Novel Treatments / JACK SHIT 2.1 Development
Five-thirty: the floor staff; the flawed show. The plate-spinners and patient players of the waiting game are lined up like a curtain call rehearsal. Resplendent in regulation black, they provide an ironic, coloured counterpoint to Black’s crew, on the other side of the pass. The family, the front-of-house, – waiters, runners, waitresses, busboys – look rested and bright-eyed: even the one or two who rode out the lunchtime slam are still presentable, still fit for public consumption. Not so the chefs, who are sweating and hurrying, doubled-up and clutching, loading reach-ins and speed racks with alarming amounts of food, arranging favourite pans and saucing spoons, sending busboys off for buckets of ice to keep their mise-en-place cool, picking herbs, sharpening knives and checking, checking, checking. Simultaneously, they are preparing and plating the Saturday night specials, so Black can spin them onto the pass, explain them to the waiting staff and runners, and then watch as the beautifully balanced, artfully arranged dishes are rent asunder, torn apart in a clash of forks and a frenzy of tearing hands.
‘Okay, okay. Jerk chicken here. Rice and black beans coming. Staff food – this side!’ As he says this, Lejohn, the diminutive but dogged sous chef, is stacking chicken thighs on plates, thumping the heavy oven doors closed with his clogs, threading his way through dervishes with dishes: a kind of telepathic or clairvoyant grace.
Meanwhile, Black is jamming a sprig of dill into a quenelle of white mousse, and saying,
‘Fish special, yes? Pan-fried sea bass, with lyonnaise potatoes, char-grilled artichoke hearts and white onion and crème fraîche mousse. Any questions?’ The staff fall forward as one, forking, slicing, grabbing, cramming. A waitress pipes up,
‘What are lyonnaise potatoes? I thought that was with capers?’
‘No, April. Livornaise is with capers. Lyonnaise is anything with cream and onions.’ Black meets her eye and then waves to collect the attention of the remaining staff. He continues, ‘These potatoes are sliced and sautéed with caramelised onion. No cream. But there is the mousse on top, which is lighter and tarter. Cream would be too heavy. Okay? You all know what it tastes like?’
‘Yes, chef.’ This joke chorus sounds like a slew of schoolchildren slurring their classroom responses. Black has his eye on a sharp-looking trio of waitresses, on whom he will rely to hold things together. Two are called April and May, which makes Black think that the third should really be June. But she isn’t: she’s called Just, for Justine. She has pink hair, and a tiny stone glitters in her nostril, but she can carry six plates and she never misses a beat. She never rings in sick; she never turns up late. These are likeable qualities, but Black has begun also to like the astringent hairstyle, the eyes you could clamber into, the curve of the neck that answers to the small of the back. He cannot pin an age on her: nothing between twenty and thirty would honestly surprise.
‘Rump of lamb niçoise with red wine sauce. That’s rump, not rack, yes? Ask them how they want it cooked. Everyone know the garnishes?’ Black begins to enumerate them on his fingers, and so it continues. There are tiny spatchcocked quails to be explained. A fat comma of darkly intense chocolate ganache, infused with chipotle and paired with pink peppercorn ice cream, is cooed at and quickly demolished. All the while, Lejohn’s jerk chicken is being torn and chewed, tamped down with rice and beans and functional wedges of bread.
Black crunches a fistful of aspirins and keeps talking. The soup, which flew out over lunch, is soupe de poisson, carefully constructed by Joseph, the tattooed prep chef with the dreadlocked mohawk and the excruciating stammer. It doubtless features a whole lot of red snapper bones and has been jacked with a ten-count gout of Pernod. The soup comes with rouille, which is a garlic pepper mayonnaise, as Black explains for the slower kids at the back. Actually, the line-up inspires something like confidence: April, May and Just are largely unflappable; Léo is a useful runner, fast and attentive and talented; the other runner, Xin, is fast but flappable. When the slam hits, Xin has a tendency to lose focus, to pick up the wrong plates, to forget his side-towel, grasping a molten soup-bowl bare-handed, and often to go to pieces so fast that the remaining staff get taken out by shrapnel. Black bites his lip, hopes it doesn’t happen. Two work-shy, distractable busboys are also concerning him: turnover tonight rests on them. What will happen if they aren’t fast enough, and the customers stacked at the bar turn vicious and start screaming for their tables? While the fifteen-minute lull that settles when the restaurant is full and fed is seized upon by Black and his crew, to regroup, restock, smoke and generally recuperate, it must be timed precisely. If it lasts too long, the savage slamming that follows will certainly slug the kitchen right in the guts, jamming the machine almost irrevocably. Black hopes against hope that it will hold together. There is another waiter, an efficient veteran called Saïd, whom Black values for his ability to sell anything. Saïd more often gives orders than takes them, but the customers, fawned-on and flattered, never seem to notice. And then another kid, – new, startled-looking – who quails but can’t remember what ‘spatchcocked’ means. Black doesn’t know his name, and resolves to lose no time in learning it. The kid, he suspects, will not last long.
