I made thousands and thousands of baby quiches for parties, and gristly little kebabs from the tough, nearly inedible chain that runs along the side of the beef tenderloin. I peeled 75 pounds of shrimp at a clip, seared Wellingtons, made chicken liver mousse (our version of foie gras), and in the course of my labors as general dogsbody, got to know the far recesses and dark corners of the vast Room facilities.
I also got to know the heavy hitters: the silent butcher and his assistant, the mercurial baby-faced chef pâtissier, the doomed-looking night saucier. And most memorably, Juan, the sixtyish day broiler man, a fierce, trash-talking Basque who, I swear, I saw one time sewing up a very bad knife wound on his hand right on the line - with a sewing needle and thread, muttering all the while, as he pushed through the flaps of skin with the point, 'I am a tough (skronk!) . . . mother fucker (skronk!). I am a tough son of beetch! (skronk!). I am tough . . . mother (skronk!) . . . fucker!' Juan was also famous for allegedly following up a bad finger wound with a self-inflicted amputation. After catching a finger in an oven door, he had consulted the union benefit list for amount given for victims of 'partial amputation', and decided to cash in by lopping off the dangling portion. Whether this story was true or not mattered little to me; it was entirely believable after getting to know Juan. He may have been over sixty, but he lifted stockpots without help, wielded the largest knife I'd ever seen, and generally kicked more ass more quickly than any of the younger cooks.
There was a procession of Swiss, Austrian and American sous-chefs, none of whom lasted for more than a few weeks. They were quickly discouraged by our veteran crew from even attempting to impose order or quality control or change of any kind. The lifers like Juan and Luis would tell these eager young neophytes to go fuck themselves right to their faces; the intractable underlings who looked to them as role models would simply feign agreement and then do what they'd always done anyway. Short of murder, you really couldn't be fired. One beefy German sous-chef, after taking more than his share of lip from a lowly commis named Mosquito, had the poor judgment to grab him by the throat, lift him off the floor and shake him. The ensuing storm brought in the moustache Petes from the local, two sinister-looking guys in long coats who'd show up to settle disputes. Sous-chef, commis, chef and all holed up in a room for half an hour, after which the sous emerged, tail between his legs and suitably apologetic, having found out who the bosses really were. Like all his predecessors, he disappeared soon after.
I began to move more freely through the halls, back stairways, offices, dining and storage areas of the Rainbow Room. I made an interesting discovery. There was, in an unused area, a narrow passage through stacked tables, where employees could actually crawl out an open window. On my union-mandated fifteen-minute breaks, I would sit out on a narrow precipice, sixty-four flights up, my legs dangling over the edge, one arm wrapped around a sash, smoking weed with the dishwashers, Central Park and upper Manhattan splayed out before me. The observation deck on the roof was open as well, for a little mid-shift sunbathing.
If you looked carefully, there were other perks. There was a healthy sports book up and running - and side bets aplenty. When a Panamanian and a Dominican were duking it out for the world middleweight title, there was always an employee willing to bet big bucks along national pride lines - whatever the Vegas odds were. A Puerto Rican has a hard time betting on a boxer from Ecuador, even if he's heavily favored. Sensibly, however, I'd buy a case of beer for the whole crew with a portion of my winnings, so there was never any ill will. Many of the Spanish-speaking members of the crew took part in an unusual 'banking' scheme where each week all the members of a large group would sign over all their paychecks to one guy. The recipient was selected on a rotating basis, and the way it worked, I gathered, was that for about two months or so everybody squeaked by, doing their best to make do without a check, spending little . . . until the day it was their turn, at which point they came into thousands of dollars and could spend like drunken sailors. This practice made no sense to me. It also required an extraordinary amount of trust in one's fellow cooks. I did not share my comrades' confidence that Luis, for instance, wouldn't skip town on a drunk after getting his big payday, and leave the others in the lurch. I held on to my meager paycheck. I had no time to spend it anyway.
