By the time I was seventeen years old, I had a drug problem. Chiefly, the problem was that I didn’t do drugs very well. I did them gracelessly, haphazardly; I was a madcap who generally pushed past a personal oblivion into territory that was, ostensibly, supposed to be spectacle, supposed to impress (Impress whom? was not a question I ever asked). No, I didn’t do drugs well at all.
To begin, when I used drugs, I looked like a drug user. Eye whites would be gore-spattered, practically candent; would barely contain the capillaries which resembled bold vermilion lightning bolts; my humours would match the warm primary color paint job on fast-food joints more often than not.[1] Hair lost all luster and began to hang stiff and split, the growth of brown roots was long-neglected and very nearly matched in length the scraggly six-inch tendrils still wet-looking under cartoonish black dye. The lids of my eyes drooped to the point that I was once mistaken for Asian—my sallow skin didn’t help matters, but I feel positive that the kicker was the pseudo-epicanthic fold that is sometimes ancillary to a morning spent working diligently through a grapefruit-sized ball of hash.
When my skin died, it stayed stuck to me—epidermis too amphetamine-exhausted to peel, and bathing just a wistful memory in my hectic schedule. It adhered like a desiccated condom: squirted full, fallen asleep in, then found still shaft-stuck, eight hours later, during a lazy second erection.[2] I was buzzard-necked and stoop-shouldered. I watched the ground nervously when I walked, both to hide my eyes and watch my clumsy, oft-numb feet. This description details only what was wrong on the outside.
I was a travesty of the Suburban Teen. And I was on my way to work.[3]
Work was the armpit-moist, asscrack-hot galley of a local franchise diner. I’d worked assiduously for nearly a year to better my station from dishroom to cooks’ line only to find the galley twice as hectic and one-quarter as private: an unremitting juggernaut of unpleasantness, need, and heat. All this for about a buck an hour more.
I’d discovered as a dishwasher that I did not have the galvanized stomach I’d always assumed I possessed, based solely upon a childhood spent watching cop shows which simulated murder (“Kid, ’dis stuff ain’t fa’ da faint o’ heart,” explained the hardboiled private dick) and browsing my mother’s absurdly antiquated (but still rife with graphic imagery) medical texts. Warm coleslaw drizzled with boysenberry syrup, chewed pancakes somehow clotted around a Gordian knot of shed hair—these things made me dry heave. Old oatmeal that stank like, well, old oatmeal.[4] Mustard on C-shift plates, dried to a Magic Shell-like reverse caisson of sorts, a solid dome concealing a liquid core which will stink to high hell when ruptured.[5] The chunky mash at the bottom of a bus pan which was always some horrid amalgam of processed flour[6] and cigarette butts.
Washing dishes in any restaurant assures you full-frontal nudity where comestible grotesqueries are concerned. But a jaunty hop across the room to behind the cooks’ line, the only change is surface aesthetic: everything looks better, but here it’s hot and redolent. It’s the difference between scooping the week old lump from the back of the litterpan (unpleasant, perhaps, but a workaday inconvenience which is taken in stride) and sifting out a steaming, shitty mess that the cat neglected to cover and which stinks so hellishly, one wonders if the feline’s poor excretory etiquette was result of a fearful fleeing from its own fetor. It was probably a poor idea, me becoming a short-order cook.
This specific morning was sunny. Gorgeous. Sunny and gorgeous with a pacific breeze, seventy or so Fahrenheit: mocking. When the world at large awoke, it would render them Hallmark cheerful, beatific. Juxtaposed with the wreck of me, we as a pair belied any notion of the Pathetic Fallacy: nature definitely does not sympathize. Sunny and gorgeous, yep. Crisp, the weather. I, on the other hand, shambled through the dawn, going up and coming down; I crawled out the passenger side of my cobbled together car[7] and slunk in the side door of my restaurant.
