It doesn’t take long for a person to get sick and tired of washing dishes, especially in a busy restaurant. Although the multifarious personalities of the crew, the complicated nature of the operation, and even the workings of the immense Hobart dish machine all had their charms, the work itself well and truly sucked, which, combined with the suckiest imaginable experience—incarceration in high school—made for a rather bleak existence. Clearly, I needed to escape from something, and graduation seemed like it was years away. And there, behind a high, stainless-steel counter, was the world of the cooks.
At any given moment, at least a dozen of them were working away in the kitchen. At first they all seemed inter-changeable, a raucous, profane cast whose sole interaction with the dish crew was to scream for stacks of scalding-hot dishware—dinner plates, B&Bs, soup bowls, monkey dishes, salad plates, goosenecks, casseroles, platters, ramekins, and parfaits. As I delivered the goods into their infernal realm, I began to differentiate their jobs, their names, and their functions.
There were many major divides. The first was the nature of their preparations: hot and cold. Generally, the men cooked the hot food, and the women attended to the cold preparations. Then there were the line cooks, who prepared the à la carte meals for the Kashmiri Dining Room, as opposed to the banquet crew, who produced vast quantities of identical foods for large parties, along with dreadfully large quantities of dirty dishes and utensils. Finally, a different uniform designated the coffee shop cooks, who slammed out short-order dishes in their own little kitchen down the hall from the main arena. All this was presided over by an executive chef and a couple of assistants, known as sous-chefs. (When I first heard this title, I assumed that these individuals were Oglalas or Minneconjous, until I discovered by some accident that the proper spelling of their title was not “Sioux.”)
This group was an intimidating one to any outsider. First of all, these people actually knew how to do things and always seemed to be furiously busy doing them. Second, they seemed to have their own language, giving names to people, actions, and objects that the uninitiated could only understand after observation and familiarity. It would not do to ask for clarification, and anyone confessing ignorance of their arcane lexicon was raucously and profanely ridiculed. This risk of humiliation led to some awkward moments and a few near misses. A novice might be dispatched to fetch a nonexistent left-handed ladle or a “meat stretcher.“ I recall vainly searching the dictionary for the meaning of “bamperine“ only to find out months later that the nonword was a corruption of the French bain-marie, basically a steam table. I also discovered that every cook took offense at being called a shoemaker, which was a French-originated term of derision for Italians in general and bad cooks in particular. Worse was being termed a Greek, which meant, well, a Greek, or a cook prone to producing overly oily, sloppy food. To be derided as a Greek shoemaker, usually with a few selected profanities, was simply anathema.
Generally, though, the male cooks spoke in an argot composed primarily of profanities and obscenities. Pans and spoons were “male” or “female,” depending on whether they had holes or not, and sauces were “douches,” as in, “Put some douche over that turkey and send it the hell out, you fuckin’ shoemaker!” Garbage receptacles were “shit cans,” small flexible knives were “boners,” and woe unto the dumb ass who didn’t understand what they were talking about.
As a dumb ass, I was expected to do whatever the people in the white jackets wanted, which centered on the endless washing, carrying, sweeping, and mopping that kept the kitchen running. On occasion, when a large party was to be served, I was pulled off the dish crew to help on the assembly line that plated hundreds of lunches and dinners at breakneck speed. A long stainless-steel table was set up with stacks of hot dinner plates at one end and an empty, closed cart at the other. In between stood as many cooks as necessary, each with his contribution to the finished meal: potatoes, vegetables, sauces, garnishes. As a plate was shoved by, each contributed his offering, and the finished dinner had a stainless-steel cover clanged onto it just as it was shoved into the cart. When drafted onto these crews, I was certainly never allowed to touch actual food, as a rigid hierarchy regulated who did what in these situations. The chef in charge always handled the meat portion, to be placed in the center of the plate. Cooks of lesser status then added the accompaniments, checked the plate for completeness, wiped up any spills, and then—and only then—was a dumb ass allowed to burn himself on the hot plate as he covered it and put it into the wagon. Still, the whole experience gave me a chance to work with the cooks, especially since the other dishwashers I worked with were either congenitally slow-witted or had cerebral palsy and thus were liabilities on the fast-paced dishing line. As hectic as such an operation could be, I cherished these brief respites from the dish room’s drudgeries.
