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By Root 712 0

with nearly unbearable dry, radiant heat on one side and clouds of wet steam heat on the other. When I say unbearable, I mean they couldn't bear it; cooks would regularly pass out on the line and have to be dragged off to recuperate, a commis taking over the station until the stricken chef de partie recovered. There was so much heat coming off those ranges - especially when the center rings were popped for direct fire - that the filters in the overhead hoods would often burst into flames, inspiring a somewhat comical scene as the overweight Italian chef would hurl himself down the narrow line with a fire extinguisher, bowling over the cooks and tripping as he hurried to put out the flames before the central Ansel System went off and filled the entire kitchen with fire-suppressant foam.

It was a madhouse. The cooks worked without dupes. The expeditor, a just-off-the-boat Italian with an indecipherably thick accent droned away constantly in an uninflected monotone through a microphone, calling out - presumably - orders and pick-ups. I can still hear him: 'Pickinguppa, one-ah vealuh Orloffah . . . and three sole Balmoralla. Orderingah, twenty-three beef Wellingtonna and seventeena chicka for the Belvedera Suite . . . orderinga three crespelle toscana seg way . . . two a steaka one a mediuma rare one-a mediuma.'

In the middle of 300 a la carte dinners, the cooks were required to crank out enormous sit-down banquets of fully plated appetizers and entrees for the private catering rooms. 'Pickinguppa five hunnerta beef Wellingtonna!' and the whole line would break formation, drag long work tables to the center of the kitchen and re-form as a production line like you'd expect to see in an automobile assembly plant. Two cooks at one end of the table would slice and slap, others would pour sauce from giant, long-spouted coffeepots, and two more would drop vegetables and garnish. At the other end of the table, a long line of bolero-jacketed waiters would then clap down silver plate covers, stack the entrees ten or more at a clip onto serving trays, and ferry them like worker ants to the distant banquet rooms only to return a few moments later.

It was, as I've said, hot. Ten minutes into the shift, the cheap polyester whites we all wore would be soaked through with sweat, clinging to chest and back. All the cooks' necks and wrists were pink and inflamed with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the Room's fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions, and skin rot of a severity and variety you'd expect to see in some jungle backwater. And the smell of thirty not very fastidious cooks their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet, rotten breath - and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you'd been rolling around in sheep guts.

The atmosphere was not unlike a Pinero play, very jailhouse, with a lot of grab-ass, heated argument, hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting. Two burly men who'd just as soon kill you as look at you, when talking to each other, would often nestle a hand tenderly next to the testicles of the other, as if to say, 'I am so not gay - I can even do thisl' The common language was a mix of Nueva Yorkeno Spanish, Italian and pidgin English. The Spanish and Italians, as is often the case, had no problem understanding each other, but when speaking 'English', one had to conform to the style book: one didn't say, 'That's my knife.' One said instead, 'Is for me, the knife.'

My own personal tormentor for the first few weeks was the chef de garde-manger and shop steward, a big, ugly Puerto Rican with a ruined face named Luis. Luis considered frequent explorations of my young ass with his dirty paws to be a perk of his exalted position; at every opportunity, he'd take a running swat