This specific morning was the denouement of an intoxicant operetta I’d staged the previous evening. Its key aria (the operetta) had, admittedly, gone a bit off the rails by holding a high note until around five-forty—two hours too late to even consider sleep. I’d plowed lines of a crushed-out concoction of methylphenidate,[8] codeine, and oxycodone until my nose simultaneously tickled, ached, stung, and ran. A compatriot and I had smoked nearly an eighth of an ounce of weed since midnight; what we burned before the clock struck is anyone’s guess. I had put back seventy-two fluid ounces of hard cider. And, as was the shibboleth of this pretentious writer in those days, I’d been chomping on twenty-five milligram tablets of ephedrine as if they were fruit-flavored chewable vitamins—I’d been at it so long, in fact, that I’d grown to like the willow bark, dandelion, and chalk taste of them. I hadn’t eaten since the last time I’d been to school which was, possibly, several days in the past.
I was sick, sickened, sickening. Nauseated, nauseous.
I was a seventeen-year-old functioning as a simple equation:
Uppers + Downers + Hard Narcotics + Weed + (Booze · Sugar) – Sleep – Food= X
Solve for X.[9]
I had arrived five minutes early in order to remedy my foodlessness. I wasn’t hungry, per se, but I was becoming sober enough to know that I should be.[10] I’d intended to arrive ten minutes early so that I might actually enjoy the delicacy of heated food, but I managed to fuck even that up. I snatched a recently prepped[11] pot pie from a bakers’ rack and scuttled with it to the corrugated-cluttered and tableless smoking area. I bolted that one-pound pastry and its filling—Lincoln Log-sized carrots, diced potatoes, baby peas, a runny jaundiced gravy, and the dark meat of what was purportedly but dubiously chicken—in less than three minutes; quick enough that I couldn’t really dwell on my relatively unappealing snack and leaving me a remainder of one-hundred-twenty seconds: time enough for a mentholated smoke. Compunction descended rapidly—in tow perhaps of the hard-settling bolus of food now obtrusive, like a fist, in my gut—and all of the user’s quotidian, perfunctory resolutions with respect to life repair were made with sincerity if also haste.
Nauseated, nauseous, I rushed to the time clock then cook’s line: on time, at least, if ravaged. The overnight cook—a man missing five visible teeth and possessed of a haircut which made MLB southpaw Randy Johnson look positively suave—whistled in the way only the toothless can. “They ain’t fired you yet?” he asked, as way of salutation.
I nodded. I couldn’t argue: I deserved to be fired.[12] But I didn’t want to agree and draw attention to the fact. Stomach increasingly sour, I suffered a growing dread of opening my mouth at all, for fear of what might emerge. As I countenanced the deadly sincere, bullet-pointed ridicule of the overnight cook, I imagined in my belly a deformed drug baby, shaped like a jellybean, but with a face like mine; an abominable fetus, duodenum-cocooned and just waking up, its wizened little arms knocking about my stomach as they strained to reach up my esophagus, and paw at its lining. He closed his sermon with an almost avuncular, “You look like dogshit, man. Didn’t the other faggots not play nice?” In my effeteness, I nodded along with even his derision until he inserted a Camel Wide in the space between two lower incisors, grabbed his brown-bagged malt liquor and strode off curmurring, most likely about me.
“I am the fuck out of here,” he called.
I tried to smile, gave it up. Cracked my neck and groaned. The galley was mine alone for another ninety minutes. The printer stuck its paper tongue out at me. It was time to face the hashed-browns.
The first fifteen minutes or so were fine. I began to feel convalescent—the age old panacea of proactivity working its magic on me. Pancakes, eggs. Eggs, pancakes. Flapjacks in a franchise diner are easy: there’s a springloaded contraption called a “dropper” to ensure perfect circularity and uniformity. And eggs on a three-hundred degree flattop grill are very nearly fun.[13] Yes, I was beginning to feel hale, competent, when The Ticket came in.
