“You don’t understand. This punk used to work for me. He was always giving me a lot of shit. Even tried to assault me in the kitchen, but I showed him a thing or two.”
“He makin good money now?”
“Probably. You know how these deals work. He’s a prettyboy, NuShawn, just another prettyboy chef. That’s what matters to these critics. They don’t care if somebody’s talented, just so he’s photogenic.”
NuShawn studied Mike’s narrow perspiring face, Mike’s blank bloodshot eyes that always reminded him of those cheap peppermint drops you could pick up free at the cash registers of low-end restaurants. He didn’t know what this Rickey looked like, but he could see why Mike might be jealous of a prettyboy. Then his mind returned quickly to business, as it tended to do. “You think this guy need anything?” he asked.
“What? Goddamn it, NuShawn! Just give me what I ordered and get out of here!”
“Can I have my paper back?”
“Here’s an extra dollar. Buy yourself a new one. Go on. Vamoose.”
NuShawn put a wrinkled brown envelope on Mike’s desk and left the office. Mike glared at the newspaper for a while longer, started to crumple it, then changed his mind and slid it into a drawer.
Laura waved the paper in Anthony’s face. “Look at this. They thought I was a waitress! I wanted to wait tables, I’d get a job at a real restaurant. You gotta hire a waitress, Anthony.”
“Aw, Laura, it ain’t that bad. We don’t need a waitress. I’m always here to help you take out plates when it gets busy.”
“I don’t want to take out plates. I’m not a damn waitress. I’m a bartender. If they’re ordering food, they’re ordering drinks. I make drinks, remember? Sooner or later I’m gonna drop one of these hot plates in somebody’s lap and you’re gonna be sorry.”
“You won’t drop nothing. You’re a good waitress.”
“I’M NOT A WAITRESS!”
“I know it, Laura, I meant to say you’re good at whatever you do.”
Laura scowled. “What was wrong with just running a bar? Why are you letting those two jerks take over the kitchen?”
“I thought you liked Rickey and G-man.”
“I liked G-man all right when he was here by himself, but Rickey doesn’t know when to shut up. They egg each other on. I swear to God, a few more nights of listening to them yell out that window—‘Laura! Pick up! I got hot shit here!’—I’m gonna go back there and kick their butts.”
“That’s just how cooks talk when they’re busy. You want to be a waitress, you gotta get used to it.”
Anthony realized his mistake when he saw Laura rolling up the newspaper, but he could not move quickly enough to avoid being smacked over the head with it.
Lenny was in Gulfport for the weekend, consulting with the GM of a new restaurant at the Pot O’Gold Casino. It was a nice gig—he got a hefty consultant’s fee, a free suite, and a thousand dollars’ worth of chips, and he didn’t even have to put his name on the joint. As he had requested, a New Orleans paper was sent up with his coffee each morning.
He grinned as he read the review. Chase Haricot was a friend of his, and Lenny had bent his ear about the new menu at the Apostle Bar, but it sounded as if the boys had won him over on their own. Lenny wasn’t surprised. He’d already eaten there a couple of times, and the food was terrific.
He sipped his coffee. It was hot and strong, but it didn’t taste right because it lacked chicory. Draining the cup anyway, he picked up his cell phone and called his business manager, Bert Flanagan.
“See if you can set up a meeting with those two cooks I was telling you about. Get De La Cerda to come, too.” Oscar De La Cerda was Lenny’s lawyer. “I think it’s time we all had ourselves a talk.”
Rickey was on the phone with his mother.
“I bought me ten copies of the paper today!” she said in her helium-balloon voice, the one she always used when she was excited. “I give ’em to Claude, and Darlene, and Miz Morrison—that nice colored lady works by the corner grocery, you remember?”
“Momma, you ought to say black.”
“Huh?”
“You ought to say Miz Morrison is black. Not colored.”
“Aw, you know I can’t remember that. Miz Morrison don’t care. You sure you supposed to say black? I thought it was African-American now.”
“I don’t know about that African-American stuff. Any of the black guys I work with heard me say that, they’d laugh their asses off.”