________
Three hours later, the kitchen is a roiling, voluble moshpit, a seething, frenetic mêlée. With each entering waiter comes a peculiar, Doppler-like effect, as the double-doors swing and inject a brief burst of cooler air, coloured with the gentle chatter and clink of distant diners. The six-burner is loaded with sauté pans, taken from the already sweltering shelves above the ranges and perpetually poised over the rings, so that they are always hot. There are intermittent flashes of bright flame as they catch fire. Lejohn’s elegant, close-shaved head is beading sweat, bobbing and nodding as he darts from six-top to char-grill, all the while keeping up an endless, rolling stream of patois with Joseph. An old Bad Brains tape has been turned up too loud. Black is also in the three-foot galley between the ranges and the pass, his blacks clinging tight to his back, blinking sweat, blinded by the lights, slicing, spooning, stacking, arranging, pulling garnishes from ice-water and checks from the machine, shuffling the dupes in the crammed rack and calling the shots at the top of his fraying voice.
‘Okay: going on seven! Two lamb, one sea bass, one rib-eye medium, one fillet rare. Yes?’
‘Yes, chef!’
‘Garnish from you, Dimi – potatoes, olives, beans, concassée, anchovies, lamb sauce, yes? Two lamb, yes? Two fries, morel sauce, artichokes, lyonnaise, yes?’
‘Yes, chef!’ This is resounding: a voice much bigger than the man. Dmitri, a chef de partie, is a lithe Bulgarian who seems to have sweated himself into a strip of strung-out sinew in his seasons at the stove. He is stooped at the solid-top, performing his tender ministrations. Directly behind Black, he and Lejohn perform a chef’s soft-shoe shuffle at his back, avoiding each other like fencers or strippers. The latter clatters a quartet of platters at Black’s right hand, and says,
‘Sea bass, chef. Rib eye, fillet. Two lamb. Both medium rare, the lamb, chef.’
‘Coming up on two, chef,’ says Joseph, who is over on the right, doubling up between commis-ing for Lejohn and holding down starters alone, cooking and plating himself.
‘Talk to me, Joe. What? When?’
‘Chef! Two scallops and a beetroot tart. A minute, chef!’ The stutter on the avoided, italicised shellfish stretches the sibilant syllable unbearably out. Joseph’s stammer comes and goes: when he is drunk or vexed; any spotlights or magnifying glasses – these make him clam up. He talks his way around it, chooses his words carefully.
‘A minute,’ says Black, and then roars, ‘Service!’ thrashing the bell like a bested wrestler flat on the mat. Dmitri is piling pommes frites with calloused hands, finishing with a shimmer of sea salt. Black has carved, stacked and drizzled the lamb, and awaits a waiter. The doors yield Saïd, who sacks and flops six inches as they swing shut.
‘Oui, chef?’
‘Sept, quoi,’ says Black, bearing a grin as he exhausts his French idioms. ‘You can take five plates, yes? All this. Get that fucking sea bass out before the mousse goes to shit under the lights. Send someone down. Coming up on two in half a minute.’
‘Oui, chef,’ says Saïd, and is gone, his bearing and posture restored, the doors like the water dividing a swan.
Joseph places his plates on the pass: fat pan-seared scallops nestled between roundels of boudin noir, and a cute tart with a curlicued quiff of rocket and dried peach shavings. Black thumps the bell automatically, expecting Xin to appear. Unhappily, the swoosh and clunk of the doors delivers the new kid, nameless and aimless.
