It was the last day of Grade ten at Argyle Senior Secondary. I was the only guy in my circle who had his own wheels and my friend Dean asked me to give him a ride. I said sure and we motored out of Lynn Valley and over to Lonsdale. Dean was applying for a summer job at the Keg N Cleaver Restaurant where his older brother already worked as a bar-tender. As we coasted down the hill, I decided that I would also apply.
We filled in the required papers and were hired on the spot due to the connection to Dean's brother. It was my first brush with nepotism, something I hadn't encountered in my job searches in Texas prior to moving to Canada. I thought it was pretty cool at the time but I remember feeling that it wasn't quite fair. Then it occurred to me that they could always fire you if they didn't like you.
Both of us were started as dish-goats, which was the current dysphemism for dish-washers. The pay was around two dollars an hour. It was the most money I had ever made up to that time and I was feeling good about that. After four horrible shifts of being slathered in sweat, grease, blue cheese dressing, teriyaki sauce, coagulated butter and crab juice; I was promoted to assistant broiler man. It was going to be a good summer.
My mentor at the grill was a French Canadian young man who was wise beyond his years due to the earlier than usual death of his father. He was four or five years older than me but this gap could have easily been ten years due to his fatherly bearing and life experience. His name was Dan and he was The Man. We called him Bodine.
Bodine quickly taught me how to set up the big grill, to clean and scour it each night with vinegar and holy stones and soon had me warming vats of French onion soup and baking fifty pounds of potatoes at a time. He showed me how to broil steaks of all different thicknesses to perfection and have them all ready at the same time by exploiting the temperature difference on the slanted grill. Counter-intuitively, it is hotter farther away from the fire.
I have an anomaly on my thumbnails. It is a concave depression and ridging which makes my thumbs look like I have endured repeated applications of the thumbscrews. I was very self conscious of this all through my youth and the first thing I noticed about Bodine was that he had the exact same thumbs. He seemed relieved when I showed mine off to him and he really took me under his wing after that.
Forty years later, after never having seen another human other than one of my sisters with this condition, I was riding the Main St. bus in Vancouver on my way to the Post Office, when a young carpenter called out to me across the aisle.
“Hey, Bud. I couldn't help but notice your thumbs.”
He held his own out with a grin. “Maybe we're related.”
I told him he was only the second person I had met with this distinguishing mark and he told me I was the first he had met except for his grandmother. We discussed the topic and left our speculations at a draw between genetics and vestigial spiritual scars before arriving at the Sky Train station and parting ways.
Bodine had taken on the responsibilities of a man while young and balanced that load with equal parts humanity and independence. The original Keg in those days of the early Seventies was a rocking joint. The thick oak doors vibrated visibly from the booming sound system as one approached. The bar was as popular as the dining area and it was there that dinner party patrons sat awaiting their tables while quaffing drinks and yelling over the music.
Since Bodine liked to socialize in the bar, I soon realized that he was teaching me to cook so he could free up some time to relax and engage in some serious courting and building my confidence at the same time. Indeed, after a month or so I was cooking solo on many of his shifts. I still had to do the clean-up, which took several hours at the end of the night but I was glad to have gained some practical cooking experience. It was a win-win situation.
There was another Dan, a cook whom I also worked as an assistant for. He was a compadre of the other Dan and they were like ham and eggs. They planned and took an epic cross Canada road trip in my mentor's tricked out van. It was rigged with the best sound system I had ever heard thus far in my life and was usually wailing rare Jimi Hendrix and Otis Spann recordings.
The broiler bar was situated out in the open where the diners could watch the action as they shuffled down a forty item salad bar to get their greens. An old brass ship's bell was mounted at the broiler bar and was used to call the waiters when an order was ready. Each of the half dozen waiters had a unique call sign consisting of a pattern of clangs on the bell.
One night while Bodine was in the bar, I decided to try something new out. I had been taught some blues harmonica down in Texas and during my teens I always carried an A harp in my pocket to vent on. So, I devised a set of unique blues licks and quickly taught them to the waiters. It was an instant hit and afterwards I kept my harmonica in the cook's drawer at the broiler bar. One night when I was working as assistant to Dan II, he discovered it in the drawer and asked me to show him some licks.
