Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [51]
What my boss meant by this little glimpse into his soul, I have no idea. But he impressed me. I worked the double, figuring maybe this was what was required: total dedication. Forget the loved ones. Forget the outside world. There is no life other than this life. I didn't spend much time trying to figure it out. The man scared me. Years later, I got another perspective on things. I opened the Post to see a photo of my old boss's wife, draped over the awning of a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East Side. She'd apparently performed a double-gainer from the window of her high-rise apartment and not quite made it to the pavement. So I guess she wasn't that happy after all.
All in all, I was at the Rainbow Room for about a year and a half before elections for shop steward came around. When one of the garde-manger guys suggested I run for the position, I was only too happy to give it a shot. Luis, after all, was a disgrace. I was, by now, an accepted, even popular, member of the Rainbow Room crew, a dues-paying, card-carrying union member, and as a young, semi-educated firebrand with a couple of years of college under my belt, a fine private school vocabulary, a culinary degree and a predilection for left-wing politics, I assumed I'd be a welcome addition to the restaurant workers' union - a young man with the workers' interests at heart, a fighter for the downtrodden, an activist who could get things done, someone who could lead and inspire, help to achieve better working conditions and benefits for one of the largest union shops in the country. Certainly the union biggies would be pleased to see the dipsomaniacal Luis replaced by a young go-getter like me! And I wanted to see the mysterious 'contract', the Rosetta Stone of our union benefits. According to our little union books, any union member could inspect this important document at any time - yet none of us had ever seen it. Our rights as employees of the Rainbow Room, as negotiated by our duly elected representatives and officers of the union, remained a matter of rumor and conjecture. I wanted to clap eyes on this thing. So I ran.
I won handily. Luis, strangely, didn't even put up a fight. I figured that my shanking him with the meat fork had something to do with his reluctance to mount a campaign, but I was wrong about that. After a quick vote, I was the shop steward.
You'd think the union would be happy about this development, or at least curious, with an energetic young organizer in their midst. I scheduled a meeting with the union president, looking forward to commiserating about the Imperialist Jackboot on the Necks of the Workers, and the Struggle Against the Controllers of the Means of Production. When finally I sat down with the president of Local 6 (yet another Italian with a thick accent), he was oddly unenthusiastic. He looked up sleepily at me from behind the desk of his dark office, as if I were a delivery boy bringing him a sandwich. When I asked him if I could, as shop steward, familiarize myself with The Contract, so that I might better serve our members, the president fiddled with his cufflinks and said, 'I seem to have . . . temporarily . . . misplaced it.' It was clear from his inflection and posture that he didn't give a fuck whether I believed him or not. After a few more minutes of near total silence and zero enthusiasm on the president's part, I got the hint and skulked back to work empty-handed.
The next day, someone from management came by and made an unusually frank suggestion: if I wanted a long, successful and, most important, healthy career in the restaurant business, perhaps I should step down and let that nice Luis continue his good works as shop steward. It would, I was assured, 'be in everybody'sbest interest.' He didn't have to tell me twice. I made a few discreet inquiries of a few trusted veterans and quickly resigned from my newly elected position. Luis once again picked up the reins of power, as if he'd known all along what would happen.