The first of the cooking crew who had spoken to me was Miss Del, the head pantry cook. In absolute charge of all cold food, she was a veteran, stooped-over black woman whose competence, not to mention raw orneriness, elicited the respect of all the workers in the Ambassador’s kitchen. On my first day she had taken me aside, asked my name, and given me her Two Commandments:
I. Speak when you’re spoken to;
II. Clean up your own mess.
As long as I followed Del’s commandments, we got along fine. Soon we were talking regularly, and one day I confessed that I’d like to do something in the kitchen which didn’t involve washing dishes. Was there ever going to be an opening in the cold-food pantry?
“Stevie, honey, you can’t work over here, though we’d love to have you. Pantry work is for women. You need to work with the hot-food cooks. Now, I know you’re afraid of that stuttering chef [I blushed], but you don’t need to ask him for anything. Have you noticed that every day the storeroom guy throws a fifty-pound sack of onions out on the prep table? The cooks are supposed to peel those whenever they get a chance, and they HATE IT! Well, if you was to just go over and ask them if you could help with the peeling, they might just give you some other jobs too, and pretty soon you’re off the dishwasher!” This seemed liked reasonable advice.
When I first asked Bob, one of the cooks, whether he needed a hand with the onions, it was an inadvertent masterpiece of timing. Bob was plainly hungover that morning, reeking of stale booze and old tobacco and truculent in a fatalistic sort of way. (These symptoms were not unusual among the cooks.) All morning the other cooks had been sneaking up behind him and noisily dropping pots and pans, farting, or making foul remarks that set his stomach churning. The onions weren’t helping either, so Bob was more than happy to turn part of the job over to me. When I asked him if I could borrow a knife, he motioned me over to his toolbox and told me to use his boner. I opened the lid of the box, the inside of which bore the scrawl THE ONLY THING LOWER THAN A COCKSUCKER IS A THEEF. Reaching in for the knife, I disturbed a towel and discovered that it was wrapped around Bob’s .38, snuggled in with the cook’s beat-up tools. It seems that a jealous husband had been threatening Bob, and he thought it only prudent to have a piece within easy reach. Since several of the other cooks regularly packed heat, Bob’s weapon was in no way an aberration, other than in the way it cohabited with the spatulas and cutlery.
With Bob’s boner I set to work on the onions. The juice of the big Bermudas zeroed in on my hay fever, and I was weeping by the time I finished the second onion. But since I was back with the cooks and actually touching food, a few of them came and talked to me. I even got to participate in one of their time-honored rituals. Two of the hot-food cooks, Tony and Bill, weighed well over three hundred pounds apiece, most of it around the midsection. At least once a day one or the other of them would come around a corner or proceed down the same narrow aisle and confront the other. Squaring off, the two would proceed to bump bellies and then repeat the process again and again, harder and harder, until one gave way. This was as savage and unrelenting as elks in a rutting frenzy.
This day the two of them winked at each other and then sandwiched me in the middle of their belly battle for about a dozen bumps. I laughed, I shouted, all the while crying from the onions. Hearing the uproar, the executive chef stalked out of his office, looked at me, and said, “What the f-f-fuck is he doing back here?”
Elsewhere, others were trying to find their proper place. One of them begins his own story here.
Well, it’s about time. People certainly ignore you when you’re on the wrong side of the sod. God knows I wouldn’t have let that happen before. Of course, sometimes I had to remind them that I was more of a man than they’d ever be, and more of a woman than any of them would ever have.
Oh, my story.
Born in 1948. My father was a colonel in the marines or air force or some bullshit, so we moved around a lot. When I was about twelve, we settled down to live in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, which I would call the Asshole of the World if I didn’t think saying that was an insult to all assholes everywhere.
My family was very Catholic, so they made me go to the parish school and be an altar boy. About the third time I served Mass, the priest hit on me, and I was too scared to say no (saying no has always been a problem for me). Well, Father Joe pretty much fucked me from then on all the way through high school, and when I told him I didn’t know what to do after graduation, he said I should settle down and get married. After all, you couldn’t be gay in Chippewa Falls.
I had met this girl at church; her father was a big shot at the bank, and she was nice but really spoiled, and she liked me well enough. So we had a big wedding in 1967, with Father Joe doing the honors after doing me the night before. My father-in-law helped us get a decent little house, just like all the other breeders—and then I got my draft notice.
