I thought I was over it. Really, my anger had pretty much leveled out over the years and usually when I thought about my previous job at A Toute Heure and my relationship with Andrea, it was with a degree of acceptance and even some self-loathing for not being a better person, as in a person who didn't cause a seemingly level-headed lady to irrationally scream in her face.
But then on New Year's Day I was standing over a pan of hot oil, frying wings for a little family get-together, and I had the following thought: "Oh, I hope this hot grease doesn't fly into my eye because I have no health insurance." And then I remembered. And I was ashamed.
Andrea asked me to come to work for her when we were still in cooking school. Although I was terribly out of place at this particular school, twice as old as most of my classmates, and completely oblivious to the hard-partying and fornication that was rampant not only at my school but also apparently right in my own apartment (another blog completely), I labored under the delusion that as long as I showed up for class every day I was destined for greatness. In spite of one of our instructors proclaiming us the worst class ever, I was unphased and so when Andrea pulled me aside one morning to ask me to be the sous chef in the restaurant she planned to open after graduation, I thought it was a halfway decent idea and certainly in keeping with my plan for world domination.
Arriving in New Jersey a year and a half later, having driven a 17-foot U-Haul truck halfway across the country in the dead of winter, expecting to begin a cooking job in a few days, you could say I was slightly less than thrilled to find NO RESTAURANT! Instead I found a gutted out building that looked substantially the same as when I had seen it about seven months prior on a reconnaissance mission to New Jersey. Now, I kid just a little. Although there were no sinks, no stoves, no counters, no work tables, and no dining room for the customers, there were also no floors or walls! This sad reality was the groundwork for my once-in-a-lifetime epiphany that because I was now stuck in New Jersey, having laid out a LOT of money to move and rent an apartment, I was now stuck in New Jersey. I needed to learn a trade, and fast.
And I did. In the space of three months I became, to paraphrase Andrea's father, an "expert caulker," as well as a fair-to-middling painter, and mediocre drywaller. I learned more than I ever cared to know about plumbing, HVAC systems and ceramic floor tiles and will probably strangle my own self if I have to tape and paint a French door (let alone six of them) ever again. For three months I made myself available to Andrea and her husband Jim in whatever capacity they desired, only drawing the line when Andrea thought it was in my scope of duties as her sous chef to help her and her husband move into their new apartment above the restaurant. Uh uh.
Eventually we opened, to fire alarms and blown circuits and crowds that, at first, we couldn't handle. Our kitchen staff included the Sasquatch-sized teenaged son of the chiropractor next door, a "foodie" named Adam who got fired after two days for undercooking the pompano, and a series of dishwashers beginning with Cliff who left early every Thursday to attend anger management classes while ironically angrily pacing about every night fuming that no one was helping him do the dishes, and ending with Emmanuel, a profoundly stuttering Haitian who was terrified of other Blacks.
We had some good employees, too, and although for the most part things were going very well for us, it wasn't without a price: I was working 65 hour weeks. Sometimes 70 hour weeks. It was all being logged in my appointment book although I knew better than to talk about it. That's because I was working for someone who once thought, even though it was for just a minute, that the Sous Chef should help her and her husband move because the Sous Chef was on the payroll.
So I am getting off point. Here I was, completely swallowed up by my new career choice but nonetheless trying to make the most of a very stressful situation, not least of which was learning how to cook as, up to that point, I was terrified of the grill and not so hot at much of anything else except desserts. (Oh, Andrea said I did the mussels well. Smiley face!) But a cookin' I was a doin' and one lovely summer night in July, 2007, just as I was dropping a beautiful pompano filet into a pan glossed with screaming hot oil, at the exact same moment Andrea was bending down in front of the stove. And then the fish met the pan.
"YOOUUUU BUUURRRRNNNEEDDD MMMEEEEEEE!!!!!!" Andrea suddenly screamed, jolting upright and covering her face with both her hands.
The rest of the story I'm not quite sure how to tell. As it all happened five years ago, I can't remember the exact sequence of events. I do know that, in my mind, which is secret, I immediately thought, "She actually got herself burned." I also thought, "Burns happen in restaurant kitchens all the time." And I'm pretty sure that I also thought, "Gosh, all this wailing and caterwauling is making me really, really uncomfortable." Because that's what Andrea was doing: carrying on as though, well, I don't even know. I guess like the playground bully who'd just been punched back. She was showing her true colors.
Fact #1: My numerous apologies went ignored. Well, no, they were met with scorn. Fact #2: She was angry. Boy, was she angry. You see, and please don't read any sarcasm into this, Andrea had the most beautiful porcelain skin I had ever seen. Having a greyish-green, acne-scarred complexion myself, I always envied her amazing skin. It was a pity that she was 50 pounds overweight and sported the most unflattering, butchy haircut for her face and body type EVER, but she had a lock on the good skin. And now I had torpedoed her modeling career.
"How am I supposed to go into the dining room with these marks on my face!" she angrily asked me when she returned after running out of the restaurant. "I am going to have to wear a baseball hat for the next three days!"
And now we arrive at the really good part. After calming down, applying salve, and lecturing me that instead of apologizing and actually taking care of her and nursing her back to health, I had instead "made jokes," and after explaining to me that to be the face of her restaurant she had to actually have a face (although I was pretty sure 99.5% of her face was still intact), her husband walked in the door.
From across the kitchen, an Olympian 24 feet long, he could immediately see that something was wrong. "Honey what happened to your face?" he asked in alarm.
"KAKI BURNED ME!" she shouted across the kitchen. Shouted.
Mind you, it had already been well-established to everyone working in the restaurant that night that I had intentionally burned Andrea. But that was not good enough for her because now she had to make sure that Jim also knew what a filthy rotten person I was.
I don't remember what, if anything, Jim said to me, although clearly he was being very supportive of his wife and always was, to the extent that a month or so later, while his wife "slept" in their apartment upstairs, he basically told me that I wasn't wanted there anymore although my construction and remodeling services had been greatly appreciated! But that is also another blog post for another time.
The bright red cherry on the gooey chocolate fudge sundae that night was when Andrea told me to snap out of it. I was beyond defeated and demoralized, having mentally retreated to that place I often go when I don't have the slightest understanding of what just happened, and while there is probably a good medicine for this particular malady, I don't take drugs, and frankly I just couldn't get out of my funk. But that was annoying Andrea too! LOL! Because although she failed to acknowledge that the reason I burned her was because I was cooking fish for one of her customers in her restaurant, now I needed to suck it up and cook fish for her customers in her restaurant. LOL times a thousand!
Andrea, Jim and I parted ways on September 1, 2007. Oh, we mended our fences insofar as me purposely throwing hot grease right into her moneymaker, but my hours were getting longer and longer and I was closing in on a nervous breakdown. No joke. Well, this also annoyed Andrea, as did it when I went to the chiropractor right next door for 20 minutes every Friday at five p.m. Because my arms and legs were inexplicably going numb.
Although it's been five years, I have recurring dreams about A Toute Heure, mostly that I have snuck inside the restaurant and am hiding from Andrea. To this day I am afraid of her.
And, my friends, that is the story behind the Hot Grease Flashback of 2012.
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