I watch as he inspects the daily delivery of baked goods from down the street, much as I’ll watch as he tosses whatever remains at the end of the night. His hands move through the loaves and rolls and pies and cakes with a seasoned ease. He tosses some back into a large gray bin, wiping his hands on his khaki pants. His breath hangs in the cool morning air as he thanks the man with a polite smile and handshake; the same polite smile and handshake he has given for years.
I snuff out my cigarette under the black, non-slip sole of my shoe. I watch as the main lights of the dining room hesitate before turning all the way on. Music kicks on, but not the top 40s hits that would play during operating hours. The passionate voices of Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole sound as though they’re singing underwater. The sounds of brass and bass eek through the cracks in doors and windows of the old building. I hear the neon hum it’s own tune as the various liquor and beer signs are powered on, and the big hanging sign that reads “The Market” shudders, unlit, in the autumn gusts.
An old white station wagon pulls up to the back of the building and I watch as a bent old man opens the rusted driver’s side door and hobbles towards the back entrance to the building. He shuffles past the stacked milk crates and coffee can ashtrays that serve as the employees’ break area. He strains to open the big red door. The big red door separates the restaurant from the rest of the world. For a second that big steel door hangs open and the soothing jazz fills the morning with sorrow-filled thoughts of times passed. It closes, and the world is gray and lifeless once again.
I figure it’s about time for me to head in. The door closes behind me, pushing the smell of stale cigarettes, booze and trash inside in one last futile wave. Onions and garlic raise their heads to turn back the alley smells and are given their due respect before they once again fade into the background. I pass by the kitchy decorations that most bars seem to have these days: various old signs for old alcohols, old sports memorabilia, an old deer mount that has been defiled with sunglasses and other human accessories. I remember him telling me stories of times when the deer’s antlers were covered by nothing but a thin layer of dust. Most of the things that litter the walls are older than the establishment, but attempt to lend their credibility to the business.
I throw my backpack in my locker in the basement. My sweatshirt stitched with my college’s name -- the one that everyone has -- goes on top of it. No one else was here because it didn’t make any sense to pay workers that have no work to do. We have to have at least one cook there for the breakfast shift, and usually that cook is stuck doing prep for the real meals to come.
I move back to the kitchen and take up my familiar spot at the flat-top grill. There are no tickets on the line, so I have time to prep things for the day ahead of me. I cut tomatoes and bell peppers. The swinging kitchen door hits the pink tiled wall behind it with a hollow crash. I hear his voice, and for the first time notice that the radio has been switched. Some pop music scratches its hot pink nails over the blackboard that displays our daily specials.
“Where the fuck is Brian? That bisque has to be prepped five hours before service. I swear to God if we have to change our feature again tonight I’m going to shove his hand in the fryer,”
“Brian quit last week,”
“Then what the fuck are you doing cutting tomatoes. Prep that bisque.”
I had never made a soup in my life. The old cook is bent over a pot working with carrots and a knife that flashes so fast it looks like he’s cutting with the side of his pointer. The recipe card is covered in parts and pieces of seafood bisques long past. I can make out some words and some numbers, but the whole is lost to me. I pick up a bin filled with an opaque liquid. Someone had hastily scrawled “c-food stock” on a piece of tape and stuck it to the lid, probably Brian, he was never the brightest. The old cook takes it from my hands before I had the chance to do wrong. I turn around to gauge my boss’s reaction, but he had left already.
I hear the dish machine kick on. The stereo in the dishroom is switched on and hums in anticipation. The dishwasher finally connects his music to the system. It’s too loud. I know that the boss will not appreciate it. The dishwasher -- Tod or Rod or something -- has nothing to do, so he’ll be told to turn down his music and to go scrub down the walk-in meat cooler. It is exactly as bad as it sounds. He won’t last another month here. I still move to the loud room and give him the nod that shows that I’m here as well. He nods his head and his neon purple hair dangles over his eyes. He brushes it back with a non-soiled wrist and turns back around to the rack of dishes made dirty by the morning’s prep. If he’s not up for conversation neither am I.