But I was really happy about that. I thought, OK you’re married now, and all you have to do is go to war and then you’ll BE A REAL MAN, and you can stop looking at every cute stud in town and not even be tempted to sneak over to the rectory for a blow job. Everybody in town was happy for me because, just before I went off to boot camp, I found out that my wife was pregnant, so at least if I was killed, they wouldn’t have to change the population sign at the edge of town.
I found out that the way to straightness didn’t involve going over to Vietnam and hanging out with thousands of other lonely, muscular guys. I did my duty. Of course, I got hassled now and then by queer-hating rednecks. One day our squad was unloading a big stack of lumber off a two-and-a-half-ton truck when one of the rednecks in the company threw a long two-by-four my way when I wasn’t looking, and the fucking thing caught me right in the mouth. It knocked all my front teeth out and put me in the hospital for a long time. That’s how I won my Purple Heart (I think I traded the medal for a cocktail sometime later).
While I was in the hospital waiting for my mouth to heal, and for U.S. Army dentures, I really did a lot of thinking. Here I was in this stinking jungle, living a lie. Living a double lie actually. I was not a soldier; I wasn’t even a husband. I was running away from being a fag, a fag with a kid on the way. I guess I got pretty depressed, but I decided that, when my tour was up, I was going back to Chippewa Falls (even that shithole looked good now) and just be square with everybody. I worked out an administrative discharge with the army by blackmailing my CO (I think you know how) and headed back to the World.
So when I got home, I had this cute little baby girl waiting for me, and everybody was happy that everything but my mouth was in one piece. They threw a welcome-home party for me, and as usual I had too much to drink, and I told them. My parents, my wife, her parents. I told them all that I was gay and that was that. No more pretending, no more lying. Then they weren’t so happy.
My wife took the baby that night and moved in with her parents, and the bank took back the house. My “dad” took a swing at me (he missed; he was drunk, too) and told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d better leave town and never come back. The next day I did just that. And I haven’t been back.
Like every other small-town faggot in the Midwest, I headed for Minneapolis.
Aside from the growth of the restaurant industry, the last three decades of the eighteenth century were unkind to France. Citizens of all classes could rendezvous in eateries and discuss the calamities of lost wars, the government’s financial malfeasance, and the strangling effects of the ancien régime’s social order. After all, the Second Estate (the clergy) paid only 2 percent of their massive income in taxes. The First Estate (the hereditary aristocracy) paid nothing. The Third Estate (basically everybody else) shelled out a whopping 50 percent of their incomes to the tax collector. The educated middle class ( bourgeoisie) became increasingly restive in spite of their detached Cult of Sensitivity—more fodder for conversation over one’s pot-au-feu.
Another lively topic was the new republic across the Atlantic. That innovation had been guaranteed by French blood and treasure during the American Revolution, a war that found France on the winning side while suffering the loss of further fleets, armies, and colonies in the final settlement. Furthermore, talk of the irony of Frenchmen fighting to liberate foreigners from the rule of a foreign monarch, while their own king retained his despotic powers at home, allowed many a meal to grow cold. Vilified as one of the most ineffectual monarchs ever to stumble across the European stage, Louis XVI and the entire Bourbon dynasty would be swept away in the fury of the French Revolution, beginning in July 1789. This upheaval made its American predecessor look like a rather bland appetizer.
The documentation of the wrenching transformation of French society and government in those years has provided plentiful sustenance to novelists and historians for generations. Few of these have acknowledged the role of restaurants proper as gathering places for the successive waves of factions that embroiled Paris and the rest of the country in revolutionary activities. As reform-minded delegates to the Estates-General flooded into the capital, they fueled their deliberations over food and wine in these establishments. An early revolutionary martyr, Le Pelletier, was assassinated by a royalist as he dined in Fevrier’s restaurant. The table where he took his last meal became a shrine, and his moderate repast was made an icon of proper republicanism.
Overindulgence was now associated with the discredited ruling class. Shipments of foodstuffs into Paris dropped off as frugality and uncertainty combined to discourage purveyors. When the supply of bread ran out in the city, mobs of its inhabitants marched to Versailles and seized the king and his family, bringing them back to Paris accompanied by the royal guard, who had joined the insurgents. Louis and his family were placed under house arrest as more and more aristocrats tested the wind and headed for the border. Obviously, things were getting out of hand.