After that first summer, both Daniels moved on down their personal roads and I began cooking full time. Harmonica Dan told me he was leaving to go to helicopter flight school. I thought that sounded cool and I wrote for one of their brochures. When I saw what the tuition cost, I decided that it wasn’t a good fit. I wished Danny luck and never saw him again.
Many years later, when I was a letter-carrier at Canada Post, I saw a full page story in the business section of the Province newspaper. It was about Helicopter Dan. I read with excitement and pride that he was the founder President and CEO of Helijet Airways which plies between Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
I phoned his office that afternoon to congratulate him and catch each other up on our lives after high school. He said that after an apprenticeship of heli-logging to build up his airborne hours and expertise, he had the idea to start his own helicopter service. Such a remarkable person was he, that he still remembered me, my nickname, “Tex” and my old Hohner blues harmonica engraved with the epithet “Ain't life a bitch.”
I kept my job when school started up again and began a new life of coming home at two or three AM, five nights a week. My grades, for the first time ever, started to erode during that year. One Saturday night, a manager was grumbling and cursing up a storm after we had closed the front doors on a very busy shift. It had been a five hundred steak dinners night, the tips were fat and I couldn't imagine what he was upset about. He was a tall guy who usually sported a perpetual canny grin. He had been with some friends and dignitaries all evening and had seemed to be having a great time
I asked him what was amiss when he passed by my broiler bar. He told me that someone had just flown in from Bogotá and had gifted him with a big scoop of the best Peruvian Marching Powder to be had on the planet at the time. I knew that cocaine was for horses and not for men, but only because of a Taj Mahal song that I had once heard. I also knew that it was expensive, so I asked him what it was packaged in. Evidently, it was in a paper sugar packet and about twice the size. I told that him I possessed uncanny Cherokee scout abilities and not to worry. He muttered that it was hopeless and loped off to the bar.
He yelled back over the music that the garbage cans had all already been emptied as if to discourage me. That was precisely what I was counting on. My new cook's assistant was an incredibly efficient and motivated individual who would have polished the moon with a wet rag if he could have reached that high. I sent my boss back to his friends and went for a little walk. In the third pristine garbage can I reviewed, there in the bottom of a clean green bag was a small white sugar packet.
I scooped it out and brought it into the office. The manager looked like a man who had just been told that his newborn baby was a healthy boy, his wife was fine and ready to go home and that he had also just won the 6/49 Lottery. I was clapped on the back and introduced to some other young squires assembled in the office. One fellow was introduced to me as the manager of ZZ Top, who were in town for their second gig since bursting onto the charts with La Grange. I was a big fan and told him I was from Houston, Texas just like Billy Gibbons was.
A wine glass was upturned and I was told to stick a rolled up twenty dollar bill in my nostril, cover the other one, not to sneeze and to snort two of the lines of powder that had been deftly prepared with a razor. I was seventeen so I did it. There was a long staircase running from the office to the street level out the back towards the waterfront of Burrard Inlet. I let out a Wilson Pickett whoop and bounded up those stairs like a scalded cat. I rounded the building to Esplanade Street and sprinted up Lonsdale's steep slope to the Fifteenth St. and all the way back down to my original spot in the office.
“Lawd have moicy!,” I said.
It was one of the most curious things I had ever experienced. I felt absolutely no fatigue and was not aware that any time had passed. All hands had a good laugh and I remember being glad that this was a rich man's drug and thus, far out of my reach. A working man could sure get used to feeling that fresh.
The table waiting staff were mostly university students and many of them were from well to do families. I learned that it is in the best neighbourhood, where people have the most cash to spend, that you will find the most drugs. On top of that, it was only the beginning of the Seventies and much of the Sixties culture stubbornly refused to give way to double-knits and Disco.
We had a rival restaurant several hundred yards to the West called the Hobbit House and the two establishments were constantly pranking each other. It started one Friday night in the middle of the dinner hour. Our front doors burst asunder and a troop of a dozen stark naked Hobbit House employees made an impromptu conga line through our bar and dining area. They took their time, such was the shock factor on the diners and on our staff. When they calmly capered down the back stairs which led to the safety of the waterfront, we knew that they must have cased the joint prior to undertaking the operation. A week later, twenty of us retaliated with a similar raid.