I turn and leave the dishroom. I don’t hear my boss’s voice, but I hear the music get turned down and the swinging metal door to the dining room bang against the tiled wall. I hear the bucket with the bleach water and paint scraper get taken from the closet. I hear the moans and groans of the purple-haired dishwasher rise and then fall as he descends to the walk ins. The old man is done the bisque. His work for the day is done, he’ll most likely stop by some of the other restaurants in town before he heads home.
I make a few omelets with egg whites and organic spinach, roast a few tomatoes and peppers, and bake a few dozen trays of bacon. I take a smoke break. I tried to stop smoking at work, but it doesn’t work like that. The big red door closes and the world is quiet again. Servers with their uniforms half assembled; maroon shirts untucked and unbuttoned, jeans, hats and undone hair. I’m proud that I’m wearing an unwashed shirt from high school and a pair of jeans that are so dirty they probably don’t need me to stand up straight. Working in the back has its advantages.
“Hey bud, how was the morning shift?” asks Ben the server.
“Shitty, don’t hard sell the bisque,” I reply.
“Ha, wasn’t planning on it,”
My boss pushes open the door, and the employees that had began to gather to socialize before the busy lunch shift scattered into the building. Ben gives me an overacted shrug and a salute and follows. Boss man is staring me down, and I turn to leave, but he stops me.
“Don’t you have a class?”
“Yeah, but I was gonna work the triple today,”
“No you’re not, come back for dinner,”
He unconsciously rubbed his vacant left ring finger. I had heard all the rumors about his marriage. He had beat his wife; he had been caught with a server at the restaurant; he blew his wife’s savings on coke and booze. I knew how rumors worked in this place, and I had been at far too many “After-Market” parties to know how many of them were ridiculous for the sake of curing boredom at work. I don’t care about how he got to this point, but at this point he’s a jackass.
Class is class, and I fight the strongest urges to fall asleep. My eyes and attention are paid to the tiny screen of my phone, and I can’t seem to pull myself away from it. Time feels as though it is moving through a tub of butter. I catch bits and pieces about fluid dynamics and then zone back out. Time is moving through a super viscous silicone solution. Soon enough the sound of zippers and the scrape of desk chairs on linoleum floors signals the end of class. It’s time to go back to work.
The dinner shift starts much differently then the lunch and breakfast before it. The faces of the workers I had seen as I left looked strained and exasperated. They had seen too many trays falls and orders botched. They had lost too many tips and endured too much of our boss’s berating. I see Ben, he’s dropping off an appetizer of spinach dip -- one 6 ounce serving in a white ramekin served with baked pita chips and garnished with some grated Parmesan cheese and a blow torch for color. The man Ben is serving is eating a Texan Burger -- one 8 ounce patty cooked to the customer’s preference topped with fried onion straws, thick-cut bacon, house barbecue sauce, and a set up (a tomato and lettuce) served with potato chips or up-charged to fries. I can’t see what the woman is eating, but I bet it’s a salad; they always get salads.
I’ve missed out on so much. I feel cheap for coming in after what looked to be a hellish lunch shift. My fellow workers ask me where I was for lunch. I’ve returned too late to help, and they were short-staffed. “We got killed,” they say, and I notice that there’s a maroon shirt in the dishroom. Missing is the purple-haired Rod Tod dish washer.
“Fired,” my boss says behind me.
“Too bad,”
“He was shit,”
People move in and out, the deep maroon of the staff’s uniform weaving in and out of the mobs of patrons with trays overloaded with food perched high on their exhausted shoulders, rolls tumble and fall from their plates. Drinks flow and laughter cascades from the happy mouths of satisfied customers. The voice of our boss can be heard over all the colliding conversations, commanding his fleet of high school and college students. Names are forgotten in the fray, and are replaced by points and hair-color nicknames.
