Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  At some point, urban cowboy started to slow down as a hot trend in the city’s nightlife, but we didn’t pay attention and we didn’t scale back. Around this time a new girl started at the club, and I, for the first time in my life more senior than someone, ignored her in the dressing room. She carelessly left her book of dupes sitting in a drawer in the waiter station while she was having a pee break, and I stole them. Now I had a whole book of checks, marked in sequential order, which should have been returned to the office at the end of the night accounted for, wrapped up in her neatly organized paperwork. They had not been assigned to me, and I could do what I liked with them. It was the waitress’s equivalent of having her own cash register. I used them judiciously over the next few months, getting my cash-and-carry drinks rung up on these checks that could never be traced to me. But things were slowing down so considerably that we began to scale way back and frequently, in fact more often than not, worked whole shifts on the up-and-up.

  On a slow night, one month shy of a year to the week after I’d started, I arrived at work, almost late and out of breath. I had woken up late and hurting from a night of decidedly more sinister hue than average, most of it unrecoverable in my memory, and I was particularly disoriented from not being able to recall even one detail of how I had gotten home, and when it was time to leave my apartment, I was rushed and ill-prepared. I couldn’t find a clean T-shirt or a clean apron. Melissa had left a brief note, in reference to the cockroach problem, “Remember Mr. Kornfeld when we were kids? A German exterminator! Get this: He drove a Volkswagen bug!!! No kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha.” I grabbed an old dirty apron that still had bobby pins and matchbooks in the pockets and a couple of chili stains on it and ran out the door. I got changed in the locker room, put on my apron, and discovered in the pocket one of the old checks I had stolen from that new girl a few months before, who had not lasted even two weeks.

  It faintly registered in my dull and harried mind to take care, but then the thought vanished, and I went up to my assigned station on the balcony. We were used to big acts, Jorma Kaukonen and Bob Dylan and Dr. John—I even worked an Osmonds gig once at which every customer was a Mormon female clutching a scrapbook and a decaffeinated ginger ale. But this was a quiet night, with an unknown onstage, and very few customers. Laura was working the downstairs station alone—they’d cut the second waitress. And I was the only girl assigned to the balcony. At seven o’clock I had only three tables nursing their drinks, and so I stood at the service end of the bar, chatting with the bartender.

  “Things are strange,” Tom, of the rumored cash-register-in-his-duffel-bag fame, said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, assuming he was referring to how dead it was.

  “Buddy’s around,” he said, with a barely discernible tone of warning.

  “Okay,” I said, letting him know that I understood that we would be playing by the rules tonight. No stealing. All drinks written down and rung up.

  Buddy had been around a great deal lately. Something, clearly, was off in the numbers and the owners knew it, but they couldn’t find it. Buddy is that guy in a restaurant or club, the general manager who walks around with a huge keychain and has no one to talk to his whole shift. He used to stand, silently letting his presence be seen and felt, watching the floor from the mixing booth, the curved staircase leading to the balcony, or by the pass-through at the kitchen where we picked up thousands of bowls of chili and spindled the paper dupes. He would look on, poker-faced under his cowboy hat, while we dodged in and out of Wall Street big spenders, and snuck each other shots of tequila, and giggled and sniffled like teenagers. He tried sometimes, awkwardly, to bridge the gap between his brusque authority and our compulsory approval, by telling a joke and laughing at it himself, or by strangely revealing something personal about himself and his wife, and it just felt miserable to have to stand there, politely paused in front of your superior, while he struggled with his aloneness.

  Suddenly, he was walking directly toward me. I was carrying a tray with one hand, bearing only three drinks, but still involved in balancing the tray, and heading over to one of my tables to deliver them. Buddy reached into my apron pocket and pulled out my checks. While I stood there with the drinks, he scrutinized each one, and I could see his eyes scanning the serial numbers of each one on the upper right corner. Back and forth his eyes went, trying to understand their sequence. He and I understood at almost exactly the same moment that I had a check in my pocket totally out of sequence.

