It's been a while since I last posted and I've been mulling this idea over for quite some time. So as is always the case let's see what a few late vodka tonics, coupled with a frustratingly long holiday weekend can conjure up about a topic that I've always deemed too poetic to tackle.
Hands.
I've stated in this blog before that one of the things I appreciate about my job is the opportunity to work with my hands on a daily basis.
Hands help you write the story as well as remind you of the process that you've taken to get there. When I was twenty two years old I cut my finger with a Cutco knife while preparing my first crawfish etouffe. I was moving too quickly and using the wrong knife and there it went slice right into the ring finger on my right hand. It was the first real serious cut of my life and it probably needed stitches, but what did I do? I shoved it right into a piece of paper towel, covered it with a band-aid and continued working. There were several valuable lessons to be learned in that situation. First being that pain is irrelevant, when you have a job to do, as long as you can do it in a sanitary matter, the job gets done. I tell my cooks all the time that unless you are bleeding out on someones entree, just because you cut yourself doesn't mean you get to go home. The second lesson was that duct tape can truly fix anything that is worth fixing. Good cooks know that a band-aid won't fix a bad cut or a burn, it'll serve as a barrier. But have you ever gone back to cooking after a sever finger laceration? Probably not. Duct tape has the advantage of first being nearly waterproof and second nearly totally heat resistant. I know heat and a cut don't normally strike a bell, but try lopping off the top of your pinky finger and then taking that measly little band-aid over the top of a five hundred degree charbroiler. That fuckers gonna hurt.
Now I'm sure you may find this grizzly and even a little fascinating, but hardly poetic. Let me tell you a story. I dropped out of college when I was 20 years old. I was a self absorbed, frequently drunk brat with no work ethic. I was still under the illusion that everyone would buy my bullshit because I had pretty blue eyes, and was able to keep my manners together long enough to fake my way through a job interview. I ended up with a job working at a local office supply store. It started out simply enough but when it became apparent that the only real reason that I was hired was to carry large heavy boxes of furniture, copy paper and printers around the warehouse style store, I was less than thrilled. Unloading a large eighteen wheeler of pallets is a long and arduous process. The truck was parked at an angle and we would essentially put hand operated forklift under these pallets, and raise them up high enough for gravity to take over, and simply ride them down the back of the truck until slamming on the brakes before the whole eight foot colossus could ram our backs into the bailer. OSHA would not have approved.
Any ego I had about the fact that I was one day "going back to college," was quickly put to rest. After a messy break-up with a psychotic fiance I ended up in a kitchen. Where most cooks can't pick up anything resembling hot, I was able to grab fry baskets, hand stack cottage fries at an Irish pub and pull beer battered fish straight up from the fryer, all because of the hours of abuse that my hands had endured unloading the very HP printers that you curse on a daily basis for the price of ink. The other idea that I had begun to embrace through my time in the office supply store, located in a very swank shopping district, that continued on in the restaurant is that most people are assholes. I hate to make such a broad assumption, but they are, I mean I am too so don't think I'm looking down too high up from my horse. People that by profession serve or assist other people will never be anything more than just that, to MOST people. I have many fabulous examples to prove the contrary, but they are few and far between, and I have been at this a little while. So walking into a very busy kitchen of an oceanfront Irish pub, I was more equipped than I thought. Bourdain says that you can't fake your way in a kitchen. I did. Kind of. I had a jaded disposition, which fits in well, after all I had just had my heart broken and needed to spend an entire summer drunk on a beach in North Carolina to recover. I had a nagging alcohol habit, thanks to the summer in North Carolina as well as the psychotic fiance. I didn't really care what anyone though of me personally, I just needed money seeing as the previously mentioned alcohol habit had helped me blow two grand of the money I made in North Carolina. Most importantly I had my hands, I didn't need an extra towel to grab a hot saute pan, or sizzler platter. Maybe Bourdain couldn't fake it because he was still a little soft, but my hands were well on their way to being like "Tyrone's." If you don't know the reference, don't read this blog again until you read "Kitchen Confidential."
Is any of this poetic?
I like to think so.
While many of my friends were still falling in love for the first time, I was counting my pennies to be able to move out, pay off creditors. I had bosses I hated but learned how to work with. I had life experiences that I think beat sitting in a library studying for mid-terms, sitting at some dumbass fraternity party playing asshole. At twenty two I was getting off work at six and slinking into a bar stool with the same stiffs, twenty years older than me after a long work day and trading stories about kids, life and the Rolling Stones. I ended up in a kitchen where I learned how to use my instincts, heart and my head. Eric Church has a great few lines in a song called guys like me but the one that always strikes me is "You went to college, I pulled graveyards..." One night I sat in the back kitchen with a near third degree burn on the ring finger of my left hand wrapping duct tape. It was 1:45 in the morning and I was wrapping duct tape around my hands.
Hands tell as story.
My story.
