A handful of years ago, I was working the morning shift as a kitchen grunt in a little roadside eatery. That’s where I learned about the underbelly deals that are part of the restaurant business. Work would start at 4am, and it would be the lead cook, myself on prep, and a dishwasher. The three of us making dick jokes and banging pots and pans together like cymbal monkeys before the sun rose and all the deliveries would arrive. The restaurant owner would roll in around 10, look over receipts, and have a meltdown about the prices, especially in the slow season. Restaurant depot, linens, bread, produce…it would hit the fan. Holler and a’shout about hemorrhaging money, and sometimes in the most frenzied tantrums, equipment would get tossed around the kitchen. One time, a knife was chucked at my head for accepting a pallet of eggs that had increased in price by a dollar. All the knives were dull because we hadn’t sent them out for a sharpening service to save a buck after the holidays. Yet it was thrown with enough force to stick in the wall, a foot from my face. The cook rushed me out the door. Sending me down the street for a pack of cigarettes to calm things down and clear the kitchen out without my safety being on the line.

Linen prices always go up in the winter because of rugs catching the slush from foot traffic, so our rag consumption had to go down. Somehow, the cook had figured out a deal with our linen delivery guy.  Talked the fella into fudging some numbers and hooking us up with a couple extra bags of rags and aprons in exchange for 6 Vicodin. The cook was pretty run down physically, as a cook in their late 50’s is bound to be, and the VA would over prescribe painkillers. A means of shutting up old vets with aches and pains. So our cook developed a habit of using his surplus of opioids to negotiate deals with certain individuals that lived on the seamy side of life. The linen guy was what you’d consider “squirrelly.” Lanky with a pocked complexion and 5-mile stare that’s associated with long periods of incarceration. I had made a point not to find myself alone in the dining room with him. He’d get so excited about his exchanges with the cook and sometimes ask for cigarettes, too. Often, I wondered if he was eating his handful of pills and cruising the streets in his linen van, higher than a kite.
 
Then there was the bakery delivery. Bread prices went up at the beginning of every year. Same company. Same practice. The delivery driver on our route was a pudgy man with crooked teeth. He had a wife and grown kids and just so happened to have a little crush on the cook. I watched the two of them flirt endlessly, twice a week for months and months. When the owner hit the ceiling about bread prices one January, the bread truck started coming more often. But not always with bread for our restaurant. The delivery man would pull into the back alley, shut his lights off, and just sit there. The cook would take his apron off and tell me to go up front and keep an eye on things while he’d disappear out the back door with no coat on. Sometimes, the dishwasher and I would stand at the back door and watch him stroll through the snow and get into the truck, where he’d stay from 20 minutes to half an hour. After a bit, he’d come back inside with a dreamy grin on his face and light up a cigarette inside the kitchen. He’d lean like a smitten school girl on the prep table, puffing away on his menthol 100 with a certain glow to his face.
“He’s bringing an extra rack of rye bread next week. I want to run a Reuben special on the weekend.”

When an actual bread delivery would happen, the driver and the cook would make eyes at one another, giggle, and once I watched the cook pinch the driver’s butt. Up until that point, I didn’t really know what was going on as I was young and simple, just starting my kitchen sentence. Once I figured it out and asked the cook about it, he told me to keep my mouth shut because it was the one thing sparing me from being a human butcher block when the knives started flying.

I took note of his warning and never said anything about his deals of pills and sex, until now… with this story.