I woke up the next morning, had that immediate familiar feeling: I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK.
But of course I did, I got on the streetcar and rode it on downtown as usual. Once again the surly black dishwasher, the saboteur who hated white folks, got on board, looked over at me and sneered.
I got into Caligula’s, put on my white cook’s jacket, went out with my pen and notepad to the courtyard and took a seat at a table. I looked around–to my dismay I saw that I was to be the only production cook working that morning, yet again.
The meeting began. “Gonna be a busy lunch today,” said Efraim. And he talked to all the cooks about what would be expected of them.
“Bob, for you, roast bones, smoke ribs, chop up a mire poix for turtle prep, retrieve pork skins, poach eggs…” The usual litany of shit. Even more bones than usual, something like six hundred pounds.
I went into the production room and began draining the stocks. All those hundreds of pounds of sodden animal bones and boiled vegetables to be sieved out and bagged up and dragged to the garbage. I seemed to be working in slow motion. I couldn’t help it. The usual HURRY HURRY HURRY just wasn’t in me, it was like trying to run through water…
Because Stewart had been fired the day before they had Tony in to work his station. Tony came back to the production room. I looked at him wearily.
“Bob, c’mere a minute.” He showed me into the production cooler. We stood there out of earshot of all the other cooks. Tony was holding onto a clipboard full of papers, looking down at them.
“Today for Help meal you’re gonna make chicken etoufee. You’re gonna need to cut up a whole bunch of celery and onion and peppers–all of it small dice–and then grind up a bunch of garlic. Saute the garlic first, make sure you don’t scorch it, then add the veggies. We’ve got all this chicken here, fifty pounds worth, you throw that in, brown it off. Add your chicken stock, bring it to a boil, then add your roux. Make sure you pare all the skin off this chicken in here before you throw it in, okay? Then you make up a nice batch of rice. Got it?”
I just looked at him, outraged. All this would take a considerable amount of time for one man to do; he had to know that. Plus I had all my other duties, all those bones I had to take down from the meat cutter and start roasting. I’d have to get the brazier started for the egg poaching. I’d have to get out all those cases of eggs from the cooler to be poached. Not to mention the mire poix and the this, that and the other…
“Look, Bob, we’ve got a lot of production staff now.”
“I know!” I said. “They had five people working production last night! And today I’m supposed to do all this shit by myself?”
Tony ignored me. “You know what those kind of staff numbers mean, don’t you?”
That confused me. What did it mean? It meant the sonsofbitches were hanging me out to dry, that’s all I could think.
“What it means,” Tony said slowly, looking me in the eye, “is that we’ve got too many production people working now. Understand? You’re gonna have to prove yourself, make yourself stand out from now on. All right?”
Prove myself? Stand out? Did that mean things were going to get worse? Yes, that seemed a fair assumption. It would be a competition now. I would be competing against culinary school grads and veteran cooks.
So the dirty backhanded motherfuckers were trying to get rid of me! Tony, my supposed supporter, my champion, was sliding the knife blade deftly between my shoulder blades, so deftly I could barely feel it. I was too tired to feel it. I just stood there dumbstruck, taking it in.
“Yeh,” was all I could manage.
“Okay, get started.”
I stepped out of the cooler and forced myself to break out of the slow motion drag I was in, running now HURRY HURRY HURRY to get upstairs to get the bones and start on those before I’d have to slog through that blasted Help meal.
The dirty motherfucking bastards! I won’t let them fire me! I’ll show them! I’m too good for them! How dare they!
I ran into the meat cutter’s cooler, hauled out the hundreds of pounds of boxes of bones. Paul, the meat cutter, was there to sneer at me as usual. Paul, like most meat-cutters everywhere, was slightly insane, or at least he cultivated that image. He sneered at me most every morning with his half-insane meat-cutter’s glaring eyes as I rushed into his little frigid work room in my beginning stages of panic and hauled out boxes while his knives and meat grinders and industrial buzz-saws whipped around my ears.
I hauled the boxes out and over to the elevator HURRY HURRY HURRY. I pressed the button for the elevator but it wouldn’t come. Somebody had it stuck on one of the other floors.
I won’t be fired! HURRY HURRY HURRY…
I rushed upstairs to the attic–no elevator. I rushed downstairs two flights to the kitchen–no elevator. That meant it was in the little closet aerie stockroom where John, peaceful John, liked to sleep and peep at the big titty girls and beat off. I would need a sous chef’s key to open it. But I couldn’t bear to look Tony or Efraim in the eye just then, those bastards, I was too outraged at everything.
I looked around. Maybe if I pressed the button again the elevator would come? I rushed upstairs back to my cases of dead animal bones and pressed for the elevator. Still, it wouldn’t come. I pressed the button again and again and again. Godammit, I needed that elevator! HURRY HURRY HURRY!
Then like a sledgehammer the realization hit me: I am going to hurt myself today. Today is the day I break an ankle or a leg. Today is the day I stick my hand in a blender or a meat slicer. Today is the day I spill boiling beef fat all down one side of my body, starting with my useless head. Today is the day I cut off my thumb, set my paper hat on fire, get my ass stuck in a cheese grater. Today is the day I see the inside of the Charity Hospital emergency room for the second time in less than six months. Something bad was going to happen. I knew it. I felt it way down deep in the core of whatever was left of my soul.
It was time to say enough.
I left the bones where they were. Let them rot. Let Paul, crazy Paul, carry them down, the sneering meat-cutting bastard.
I walked–slowly this time, perhaps for the only time–down the kitchen stairs and into the kitchen. I walked slowly past everyone as they hurried about their business and then slowly on into the production room. One of the bakers was in there whipping up a sauce of some kind.
“Dude, you gonna be here? I need you to keep an eye on this.”
Another impossibility on top of all the other impossibilities.
“No, man,” I said, slowly packing up my knives, stowing them in my knapsack and throwing the knapsack over my shoulder.
“You going home?” he asked incredulously.
“Take care of yourself,” I said.
I walked down into the kitchen. A few of the cooks spotted me. They sensed catastrophe in the air and shied away from me, like nervous horses.
Here came Tony striding along. He smiled when he saw me; then he saw the knapsack and uncertainty came into his eyes.
“Bob, what the–?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Tony, I’m no good at this sort of thing. You have my resignation.”
“But–Bob? Why?”
“I’m not cut out for this shit.” I started to walk past him.
“Aw, Bob! Bob!” He put his hand on my shoulder, started massaging my neck. The other cooks nervously watched the spectacle unfold.
“Be mad at me if you want to, Tony. Be as mad as you want to be.”
“Aw, I’m not mad, Bob! Aw, Bob! Hey, Efraim! Bob says he’s quitting!”
Efraim looked up, unconcerned. “Ummm…OKAY!” he chirped, then went right back to what he was doing.
“I’ll send y’all a Christmas card!” I said and walked out.
I changed out of my clothes and punched the time clock. On my way through the side gate I saw the white-hating dishwasher, the whistler, the saboteur, standing by the sidewalk with a pressure hose in his hand as he hosed down the sidewalk. He spotted me walking out, didn’t know quite what to make of it. But he couldn’t in all good conscience let me go without stopping and asking me.
“Say, brah,” he said, addressing me for the first time ever in my Caligula’s career. “You leaving, brah?”
“Yeah, I quit,” I said.
A look of triumph spread slowly across his face. He laughed a good hearty laugh.
Sabotage!
THE WHITE MAN HAD FAILED!
