Sundays always meant working with the grill cook Andrew. Andrew was 24 and grew up in Warren. Unlike half the people who went to Warren, he graduated. He went to business school after high school but dropped out. Later he got in a car wreck, was sued, and owed over 20 thousand dollars. He was the best cook we had and he never let us forget it. He always talked about how other people couldn't hack it, how they couldn't hang, how basically everyone sucked but him. Besides being a good cook he was also a good rapper. He didn't aspire to be famous. Sometimes he would daydream about it. But he didn't tell anyone he was going to be famous and didn't have bitches hanging off of both arms or anything like that. He would make his songs at his friend's house and put them on MySpace. Every time he made a new song he would tell everyone to listen to it, and we all would. He had a soft yet tough voice and he could rap with emotion. The songs were typical of 2008 rap. It had themes about money, girls, and nice things, which he had none of; but you could tell it made him happy to do it. I liked that very much, there were a lot of people I worked with that didn't do anything to make themselves happy but smoke weed and drink. And he had found an outlet for his emotions, which led to him having the confidence to be a better cook and do less drugs and drinking.
Andrew had it bad, though. His mother was a heroin junky and he had no father. He would sometimes describe, without showing emotion, how his mother would shoot up in front of him. How his mother would have huge abscesses where she plunged the needle into her body. Everyone would stare with pained faces while he would tell us these stories. It wasn't the stories exactly; it was the way he said it, like it seemed normal. Like it was normal for a mother to shoot heroin in front of her son. No one had the heart to tell him that it wasn't normal. Even though we all wanted to, no one gave him a hug.
You got the sense that he wanted to be black. A lot of white people had that from the Youngstown and Warren ghettos. A lot of white people — much more than the media shows — grew up in the world of poor black people. The poor black kids had outlets in the media to represent them: musicians, movie stars, sitcoms and politicians. But poor white people weren't represented in the media except maybe the trailer park hicks. But white kids from the ghetto couldn't look up to them. So Andrew looked up to the rappers, and what the rappers exude were the anger and wants of the poor people of the ghetto. Andrew was poor and he would probably die poor. But he was nice and a good worker.
My job that day was to do expo. Expo really wasn't cooking. Andrew, the grill man, cooked all the steaks and chicken. The only things I cooked were mushrooms and onions. The first thing I did was stock my area. It was important to have a stocked area. The managers didn't care if anyone stocked. They barely ever went near us unless something went wrong. We stocked our areas because it made things easier for ourselves.
There was a rush for a while. I had to hurry around putting the plates in the pass-window, throwing baked potatoes on them, sweet potatoes, grilled veggies, and French fries. I was sweating and wanting to leave and go on vacation to New York City. Nothing of what was happening mattered to me. I was a robot repeating motions in response to stimuli.
Saw a ticket.
Read ticket.
Four top.
Four adults.
Eating off adult plates.
Grab four adult plates.
Flick them on window.
Read main dish line to see if any fried shrimp was needed to be called to Diego on Fryers.
There was.
“Diego, three fried shrimp.”
Diego yells back, “Three fried shrimp.”
I have to keep yelling, “Three fried Shrimp,” until he calls it back.
Read line below main dish.
That was the side dish line.
It was indented.
Look to what had to be microwaved.
Grilled veggies and broccoli.
Grab broccoli and grilled veggies.
Both in plastic bags made from petroleum.
(Sometimes while putting the veggies in petroleum based bags I would remember an article I read online on how that might cause cancer.)
I put the bags in the super microwave that would cook food five times faster than a normal house microwave.
Look again at the ticket.
Two plates need baked potatoes.
They weren't plates for people or food that was going to be eaten by my fellow humans.
They were plates that needed to be filled.
Plates that required side dishes.
I went and got the bake potatoes and slapped them on a plate.
The microwave buzzed.
Veggies were done.
Veggies were stuck on plates in little white dishes.
The ticket was complete.
Then I looked and the broil cook had put up four tickets. I had to do the same thing but with four tickets.
Five minutes later Andrew would say, “The ticket is sold.”
I would have to stop what I was doing and run over to the plates.
Read the ticket to see what the potatoes needed, not what the customers wanted, but what the potatoes needed.
The potatoes needed sour cream and butter.
I would grab scoopers in hot water and scoop out butter and sour cream then flick them in the potatoes.
Then grab a large ladle and scoop lemon butter onto the steaks to give them a nice shine.
I looked at the top of the ticket to see what the name was and yelled, “Tammy.”
I looked around the kitchen and Tammy was nowhere to be found.
There was no server in sight.
So I had to yell, “Runners.”
No one came so I yelled, “If no one runs this food it will die and the window will be backed up and everything will be screwed.” When I said, “die” I meant that the temperatures of the steaks would rise from medium rare to medium because the steak cooks itself to a new temperature every three to four minutes.
A server came and took the food and the ticket was able to be stabbed.
Another ticket was sold.
That is how my time was spent at the steak house. The tickets would come and I would put the food on the plates and sell them to the servers. The managers would tell us to have pride in our work. I couldn't. I didn't care about steak. I didn't care about the steak house. They didn't give good raises, when they gave raises. The managers weren't awesome; they were generally lazy. The microwaves wouldn't work. The ovens wouldn't work. The grill had parts of it that didn't work, and sometimes dish tank wouldn't work. The place was ghetto and no one cared. I looked online out of boredom to see who the owners were and found out that one of them lived in a giant castle in Ireland with a moat around it.
After the midday rush was over the dishwasher came in. His name was Frankie. Frankie was a very wide and strong young black man. Frankie was a collection of horrible things nobody would ever want to happen to them in one person. He grew up on the worst street in Youngstown on Evergreen. Evergreen was horrible in the 80s when he was child and still to that day a person could drive down that street and see nothing but ramshackle houses and poor black people, jobless, sitting on their porches drinking forties waiting for their lives to change but without having a clue how to make it happen. They were so psychologically disenfranchised and restricted to their respective slums; they had no idea how to live in the white man's world. When driving down that street the old Hobbes quote rang in one's ears, “The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”