  “What the fuck is this?” Buddy said, still looking at the checks, but starting to shake.

  “Oh. My God,” I said, putting down the tray of drinks on a nearby empty table. “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going,” I said, backing away from Buddy, who was now looking almost purple in the face. I feared, truthfully, that he was going to beat me. I started running down the back stairwell, untying my apron, taking the steps two at a time. I ran to Laura on the ground floor, who was applying beige lip gloss from a long wand with a sponge tip, and grabbed her by the arms, hissing, “He got me! He got me! Fucking Buddy just busted me!” And without stopping to talk to anyone else, I pushed open the safety bar on the side doors that spit me out onto Thirteenth Street and ran a few steps down the sidewalk. I hid behind our Dumpster, shaking, until I saw Buddy open the door and look up and down the sidewalk and then go back inside. Laura came out five minutes later with my stuff from my locker, nervously smoking, but laughing wickedly.

  “You are so busted,” she squealed, her nose wrinkling up with glee.

  “What the fuck’s gonna happen?” I asked.

  “I don’t know but don’t say anything about the rest of us,” she warned, and flicked her butt to the curb before slipping back inside.

  It was not even dark out. At seven-thirty or so on an August night, the city was alive and daylight lingered. I had thirty-seven dollars in my apron pocket. Tens of thousands of dollars in cash had passed through my fingers that year, and I ended up with thirty-seven wrinkled singles, shaking with the fear of having bluffed my way into a circumstance well out of my league, crouched behind a Dumpster on Thirteenth Street. I walked all the way home, north and west, wondering what was going to happen to me. What was left in the change jar?

  The owners called in the morning. The bonding company called in the morning. And then Detective Sperro of the Sixth Precinct called to explain that he was the government official charging me with Grand Larceny and Possession of Stolen Property. He explained that the bonding company was the party pressing the charges, not the Lone Star Café itself. He advised me to retain a lawyer, and said, if I liked, he would send a squad car in half an hour to bring me in to his station on West Tenth Street. He read me my Miranda rights over the phone.

  “Do you understand fully everything that I have just explained to you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Iassou, Gabriellaki,” called Dimitri, as I entered the Terminal Food Shop Deli. He looked at me fully, with his eyes fixed on mine. “You are coming home too late, kooklamou,” he said, like a concerned uncle. He had seen me many mornings, getting out of a cab, struggling to appear coherent, as he was opening the shop.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I sat on the front stoop with my egg-on-a-roll waiting for the cop car, not in a million years the way I imagined a felony arrest would be.

  The next day, I called the only person I knew who had ever been able to help me out with money: my brother Todd. He had amassed a collection of guitars that filled a whole basement room in his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, but instead of becoming a professional musician, he had cut his hair very short, invested in a few work suits, and started a career on Wall Street, in Ginny Maes. A few too many bone-a-fied humiliations surrounding money experienced in his youth, perhaps, had driven the artistic impulse right into the basement, to be let out on weekends only. Hidden under his crisp white Brooks Brothers shirt, he wore a thin leather necklace with a sterling silver electric guitar dang
ling at the throat, and years later, when he was a very secure and well-compensated veteran of Goldman Sachs, he wore a silver bracelet and didn’t worry that it was not hidden by his white cuff. Rather, that was his point.

  “This is Todd,” he said, picking up the line.

  “Todd, hey—”

  “Steve, two fifty! Two fifty!” he shouted to someone. “What’s up?” he shouted to me, uncertain to whom he was talking.

  We managed a clipped and perfunctory four-minute phone call, Wall Street traders shouting behind him in the background, and he shouting at them with me mid-sentence hanging in his ear, during which he put me on hold more than once. This was how all phone calls would be with him for the next dozen or so years that he spent on Wall Street, and they were, those phone calls, the very first step in an incremental distancing that would eventually lead to a complete and definitive loss. I knew it was too bothersome to call him during work. It was too alienating to try to talk, like siblings, with someone who is putting you on hold every twenty-five seconds, as his work demanded. The days of lucky rabbit fur leg massages were long behind us both. I learned to call infrequently and to talk fast when I did. But in those four minutes, while on hold, he had retained a lawyer to help me, for fifteen hundred dollars, and conferenced her in to the call.