One foggy night around ten, with only a few customers left in the main dining room, an electric current seemed to run through the floor staff. There was a sudden gang-rush to the upstairs bus station, where one could just barely see and hear what was going on in the Room. 'Frank is here! Frank is here!' was the battle cry. Even the cooks abandoned their stations to see what the commotion was about. Sure enough, the Man Himself had come to dinner: Frank Sinatra was in the house - and he was singing! Sinatra had swung by with a posse of thick-necked pals, ordered up some bottles and snacks, and now, backed by the house orchestra, was belting out tunes to an awe-struck audience of about twenty customers who had been lucky enough to linger over dessert. These few tourists who, up to now, must have been bemoaning the bad weather, the lack of visibility ruining the famous view, the empty dining room and the miserable food, were suddenly the luckiest bastards in New York. Sinatra, having a good time apparently, sang for quite a while. He was still there when I knocked off work.
Other celebrity sightings included a well-known member of a Sicilian fraternal organization - in the 'entertainment and financial services sector' - who made an impromptu visit to the kitchen for a few words with our kindly Neapolitan chef. I saw a fifty go into poor Quinto's chest pocket, with an affectionate slap on the cheek. Now the hapless bastard was committed to making 'Gnocchi genovese . . . like I used to get'. Gnocchi genovese was not on our regular menu, and I doubt that the chef had actually cooked anything - much less gnocchi and meat sauce - from scratch in years. Quinto was more like an air-traffic controller than a cook, but he'd taken the man's money (not that he'd had a choice) and he spent the next hour, in the middle of a busy dinner service, spooning batch after batch of gnocchi into simmering water, his hands shaking with fear and tears streaming down his face, as one batch after another failed to meet his expectations. I don't remember the finished product going out, but the chef showed up to work the next day, so I imagine the customer was happy.
Another memorable evening was the RFK charity tennis tournament. The whole place was taken over by actors, politicians, famous faces, and long-haired Kennedy kids in tuxes and basketball sneakers. Secret Service agents and sniffer dogs combed the kitchen for fissionable material and hidden weapons. I was surprised when they didn't find any. The highlight of the event was a mishap involving honored guest Dina Merrill, sitting near the head of the banquet table with hubby Cliff Robertson. One of our veteran waiters lost control of an entire tray of bubbling tortellini alfredo, depositing an upended pile of Parmesan-laced heavy cream and pasta directly on Ms Merrill's coif. There was weeping and rending of garments in the kitchen that night, I can tell you, the offending waiter nearly suicidal with fear, shame and grief. He was part of a father-son waiting team, Dad having been relegated to running coffee orders for his golden years, and son was despondent. I don't know what he was crying about; it was a union house, after all.
As in any large restaurant operation, there were tiny centers of power, fiefdoms, little empires that seemed to exist outside of the normal hierarchy. Gianni was the pastry chef, and his shop, set apart from the main kitchen, was a relative fortress of solitude and civility in a sea of chaos. I worked with Gianni every once in a while - just to escape the heat and frenzied pace of the main kitchen, and because the quality of life was significantly better in Gianni's tiny kingdom. I could, thanks to Chef Bernard at CIA, throw together a decent souffle when called upon to do so, and I was good at decorating and inscribing cakes, for which there was a lot of call. The Gianni crew consisted of a taciturn Swiss who worked three other jobs and always looked ready to die from fatigue, and an aged ex-Wehrmacht corporal with dyed red hair and moustache who loved to regale me with stor
ies of Weimar era perversions: 'Zey vould feed ze girls bananas,' he said once, leering and winking as he described a purported club for coprophiles. 'Hitler and Goering . . . yah, Goering, zey would go these places.' Daytime with Gianni involved a lot of very fast, very hard work, mostly production-cake assembly, wrapping of the ever-present Wellingtons in pastry dough, rolls, pastries, stacks of crepes for crespelle, cookies, the sectioning of fruit for later dipping in caramelized sugar. All the while, Gianni urged us on with cries of 'Cha! Cha! Via! Let's go!'
