Take-Out

by Rob Hart

  The drinks poured, the guests settled, they finally look up at me. Their eyes quivering.

  “You are about to join a very elite club of diners,” I tell them. “After this you will be different. Embrace it. Do not concern yourself with what society thinks. Society is behind the curve for people like us. You are pioneers.”

  The girl stares at the pile of red meat on her plate, her hands folded in her lap. She asks, “Who…?”

  “Do you really want to know the answer to that?”

  She shakes her head.

  No one ever does.

  And no one wants an audience for this. I bow, deeply, and take my exit.

  Close the door and head back to the kitchen.

  Pull the wad of bills out of my pocket and count it off.

  Another successful transaction.

  I check my watch. Figure on fifteen minutes. Wonder what I’ll find. Some people vomit. Others sit there and leave the meat untouched. Some practically lick the plate clean. Only one person so far has asked for seconds.

  Regardless of the outcome, all of them have a story to tell.

  In this town, experience is currency. Changing a person, giving them a story, therein lies the secret the longevity. Everyone is desperate for an inside angle on this unknowable city. To appear as though they’ve mastered something that could never be tamed.

  This is the sweet spot in which people like me can thrive. The people who are willing to embrace the risqué.

  I pull the wad of bills out of my pocket and count it off. Then I pick up the phone, and place an order for another ten pounds of jamón ibérico.

  It’s expensive, at ninety dollars a pound. But you can sell it for a five hundred percent markup when you can trick yuppie foodies into believing they’re eating human charcuterie.

  Only the strong survive the astronomic rent of the Meatpacking District.

  The whistle went off and Eddy fell in step with the single-file line marching into the dining hall. His stomach gnawed on itself. Between processing and a ferryboat running behind schedule, he missed breakfast.

  As he passed the long row of empty cells, their occupants shuffling somewhere ahead of him, he reached out and drummed his fingers on the metal bars. Hunger, at least, was a problem with a solution.

  The dining hall made him think of his high school cafeteria back in Utah. White paint peeling, thick columns holding up the ceiling. The whole thing like it was poured and chiseled from one giant slab of concrete.

  Instead of long tables with benches like he expected, the place was filled with four-top tables, many of which were already taken by inmates, sitting in plastic chairs and hunched over metal trays. The low murmur of hushed conversations and harsh metal clacking of silverware permeated the room.

  There were three guards strolling the gaps between the tables, eyes swinging like searchlights. That was a little different from high school, too.

  Eddy watched as the inmates accepted trays of food through a gap in the bars, from a counter that fronted the kitchen. He figured on something that only vaguely resembled food, flopped onto his plate with indifference, but when he caught sight of the menu board, he risked a brief smile.

  Split Pea Soup

  Roast Pork Shoulder

  Mashed Potatoes

  Stewed Corn

  Bread & Coffee

  Eddy accepted a tray of food and a lukewarm cup of black coffee from a hatchet-faced man behind the counter. The food looked better than any meal he’d had recently. He took it and wended through the dining hall, looking for an empty seat.

  There weren’t any in sight. Within seconds his heart was racing. A man standing alone in a place like this probably looked a little like a target. Every second he was on his feet, he was drawing attention to himself.

  He came across a table with three men and an empty seat. He paused and thought about asking if he could sit, but didn’t want that to be perceived as a sign of weakness. He pulled out the seat and sat, hoping he hadn’t just made a mistake.

  His skin was hot with anger and regret. This was his fault. He knew it was his fault. All he had to say was no. Instead, he said yes. It was a mistake he’d repay for the next ten years.

  The man directly across from him, his face a topographical map of scars, slate gray hair slicked flat to his skull, raised an eyebrow.

  “Here we go,” he said, his voice like a handful of gravel in a tin cup. “We needed a fourth man.”

  Eddy glanced at the other two men, faces down, shoveling food into their mouths. He looked at the man across from him. “For what?”

  The man’s eyes darted around the dining hall, focusing on the guards, who were all far enough away they couldn’t hear. “If we’re going to get the hell out of here. I’m Milton, by the way.”

