Since it was an eight hour shift, everything from here on was time-and-a-half. As Bill figured it, he would make at least two hours overtime a day. That would increase his salary handsomely and was, as he could see it, a nice benefit. Bill saw Rosie pass by on her way through the double doors. He followed her with his eyes as far as he could see her checking out her ass and her legs. Only when she was completely gone out by Kalista did he turn back.
“Like what you see?” Edelgarde was standing at the serving counter of the open-kitchen window.
He could have been embarrassed. Maybe someone else would have been. Instead he just smirked and said, “Yeah.”
“You can have it, you know. She’s stricken.” Edelgarde smiled, shifted her weight one foot to the other as she stood there. “You can have us both if you want, separately and together.”
Bill stood there, looked at her.
“You’re cute,” she said. “I’m usually not this forward and I generally don’t fool around at work. But… Rosie and I are really good friends and as good friends sometimes do, well, you know, we share things and we enjoy being with each other.”
“That so?” Bill asked.
“That’s so,” Edelgarde said. “Anyway, we got an order. And I’d like a hamburger with fries for dinner, if you don’t mind. Usually I eat first and then Rosie.”
“We done for the night?”
“Probably. Mostly. We don’t usually get much after 10:00 and if you’re wondering, tonight was a pretty good sample of what it’s like. We do about fifty covers on average. Maybe seventy-five on a really good night and a hundred on an exceptional night. Friday nights are usually up there.”
“Okay, Bill said. “Let me know when you want the hamburger.”
“You can do it now. Rosie will do the table.”
“How you like it cooked?”
“Rare.”
“Really?”
“Yup. I like all my meat rare.”
“Me too. Good girl.”
“I am a good girl,” Edelgarde said. She smiled and leaned forward so that she was leaning on the counter. “In time, you’ll see what good girls me and Rosie are.”
As she leaned there, kind of resting on her arms which she’d rested on the counter, Bill could see almost all of her bosom. He knew, given what she’d said, she’d made this move so he could see exactly what he was seeing. She knew he knew too, or he surmised this by her somewhat blatant attempt to look cute, which she surely did. She looked downright edible.
“So…” she finally said. As she said this the double doors opened and Bill could see Rosie step through. She was carrying two shrimp cocktails. He saw her look at Edelgarde in the service window and maybe frown a bit, maybe not, maybe he just imagined it. Anyway, as Rosie went around and out into the dining room, Edelgarde stood up and moved away from the service window.
With her gone, first thing Bill did was fetch a hamburger and set it on the grills of the broiler. The broiler was plenty hot since nothing had been cooking, so he watched the hamburger patiently and as soon as he was sure the down-side was striped, he slid his spatula under it and moved it so it was rotated and would be diamond-marked. Because the grills were so hot this did not take long and a moment later he slid the spatula under it again and flipped the burger.
While the burger was on the second side, he quickly dropped an order of French fries into the fryer. Then he grabbed a bun and put it face-up under the broiler. It toasted in about five seconds real-time. He grabbed up the bun, set it on a plate, slid his spatula under the hamburger and placed the burger on the bun’s bottom.
Done! He put it a set-up of lettuce, red onion and pickle on the plate before he went for the French fries.
By Peter Weiss
Then there they were, standing in the little alcove outside the door of The Clock, hugging tight. Robert kissed Bill on the cheek, something that might have been uncomfortable under other circumstances but which seemed quite natural at the time.
“Keep in touch,” Robert said.
Bill knew he would not keep in touch. Bill knew it was one of those moments, one of those things. He’d already had some like this one, not quite as deep, but similar, when he’d said goodbye to several of his friends upon heading off to Columbus, and before that too, with friends and even relatives on his mother’s side who he’d lost contact with after his mother died.
There was so much to remember, even then in his short twenty years of life.
Trish had asked him if he could fix Patsy’s grade. She’d stood there with those black lips in those high-heel, open-toe, open-heel mules, in just a full, black slip and no underwear. She’d already told him that.
She was hot just the way she was. But as she asked him about Patsy’s grade, she sucked at one of her fingers and fussed with the bottom of her slip, lifting it ever-so-suggestively.
