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The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 2 of 7.

“Why you come to work?” Bandula inquires. “Why not stay home to bed? Sleep.”

“Hey, Bandula. How’s the black adder?” I ask, because he has a way of terrorizing the rest of the staff that I find charming.

“I think I know why he is here, yes? Need money for cock,” he rubs his hands together, pleased to be able to answer his own question. “He needs big cock for fat ass, so he does the work. Maybe too, for cake. Fat faggot love cake.”

Peter storms into the kitchen, relieving me of the burden of trying to formulate some kind of come back to Bandula’s barrage of homo-erotic imagery. He looks pissed. He points at me.

“What the fuck? Denis!” Peter demands of me, “where the fuck are the other two mutants? We’ve got a thirty person reservation for three-thirty?”

“I’m here, right?” I shrug. “What else can I say?”

Peter knows the score. He’s just likes the sound of his own voice. Jack and Nick will show up late, punch in, and spend twenty minutes getting changed like they always do when the Chef isn’t here. Peter and I will have to work together to keep things from sliding into total anarchy. It won’t be easy. Well… though… wait…

I can see Jack sneaking up behind Peter. This is a surprise. Jack is supposed to show up for work at three. What I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around, is that it is three and here, for work, Jack has shown up. The mind reels.

“Bean-ZAY!” Jack yells in Peter’s ear, flashing him a brown-toothed grin. Peter is gay and likes to sing in the kitchen, so Jack thinks it’s funny to call him Beansie because beans are, as Jack points out, the musical fruit.

“I’m here, man! It’s a new day, Beansie! A new fucking day.” Jack always emphasizes the ing when he says, fucking. As he frequently reminds us, Jack don’t drop no g’s.

“I fuckin’ can’t believe it. Fuck-nuts made it to a shift on time. Somebody call the fuckin’ papers,” Peter mutters under his breath.

Peter is gay and likes to sing in the kitchen, so Jack thinks it’s funny to call him Beansie because beans are, as Jack points out, the musical fruit.

“Tell me when Nick finally gets his ass in here,” the bartender barks. “Ted, the little shit, was whining about start times today. He’s talking about going to the owners and telling them that the sous can’t control the kitchen while the Chef’s away. Fair warning.”

“Jesus Christ,” I sigh. How the fuck can I make these idiots listen to me? By that I mean, how can I convince the bosses that cooks who can crank out a hundred flawless plates after a three day coke jag, are better for business than those clean-cut culinary grads they keep sending me. I can’t use cooks who want to go home if they cut themselves, think they know how to make a carbonara better than the Chef, and always want weekends and holidays off. “I’m going to kill that fuckin’ twit.”

I mean it this time. I can’t take it any more.

“Get in line,” Peter says. “He called the Chef at home to say that I was on the phone all day with my husband. Like, excuse me? I called him twice because we’re trying to buy a house. The deal is in the works, thousands of dollars are at stake. I wanna keep an eye on the situation. So fuckin’ sue me.”

This is bad news. In a way, Ted’s right. I can’t control Jack and Nick. They’re both great line cooks, but it’s always something with those two. I can depend on Ruggario and Juan to do their jobs and show up on time, but they don’t cook on the line. Jack, Nick, and I cook on the line.

It isn’t that they don’t respect chain of command, it’s that they’re both relentless fuck ups, and they fuck up as a team. Jack and Nick are a satanic wedding of insanity and stupidity. Jack providing the lion’s share of the former while Nick brings the bulk of the latter.

Nick will probably puke blood in the parking lot for a while when he does arrive, so we won’t be able to count on him to help with the reservation, but he’s an incredible broiler-man. For perfect steaks, salmon, and halibut all night, I’ll put up with a little tardiness and projectile vomiting.

I’ll have to be extra nice to Jack. It’s just him and me, and I’m going to need him to be on the ball very shortly. The cue ball that is, not his customary eight ball. He wasn’t sporting a four-day growth of beard, shaking uncontrollably, or reeking of vodka when he walked through here just now, so we might be okay.

Incidentally, do you know how much vodka you have to drink to ‘reek of vodka?’

You know it’s going to be bad when he shows up wearing his glasses. If he doesn’t have his contacts in, it means that he rolled out of bed covered in liquor sweat and dried puke thirty seconds before he left for work, and is only on his feet out of sheer force of habit.

There is silence for a while. Jack is prepping his station, looking uncharacteristically fresh and useful in his clean whites. “Got time to burn one?” he asks me, arching an eyebrow. “It feels like a sleeper. We’re totally not going to get hit for a while.”

When I tell Jack about the reservation, his face falls for a second.

“Thirty people?” he pauses. “Pfft. Ten minutes, we serve thirty people. THEN we get baked.”

Well… why not, right?

Peter comes back into the kitchen. “It’s coming,” he says. “Get ready to roll!”

We spend the next twenty minutes running our asses off, trying to make sure that all the food looks good and gets out at more or less the same time. There are close calls, but no disasters. I’m blown away. Jack’s got a lot of energy for three thirty, he’s not even hung-over.

After the hit, we sneak out back and smoke a joint. Then we come inside and clean some fridges, restock our stations, this isn’t a time that we normally do a lot of business.

Bandula wanders into the dining room. He wouldn’t do that if the Chef were here. If Ted saw it he’d have a field day, but what am I supposed to do? The Chef warned him about that shit, but he doesn’t listen. Bandula likes to find the biggest pair of tits in the room, and stare them down as though they were challenging him to a duel. It’s like the Wild West, except instead of a six-shooter he’s packing a hairy, one-eyed monster that could give Tokyo a run for its money. It terrifies the customers and its bad for business, but he never calls in sick, is never late, stays until his job is done and never complains about the work. He might threaten, harass, grope, and molest the staff but, he works doubles on a regular basis, and he keeps the place clean. He’ll be here until at least ten tonight, and come back at five a.m. to vacuum the dining room and clean the kitchen. A dishwasher like that is hard to find.

The Chef (speaking of one-eyed monsters) is the only person he listens to. But like I said, the Chef isn’t here today.

How can I explain the Chef?

Peter charges into the kitchen. “Chef on line one!” he yells to me. “He sounds pissed.”

I run to the phone and hit the button, “what’s up?”

“The meat,” his voice is raspy and hollow. “You are responsible for the meat.”

“As always, Chef,” I say, running a nervous hand across my chin. When you work with food you try not to touch your face, but this guy throws all of my instincts out of whack. I’m like a stammering schoolgirl, except instead of wishing he would ask me to the prom I’m sort of afraid that he’ll kill me and eat me. “What… um…” I struggle for a moment and try to ignore Peter and Jack snickering in the background. “What does that mean?”

“Meat. The good meat. The best meat. It comes from Brazil tomorrow morning. It gets to the market at four a.m. It will be gone quickly. We must have it for the special. For Thursday, the champion of days,” the Chef is big on authenticity. And freshness. He asks me to do this kind of shit all the time. “You must be first to the meat. Do not be late. Do not try to sleep, or you will never make it.”

There is a click, and I hear a dial tone

Wooden Rocket Press’ Sunday Paper posts new serialized fiction each Sunday. Return next Sunday morning for the next section of Blood Come. For other stories check out the Sunday Paper archive.

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