How in the sweet tea shit did I get back here I thought to myself. As I begrudgingly tied a half-hearted knot behind my apron. Back in a kitchen again, only now a little older and a bit more bitter. I can’t tell you how many kitchens I’ve worked in, I truly couldn’t. Enough to make me an expert I suppose.
From coast to coast and several cities in between, I’ve slimed my soles across their sludge greased, chipped tile floors like some lobotomized figure skater. I’ve smelt the aroma of innumerable foods all chilled together in the deep freeze so many times that it shoots through my nostrils with the familiarity of a childhood foe. Scrubbed the blackest pots, burned every inch of skin from my fingernails to my elbows and been given more first shift menus to take home and study than I can count. Does anyone ever actually study those? I prefer learning on the job myself.
But I swore a vow to myself at the doorway of the last kitchen I left never to return.
I’m a writer. And a damn good one even if I’m the only one who thinks so. A man can become numb to anything the longer he endures it and rejection letters are no different. But one of these days I’ll drink a glass of champagne and it will taste the way it does for some.
It’s been over three years since I was last working in a kitchen and I had most certainly believed that those days were indeed behind me. I have worked for a few desk jobs since and even made the mistake of trying to write for a living as a journalist. I lasted about six months before they gave me the boot. Something about not sharing the company values. In this day and age, even the truth needs to be on brand.
Never write for someone else. My love for writing and the way I keep a roof over my head shant cross paths again until I’ve gotten me a book deal big enough to send me somewhere warm for good. I had my suspicions that one would kill the other in such cruel reverse. Hell, in the half a year I worked down at that paper I don’t think I wrote more than half a page outside of my office. Now I know for sure and until that book deal nary the two shall meet.
That job paid okay. Enough so that I could tuck away a little nestegg and treat myself as if I were already a successful writer. Bonafide. So I did all the romantic things a writer does like stay out late all night chasing tail and then often winding up alone at twenty four hour diners. Falling for adventure wherever it presented itself. Yeah I did it all, just about everything but write.
It’s a common problem you know, when you’re working, you’re too damned exhausted to come home and write and when you’re unemployed there is just no fire under your ass. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t and you just oscillate between having a sore back and being a bum. Been doing it like that for at least a decade now. Lotta manuscripts, no books.
Last night out before work starts I catch a buzz but not too much because I am maturing. Still wake up three times that night in a cold sweat for fear that my alarm doesn’t go off in time and I lose this most needed new job. Then hit snooze three times in a row once it does.
So here I am, back in a kitchen, standing sullen when not vacant.
It took a few hours for it to really sink in that this was my life for the foreseeable future. But it sank in for sure around the same time the filet knife went into my left palm via my careless right. A blade so sharp it went in like my flesh was rotten pear. It slid out reflexively and I began to bleed like a stuck pig into all the steel inserts which fortunately, were stainless. I stood gazing upon the bloodstream in some monk-like trance while the other cook and waitress panicked on my behalf. I was having one of those lifeflash moments which culminated into a deep sense of self loathing and disappointment.
How in the sweet tea did I get back here I thought. Then I wondered what previous day dream had led to this injury and whether or not it was worth it, should it return to memory. A flat slap on the back from my fellow cook had me come to. Then I raced to the back kitchen where a waitress was frantically pulling down the first aid kit from the wall. It just took a bit of gauze and tape before I was back on the floor, chipper as a chipmunk.
I almost hit a mainline and for minimum wage.
There are some good things about working in a kitchen I suppose. I’m just a lot older now and don’t see things with the same rose-coloured eyes of my youth. But it’s honest work at least and I can’t find any dishonest work anyway. The people I work with are nice and that’s not nothing. The place is old school and I can’t complain about that. No computers or tablets, just pens and notepads and a number you can call for takeout. It’s a simple kitchen set up, only two of us in there and the menu is nothing but the classics.
It’s strictly a breakfast joint, the most eccentric thing you might cook is a side of french toast. The place has heritage too and I like that. Open almost seventy years and was once the regular breakfast spot of one Leonard Cohen. So in some sense, I retain a connection to my love for literature. I’d much rather be the guy that comes in for his daily breakfast before returning to his study than the guy making his eggs but for now such is life. Mr. Cohen is dead and I am not so I will attempt to keep my chin up while it’s still in my control.
The first job I had was filling up little cups of syrup which were broken up into two different trays of course, the real and the table. The real syrup is for those who dine in and the table is for those who dine out. It’s always in the first hour or two of any shift that you begin to learn any restaurant’s dirty little tricks. That job jogged my memory of a time when I worked at this pub grub place out east and one of my tasks was to take all the Heinz ketchup bottles that were getting low and bring them to the back to refill them with the No Name version. Or this deli joint I used to work in Winnipeg, “Remember,” said my manager on the first day, “If they’re eatin’ here always fresh bread, but if it’s take out use the day old shit.” I could go on but the commonality is already there.
And, at least here, I wouldn’t have to hide in the back storage room behind the boxes of plastic cutlery everytime some dumb dumb had a birthday. I used to work at a joint where we all had to come out and sing to them like we were in The Sound of Music. It didn’t take that manager long to find my hiding spot and come personally get me to acquire my joy for the occasion. And better yet still, here I didn’t have to wear a hairnet which I generally had to at a lot of places. One poutine place I worked in Montreal forced me to wear a beard net as well. There is no such thing made at the industrial level so you just wear an additional harinet strapped across the chops and you look like some confused beekeeper. And I didn’t have to show up fifteen minutes before each shift even though you don’t get paid for it like a lot of places. I didn’t have to wear a name tag or talk in some corporate language either. I remember slanging pizzas for this chain spot out in Vancouver and they’d correct you any time the manager Bill heard you use the word customer he’d say. “They are not our customers, they’re our guests.”
“Are we charging them for the food?” I barked back on behalf of the kitchen staff amid one massive dinner rush. In no mood for euphemism.
“Yes as matter of fact we do.” he replied.
“Then they are customers my dear friend Billy.” That was my last shift spinning dough.
So why complain? I can eat there for free and the food is good.
I just feel like I should be somewhere a little farther along the line by this point but for now it’s groundhog day, everyday, in snowy Montreal. The summer, just one long drunken bliss. I can hope this will be my last kick at the kitchen but I can’t say. The only thing I can count on for sure is that I can’t trust myself.