The phone rang at 7 am, jolting me awake and flailing, sending the phone skittering onto the floor. I didn’t worry about it breaking, it was a five dollar phone and only fell about 6 inches from the frameless mattress to the dirty carpet.
A heavily accented voice demanded Is this Laura? Angry about being woken, pissed that someone was calling me and sounding so pushy I grumbled something bitter and demanding sounding right back while I searched the milk crate nightstand for a cigarette and a light. You The Girl? The voice persisted, I got your number here on the cork board. What? You come to work for me? I need a Girl. Today, you come, we talk, you wanna work or what?
It is and is not as shady as it sounds. The heavily accented voice belonged to the new manager of a Family pizzeria I had left in a fit of rage a few weeks prior, screaming obscenities and threatening to slice off the pizza guy’s balls with a dough scraper.
For years, I worked in the food industry. I worked at a mid-range restaurant as a server in a posh part of the city (where the chef screamed at me for eating a dinner roll and the line cook guys screamed at him on my behalf), as a day shift manager at a high volume chain pizza place (where I was poached to work at the Family place by the first manager), at a deli making sandwiches for nice construction workers and pissy secretaries, and – very briefly to get some quick cash together for a two week drive to Key West – I worked flipping burgers. Mostly, from high school and past college, pizza was my life. Aldo and I ate pizza or pizza related items almost daily. I weighed about 120 pounds, worked 12 to 16 hours a day (except Sunday, when we were only open half days) and made more money than I do now even though we lived more or less in squalor.
In all of those places except the deli, I was the only woman in the back and Not The Girl. I was a terrible waitress, a horrible cashier, a fair to middling manager, a decent dough tosser and fry/grill person and a damn good prep cook. I went back to Family on the condition that I was NOT a Girl. The Girl was the one who looked like a lumpy mattress in her full while apron, who answered the phone politely and took orders, the one who waited on customers, the one who usually ended up giving blow jobs to the boss in the walk in or on flour sacks in the storage area. I was not The Girl, did not want to be The Girl, never in my life had any desire to be The Girl.
A lot of people think kitchen = woman. Not so. In the service world, it is all testosterone. To work with these guys, you need to be able to joke that, yes, your penis is indeed bigger than theirs (and be prepared to show it), to curse like a trucker, drink like a sailor on leave, and shut the hell up unless you are bleeding or on fire (and even then no one wants to hear it).
I learned a lot working in those places. I learned how to stand up for myself and how to trash talk. One time, I walked in on some of the crew taking bets on the shade of my nipples. I ripped open my dishwasher shirt (those snap buttons are a real plus for strippers I would imagine) to settle the bet right then and there. I listened to countless conversations about how to get a woman to do anything you want, not once being asked my opinion. I listened to endless banter about balls, dicks, boobs, beer and drugs. I learned kitchen spanish from the Guatemalan dishwashers. I learned how to fold pizza boxes at the speed of light, which parlayed nicely into shirt folding once I started doing wash for 4. I learned how to use and clean the grill, ovens and Hobart, how to make dough from start to slap, and how to ID kitchen scars and types of cockroaches.
I still miss it. Working in an office is nice, but women are much more bitchy and back stabbing. In a kitchen, the guys will just tell you exactly what the problem is, usually laced with plenty of colorful curses and punctuated by waving something sharp around. Then they quit or get over it. Mostly, like in my case, they did both.
Some days, after a bad day in the office or after reading a cook’s memoir (currently Cooking Dirty), I get nostalgic and think maybe I could find myself a nice prep job… maybe doing buffets or something. I think about the long lasting bonds I made and still have with some of the old crew members. Then I think about the long hours, the time it took me to retrain myself to have a conversation without using expletives, the smell in my hair, my skin, that never came out. I think about the injury I got from lifting the dough bowl that never quite got right again, the long, thin scars from hot hotel pans and run ins with pizza ovens on my arms that made a teenager ask if I was a cutter. I think, and I think… and I think I am too old now to do anything but remember the good times.
1 Comment
September 13, 2009 at 8:20 am
You painted such a fantastic picture of your life in the kitchen that I didn’t want it to end. This was really good. I mean it. Even if you don’t return to the restaurant business, you should at least consider writing about your experiences. Brilliant!