone. I could’ve found another job in Buffalo, another kitchen, another crew. I had a few bucks, so I could’ve sucked it up and tried New York, followed my Chrysler Building mirage. But I didn’t. I headed south instead, because south’s the way you go when you’re falling.
The best thing about Florida is leaving it. You can say Disney World, Orlando, that killer whale they make do tricks for baitfish. You can say Miami Beach, art deco dreamlands of ice-cream-colored high-rises, lovely beaches, girls walking around with tits like varnished beach balls.
I say bullshit. Florida is one of those places you’ve either got to be born to or love so much beyond all rational reason that you’re blind to what lives there, just below the delicate scrim of civilization.
Florida, that suckhole. That sink-pit of bad feelings and worse memories. Every minute I spent there, every second, was a torture except for the ones that weren’t. The international courts have been trying for years to ban the practice of waterboarding prisoners of war. That’s where you take someone who you think knows something he’s not telling and simulate the sensation of drowning by strapping him to a board, lowering his head, covering his face with a wet towel and dumping water over him. From what I hear, it’s a fairly efficacious way to get a fella to spill his guts. Not a nice thing to do, certainly, but effective. Florida was like that every day and most nights. Every breath was like drowning. I would’ve done anything, told any secret, just to get out and stay out. And eventually I did.
I went there because Florida—America’s flaccid wang—is as far down as you can get without fighting the tides and floating to Cuba. I was dropping out, running away again just as I’d been doing since I was six, dressed as a spaceman, carrying my books about local birds.
Leaving Buffalo had looked to be easy. After quitting La Cité, getting drunk, blacking out, waking up, making my way home, blacking out again, waking up again, and burning through my hangover alone in an empty apartment, I realized that I could probably be gone in hours. Sam and I had been bouncing from apartment to apartment so often and for so long that we’d stopped even bothering to unpack most of our boxes at the conclusion of each move. Over time, they’d become tables, shelves. The boxes had taken on a whole new life as furniture. Looking around, I realized I didn’t even know what was in them anymore, so figured them unnecessary. We could pack the car and be gone by evening.
My friend Kurt was down in Florida doing something technical with cell phone towers. He insisted that we join him immediately. But there was a money problem. I mean, a thousand or so dollars in IOUs look real nice on the dresser when you’re working, but tend to evaporate quickly when you quit in a huff. Then there was the problem of Sam, who actually had a life upstate. She’d been laid off, but still had friends, family, appointments, places to be. There was the problem of our engagement.
Because Sam hadn’t been there to see the way the schoolboy had looked down at me, the way he’d walked in like he owned the place (because, at least in part, he sorta did), I had to explain it all to her. And at the end of an epic, three-day-long battle—a screaming, crying flare-up, an apoplectic detonation after months of simmering border conflict and insurgency—I told her that I was going to Florida, with her or without her.
Then I told her she was coming with me whether she liked it or not—that she was going to be Bonnie to my Clyde, my wingman and passenger on whatever dumb-ass, unplanned, retard stunt I felt like pulling, because we were getting married, so with me was where she belonged. No matter what or who she’d be leaving behind.
I told her to just get in the car, please, and stop making such a motherfucking scene in the parking lot, please, because people were starting to stare.
KURT’S PLACE WAS IN BRANDON, a semidistant exurb of Tampa that was suffering through a spasm of new growth, a boom cycle that’d torn the main artery out of what was essentially a small, very Southern community, replaced it with a graft from some nouvelle Levittown—all big boxes, tract housing, twenty-four-screen movie theaters, enormous strip-mall Golgothas and T.G.I.McPtomaine’s-style chain restaurants—but left everything else untouched. A block deep, it was just swamp, double-wides, bars, and cockroaches the size of mice.
Kurt had been in this pasteboard utopia maybe six months already—living in a two-bed, two-bath apartment, divided into an east and a west wing, united by a common living room and kitchen, in a complex filled with hundreds of identical numbered boxes that all backed up to a palm row that smelled like stump water and decay. The exterior walls of each building were stucco, cream-colored. Inside, everything was white.
He was already settled into the right-hand bedroom. Sam and I moved into the left, where the complete, loud and bitter dissolution of our five-year relationship began almost immediately.
TO SAY I MERELY DISLIKED FLORIDA would be an understatement of colossal proportions. I truly hated it, loathed every inch of the place with the kind of wild, sputtering passion that can generally only be mustered for the hating of another living thing.
But then, I still consider Florida to be alive, the land itself possessed of a certain collective animism and low, sentient cunning. Nothing so hot and smelly as Florida could be anything but alive. Nothing that buzzed and grew and sweated and stank like Brandon, Lakeland, Plant City and central Tampa could be only a place, only a location, and not some animate, vaguely menacing thing. Living there was like camping out in a Cuban longshoreman’s underpants, and I felt from my very first day there as though someone or something was out to get me.
