Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,2
blue jeans costing more than I would take home in a single paycheck. I hung a left off Main, swung into the parking lot behind the strip of stores that housed DePuzzo’s Restaurant, and pulled up next to a dumpster. I watched a guy push a shopping cart full of used car parts through the lot.
The kitchen was what I expected. It was Brazilians in the back, and they spent the whole day speaking Portuguese to each other and telling me what to do by pointing or demonstrating. They watched me and I watched them. That’s all I was there to do: get the job done. I had to. The four Brazilians back there with me had been at this together for close to eight years and they had it down fast. That’s how it was: two Brazilians on the line, a sauce/sauté guy and a grill/oven guy. Then there was me and another Brazilian as prep cooks. During service we did salads and desserts. An older Brazilian woman worked the dishwasher, slinging those greasy pots and pans and plates, working the steam and spray gun just trying to stay ahead. I didn’t see the owner until evening.
He came in while we were winding down our prep and walked right up to me. He didn’t say hello or shake my hand. He looked at me and went to the space between the walk-in and the bakery racks where the large cutting boards were kept. He picked one out, laid it in front of me, and got a yellow onion. He slapped it down onto the board.
“You know how to dice an onion?” he said.
“Yeah,” I answered and reached for my knife.
“No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t know shit about cutting an onion.”
He took the knife out of my hand, split the onion in half from the root end, peeled the skin back, and did a large rough dice, fast, looking at me the whole time.
“That’s how to dice an onion for the pomodoro sauce,” he said. He put the knife down and walked to the front of the house.
I should have known better. It was his restaurant, his kitchen, his recipes, his system. I had to learn that, down to the finest detail. Even having done it before, I had forgotten to let it all go. Guess first impressions are best made through silence sometimes.
The owner came back in, watched me work, then asked me to step outside.
We went out the back door, into the parking lot where the summertime heat was cooking the dumpsters. There were so many flies I could hear them. I could also hear heavy traffic on the other side of the building running down Main Street. Cars driving slowly, checking out the walkers and the clean window displays. I swatted at a fly.
“You get paid every two weeks with a paycheck. I won’t take uniform expenses off the top, but you don’t tell them that.” He jerked his head back toward the kitchen door where the Brazilians were chopping and banging pots. “You call me Mr. DePuzzo,” he said. “I’ll call you whatever the fuck I please.”
He turned and left me standing there, the Cape air just starting to cool with the onshore breeze. A gull picked at an old french fry next to a gutter. A woman came around the corner into the lot and parked in one of the spaces for the jewelry store. She was in a Mercedes with Connecticut plates. She stretched her tanned and sandaled legs and brought herself up into the fading sunlight. She looked at me in my apron and white T-shirt, turned, and walked quickly to the rear entrance of the store.
The Brazilians were working fast to leave some sit-down time before dinner service began. Like all cooks, they wanted that time outside before the shit started. I went back to my cutting board and began prepping the garnish parsley. The other prep cook was working behind me. Something slid up between my butt cheeks and I jumped. The Brazilians all laughed. I wheeled fast and clenched my fist and the other prep cook raised a thumb in an all’s good sign.
“You don’t know how to cut a fucking uneeon,” he mocked in English and laughed.
“I tell you something,” one of the line cooks said. “You no say shit to DePuzzo, you follow us, you be okay.”
“So you motherfuckers speak English?”
“Yeah, buceta, but the owner don’t know that,” the line cook said. He was wrapping blue