The incident that turned the revolutionary tide inexorably against the king occurred on June 21, 1791, when, as restaurant-savvy Parisians put it, Louis attempted to run out on the check. At the urging of the queen, Louis disguised his family and, with a few loyalists, boarded a coach and made a run for the frontier. He was hoping to reach the territory of his decidedly monarchy-friendly brother-in-law, the emperor of Austria. He nearly made a clean escape, but Louis was a renowned gourmand, and hunger overtook him before the authorities in Paris could. He ordered his carriage to stop in the town of Varennes in Champagne in order to refresh himself in the establishment of a man named Sauce. While the monarch was dining on a platter of pigs’ feet, he was recognized by the local postmaster, who was familiar with the royal portrait from the stamps he sold. The alarm was given, and Louis and his party were duly arrested. He was allowed to finish his supper before being dragged back to Paris.
Revolutionary propagandists made much of the king’s flight to Varennes. Clearly, he had been abandoning France in its hour of need, going over to the enemy, as autocratic governments throughout Europe ranged themselves against the revolutionary upstarts in Paris. Caricatures of the king at his last meal outside of captivity showed him as a porcine libertine, the husband of the reputedly immoral Austrian whore Marie Antoinette. Before Varennes, France had been struggling toward a constitutional monarchy. Louis XVI’s arrest on Sauce’s premises condemned that idea and, ultimately, the king himself. These stories mutated and spread throughout the nation and were increasingly associated with the unique French institution, the restaurant.
Even I was shocked by what I found in Minneapolis. It seems like everybody came out of the closet at once in the late sixties and early seventies. Being gay was finally cool, and a lot of us just went wild. There were a bunch of new bathhouses operating in town, and at least five nights a week, I’d start the evening with cocktails at the Gay 90’s and then head over to Big Daddy’s Bathhouse. Most of us felt like we had just been liberated, or let out of fag jail or something.
Without much in the way of skills, I had to find work that would get me enough money to live and also not get in the way of my nightly activities. Restaurants were a natural for me and for lots of others. Just about every nice place had gay waiters, and all you needed to get a job were good manners and a willingness to hustle, and believe me, I knew how to hustle. Manners were the problem. I lost a couple of jobs because I told the asshole customers exactly what I thought of them.
But in the end, in restaurants nobody much cares about where you’re from or who you’re sleeping with. The only thing that mattered is whether you could do the job or not. Even if I was a bitchy waiter, there were always other jobs that needed doing. I got some experience doing short-order cooking and cold food in a couple of places and did some bartending too. I worked nights because getting up in the morning has always been a problem for me, especially if I wake up next to some sissy whose name I can’t even remember. The only thing I was ever sure of was that I had met him the night before in a bar or a restaurant.
On the morning of October 16, 1793, the executioner reached into the basket below the blade of the guillotine and retrieved the head of Marie Antoinette, recently retired queen of France. As he held the grisly trophy aloft for the jeering spectators, the headsman jammed a piece of cake into the lifeless royal mouth. The crowd roared its approval. Many of them recalled the words the queen had spoken before the Revolution. When Marie was told that the people of Paris had no bread and quipped, “Let them eat cake,” she had actually recommended the far less cakey brioche for the starving masses, but the howling mob, in this instance anyway, was disinclined to quibble about the menu.
Besides, there were plenty of places where the menu could be a source of debate and concern. Though money was short and victuals scarce in revolutionary Paris, restaurants continued to flourish in the French capital. Members of the constituent assembly flocked to Beauvilliers, where the wine selection was reputedly the finest in Paris. Meot offered more than one hundred dishes on its menu, and the republic’s constitution of 1793 was drawn up in that establishment’s private rooms. Perhaps the finest meals of all could be had at Les Trois Frères Provençaux, which had, before the upheavals of 1789, existed as a modest hole-in-the-wall serving decidedly mediocre fare. With the overthrow of the Old Regime, Les Provençaux moved to the fashionable Gallerie de Beaujolais, overlooking the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and packed in the customers seeking its savory Mediterranean dishes. Restaurants had never been more popular.