Food service (especially of this lowbrow variety) makes one a quick study in the variable circadian rhythms of folks. For that bar shift cook, seven a.m. was the afternoon. For a lot of people, it was breakfast time, but for some, it was lunch, dinner. There were two people sitting at table 13. One of them was having breakfast, the other, lunch. The Ticket dictated its demands in plain language: one full-stack of potato pancakes, one Reuben.
The potato pancake—“po-cake” to drug-addled, goy teen short-order cooks or “latka” to the Yiddish who enjoyed them before their bastardization—is a fairly ancient concoction involving scallions, shredded potatoes and egg (amongst other possible ingredients). They look, in their inchoate form, a bit like infant-gargled hashed browns—nebulous in shape, birdshat in appearance. Something one might find in the bottom of a bus pan. Cooked and slathered with something savory, such as sour cream, or something sweet (applesauce), they are frequently delicious and (if authentically prepared outside of a chain chow joint) occasionally transcendental.
Reuben sandwiches, however, are not any of those things. They are, for all intents and purposes in my opinion those days, an invidious anti-sandwich.[14] Invented sometime in the 1920s and popular within the decade, the Reuben is a nauseous combination of ingredients which on their own are robustly pungent to the point of offense—the sandwich fails for the same reason the NFL Pro Bowl does. Too many big egos combine poorly, and no one’s interested in team playing—each ingredient in a Reuben screams for palatal primacy. Heavily buttered rye bread is grilled to begin. Rye, to those not already brainwashed, sworn devotees, tastes a bit like old, cheap wheat bread salted with ammonia crystals. It makes shudder the sides of the tongue.
A cook then attempts to melt swiss cheese over the aforementioned. This will not work. Swiss cheese, even when relatively fresh, deli-purchased and unprocessed, never truly melts. Instead, it becomes unctuous and rubbery, like the spat upon labia of an octogenarian submitting herself to a sildenafil ravaging. Corned beef or pastrami is layered next atop this mess—it was corned beef, in the case of my restaurant, and our stock was basically thin-shaved pickled Spam. A generous drizzling of Thousand Island dressing[15] follows and then, then, there’s the fucking sauerkraut. The lip-pursing heart of the sandwich.
Sauerkraut probably has its origins in spoiled meats. No joke. This shredded cabbage sodden with lactic acid—which occurs naturally when bacteria ferments its sugars—has any number of practical perks. Primarily, it keeps for a long time. In the era before refrigeration, such an attribute (despite its other obvious and aggressive failings) could not be overlooked. Secondary to that is its distinctive, shrieking flavor, which is mostly derived from that lactic acid—the very same lactic acid makes your muscles burn during and ache the day after a workout. This muscle-crippling flavor (actually a bit like rye bread with the volume dialed to eleven) is of practical advantage because, in those days before refrigeration, the meat supply was hardly guaranteed, and even salted meats were frequently past their prime (but throwing them away was wasteful and necessarily out of the question). Still edible, the flavor of spoilage was masked by the only thing that could mask it: sauerkraut. Anything to get that meat down.
Anything awful will taste better in company of kraut. That’s the theory. Sauerkraut is like hammering a knuckle to take your mind off the pain of a migraine. The brain has a gating mechanism for pain and only registers severest injury; apparently the gustatory senses work similarly, and only the most grievous palatal offense shows up on the radar. The smell of cold kraut triggers my gag reflex as effectively as swallowing and tugging back up a Life Saver on a string.[16] Hot, it’s like tiny farmers have mistaken my uvula for an udder and have decided to milk it.
No, I do not care for Reuben sandwiches.
I could do everything with aplomb, save cook a Reuben. All of my coevals know this, though, and pitch in.[17] All of them except the C-shift cook who now lolls just out the back door with his malt liquor and a smoke. Seven-twenty a.m. A dupe[18] has dictated my pressing need to prepare one full-stack of po-cakes, one Reuben. And, in suit, I panic.