‘Two scallops and a tart away. Table two, please,’ says Black.
‘Chef?’
Black barely registers this over the chatter of the check machine, the crash and abbreviated sizzle of sauté pans being hefted into the sink, and simply repeats his instructions. Undeterred, the kid tries again:
‘Chef?’
‘It’s the middle of the fucking rush. It’s Saturday fucking night. You’ll understand if I don’t stand around making pleasantries. Take the fucking food.’ Black says this with some volume and violence to his voice. Wisely, the kid ferries the plates away. Very soon, though, he is back, and Black glares up at him through the encroaching fug hastened by the two mojitos, five double espressos, one sheet of aspirins, two ephedrine drinks and a beer that he can remember consuming since morning. Black would like nothing more than to have Lejohn or Dimi expedite for the rest of service, to step back into the line and take over one or other of their stations – anything to haul him back from the helm. With elaborately mimetic gestures – the hands half-raised as if to quell, the pursed lips, the forehead like a scrunched letter – the kid is asking where table six’s food might be. Black resists the temptation to give a short list of potential repositories and scans the rack, teeth clenched. There is no ticket for table six. He conveys this with unmistakable clarity to the kid, who twists and squirms about and says,
‘But I put the order through about forty minutes ago. They’re getting, you know, pretty cross.’ Black, too, is simmering: what the French call mijoter, where a bubble breaks the surface every now and then.
‘How many covers? What did they order? Does Midas know?’ The kid can’t remember what they ordered, but there were six of them, and no, Midas doesn’t know, because the kid hasn’t told him yet. With maximum ferocity, Black roars,
‘Fucking find out, then, yes? Move!’
Another table comes up to the pass: a couple of quail, more lamb to be carved and more steaks, which will help keep the food cost down and the margins up. The check machine is running pretty much without pause now, a non-stop newswire of bleak bulletins. As Black plucks checks to stick in the stacked rack, the kid slinks back in. He seems about to speak, but Black isn’t really interested.
‘Oh. Hey. Hey. Come here. Fucking come here, you. A fucking six-top – three quarters of an hour late! Does this sound like the sort of thing I might like? Does this sound like the sort of thing we just take in our stride back here?’ Black hammers on the bell, shaking his head to emphasise the appropriate response: ‘Fucking no, chef. No, it fucking doesn’t. Ah, Saïd: praise be. Saïd, please go and sort out the colossal cock-up this clown has caused. Table six. Drinks, whatever they want. On us. Tell Midas. Right. You – stay there and try not to fuck anything else up. You will take this food out, grovelling apologies, and if there’s the slightest whisper of complaint, you’ll pay. And I do mean pay,’ Black says, rubbing thumb and forefinger together. ‘And if you kept it quiet because you thought Midas might bust your balls, I’d ring your mother now, yes? Because I swear to God I will wear your back out tonight. Get in the fucking sink. If you can wash a plate, I might dream about letting you carry one, one fine fucking day. Yes?’
‘Yes, chef. Sorry, chef.’
‘Shut the fuck up. I don’t give a fuck if you’re sorry. I just want it fixed.’
Scowling, Black drops his head and attends to the lamb on the cutting board. In a characteristic display of misdirected aggression, he takes the first cut on the second rump of lamb too quickly, too sharply, and the knife slips into the soft swell of muscle at the base of his left thumb. Whirling, he jams a towel over the wound and goes through the shits and fucks and sucked-breath sssssffpps of people in pain.
‘Shit, chef, you pissing blood,’ says Lejohn. Dmitri turns from the stove as Black pulls back the towel, which already bears a vivid, dark bloom. Lejohn, unusually squeamish for a man who spends all day dealing with meat and fish, ducks and reels, pale palms a-flutter. The creases of Black’s hand are puddling with blood, and a sliver of bone winks in the gape of the cut.
‘It’s deep, chef. You’ll have to go to the hospital,’ Dmitri says. ‘You’ll have to get this stitched. Midas will drive you there.’ Hunched, Black seems smaller, seems stunned stupid with shock.
‘Will he fuck,’ he says. ‘Get me a cab.’