  Milton jerked a thumb at the nervous-looking man to his left, with a shaved head and glasses and sweat collecting at the base of his neck. “That’s Abner.”

  He turned the thumb and pointed it to his right, to a towheaded blond who looked like a linebacker gone to seed. “And this is Franklin.”

  “I’m Eddy.”

  Abner looked up. “Would you like to hear something interesting?”

  Milton rolled his eyes but Eddy said, “Sure.”

  “In Russia, prisons are called guags,” Abner said, pushing his glasses up his nose and toward his eyes. “They’re not very nice. People try to escape all the time. When they do, they bring an extra person along. Someone they can eat if they run out of food. They call that person the cow. The cow doesn’t know he’s a cow, but he is all the same. If they start a fire, it would give away their location. They eat the cow’s kidneys and blood because you can eat those without cooking them.”

  “Jesus,” Franklin said. “Kidneys and blood? You gotta say that kind of stuff while we’re eating?”

  Eddy suddenly didn’t feel welcome. He went to stand, looking around for another free seat. “I can find a different place to sit…”

  Milton put his hand up and motioned for Eddy to stay where he was.

  “Abner thinks he’s being funny,” Milton said. “His kind of funny isn’t most people’s kind of funny. Abner, we’re not in the middle of the Russian wilderness. You can see San Francisco from the windows. We just have to get across the water. Believe me, that’s going to be the easy part.”

  “It’s not so easy,” Abner said. “Lots of people have tried. No one’s ever done it.”

  “We’ll get to that part when we get to that part,” Milton said. He turned to Eddy. “First day in?”

  Eddy nodded.

  “Welcome to the gas chamber,” Milton said. “Eat quick. We only get twenty minutes. Move fast enough, you can get seconds. But your plate needs to be clear at the end, no matter what. You leave food on your plate, maybe they give you a warning this time, being it’s your first day. Next time, they start revoking privileges.”

  “Thanks. No one’s really explained…”

  Milton raised an eyebrow. “I said you have to eat quick.”

  Eddy nodded and tucked in. The soup was a touch bland but the pork shoulder was perfectly cooked, falling apart before he even put his knife to it, and the mashed potatoes were among the best he ever had. He cleared half his plate before he realized the food was singeing the roof of his mouth. He was so hungry he didn’t care. He paused to catch his breath and looked at the other men, who were eating with equal fervor.

  “Why do you call it the gas chamber?” Eddy asked.

  Franklin nodded toward a small box near the ceiling, painted white to blend into the wall. “Tear gas canister. We misbehave, guards turn ’em on.”

  Eddy looked around the room and saw seven he could count from his vantage point. He took a big bite of corn. Perfectly buttery and salty.

  “This food is pretty boss,” Eddy said. “Not what I expected.”

  “They got a thing about the food here,” Franklin said. “They figure if it’s good, we won’t cause trouble or try to escape.”

&
nbsp; “Little do they know…” Milton said, laughing.

  Franklin rolled his eyes. “Okay. You obviously want to tell us. What’s this plan of yours?”

  Milton looked around again, to make sure no one was listening. “It’s well established that digging instruments are hard to come by, correct?” He glanced at Eddy. “At the end of the meal, the guards check to make sure all your silverware is accounted for.” He stuck a finger in the air. “So don’t go dropping anything.”

  “You think a spoon is going to get you out of this place,” Franklin said. “You’re a kook, Milton.”

  “No, I am not a kook,” Milton said. “I’ve got it all mapped out. Just need something to dig with. And I figured out how we get a spoon or two. It’ll take a little time, but, you know, time is the one thing all of us have.”

  Everyone paused and looked at Milton, who was smiling like he couldn’t possibly stop smiling.

  “We bribe one of the lifers,” Milton said.

  Franklin huffed. “That’s your plan? First you invite this stranger into the crew, like we can even trust him. Then you tell us the way to get this done is getting even more people involved?”