  “Jesus, Gabs. I had no idea this was going on,” Todd said in closing.

  “Right,” I said. “I know. Sorry.”

  The lawyer and I then spent twenty minutes on the phone during which she asked me to describe the details of the scheme and how I had learned it, and then, in the final three minutes of our strategy conversation, she asked me my date of birth. When she put the math of the year together, she stumbled for a minute: “Are you telling me you’re only seventeen years old and you’ve been serving alcohol at the Lone Star Café for the past year?”

  As I explained that part of my story, I could nearly hear her smiling ear to ear through the wires.

  It apparently took less than an hour of her time, billed against her retainer, to get the charges dropped, but when she called me a few days later to tell me the good news, she was not festive. She advised me, authoritatively, to get my life together.

  “You need to enroll in school and get out of state,” she counseled. “In lieu of juvenile prosecution they could consider you for a juvenile diversion program, with counseling for twelve months, and this will also show on your lasting record. But I can’t guarantee it so you’d better do a lot of good stuff, Hon, and do it fast.”

  I never even met her. But this stranger, brought to me by my brother through that technological innovation the conference call, was that walk-off-the-mound coach I’d been in need of some years earlier. Her grip on my neck was not as soft and not as encouraging as I always imagined the concern and guidance of an authoritative adult would feel. She scared me. It was sobering to finally encounter someone who wasn’t egging me on to greater extremes of outrageousness, for their own vicarious pleasure, and who didn’t for one second take me for anything but the teenager I was. I knew that I did not want to go to that juvenile diversion program because I had an intuitive sense that it would turn me irrevocably into the kind of character that I was now only rehearsing to be.

  “I’m going to bill Todd and you work it out with him, okay? And you need to follow up with me in fifteen days so I can report back to the assistant DA.”

  And within a few weeks, I was, indeed, enrolled in college. I arrived on the campus of Hampshire College in the middle of an apple orchard in Amherst, Massachusetts, via Peter Pan bus. I was like a deep-sea diver who does not take the appropriate time coming up from twenty thousand leagues. People all around me were discussing Third World feminism, doing shifts at the on-campus food co-op, building eco-yurts for academic credit, and playing Ultimate Frisbee in their bare feet in the rain. I was still in cowboy boots working my fucking tables, sort of.

  Monday through Thursday I wandered around this rural campus, with no required classes and a highly politicized culture, and started to get steeped in the language of the place—div’s and mod’s and integratives—and I ate stir-fry and tempeh and tofu for the first time in my life, as it was what we ate in our cooperative housing units where we spun the dial on a shared “work wheel” to divvy up the household chores. I met no one who knew where to score an eight-ball of coke.

  Immediately, I got a job in town at a short-order diner called Jake’s, cooking eggs and hash browns on a griddle top ladled with liquid oleo on Friday and Saturday night shifts. When the bars closed at one a.m.—rather provincial, I thought, having just come from New York and its four a.m. closing time—hundreds of drunk and stoned students from the surrounding five colleges crammed in for big plates of greasy food and coffee, rowdy from the bands they had just been out to see, or morose and limp from the foreign films they had endured, but either way, closer to me in age than anyone I’d been near to in years. I couldn’t take my eyes off them and feasted on their fully incubated youth.

  On campus, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley wafted out of the dorm windows, but in the kitchen at Jake’s we crushed it all night long to Guns N’ Roses. On weekends I cooked side by side with Greg, a part-time, Republican, poli-sci student at UMass, and we cranked out a thousand griddle-topped omelettes and pancakes at a pace I had not encountered since my chimichanga experiences as a young teenager. In the middle of the rush, he once called me over to the pass to look out at a father and his young daughter having pancakes after a night they’d had at the roller rink. I was truly impressed by this out-of-the-blue tenderness, taken aback that Guns N’ Roses Greg had such a soft interior that he could call me over to admire this father-daughter moment, and as I looked back at Greg, beaming, he tossed his spatula in the air and whooped, “I bet she’s pretty tight!”