But the atmosphere in Gianniland was remarkably happy-go-lucky. At the beginning of the workday a waiter would appear with an urn of steaming hot espresso, and we would actually sit down for a nice demi-tasse, accompanied by homemade sticky buns. Even in the middle of full-bore production, Gianni found time to hurl profiteroles at the skaters sixty-four flights down in the Rock Center rink, all of us having a good laugh when he scored a direct hit. And Gianni was a skilled raconteur. His romantic adventures and misadventures made for much entertainment. Though married, he was relentless in his pursuit of every woman in the restaurant - most of them looked like whichever was the uglier of Cagney and Lacey (the later episodes when they bulked up to cruiser weights). He was always befuddled when one of them would resist his affections: 'So I saya to thees girl, "I bring you out to nice dinner which I pay . . . and I drive you in nice car - a Buick . . . and you no wanna fuck me?" I don't unnerstan!' 'He was kind of charming, totally untrustworthy,conspiratorial, possessing mysterious juice with the ownership, able to operate completely outside the normal chain of command. What I loved about Gianni, though, was that at the stroke of four, when the day-shift ended, we all sat down and had a lovely meal of prosciutto, arugula, sliced tomato and mozzarella on fresh-baked Italian bread, often accompanied by a nice bottle of red wine and more espresso.
Where Gianni got this stuff, I have no idea, particularly since edible food was decidedly not a perk enjoyed by the rest of the staff and kitchen crew. In the main kitchen, and for the floor staff, the 'family meal' was uniformly awful. Hunks of silver-skin-covered breast flaps of veal - not even braised until tender, just poached grey with a few slices of onion - accompanied by leftover pellets of gluey steam-table rice or two-day-old pasta. There might be some inattentively chopped fried peppers and onions if you were lucky. The Big Event was when one of the cooks was allowed to thaw out a few boxes of freezer-burned sweet sausages, lovingly referred to by the cooks as pingas. This was everybody's favorite meal, and the excitement and enthusiasm with which my comrades-in-arms scarfed these things down was truly tragic to watch. Compared to Raft Day, however, the pingas were indeed a luxury. The Room prep area always had three gigantic steam kettles filled with a dark, all-purpose stock, simmering endlessly under a 'raft' of ground beef, meat scraps, chicken bones, turkey carcasses, the trimmings of vegetables, carrot peelings and egg shells. When stuck for gruel, the cooks would actually skim this floating compost off the surface, toss it with a little tomato sauce and dead pasta and serve it to the inexplicably grateful staff.
It was but one of many food crimes I witnessed and took part in during my time at the Rainbow Room. During service, châteaubriands - big hunks of beef tenderloin for two - if ordered well done, were routinely thrown into the deep-fryer until crispy, then tossed into an oven to incinerate further until pick up. Everything was seared off in advance. When the expeditor called for the order, one simply heated the plate vegetable, garnish and all - under a salamander, drizzled a little sauce over the item and sent it out to the unsuspecting rubes. Any magic I'd imagined about a big-time fancy New York kitchen was replaced by a grim pride in creative expediency and the technical satisfaction of being fast enough to keep up, getting away with trickery, deception and disguise. 'An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins,' as we used to say.
I didn't care what atrocities we were inflicting on a credulous public, lulled into docility by our spectacular view, our swank appointments, big band and high prices. I was putting up serious numbers, and holding my own with the best of the lifers. I could destroy and serve a nice piece of veal or a Dover sole as fast, if not faster than any of them. I was working every station in the kitchen, keeping up with the ugliest, meanest twenty-year veterans anyone back in Provincetown had even dreamed of. I was a line stud, an all-around guy, a man's man. I was on top of the world.
On the other hand, I was tired. By now, I was going in to work at 7:30 A.M. and working straight through until midnight almost every day. As soon as I'd finish up in the Luncheon Club or the pastry shop, the chef seemed always to be wanting to take me aside and squeeze me for another night on the hot-line. After weeks of this, and still not taking home over 200 dollars on payday, I finally balked. Unable to convince me, the chef summoned me for a private chat with the boss, a sinister Italian with yet another thick accent. The boss looked up at me from his desk, fixing me in a shark like gaze and said, 'I understand you don't want to help us tonight by staying late?'
