I was a failure. A fraud. A homo. A queer. A fag. Gay.
I knew that in other parts of the world, being gay wasn’t such a big deal. There were gay bars, gay businesses, even whole gay neighborhoods. There were gay doctors and gay lawyers and gay actors and gay musicians. In big cities like New York and Toronto and San Francisco, there were gay pride parades, full of gay people covered with gay glitter and gay feathers dancing to gay music. Those people looked happy, like they could afford to have fun and be themselves.
But none of that mattered, because none of those people lived in Deep Cove.
Was I supposed to throw myself a one-man pride parade? I pictured myself zooming down Main Street on a pink bicycle wearing a feather boa, dodging rotten tomatoes and the jeers of everyone I’d ever known. I imagined Kierce and Ferris and their hockey buddies beating the shit out of me. I saw Jay looking at me with disgust and never speaking to me again. I wondered how my family would react if they ever found out. Would my parents disown me? Would Alma be so embarrassed that she’d pretend she didn’t even have a brother?
I was an island of gayness in an ocean of straightness.
The way I saw it, I had two options. I could try to be somebody other than myself for the rest of my life, or I could pick up and move far away. It was obvious that Plan A had failed miserably. If Lisa couldn’t turn me on, there wasn’t a girl on earth who could change me. It wasn’t going to happen. Period. Full stop.
That left me with Plan B. I had to get out of Deep Cove, move as far away as I could, because there was no way I could tell anyone here who I really was. To hell with figuring out a career plan for after high school. What I needed was an escape route.
To make matters worse, things at the restaurant were getting shittier by the day. I couldn’t seem to get any faster at washing dishes. Every time I felt like I was getting somewhere, a huge load of dishes would come in from the dining room, or the dishwasher would malfunction, leaving me soaked and the dishes still dirty.
When I fell behind, JP always kept his cool, but I knew I was holding him up. Luckily, the customers didn’t seem to mind waiting for their food. We were packed every night, and the Sandbar was getting rave reviews. It was great that the restaurant was doing well, but it didn’t make me feel any better about being the weak link.
A couple of evenings after my night on the hill with Lisa, I was crossing the kitchen with a stack of plates, fresh out of the dishwasher. JP turned around quickly with a hot pan of food, and when I moved to get out of his way, I tripped, and the plates flew out of my hands. I watched in horror as they landed on the service counter and smashed into a million pieces. Shards of broken pottery sprinkled a row of freshly plated entrees that JP had just put up for one of Ken’s tables. I froze as Denise came rushing into the kitchen, followed closely by Ken.
“What was that?” she asked. Then she saw the mess I’d made. She covered her face with her hands. “Danny, Danny, Danny. What the…No, I can’t deal with this right now.” She turned around and walked out of the kitchen. I looked at JP, who had quickly turned back to the stove to remake the orders.
“Okay, guy,” he said. “Scrape those plates into the garbage, and then sweep it up. Pronto.”
“Way to go, guy,” Ken sneered. “Now I get to explain to the customers why their food isn’t ready yet.” He gave the swinging door a heavy smack on his way back out to the dining room. I lifted my middle finger at his back, and was momentarily pleased to hear JP chuckle.
I felt like shit, but there was no time to stop and feel sorry for myself. I did as he told me and got the mess cleaned up, then dove back into the dish pit and tried my best to get things under control. JP managed to pull everything together in short order, and soon enough, things were back on track.
“Don’t worry, guy,” he said. “Everyone has accidents. That’s the business for you.”
Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better. The rest of the shift seemed to drag on forever, and Denise didn’t look at me for the rest of the evening.
The next day, when I got to work, I found her giving a tour of the kitchen to Parker, a sullen younger kid I recognized from school. She was explaining how to use the dishwasher.
“Hey, Dan,” she said. “Why don’t you go wait in the dining room for me.” I went out and sat at one of the tables, my chin in my hands. I figured I was lucky to have lasted this long. I couldn’t blame Denise if she fired me; I was a total disaster as a dishwasher. After a few minutes, she came out and sat across the table from me.
“So, this probably won’t surprise you,” she said, “but the whole dishwashing thing just isn’t working out. I hate to say it, buddy, but you are definitely not cut out for the dish pit.”
“It’s okay,” I said, trying not to sound as miserable as I felt. I moved to stand up from the table. “Thanks a lot for giving me a chance. It was really cool working for you.”
“Hang on,” she said, “where are you going? I didn’t say you were fired, I said you were a terrible dishwasher.”
I didn’t understand. “Do you want me to wait tables?”
“Hell, no. If you were even half as bad at that as you were at washing dishes, this place wouldn’t last a week. No, I was thinking that I’d put you to work with JP.”
“Really?”
“He’s really been slammed, and I can tell that he’s only barely keeping his shit together. I’m pretty sure if I don’t get him some help soon, he’s going to quit, and then we’re all screwed.”
“Do you think JP will be okay working with me?”
