Hatched (25 page)

Those were the only stains upon this sterile floor, the gusts of blood, sometimes tinged with flakes of skin or scabs, that Johnny inadvertently let fly when his efforts forced expulsion from his sculpted lips. Oh, Johnny!

Chapter 20

Boris suddenly burst into the Yolk, awkwardly stumbled towards the walk-in, and a few short moments later emerged with a tub of lobsters. He placed it right behind him, to the right of the pot-scrubbing station, so that during the inevitable Saturday-night rush he would be able to just reach in and grab the next victim to boil, stab, and then pry open for its slimy, bright-green eggs.

“Boris!” called Nate from across the Yolk. He had finished placing all the eggs in their stainless-steel holders and was now preparing to man his station for the evening, bringing forth the food he’d prepped and arranging desserts he’d half prepared so that the final touches could be added when need be. “Boris! How does the locker room look?”

Boris was a large, gruff, forty-year-old chef who, all those years ago, had trained at the Culinary Institute of America, after dropping out, or perhaps being kicked out of Bard College, for rampant pot smoking and, more problematically, selling marijuana and ’shrooms. He had learned, from the almost superhuman consumption and then preparation of munchies-satiating food, how to make really good comfort food for the really, really hungry. As such, he was well-suited to a range of New York restaurants that needed his bull-like ability to produce at “crunch-time” the quantities of food that rush-style evenings required.

John knew all this, but he also knew that Boris couldn’t be counted on to prepare delicate or fastidious foods, and so he put him to work on evenings like this one, when rapid steaming, dissecting, and cutting of lobsters, in whatever form they needed to be arranged, was of the essence. Boris wasn’t witty, he wasn’t smart, he wasn’t careful, and he wasn’t subtle. But sometimes his gruff rapidity was what the wealthy and often geriatric clients of Fabergé Restaurant really wanted, so as to be able to shed some of their unearned wealth.

“Locker room?” Boris, after thinking for a few minutes, had no idea what Nate, who was always so strange, was talking about. He did try to decrypt his meaning, though, so as not to feel the idiot that Nate could make people feel, particularly since he was to be working with Jessica, whom he knew he would someday lure into his lascivious bed for many ravishment.

“You have some of my first-stringers, B!” called Nate, approaching the pot-scrubbing area of the kitchen. He peered down into the basin of insect-like critters whose lives were, he reflected, quite literally at stake, and about to be staked and, in the surf-and-turf dishes, near steak. He made a mental note of this, to mention to Jessica later on. As he stared into the essence of the lobster basin the lobsters, still frisky and not yet depleted by the heat and deoxygenation of their water that would inevitably set in by the latter part of the shift, seemed to raise their claws in salute. They even clicked together their vice-like appendages, grasping at the air above their basin.

“Ah, Boris, true to yourself, you tender-hearted bastard!” Jessica looked over at the object of Nate’s attention. Boris had removed the elastic bands that protect the chefs’ fingers from their iron grip.

“Boris!” blurted Jessica, inadvertently.

“Jess, they are given two chances, the lucky scavengers o’ the seas! Leap! Hop! Extend! Win! And you will receive that shiny golden medal we call LIFE.” Boris looked at Nate with as much bewilderment as Jessica did with comprehension. Jessica, ever the angelical purveyor of sacred knowledge, turned to Boris.

“Nate’s Lobster Olympics are held this week.”

“Every week!” corrected Nate. “I’m preparing them for glory, all of them!”

“Every week.”

“And tonight’s team, Boris, fared well, but, well, not well enough! I freed every one of them who won gold medals, even those who tied for first place!”

Boris was catching on; he had heard about Fabergé Restaurant’s antics from those employees who, out of both belligerence and envy, found endless reasons to critique this strange establishment from the warm security of those places that stuck to more standard fare.

“Well, we’ll see if there’s any talent for resistance to me!” Boris eyed Jessica. She certainly had that talent, in spades, as regards Boris.