Yet as much as I hated it there, I was forced to acclimate swiftly as a matter of survival—putting my up-North self with its up-North ways and up-North metabolism on a down-South footing lest the environment just crawl down my throat and choke me. There was no getting-to-know-you period, no geographic honeymoon. On the day we arrived it was 170 degrees with 900 percent humidity, and as soon as I pulled into the parking lot, some kind of giant lizard fell out of a palm tree and onto my hood, dying there, sautéing itself. Sam and I would end up spending a few months. It felt like most of a lifetime.
I’d brought my knives with me, a couple pairs of generic whites and checks, my work boots. Because our bankroll had been seriously compromised by the journey and just a couple weeks without work, I took the first job offered to me, at the first restaurant I tried—a garish, oversize, rattletrap fish house close to a highway off-ramp. It was no different from the dozens of other garish, oversize, rattletrap joints surrounding it. I’d chosen the place more or less at random. The interview went approximately like this:
I walked in, saw what I correctly assumed was the restaurant’s hostess sitting slumped at a nautically themed bar (graying wooden ship’s wheel mounted on the backsplash, crab traps and shrimper’s buoys depending precariously from the ceiling), running a sweating, half-empty bottle of Corona across the back of her neck. I asked if they were hiring. She asked what I could do. I told her I was a cook. She said to sit and help myself to a beer from the well if I cared to.
It was about nine in the morning.
The hostess turned away and shouted across the massive emptiness of the restaurant, “Jimmy! Cook for you!”
Jimmy, the owner, came out of the back wearing an I
ron Maiden–tour T-shirt stretched over his ample circumference, a kitchen apron and bicycle shorts that fit him like two sausage casings and a codpiece. He smelled like he’d slept the night in a crab pot.
Exit the hostess. Jimmy and I took each other’s measure like two unfamiliar dogs meeting for the first time but too domesticated by our circumstances to just come right out and sniff each other’s asshole.
“Cook?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“New York, mostly.” Which was true enough, and if he assumed I meant the city rather than the state, all the better.
“What brings you here?”
Those of you still reading at this point know exactly how long of a story that would’ve been to tell, so I abbreviated. “Just where I ended up.”
“You work a fryer?”
I said that I could. And anything else that was needed.
“Ten an hour, cash. Mondays off.”
“Ten an hour the going rate?”
“’S’what I’m offering.”
“Deal.”
Total time elapsed in my job search: twenty minutes, maybe. Not a record, but close. I didn’t even bother fetching my knife kit out of the car. My tools—like any professional’s—had a delicate constitution and stronger opinions on their employment than I sometimes had about mine. Had my good steel been exposed even for a moment to an environment such as this, they wouldn’t have worked right ever again.
I WOULD LAST AT JIMMY’S CRAB SHACK33 just long enough to get my legs under me enough to flee.
The place appealed to the Okie/cracker, white-trash highway trade and was successful for three reasons. One, Jimmy (or whoever had come before him) had invested long ago in a large sign on a tall pole. Two, he had an enormous parking lot. And three, he offered a daily seafood special for $17.95—fully two dollars cheaper than the seafood special of his nearest competitor. The special was the same every day: cold crab salad (made, actually, with pollack), a fried fillet of haddock, two crab legs, a fruit cup and half an onion in lieu of the classic baked potato—the onion sliced, battered, and fried in the style of the Bloomin’ Onion appetizers so popular at the chain restaurants that encircled Jimmy’s.
No one seemed to care that the daily special never changed. This was likely because Jimmy’s Crab Shack had never in its long history seen a repeat customer. And no one ever complained, because anyone smart enough to know good food from bad would’ve taken one look at the limp fishing nets hung on the walls, the greening, foul-smelling aquarium that separated the bar from the cavernous dining room, and the pimply teenaged waitstaff and run for their fucking lives.
Lucky for Jimmy, the world was full of stupid people. And all of them vacationed in Florida.
Jimmy would later tell me that he’d actually invented the Bloomin’ Onion (which he called an Onion Blossom) and had been serving it for years before the idea was stolen from him. The Onion Blossom was Jimmy’s one claim to culinary immortality, and its alleged theft had wounded him deeply. Night after night, he took out the loss of it on every single customer unfortunate enough to find their way to his doorstep.
Fact or not, Jimmy’s story of the Onion Blossom was true. Even if Jimmy’s story was more or less dependent on the half case of Corona he habitually consumed before the start of dinner service (the balance of which he consumed during), it still affected his every action and spoke to the very human need of every man to feel that he will be remembered for something. Jimmy had no children who might someday fondly recall him. He’d done no great deeds—or at least none that he ever talked about. He’d certainly never satisfied a customer. What he had was a deep-fried onion in the shape of a flower, which was better than nothing, if only just barely.
I WENT STRAIGHT FROM THE BAR to Jimmy’s kitchen, stopping off in the locker room only long enough to grab an apron and a dishwasher’s jacket, but discovering in the process that stepping into the fetid stink of old sneakers, greasy linens, sweat, stale cigarette smoke and foot spray felt more like coming home than anything I’d ever known. Climates change. Borders get crossed. Cuisines may vary. But kitchen locker rooms will always smell the same. Some men might’ve found it disillusioning to realize that the length and breadth of their lives could be described by the smell of rotten feet and exhausted perspiration, but to me it just meant that everything came full circle and the world was really far smaller than advertised.
