turkey leg

Yeah, so people were like do your blog...we love your blog...
and cheers that you are doing your bullshit blog...

I need some meat though.

The business, the restaurant business, it is such a succulent bone.

I remember when I first got into it, where I was, what I was doing, and who got me into it.

I was working at Pace Warehouse, one of those Sam's type places, in Greensboro, at Guilford College road where it bisects market street, out by the church's chicken, stocking shelves at six in the morning. At times they had me driving a cherry picker even though I was not authorized to and I was high. On the weed. I ate my lunches with a rastafarian named Zebedia. We smoked more pot on our lunch break. One afternoon after lunch they tried to make him drive a cherry picker and he ran it into a dock. He just laughed, but they threatened me with either being at the top of the cherry picker or driving it...so I always drove. I devised a hiding place in the stock shelves where it was safe to smoke pot. They tried to make me put a stereo sound system shelf thing-a-ma-jig together but I couldn't do it. the instructions were ridiculous. I just fell asleep in the middle of the aisle but they didn't fire me, they told me to get some rest and report for duty the next morning...I'm telling you when they found me I was laying sprawled in the floor of the warehouse snoring. this is where America went wrong. They should have put their laundry money in socks and beat me to death.

I went home. At the time I was living with Jennifer Donahue and Steven Eigeman on Friendly Ave across the street from that fucking Hester's day care. It was a great house. There was a breeze. We had a back yard. Our backyard connected to all of the other back yards on the block by way of an old two track dirt lane that meandered behind the properties. I liked that back alley. that's what it was, an old alley. Dogs and cats would run around back there.

I was tired of that bullshit warehouse job. They were going to fire me anyway. I had served my purpose, the holidays were over. Zebedia had vanished. I was working with a bunch of redneck assholes. Jennifer was a line cook. When I could no longer afford to pay rent she forced me to get a job where she was working. She told me that there was a dishwashing job open at a new restaurant that she had started cooking at called Bert's Seafood Grille....yeah even at that point when she said it I knew it had an extra "e" on the end. I started working for Mary and Drew Lacklen scrubbing pots...as they say. I guess I was eighteen. Jennifer quit about a week after I started. It didn't have anything to do with me.

I was scrubbing pots, running the dish machine, eating scraps off of the plates, washing potatoes, and peeling carrots and I was blissfully happy. One day that asked me if I wanted to come over into the kitchen and work the fryer because the fry guy was on a bender and it didn't look like he was coming back...even though he was only down the block at a local bar...so I started doing it. Making French fries, hush puppies, and operating the steamer steaming shellfish. And then I started getting all of my miscreant friends jobs in the dishroom.

If you ever get to work on a restaurant line and you get into it, then you can probably understand how one gets hooked on it. Only a few losers fall for it. I did. I fought against it for a while, but it is the only thing I know....I think I love it.

The first team was Brad Hendrix, Evelyn Ruth, and Johnathan Hopkins. Brad was lead saute, Evelyn was grill and expeditor, and John-O rustled up the fries.

And so I lived my days.....

Mary was the chef. She was the driving force. The recipes were her's. If she was in the kitchen you really had to put your nose to the grindstone. We would come in at one or two in the afternoon and prep like motherfuckers up until the very last minute before five and then as soon as Mary left the kitchen to change the menu on the chalk board in the dining room we would bail out the back door and smoke a cigarette and take pinch hits. In the dining room at the stroke of the hour, Drew would unlock the door and the people would cascade in. Within fifeteen minutes we would be inundated with tickets, completely slammed, yelling, throwing shit on the grill, slamming steamer doors, dropping fry baskets into molten oil, lining up plates, garnishing plates, preparing the sauces, putting everything together so that it all came out at once, this with that, and that with this...tickets came in, tickets went out, everything just hummed, and you sweated and were drenched and your mind had to race to keep track of everything, and the slighest misstep would send the whole shebang into the crapper, but the rush coursed along and you would look up from having just walked in from your five o'clock smoke and it would be nine o'clock.....



that was the life...

And then John-o got cancer.....

and died.