I'm a traveler!

I joined Chuck at the bar after I finished closing down for the night. Chuck looked like a middle aged Horatio Sanz and sounded like a bad impression of Harry Caray. "Mike! Want a tequila shot?"
"Sure" I said. I liked drinking with Chuck, it was always an interesting experience.

The Wine Bar was located in a charming spot, right next to a Subway sandwich shop and a pick up bar for people forty plus. The lights of the Wine Bar were off me and Chuck watched the elderly bar scene file down the street. We heard the door open and watched a woman in her late fifties stumbled in wearing a strapless, form fitting, Hawaiian printed dress.

Chuck took about three seconds to pounce on his prey.

"Hey baby, hey baby, how are you." Chuck slurred.
"Is this place open?" the woman said.
"Only for VIP's my dear. Why don't you come sit down by your new friend Chuck?"
"This place is open, right? I don't want to get in any trouble." The woman was about as drunk as I've ever seen a human being.
Chuck had one eye open now and I was pretty sure that he was about to pass out mid pick up line. "Sit down by Chuck and have a drink, beautiful."

The lady whispered in my ear, "I don't have any money."
"I think Chuck's taking care of the drinks tonight." I said.
"Hey Mike! Grab the lady a corona, she looks like a corona type of girl."
I went behind the bar grabbed another round for all of us. The woman sat at the bar and Chuck tried to woo her.
"So, what do you do?" the woman asked.
"I'm a traveler!" Chuck said, "I travel all over, that's what I do."
"A traveler?"
"I'm the district manager for Applebee's." At this point, Chuck was drinking brandy from a snifter about the size of his huge head. "It's a job though, I don't care for the food. I don't care for it, but I get to do what I want in this world."
The woman finished her beer and started to get a worried look in her eyes. "I've got to go, thank you for the drink, I have to go."
Before the woman made it out of the bar Chuck started to scream in his usual way. "That bitch, they all take free drinks and act like bitches! Fuck this place Mike, let's go to the strip club. Come on! Let's get out of this shit hole."
To put it in perspective, it was 2 a.m., the nearest strip club was at least and hour away and we were both hammered. So we did what anyone would have done, Chuck rented a limo and we drove into the darkness on our way to have a little fun.

We talked and laughed down the highway, throwing our empty beer bottles out the window.

We got to the strip club with ten minutes until close and a dream in our heart.

"We only got a few minutes!" I heard Chuck say as he barreled through the strip club and grabbed the first girl he could. "Hey baby, wanna go to the champagne room with us?" Chuck turned to me and said, "Come on Mike, this is gonna be awesome!"

I wish I could say it was. I had a whiskey headache that was starting on in base of my brain, and believe it or not when a drunk, sweaty, Horatio Sanz look-a-like is sitting next to you in the champagne room, it can hinder the lap dance experience just a tad...

At this point, I was weaving in between consciousness anyway. Blurry vision, a pounding headache, a stripper from western Kansas, all while a drunk Horatio was leading the way, it should have been a blast.

We were the only people left in the club, there was nothing but bouncers and strippers counting tips in corner. The party at the strip club was over now and it was time to leave. The last thing I remember was trying to open the front door and puking as I hit the ground.

Somehow, I woke up the next morning. I had no idea how I got home, I didn't even care, all I cared about was getting over the massive hangover. My hands were shaking as I put on my chef's coat and as I walked to my car I hoped that Chuck would stop by the restaurant again.

Aren't you supposed to be in rehab?

"You need to pick me up man"
"Aren't you supposed to be in rehab?" I said.
Josh started to cry into the receiver of the phone. "No man, I ain't going, things are to fucked up right now. "
"Are you drunk?"
"I picked up a bottle of beam on my way to my parents house."
"Alright, I get off at ten, can you wait?"


Josh was at one point the sous chef of the Wine Bar. He was supposed to be the great white hope of the bar's reputation, a culinary school trained bright eyed boy with enough drive to make up for years of declining sales and a down on it's luck fine dining restaurant. He was perfect except for the alcoholism and slight drug problem.

"Culinary school was great, I was too coked up half the time to taste anything, but fuck it." the owner of the wine bar didn't know about the drinking problem right away because "I can hide that shit, I don't have to do a line until I get home man." Josh would tell us.

He was right too, he did hide it pretty well; for about a month. About three weeks into his employment a Honda Accord would pull up to into the parking lot everyday. An alarm would sound on Josh's watch at about three thirty in the afternoon. He would stop his prep and go outside into the Honda. About twenty minutes later Josh would be back inside, sometimes it would be quiet, he would turn on whatever Phish live album he was listening to at the time and go back to cutting tenderloins. Other times, a coked out Josh would scream back into the kitchen like a hurricane of a human being and smash dishes on the floor laughing hysterically.

About two months later the freak outs began. He would be working the saute station in the middle of service taking swigs off the Applejack and cheap sherry on the speed racks. When the board filled up with tickets he could be a drunken well oiled machine, other times he would freak and rip the tickets of the pass and throw them on the floor like confetti. If he burned something during a busy night you would usually have to watch out for screaming hot saute pans being thrown down the line.

I wasn't there for it, but one day Josh was gone. The owner had somehow convinced him to go to rehab. There were little words said about it, one day he was just gone.

