The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [20]
He hadn't had a woman for years.
From where he stood, awkwardly trying to figure out what to do, he could see Eric, the sous-chef, counting out dinner dupes by the printer, spiking the little slips of paper onto a spindle, his hair plastered to his skull with sweat. A shorter cook (he thought they called him Lenny) was scraping down the grill with a wire brush, bobbing his head along with the speed metal on the radio, bitching in kitchen patois about some violation of protocol that Bobby didn't understand.
"You want truffle jiz? Get your own truffle jiz, cabron. I tired a you raiding my motherfuckin' meez every time I turn around, pinchay culero. Every time you go in the shit, you sticking your hands in my fucking bains."
Next to him, an Ecuadorian pasta cook named Manuel smiled serenly, shook his head and apologized. Insincerely.
"I sorry my friend," he giggled, turning toward Eric, who had clearly heard all this before. "Chuletita no like I touch the station. He like I touch the pinga. Si! Verdad! Touch his pinga is okay. Culo, no problem. He like that. But no touch the station." He reached over and swatted a dirty side-towel at the back of Lenny's head, before dropping down to his knees to mop out his low-boy refrigerators. Two cooks, Segundo and Eduardo, were dumping a tray of indifferently roasted chicken legs into a hotel pan on the pass. Billy, the skinny white boy with the pierced tongue on the garde manger station, listlessly tossed salad in a large stainless-steel bowl with his hands.
In the corner behind the line, Nikki was heaving a stack of dirty saucepots and saute pans into a cardboard-lined milk crate, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, her chef coat unbuttoned. Bobby saw the pink and red bum marks — like tribal markings — on her forearms, and thought they were the sexiest thing he'd ever seen. Her hair was popping out of its ponytail, long strands falling over her face, and Bobby could not help but be fascinated by how the muscles on her arms swelled and jumped as she slung, one-armed, one heavy load of pans after another loudly into the crate. She hadn't seen Bobby yet. As she leaned over the stove, to remove the burner covers, he stared at the way the boxy, checked poly pants stretched over her ass.
"I'm hungry!" complained Joe, the head tech, with a hoarse, froggy voice. Billy, who relied on Joe for cocaine now and again when the busboys and bar-backs didn't come through (Bobby knew this from observing Joe's mid-shift runs around the corner to the Full Moon Saloon — and the ensuing not-very-discreet sequence of hand-offs and bathroom visits which inevitably followed) was all too willing to make something special for his patron. No chicken leg and wilted salad for Joe.
In the noise and clatter of the kitchen, Nikki still hadn't seen Bobby, who continued to stand there as if invisible, ignored by the cooks and their proteges from the floor. Unlike Frank, now tucking into a porterhouse steak on a broken chair in the corner, Bobby did not share the impounded guns and drugs from the door with the kitchen crew. He didn't let the cook's friends in for free — or give them drink tickets. No one had dared ask him. Everyone eating something other than the staff gruel in the kitchen at this moment had some kind of special arrangement with one cook or another. The waitress, Tina, was a vegetarian. The usually surly cooks had fixed her up with some grilled vegetables and cous-cous. Because