“Well, anyway, babe, I’m so proud of you. ‘He ain’t never been in charge of no kitchen before, but he’s doing fantastic!’ It says so right here in the paper!”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“How’s Gary? He’s doing good?”
“Oh, yeah. I couldn’t do this without him.”
“You met any nice girls?”
Rickey refrained from heaving a deep sigh. He had come back from the CIA, moved in with G-man, and eventually reconciled with his mother. He knew she loved him and needed him. Brenda Crabtree (she’d reverted to her maiden name) made a flighty impression on people, but she was no dummy—she’d raised him while working as an accountant at a Ninth Ward restaurant, had made sure he got to school even if the school wasn’t very good, had called Rickey’s father in California and threatened him with court when the child-support payments didn’t come on time. On the subject of her son’s sexual orientation, though, she was deliberately stupid. It irritated Rickey that the devout Catholics of the Stubbs family had become far more accepting than unreligious Brenda.
He’d gotten her to stop asking what she had done wrong, and whether he thought things might have been different if his father had been around. He’d put an end to the clippings about the dangers of HIV by telling her point-blank that G-man was the only person he’d ever slept with, and if she thought G-man was sleeping around, she should take it up with him. But asking “You met any nice girls?” was an annoying habit Brenda had not yet been able to break. In her fantasy world, the ten years he’d spent with G-man were some kind of awkward phase, and any day now her son was going to get married and give her a couple of grandbabies.
“No, Momma,” he said. There was no point in taking it any further.
In a few minutes they said goodbye and hung up. Rickey looked over at G-man, who was lying in bed reading the new issue of Gourmet. “You think she’d leave me alone if we could have a kid?” he said.
“We are gonna have a kid,” said G-man. “Its name will be Liquor.”
chapter 9
Terrance and NuShawn were cruising on Terrance’s night off. NuShawn had a badass ride, a Viper GTS that could supposedly do a ten-second quarter mile. Terrance had never let NuShawn show him.
They’d smoked a joint, eaten a package of cookies, checked out a hot new club on St. Bernard Avenue only to find it closed down after a shooting. That was one of the problems with hot new clubs in New Orleans: the moment they got too hot, some fool showed up with a gun. Terrance supposed it was the same in other cities. Grand opening? Grand closing!, as Chris Rock said in one of his more caustic comedy routines.
“Nothin goin on,” said NuShawn. “I got places to go, people to see.”
“You can drop me home, then.”
“Hey, man, I thought we were hangin out. Why you want to go home early?”
Translation: NuShawn was kind of a small, reedy guy, and he liked having somebody Terrance’s size with him on his “rounds.” Terrance didn’t care for that. Some of the people NuShawn dealt with kept their guns behind the sofa cushions; some just let them lie out on the table. Size was no advantage in such a crowd.
Terrance could take his cousin’s company or leave it. Mostly he was out with NuShawn tonight because he’d stopped seeing a woman last week. Or, if truth be told, the woman had stopped seeing him. At any rate, it was Sunday, the big night of a kitchen worker’s weekend, and he didn’t feel like sitting home.
“You hungry?” he said.
“Shit! All
you ever wanna do is eat. Every time we go out we gotta eat three or four times.”
“This is different. I know the cooks at this place. They’ll fix us something special. It’s a nice quiet place. If you don’t want to go, just drop me off—I’ll get a cab later.”
NuShawn pressed the Seek button on the radio and listened to several stations before settling on one whose signal seemed to consist entirely of throbbing bass. “They gonna fix us a special meal?” he said finally.
“I bet they will.”
“We gotta pay for it?”
“Course we gotta pay for it.”
“Well, what the hell good is that?”
Terrance prevailed, but when they walked in the door of the Apostle Bar ten minutes later, he kind of wished he hadn’t. All the tables were full of people eating, and customers were three deep at the bar. A harried-looking waitress ran plate after plate from the window to the tables.
“Real nice and quiet in here,” said NuShawn.
