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He hit the time clock looking half dead- disheveled hair, stained white tee, worn hound's tooth pants. "You're late again" I said, while thinking: goddamn, If I could only find another cook worth half your salt? Just one of many times I could've fired him. I am no pushover or sentimentalist, so there are a few things you need to understand. Old Jim was an insufferable drunk, relied exclusively on curse words to talk, gambled, lied and rumor had it, once killed a man in the pen, yet despite his faults he was a maestro when in the weeds. When the wheel was blooming tickets and the servers were screaming like banshees, he never lost his cool. It's not the point that I once caught him washing his pants in the dish machine, knew of his stash of Pabst in the produce cooler, turned a blind eye to his nightly dinner of broiler station scraps and that those, in actuality, were whole fillets and not even his habit of referring to his knife as his "tool". The point's that in all other respects he was born for the kitchen's hellish ways, the long, cruel hours on your feet, scorching heat of salamandered plates, desperate pleas for traction thrown salt asks of spilt grease, inevitable cuts, burns and falls, the sheer will it takes to keep your hand over a broiler grill when flipping steaks. "The breaks" had never broken him, so I let him saunter in like he owned the place but watched him like a dog that could turn on you at any time. What it amounted to was that Jim was an indispensable, son-of-a-bitch who if I gave enough rope, always towed the line Post a comment in response: |
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