Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [40]
One day I was sitting at the bar, enjoying an after-work drink, when Bigfoot approached and began giving me an uncharacteristic shoulder massage. I thought this a remarkably kind gesture until he told me that his Presidential Guard was at that moment downstairs tackling the difficult problem of repairing a city-owned sewage pipe. The problem had occurred directly below our walk-in. In typical fashion, Bigfoot had induced his Mexican disciples to hammer straight down through 2 feet of concrete, then, like Colditz escapees, tunnel 25 feet through waste-sodden earth beneath the walk-in, and make a hard-left turn to the site of the break. The big hands gently squeezing my shoulders were trying to determine whether I was thin enough to wriggle around the tight corner - through mud and shit - to help the porters, apparently too well fed to fit.
I couldn't hold it against him for trying. 'That's not my job' was not in the Bigfoot phrase book. Toilet overflows while the chef is at hand? He's going right in with a plunger, and fast. No waiting for the toilet guy - he is the toilet guy now. In Bigfoot's army, you fight for the cause, anywhere you are needed. If it's slow in the kitchen, you pick an old saute pan and scrub the carbon off the bottom. Genteel sensibilities are unwelcome. Lead, follow . . . or get out of the way.
I worked for Bigfoot part-time while I attended CIA, and years later - over ten years later - I washed up on his shores again. It was a low point in my career. I was burnt out from my five-year run in the restaurant netherworld as a not very good chef - in rehab for heroin, still doing cocaine, broke - and reduced to working brunches at a ridiculous mom and pop restaurant in SoHo where they served lion, tiger, hippopotamus braciole and other dead zoo animals. I was determined never to be a chef again, sickened by my last gargantuan operation: a three-kitchen Italian place in the South Street Seaport, where I seemed to have spent most of my time as a convenient hatchet man, waking up every morning with the certain knowledge that today I'd be firing someone again . . . I was spent, desperate, unhappy, with a negligible-to-bad rep, in general a Person Not To Be Hired Or Trusted, when Bigfoot called looking for someone to cook lunches at his new saloon/bistro on 10th Street.
We met, and I must have looked like a rhesus monkey - the one in the perils-of-freebase commercial, cornered up a tree, shunned by his monkey pals, exhibiting erratic, paranoid and hostile behavior. I was rail-thin, shaky, and the first thing I did was ask my old pal Bigfoot if he could lend me 25 bucks until payday. Without hesitation, he reached in his pocket and lent me 200 - a tremendous leap of faith on his part. Bigfoot hadn't laid eyes on me in over a decade. Looking at me, and hearing the edited-for-television version of what I'd been up to in recent years, he must have had every reason to believe I'd disappear with the two bills, spend it on crack, and never show up for my first shift. And if he'd given me the 25 instead of 200, that might well have happened. But as so often happens with Bigfoot, his trust was rewarded. I was so shaken by his baseless trust in me that such a cynical bastard as Bigfoot would make such a gesture - that I determined I'd sooner gnaw my own fingers off, gouge my eyes out with a shellfish fork, rub shit in my hair and run naked down Seventh Avenue than ever betray that trust.
There was order in my life again. In Bigfootland you showed up for work fifteen minutes before your shift. Period. Two minutes late? You lose the shift and are sent home. If you're on the train and it looks like it's running late? You get off the train at the next stop, inform Bigfoot of your pending lateness, and then get back on the next train. It's okay to call Bigfoot and say, 'Bigfoot, I was up all night smoking crack, sticking up liquor stores, drinking blood and worshipping