“I never seen it like this. Must have been that review in the paper. Lemme look in the kitchen a minute.”
“You go in the fuckin kitchen, I’m leavin! Last time you went in the kitchen at a place, I ended up sittin there for about nine hours!”
“Just lemme glance in,” said Terrance, and left NuShawn standing at the end of the bar.
Neither Rickey nor G-man looked up when Terrance came through the swinging door. Their eyes moved only between the food they were making and the solid line of tickets that hung in the window. They looked hot, sweaty, and pissed off, but Terrance knew they weren’t really angry about anything; it was just the habitual expression of the cook in the weeds.
“Y’all all right?” he asked.
Rickey gave him the briefest of glances. “We already 86’d three things, one of my burners isn’t working, and all the pots are dirty. We’re taking it in the ass.”
Terrance moved to the sink. It was heaped with dirty pots, at least one of which, he could smell, had been scorched on the bottom. “I’ll get these for you,” he said.
“Thanks, T.”
Terrance knocked out the pots in ten minutes. There was nothing else he could do to help, so he rejoined his cousin at the bar. “I just remembered about this place,” said NuShawn. “This the place your boss was talkin about.”
“He talks about a lot of stuff,” said Terrance. “I don’t want to hear any of it right now.”
They ordered a couple of beers and watched a soundless basketball game on the TV over the bar. The crowd was thinning out, some people leaving, others moving to the back room where you could shoot pool. In a little while, Rickey came out of the kitchen carrying two plates. “Thanks for doing those pots. I fixed you a couple of dinner specials.” He had a blue-green bandanna tied around his head. Terrance noticed that the bandanna was the exact same color as Rickey’s eyes.
“How’d you know I had my cousin with me?”
“I didn’t. I fixed ’em both for you. Hell, I used to make those staff meals, I remember how much you eat. But you can share, can’tcha?” Then Rickey seemed to remember something. “You’re Terrance’s cousin?” he asked NuShawn.
“Yeah, man. Thanks for the food.”
“Sure … Listen, I gotta get back to it. Y’all hang out if you can, but we won’t really slow up for another hour.”
Rickey cast a final curious glance at NuShawn and headed back to the kitchen. He probably wanted to pump NuShawn for dirt on Mike. No way was Terrance encouraging that, though. NuShawn and Rickey were two of the most trouble-causing people he knew. He probably shouldn’t have let them in the same room with each other.
“These some kinda little birds, or what?” NuShawn said.
Terrance looked at his plate. Two boned-out quail rested on a bed of wild rice. Four spears of roasted asparagus were arranged around the rice in a box shape. The quail were meltingly tender beneath a sauce that tasted of Southern Comfort. Even NuShawn shut up and ate.
Rickey had had to pee for two hours. As soon as the tickets cleared out, he went to the bathroom. He was still standing at the urinal with his dick in his hand when Terrance’s cousin came in.
“Hey, man, that was some good shit. I never ate no quails before, but it was good.”
“Thanks, uh—sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“NuShawn Jefferson.”
“Thanks, NuShawn.” Rickey zipped himself up and went to wash his hands. “We were sure glad to see Terrance in there. I miss working with him. He’s cool.”
“Yeah, he all right. Say, you got some guy name of Rickey working here?”
“That’s me.”
“Damn!” NuShawn took a step back.
“What?”
“Nothin. I know a guy who hates your ass, is all.”
“Really? Is he a stupid fucking cokehead named Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“So he even talks about me to his dealer? I feel honored. I don’t guess you know what his problem is or anything, cause I don’t.”
“He say the same shit bosses always say. You slackin off, you got a smart mouth. Oh, and you supposed to be suckin some guy’s dick in the newspaper. I got tired of puttin up with that kinda boss shit a long time ago. Went into business for myself.”
“I’m tired of putting up with that boss shit too, NuShawn. But I love to cook, and it’s hard to get cooking jobs without running into a lot of assholes like Mike Mouton. So what would you do if you were me?”
NuShawn considered. “I guess I’d start my own restaurant.”