  He was smart and dirty-minded and a perfect gateway friend for me between the larcenous crowd I had just been with and these obscure new classmates I was now soaking bean curd with.

  I had not heard of the My Lai Massacre, the Sandinistas or the Contras, Pinochet or Allende, but in the exact same way that I had been able to put on the navy blue T-shirt and make friends in the dressing room with the waitresses at the Lone Star Café, and to recite my line to the bartender when leaving his tip, I quickly enough learned to say “regime of torture” and “system of apartheid” and “military-industrial complex” as the coke snot dried up and my hair grew longer and I tried to become a college freshman, all over again.

  I was not good at self-initiated studying and worse still at navigating a place that had no required classes and nobody writing you a demerit for detention if you didn’t show up and didn’t do any of the work. The first time I cut a class and nobody noticed made me feel from then on that nothing mattered and nobody cared. It was the most ill-conceived—not to mention expensive—education model I ever could have imagined for myself, this one in which you spring loose totally aimless eighteen-year-olds on a campus designed much more like graduate school than undergrad, and then watch all but the most serious and exceptional of them flail and falter. But it seemed like a perfect match when I was scrambling for a solution to my Grand Larceny and Possession of Stolen Property problems. A good friend of mine had graduated from the place and was on some Committee of Campus something at the time that I was having my run-in with Detective Sperro. My friend got me the application and the over-the-phone interview, not to mention the over-the-phone acceptance, in a dizzying span of two weeks, during which time I never once mentioned to the school my impending felonies. We were the hottest spot on the planet to be for Halloween—Purple blotter! Windowpane!—according to Forbes magazine, or maybe it was Esquire, with Bennington coming in second—LSD dosed out from Visine bottles!—and we had, as well, an attrition rate as infamous. I was out in five semesters, ditched, with barely any of my basic requirements met. But I was brimming with all of the appropriate intellectual angst and political discontent that had at first been foreign to me when I arrived. Now I was a staunch Marxist
feminist, a budding lesbian, a black nationalist sympathizer, and a literacy advocate. I was also, once again, a dropout.

  5

  AT FIRST, MELISSA LET ME HAVE A LITTLE OF THE WIDE-OPEN SPACE of the dirt-cheap loft she’d moved to on Driggs Avenue in Brooklyn, while I figured out what to do next. Together we smoked Camel filterless cigarettes and let our all-black laundry pile up while I wrote endlessly in my journals and she painted large canvasses of dried flower pods, clearly influenced by the painter Terry Winters, whose brushes she was cleaning for a living. The winter days were pitch-black by four forty-five in the afternoon, and with my dropout’s prerogative, I did not ever wake before one, leaving what felt like half an hour in which to rally one’s wholesome life into shape. I could barely shower and finish the crossword puzzle before the day was already over.

  I did not seek out my old Lone Star Café friends, and my brother Todd, in just that short time, had become truly wealthy, inaccessible and hard to reach, but also unrecognizable, with the new relentless and lacerating sarcasm of a young man come lately into a shitload of power. Melissa, who had gracefully managed to barely grimace or flinch while I was coking it up at our apartment on Twenty-ninth Street now flexed her maternal muscle and suffocated me with instructions about the kitchen dish towels, the coffee pot, the correct route to the subway, and the hours of the Metropolitan Public Pool. It was way too late in the game for me to be able to receive surrogate mothering with any gladness. Meanwhile, if there was any single inch of my own flesh or remote coil of my own brain that I have warm regard for at this time, I cannot recall it. We agree that I need to make some different arrangements—maybe a summer in the country—and when spring emerges some weeks later, I have left Brooklyn and moved back to my hometown.