splat chapter four

A word about Atlanta's exclusive private club scene. And we're not talking about Atlanta's exclusive adult private club scene, either. That's too sordid and corrupt. It might make a great Atlanta-based crime fiction novel, except that it would all be true, and I'd be in real trouble then. No, I want to talk about the private clubs that cost the earth to join just as a way of discouraging the riff-raff. There's not really much to choose between them unless you like to measure degrees of superiority. Here are a few of their mission statements, right off their websites:

• The Capital City Club has been located on Harris Street Downtown since 1883 and is one of the oldest private clubs in the country. Their motto is 'To promote the pleasure, kind feeling and general culture of its members.'  
  
• The Piedmont Driving Club, on Piedmont Road since 1887, stands for 'The promotion of recreation and enjoyment for its members and their families.'
  
• The Cherokee Country Club, a newcomer, on West Paces Ferry around the corner from the new Governors mansion, wants to be known for its 'Commitment to the highest standards in dining and member services.'  
  
• The Atlanta Athletic Club, chartered in 1898, has moved steadily away from the hoi polloi (read: blacks) in East Point and now is located in Duluth, way outside the Perimeter in what they hoped would remain white people country. It was motivated by 'A group of young men seeking a place where they could enjoy indoor and outdoor athletics with their business associates and friends.'  
  
• The Ku Klux Klan, which was created at the end of the Civil War by six bored middle-class Confederate veterans who decided to form 'A social club - one purely for amusement, centered on practical jokes and hazing rituals.'  
  
• The St. Ives Country Club is new, and insists a little crassly upon its goal, 'To operate the most successful and highly regarded member-owned club in Metro Atlanta.' 
  
• The White Magnolia Club (a fictitious member of the Rich White Guys Clubs of Atlanta, virtually established in 1896 around the corner from the Capital City Club) puts the same sentiment slightly differently: 'Its all about us.' 

A word about the White Magnolia Club, where Suzie worked. Those readers who know Atlanta might notice that you can navigate using these pages, and not get any more lost than if you used a map - this is modern Atlanta, after all, and everyone gets lost here, even natives from eight generations back. In the interests of accuracy, I've gone to great pains to describe the Atlanta I know and love.

But because of the threat of dismemberment, I'm going to have to fudge a few details about certain aspects of this story, despite my scruples about accuracy. So, though you can otherwise navigate by this book, you're not going to be able to find this particular clubby bastion of white male privilege, though there are lots of others to choose from. And you won't exactly recognize the garage full of loveable dopesmoking mechanics, though there are plenty of them in Atlanta, too. And if you did recognize these places, I'd have to insist that you'd be wrong. And in case anybody official were to object to my portraits, skewed though they may be and twisted around to serve my own wicked purposes, then I would have to rest on the fact that this is a work of fiction, and I've exercised my right to make shit up.

Instead of laying myself open lawsuits and drive-by sprays of bullets, I'm just going ahead and telling you that the White Magnolia Club, as well as Stones Auto Repair, is fictional. Completely. Any resemblance to any other private club or garage has been made to look like a coincidence.

To begin with, the White Magnolia was a private club that only rich southern white men could belong to, and only after membership fees that would buy a house in the suburbs. The Club bowed to the pressure of progressive members back in the '90s, and now had a couple of Jews, and three blacks, two of them from Africa. The Board of Directors was considering admitting an Indian Indian. But no Hispanics, no Asians, no Native Americans, no women except as wives. Though a son could inherit his daddy's membership, Mom was out in the cold when her husband died or if they divorced, even if she'd been attending functions for thirty years and was head of the Ladies Auxiliary.

The main qualification was how much money a man had, but plenty of consideration was given to such arcanities as racial and ethnic purity, religious righteousness, college affiliation, voting record, and family connections. It was a good ol' boy's club, pure and simple, established for the comfort and pleasure of people who liked to think they ran things.

And it didn't matter a lick what someone did for a living, as long as his bona fides and checks were good. Members owned garbage companies, peanut farms, cement factories, pulp mills, car dealerships, construction companies, bail bond offices. There were no drug dealers, because most of those were black or Hispanic, but they did have a particularly successful pharmaceutical representative, the head of an HMO and several plastic surgeons. They didn't have any prostitutes or madams, because most of those were women, but they did have the owner of an employment agency and half a dozen politicians.