In the kitchen, the crew had been assembled into a bucket brigade and was stowing the day’s fish and produce deliveries. They worked like a chain gang, all ropy arms, prison tattoos, steam burns and loose, easy conversation that riffed up and down along the line like some sort of freaky jazz improvisation, always returning to the central theme of who among them was the biggest fag and who among them sucked the most cock.
Ten bodies, all told, in various stages of breakdown, were variously employed to the task at hand—ten including Jimmy, who’d reinstalled himself at the head of the line nearest the refrigerated trucks so he could check in every ounce of product he was paying for, abuse the Cuban drivers and scream into his cell phone over shortages, real or imaginary. I’d been plugged in just in front of Jimmy’s head cook and kitchen manager, Floyd, so I could see where in the kitchen’s one enormous cooler everything was supposed to go.
Floyd—who wore a white Danzig wifebeater, cutoff army fatigues, big hippie-stomper combat boots and a seemingly haphazard array of patchy black facial hair—cursed every case, carton, can, flat and bag that passed through his hands before tucking it away in the cooler, following some sort of bizarre stocking system that violated every single health code of which I was aware—putting raw meats (fish, in this case) over greens, mixing proteins on the shelves, and jamming freezer cases on the top shelf, right under the condenser.34 The obscenities were amusing and lyrical and rarely repeated—goddamn U10s, motherfucking dry packs, shitty celery, butt-fucking mushrooms . . .
I watched Floyd work, knowing that my first night’s survival on the line could well depend on being able to lay hands fast on a fish tub full of dyed pollack, some shitty celery or a can of motherfucking dry pack. For a line cook, no time goes so slow as time spent off the line during a hit; nothing breaks the rhythm like stepping away; no confounding, infuriating stress is like the stress of standing slack-jawed inside a walk-in or pantry, looking for something and not finding it.
I listened to the cooks talk, took the probing abuse when it came down my way—them calling me Cherry and FNG and saying how pretty I was. All of it was familiar, nothing more than depth-charging, a way for them to test the new guy’s limits, the thickness of his skin and integrity of his emotional superstructure. It wasn’t hazing exactly, but a highly stylized and precise assault. Hazing is juvenile and cruel without purpose. But calling the new guy queer, telling him you fucked his mother last night, that everyone around him is crazy, that he’ll be killed if he can’t keep up, and that the only way he’s getting paid is to suck nickels out of your ass—that’s a refined tradition, a jive as artistic as it is efficient, because if a crew could break the Fucking New Guy with language, it saved them the trouble of having to watch him shatter under pressure on the line. If they could rile him, offend him, disgust him, chase him off, make him cry, anything, it was better to know quickly exactly what it would take. Better to find out in the cool of the morning. Better to know than not.
And I, as the Fucking New Guy, had to take it. I had to laugh and say, yes, I quite enjoyed intercourse with livestock, thank you. And, yes, my grandmother was available for a three-way. But at the same time, I had to have some spine, a little something tra le gambe. At least enough to look a total stranger in the eye, smile, and say I’d give five American dollars for that stranger’s little sister to come over and lick a gallon of ranch dressing off my nuts.
Or, you know, something like that. These conversations were fluid things, covering a broad range of outrage and obscenity, so the Fucking New Guy had to pick his moment carefully. In pris
on, they say that the quickest way to earn the respect of your peers is to pick the biggest, meanest, ugliest bastard on the block and beat him to death with a chair on your first day. In a kitchen, the same was accomplished by picking anyone on the crew and telling him you’d gladly fuck his cat if his mother was otherwise occupied.
Or something like that.
I knew all these rules. I’d been the FNG often enough. So when, after a long battery of questions about my animal/vegetable/mineral sexual preferences, it was suggested that because of the way I was standing right up on Floyd, maybe the two of us were boyfriends already, I paused, looked down the line, and said, “No, but if I had to take any of you smelly fuckers to the dance, I think it would be Roberto there.”
With the corner of the produce case I was holding, I gestured casually to the biggest of the cooks, a sweating Checker cab of a man with his four front teeth missing. “With that smile, I could just slip it right in and he’d never know.”
Laughter banged up and down the line. The cook next to Roberto (a whippet in stained Chefwear pants named Stevie who looked like the spawn of a greyhound bitch and a yard of hemp rope) dropped the freezer case of lobster tails he was holding and Roberto cuffed him in the back of the head before standing up straight, blowing me a kiss, and snaking his gray tongue in and out through the hole in his grin.
I winked, passed on my box to Floyd, turned to grab the next one. Things cooled out a little after that, and when the trucks were empty and the cooler packed, the work gang broke up. Jimmy retired to his office, smiling. All the cooks filed out onto the back loading dock to smoke cigarettes, pass a bowl around, and sniff—now a bit more delicately—at those things that were really important to them: where I’d been, what I’d cooked there, and how in the fuck I’d ended up here.
Cooking Dirty Page 21
