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By Root 728 0

and for the floor staff, the 'family meal' was uniformly awful. Hunks of silver-skin-covered breast flaps of veal - not even braised until tender, just poached grey with a few slices of onion - accompanied by leftover pellets of gluey steam-table rice or two-day-old pasta. There might be some inattentively chopped fried peppers and onions if you were lucky. The Big Event was when one of the cooks was allowed to thaw out a few boxes of freezer-burned sweet sausages, lovingly referred to by the cooks as pingas. This was everybody's favorite meal, and the excitement and enthusiasm with which my comrades-in-arms scarfed these things down was truly tragic to watch. Compared to Raft Day, however, the pingas were indeed a luxury. The Room prep area always had three gigantic steam kettles filled with a dark, all-purpose stock, simmering endlessly under a 'raft' of ground beef, meat scraps, chicken bones, turkey carcasses, the trimmings of vegetables, carrot peelings and egg shells. When stuck for gruel, the cooks would actually skim this floating compost off the surface, toss it with a little tomato sauce and dead pasta and serve it to the inexplicably grateful staff.

It was but one of many food crimes I witnessed and took part in during my time at the Rainbow Room. During service, châteaubriands - big hunks of beef tenderloin for two - if ordered well done, were routinely thrown into the deep-fryer until crispy, then tossed into an oven to incinerate further until pick up. Everything was seared off in advance. When the expeditor called for the order, one simply heated the plate vegetable, garnish and all - under a salamander, drizzled a little sauce over the item and sent it out to the unsuspecting rubes. Any magic I'd imagined about a big-time fancy New York kitchen was replaced by a grim pride in creative expediency and the technical satisfaction of being fast enough to keep up, getting away with trickery, deception and disguise. 'An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins,' as we used to say.

I didn't care what atrocities we were inflicting on a credulous public, lulled into docility by our spectacular view, our swank appointments, big band and high prices. I was putting up serious numbers, and holding my own with the best of the lifers. I could destroy and serve a nice piece of veal or a Dover sole as fast, if not faster than any of them. I was working every station in the kitchen, keeping up with the ugliest, meanest twenty-year veterans anyone back in Provincetown had even dreamed of. I was a line stud, an all-around guy, a man's man. I was on top of the world.

On the other hand, I was tired. By now, I was going in to work at 7:30 A.M. and working straight through until midnight almost every day. As soon as I'd finish up in the Luncheon Club or the pastry shop, the chef seemed always to be wanting to take me aside and squeeze me for another night on the hot-line. After weeks of this, and still not taking home over 200 dollars on payday, I finally balked. Unable to convince me, the chef summoned me for a private chat with the boss, a sinister Italian with yet another thick accent. The boss looked up at me from his desk, fixing me in a shark like gaze and said, 'I understand you don't want to help us tonight by staying late?'

I was tired, I explained, and in love, I added, hoping to appeal to that romantic Mediterranean nature I'd read and heard about. 'My girlfriend,' I said, 'I don't see her anymore . . . and I miss her . . . I have,' I added, 'a life . . . outside of this place.' I went on to describe going home each night to a sleeping girl, rolling exhausted into the sheets, still stinking from work, and how I arose at six with the girl still asleep, never exchanging so much as a word before leaving for work again, for yet another double. This was no good for a relationship, I said.

'Look at me,' said my boss, as if the nice suit and the haircut and the desk explained everything. 'I am married ten years to my wife.' He smiled. 'I work all the time. I never see her . . . she never sees me.' He paused now to show