“Please?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pretty please.” She’d drawn her knees together, then let them separate, looked at him with puppy-dog eyes. “I’ll do anything for it.”
“Like what?”
“Like your wildest dreams. And I do mean anything. From tying me up to…” She’d leaned in on over the trunk that separated them to whisper in his ear.
He could see the slip fall away from her body, could see her tiny breasts with their prominent nipples. He remembered thinking he’d died and gone to heaven, or something to the effect of how lucky he was at the moment.
What she’d whispered in his ear had been so far from his dreams it might never have come into his mind, just like being a cook had never come into his mind until the moment Robert stepped into Bailey’s office that morning and whisked him off to Suburban West.
“Well,” Bill said, “for that I might just be able to fix that grade.”
“I know you can,” Trish said. “I know you will. I know you would even if we didn’t do anything here tonight. I know, knowing you now, that you wouldn’t let Patsy fail if there was anything you could do about it.”
“You think I’m that much of a softy?”
Trish just smiled at that.
They spent the night together. They drank some wine, smoked some weed, popped more Quaaludes than they should have. Then they drank more wine and got so wasted they could hardly stand up.
They sat a long time on the sofa making out. Petting. Petting in that old sense of the word. They kissed and they touched and then they kissed and touched some more.
And then they walked hand in hand, very late at night/early in the morning, into Bill’s bedroom where Trish pleased herself with him in every way she wanted while Bill let himself enjoy what would end up being one of the very best nights of his life.
Patsy could never get an A. Bill fixed it so Patsy went to talk to Hank who told her he couldn’t just give her a grade, but that since she was having such a hard time with the exams, he could arrange for her to write an extra paper. He even allowed her to be able to get help with the paper. She had to write it, but she could get help.
That, of course, was an allusion to Bill’s helping her with the paper. Which he did. Which, mostly, he wrote for her sitting outside in the backyard while she and Trish sunbathed. For which Patsy was ever grateful in ever so many ways. And Trish too.
Leaving Columbus meant leaving so many memories.
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
Cinco de Mayo plus a couple, a beautiful Thursday morning. Classes were over at the university and graduation was coming Sunday, a little later this year due to the way the calendar worked out. Bill’s fiancé was up in Cleveland visiting her family, making arrangements with them for the ceremony.
Bea was overtly cantankerous from the get-go. Bill had taken Mary to the Upper Room last night after work and they had driven in together this morning. To Bea, they both looked happy and sated. She recognized the after-pleasuring-themselves aura about them both, and it ticked her off. Worse, they made no attempt to conceal what they’d done. They didn’t flaunt it, didn’t go around telling anyone/everyone. They just came in together. Bea knew right away why. She knew where they’d been.
So they were at work. They’d changed into uniforms, had coffee, played the numbers. Bill and Bea had talked about what she needed help with, things from downstairs that needed carrying up, stuff about the dishwashers, that they needed to do.
Bea was doing her thing over on the pantry station. Henry Lee had just come in and was sitting over by her reading the racing pages. Bill and Mary were in the back. They had things well under way. The round was in the oven, the sauces were on the stoves and the specials were either prepared or they were working on them. Waitresses and dishwashers were not in yet so things were relatively quiet.
The more Bill and Mary worked together, the madder Bea got. Mary had turned up the music so it spread throughout the kitchen, this despite the hum-roar drone of the exhaust fans.
Henry Lee noticed Bea’s mood almost immediately. He wrote it off as a woman thing until, when he was on his second cup of coffee, Bea started mumbling to herself.
“Your time of the month?” he asked her without getting off her stool.
“What?” Bea said.
“Girl, you talking to yourself.”
“Was I?”
“What happened? Mr. Bea not doing his homework?”
“Mr. Bea doing just fine.”
“So, what’s up with you?”
“Look at them,” Bea said.
From time to time as he sat there, Henry Lee had been looking at them, Mary and Bill, and seemed to him they were just doing what they were supposed to be doing.
“What about them?” he asked, but then it occurred to him that Bea was being catty, jealous. “They just working. You horny or something? Bathroom door locks.”