A plate falls with an incredible with a resounding crack and the sound of the plate’s body being scattered all over the floor. The sound only momentarily stuns the dining room into silence., I see a whoosh of khaki past me, and my name cracks the silence left in the wake. With no dish washer here I was the low man on the totem pole, or the only one that he remembered the name of. I grab a broom and a butler, and stumble through the crowd. I still stop and say excuse me. He dashes off a quick thank you before he departs to the alley behind our building. His hand reaches for the the handle of the big, red, steel door, the gateway. I follow him as I empty the butler into the appropriate bin, the big steel door closes behind me, and silence clears the air. He inhales his Marlboro Red to the filter in three long drags. He turns from the door and flicks the cigarette into a coffee can. He flashes the same quick smile he shown the baker and hefted the big door open.
I go back into the kitchen and there are orders all the way down the line. I grab the one closest to me and start preparing it. Calamari app -- pre-portioned serving, bread, fry, serve with a dipping sauce and garnished with green onion; done. Steak with fried potatoes -- steak goes on, potatoes are wedged already, they’re the flat top with salt and pepper; done. I complete several other orders, and notice our salad cook is struggling to keep up. I help her as my last order finishes.
The door slams against the wall again, but I don’t look up.
“Put down that fucking lettuce,”
I know he’s talking to me.
“Put it down and take this.”
He hands me a potato wedge.
“Is that cooked?”
“I don’t know,”
“Take a bite,”
It tastes okay, but as my teeth get deeper I hit the apple-like texture of an undercooked potato.
“No, it’s not,”
“Get the fuck out,”
“What?”
“Get the fuck out of my restaurant.”
I don’t know what to say. Everyone else is in stunned silence. Servers open the door and see the oddest scene; a quiet kitchen. They immediately turn back and leave before the door even has a chance to swing shut again. I take off my apron and walk out the kitchen door. I hear some apologies from my co-workers, and spot my former boss out of the corner of my eye at one of the corner tables. I keep my head down and push down the angry red ball that is welling in my gut. I walk through the swinging doors out onto the dining room floor without destination or cause. I’m free in some ways, but entirely lost in others.
“Is this how you want customers to feel?”“No sir, I’m sorry,” my boss replies.
“You have an easy fucking job, you know that? Your job is to bring me food; the food that I ordered, and make sure that it’s not complete dog shit. That’s your job, and that’s what you failed to do,”
“I’m sorry sir, your meal will be on the house,”
“You’re goddamn right it will be. Can’t even cook fucking potatoes,”
Everyone at the table knows that this guy is way out of line, but no one is saying a word. He must be their boss, and they know that standing up for some manager of some restaurant isn’t worth losing their jobs. They all shift and squirm in their chairs trying to avoid the critical looks of the rest of the patrons. My former boss unconsciously fiddles with his ring finger again. The servers do their best to keep the customer’s attention on the food in front of them, or on the menu, or on anything that isn’t the scene.
“Would you like to see our wine menu?” they ask.
“Can I interest you guys in some dessert?” they ask.
“How is everything tonight?” they ask.
Someone has wrote my name in big letters with the number 86 in dark red ink on the kitchen whiteboard. We are out of the salmon, lamb chop, stuffed peppers, artichoke hearts, and me. My former boss catches me lingering at the board and asks me to come to his office.
His office is in the basement next to the employee lockers. It’s not a place that anyone spends much time, including the cleaning staff. Old promotional ads for drinks and specialty alcohols are propped up against his beige hospital office walls. They loom over his desk like an ever-present panel of judges. His desk is covered in sticky notes and official-looking documents. I see the paperwork for Rod Tod on his desk, and the appropriate filings for termination next to it.
He itches his ring finger and sits down to do something he’s done hundreds of times. He asks me to take a seat, I oblige. I think about the dish washer boy that had sat here less than six hours ago. I bet he was furious. I bet he swore and cursed and said things that he’d later tell his friends about. They’ll be in awe of how brave and courageous he was to stick it to an asshole boss. He did something that they had always wanted to do. I couldn’t be mad at him.
