-Excerpt
Chapter One
It was the kind of October day for which reasidents of New Orleans endure
the summers, sparkling blue-gold with just a touch of crispness, and
two old friends were sitting on a low branch of an oak tree in Audubon
Park drinking liquor. They had started out with tequila shots upon
waking up, but harboring a residual grudge against the drink, they
soon switched to vodka and orange juice, which they carried to the
park in a large thermos.
John Rickey and Gary "G-man" Stubbs had been born and raised
in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, but they'd lived Uptown since they were
eighteen: "From the 'hood to the ghetto," Rickey had described
the move at the time. Their current neighborhood hardly qualified as
a ghetto, but the remark revealed a downtown boy's discomfort at living
Uptown. In the Ninth Ward, "Uptown" signified rich and snooty.
They were twenty-seven now, but only Rickey had begun to develop the
comfortable little paunch common to natives past their midtwenties. The
few extra pounds did not diminish his sharp-featured good looks, but
he wouldn't have cared much if they had; physical vanity was not among
Rickey's numerous sources of anxiety. Six months ago he had bleached
his light-brown hair platinum. Now it was half split ends and half dark
roots, and though it looked very bad, he hadn't yet gotten around to
having the bleachy ends cut off. Since he had neglected to brush it this
morning, it formed a two-toned nimbus around his head. Rickey was a young
man with a great deal of nervous energy; even when he was half-drunk
and trying to relax, he had a hard time sitting still.
G-man had no trouble sitting still. He was a little taller than Rickey,
and quite skinny for a New Orleanian. Though he wore his chestnut-colored
hair very short, a slight curl still made it unruly most of the time.
His mother had been a Bonano, one of the city's vast population of Sicilian-Americans,
but this heritage was reflected only in the darkness of his large, myopic
eyes. Otherwise he looked like his Irish-blooded father, rangy and fair-skinned,
with a long blunt nose and a rather sensitive mouth.
Like many young men in New Orleans, Rickey and
G-man made a precarious living in restaurant kitchens. They'd begun
in their teens as dishwashers and worked their way up to line cook
positions. Now cooking comprised most of their lives; asked to define
themselves in a word, they would not have given their family names
or (as would many New Orleanians) the name of their high school; they
would simply have said, "We're cooks." A
few days ago they had been dismissed from their latest kitchen in what
they considered a travesty of justice.
Jesse Honeycombe, a country-pop crooner from
Florida, had one big radio hit called "Tequilatown" and opened
a restaurant on the strength of it. Tequilatown was a French Quarter
tourist trap that served indifferently barbecued ribs, elaborate sandwich
platters, and margaritas in plastic buckets. Jesse Honeycombe wasn't
exactly responsible for the firing, but that didn't matter to Rickey
and G-man, who had been cursing Honeycombe's name ever since the incident
went down.
Honeycombe had played a show at the Lakefront Arena that night, and
fans packed the restaurant afterward in hopes that he would show up.
The kitchen was slammed. Rickey was working the hot appetizer station,
making loaded nacho platters and spicy chicken quesadillas. G-man, for
some reason, was on salads, the most hated position in the kitchen. Everyone
from the kitchen runners to the head chef was in the weeds for three
solid hours. They fell into a rhythm where they weren't really thinking
about the food or how many tickets were lined up; they were just moving
their hands and hustling their asses and slamming out orders as fast
as they possibly could. When the hellacious rush finally slowed to a
trickle, Chef Jerod passed around cold bottles of Abita beer. Drinking
was forbidden on the clock at Tequilatown, a restaurant with liquor in
its very name, but the crew had rolled so hard tonight that the chef
decided to make an exception to the rule. Of course, the manager chose
that moment to drop in and see how things were going.
Chef Jerod managed to hang onto his job by the tips of his knife-scarred
fingernails, but the manager made him fire almost everyone else, including
Rickey and G-man. This would create no crisis; there were half-assed
kitchen workers looking for jobs all over town. The hospitality industry
provided New Orleans with its major source of revenue, and the city responded
by providing an inexhaustible source of fodder for the industry: poor
but able-bodied young men who came into the kitchens with very little
training and could be easily replaced when they got fired, quit, or died.
Most of these young men were black, but there was a sizable minority
of white boys. Some, like Rickey and G-man, stayed in the business and
became skilled cooks. A place like Tequilatown, though, didn't really
need skilled cooks; it made sense to replace them with hapless kids who
would work for considerably less money.
