And then New Guy walks into the PK, asks Chef where the sugar is and Chef gives New Guy the new guy boilerplate, ‘Why don’t you try looking for it numb-nuts?’
Chef always acts like a hard-ass up front; he wants all front-of-house peoples unconsciously striving to please him by their second week. Which sucks for New Guy, because it is always, for unsolved reasons, impossible to find sugar in this restaurant. Plus, even Chef gets lost in here. It’s a 3,600 sq. ft. building with a foundation shaped like a field goal post; the basement housing the prep kitchen, keg cellar, office, liquor storage, restrooms, maintenance room, dry storage, three stairwells—everyone’s been lost in here at some point.
Stephanie rushes behind and beyond me to retrieve I don’t know what, it doesn’t matter, I don’t even see her, I can smell her, the sweet anise coming up under the thrust of air she has stirred.
‘Hi Olivia,’ she smiles, walking back with a stainless steel tub of dressings.
It’s almost impossible to escape the incestuous dramas that pervade restaurant employment. For thirteen years I prided myself on not being cast in them, through my hormonal raging teens and early twenties, through college and post-college loneliness. All streaks come to an end, I’m learning.
‘Ehem, h—ehem, heeey,’ all high-pitched. Fuck. I keep my head down on the spinning juicer. Some people, when they use your full name, you think: where? And others, you think: oh, you found me. Most people call me Liv.
‘Hey, Liv, can you grab me the leeks out of the walk-in?’
Yeah Chef.
Eh-hem. Take Chef there. He even has a wife, which you’d like to think is a nice solution to the sexual queries and quandaries that come up so quickly and often in this industry. You know, like detachment or maybe containment, is a better word, of all the hot molecule hormones grinding on everyone you work with.
Nope. Eh-hem. Being the wild and crazy kids they are, Chef and his wife invited the last head bartender to bed with them during an after hours whiskey session seven months ago and the residue of whatever happened that night is still wincingly (for you) apparent in their (Chef and his wife) tight lipped cheek kissing hellos.
‘Thanks, puss muffin,’ the hardened wax spirals of his mustache’s ends hop a little.
‘Welcome, dick brain.’
He says this kind of shit to all of the girls, lesbian or no.
When everyone here first found out I was gay, the kitchen guys, especially Steven, the sous-chef, like most people, I’ve found, said, but I don’t look like a lesbian. They giggled and nudged and asked what I thought about every female, celebrity and lay girl. Eh-hem, like I was going to leg sweep and scissor any chick that came within three feet, is what I told them. Idiots.
Eh-hem.
Sorry, I clear my throat a lot. Hem. I don’t mean anything by it. I don’t even know why. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. I also have this crazy tic thing with my elbow when I’m nervous or just generally uncomfortable where I do a like flap of what looks like the beginning and end of an unfinished Chicken Dance with my right elbow. The only time I’m nervous and not doing the tic is when my elbow is being borrowed by task.
I am juicing lemons with the force from my right elbow. Boonies’ owner wants everything fresh as far as cocktail ingredients, which is kind of hilarious considering. He started collecting Boone’s Farm bottles years ago with this restaurant in mind.
There is a stairwell direct from keg cellar to bar back, so I always check if any kegs need to be tapped on my way to set up the ba—
Stephanie is here, changing the soda lines. She looks like she’s having a hard time. She is saying ‘shit’ a lot.
‘Can you give me a hand, Olivia?’
‘Eh-hem, yeah.’
We are touching shoulders now. Her hands are on her hips looking down at my hands. My hands are on the mouth of the pneumatic soda feeding tube. I show her how to clamp and lock the plastic head of the tube to the nozzle of the syrup bag. She says, the smell is so strong, she says,
‘You want to go to Schlitzy’s after work, get really drunk? Throttled. Like, this-summer drunk.’
She’s talking about this summer, when the whole staff would go out after shift almost every night and get tanked. Also, when I started fantasizing about her. And as she may or may not remember, this is also when we made out once after I touched her calf tattoo and she thanked me for being the only ‘nice one’ to a newbie.
I smell her breath, which smells like breath, it’s impossible to describe any other way, ‘Eh-hem, yeah,’ and she smiles and walks back into the PK. I am no longer holding anything. I feel whatever sweat is before it’s sweat, hot, behind my face. I am a chicken.
Forty-three minutes until close, I’m behind the bar and climbing down the rungs of this ridiculous wooden wheel tracked ladder—the owner had a horizontal refrigerator installed twelve feet behind and above the bar to hold rarified/retired Boone’s bottles, just to make sure the irony hits everyone in the fucking face—with a bottle of ha fucking ha Tickle Pink in my right hand when Stephanie stabs her drink chit on the chit spear and, after Steven, retrieving water for the kitchen, brushes her, she makes a stupid sound for a giggle, pops her eyebrows and lines her forehead and says, ‘I might have to take a rain check on the night cap,’ and takes the beer I poured her to her table. I touch the floor and take my hand off the stringer and, eh-hem. I am lost.
