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The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 3 of 7.

They say he was running coke for some Vietnamese gang when his car went off the road and hit a tree. He tried to drag himself away from the crash so he wouldn’t be caught with the blow, but only made it a few hundred yards. He wasn’t found for three days. In the meantime, his injuries became infected. He ended up losing three fingers, two toes, and an eye. He went to the hospital and then to prison, where he served seven years. During that time, he acquired a culinary degree and (rumor has it) killed two other inmates.

This is how the Chef came into my life. Because of the culinary degree that is, not the jailhouse murders.

When he really doesn’t like somebody and decides its time for a disciplinary lecture, he takes out his glass eye first. He loves forcing people to deal with that gaping socket. God help you if you look away.

“If you were stranded in the wilderness due to a plane crash,” he asked me during the job interview. “How long would it be before you chose to consume human flesh?”

I immediately said that after five days without meat I would probably resort to cannibalism to survive.

“To survive?” he asked. “You would make that choice?”

“Anything to survive,” I told him emphatically.

“The important thing,” he gripped me tightly in a firm handshake as his eyes penetrated my soul. “Is that you don’t have to think about it. The important thing, is that I know you have asked yourself this question before I asked you this question.”

“I will destroy you,” he said. “Only to rebuild you. The man you are will be immolated in the fires of discipline. From his ashes, a sous chef shall rise.”

The dishwasher interrupts my reverie. Bandula is looking at me thoughtfully. Seeing that he has caught my eye, he turns his gaze upward, as though addressing some highly placed authority figure. Any time his remarks become analytical, Bandula looks at the ceiling.

“Denis has a trouble,” he says mournfully, rubbing his hands together. “No doubt. If he does the fuck up, fucked he will be. Not by the gleaming cock of his playdream, but by the burning cock of failure.”

“Woah,” Jack squints at me little. “That’s intense.”

“The cock of failure will fuck him away from his home, fuck him away from his job, fuck him away from the cake that is his love. You,” Bandula looms over me, his face a stony mask of prognostic calm, “beware the cock of failure.”

“Glad you guys are looking out for me,” I mutter. “Thanks a lot, but I won’t fuck this up.”

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do,” Bandula considers the possibilities. “Life is a maybe. Maybe I kill someone today,” he likes to launch into little homicidal soliloquies. To pass the time, I assume. “Maybe I kill you,” he points at me, fully extending his long, bony arm in my direction. “Yeeeesssssss,” he says thoughtfully. “You fat, lonely faggot. No one cry for you. No police. Oh, but not to worry,” he beams benevolently at me. “Before I kill you, I fuck you. I fuck you. You cry. Blood come. Then die. No more cake.”

Jack sighs, “and they say romance is dead.”

“Wow,” what else do you say, right? “You couldn’t even, like, buy me dinner first?”

“I buy hallmark card for dead baby’s mama,” he snaps. “Wipe my ass.”

“This is awkward,” says Jack. “I’m a little jealous right now.”

Finally, almost an hour late, Nick shows up. He brought another joint, so I forgive him. He’s more of a retard than an asshole, so when you take the bribes into account he does more good than harm. He’s white as a sheet and his hands are shaking, but that’s pretty normal.

“Hey shitwits,” he says as he fills a one liter container with water, downs it in a single gulp, and fills it again. “Did I miss the four p.m. rush?”

Nick says shit like that to emphasize his view that it’s not such a big deal whether or not he shows up to work on time. I inform him that we just got hit with a thirty-person rezzie. He shuffles his feet and stares at the wall. Then he mumbles something vaguely apologetic and heads out the back door to begin his daily ritual of open vomiting and clandestine masturbation.

“One weeks, three day,” Bandula says. “Three hundred.”

Jack laughs, and says, “no way man. I give my boy a month at least.”

“I make from you the money,” Bandula smiles. “I buy for me the pussy.”

“A week and three days?” Jack scoffs. “That guy’s been a day away from death for six years. It’s going to take more than a payday weekend to kill him.”

“Your money will be my money.”

Peter, passing through the kitchen to get lemons and limes for the bar, provides his own analysis.

“If Nick lives to the end of his shift I’ll be shocked,” he laughs. “I saw him at the Centurian last night getting his ass kicked by three bouncers. Tom told me that he whipped it out on one of the shooter girls,” Tom is a bartender at the Centurian.

“Sunshine is lucky he works here. That’s the only reason they haven’t banned him.”

“Dude, that was entrapment,” Nick walks in to hear his reputation slowly dwindling. Or growing, depending on the scale that we’re using. “She offered me thirty bucks for it.”

