Line Cooking Narrative

I'm watching the cooking channel on my day off – Thirty minute meals with an attractive smiling and well endowed young lady, Everyday Italian, Sarah's poorly kept secrets, Bobby Flay's big fucking barbecue, Molto Mario – just sitting there, wasting away, seeing food that I'm never going to eat, or probably even try to make. I flip through the menu – dumbly fumbling with the remote, I want to see what's next even though I don't care – the perils of Pauline, or whatever that old southern lady who has a tendency to smother everything in butter and/or cheese shows' name is.

The phone rings. Can I come into work? Would it be a problem? No, seriously, I'm not doing anything important. I can be there in twenty minutes? Good. I feel ripped off in spite of the fact that I had absolutely nothing going on – at all.
Work is the smell of a deep fryer and eggs cooked in too much grease. I would rather live on the streets I told people, but I still find myself here, doing the same thing over and over and over again. We've got the universal ingredients: breaded shrimp to make college kids feel high-class, French fries by the box, crispy chicken fingers frozen in cases, little bags of rice and vegetables, packages of freeze dried vegetables, packaged premixed mashed potatoes, sealed portioned steaks, whatever you need - its got its own little plastic package. Remove the food and mix with whatever other packages you need to create an entrée. Here's your dinner, please let us know if we forgot to take an item out of its appropriate little plastic package, because if we did we will take it back to the kitchen and do it for you, then pretend to re-plate it so it looks like an entirely new dish – even though it's not and we both know it. I've been here for two years; they gave me a little star to put on my name tag – which apparently infers that I am really good at taking heated things out of packages without pissing off the manager or the customers. The waitresses are a different story, though. My god.

We're twenty-first century kids – pissing around, doing odd-jobs with no real direction. We do what people tell us. We do what we think we want. We do what society tells us. We do what our mom tells us, and what our boss tells us. That thirst that we had for life, the exuberance of living, the desire to do well, the excitement that we could find in a job well done, that – that's dead, or sedated, maybe waiting to come out and bring the fire of life back into us, but we've been conditioned to repress it. We've been conditioned like rats in a box – hit the lever, get the treat; rinse, repeat.

Mary is in the window. A customer tried to grab her ass, complained that the food wasn't hot enough even though she could see the steam coming off of it, someone spilled water all over her shirt, the dishwasher accidentally dropped a stack of plates into her arms – all that stuff that the waitresses go on about. She's talking in my direction even though she knows that I am just nodding and pretending to pay attention. That sucks. It's the arrangement that we have – she bitches and I don't tell her to shut up. The manager stops by to tell her that she can't cuss out the customers – even if they do try to grab her ass. The indignant look she shoots him as he turns to leave should have killed him. Then she's asking me what she wants to eat. How the hell do I know? I look like a goddamn chef? I'll think of something.

It's lemon pepper on a grilled chicken breast. I set it on grilled toast with garlic butter and a slice of swiss cheese. The side is sautéed tomatoes, red onions and scallions over not-too-greasy hash browns. It's enough of a change from the usual to get a response. The kind of thing that gives rise to responses of the “oh-my-god-you're-such-a-chef” nature. I do what I can. It's child's play, really. She's all tattoos, piercings and dyed hair, wicked glares and satiric laughter; she doesn't know a thing about food – what she knows is how to put someone on the defensive in a hurry.