I called, first, to that toothless C-shifter who replied not unkindly (speaking comparatively), but still volunteering myriad neological variations of the word “faggot.” I double-, triple-, quadruple-checked The Ticket. I abandoned my doomed galley and ran to double check the schedule for the next cook’s arrival time—not another miscreant aboard ’til seventy-some clockface hashmarks passed. I called one last time through the thick metal bathroom door to that C-shifter who replied vociferously that No was his Final Word. Distantly, the grating clamor of the kitchen printer sounded; upon inspection, a semi-perforated garland of tickets dangled from that first one to nearly touch the grill below. The word Shit exploded forth involuntarily, like a sneeze.[19] And I knew that I was on my own.
What follows, though it will unfurl loquaciously and over a number of pages which necessitate ample reading time, occurred in less than one-hundred-fifty seconds.
I returned to the kitchen, stretched on a pair of latex gloves[20] and buttered two slices of rye bread. I lobbed both onto the griddle and layered them with processed swiss. The short order cook’s biggest tribulation is timing: bread and batter cook at different speeds but often both are needed, piping hot, at the exact same moment. Knowing this, I left the sandwich uncompleted and began to ladle out the po-cakes. Five to a full-stack, the batter was especially runny this particular day. Lacking in potatoes and other thickening agents, the resulting latkas were amoebic and bled into each other, forming a larger tessellation. I had to reach into the plastic batter bucket and manually extract extra solid bits to fill out the five too-sparse nuclei of the mess. When I was satisfied enough to walk away from the buttermilk-colored latka slop and return to the Reuben, the entire right side of my griddle was occupied by the globular mess.
In restaurant chains, portion size is of ultimate import and controlled with the merciless and authoritarian fist of Peter Principle-style management. To ensure national or international uniformity (Brand Standards), chain restaurants have one or more employees dedicated to the task of pre-portioning the essential components which comprise the menu-touted entrees. An underemployed individual spends his or her morning placing into plastic bags eight-ounce portions of lettuce; scooping into Styrofoam cups four-ounce portions of mashed potatoes or mac and cheese; peeling nacreous cold cuts away from one pile and placing them in another one atop a digital scale until it reads five-point-oh. Thrilling work, it’s necessary for the survival of the bland corporate commissary because short order cooks have neither the time nor presence of mind to keep portion size in mind when rushing through a breakfast, lunch, or dinner hour. It is not, however, cheap, when one takes into account the wage of that portioning employee or employees, the cost of plastic bags and plastic soufflé cups, calibrated scales and scoops, the resultant explosion of trash and its subsequent disposal. Management, those incarnate Peter Principles, then, occasionally cuts corners to make monthly bottom lines by skimping on the essential equipment to allow proper portion control or hiring some jackleg layabout because he comes at minimum wage.
The corned beef and sauerkraut components of a Reuben sandwich are pre-portioned in just such a fashion. The corned beef, generally, is balled into the bottom of a baggie which it will share with the kraut—separately wrapped, but nested within. Mise en place tyro that I was, I suspended the pre-portioned bag above the grill and averted my face slightly; I allowed it to unroll, expecting the meat to splatter and sizzle, expecting to spy with my one open eye and snatch with my opposite palm[21] the separately bagged sauerkraut—against which hot reek I had not yet steeled myself and remained entirely unprepared for. But it happened anyways, the kraut. That particular day, perhaps because of some Peter Principle manager’s incompetence, perhaps out of the previous day’s portioner’s sheer lethargy, there was no separate containing bag. Five ounces of sauerkraut and a rivulet of lactic acid came raining down atop a sheet of five-hundred degree steel; an exhortation of miasmatic steam aerosolized that rotten/sweet flavor of putrefaction so characteristic of sauerkraut and sent it straightaway to my waiting nose. And I was just some seventeen-year-old schmuck functioning as a simple equation:
Uppers + Downers + Hard Narcotics + Weed + (Booze · Sugar) – Sleep + barely chewed, slightly congealed food + a cloud of atomized sauerkraut, worn as fetid halo = X
Solve for X.