Chef Jerod had apologized to everyone as he handed
out the severance pay envelopes. Though he was a hardass, he was almost
weeping with humiliation. "I
swear I'd quit this place myself if they weren't paying me so fucking
much," he said. No one really held it against him. They knew that
the manager, Brian Danton, was the real asshole. That was almost always
how it was, and there was nothing you could do about managers.
So now Rickey and G-man sat in the park passing the thermos, watching
the joggers and golfers, occasionally expressing mild amazement at the
fact that people would expend that kind of energy when they didn't have
to. This was not simple laziness-though they could be lazy with a will-but
more a reflection on the sheer physical work of being a halfway-decent
cook. Cooks on the line in a busy restaurant spend all their time in
motion, preparing the mise-en-place of ingredients they will use throughout
their shift, lining up saut pans on burners and flattops, keeping track
of their tickets, burning their hands, reducing their feet to hunks of
abused and stinking flesh that feel like nothing more than a couple of
raw stumps by the end of a shift. Cooks don't go jogging on their day
off.
Rickey and G-man had been friends since their
grammar school days. The Lower Ninth Ward was a cross between a country
village and a Third World slum, far below the Garden District and the
French Quarter and the other parts of the city known to tourists. Most
of the houses were old, small, and in disrepair; the streets were prone
to sudden flooding; the air smelled of frying sausage and the nearby
Industrial Canal. Rickey and G-man had Ninth Ward street smarts and
the hoarse, full-throated downtown accent: "Ax ya momma can we have some'a dem cookies she bought?" They
had always been vaguely aware of each other, as the few white kids in
the public schools were. The first time they really took notice of each
other was in fourth grade, during Job Week, when the class was assigned
to pair up and put on a skit about one of their parents' occupations.
Even at age nine, Rickey and G-man (then still known as Gary) recognized
the thoughtless cruelty inherent in this assignment. Many of their classmates
had mothers who worked at McDonald's or as hotel maids, and no fathers
to speak of. It wasn't that all black people in New Orleans lived this
way, but that the black people who could afford it-just like the white
people who could afford it-sent their kids to the superior Catholic schools.
Rickey's father was a chiropractor who lived
in California, paid minimal child support, and hadn't seen his son
in three years. As a result, Rickey had a distorted idea of what chiropractors
(and fathers) did. He and Gary stole a box of red hair dye from the
K&B drugstore and borrowed
a bunch of Play-Doh from one of Gary's young cousins. Two dowels provided
the framework for a surprisingly realistic false arm with a plastic bag
of dye tucked into the shoulder end. Gary folded his right arm inside
his shirt and wore the false arm in a sling.
"A chiropractor is a doctor who performs adjustments on the spine," Rickey
told the class before bending Gary backward and "adjusting" him,
ripping off the false arm and spraying red hair dye all over the classroom.
Gary howled in "pain" and collapsed dramatically on the threadbare
school carpet, his legs flailing a bit before hitting the floor with
a terrible, final-sounding thunk.
That was the first time they were sent to the principal's office together.
They had to apologize to their teacher and explain to their classmates
that doctor visits were unlikely to result in surprise dismemberments.
Gary's mother, who had never known her youngest child to do such a thing
before, made him go to confession and tell the priest all about it. (He
thought he heard the priest stifle a laugh, but he never told his mother.)
Rickey's mother, who had been something of a bon vivant in her youth,
found the episode hilarious. She called up the Stubbs family to chide
them for overreacting, and the two families ended up friends. To Rickey,
an only child, the crowded Stubbs household was pleasantly chaotic; some
of Gary's five older sisters and brothers had grown up and moved out
by then, but they had kids of their own and there were always children
around.
After the false-arm incident, Rickey and Gary got beaten up a lot less,
because their classmates now thought they were funny, crazy, or both.
More important, they recognized something in each other that had kept
them together from then until now, fired and broke, sitting in an oak
tree drinking liquor.
Rickey pushed his hair out of his eyes. "It's too damn bright out
here," he said. "Can I borrow your extra shades?"
"They're prescription."
G-man had already been wearing glasses in the
fourth grade; from his ferocious squint when he removed them, Rickey
always figured he'd been one of those little kids who'd needed them
since he was three or something. Now he wore dark lenses almost all
the time, even in the kitchen when chefs would let him get away with
it. "I don't care," said
Rickey. "Just give 'em here."
