Finale!

That day’s service carved itself into my brain like drunken teenage lovers etching their initials with a pen knife in tree bark, illustrated like the perfect how to manual on self discovery. All of a sudden, I meant something. I had purpose. I could be taken seriously. A possible career on the horizon. Forget all the people out there in their silly office jobs or whatever the hell else they all did. To me, this was the best thing ever. 

Over on the other side of the pizza station sat a large piece of rectangular soapstone, maybe three feet by four feet across. Here Kevin showed me how to roll the dough out with a pin, shape it into a round disk and place onto a wooden pizza peel sprinkled with corn meal so the the pizza would slide right off into the oven. What a marvel to think of this. My mind reeled. Once the pizza was on the peel we applied the sauce, followed by, Kevin’s secret maneuver, a generous handful of grated Parmesan Reggiano cheese, something Kevin had shown me how to prep back in the dishwashing days. In fact, most of the ingredients that went into the pizza I had prepped in some way or another on my way up and out of the dish pit. This meant everything. I now saw where it all came together. Food was not just something to play around with, it was essential to life, to survival. Only one way out existed to eradicate hunger, to eat. Everything else paled in comparison. Every other craft. This is why the importance of knowing how to cook was an intricate part of life. Variety mattered. The human brain needed new things, new experiences in order to stay fresh, for life to remain vibrant. And what remained in life more diverse and important than food? The driving force of our energy and nutrition. Each culture had its own, which borrowed from another source and so on and so forth throughout history. Each flavor had its own levels, ranges of intensity, and there were things like spices, herbs, zillions of combinations, the dimensions of spicy food from the humble poblano to the jalapeño to the serrano to the habanero and then into the stratosphere with the ghost chili and the other ones that made you breathe fire from your ass and sweat like a whore in church. Endless relationships between ingredients where some worked like magic and others simply failed for no reason. The mystery of the mouth, the taste bud. People’s particular inclinations were decided early on in their youth, maybe even when they were given sustenance from their mothers in the womb. Flavors. Four, five, possibly six of them, maybe more to be discovered. The depths endless. Entire universes to be explored. From one wormhole to another. Simple stuff any jerk could pull off to the most complex and ridiculous that only a chosen few in the world could put together. 

A little white ticket came through a machine which clicked and whirred as the mechanism inside cut the “dupe” as Kevin called it. He placed it up inside a long rack containing marbles holding in place. Once you rolled out the dough and applied the sauce and cheese, the only chore left was to follow the instructions on the ticket for the rest of the ingredients. Extra slices of mozzarella cheese and some sausage, pepperoni, caramelized onions, whatever. 

The way the waitresses treated me now was another new development. Kevin explained. 

“They’re trying to get into your good graces, butter you up, so they can get away with murder.”

I had no idea what his statement meant. I enjoyed flirting with them. They cut bread at the station across from my own, slicing while bending toward me in their low cut blouses while maintaining eye contact with me. It infuriated Kevin. He knew the whole act. As soon as I peeked out from under the shadow of his wing, the instant he stepped away, they used every technique in the book to acquire free food which he felt upset his food cost. He hated them all. On the pizza station that day his anger and insanity was cranked to new levels. The lunch service, stressful and jam packed with diners, gave Kevin the license to curse at every dupe and admonish the waitstaff for the slightest or even imaginary discretions, a hellish clusterfuck that saw the managers coming out of the woodwork to soothe him, customers looking over from their tables to see what all the commotion was about, Adam and Teddy embarrassed, frustrated by the whole situation. Me, well, I just stood and watched. I did what I could but was still too green and under Kevin’s thumb to really do anything. He brought me out of the pit and for that I was grateful for him, this twisted master of my destiny. He now held a certain power over me absent with the others because they had been hired as cooks. He had brought me up out of the abyss and for that I had become his bitch. 

This went on for some time. I won’t bother you with the rest of my year long tenure there, it’s really more of the same. The whole point of this rather long winded story is that I needed discipline at that point in my life and found it. Without it, I was lost. My generation was the first to be without a draft and in the absence of proper discipline in my early life, I never matured. 