I’ll save Reader the work: X, at that moment, was equal to violent projectile vomiting. There went everything—the stomach acid, the sniffed back snot,[22] the hard cider, the soda-pop, the pot pie—out in a bullhorn torrent and all over the goddamn griddle. I booted, ralphed, hurled. Found my liquid words.[23] I gave the Technicolor Yawn. My head reeled; it took me the decompressing relative stillness and silence of fifteen dizzy seconds to realize that, yes, that had just really fucking happened. I’d just thrown-up on a hot grill. All over the violently hot metal, all over those po-cakes. If the galley’s security cameras had actually worked, I could have sold the tape as emetophiliac porn.
When I slid at last back into the pressing reality of the moment, there were pressing issues immediately at hand. I had just ruined half of an order which was, at this point, starting to be deleteriously late.[24] I had hung from my rail three more tickets, seven diners’ meals in all, which also required preparation. And I was becoming acutely aware of another peculiar, but urgent concern: the smell of one’s vomit frying atop a pile of sauerkraut is so abominable as to be literally indescribable. I have no elucidating words to offer except these: the only thing I’ve ever smelled which equals its magnitude is a spilt colostomy, but the two flavors have little in common save their equivalent ability to horrify.
Complete grill maintenance—a rub-down with oil and an abrasive metal screen which removed any lingering foodstuff or contaminant, then an emptying and sanitized wash of the unit’s grease traps—required ten or more minutes even when it was a cook’s sole concern. I simply did not have the requisite minutes for this task, considering that the already unforgiving service staff could never be apprised of the reason for delay.[25] I fingered a nearby dough cutter (a wood- or plastic-handled sheet of Stainless which, aside from duties implied by its descriptive name, also serves in every kitchen as a griddle-clearing tool, rather like an ice scraper) and made my decision: I planned to simply scrape away the mess and hope for the best in terms of stomach acid/extreme heat sterilization.
Using forefinger and thumb as pincers, I discarded the sodden bread slices. Put metal to metal and scraped away the stray sprayed droplets of burbling vomit at the grill’s port side. Undigested peas. Cubed, regurgitated potatoes in griddle’s center. And carrots: carrots so large I couldn’t believe I’d gulped them down without choking. My regurgitant that day resembled a briny, yellow-but-slightly-pink (?) chowder. I stood poised above the now-half-cooked, absolutely contaminated parodies of po-cakes (still amid the hot stink of frying sick, I consider it a feat that I didn’t repeat my earlier expulsion), and I was ready to lift them away from the steel and into the trashcan, using a larger spatula when that C-shift culinarian returned—full of Mad Dog 20/20, zest, pity, and bombast.
When he shoved me aside, I was, I think, a combination of startled, still nausea-woozy and post-/mid-high. I toppled easily and crumpled, skull caroming off of a countertop’s corner on my way to the floor. I lay nearly like a lazy odalisque on that greasy ceramic diamond-plate floor, bleeding freely, unsure of whether I would rise, and so missed any chance to reply to the man when he exclaimed, “You fucking cooked the po-cakes and not the Reuben, you faggot moron?” Or maybe I dismissed the sentence’s first terribly important clause in favor of its outrageous last: such contumelies, though typical, still rankled me. On the floor, I felt the insistence of another gut-heaving, but had nothing left in me to expel. I felt a thin burn in my throat and, again, didn’t reply, when C-Shift asked rhetorically, “What would you do without me, man?” I remained silent when he advised the appropriate waitress that her latkas sat waiting, but her sandwich would be two minutes longer. It was, for the record, only in retrospect that I realized I’d actually heard these three utterances.
By the time I knelt and pulled myself up, tremulant, to standing—latex hands slick and bloody—I had just time to hear the cymballike resounding of spatula across griddleskin, the click of metal against kiln-fired plate and a mutter of thanks from a fifty-something waitress, as she sped away, order in hand. Attempting to orient, I was facing the wrong way for the visual cues which might have spurred me to action.