  Milton stuck a finger in the air again. “First, there are plenty of guys here with nothing to lose. Chances are whoever does it for us ends up on D block for a bit, but we can make it worth his while.”

  He put up a second finger. “Second, you got, what, eight years left?” He turned to Abner. “You got seven. That I know. I got seven, too.” Milton looked at Eddy. “How many you got, kid?”

  “Ten,” Eddy said.

  Milton winced. “Ten years on the rock. You’re in the prime of your life. You don’t want to spend the prime of your life here, do you?”

  “Does anyone want to be here at all?” Eddy asked.

  “It’s not that bad,” said Abner.

  “Shut up,” said Milton, drawing out the word so it sounded more like “shaht.” “The point is…”

  Abner made a low whistling sound, like a bird being strangled. Milton fell silent, putting his head down and cramming food into his mouth. Eddy looked up and saw an Easter Island statue in a guard’s uniform pass the table.

  “Gentlemen,” the statue said, in a way that made it sound like he didn’t think they were gentlemen.

  Milton looked up and smiled. With a mouth full of food he said, “How are you today, sir?”

  “Missing the days when you goons weren’t allowed to talk in the cafeteria,” the guard said. “Just the sound of silverware for twenty minutes. Music to my ears.”

  The guard wandered away, eyeballing another table.

  Abner leaned toward Eddy. “That’s Kowalski. He says that every day.”

  “So this theoretical and charitable lifer,” Franklin said. “What’s the chance he keeps his mouth shut when the guards turn the screws?” He threw a hard glance at Eddy. “What’s the chance our new friend doesn’t go right to a guard as soon as we’re done eating? Maybe he thinks he’ll get a little reward.”

  “I don’t…” Eddy started.

  Milton spoke over him. “Anyone here for life is going to know better than to rat.” He looked directly at Eddy. “No one here is stupid enough to rat.”

  Eddy nodded and kept eating.

  “It’s like, there was this one guy,” Milton said, leaning forward, dropping his voice. “Dimed a couple of fellas who were making pruno down in the bakery. Booze supply runs out and people are clawing at the walls. It wasn’t pretty. You know what they did to him?” He whistled. “That wasn’t pretty, either. Face looked like the inside of a pot of chili. I get nightmares about it sometimes.”

  Eddy tried to swallow the food in his mouth but couldn’t stop thinking about chili.

  “It’s too bad you don’t have a pen and paper,” Milton said, giving Eddy a hard stare. “This is a lot of important stuff. The kind of things you don’t want to forget. You get me?”

  Eddy nodded, scraping at the remnants of food on his tray. How clean was clean enough the guards wouldn’t give him trouble?

  He had a lot of questions.

  So many he didn’t know where to start with them. But it was nice there were people to show him the ropes. He’d spent the last few days forgetting how to cry. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. Hell, maybe there was a chance to get out sooner.

  “I’m just saying,” Milton said. “It’s good to have friends in here. If you feel like you owe me anything, I’m around.”

  “I got it,” Eddy said. “And I appreciate it.”

  “Do you?”

  The question was sharp and it made Eddy’s mouth run dry. He swallowed, pushing the wad of food down his throat, and nodded.

  “I do,” he said.

  “Good,” Milton said. “Looks like we’re all about done here. I’ll get a guard to come over so we can get the hell out of here. We can show you around a bit, Eddy. With any luck, you won’t get to know this place too well.”

  Milton put his hand in the air and stood, Franklin and Abner standing along with him. As Abner stood, his elbow bumped his cup of coffee onto Eddy. The cup was mostly empty, but as the liquid splashed his gray pants, Eddy jumped.

  “Sorry about that,” Abner said, reaching down to blot at the streaks of coffee with a napkin. Eddy pushed his hand away.

  “No harm,” Eddy said.

  Kowalski stopped in front of the table and surveyed the four of them.

  “You ladies done playing grab-ass?” he asked Abner and Eddy.

  “Just an accident,” Abner said.

  “An accident,” Eddy repeated.