The original home of the White Magnolia Club was downtown on Peachtree Street. It was built as a big Victorian house after Sherman came through with the wreckers, and sold cheap by a northerner fleeing back home during the panic of 1873. A bunch of good ol' boys bought it, and, still rankling from the superior attitudes of those damned Yankees, declared right off the bat that nobody who wasn't from the South could join their Club.

Progress being what it is, the area got pretty gritty (read: black) in the '50s and '60s, and Club members voted to flee up Peachtree to Ansley Park, three miles north, an expensive suburban enclave built at the turn of the last century in the grandest post-Reconstruction style. Typical of development in Atlanta, the lovely old mansion on Peachtree was eventually razed to the ground, and John Portman put up an enormous bronze statue of two naked dancing girls on top of what used to be stately columns and well-tended gardens.

So when they built the current governor's mansion in 1968, that awful, blocky Greek Revival thing on West Paces Ferry, the Club bought the old governor's mansion for a song, and completely restored and refashioned it into the grandest private club in the South.

It was built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, up on the top of a hill, at 205 The Prado, Ansley Park, in the early years of the last century. It was the very finest address in Atlanta at the time, the residence of hot developer Edwin Ansley. It had thirteen rooms, five baths, and the house was dressed with granite excavated right there on the property. After 1925 it was the home of eleven successive governors of Georgia.

Two stories and a full basement, built on top of a rise, acres of land beside and behind it, servants' quarters and other outbuildings; the place reminded the visitor of an old plantation, including life-size statues of black boys holding lanterns at the end of the driveway. Suzie drove her beat up old car very slowly past them for someone who was already twenty minutes late to work.

The place has seen some renovations, seeing as how the Club has owned the ex governor's mansion for awhile. They knocked out the various parlors and dens downstairs, made two huge ballrooms out of the space, and commissioned two enormous rugs emblazoned with the club's logo. They kept the original heart-of-Georgia-pine floors, which could still be seen around the edges of the room, but lowered the ceiling with practical suspended-tile ceilings that were now going gray and getting ugly, but were still a good idea because they hid the pipes and ducts that were installed at the same time. There were now double-paned windows, central heating and air conditioning, hidden speakers, programmed lighting, discrete security cameras, and a courtesy elevator for the more fragile members.

The newest renovation, done at a cost of several millions dollars, converted what used to be spacious living quarters upstairs, and then mostly storage, into a whole bunch of casual dining rooms. They also, while they were at it, converted the ground beneath their prize-winning ornamental gardens into a brand new parking deck; and converted the entire basement into a huge commercial kitchen. This was all several years back, but they still pointed it out with pride.

A set of semi-circular granite steps led up to a set of ancient carved oak double doors, which swung open to reveal a long wide breezeway going through the middle of the building to a covered verandah out back, overlooking the prize-winning gardens. The breezeway was recently renovated into a two story atrium, with white marble floors and a fountain in the middle under a glass roof. You could stand in the hall and catch glimpses of the second floor with all the private dining rooms and lounges. A sign at the foot of the stairs insisted: Coat And Tie For The Men And Evening Dress For The Ladies Are Required At All Times. There Is No Smoking In The Casual Dining Rooms.

At the head of the house were the two massive ballrooms on either side of the breezeway that held up to 250 each, with a luxurious rug, sconces and chandeliers and fireplaces shining with brass. Expensive watered-silk wallpaper patterned with yellow orchids covered the walls of the Ladies Slipper Ballroom to the left, and green ducks and brown hunting dogs decorated the Southern Sportsman Ballroom to the right.

Behind the Sportsman Room was the large dining room: paneled in mahogany, seating just under a hundred, a long formal dining table running down the middle of the room flanked by high backed chairs, with mirrors and crystal glinting everywhere. Behind the Ladies Slipper Room was the pantry, a library, a game room, and a lounge where the wives adjourned after dinner so that the men could stay in the dining room to drink and smoke and have strippers in.

Up on the second floor were a variety of dressing rooms for men and ladies, lounges where the same could sleep off too many cocktails, and private dining and function rooms all named after southern flowers, where from a pair to several dozen could have intimate gatherings.

The basement was where Suzie worked. In the kitchen. Except for orientation, she'd never seen upstairs. And she'd never gone up the front steps. Or seen the gardens. Suzie's Doohickey never sullied the grandeur because it disappeared from view down an access road alongside the iron-railed fence, and sat in the depths of the underground garage until her shift was over.

