Here is a story of me getting yelled at by a man at one of the most popular restaurants in the city I lived in. But to tell that story, I have to kind of tell a bunch of other little stories that are kind of fucked up.
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But shit was out of control. We'd do meth and stay up for three days drawing on the walls of my apartment with permanent marker. The apartment was a flop house, there were five of us living in the two-bedroom one-bathroom, and we were, to a man, addicts.
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I figured I was doing all these drugs because I was filling a void. That's what they always say, right? You're filling a void. And I figured that void was boredom. Not a lot to do down in our valley that you don't buy from a shady guy in the trailer park, y'know what I mean?
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I decided to move to the city so I could quit injecting drugs and get real hobbies, and it worked for the most part, kind of, a little bit. Of course, the drinking got pretty out of control after that. A lot out of control actually. Completely out of control.
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I was carrying around a ball of trauma. Raped at a party. Long-term relationships ending without real emotional support. I was closeted as hell and miserable. And, this is important, I wasn't very cool.
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When you're in your twenties and you're cool, you're kind of allowed to be a fuck-up. Life's a little easier when you're thin and white and pretty and you have cool tattoos and you have an opinion about Steve Albini, especially in this hipster city.
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I was not cool. I am fat, I don't dress very cool, I watch anime, I am not cool at all. And I did not fit in very well at the Very Cool And Popular Restaurant I was hired at.
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I worked with insufferable people, mostly insufferable men, in the back of house. They were the kind of guys who behaved like they belonged in Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential, drunken assholes who think their drunken assholery is cool.
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Worse, if you'd said that to them they would have scoffed. They weren't going to be stuck in this kitchen forever, as soon as one of their mediocre garage bands got big they were gonna get a record deal and get out of here. (I'm sure.)
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Give a white boy an electric guitar and we just instantly think it's supposed to come with a spotlight. I have no idea why, it's just science or biology or something.
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Anyway, each of the Kitchen Guys was an asshole in his own way. Jack*, who got fired for calling a waiter a homophobic slur after spending a few months torturing me after I was hired. Mike*, who told me if I apologized to a waitress I'd made cry, he would fire me.
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Adam*, who was probably a serial sexual harasser and who knows how much worse, and the co-owner of the restaurant. And AJ*, who couldn't cook for shit, and had a hell of a temper. There were others, but those ones stick out in my mind as some of the worst offenders.
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(*Name's changed, obvs) This restaurant was fucking busy when I worked there. The food's not good, it's basically re-heated noodles with jar sauce, but it had to go out fast because the place was constantly slammed.
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We'd open in the evening to a line stretched around the block. For some reason, everyone wanted our shitty food and our shitty attitudes. It was "cool" to eat at our restaurant. The staff was abusive and we listened to metal. Suburbanites out for a Friday night meal loved it.
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For some reason there was this period of time where people just thought it was great that cooks were abusive assholes. I mostly blame Bourdain, but this restaurant would have likely had this problem anyway.
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Once upon a time, before Adam had become the co-owner, there'd been an owner named Jim* who got a little out of control on the drugs and alcohol, a lot out of control actually, to the point where they had a restraining order to keep him out of his own restaurant.
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Jim would come in, get into fights, get drunk, take booze out onto the streets to keep drinking, do some crack, you know, whatever. Doesn't excuse the cops busting his head open one night when they threw him in a cell and killing him, but nothing would.
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But that was the kind of culture at this restaurant. The only cool points I scored were from my track marks and the story of the time everybody fell out one after another in my apartment. They liked that about me. My needle use was "cool".
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We had a full kitchen, a lot of stations, and each one was busy in their own way. Two dishwashers manned the pit, one feeding racks of dishes into the machine constantly, the other running clean plates to the line, clean glasses to the floor.
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Next was my habitual position, pantry, where salads were made, tickets were grabbed and put up for their stations on the line. Pantry was mac's expo, and mac was next on the line, taking care of a dozen jet-engine hot burners and sending out bowls of pasta.
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After that, another expo station, middle, for another burner station, saute. And finally, on Friday and Saturday nights, one more kitchen employee whose job it was to simply move from one station to the next in fifteen minute increments and break out each worker in turn.
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(Because otherwise, believe me, there wasn't going to be any breaks.) Most nights, we'd get blow, or booze, or both, and stay late in the basement drinking and talking shit but I hesitate to say any of us actually liked each other, or at least that I liked any of them, esp AJ.
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AJ felt safest in the pantry position but he didn't want to stay there, he wanted the raise that came from being a mac cook. And since AJ was popular, AJ got moved up. And since I was a good pantry, I had to be his pantry. And that, my friends, is where things got rough.
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It must have been a Wednesday or a Thursday or something the first night AJ and I had to work together. He was too new and too inexperienced to work mac for a Fraturday as we called it, our two busiest and longest shifts of the week. But the rest of the week is deceptive.
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You think it should be slow, or at least manageable, but sometimes things happen, rushes happen, customers pour in, the tickets come rolling in, and your cook gets stuck in the weeds. It happens.
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The real test of a line cook is not how well they cook or how fast they cook. The real test of a line cook is how they handle the weeds, when the tickets are a solid line across your station and every burner is full and more tickets are coming in and you're FUCKED.
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The cook who can look at that, keep their head, break up the tickets into manageable portions, and power through? That's the cook you wanna keep. The guy who doesn't lose it when things seem fuckin' lost. You want the guy who, when he finds himself in the weeds, doesn't get stuck
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That night, the tickets started rolling in, and mac musta been the prom queen, because everybody wanted to fuck him. Everybody wanted macaroni that night. We were like eighteen tickets deep and they were still coming.
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