  Kowalski nodded and looked down at the table, mumbling to himself. When he got to Eddy’s tray, he stopped. “Where’s your spoon, inmate?”

  “It was…just here.”

  Eddy looked around the empty trays and small piles of silverware. He was sure he left it right on top—positive he did that—but there was only the fork and knife. He looked up at Milton. The way Milton was smiling made his heart climb into his throat and expand until he couldn’t breathe.

  “I ask again, where’s the spoon, inmate?”

  Milton raised an eyebrow, the corner of his lip curling up, and mouthed the word: “Chili.”

  “I…must not have taken one?”

  “Right,” the guard said, putting a massive hand on Eddy’s shoulder. “Let’s go have a talk. See if we can’t jog your memory.”

  As the guard led Eddy away, he heard one of his lunch companions softly calling after him: “Moooo.”

  People called him “Creampuff.”

  No one knows if it was a nickname thought up by the staff, or if he actually called himself that. That’s just what people called him. It could have been like when you call a big guy “Tiny.” Cognitive dissonance. Here’s this big black guy, and he answered to Creampuff like it was John or Paul.

  There were a lot of things people didn’t know about Creampuff, but here is what is known: he was huge, like a recurring childhood nightmare. People say he was nearly seven feet tall, but that’s just the way truth gets warped by word of mouth. He was more like six-three, which is still pretty big. He had gauges in his ears wide enough you could fit your thumb in, and a thick beard like a jumble of cables that reached down to his sternum. And always he was wearing a gray wool skullcap, even in the summer.

  He had one tattoo. A series of black lines running parallel down his left forearm. It started with five lines. The last time anyone saw him, when the morning shift found his body in a thick pool of blood, throat cut ear to ear, there were seven lines. No one knew what they stood for. Nearly everyone had a theory. Most of those theories had to do with how many people he had killed.

  Which is a little heavy, and not really based on anything. Creampuff was only a bouncer.

  Granted, he was a special kind of bouncer, with a skill set tailored for these strange, modern times. He was required to deal with a hugely diverse range of people—zombie tourists to rich yuppie jerks to bridge-and-tunnel trolls to the mo
st dangerous animal in New York City: moms pushing baby carriages.

  Creampuff was a bakery bouncer.

  The kind of job that didn’t exist ten years ago and suddenly is in such demand, colleges should teach a course on it.

  You know what a canelé is? It’s this little pastry that originated in Bordeaux, in the southwest of France. It gets cooked in a copper mold, which forms a deep bronze crust on the outside. Inside is light custard flavored with vanilla and rum. They’re the perfect little mouthful, barely bigger than one bite, and you can get them in a lot of places in New York, but only a few places actually do them right.

  Patiserie in the East Village is one of those places turning out perfect canelés, going back to the 1940s, when the store first opened. But as with any business that isn’t a bank or a real estate agency, one day, they found themselves struggling to meet their rent. Their canelés, being a thing of legend, did good business, but still, were barely keeping them afloat. It’s hard to keep the lights on when your star product sells for three dollars a pop.

  So the owners of Patiserie brought on a hotshot pastry chef—a kid with half his head shaved and cooking utensils tattooed up and down his forearms—to put a new spin on the menu.

  And this new chef considers the canelé.

  It’s classic, but as a canvas, a little blank. He tinkers with it for a few weeks, and eventually figures out a way to get rum-infused ice cream on the inside.

  Think about that. Instead of a warm custard, it was still-cold ice cream. To properly caramelize the crust of a canelé, you’ve got to hit it with a ton of heat. Plus, introducing alcohol into the mix screws with the melting point of the ice cream. All that, and there was still cold, perfectly-unmelted ice cream on the inside. This thing was a marvel of modern kitchen engineering.

  Word spread, and within a week of it hitting the menu, the chef was on Good Morning America, the plastic-faced anchors making a show of begging him for the secret to his cooking process, which, of course, he wouldn’t reveal. They did come up with a new name for this treat: the Creamelé.

  So that goes viral, and the next morning, there’s a line down the block and around the corner. Everyone wants a Creamelé.