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We were pretty busy initially, and along with the young proteges who held us in something like awe, Sam, Dimitri and I would work all day and late into the night. When the restaurant closed, we'd take over the bar, drinking Cristal which we'd buy at cost - and running fat rails of coke from one end of the bar to the other, then crawling along on all-fours to snort them. The cuter and more degenerate members of the floor staff would hang with us, so there was a lot of humping in the dry-goods area and on the banquettes, 50-pound flour sacks being popular staging areas for after-work copulation. We'd bribed the doormen and security people of all the local nightclubs and rock and roll venues with steak sandwiches and free snacks, so that after we'd finished with our pleasures at the Work Progress bar, we'd bounce around from club to club without waiting on line or paying admission. A squadron of punk rocker junkie guitar heroes ate for free at Work Progress so we got free tickets and backstage passes to the Mudd Club, CBGB, Tier Three, Hurrah, Club 57 and so on. And when the clubs closed it was off to after-hours where we'd drink and do more drugs until, weather permitting, we'd hit the seven o'clock train to Long Beach. We'd finish the last of our smack on the train, then pass out on the beach. Whichever one of us woke from the nod would roll the others over to avoid an uneven burn. When we finally arrived back at work, sand in our hair, we looked tanned, rested and ready.

We considered ourselves a tribe. As such, we had a number of unusual customs, rituals and practices all our own. If you cut yourself in the Work Progress kitchen, tradition called for maximum spillage and dispersion of blood. One squeezed the wound till it ran freely, then hurled great gouts of red spray on the jackets and aprons of comrades. We loved blood in our kitchen. If you dinged yourself badly, it was no disgrace; we'd stencil a little cut-out shape of a chef knife under your station to commemorate the event. After a while, you'd have a little row of these things, like a fighter pilot. The house cat - a mouse-killer got her own stencil (a tiny mouse shape) sprayed on the wall by her water bowl, signifying confirmed kills.

Departing cooks and favored waiters, on their last day of employment, were invited to nail their grotty work shoes to a Wall of Fame by Sammy's cellar office. As time went on, row after row of moldering work boots, shoes and sneakers were pounded into the wall, a somewhat grim reminder of departed friends. On slow nights - and there were, disconcertingly, a growing number of these - we'd have fun with food color and sweet dough. Dimitri, it turned out, was remarkably adept at crafting life-like fingers, toes and sexual organs from basic ingredients. He'd fashion frighteningly realistic severed thumbs - skin rudely shredded at one end, bone fragments made from leek white projecting from the wound - and we'd leave these things around for unsuspecting waiters and managers to find. A waiter would open a reach-in in the morning to find a leaking, torn fingertip, Band-Aid still attached, pinioned to a slice of Wonderbread with a frilled toothpick. A floor manager would be called down to the kitchen in the middle of a dinner shift to find one of us standing by a bloody cutting board, red-smeared side-towel wrapped around a hand, and as they approached, one of Dimitri's grisly fingers would drop onto his foot. We experimented constantly, finding to our delight that not only did the sweet dough look like flesh when shaped and colored correctly, but it drew flies like the real thing! Left overnight at room temperature, Dimitri's fake digits could develop into a truly horrifying spectacle.

Eventually, when every member of the staff was thoroughly inured to the sight of a severed, fly-covered penis in the urinal, or finding a bloody finger in his apron pocket, we moved on to even greater atrocities. One night, with his full cooperation, we stripped Dimitri naked, spattered and filled his ears,