The kitchen of the White Magnolia Club took up the entire basement, a massive kitchen in the middle, ringed all around with store rooms and coolers. The ceilings were low, criss-crossed with ducts and pipes and fans. The walls were beige, darkened by steam and cooking fumes, brown streaks running down the walls from daily condensation. The floor was checkerboard tile. The kitchen equipment was all stainless steel: tables, stations, sinks.

As in every large kitchen, a shiny steel table ran right down the middle of the room, with sinks and dishwashing equipment over against the far wall, next to a row of commercial stoves, ovens, grills, deep fat fryers and serving stations with warming lights. The cold prep area was against the other wall, near the walk-in coolers. The corner nearest the door was the butcher shop, and the corner closest to the kitchen stairs was the pastry shop. In back, beyond the coolers, squeezed into a corner behind the trash room, was the employee break room, a plastic, utilitarian place with folding tables and chairs.

The head chef's office was next to the door, the first thing you passed going in and the last going out, where Chef could sit and scrutinize everyone suspiciously as they hung up their jackets and punched the time clock, took out the trash or slipped a case of food out to their car.

There are several ways to run a kitchen. The General Manager, the Executive Chef, and the Sous-chefs operated under the brigade system, a quasi-military hierarchy devised by the head chef of the French army over a hundred years ago. It's a rigid organization, where everybody has a boss who reports to a boss who reports to THE boss; where every aspect of the work has someone assigned to perform it the right way. And there is only one right way.

Chef had a recipe book everyone was expected to follow every time. There were pictures of the finished dishes showing exactly how each one was supposed to be produced and plated. There was even a timing sequence, where a particular dish was supposed to take this much time to cook, this much time to cool, and this much time to stand before being served.

You've probably seen the brigade system at work if you watch the Food Channel. You might have thought it was a logical, smooth way to run things. Most restaurateurs agree. Any fancy establishment of any size will usually insist upon it as the perfect way to run a restaurant.

But go ahead and take a poll of people who've spent time in an army brigade and see if they agree with 'perfect'. Organized - yes sir. Covering all the contingencies - affirmative. Giving everyone a sense of their place in the system - sir yes sir.

Jail is like that, too. The brigade system is perfect if you want a bunch of droids doing exactly what they're told to, acting more like cogs in a machine than human beings. But there's one problem. Cooks tend to be on the independent side of droids, cogs or army types.

The executive chef of the White Magnolia Club was an Italian guy from New York. He'd been hired away from a big-name restaurant several years ago in order to lend a cosmopolitan air to the club, and because the chef before him enjoyed making such dishes as shrimp and grits with hushpuppies and collard greens, rather to the embarrassment of members who liked to entertain northern business acquaintances.

Chef Ricardo was how the staff addressed him. He was 6'4'' and weighed close to 300 pounds. Dressed out in his chef uniform with an extra large twelve inch toque hat on his head, he looked just like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Except for his rather long greasy black hair, which kept escaping from his hat and getting into the food.

He was a very strict brigade man, and just as in the army, where the responsibility for everything lay with the chief, the blame for anything that went wrong always fell on the lowest ranking recruit.

So a hair would be found in a member's food, and would be brought to Chef's office by a waiter, and he would look at it with extreme distaste and then blame the black cooks who'd worked on that particular dish. He'd come slamming out of his office, yelling commands at the entire kitchen to put down their work and listen, and they'd all stop and crowd around while he came screeching back to the cooking station, his white workshoes squealing, his face red, waving the offending follicle in his fat fist, and getting right up into the faces of some poor group of cooks, shouting at them from six inches away just like a drill sergeant, blaming them all for sloppiness, for health code violations, for being lazy and shiftless.

And they'd stand there with their heads bowed, nodding at everything he said, saying yessir and sorry sir and never again sir, looking steadily at the hair: straight, greasy, and an entirely different kind of black from what grew on their nappy heads.

Nobody dared to point this out, of course, so they just stood and listened and agreed until he got tired of yelling at them, and turned on his squeaky heels to march back into his office, slam the door, and sit steaming while the staff got back to making dinner.

While the Executive Chef and his team of Sous-chefs, all white guys, thought they were running the kitchen in brigade style, in reality this was a particular type of Southern kitchen, operating under an entirely different system. In a Southern kitchen, the real power is wielded by the two oldest black ladies who work there. One of them was Miss Mabel, and the other was Miss Charlene, and they'd been there since the Club moved uptown. They didn't decide what the members were going to eat, or what raw materials were going to be ordered, or who was going to be hired or fired, but they assigned and oversaw all the preparation and cleanup, and most of the cooking. Not officially, of course.

