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.