Bea didn’t say anything. She was like the bull seeing red, getting madder and madder. If it was in the cartoons, she’d be scratching that front hoof in the dirt and the smoke would be coming out her ears. For no apparent reason to anyone but herself, she stomped over by the dish machine and threw a stainless steel mixing bowl into the pot washer’s sink. The stainless steel on stainless steel made a huge crash, was a clear attention-getter.
“Watch out,” Henry Lee said to no one in particular. He stood up. No way he was staying where he was. Bad enough he had to ask Bea for the key to the linen closet, which he did.
She threw the keys to him in an unfriendly way. He caught them, caught her looking at Bill and Mary who weren’t doing anything other than working. He shook his head and went on down the stairs.
Mary didn’t have to say anything to Bea. She knew what was up. She knew Bea knew the moment she called her and told her she was riding in with Bill. She figured Bea might be miffed, but wasn’t anything she could do about it, anything she wanted to do about it. She wasn’t not going with Bill on account of Bea. Bea went home every night to Mr. Bea.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
By Peter Weiss
and
Fiction Outtakes: The Second Hundred coming soon on Amazon
an outtake/excerpt from I See My Light
Sometimes the best wins out, Murph thought. Most often the most corrupt does. Or the most dirty.
Politics of the day caused him to be thinking this.
So he remembered Isaac Logart, a Cuban welterweight in the 1950s. Logart was on the Cuban Olympic team and jumped off the truck in the United States, in New York, where he defected. He promptly became a pro fighter.
Murph met Logart in the 1970s in the hotel at which he started working. Logart was a pantry man there. He made coffee and toast and did a few other things, but not much more. He didn’t have much of a brain left and his speech was all slurred. He wore thick black-plastic eyeglasses that were always loose on his face so one of his regular motions was to keep pushing those glasses in place on his nose.
One thing about Logart, he had muscles. He had muscles like no other person Murph had ever known. He had muscles in places other people didn’t even have places, Murph used to say when describing him,. That’s how strong he was. Murph also kidded him all the time saying the coffee tasted like he’d put his socks in it.
Logart was one of several people personally responsible for making Murph a distance runner, the last one actually. Murph had just started running, not so much because he wanted to as much as because his wife, a modern dancer, had told him she didn’t want to be married to a fat guy and that he’d better start doing something about himself.
So it goes.
He started by walking in place in the apartment. Then he was running in place for more than half an hour at a time and then one time when he and his wife were up on the boulevard, out of the blue Murph just felt like running so he told his wife he’d meet her at home. He took off and ran all the way home.
That’s how it happened, straight up.
From there, Murph started going out to run, and one day when he’d run two miles he happened to mention it to Logart. Logart looked at him through those thick eyeglasses and said “Run four miles tomorrow.” Then he added, “In boots.”
That was how Logart was. You could ask him anything about boxing and he would teach you anything you wanted to know. But you could never fool around with him by faking going to hit him. If you did that, he was apt to knock you out straight.
They were talking in the kitchen one time about his career. Logart was a top contender, number one contender for almost two years but he never got a title fight. Murph was asking why.
“It’s all fixed,” said Logart.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“They wanted me to go down and I wouldn’t.”
“So what did you do?”
“I waited. I trained. I took lesser fights.”
“Why wouldn’t they give you a fair shot?”
“Cause I’d a beat them. I was better. They made me get out of fight-shape and get older and slower. And then they were dirty.”
Truth was that later in his career he fought and lost an elimination bout for a chance at the title. He lost, he said, because of the unwanted layoff.
Next Murph thought about a woman in his Master’s program. She really had little talent but she had really big tits. Turns out she screwed the professor and published a novel because of his backing.
Going way back was the head of the creative writing program where Murph did his undergraduate work. He got his job because of paternalism, not talent or qualifications.