Miss Charlene was a pastry cook, and while there was a pastry chef above her, she made all the most popular desserts. Likewise Miss Mabel, who made all the sauces. Together they operated the whole kitchen, and let the highly paid, titled white guys think they were doing things their way. I've heard this system called the Black Mafia, but it was much more like a Black Matriarchy, where Grandma can still whip your ass at 83 and absolutely everyone bows to her will.

The fact that a pair of black women actually ran the kitchen was the cause of great anguish to Chef Ricardo, who'd been taught that the Commander in Chief ran things. It was like the way a dysfunctional marriage heads for divorce. Daddy hung out with his buddies and loafed while Mamma and the kids did the work, and he only came out of his office to scream and yell, waving recipes and photographs, prepared to first lecture and then spank the children, who would scatter and hide, beg and plead, and do anything to avoid punishment. And then he'd go back into his office after showing just how big an ass he could be, and they'd come out from hiding and go right back to doing everything the way Mamma wanted it done.

This particular evening was no better than normal for Chef, who was getting to the end of his rope. Suzie easily avoided being noticed for her lateness because Chef was piled off in the corner with his Sous-chef entourage around him, busily taking out his rage on the Latino dishwashers.

'These glasses are full of spots!' he screamed, waving a wine goblet by its stem, holding it above his head and turning it so everyone could see spots glowing dully under the florescent lights. 'I swear to God. Nobody else anywhere in the world has it as bad as I do. How many times do I gotta teach you how to polish? And what happens? The members get a dirty glass, and they complain, and it makes me look bad. I Will Not Have It!' and he slammed the glass down on the floor, where it shattered with a loud, satisfying kliiing.

Suzie waited until the sudden silence was broken before punching her time card, lest the loud clunk of the machine draw his ire. A Latino porter scurried over to grab a broom and dustpan, but everyone else's attention was riveted on Chef Ricardo. 'That glass is coming out of your pay,' he said to Manuel, the dishwasher he'd picked to blame for the problem. 'I'll show you again, one more time, and don't you ever forget it.'

Chef's face was red. He grabbed another glass, plucked a moderately clean napkin off his shoulder, held the stem with a corner of the cloth and violently twisted the goblet into the napkin. Then he held it up for display. Suzie thought it looked a little streaky, but didn't think anyone would point it out.

Chef thrust the glass at Manuel to take, and let go a fraction of a second before he had it. It crashed to the floor. 'Idiot!' cried Chef. 'You did that on purpose!' Manuel said nothing, but leaned down and began to pick up the larger fragments. Everyone backed away from them. Chef looked like he wanted to take a third glass and break it over Manny's head. But he controlled himself, and gestured angrily. Manuel gently took a goblet out of the tray and rubbed it dry with his napkin, his bare hands never touching the glass, the goblet coming out of the napkin gleaming like crystal.

Chef leaned close and snarled, 'You better watch it. I have my eye on you, and you are this close to being fired, my friend. Today.' And then he spun around with a squeak, and crunched through the glass back to his office, where he slammed the door and sat heavily in his chair, glowering out at the people in the kitchen who immediately turned away and went back to work.

Suzie had edged away from the office as soon as she punched in, and slunk off toward the coldboxes as Chef had stalked back to his office. She'd briefly noticed the schedule posted above the time clock. A banquet for 125 at Seven in the Ladies Slipper Room. Cocktails for seventy-five in the large dining room at Seven-thirty, thirteen in the Camellia Room at Eight, four in the Honeysuckle Room at Eight, six in the Petunia Room at Eight-thirty.

Suzie looked around. Everyone was back to work. There was a knot of cooks over at the stoves making lots of clatter and commotion, with porters scurrying around the fringes carrying trays to the stove or pans to the sink. It probably clearly going to be a busy dinner rush in the Casual Dining room; waiters were already coming in with orders and going out with platters, adding to the air of constant panic.

She went back and said hello to Miss Charlene, who was looking rather displeased. 'Just find something to do and stay out of the way for now, child,' she said, stirring a huge bowl of chocolate pudding with her wooden spoon. 'Go ask Manuel if you can help polish up, how bout.'