This game, far more amateur and unimaginative than Nate’s, nonetheless helped that clock that seemed on most nights to be bathed in molasses to move more quickly. All of the members of the kitchen staff were caught up in the action, anxious to see if any lobster would be wily enough to grab hold of the hand that cooks it.

“Remind me not to help you out with the lobster rush tonight,” said Nate, directing his remark to both belittle Boris and defuse whatever admiration Jessica might have for this approach to liberating the worthy.

Boris took his towel and wiped his cheeks and the areas around his eyes. He was already wet with the perspiration that his hefty frame brought forth with even mild exertion. Boris had earned each one of this 260 pounds with the rich foods that he not only prepared, but gleefully consumed prior to, during, and after each shift. The fact that he pinch-hits in multiple establishments around town only aggravated that problem, rendering him far more unattractive than his ego permitted him to think.

Suddenly, through the server entrance across the kitchen, John entered the Yolk. He looked over the station that he had occupied for so many years, for virtually his entire life, and there he saw but the obese, obsequious man that he had hired to fill in for him. It was hard to understand why John now directed his talents to the Hobart washing station given his long and glorious career as a chef. “Boris!” he called out, with a rather sardonic grin. Boris stood at attention and dropped his pretensions of glory, of whatever sort might occupy him in his quest for what lay within the chef’s clothing that adorned Jessica’s beautiful body.

“John!”

“Boris, this is a big night, and we can’t afford the inspector’s write-up. We’re serving it all tonight, Boris, and they’ll be here to taste it!”

John seemed to have nothing but scorn for his clients. He once read that Enrico Ferrari likewise treated his customers with scorn. It was true that Ferrari aficionados have to reach deep into their plunging pockets in order to buy one of the miraculous red vehicles that Enrico fashioned. But it was also true that Enrico’s passion was for racing, and not for watching wealthy clients drive racing machines on roads that held back the stallion that is Ferrari’s symbol. Perhaps for this reason, Ferrari carefully cultivated relationships with the drivers of his glorious race team but refused, with a kind of scorn, to have any part in the retail business of selling cars to the “non-meritare,” the undeserving, the rich fools that kept his passions alive. John went a step further, though, feeling a sense of condescension towards his clients and towards pinch-hitters like Boris, pure hatred. His communication with this boor was now over for the night, and forever.

John turned towards Jessica, who stood between Johnny, Boris, and Nate, awaiting whatever was to happen tonight.

“Jessica, garnish for Boris tonight!”

This command represented a not-so-secret coded message that meant: “Jessica, please see to it that Boris’s plates look okay before they are sold to the servers.” The servers were supposed to perform that final act of garnishing with parsley or, depending on the dish, some kind of egg. So with a small amount of thought, Boris would have known that he was going to be surveyed, and not admired, by Jessica. The message here was one of disgust towards having to deal at all with Boris, but complete faith that the products of a pathetic man’s labor would be salvaged by the gentle intervention of Jessica.

But the backstory here was even more complex. John delegated surveillance of the final products that left his kitchen to Jessica or Nicky or, when neither of them was present, Nate, whom he could trust. Even when it was he himself who had occupied the place of culinary honor behind the sauté station, his rightful throne, he would turn to Jessica when he felt, that is to say knew, that the dish being handed over the steel barrier towards the servers was ill-prepared. He could spot an error in his recipes from a mile away, but it was in just such surveillance that he had almost lost his job of almost twenty-five years at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, where he had received almost all of his training. He had worked in the central kitchen at the Ritz beginning at the ripe, old age of fourteen, and his obvious skill and devotion led to his being named executive chef at the young age of thirty-six. He occupied that post for seven years, before opening up his first restaurant in Cape Cod, and then, five years later, New York.

There was a food surveyor who had been hired by the Boston Ritz who was paid a portion of tips from all the servers. He was charged with quality control, since he had previously worked—but not worked out—as a sous chef, and he had this not-so-glorious but nonetheless lucrative position, because he had married into the family that managed the hotel. This quality-control guy, with the rather unfortunate but probably fitting name of Harold, had married a member of this rather royal institution, a rather unattractive Italian American, in order to stay in the job and, moreover, in the building that was named “Ritz.”