_______
Black is home early, for a Saturday. It is not yet Sunday morning as he stands in his own, calmer kitchen, smoking a pensive cigarette. Fighting cackhandedly with the seatbelt, Black had palmed the cabbie off with bloodied notes and spent a joyless hour in a waiting-room. Incredibly, he thought, the form-filling girl at the front desk had looked him up and down, blacks and blood and all, and asked what he did for a living. And you couldn’t smoke. Every ten minutes he had picked his way past the Saturday statistics of brawled drunks and kicked-in tramps, interspersed with mute children, to go for a cigarette and to avoid people telling him that they supposed he’d cut himself. Later, stitched-up and woozy with chewable codeine in the backseat of the taxi, he had fielded a phone call with unprecedented powers of confusion and unbelievability, mostly agreeing, and then let the thing slip casually from his mind. Now though, Black is once more standing on the edge of something rather bigger than he is. These things are cyclical. They come back around. A bell rings: that phone call followed-up, right up his street.
He measures the hallway’s ten-pace trudge and reaches the door, sensing blood-heat and presence on the other side. Then he opens it.
‘Paige,’ he says, to the woman who was his wife. Then: ‘Jayne,’ to the girl with his mouth and Paige’s eyes and bones.
‘Jay. Still Jay,’ says Jay.
And there is the awkward business of embraces: Black hunches, hazarding the hug-habits of two women he hasn’t held for half a decade. Which arm goes higher? Which side does the head go? Incongruously, he is reminded of meetings and partings with Lejohn, who unfailingly proffers a fist-touch to Black’s extended handshake: the galling paper-scissors-stone of multicultural etiquette. Paige is putting warm words right in his right ear:
‘Love’s funny, isn’t it? You’ll do anything – pack up all your shit and cross the world – just to get away from that person. So – can we come in, or not?’
They do, and Black follows them in, seeking out props: drinks, snacks, cigarettes – anything to buy time. There they are, then: the family that went nuclear. Fraser Black, his daughter and his daughter’s mother. Paige is still familiar. She has this new clutch of letters, true – she is now Doctor Paige Keller, of – where is it? Princeton? Cornell? Black cannot remember. Analgesics and alcohol are making details deliquesce, like a heat haze or mirage, always just out of reach. But Paige is as he remembers – perhaps with a little more wariness written in at the corners of eyes and mouth. Jay is not: proof of some physical equation involving distance and time, relative to youth. There is something coltish and flyaway about her now, and a jarring length to her limbs. And she has this accent, too, which is neither here nor there. Black realises that he no longer has any idea who she is, which is quietly terrifying. He must start from scratch, and learn her by heart.
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“…torn apart in a clash of forks and a frenzy of tearing hands.” The redundancy of ‘torn’ and ‘tearing’ here doesn’t seem to work. Picky, picky.
“…will certainly slug the kitchen right in the guts…” This recalls the pathetic mugging attempt in 1.1 (“handwarm handgun snug in the guts”.). I’m assuming that you did that on purpose, and I am torn about its efficacy. On the one hand, it’s a nice comparison and on the other, it is stumbling point because it’s not obvious enough, but just rings a bell which one must follow to find out the source—a process which pulls you away from the action. Hmm. I know the action is not your primary focus necessarily, but you usually present a more comfortable balance between the patterns and the forward motion.
“The stutter on the avoided, italicized shellfish stretches the sibilant syllable unbearably out.” Again, picky. I am not a stickler about sentences with this structure, but here it doesn’t work for me. The rhythm is slightly off with the ‘out’ at the end.
“…smoking a pensive cigarette.” I know I am unbearably pedantic. Tut tut.
Those were the only specific issues that caught my attention. Your prose is delightful, and rarely offers much room for criticism.
As for Black: The description of the kitchen environment gives some clues about the behavior that ended his marriage, at least for me. It is obvious from your thorough description the urgency of his investment, the resulting falling away of the unnecessary, his weariness contrasted with the addictive nature of the environment. I was very impressed with how skillfully you capture that atmosphere—which I recognized on an emotional level, not just intellectually.
The arrival of Paige and Jay was very well done, also. Particularly the bit about the hug-habits. My only question about that section was the very last sentence. Does Black know at this point that he will be allowed to learn Jay from heart? It seems very definite for a situation that can only be fraught with uncertainty.
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