G-man stretched out his long legs, reached into
his pants pocket, and pulled out a slightly squashed pair of gold-rimmed,
pimp-daddy-style dark glasses. He passed them to Rickey, who put them
on, surveyed the park through what appeared to be several inches of
murky water, and said, "Goddamn,
your eyes are fucked up."
G-man had heard this before and let it pass without comment.
"This orange juice is warm," Rickey complained. "I
wish I had a daiquiri."
"You want to walk over to the zoo? I think
they got daiquiris in the Beer Garden."
"No, dude, it's like seven dollars to get
in the zoo. You know where I wish I was, G? I wish I was in Tequilatown."
"Scratchin my balls and watchin the sun go down," G-man
sang, riffing on Jesse Honeycombe's big hit.
"Pickin sea salt outta my ass crack ..."
They went on in this vein for several minutes,
an extension of the dialogue they'd been having since the incident.
Though they were trying to console themselves, the thing always ended
up making them mad all over again. This time, Rickey went off first. "Fuck that place!" An old
lady walking a Chihuahua near their tree gave him a sharp look, but he
took no notice. "Fuck Jesse Honeycombe, fuck Brian Danton, and fuck
Jerod Biggs too. Fuck 'em all."
"Rickey ..."
"What? We're the victims of injustice. It
sucks."
"This doesn't suck," G-man pointed out. "It's
a beautiful day, and right now the poor bastards they hired are prepping
dinner and getting ready to take it in the ass all night, and we're
sitting here drinking. Tell me how that sucks."
"I'll tell you next week, when our rent's
due."
"You're a real cheerer-upper, you know that?"
"Well, damn, G. We got about two hundred dollars in the bank. Favreau's
not gonna give us another extension." Favreau was the landlord who
rented them a shotgun cottage on the river end of Marengo Street. They
were fortunate that he was a patient man; nonetheless, the mention of
his name depressed them further.
The October shine had gone off the day. They
rocked glumly back and forth on the tree limb. Rickey drained the last
of the vodka and orange juice. "Tequilatown's a shithole. But
did you ever notice how much money it's making?"
"About a hundred grand a week, I'd say."
"And the food is garbage. All Honeycombe
has is a name. You know, G, we could run a better restaurant than Tequilatown."
"Uh huh."
"We could," said Rickey. "We're good cooks." He
knew this was so. Right after they graduated from high school-almost
ten years ago now-Rickey had even spent several months in Hyde Park,
New York, at the fabled CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, hardcore
training ground for chefs all over the country. He did well there until
a run-in with another student resulted in his return to New Orleans,
which was not an entirely unhappy thing: living up north was expensive
and cold, and he was lost without G-man.
"Course we're good cooks," said G-man. "But
it takes more than that. Like money."
"We might could raise some money if we had
a good idea."
"Lots of people get ideas. Remember Lamar King's Bordello?" This
had been a failed concept by another washed-up rock star, his claim to
fame being that he had once shared a stage with Bob Dylan. He and his
backers had bought a huge, decrepit building in the French Quarter, spent
millions of dollars bringing it up to code and decorating it to look
like a whorehouse, or what they imagined such a place to look like: lots
of red velvet swags, stained glass, a grand piano. The menu had boasted
items like "Pretty Baby Prime Rib" and "Aphrodisiac Oysters." The
place closed its doors within a month. Rickey and G-man had passed several
afternoons in various bars debating why a rock star would want to open
a restaurant anyway. Rickey posited that chefs were actually cooler than
rock stars, and Lamar King knew it. G-man thought King might have been
around the amps too long.
Rickey was lost in thought. He held the empty thermos in his hand, staring
into its shiny depths. A faint distorted reflection of his own eye winked
up at him, blue and bloodshot. Lots of people get ideas, G-man had said,
but how many of those ideas were good ones? More to the point, how many
of those ideas were suitable for New Orleans? Plenty of would-be restaurateurs
came from out of town, opened a place, watched it fail, and left cursing
the city's moribund economy, punishing summers, fossilized tastes, or
all of the above. Rickey was used to all that. Surely he could come up
with an idea for a restaurant that would be uniquely suited to his lifelong
home. He tilted the thermos and watched one last drop spill out, and
that was when it came to him.
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