Suzie chuckled and Miss Charlene winked, and Suzie walked over and stood next to Manny and grabbed a napkin. Talking and joking as much as they could in Suzie's limited Spanish and Manuel's kitchen-functional English, they made short work of several stacked-up trays of goblets, and then started on the silverware while more glasses went through the big Hobart dishwasher.

It's amazing how peaceful you can be when you're doing a mindless task. There's nothing as serene as working at some utterly repetitive, seemingly boring job. Look down. Select a fork. Lift a fork. Place the fork in a napkin between your fingers. Rub back and forth using a little pressure, examine for remaining spots. Chuck the fork into a tub with the rest of the polished forks. Repeat. It was a calming exercise, and Suzie loved it because it gave her a chance to think. The way they polished things was a bit different than Chef taught them. They routinely breathed on the glasses that had already dried in order to soften up the spots, and if they were really on there, a little spit did the trick every time.

When they were finished, Manuel began loading a bunch of pots into the Hobart. Suzie wrestled the tubs of silverware onto a cart and dragged it back to the china closet, and came back for the glasses, and with a nod to Miss Charlene, fixed herself a cup of coffee and stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. She had to walk through the garage to get to the air, and was slightly out of breath when she got to the entrance where the employees went to smoke.

It was getting on in the evening, the air was cooling off, and through the trees, which were still just filling out, she could see the skyscrapers and apartment buildings lining Peachtree, and past those she could see the sky - orange gold and pale yellow, fading to baby blue in the west, with that green at the horizon that says pollution. She wasn't sure; was that another crane on the skyline? A blue glass building that split at the top into two broad, flat pincers. Like an opening silo.

There was a dual-purpose trash container sitting at the edge of the drive, the top brimming with cigarette butts, their white ends poking up like a big city seen from 30,000 feet. Styrofoam coffee cups filled the can beneath it. The area smelled like a bar the morning after, and the way the wind was blowing, she got whiffs of it all the way back to the kitchen, where she could hear vague drum beats and cymbal crashes.

The noises of a kitchen are distinct, and at a distance they sound like music. All the surfaces were metal, so everything clanked. The floors were wet nubby tile or rubber mats, so shoes tended to squeak as people walked around. Plates clinked, plastic bags rustled, trays scraped over the counters, knives went click click click click scrape clunk. There were the sounds of gas fueling the burners and dripping faucets pinging and fans howling and dishwashers running and refrigerators whining and water spraying. The kitchen made noise even when there was nobody there. Sometimes it was just the dripping faucets. And the click of the time clock.

It was a fast-paced environment; kitchens always are. Aside from unpredictable rushes in the Casual Dining rooms, it took hours to prepare everything for a half-hour's panic serving a banquet, and then nonstop in and out until the members and guests were fed and they could clean and close. It got so hectic forty-five minutes before plate-up that the cooks got into fights with each other and lashed out at the servers and porters when they got too close.

Suzie was new at the White Magnolia Club, so she was everybody's gopher while she learned her way around the kitchen. As an apprentice cook, she was learning everything from the bottom up. Because she was white, it was understood that she was training to become a chef. Because she was female, it was understood that she would never rise to Executive Chef, but might make a good Sous-chef down the line. Because she was Suzie, she was accepted by the black and Latino lower-level kitchen staff, and because she was Suzie, she was looked at skeptically by the executive staff. She wasn't sure, but she thought she liked restaurant work.

She was just going back to ask Miss Mabel what to do next, when the Garde-manger tapped her on the shoulder. The Sous-chef technically in charge of all cold foods, he was a tall thin northerner, with a baseball cap instead of the usual toque covering his thinning hair. He told her to make up two containers of salad mix for the banquet. She glanced over at Miss Mabel, who nodded, and then went off, satisfied. Lettuce was something she knew how to do. She was constantly afraid that one of the Sous-chefs would put her on a station and give her a task she'd never done before and had no idea how to accomplish, like breading shrimp, or a task that was way messy, like breaking ten dozen eggs into a sieve over a bucket, or difficult, like grating fifty pounds of cheddar in a machine that clogged with cheese every five minutes.

Suzie went to get a case of iceberg, a case of romaine, and a big bag of field greens out of the walk-in. She dragged the heavy, sodden cardboard boxes, hoisting them around corners, and finally landed them on top of the triple sinks, two of them filling with water from blasting taps.