My hot sick was cooked into a pile of potato pancakes which had just been served to a paying customer. Probably, I feared, some spavined, sweater-vested gent and his shrunken ex-labor camp wife, who would smile and hold liver-spotted hands as they ate.[26]
C-Shift, he clapped me on the shoulder and passed over an egg-covered spat. He apologized when he saw the wet red of my mitts. “Motherfucker, I didn’t think I hit you that hard. Are you okay? Jesus, don’t tell anyone, okay, if you are? I didn’t mean nothing by it, I was just trying to get by.” He stayed, then, and helped me finish off the remaining diners’ meals while he chatted amicably, hoping I’d forgive, forget the assault.
“I didn’t know you were really sick,” he said. “You don’t look so hot at all. Don’t tell none of the managers, though, about the fall. It looks bad for everyone, okay?”
Somebody, somewhere, was snacking on what my body refused to. I cooked lugubriously, silently, as I considered whether or not to tell,[27] to rush out into the dining room and snatch away the plate of baked batter and spew; as I considered nothing less than throwing away my job and any chance of reference. I’d found it hard enough to land this job, which I’d only managed by happenstance.[28] And so I resorted to black comedy.
Does my vomit taste better with sour cream or applesauce? I thought.
So, so sorry, I thought.
And then C-Shift, he said what he had seen. “That po-batter,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything like that awful shit.” My guts tumbled and, for a moment, I feared syncope. “I dunno who exactly this place is hiring lately, but that new prep guy doesn’t know shit about prep.”[29]
“What are you talking about?” I asked. Certain that I was about to be blackmailed—or perhaps become embroiled in a more desirable quid pro quo exchange of silence regarding my head wound and the assault that caused it for silence regarding my act of biological terrorism—I was actually confused as to where the man was headed with this line of dialogue.
“The po-batter. That shit was all runny and there was fucking carrots and shit in it. I know you’re still a newbie and all, but you shoulda fucking better known that there ain’t carrots in po-cakes. I mean, come on. You shoulda got a new bucket or something.”
C-Shift, it developed, had seen nothing of my incriminating act. When this became indubitably clear, I jettisoned a rank sigh of breath and began to chuckle gratefully, if guiltily. My job was safe and, blood roiling with the endorphins which accompany vomiting, injury, and the getting away with of nefariousness,[30] I actually felt sprightly for the first time in recent memory.
An early rush had begun and C-Shift, resigned to staying late, lit a smoke right there on the line. “Fuck,” he said, then belched. “That stupid fucker,” he proceeded, apropos of nothing, “he should have known better.” I inquired and he elaborated. “The po-cakes, man. Who puts carrots in po-cakes?”
“I don’t know,” I said, that moment glad to be the confidant of a man’s man, a lifetime line cook. “Some people,” I offered, but let the sentence hang. An aposiopesis allowing him to complete the sentence to his delight, but still imagine that it was the sentiment of another, one who had validated him and made him righteous, strong.