Harold had also had his fair share of extra-marital affairs, especially with the cleaning staff. Because of the regularity of his straying, and the special efforts he had to exert to lure staff underlings into his bed, he started suffering pecuniary consequences, particularly when Bérenice, an au pair turned Ritz employee, had seduced him and then had extorted growing sums for her sexual favors. In order to compensate for his lusty losses, he decided to extort a growing proportion of tips from the servers, and when he didn’t receive them, he’d have them wait, unduly, while he passed his eye over other plates destined for their clients, which had the effect of both delaying timely delivery of the food and chilling the entrées, two kisses of death in US restaurants.

In order to get back at him for this deviance, John was informed of a plan to get back at Harold by tainting his food with laxative. He had gone along with the plan, knowing that the entire kitchen was in turmoil on account of these delays. What he didn’t know was that Roger, the seemingly quiet and conservative busboy who had been charged with picking up the laxative that John was to insert into the daily meal of the inspector, had bought an animal laxative, not from a drug store, but from a farm-supplies store. And it wasn’t just any laxative; it was a large-animal laxative, used for everything from bovines to elephants, such that when the inevitable cramps began, causing restrained laughter throughout the kitchen staff as they watched the full-of-himself inspector take to the door of the kitchen, the effects went far beyond copious and watery feces.

Poor Harold took so ill that he ran to the Boylston subway station in order to head home, hoping to suffer the embarrassment of dramatic cramps in secret. Once the doors shut, between Boylston and Haymarket, his intestines virtually exploded, and before the ambulance was even dispatched, this Harold, a one-time sous chef and now hated inspector, lay dead on the seat of his subway car, glued to the very backrest of his chair by a virtual mountain of shit. It was ever since that day that John, who narrowly escaped prosecution, and only because of the solidarity of the kitchen staff, refused to engage in the inspection of food, at least visibly. And he also maintained not just a tight ship, but a kind of family tie with his employees.

“Shit,” said Boris, as he considered that he was to be babysat, rather than admired, by gorgeous Jessica.

I was feeling bloated that night, filled, overfilled, strangely anxious and trembling. It was as though my entire being was coming into itself, transforming itself into a giant sentiment of existence beyond the shell that confined me here. Where will this lead me? When can I break out? And where shall I go when I do?

Chapter 21

The night began slowly, as Saturdays were wont to do, and Tina fussed even more than usual with the preparations for the onslaught. There was a new Peter Carl Fabergé creation that John had placed on the entrance table to the dining room in celebration of his accomplishment, the completion of that fateful collection of trinkets. And one of the servers, a rather pitiable woman named Sarah, was late. She had been up half the night throwing up the remnants of a birthday party that her friend had arranged in the Bronx, a disgusting process that began on the endless subway drive back home to Brooklyn.

Tina was dealing with more than just the usual preparations, staffing issues, and set-up. There was something ominous going on that evening. She had overheard some of Doris’s pronouncements earlier in the day, and she knew that the situation, always dire, was ominous, and that the evening may have been ill-omened. Normally, on Saturday night, there were already boxes of those ‘disposable’ or not perishable goods that could be bought and prepared in advance. Tonight, there were no such luxuries, and for some reason, known to him but not divulged to others, John had gone all-out in the perishable goods, buying every one of the expensive specialties that Fabergé Restaurant ever offered in preparation for an evening that seemed appropriate for, what, a royal wedding? He must have known far more than he was revealing—as usual—and Tina would make the dining room perfect, under the false pretense that the clients, either untrained in the art of proper eating, overly drunk, or some combination of both, would notice. “Thank goodness,” she thought, “for the fictitious figure of the inspector.”

Elizabeth was in and out of the dining room, as usual on the nights that were destined to be really busy. She was a person who knew on which side of the toast the butter went, and Tina respected her for it. She was young, she was exceptionally buxom, and she probably knew, thought Tina, that both of those diseases are fatal, that is, both of those benefits are short-lived. “Make hay, and, well, roll around in it, and all that stuff,” thought Tina.