When all the produce was stacked nearby, she fetched a beat-up ten inch kitchen knife from a drawer. It would have been nice to have a decent knife, but since she wasn't a cook, she didn't have one and had to make do. Anyway, lettuce wasn't that particular about how sharp your knife was. You could always rip through it rather than slicing it. You could even hack at it and really mistreat it, and still serve it for dinner. But not if Chef caught you.

The sinks were half full, so she turned off the water, then took a head of iceberg lettuce and hefted it. Now for the fun part. With the lettuce in her hand, the core outermost, she turned her hand over, and slammed it in an arc toward the side of the sink. It boomed - how satisfying - and with a big crunch she wrenched the broken core out of the bottom of the lettuce with her other hand and tossed it up on the sink table. Boom, another, and boom, like how you'd do it if you were mashing an enemy's brains out against a wall. It had a righteous feeling. There was pleasure in smashing cores. Cutting them out the way you were supposed to was no fun.

'Smashing bruises the lettuce,' the Garde-manger had told her when he'd showed her how to prep lettuce. 'You've got to core it with your knife.' And he'd twisted the tip of a huge bowie-looking knife into the bottom of a head of iceberg, using a kind of dance-like movement to cut it out in one slash. She knew she'd never be able to do it that gracefully, so whenever he wasn't around she went back to the old way and smashed the heads. It was so satisfying.

When she had a case cored and ready to cut, she held down a green head of iceberg and chopped it into slices an inch and a half thick, raising her knife into the air and snicking off whole sections of lettuce scalp. Then she gathered the slices up and turned them to cut them into chunks, sweeping it all into the sink with the side of her knife.

As fast as she could, she swiped another head off the pile and chopped through that, and went for another one, racing herself. Then the romaine, much less satisfying because she couldn't core it with extreme prejudice like she could with iceberg. She put her knife down and started ripping chunks of lettuce off the core with her hand, making sure they were a consistent size and shape so the Sous-chef wouldn't complain. She actually felt virtuous about this, because she'd heard somewhere that it's better to tear than cut lettuce. Something about vegetables and metal knives and oxidation. She wasn't sure if it wasn't a witch told her that. Either a witch or a nutritionist.

The field greens only needed to be torn through once, and she threw them into the rinse water on top of the other lettuce. Then she leaned halfway in and stirred the whole batch with both arms until the lettuce was thoroughly washed, and the grit agitated its way to the bottom of the sink.

Then she scooped up armfuls of washed lettuce into the second sink, and swished them around until more grit went to the bottom, and then scooped up all the green stuff and dumped it into the third sink, where it drained for a few minutes, and then tossed it into twenty-gallon plastic Cambros that sat and waited for her to wheel them off to the coldbox to wait for dinner. That was forty gallons, in under half an hour. Suzie's shirt was soaked and her arms were sore, but she felt a real sense of accomplishment.

Then it was time for another break, so she poured herself some sweet tea and snuck past Chef to go stand around in the evening air. Joseph the grill cook was out there having a smoke. He'd always had kind words to say to her, and Suzie thought of him almost as an older brother.

'So girl, how you getting on back there?' he asked as Suzie slumped against the wall and sipped her sweet tea.

'Alright, I guess,'' she said. 'Except I don't think I like Chef Ricardo very much.'

He laughed. 'Don't pay him no mind, Baby. He won't last much longer. You see how mad he gets when he don't get his way. He's going to wake up one morning and see it's never going to change, and then he's going to get hisself another job back up north and leave us alone.'

A black guy in his thirties, Joseph was at the top of his profession working on the grill, and he was a pleasure to watch: his movements were efficient and graceful, his attitude was cheerful, his jokes were wicked. Everybody in the kitchen liked him. The executive staff ignored him.

In a regular Southern black-run restaurant, of course, he could easily advance to the top of the line where he supervised the rest of the grill cooks, or move on to head chef and run everything under the aegis of the old black ladies. But in a fancy brigade kitchen, he was stuck wearing a hairnet and taking orders from the grill chef with the toque because he'd never been through culinary school, and wasn't white. It wasn't a condition anyone ever remarked on, but to Suzie it was obvious that the color bar was entrenched in the kitchen. 'And then what, after Chef leaves?' she asked.

'And then we do just like we're doing now, but with another overeducated white guy telling us how to do things his way. And we'll do what we always do until he goes away again. See, Honey, we're always here doing all the cooking and cleaning, and the chefs come and go. If they can't work with us, they go even faster, is all.'