There was only one time that I didn’t see him in the morning going through the bakery’s delivery. The delivery man just dropped off the big gray bins and left; we probably got some dented loaves and some burnt pies. I asked the old cook that morning where the boss was, and he said “with his kids,”
I imagined him sitting awkwardly on the corner waiting for his ex-wife to drop them off. I could see him fidgeting because he hadn’t smoked that day, because he didn’t want to smell like cigarettes around them. I can imagine them holding tight to their mother’s pant leg not wanting to get into this stranger’s car. He stays silent; his heart breaking with every plea to just go home. Their mother reasons that they’ll go out for ice cream later.
“You guys like ice cream? I like ice cream too,”
They bury their faces deeper into their mother’s leg. He looks at her, his eyes search for something that says that this is okay, that this is normal.
He showed up to the lunch shift and fired three people that day. I heard him swearing at his desk when I was in the locker room. Everyone avoided him that day; people made jokes that his dealer cut him off, or that the prostitutes were all tired of getting paid in The Market free appetizer coupons. I laughed. I knew what it was about, yet I still laughed.
So I’m in this chair. This chair that I was hired in. My jeans are stiff and aren’t supposed to bend. I stare at my hands and realize the scars I’ve accumulated here. Knives, jammed disposals, hot flat tops, hot dishes, sharp corners. They’re all there. I see his hands as he gestures at me, and he sports the same scars. His forearms are crisscrossed with thin white lines and oblong burns that weren’t cared for enough to heal properly.
I don’t know what he’s saying. I’m not there right now. This is the same thing with my class this afternoon. I know that I should be listening to him. I know that my tangent thoughts can wait until I’m off into the cold night. He stands up and offers to shake my hand. I look at it, the cuts and scrapes and burns, and I reach out my own hand with its cuts and scrapes and burns.
I clean out my locker and say my last good byes to everyone. My name on the 86 board was already erased and replaced by “seafood bisque”. Ben stops me and says that I can still come to the After-Market party tonight, but I decline. He promises that we’ll keep in touch even though I won’t see him everyday. I know we won’t. We’ll run into each other on campus and exchange polite courtesies the first time; then it will be a hello and a how are you doing; then a nod; then pretending that we don’t see each other.
I leave the restaurant with the last of the customers. They giggle and laugh; their breath hangs in the air for a second before being lost in the cold. I watch the employees leave and some of them had started drinking behind the bar already. They move in a mass of maroon like a school of fish. They all were ready to leave that building. The poor server that was stuck in the dishroom is the last employee to leave. He’s angry that he drew the short end of the stick and hurries to catch up to the mob.
I crush my cigarette under the black non-slip sole of my shoe, and turn to leave. I hear the big red door open again and my former boss come out with bags of trash from the night. His nice khaki pants are stained with grease and streaks of steak tips and marinara sauce. I swear I can smell the congealed ranch from here. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned the first few buttons of his dress shirt. The first dumpster behind the building is full, and so he has to walk to the corner to dump the trash in the neighboring establishment’s dumpster. He hoists it up and it teeters on the edge of the big brown container before it decides to fall on the sidewalk.
It splits open like an overripe melon and the man curses. People out for the night look at him with disgust as he attempts to guide the soupy mess of bisque, calamari, steak tips, burgers, bloody band aids and spoiled ranch dressing back into the black plastic sheet that was once a bag. He apologizes profusely to those that are forced to walk in the street to avoid the putrid excrement of The Market restaurant and bar.
I pick up the last bit of trash and hand it to him. We carry the last bags out in silence. He thanks me and turns around and opens the big red door and walks in. I hear the moody sounds of deep saxophones and the sad tones of an old piano. The door closes, and I hear the laughter of someone here for a weekend vacation.