Once, when I had a rare night off, my mother's Danish boyfriend came in with his drinking buddies from the St. Alice Hotel Pub. He had apparently arrived in a shopping cart with a red napkin tied to this head like a pirate. His entourage was singing a ribald Scandinavian song in which the only discernible word was “vaselina.” Upon informing the host that they were friends of “Tex”, they had been cordially invited into the bar to drop some coin. After a very wet wait, they had been shown to a table right up front by the broiler bar and ordered baseball-cut teriyaki steaks and lobster tails. A young fellow whom I had recently taught how to cook was on shift.
The Danes unlucky waiter recounted to me how the lad had been lifted bodily out of his station and threatened with his life in Swedish, Danish, German, French and English because of an overdone steak. Before the police arrived, the perpetrator told all those assembled who's step-father he was. He was quickly escorted out by three other Vikings, one of whom had ducked outside to retrieve the shopping cart during the commotion. They were told at the door that the meals were on the house and that they were now barred from the restaurant for life.
The Keg didn't hold it against me and the staff became my family for a difficult period in my young life. I did my homework in the dimly lit bar to avoid being in the maelstrom of chaos that was my parents' rental suite on Kilmer Road, up the steep slope of Mountain Highway. In those days I wore my hair to elbow length, perfectly combed and cleaner than a German dinner table.
In time, the restaurant's owner took on a slick investor from California. By the time this new partner came on board, I was a well established cook. The new fellow had a psychology degree from no less than Stanford University and a pretty Latina girlfriend. The day we met, he told me that I had to wear a woman's hairnet while I broiled. I told him that I would not dignify his order with compliance but that I would step down and hit the road if ever a stray hair was found in any food I served. Cherokees are proud of their hair. After that, he took to calling me “Chief.” I could tell that he was going to californicate our restaurant.
First he decided to clamp down on the portions. Prior to this, all the cooking staff ate for free. I chowed on teriyaki baseball steaks, king crab and lobster tails on a daily basis. Now, we had to pay for our food. We used to throw a little extra on the plates of friends and relatives. Now that was forbidden and a punishable offence. Tiny weighing scales were purchased and even the mushrooms were to be carefully measured before gracing a steak. The bacon bits were metered out in little ketchup cups.
The generous spirit that had made the restaurant a North Vancouver legend was now in the hands of a man bent on tying a rope around its neck, forcing it to crawl between his legs and milking it. What was worse, as a Texan I knew for a fact, that people in California put sour cream on their tacos! Gawd!
After awhile, I had held every post in the restaurant except bartender, waiter or prep-cook. The first two positions didn't interest me and one day I was approached by California to see if I was interested to learn the prep-cooking and to take on that salaried position. The original prep-man was heading to Lahaina, Hawaii to work at another steak joint. I said yes and was given training by our outgoing man and a further two weeks with a young Japanese fellow at the Granville Island Keg, who was a master of efficiency and cleanliness.
One of my first post graduate duties was to train another man for my replacement on my days off. I was instructed to pick him up one morning on my way to work. I drove in the predawn fog to the address I had been given and a boy big enough to punch out a cow, was waiting on the curb like a young Moses, just waiting to start smiting things. I motioned him into my 67 Beaumont Acadian and off we sped, albeit tilted over like a fallen cake.
“They call me Mountain,” he said.
“I'm Mike, they call me Tex.”
When we got to the parking area behind the restaurant, I discovered that the PhD. had caused an old telephone pole to be placed right across where I had always parked, since the beginning. I swore and started to back up to look for another, more inconvenient location. Mountain asked me to stop. I applied the brakes and he hefted his grizzly bear frame out of my toy car and squatted down by the barrier. He clasped it like a Highlander preparing to toss the caber and hoisted the twenty foot pole to chest height, walked over a few yards and let her drop. I smiled and parked in my old spot while Mountain dusted off his hands on his jeans. It was going to be a good day.
Once inside the kitchen, we set to work straight away. Everything was prepared in gargantuan proportions. Five gallons each of Roquefort, Italian and French salad dressings. Five gallons of home-brewed teriyaki sauce. Forty quarts of onion soup. A dozen Australian-style baked cheesecakes, baked in spring-form pans. Forty pounds each of lobster tails and king crab legs thawed and split with shears. Twenty pounds of mushrooms sautéed in red wine and butter. Thirty quarts of gravy. All the vegetables for a forty item salad bar washed, chopped and arranged in crocks. Cases of lemons, limes and pineapples prepared for the bartender’s garnishes.