“Actually, it was his idea. He thinks part of the reason that you are such a shitty dishwasher is that you spend half your time watching him cook, so we might as well put you where you might actually learn something.”
I felt as if I’d won the lottery. Big-time.
The next morning, I came to work an hour early so JP could give me a rundown of some basics.
“Okay,” he said, “first things first. You don’t touch my knives. You touch my knives, I cut your thumbs off, I go to jail, Denise has to close the restaurant, you have no thumbs, and nobody wins.”
JP’s knives were his babies. He’d transported them from Montreal in a metal briefcase that looked like it held a nuclear detonator, and he kept them next to the stove in a wooden block.
He reached up to a shelf and pulled down a stained, tied-up bundle of cloth. “Go ahead,” he said, dropping it in front of me, “unroll it.”
It was a set of five knives, much older and more beat up than the ones he used. The handles were mismatched, and there were spots of rust on some of them.
“This is my backup set. I used these way back when I was a young kitchen slave, like you. You can use them for the summer. They don’t look like much, but they’re good knives. These are real steel; none of that stainless bullshit. That’s why they’re kind of rusty. You have to keep them clean and dry, and you rub oil onto them every night before you leave the kitchen.”
“Cool,” I said. They were pretty shitty-looking knives, but I wasn’t about to complain. Anything to keep me out of the dish pit.
JP grabbed a ten-pound bag of potatoes from the corner and dropped it on the counter in front of me.
“First lesson.” He picked up the smallest knife in the bundle. “This is your paring knife. Small, but very important. This little guy will do delicate work, like making garnishes, and it can do stuff that bigger knives can’t, like getting the seeds out of a pepper. But first things first.” He sliced open the bag of potatoes, grabbed one and peeled it perfectly in about ten seconds. He did another one, slower, showing me how to hold the knife and move the potato, and then he got me to try. I was slow and choppy, and cut several chunks out of the potato in the process.
“Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to use a peeler?” I asked.
“Oh yes, much easier. But what would you learn?” He patted me on the back. “You do this whole bag, and then we’ll see what’s next.”
I looked at the gigantic bag of potatoes, took a deep breath and started peeling.
JP was right; by the time I’d peeled twenty pounds of potatoes, I felt as if I’d actually learned something. Over the next couple of days, I peeled what felt like hundreds of carrots and thousands of potatoes. It was boring and repetitive, but I kind of enjoyed the rhythm of it, and by the end of a few days of nonstop peeling, I felt as if I really knew how to use that paring knife.
Over the next week, I slowly graduated to doing more complicated prep work. I wasn’t actually learning to cook yet, but I knew the difference between a slice, a dice and a julienne. Depending on what JP needed for a particular dish, I did plenty of all three.
JP showed me how to pull the hairy little beards out of mussels, and how to devein a shrimp. I used my hands to break apart endless heads of romaine lettuce, wash out all the dirt, and rip them into little pieces for Caesar salad. I learned to crush cloves of garlic with the palm of my hand so that they would slide right out of their skin, and to mince them into tiny piles of fragrant mush that went into almost everything JP cooked.
The kitchen had become fun again. Now that I was helping him, JP was able to relax a bit. When he was relaxed, he listened to music. Lots of music. When we had a rush, and things in the kitchen were really intense, he’d listen to the Clash or the Stones. When things were calmer and running smoothly, he listened to hippie music, like Van Morrison or Joni Mitchell. But his standby was definitely Stevie Wonder, who quickly became my favorite too. When Stevie’s happy seventies beats rolled out of le boom box, I found it impossible not to tap my feet.
Parker tuned out JP’s music with giant headphones, plugged into a Walkman that was turned up so high that we could hear the muffled sounds of Green Day or NOFX buzzing around his head. He only communicated when he absolutely had to, and then only with grunts and shrugs. That didn’t bother anyone though, because he turned out to be a much better dishwasher than I’d ever be. He stood scowling at the sink, attacking the dish pit with gusto and angrily nodding his head along to his music.
Out in the dining room, things were also going well. Lisa told me that they were making pretty good tips, and Maisie was her usual cheerful self. Denise didn’t say much; she had a lot on her plate. But she always had a slight smile on her face, so I assumed that she was happy with the way things were going.
Ken continued to rub me the wrong way. He wasn’t friendly to me at all, although he flirted constantly with Lisa and Maisie. He was totally full of himself and would ramble on and on about pretentious crap like the bouquet of a charming Zinfandel. Worst of all, he was constantly making suggestions to JP in the kitchen.
“You know,” he said, “if you chop up some parsley to sprinkle over the bruschetta when it comes out of the oven, it will really improve the presentation.”
JP smiled and nodded. “That’s an idea. I’ll think about that.” He didn’t follow Ken’s advice on that or anything else. The customers didn’t seem to mind that the bruschetta didn’t have parsley on it; they ordered tons of it, and the plates always came back empty.
Sometimes, when I was hard at work in the kitchen and the music was playing, I could almost forget that I was counting down the days till I could leave Deep Cove forever and start a new life somewhere else.