This was in itself a bit surprising. With tumbrels full of condemned aristocrats rolling through the streets of Paris, foreign armies massing on the borders, and large sections of the country in open revolt against a regicidal central government, it seemed unlikely that any business segment, other than the mortuaries, could prosper. Yet Paris restaurants reached new heights of expertise and acclaim. There was even a lively catering business serving imprisoned nobles waiting for their trips to the guillotine. All sorts of delicacies were delivered to the condemned, oftentimes prepared by the same hands that had served these aristocrats before their condemnation. The pleasures of the table were all that remained for the displaced—and doomed—First Estate.
Those who had, in happier times, provided such pleasures for the nobility now did so under their own auspices. The chefs de cuisine, rôtisseurs (roast cooks), sauciers (sauté cooks), and pâtissiers (pastry cooks) who had manned the culinary establishments of the aristocracy suddenly found themselves out of work as the Revolution roiled toward its inevitable, bloody conclusion. Their employers had either fled the country or been frog-marched to prison, leaving kitchen staffs bereft of employment. They had little choice but to find a place in the burgeoning restaurant industry.
In actuality a few pioneering chefs had made this transition in the decade before the Revolution. Antoine Beauvilliers was a notable example. He left the service of a branch of the Bourbon family when they were forced to downsize their staff, owing to the family’s financial mismanagement. His establishment, set up in a property hastily sold off by a fugitive aristocrat, soon became a popular dining spot. Its popularity continued through the Revolution and into the nineteenth century.
Once the Revolution had begun, a flood of new talent reached Paris’s kitchens. For some the transition was far from smooth. Gabriel Charles Doyen, Marie Antoinette’s personal chef, went to the guillotine in 1794, charged with longing for the Old Regime and missing his former employers. Some chefs were seen as too connected to their aristocratic employers and were brought along by those nobles who had the good fortune to flee the country. Thus they traveled with their patrons to any city in Europe that would welcome such exiles, and some made it as far as the émigré outpost of New Orleans, where they added their talents to a new nation’s cuisine.
In some sense, this shift of employment mirrored the movement away from the patronage of European creative artists popular throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century. Visual artists, writers, composers, and now chefs struck out from their dependence on the whims of noble patrons and into the competitive arena of public performance. Though the upheaval of the Revolution accelerated the process for chefs, the institution of the restaurant had already begun that transition. Moreover, this new merit-based competition among restaurateurs continued and enhanced the democratic nature of the restaurant.
I didn’t witness the confrontation, but a couple people later told me that it had been pretty heated. After I was sent packing to the dish area, Miss Del charged into Chef Logan’s office and told him in no uncertain terms that she was not going to go on working overtime forever just because he couldn’t find her any help to set up the Sunday brunch every week, and furthermore, there was this kid who had been peeling onions who really wanted to learn how to do food, and she would be more than happy to train him, and it was a goddam shame that somebody could come over to this country and have some opportunity and then turn around and deny it to somebody else just because he didn’t like him, and since nobody could figure out why he didn’t like him, he oughta wonder if he wasn’t just some dumb foreigner who didn’t know shit from Shinola, but one thing he oughta know was that Del and all her recipes were leaving the Ambassador unless she got some help, and she meant soon.
The chef stuttered out O-O-O-K and told the steward to replace me on the dish machine. Del winked at me as she returned to her station.
For Atahualpa, the last ruler of the Inca Empire, August 29, 1533, proved to be a pretty bad day. Despite providing Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors with a ransom of a roomful of gold and two others filled with silver, the Great Inca was strangled to death by the Spaniards, as a prelude to their conquest of Peru. Things could have been worse. Atahualpa had recently renounced his native gods and converted to Christianity. According to the church, he could then lawfully succumb to the garrote rather than be burned at the stake as a heretic. Once again, the rule of law served to protect us from our darker impulses.
Shockingly, the Europeans did not offer the Incas a refund on the ransom already paid. Instead, the proceeds went toward purchasing altarpieces, whips, and leg irons for use in civilizing the latest province of New Spain. However quickly the treasure was spent, the true wealth that came from beneath the Peruvian soil was vegetable rather than mineral. The discovery of the potato changed European cuisine almost overnight.
Here was a crop that was hardy, nutritious, and versatile. It could be eaten by all classes, made into a passable spirit, or used as cheap fodder for livestock. In short order the potato flourished from County Cork to the Urals and then recrossed the Atlantic during the second century of European incursion onto the North American continent.