Back inside, Chef was calling everyone to come help plate up the evening's banquet. 120 covers, and fifteen minutes to serving time. There were several stacks of plates at one end of the forty foot stainless steel table that spanned the length of the kitchen. Down the middle of the table were pans and containers of prepared food.

Over by the sinks someone had lined up a mess of salad plates, and two Latinos were hovering over it raining Suzie's lettuce into the bowls, a third waited to toss three cherry tomatoes and a few bits of crudit on top, a forth added a handful of croutons, and a fifth stacked the plates into a coldbox ready to be served. They seemed to be having a good time.

On the other hand, Chef stood silent at the head of the steel table, the Sous-chefs stood below him, lined up according to rank, then the black cooks, and then the Latino porters, all standing there like they were waiting for the music to start at a square dance. The food was laid out in large bowls, pans, and tubs down the line. The upper part of the line was quiet and poised for action, while the lower end was more at ease, laughing and joking while they waited for the show to start. Suzie joined the line at the bottom end, squeezing between two Latino porters. They joked quietly for a minute until Chef barked out, 'Begin.'

Chef Ricardo stood at the head of the line with his hands behind his back, observing. The Chef de Partie took a plate from the stack, and with his bare hands, artfully arranged precisely five asparagus spears on one edge. Then he handed it to the Rotisseur, who laid four baby carrots next to it, and passed it on. The Poissonnier had a large pastry bag full of mashed potatoes, and piped a crescent of potato next to the carrots. The plate was passed to the Garde-manger, who sprinkled the potatoes with cayenne pepper and passed it on. Then a piece of pork loin slapped down in the middle by the Saucier, and the Ptissier ladled on a sauce of mushrooms and wine, and handed it down to the Grilladin who arranged three barbequed shrimps around the potatoes, and passed it on to one of the black cooks who laid a sprig of parsley between the potatoes and the meat, and passed it to another cook who wiped the rim of the plate carefully with a damp rag, and passed it to another cook who put a metal lid over the plate and passed it to a porter who took the plate and stacked it into a hotbox on wheels.

The cooks reached with bare hands into the piles of food to select an item and dump it on the plate. The guy doing the meat squeezed and slapped the pieces with a friendly gesture between plates. When a tray was empty, a porter with enormous oven mitts brought another one over. They'd dump the remains of the first tray into the new tray, slopping the food into a mound.

The head porter stood by waiting to shut the hotbox when the last of the pork entres came down. Then he wheeled out another hotbox for the filet, while a third box awaited the fish. There was a flurry of porters changing out the vegetables with every entre. A porter waited to wheel the boxes to the dumbwaiter, which another porter would help wrangle upstairs, where yet another porter would open the boxes and hand the plates to the waiters.

Chef walked up and down the line finding fault with everyone, but nobody minded, because as long as he wasn't plating, his hair wouldn't get in the food. The moment the last plate was put into the hotbox, everybody broke away from the table like a chorus line peeling toward the wings.

Chef stood around talking to his Sous-chefs, then grabbed his things and went home to yell at his wife and children. And things loosened up a bit. The general manager had already left, Chef left when the plates were served, and the Sous-chefs soon after, leaving the minions to clean up and close.

After checking with Miss Mabel, Suzie grabbed a wet rag and started closing down sections she knew were finished for the night. She cleaned the lesser used of the two griddles with soda water and salt and a big pumice stone, her favorite hotside job, watching the water foam and steam, and enjoying how easily the grease and burnt food scrubbed up off the hot grill, and how shiny it was when she was finished.

Then she cleaned the outside of the walk-in coolers, wiping down the doors with stinky bleach water and making sure the glass was free of fingerprints and grease marks. And then she wiped down the long table, even though someone was undoubtedly going to come along with something filthy before the night was over. And she swept the floor down the alley of stoves, and swept out behind the cold station, and generally did Clean As You Go things.

When everything was cleaned and put away it was well after ten. All the cooks had gone home long ago, and it was just her and the Mexican porters, so there wasn't a lot of cross-cultural communication, since Suzie's knowledge of Spanish wasn't even up to the level of polite conversation. It was Manuel who told her to clock out and go home. Suzie was dog tired, so she staggered over to the time clock, punched out, pulled off her white jacket and fled to her car.

 

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next chapter, suzie goes home.