Po Boy views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Sauced Kitchens
Or
When A Pistol Appears
“Welcome
to Green Gables Country Club; your home away from home for the summer season. We’ve
seen to every detail regarding your comfort and convenience; the swimming pool
is out to your left; tennis courts to the right; our golf pro will handle all
your tee times and there’s card rooms and private dining suites just up the
grand staircase. The cigar bar is toward the rear past the conference rooms. Breakfast
buffet, lunch and dinner will be served in the main dining room; our menu will
apprise you that should you wish anything that’s not listed; our culinary staff
will happily prepare anything that
you wish. Please refrain from entering the kitchen, the Chef is a maniac and
might kill you just for kicks and grins--- his words not mine.”
Here’s
where I come in. I’m youngish, a mere thirty, I cook in this kitchen of
culinary cut throats, pyrotechnical pirates and mainstream misfits; we feed
these privileged, pampered, perfumed and pomaded persons. We don’t hate them,
they are our charges, the people that we play like marionettes who strut and
fret their hour upon our stage. We’re
the inner workings, we’re what goes on;
what do they know? They know nothing.
John
Borg Jr. is the chef in the kitchen, his genre is controlled chaos; his crew is
his accomplices. He is the gang leader; we’re his gang. We’re forced to listen
to his favorite music at all times: either the Rolling Stones or Beethoven, on
an old record player. We work 12-14 hours a day, eat on the run and drink from
a keg of beer (PBR) in the walk-in refrigerator. The universe revolves around
us. We rarely are given days off. It’s worth it. We serve at the behest of a
gourmet god; Borg and our kitchen is our world, we’re defined by our work, we’d
do this for nothing.
Mom
(aka Wayne Dunstin) works the cold station; he is responsible for getting us to
and from work in whatever condition we happen to be in. Andy, son of a well to
do family and an alcoholic misfit is my wing man and I’m the sauté spider
monkey. We have (female) dishwashers with loose morals and a pearl diver (pot
sink) named Domino Floater who comes to work in his pajamas and a silk baseball
cap, his favorite thing to do is tell the waitresses that pass by his station
what great breasts they have.
We work and drink until we’re tired and then
we work and drink some more. When we get off work we go out to bars and drink
some more; it’s not unusual for Borg to challenge an entire bar’s customers to a brawl, he’s that kind of guy. My woman and child have left me and I spend a
lot of time sleeping in my car with my Chesapeake Bay retriever Saffron. I
don’t care; I work in the presence of genius. I am totally wet brained; running
on impulse; learning.
Borg
smokes pot from a corn cob pipe in the kitchen, sometimes he uses the trashcan
as a urinal, he packs his nose in the office (although we don’t learn about
that until later), he has a library of 10,000 cookbooks; he knows everything
and he force feeds us information that we sponge like dehydrated desert rats.
True story.
One
week we tunnel bone 200 Rock Cornish hens for a Jewish wedding, we make a
Perigord sauce from the bones and Borg throws me a copy of Escoffier and
commands me to read the section on clarifying stocks. The Day arrives and the
kitchen stands at attention waiting for commands. Borg jumps up on a prep table
and puts on an LP of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, directing the kitchen as
though it’s an orchestra and that’s how we perform. After the meal we’re (the
entire kitchen) marched out into the dining room to a standing ovation. I
decide to become a Chef that day. Borg stands with his arms outstretched, head
bent, as if on a crucifix and we see him as our messiah. That was forty-five years
ago.
To
this day after recalling my actions and attitudes, I can’t help but wonder why
I thought that this was a normal working environment, but it was and in a lot
of places still is. I’m amazed that I went through that tunnel and managed to
come out the other side as sane as I am.
Sometimes
we would catch an afternoon break, pile into Mom’s station wagon (He called it
‘The American Dream’) buzz to his house with beers and po-boys, watch Star Trek and see if we could guess who
was gonna get laid in that episode.
I
fell in love with a little red head girl who worked in a hospital pharmacy and
would sometimes bring her work home with her; she and her friends had come to
town from Martha’s Vineyard just for a lark, they were friends of Carly and
James and them folk.
I
had a summer adventure that I still haven’t recovered from; Andy went back to
his family; Mom died of cirrhosis; Borg forged ahead of us all and got clean
and sober, but never sane. I woke up one September morning and discovered snow
on the ground, put in my notice and drove back to New Orleans.
Much
as I cherish Anthony Bourdain, I must say, when I picked up Kitchen
Confidential, I only got to page fourteen. My thought was: “been there, done
that”. Anyone that’s worked in the old kitchens knows that that’s the way
things were--- normally; there was
not a shred more sanity in the front of the house either. To paraphrase the
Hatter: “Alice, we’re all mad here”.
That
was then and this is now; we wouldn’t get away with that sort of stuff today, or
want to, thank goodness...Would we?