[1] When later that year I made it to the service floor of the restaurant at which I worked, I had one Sunday morning party of four ask me to settle a bet: “We’re trying to decide if you’re hungover or high right now. Your eyes match your shirt, dude.” The shirt was indeed a sort of faded scarlet, and I said to them, “Can’t it be both?” They tittered and tipped well. The eavesdropping churchgoers in the next booth did neither. [BACK]
[2] That metaphor disgusts even me. [BACK]
[3] Where I was actually far from the leading slubberdegullion. I might actually have been at the rear of the pack, come to think of it, where chemical depravities were concerned. [BACK]
[4] And it didn’t come off the pan either, once it had been stuck there for three or four hours. Fun fact: this is how I learned to make dichlorodiethyl sulfide, or mustard gas. I’d become increasingly inventive and aggressive in my improvisational methods for shearing the last stubborn remnants of the antemeridian oatmeal from the sides of its metal well. One morning, I mixed bleach, Lime Away and a sky blue, ammonia-based window cleaner. I mixed a copious amount of these fluids in a yellow mop bucket, preparing, I guess, to submerge completely the two-gallon pot and its sticky ecru mess. We had to close and vent the restaurant that afternoon. Oddly, I was not fired. [BACK]
[5] Incidence of which once made me literally sick. I still hate mustard with a gag-inducing passion. If and when I date, and the other potential kisser has consumed mustard, she must first brush her teeth before kissing can commence. For real. [BACK]
[6] Ruined bread, syrup-drenched and anticipatorily sliced pancakes, mashed potatoes, waffle batter: these things all look exactly the same when soaked in water and presented with no context. [BACK]
[7] VW hull with many inappropriately installed Japanese bits beneath the hood. The hood itself was duct-taped shut; it took most of a roll each time I had to unearth and then re-mummify the engine compartment. The hubcaps were in the boot. You get the idea. I was advised of the mismatched parts by a mechanic who said, nonplussed, “This should not be working. I’m hesitant to touch any of it, actually. Please just go.” [BACK]
[8] Ritalin, a hydrogen bond away from being cocaine and actually, in my experience, harder to quit. [BACK]
[9] X, in this case, is equal to the shell of a boy, a virtual zombie with very little left in his human gas tank. If you ended up with X=loser, you’re right, but you forgot to carry the one. [BACK]
[10] Knowledge of such should bes kept me from ever looking exactly like those people on the anti-meth billboards. [BACK]
[11] This means, for the uninitiated, that the pot pie was room temperature, yes, but previously cooked; in need only of a reheating. [BACK]
[12] Submitted into evidence: Q.v. the mustard gas incident; the sobriquet “8 Minutes,” which was bestowed upon me after it became brutally obvious that I would be eight minutes late (exactly) for nearly every shift assigned me; the obvious purchase and sale of illegal drugs on store property and, in suit, being perpetually under the influence of said chemicals on company time; theft of food; theft of supplies; theft of management’s cigarettes and narcotics (though the latter couldn’t be proved); &c. I’d only been there six or seven months. [BACK]
[13] Given three eggs, an oiled and un-dinged spatula, and a flattop grill I can still, a decade hence, roll you an omelet which will engorge and dampen your naughty bits for both its fluffiness and right-angled precision. [BACK]
[14] This epithet—anti-sandwich—was coined with regard to the fact that, when these events transpired, I positively despised every single ingredient involved in a traditional Reuben. In the eleven years between the action and this editing, I have actually come to enjoy two of those ingredients. In the interest of full-disclosure, I felt compelled to mention this. I will not, however, share which two ingredients I have come to enjoy. [BACK]
[15] Thousand Island dressing is, in reality, merely a blend of ketchup, mayonnaise, and pickles. [BACK]
[16] Thank you, bulimic ex-grilfriend #2 for teaching me that trick. [BACK]
[17] The training video did teach, after all, that Its [sic] Fun To Cooperate. To be a TEAM.© Because “Togeather [sic] Each Achieves More!” [BACK]
[18] Industry parlance lesson: “Dupe” is a truncation of “Duplicate Ticket”—that is, the ticket which comes out of a remote printer near the wheel cook’s station in the galley, after a server has entered the order into a computer terminal. This term is a perhaps somewhat inexplicable differentiation, one unnecessary in restaurants where it is used, descended from the pre-tech diners where the order your waitress scribbled tableside (that ticket, in such cases, is the Original Ticket) was the only extant ticket, the one passed through to a head short order cook via spinning wheel (which also explains why the head cook is called the Wheel Man, Wheeler, or simply Wheel). [BACK]
