Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [110]
After a no-show and a late arrival and yet another ugly, histrionic incident of insubordination, my friend had no choice but to fire his cocaine-stoked and deranged employee, telling him, in classic style, to 'Clean out your locker and get the fuck out!'
The cook went home, made a few phone calls, and then hanged himself.
It's a measure of what we do for a living that this kind of a thing could happen - and that my friend, on his next visit to my kitchen, was greeted with gestures of mimed strangulation, cooks and waiters holding a hand over their heads, sticking their tongues out and rolling their eyes up, tagging my friend, to his face, as 'serial killer' and remorselessly teasing him. My friend had worked for me for years, and had, at various times, caused me much grief and frustration. Since becoming a chef in his own right, however, he'd taken to calling me at intervals - to apologize for his past bad acts, telling me that when faced with managerial problems of his own involving personnel, or 'human resource difficulties', he'd seriously regretted all the pain and worry he'd caused me.
Now he knew, you see. He knew what it was like to be a leader of cooks, a wrangler of psychopaths, the captain of his own pirate ship, and he wasn't liking that part of the job very much. Now somebody was dead and there was, inarguably, a causal relationship between the event of the troublesome cook's firing and his death by his own hand.
'The guy was fucked up anyway, it's not your fault,' was the standard conciliatory remark. It was about as sympathetic as any of us could get.
'Guy would have done it sooner or later, man. If not with you, some other chef.'
That didn't quite cut it either.
'The guy had to go,' is what I said, the kind of cold-blooded statement not unusual for me when in chef-mode. 'What? Are you gonna keep the guy on? Let him talk shit to you in front of your crew? Let him show up late, fuck up service . . . because you're afraid he's gonna off himself? Fuck him. We're on a lifeboat, baby. The weak? The dangerous? The infirm? They go over the side.'
Typically, I was overstating the case. I've coddled plenty of dangerously unstable characters over the years; I've kept on plenty of people who I knew in the end would make me look bad and become more trouble than they were worth. I'm not saying I'm Mister Rogers, a softie - okay, maybe I am saying that . . . a little bit. I appreciate people who show up every day and do the best they can, in spite of borderline personalities, substance abuse problems and anti-social tendencies; and I am often inclined to give them every opportunity to change their trajectories, to help them to arrive at a different outcome than the predictable one when they begin visibly to unravel.
But once gone - quit, fired or dead - I move on to the next problem. There always is one.
There have been a lot of success stories out of my kitchens over the last two decades. Mostly Mexicans and Ecuadorians who now own homes, have careers, enjoy the respect of their peers and their neighbors. They support families, drive their own cars, speak English fluently - all things I can barely do. I care about my crew and their problems.
I go home Saturday night with a sulking cook getting crispy around the edges on my mind? Someone in my kitchen talking about going AWOL, exhibiting symptoms of the dreaded martyr mode? My weekend is ruined. All I'm going to be thinking about for every waking moment is that cook and what I can do to fix the situation. I'll lie there on the bed, staring into space, paying scant attention to the TV, or what my wife is talking about, or the everyday