If one began at six AM sharp, one was lucky to be hauling the thirty gallons of ice for the salad bar, just as the first customers were being shown to the bar at five. Mountain was a very fast learner, an agreeable fellow and particularly helpful in taking in the meat order from the back door to the walk-in cooler. When we grabbed a few moments to do an inventory for the next days deliveries, he lit a Craven A cigarette. I had given my tobacco to Jesus only a week prior and I was gratefully surprised at how easily He gave them back.
On the next day, I was showing Mountain our pantry for dry goods and one of the shelves broke free spilling its contents onto the floor. When I was returning to the accident scene with a screwdriver and hammer, it struck me that the place was an absolute pigsty. I looked up and down from the massive double sinks to the Hobart dishwasher to the mega-mixing machine and along the red-tiled floor. I decided on the spur, that I might as well use my new helping hands to get everything Navy clean. Mountain was obliging and we spent that day scrubbing, disinfecting, organizing and fixing while cooking in between. because the restaurant was empty, we cranked the expensive sound system up and played what we wanted.
It was bliss. We both got caught up in the spirit of the moment and to the strains of Jethro Tull, Rolling Stones and Z Z Top, we went Catholic on that kitchen. By three PM you could have safely made a sandwich on the floor. Everything broken was fixed and she gleamed white from ceiling to floor like an ice floe. The stainless surfaces were without blemish, the food was all prepared and we were chatting with a Fijian delivery man by the door when our music faded to a whisper.
California came up the back stairs towing an oily little man in a blue windbreaker. The Stanford man looked like Chevy Chase in a cowboy shirt. He had that slightly pigeon-toed walk of a man from El Cerritos who gets a flat tire in Bakersfield late at night. The stranger looked like Colombo and had a small clipboard in his hand and I kept waiting for him to pull a boiled egg out of his pocket.
Boss looked at Mountain then at me then at the dazzling kitchen. He blushed red and laughed nervously like a man who had audibly farted at a wedding. The windbreaker man shrugged his rounded shoulders and rolled his eyes. They walked without a word back to the cooler and opened the door. Another nervous burst of laughter issued from the sparkling cold room.
Presently, the boss spoke, “Dude, seen-uh... enough?”
“Yes, Sir,” said Colombo.
They departed and we heard the music being turned back up. Ravi, the Fijian deliveryman, had just been explaining to me how a proper old time kava-kava ceremony was to be conducted and had promised to bring me a bag of his best from Viti Levu on the morrow, when he delivered our lobster. I was eighteen years old and very interested in anthropology as well as psychotropic botanicals. The deal was set and I told him to come around two P. M. He grinned and hurried off. While we packed away the delivery, the boss reappeared.
“How did you-uh... know?” he asked.
“Know what?” I parried.
“That the-uh... freaking Health Inspector was coming. I didn't even know-uh. Those guys are-uh... random. I had to-uh send the poor bastard off without his-uh... usual swag. It was intense-uh," he explained and his eyes bugged out like grapes trying to give birth to riddles.
“It's a Cherokee thang,” I said, smoothing my pony tail and smiling up at Mountain, who stood alongside, beaming like Little John at a banquet in Nottingham Forest.
“Hey Boss, do you want to come to a real Fijian kava-kava ceremony tomorrow with me and Mountain?” I ventured.
“Uh, sure... I'd-uh... be into that. Like where and-uh... when?”
“Right here at two PM. Ravi, the lobster guy, is bringing some shit his grandmother carried back from Suva in her panties. He’s going to show me the traditional way to mix it and which proper gods to call upon.”
“Bitchin’. I'll-uh... be there.”
The next day went smooth as a glass Cadillac on a Teflon turnpike. Mountain and I whistled while we worked and we had everything set for Ravi's arrival. He showed a few minutes late and the boss a few minutes later. I introduced all hands and then Ravi set to work. He took a large plastic bag full of fine pepper coloured powder and asked me for a large bowl. I brought one and he next asked for a clean cloth napkin. Mountain was sent for a large stainless steel bucket of clean cold water. California asked questions about how much it was worth and such like. We all tried to ignore his capitalistic brain waves.