“Yeah,” said Rickey. “I guess I would too.”
“You need somethin?”
“Got any weed?”
“No, just C.”
“I guess not tonight. Thanks anyway.”
He went back to the kitchen and told G-man about the conversation. “I wouldn’t have minded a bump,” said G-man.
“Fuck that. If it turns you into Mike, I’m never doing it again.”
“That won’t be any big loss, since you haven’t done it in about three years anyway.” G-man looked over and saw Rickey scowling at his depleted mise-en-place. “Dude, I don’t get why you take Mike so seriously. Nobody else does. I mean, we got screwed over by Brian Danton at Tequilatown, and you don’t hate him. So how come you care what Mike thinks? He’s so stupid, he thinks you get a good review by sucking the restaurant critic’s dick, for Chrissake.”
“Brian Danton didn’t go around trashing me,” said Rickey. “He had a rule, we broke it, and he fired us. He had a reason for what he did, even if it was a stupid reason. But I didn’t do anything wrong at Escargot’s. I did a good job. Sometimes I think that’s why Mike hates me so much. He just disliked me to start with, and I never did anything he could fire me for.”
As twisted as this logic was, G-man could see it, and he nodded. Still, he couldn’t help wondering if there might be more to it. His peaceful soul usually kept him from questioning things too deeply, but he didn’t like the way Mike Mouton seemed to have fixated on Rickey.
Anthony came into the kitchen as they were cleaning up. He wore the hangdog look that usually meant he had something important to discuss.
“Busy night,” was all he said at first.
“Sure was,” said G-man.
“Nice crowd, huh?”
“Anthony,” said Rickey. “No offense, but what do you want? I know you want something.”
“Well, we’re making so much money. I gotta give you both a big raise, cause you’re the only thing bringing it in.”
“Cool!” said Rickey. “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get a car. I never had my own car before. I’m gonna get me a crappy old car.”
“I’m gonna get a real good knife,” said G-man.
“Yeah, me too. A car and a Wüsthof knife.”
“Uh, guys, if you could start spending your riches a little later? Like I said, I gotta give you a raise. But you can see this kinda business is too big for the place.”
“It
won’t stay this crazy,” said G-man. “It’s the review. It’ll die down some.”
“Some, but not a whole lot, I bet. And we got Mardi Gras coming up. Y’all are gonna have some fairly nice money of your own. You could start putting it away toward your restaurant.”
“I got a bad feeling where this is leading,” said Rickey.
“Look, I know Lenny’s manager called you to set up a meeting, and you said you weren’t ready to talk to him again yet. I wish you’d think about talking to him.”
“Fuck Lenny!” Rickey tossed an empty squeeze bottle into the sink with more force than was strictly necessary. “That big fucking pork chop. He wants to talk to us, he can call us himself. Not some manager, like, summoning us. That pissed me off.”
“It did,” said G-man. “It really pissed him off.”
“Lenny’s kinda big-business that way,” Anthony admitted. “He don’t think about the effect. But listen, if he called you himself, would you talk to him?”
“I don’t know,” said Rickey sullenly. “Maybe.” Behind his back, though, G-man gave Anthony a thumbs-up.
chapter 10
The turtle soup is excellent,” said Lenny. “It lives up to its reputation.”
“Yeah, I had it before,” said Rickey. He saw no need to mention that he had eaten at Commander’s Palace only once, ten years ago, when his father had visited from California and brought him to lunch here. If he wanted to be a chef, his father had said, he should eat at the best restaurant in New Orleans. Of course every New Orleanian had his own “best” restaurant, but Commander’s Palace was a hard choice to argue with. Serving fine Creole food in the Garden District since 1880, it had done what most of the city’s other old-line restaurants had not: evolved with the times while preserving a deep sense of tradition. The older dishes on the menu did not seem stodgy; the newer ones did not seem like frivolous nouvelle upstarts. The food had a coherent voice, a harmony. From the turtle soup au sherry to the bananas Foster prepared tableside on a rolling cart, Rickey had never forgotten anything about that meal.