[19] I’ve always admired this particular cussword’s simultaneous manner of explosion/hiss. [BACK]
[20] Latex gloves are not required in every state and, in the opinion of most cooks, where they are required, they make everything less sanitary. When ungloved, most cooks wash frequently simply out of personal preference: A) it gets pretty sloppy back there; B) the sloppiness involves getting a lot of gross and unwanted gunk on one’s hands; C) no cook wants to accidentally smear ingredient y on or in meal x and thus have to re-cook the whole goddamn thing; D) contrary to popular belief, most cooks are actually (relatively) decent human beings who happen to swear like sailors, yes, but don’t want to yuck-up your entrée. Gloved, everyone thinks he or she is impervious to harm and so doesn’t swap pairs out of both this sense of invulnerability and sheer lethargy—tugging a new pair on over sweat-pruned hands isn’t always easy. Just before their removal, a cook’s latex gloves are probably exponentially more filthy and bacteria-ridden than ever his hands would be allowed to become. All of this to say that latex gloves (where required) are usually donned only for inspection purposes and otherwise used only to handle the sort of unsavory business one would certainly seek out gloves when conducting at home. Like going anywhere near sauerkraut. [BACK]
[21] With eleven years of hindsight, I see now that this face-averted bag drop/catch is absolutely the sort of thing that seems only speciously like a good trouble-saving idea, but which in actuality requires much greater effort than proper comportment. Like, for instance, unbolting and extracting both the screen and storm pane from a second floor window so that one might micturate without having to go all the way downstairs to the bathroom there. The bag drop/catch was a showboat-y sort of maneuver I’d twice previously executed with success, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was sort of the kitchen equivalent of the entirely unnecessary and very risky Willie Mays-style basket catch. [BACK]
[22] Which is the secret, despicable joy of every snortable-intoxicant addict. [BACK]
[23] If I’m not mistaken, I’ve pilfered this phrase from Castaneda. [BACK]
[24] Regardless of how busy this franchise’s kitchens got, seven minutes was the insisted-upon time for breakfast orders. [BACK]
[25] Try it yourself, see how it sounds aloud: “It’s gonna be a minute for any orders, someone put puke on my grill.” There’s no exculpatory way to phrase this. [BACK]
[26] Not that I don’t still feel pretty bad about this, but at the time I was mortified beyond belief. It was, at seventeen, the worst thing I had ever done to someone. I would quickly top it, of course, and then top that, and so on. Such is growing up. [BACK]
[27] Again, try it yourself. Say it aloud: “Hey, could you get that plate back? I puked in it. Sorry.” [BACK]
[28] The General Manager, who knew me as a black-clad and incorrigible smoking section regular, had placed a Post-It on my application that said DO NOT HIRE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE. When I asked for an interview, law (or company policy) required that I got one. The scheduled afternoon, that GM had a family emergency (which I later discovered likely meant he had run out of blow) and when the Assistant retrieved my application for the interview, the Post-It had fallen off. I started that night; when the GM returned to the store, he found me in the dishroom and fairly screamed, “What in the blue fuck are you doing back here?” [BACK]
[29] Industry parlance lesson: “Prep” is “preparation”—the baking of pot pies that will later be reheated and served, the mixing of pancake batters, &c. This individual, in many chain joints, is responsible for much of the previously discussed portioning. [BACK]
[30] Epilogue in a footnote: I did eventually spill the beans to an employee contemporary who traded entertaining anecdotes for knives of hash; and though I swore him to secrecy, he promptly shared the gory details with all interested parties. By then, though, I was part of the dysfunctional family that comprises any given restaurant, and the tale became a sort of dark legend. Four years later, I started work at a completely different franchise and with men I’d never before met. When one of them called down a Blackie Melt, I was bewildered. I asked, he answered:
“It’s a Reuben. Sorry. Long story, but years ago, this fucking drug addict kid somewhere ’round the city used to puke on the grill when he cooked Reubens. Booted in some pancakes and then served them once. You imagine that? Name was Black or he was black or something, I guess. Fucking drug addict kid. Seriously.” I laughed and prepared the Reuben without volunteering anything. I figured that, sooner or later, a waitress would whisper the secret to him and he’d find out who I was. That I am him, the fucking drug addict kid. Seriously. [BACK]