I was tired, I explained, and in love, I added, hoping to appeal to that romantic Mediterranean nature I'd read and heard about. 'My girlfriend,' I said, 'I don't see her anymore . . . and I miss her . . . I have,' I added, 'a life . . . outside of this place.' I went on to describe going home each night to a sleeping girl, rolling exhausted into the sheets, still stinking from work, and how I arose at six with the girl still asleep, never exchanging so much as a word before leaving for work again, for yet another double. This was no good for a relationship, I said.
'Look at me,' said my boss, as if the nice suit and the haircut and the desk explained everything. 'I am married ten years to my wife.' He smiled. 'I work all the time. I never see her . . . she never sees me.' He paused now to show me some teeth, his eyes growing more penetrating and a little scary. 'We are very happy.'
What my boss meant by this little glimpse into his soul, I have no idea. But he impressed me. I worked the double, figuring maybe this was what was required: total dedication. Forget the loved ones. Forget the outside world. There is no life other than this life. I didn't spend much time trying to figure it out. The man scared me. Years later, I got another perspective on things. I opened the Post to see a photo of my old boss's wife, draped over the awning of a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East Side. She'd apparently performed a double-gainer from the window of her high-rise apartment and not quite made it to the pavement. So I guess she wasn't that happy after all.
All in all, I was at the Rainbow Room for about a year and a half before elections for shop steward came around. When one of the garde-manger guys suggested I run for the position, I was only too happy to give it a shot. Luis, after all, was a disgrace. I was, by now, an accepted, even popular, member of the Rainbow Room crew, a dues-paying, card-carrying union member, and as a young, semi-educated firebrand with a couple of years of college under my belt, a fine private school vocabulary, a culinary degree and a predilection for left-wing politics, I assumed I'd be a welcome addition to the restaurant workers' union - a young man with the workers' interests at heart, a fighter for the downtrodden, an activist who could get things done, someone who could lead and inspire, help to achieve better working conditions and benefits for one of the largest union shops in the country. Certainly the union biggies would be pleased to see the dipsomaniacal Luis replaced by a young go-getter like me! And I wanted to see the mysterious 'contract', the Rosetta Stone of our union benefits. According to our little union books, any union member could inspect this important document at any time - yet none of us had ever seen it. Our rights as employees of the Rainbow Room, as negotiated by our duly elected representatives and officers of the union, remained a matter of rumor and conjecture. I wanted to clap eyes on this thing. So I ran.
I won handily. Luis, strangely, didn't even put up a fight. I figured that my shanking him with the meat fork had something to do with his reluctance to mount a campaign, but I was wrong about that. After a quick vote, I was the shop steward.
You'd think the union would be ha
ppy about this development, or at least curious, with an energetic young organizer in their midst. I scheduled a meeting with the union president, looking forward to commiserating about the Imperialist Jackboot on the Necks of the Workers, and the Struggle Against the Controllers of the Means of Production. When finally I sat down with the president of Local 6 (yet another Italian with a thick accent), he was oddly unenthusiastic. He looked up sleepily at me from behind the desk of his dark office, as if I were a delivery boy bringing him a sandwich. When I asked him if I could, as shop steward, familiarize myself with The Contract, so that I might better serve our members, the president fiddled with his cufflinks and said, 'I seem to have . . . temporarily . . . misplaced it.' It was clear from his inflection and posture that he didn't give a fuck whether I believed him or not. After a few more minutes of near total silence and zero enthusiasm on the president's part, I got the hint and skulked back to work empty-handed.
The next day, someone from management came by and made an unusually frank suggestion: if I wanted a long, successful and, most important, healthy career in the restaurant business, perhaps I should step down and let that nice Luis continue his good works as shop steward. It would, I was assured, 'be in everybody'sbest interest.' He didn't have to tell me twice. I made a few discreet inquiries of a few trusted veterans and quickly resigned from my newly elected position. Luis once again picked up the reins of power, as if he'd known all along what would happen. I didn't raise a stink and a few weeks later left the Rainbow Room entirely.
I'd seen On The Waterfront. And I learned fast.