Soon, the four of us were cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, encircling the bowl. The cloth was stretched across the bowl and some powder was poured in. It was mixed with water and the mash was stirred by hand and allowed to percolate through the cloth into the bowl. This was repeated many times while Ravi spoke softly in his own language. From time to time, he would look up at us flashing his impossibly white teeth in a friendly smile.
The only sound was the big overflow sink where a case of lobster tails were thawing prior to being split and butterflied. The water made a soft sound not unlike a mountain stream flowing down a volcanic slope on its way to a lagoon and the frozen lumps banging on the resonant sides of the huge sink sounded like a priest drumming on the bottom of his dugout, calling sharks into a reef.
Presently, the bag was empty and the bowl was full of a liquid that looked like the water in a mud-puddle at a gas station in a town that god forgot. Ravi produced a half coconut shell from his gear and dipped it into the funky fluid. He filled it and solemnly walked over to a drain on the floor.
“Doo mus offah de fust bool to Toki. This akshon is hi-lee creeteekal. If yoor uddah sarkal fellas doan do it, yoor not to drink grog bid doze mans.”
He poured it slowly down the steel drain and returned to our circle. He refilled the half shell and handed it across to me. Before I took it, he instructed me to clap my hands three times and say Toki's name. I did this, raised it to my lips and poured it down. It smelled earthy and as I realized that my lips were already numb, it struck me that brand new blue jeans used to smell the same. I refilled the shell and offered it to Mountain.
He clapped, said Toki's name and quaffed it.
“Oh, Momma!,” he exclaimed.
Mountain refilled and offered it to Stanford.
Boss clapped, invoked Toki and drank it down.
“Fukkin’-uh... harsh, Dude.”
Boss offered it to Ravi and we went on in this manner until the bowl was drained. Our lips, tongues and innards were numb but our minds were crystal clear. We sat for awhile and California asked Ravi about what he could expect. Ravi gently told him to be patient and that he would soon see for himself. He intimated that the experience was different for each individual and depended more upon Toki than anything else. Ravi politely rose after an appropriate time, gathered his bag of goodies and walked out the back door like a cat you thought you saw from the corner of your eye. California rose next and told us he was going to catch up on some paperwork downstairs in his office.
Mountain and I put on our music and set about finishing our own work. I was preparing the lobster and he was assembling the salad bar. When I came to the sink to begin cutting the lobster shells and pulling the meat out, I laughed like a child who has just squished mud between his toes. My job suddenly looked as if was going to be more interesting than usual. Apparently, the lobsters had decided to leave the bounds of the sink and were gently swimming to and fro through the air above. I plucked one out of the air about a foot over my head as it was swimming toward the mixing machine, twenty yards away.
Another crustacean rose from the cool water and started for the Hobart machine. I snatched it easily and put it back in the sink. Several more had become airborne by this time and I decided that I would have to take them from the air, rather than the sink, to be sure that none managed to escape. It was like catching butterflies under water. I somehow managed to snatch and cut them all without spooking the herd. Once lined up in their stainless steel refrigerator trays, they behaved well and stayed put. While I worked, I could hear Mountain chopping vegetables and giggling like a man with his hands tied, getting his ears licked by a half dozen St. Bernard pups.
The next day, California strolled into my kitchen just as Mountain and I were chucking our aprons into the Keefer Laundry bag and heading for the door. He asked me if we could speak for a minute. Mountain stepped aside and made his way down the stairs. I pulled back into the kitchen.
“That was-uh... absolutely over the top yesterday. I-uh... had to… phone Carmen, to-uh... drive me home.”
“My lobsters all tried to fly away and I had to chase them down one by one. Mountain said every time he cut a lettuce in half, that it grew back whole again.”
“How-uh... much am I-uh... paying you?”
“Six hundred a month.”
“Well-uh... you're making Eight now-uh... Chief. Come-uh... over tonight. Carmen's making her-uh... Chili Verde. I got-uh... some bitchin' Piesporter Goldtropfchen-uh... Spatlese and some-uh... wicked sinsemilla."
fin