It’s a complicated world, Murph thought. He could remember some of the rules of leadership. Most of them weren’t too pretty. And then there were our leaders, the American Politburo, liars, thieves, extortionists. Their major MO: spend other people’s money indiscriminately and promise anything to stay in power.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
By Peter Weiss
Union and management clashed a lot in the hotels in the 1970s. There were many issues, some a lot more important than others and some which should not, perhaps, have been issues at all. I can’t speak about after 1979 since I haven’t been involved with hotels since then, but in the 1970s , major issues ranged from preservation of jobs to wages. Examples of non-issues might be things like the fireman’s job. In older times when the stoves were wood-burning, a fireman’s position was necessary because the fires had to be built ahead of time and then had to be maintained throughout the day. Since there were a lot of stoves and a lot of fires to be maintained, it was a vital position with lots of work, little glory, and a high risk of getting burned. With the advent of gas, that position became obsolete, and while management argued for the elimination of the position and the termination of the firemen, the union argued to preserve the title and find other work for the firemen to do. That was pretty much how it played out, so in the St. Regis, for example, the firemen came in at 6 AM and lit the gas stoves since they were all flat-top stoves and required some warm-up time, then did kitchen chores ranging from accompanying the floor chefs to get the requisitions filled, acting as runner (a go-for) for things needed, and cleaning and maintaining the stock pots, etc. Believe me, there was plenty of work for them!
In all, the fireman’s position was not a big deal except to management which saw it as an inroad into layoffs and cutting kitchen personnel; once management began to cut there, that was the lead-in for cutting whenever and wherever it chose.
One of the biggest issues in the hotel I worked in was combination jobs. Simultaneously, the major nationwide issue for the union was wage increases for the maids. Eventually the union leaders and the union people in the St. Regis would come into conflict with these, but that is a story for another time.
One evening when I came into work, I saw that the main kitchen had a small banquet to do at 6 PM, a wedding reception of about 20 people. I noted it had a fish-item appetizer and we had no fish cook that night. Yes, for each type of food there was a specific cook and the union held to not letting cooks do combination jobs, a matter of preventing drastic cuts in the kitchen personnel. What was on the menu was really no big deal: a simple poached fish in a simple white wine sauce with a simple garnish. It had a fancy French name, but that was all it amounted to. Under any normal, ordinary circumstances, I would’ve knocked it out from my station. I was first cook and really it was no big deal. The problem was that I was Assistant Shop Chairman for the union; I couldn’t possibly perform a combination job, no matter how simple, since it would’ve set a precedent I could not/would not set.
The Executive Chef knew this. The Sous Chef knew this. They, especially the top banana, were counting on my not wanting to ruin a wedding reception for some happy but unsuspecting newly-married couple. And I didn’t want to do that; I didn’t want to do that very much. So at 4 PM, two hours after I started work but when both the Sous Chef and Executive Chef made their first appearances in the kitchen during my shift that day, I asked to speak to them and we met in the chef’s office. I told them that I couldn’t possibly put up that fish appetizer and wouldn’t do it only because of my union position. I told them that in respect for the newlyweds and for them and my job I would prepare everything and leave it ready. All they needed to do was to bring in a cook to serve. The chef didn’t say anything other than that he expected the banquet to go off without a hitch and for the fish appetizer to be plated at 6 PM when the banquet waiters came for it. He and his sous chef then disappeared and didn’t return to the kitchen until 6 PM on the dot when they both went into the office and purposefully stayed off the kitchen floor.
I didn’t waste my time. I spoke with Tony, the Floor Chef, Gomez, the Shop Chairman, and my friend Isidro, the night Garde Manger, and we all concurred that I would prepare everything as I had told the chef but not serve it, and that was that. Gomez was not working that night, so in effect I was the head union person, and I was surely in a bind.
At 6 PM sharp, the banquet waiters came for the fish appetizer. I wouldn’t plate it and stayed on my station, maybe 10 or 12 feet away. The waiters begged me and finally the headwaiter went for the banquet captain who went directly into the chef’s office. By this time it was nearly 6:15 PM and I had already held up the serving of the banquet by a quarter-hour.
The rest happened really fast. The Chef came storming out of the office followed by the banquet captain and ordered me to put up the fish appetizer. I told him I couldn’t and wouldn’t. He then came around the service counter, swooped up my knives in a hissy-fit and hurled them over the counter into the middle of the kitchen. Next, he fired me, ordered me off the kitchen floor and to go punch my time-card. Then he ordered the Floor Chef, Tony, to put up the fish.