"We're going through a lot less tenderloins these days." the owner said.
Josh isn't here I though to myself. He was stealing five a week. Not to mention stealing cases of wine, foie gras, pork shoulders, and he was even known to drink a bottle of sherry every night on the line. Josh was a miniature wrecking crew. A one man band of destruction and chaos, that no one missed.

When he called me he was supposed to have been in rehab for a month. He had been staying with his parents after being kicked out of his apartment.

"I get off at ten, can you wait?"
"No, man, you need you to get me now!" Josh said.
"Sorry, I can't. I'm working the fucking dinner service now." I said.
"Fuck you man, you're an asshole." he hung up the phone, I tried calling him back, but never got him back on the phone, in fact I never heard from him again. I did hear that he tried to get his job back. but then broke a window in the Wine Bar when he was told he could be a line cook, but not the sous chef.

I saw him about a year later in a specialty food store. He was dressed in chef's whites and had a name tag that said he worked for the country club. He had lost about fifty pounds from his already skinny frame, I felt bad for him. We didn't talk, but just sort of stared at each other for a minute, then looked away.

Best Seat in the House

There was a leather couch set up in the corner of the Wine Bar. It was meant to be a symbol of relaxation and luxury. Big spenders would sit on that couch and drink artisan cocktails and celebrate whatever was going on in their lives, a special night out, a special night on the couch. I had been the sous chef for about a year and was in my usual place at the bar with owner and Executive Chef drinking sazeracs at two in the morning with two of the usual barflies surrounding us like bookends. On my left was the military doctor that had to perform two eye surgeries in the morning, on the Chef's right was a professor that had been kicked out of the Wine Bar a week ago for getting a little unruly.

"The best lunch cook I ever had." said the owner. "Was a coke addict that worked for almost nothing." He bought a round of whiskey shots for the group and continued his story. "The sous chef at the time was a real piece of shit too." he laughed. "But, I got a lot of laughs out of him." he pointed to leather couch in the corner. "There was this girl that worked in the kitchen, she was a part time cook I think. Anyway, she wanted to take the night off and sous chef and lunch cook convinced her that the only way they could let her take off, was if she blew them both on that couch. I used to watch the security film of them, she'd go back and forth on them. They were both naked on that couch and she'd just go back and forth, up and down, it was like the perpetual motion bird toy you'd get as a gag gift. It was some funny shit."

The leather couch is still there, for special night out.

The Bird nearly killed me

Jane, a name that will shred my eardrums for the rest of my life.

The Bird as it shall be known, was a "farm-to-table" restaurant I worked for, for a brief period of time. I can't help but wince in pain when I think of it.


"My cousin was Charles Manson"
"Really?" I said.
The waitress said"I like to listen to his music when the restaurant is closed. His music is really good! And it's genius. "
"Are you sure it just doesn't suck?" I was a week into my stay at The Bird. I wasn't in the mood to make friends with anyone. The Bird was sucking the life out of me. I didn't care anymore.
"I used to live in Mexico. I just did it on a whim. You know a lot of people say I should write a book about my life. All the things I've done."
"Your life isn't that interesting." I said. It was almost two o' clock and Jane would be coming into the restaurant at any minute. It would start with a shriek of a voice and then end with a snorting laugh. I was in charge of the kitchen and everyday would have to come up with a special that would use up some of the produce in the basement. Lucky for me, there never was any produce in the basement, there never really was. Jane kept it bare as possible. It was always empty except for a few potatoes and whatever ziplock bags of herbs that Jane would snip from her garden, and for some reason there was always a case of coconut milk.

Jane had bought The Bird ten years prior and under her rule, ten chefs had quit in three years. She was most likely the most unstable person I've ever come across, one minute she would be talking about how she was going to have an article written about her in the New Yorker and the next minute she would tell me stories about how she would call the restaurant while on speaker phone in her therapist office.

I really tried to make The Bird work, I really did. I stuck through some hard times, very hard times. After about three months I came up with a menu, after many hours of Jane screeching at me over details of the food and even more hours of me imaging that I was stabbing a fork in my eye, the menu was done. I had all the local farmers primed and ready to ship out all of there best animals part and vegetables.

But, then it happened. D-day. It was a Friday, and it was raining hard. It wasn't going to be a bad day, the new menu was about to take effect. The beautiful meats and vegetables were on there way. It was going to be a good one alright....I waited until about the time dinner service was set to begin before I started to worry. The food wasn't being delivered, could it be the rain? I called Jane, she told me "I'm feeling uncomfortable the direction you want to go." then she told me that she canceled the orders. No new menu, no meat, no veg. I was totally fucked. On top of everything else, the rain had totally flooded the basement, the prep cooks had taken their shoes off and waded in the water splashing going from task to task, god bless them they never stopped working. I thought that we might be ok through it all, maybe it would be slow, because of the storm that was going on. Wrong, we sold out of food around 7pm. People were being turned away at the door and the crowd in dining room were getting a little grouchy at best. Around 7:30 I kindly asked the dishwasher to "stop being an asshole and get me some clean fucking pans." Now, the punch he gave didn't connect with me, but I did feel the breeze of his knuckles on the side of my face. I knew he was a little grouchy too. It was a perfect shit storm and I was in the middle of it. I did what every other man in my position would do, I clocked out at 10 and went home and cried. At about midnight Jane texted me and asked "How did everything go tonight?" The next day I resigned, I've never heard Jane's voice again. But sometimes when the wind blows and a tree scratches the window, or someone steps on a cat's tail, I get reminded of Jane's screech and the horror of The Bird.