“What?” a shrill note creeps into Peter’s voice. “Are you nuts? Who the fuck wants to see that?”

“You’d be surprised,” Nick grins, slapping his ball-sack with his palm, as he always does when he thinks he’s scoring a point. “I gotta charge you fifty though, I got bills to pay and you got no damn vagina.”

Jack and Nick laugh their asses off. Peter is unphased.

“How are YOU standing?” he demands of Jack. “You were there with him, weren’t you? Didn’t you guys go to the Burn after that?” The Burn is an after hours bar which is only slightly less welcoming than a Russian gulag after three days without gruel.

“I went home at ten a.m.” Nick yawns. “Gotta get my beauty sleep.”

“See, that’s his problem,” Jack says, pointing at Nick and shaking his head. “This dumbass went to bed.”

Oh, I get it. Jack isn’t hungover because he’s still drunk. Figures. That explains how he managed to make it to his shift on time. He probably didn’t even go home last night.

When the supper rush hits, we’re all ready. I love the rush. The rush is the reason that I cook on the line. You just put your head down and go. Consciousness is restricted to one hundred and twenty seconds in either direction. There are no long-term plans and no distant memories. It’s all about right now and what needs to be done. From six p.m. to nine, everything is a blur.

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.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.

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.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.

The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 1 of 7.

I used to jerk off in the mornings. Now I just wake up and try not to think about Ted.

It’s only for twenty minutes as his shift ends and mine begins, but knowing that I’m going to see him fills me with dread. He’ll tell some stupid joke, and he’ll giggle. Then he’ll chuckle. Then he’ll guffaw uproariously until his whole head turns purple. I can’t look directly at Ted when he laughs. Imagine someone took a semi-erect penis, with beady eyes and a five o’clock shadow, made it wear an apron, and taught it to flip burgers. That’s Ted.

Ted only knows four jokes. None of them are funny, but what he lacks in wit he makes up for in persistence. By this I mean that he tells the same four jokes over and over because he has the memory of a fucking goldfish. Ted is the day-shift supervisor but he tells people that he is the “executive sous chef.” We have a small kitchen. Nobody is ‘executive’ anything. If you want to get technical though, I’m the sous chef.

Ted is the best at everything that can be done. There’s no way to argue with him. He does not comprehend reason. You might suggest that there can be no “best” way to cook French fries. You throw them in the deep fryer and pull them out when they’re done. You can fuck up French fries by taking them out too early or leaving them in too long, but there’s no trick to it. Trying to explain something like that to Ted is impossible. He has fifteen years of experience, he says. No one on the planet can dunk sliced potatoes in hot grease like he can, and that’s that. The idea that “his way” might not be the best way, or the possibility that there may be no “best way,” brakes every rule of his egocentric logic.

I steel my resolve to face Ted — with his twisted laugh that sucks all of his blood into his repulsive face — and be strong. Each time his head turns purple, I will be a man of granite. I’ll see him soon. I know I will.

I nod to Peter the bartender. After drop my gear off in the changing room, donning my whites, gathering my knives, I head into the kitchen with a knot in my stomach. I have to pretend to like him. If I don’t, there’ll be trouble. Ted does everything in his power to spread vicious rumours about anyone who dislikes him. The owners haven’t yet figured out that he’s full of shit. Based on his much lauded ‘experience,’ they think he is to be taken seriously. They also think that the rest of us are jealous of him. They hang on to these ideas because they’ve been paying him like he knows what he’s doing and they’ve come too far to admit that they were wrong.

When I arrive in the kitchen I find that Ted has gone home already.

Goddamn.

It takes a great deal of psychic energy to prepare for the purple-penis, French fry king. Now that he’s not here, I’m almost disappointed. Not really, but almost.

Ruggario the baker and Juan the saucier, who start their shifts around noon and leave after the supper rush, are busy in the back. I don’t talk to them much, because I don’t need to. They both know their jobs. They’re both rock solid.

The first person I talk to is the dishwasher, Bandula. He’s a sociopathic ogre with shoulders as wide as a city bus and hands as big as dinner plates, but he’s not Ted so I’m glad to see him. He doesn’t seem glad to see me, but Bandula is never glad to see anybody who won’t have sex with him for money. He’s mopping the floor when I come in.  I slip, and almost throw my back out, just barely catching myself before I fall. I give the dishwasher a meaningful look, reach behind the counter, and produce the “Caution: Wet Floor” sign. I place it in the center of the room.

Bandula pretends not to notice. That sign is the only thing we argue about. I’m terrified that some harebrained server is going to come charging through those doors and break their neck some day. I’ve told the Bandula more than once, if it happens, he’s the one who will have to dispose of the body.

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.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.