At Sweet Tomatoes the flames worked for me, not against me. It is no coincidence that I found my way down into that basement, in front of the wood fired oven. Each day I got up early, walked down there, punched in and before I changed into my chef’s garb got the fire started, pulled the heavy iron grate off the front of the oven, started with bunched up newspaper, then built a little fort on top with splinters and kindling, some bark scraps, then smaller logs and finally the big ones. I would start it all with a single flick of my lighter, watch as the flame caught on the inky paper and grew up into the scrappy pieces, take them on, engulf them, continue to grow, lick up into the bigger pieces, the bottom now sagging, collapsing into itself, the yellow and orange growing ever larger until the big logs placed atop the pile had no choice except to relent and give themselves over to their destiny, what they were intended for, to cook pizza, and before it all got too out of hand as I watched, I used the tool to push the whole flaming mess into the back of the oven where I would continue to watch as it began to really take hold, to roar, to engulf the entire backside of the brick lined dome, the flames curling and dancing angrily to the top, a demon that lived purely for the fuel it consumed and nothing more, a spark that once fed, would grow and devour the world if allowed to. 

As I look back at my time spent in kitchens, I realize they gave me a plethora of great attributes, mainly passion, discipline, and pride. It changed everything for me, well, until the magic wore off. One day, about fifteen years after being in kitchens, after becoming a chef myself, I walked away, and then many years later regretted this impulse. I went for the instant gratification and then found myself at the ass end of all my life’s bad decisions.

At Sweet Tomatoes, the management ended up shitcanning Kevin for throwing an insane temper tantrum during service. Someone had “accidentally” switched the lids on the salt and sugar bins and Kevin had poured a giant cup of sugar into one of his finished stocks, tasted it, and then blown a fuse. He hoisted both buckets over his head and launched them from the kitchen into the dining room. Quite a feat considering the size of the buckets and their weight. Pure rage in its finest form. The veins standing out, his face red like a boiled lobster. I saw the first bucket fly by the pizza station and then looked and saw the second go even further. Hitting the floor and spilling their contents. The sugar not as destructive as the flour which puffed out an enormous, glutenous cloud which spread everywhere and took a combined staff effort to clean. The silverware quit clinking and a hush went through the dining room. Heads turned. Kevin looked like Lucifer himself as he came exploding out of the kitchen and onto the line. I turned away from his gaze. Teddy and Adam did likewise. We bent to our work, our orders, as he let loose a stream of profanities. I watched the surprised faces of the crowd as they soaked it all in. This was a lunch for the ages, they’d go back to work or home with one hell of a tale. 

“Who the fuck changed the lids back there?” Kevin said. I looked from the corner of my eye and could swear I saw steam shooting out of his beet red ears. The General Manager, an older, taciturn woman named Marjie came over to confront him. 

“Kevin,” she said “You need to calm down.”

He turned on her.

“You,” he said. “Fuck. You.” He stood over her and pointed a finger in her face. The sweat trickling down his forehead, streaming off the tip of his nose, eyes blazing. His face an inch away from hers. She kept her cool and stared him right back. 

“Kevin,” she said, and puffed herself up as she stared into the abyss of madness. She took a breath, about to give him the what for, but instead turned away and sighed, refusing to give him the gratification. Smart. I knew then and there he was toast. Marjie was not to be tangled with. He may have survived his initial temper tantrum but not screaming in her face. The next day he vanished and Bunzer had replaced him, this of course created a swirling rumor regarding who exactly had switched the tops on the salt and sugar bins. We all knew Bunzer’s reputation, that of a prankster. He performed all sorts of tricks, mostly on the waitstaff who he hated as much if not more than Kevin. The two were good friends. Chef and sous. So I thought the rumor bogus. Still, it may have been a harmless prank that had turned into something magnificent. 

My own tenure at Sweet Tomatoes ended rather abruptly when friends of mine invited me to live with them down in Tallahassee, Florida. I had turned 21 and wanted to escape the Vermont winters. Like any stupid idea, it seemed like a good idea at the time.