I didn’t quite obey, but I didn’t quite disobey. My knives had scattered. Some had bounced on the floor and landed. Others had flown to the middle table and bounced off that to the floor. I took my time collecting them, long enough to see Tony serve up the fish appetizer and then slide over to my station, the saucier station, to start readying the main course for dishing up. I’d prepared everything for both courses and so the damage to the newlyweds was a mere fifteen-minute delay, one I had done my very best to avoid.
In the locker room, I locked up my knives and changed clothes then sat down on the bench in front of my locker, the same bench I’d sat on a few short years ago when Raul had handed me the cup of scotch I’d drunk at 7:15 in the morning before heading into the kitchen for my first day of work. I knew the chef could not fire me for doing union business, so I wasn’t all that worried. I was concerned, for sure, since I needed the paycheck, but I was more pissed than anything, not that the chef had fired me but because of how he had handled my knives.
Before I left for home, my friend Isidro found me in the locker room. He told me that they’d spoken to Gomez, the shop chairman, and Arturo and Raul, the kitchen delegates, and to the union. The union had said for me to report to work as usual the next day, to clock in and go to work no matter what the chef did and that Ernie Peters, our union field representative and business agent, would be in to see me sometime during my shift.
(to be continued)
This morning my daughter sat and ate a croissant with her hot chocolate. It was store bought but it was fresh and good. I watched her peel off some of the top and scoop out some of the insides and drop it down on her tongue. Then she sipped her hot chocolate through a straw and repeated the process.
Pastry chefs and many Chefs de Garde Mangers are like artists, and overall, in part, what distinguishes a pastry chef from a patissier, a Chef Garde Manger from a cold food person and an Executive Chef from a first cook or even a Saucier is that artistic quality, the ability to make a masterpiece out of a suckling pig or a decorative turkey. The saucier will make the sauce for that turkey, a cold food person will slice it and rebuild it on its frame, but the Chef Garde Manger will take it like a canvas and make it a work of art for display and even eating if that is part of the purpose. Like the visual tricks in the making of movies, sometimes display foods are made for looks and not for consumption.
Arturo was a true pastry chef and he ran the baking department at the St. Regis. That was his career, his job and his life. He was from Italy. Working with him in the pastry department (that name in English does not do justice to the work these people did) were two Frenchmen. One of them mainly baked and decorated cakes. The other made all the French pastries that you could ever want, from the delicious little cookies to the exquisite eclairs and everything else in between.
A moment’s pause to celebrate gourmet food. One of the great things about working in that hotel’s kitchen was that anything and everything you ever wanted to eat was simply there for the taking if you had the position and authority to take it. When I became Saucier and then moved on to Floor Chef, I was in that position. I could walk into the bakery department and take any pastry I wanted. I could walk into the Garde Manger and eat as many cocktail shrimp as I wanted, or whatever else I wanted, and I could have anything to drink I wanted, from espresso to Rum 151. I rarely abused this privilege, but sometimes when the craving for meat would hit me I would go to a freshly made prime rib, cut it in half and take the middle piece for myself. I generally never ate that whole piece of meat. I cut it into squares and shared with the workers on my shift.
Dominic was the baker. He was the fifth man on the Pastry Department team. He made the breads, rolls, challahs, croissants, brioche and everything else of that sort served in the hotel. When I started in the hotel, he worked days, but then the management began making payroll cuts and after awhile he went to working nights so that he would come in while we were doing dinner, at around nine or so, and he would start baking. He worked into the wee morning hours.
The first trays of croissants came out of the oven around 11:00 PM. By that time dinner was over although there were always late orders and room service orders that came in. My friend Francisco and I would be cleaning up and getting ready to get off work, but we took to having a quiet moment together every night. So I would order us espresso from the pantry and we would walk back to the pastry department and choose from the several trays of them the exact croissants we wanted.
Imagine. I liked them light and moister inside. Francisco liked them darker and drier inside. We would sit at the table and shoot the breeze with Dominic, an Italian from Brooklyn, and we would enjoy the best of the best. MMMMM.
I don’t get too excited about gourmet food. I’ve had it all up to a certain point. But some thirty-five years later, I remember the smell of those croissants. I remember the smoke pouring out of them and how they melted on my tongue. I remember looking at maybe a hundred of them and picking the very one that pleased my fancy.