And there the potato died a horrible death in the kitchens of mid-twentieth-century America. The humble potato was an integral part of every meal, whether baked, fried, boiled, shredded, diced, drowned in polypropylene cheese sauce, or steamed to translucence. But of all the ways concocted to use or abuse the potato, none could be more dastardly, debilitating, or depraved than the baked stuffed potato, aka the twice-baked potato. And each of us who saw this item listed on a banquet production sheet had his own personal, obscene term for it.
At the Ambassador we had a catering manager who delighted in padding the guest check by selling his customers the enhancement of baked stuffed (BS) potatoes on party menus. For just an additional dollar, the guest could be served an elegant BS potato alongside the main course, instead of the usual inert, foil-wrapped spud. Think of the delight that four hundred revelers at a wedding banquet might find in devouring the very best BS potatoes on Highway 12! No fussing with foil wrappers or bowls of sour cream. No burden of having to wield salt and pepper shakers to make the baker palatable. No burnt lips or tongues from potatoes that actually held their heat. A real BS potato for only a measly dollar more. The things practically sold themselves.
For the cook who drew the assignment of producing the BS potatoes, life held few delights. First, he had to go searching for enough conventional baked potatoes to complete his work. At the Ambassador we routinely collected all the leftover baked potatoes at the end of each dinner shift. The overproduced potatoes were stashed in the walk-in cooler to await reincarnation. If the cook could find enough of them—half as many as the guest count—he was in business. If not, he would have to actually bake some raw potatoes in order to produce the BS, an unfortunate additional task and expense.
Each potato was then split lengthwise with a knife, and the grayish-tan innards were scooped out and discarded. Once baked and chilled, the flesh of mealy russet baking potatoes gets crumbly and smelly, and only the stuffable skins are of any value. These were laid out in yawning rows on a pan to await further insult.
This insult came in the form of the stuffing used to fill the BS potatoes. The cook estimated how much milk to heat on the stovetop, and if the milk did not scald while he hurriedly smoked a cigarette, it was transferred to a thirty-quart-capacity bowl mounted on a Hobart mixer. The cook then opened several no. 10 cans of dehydrated whipped-potato mix and began feeding their contents into the milk while the mixing paddle slowly whirled about. If the task was not done carefully, equal amounts of potato mix reached both the milk and the floor. Usually, after considerable scraping and cursing by the cook, this bland cocktail reached a state approximating mashed potatoes. But the magic had only begun.
Five-pound tubs of sour cream made their appearance, and their contents were incorporated into the mixture. A pile of bacon, left over from breakfast, came next after being finely chopped. (Occasionally, an unwary cook tried to cut corners by sneaking in Bacos from the salad department. The food coloring in the artificial soy-bacon substitute inevitably turned the resulting glop a lurid pink.) The cook also opened a can of freeze-dried chives for inclusion. On opening, the chives smelled like an old tomb, powdery and rancid, but in they went. Next, raw egg yolks were added to bind and enrich the mixture, as was just enough salt and white pepper. A final adjustment for consistency may have required some more whipped-potato mix, and a two-finger taste completed the process—the mixing process, that is.
The task of shuttling this mélange into the listless skins remained. The preferred tool was a large pastry bag, a conical canvas tube with a toothed metal tip at the pointy end, which served as the orifice from which stuffing flowed. The amalgam was then scooped into the big end of the tube and squeezed out the small end. A few wrist and finger gyrations imparted attractive swirls and curls to each BS potato, but just as often some particle refused to smoothly pass through the tip and the cook had to exert more pressure on the bag to move the recalcitrant lump. The resultant tube fart blasted a little extra mix into the shell and onto its neighbors and the cook’s apron. Strangling a pastry tube for hours was exhausting and often made for a bad day.
The finished BS potatoes were drizzled with melted butter and dusted with parmesan cheese. Thus adorned, they returned to the cooler to await immolation in the oven and service to the unsuspecting. Each simple, nutritious potato had been augmented with bacon and butterfat, and milk, cream, cheese, egg yolks, and dehydrated carbohydrates laid in ambush for the descendants of the European colonizers. Somewhere, perhaps outside a cardiac ward, Atahualpa the Great Inca is smiling.