Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,3
electrical tape around the handle of a set of tongs, marking his pair. He came out from behind the line and stuck out his hand. “Gleason. That’s Rener on grill and Marcello with you.” We all shook hands.
“Vai toe man o cu,” I said in Portuguese. Fuck you. Like I said, I’d been on the line before.
These guys worked clean. They didn’t do lines to keep going or show up high. They’d take their shift drink out back when we were done for the night, but that was it. Hell, I was the only one who smoked butts back there. They just worked and called the waitstaff buceta to their faces. It was their only recourse.
The Cape Cod summers did that to them. Falmouth’s population was exploding, the stress and long hours boiling with it. Going through work shirts like they were disposable because they got filthy so fast. Jamaican community expanding for the season. The Cape Verdeans battling with the Jamaicans for jobs and with knives at house parties. Eastern Europeans in on work visas cranking out eighty-hour weeks. I once worked with two Bulgarians mowing on a golf course who did five a.m. to three p.m. at the course and then went to Stop & Shop from four until two a.m. to stock shelves. Every day for four months. Then they went home to Bulgaria and bought apartments, cars, and set up a computer business. That’s all they wanted, a little place of their own in the same building as their parents and enough to get them out of the cracks.
But the Brazilians. The Brazilians had originally come to the Cape because of the language. The Portuguese were already here. Now, the Brazilians worked like dogs, kept their heads down and saved, figuring they could work hard and long enough for ten years to move back home and retire.
“Man, in Brazil,” Marcello told me one day, “I had a bike and a girl and the beaches, man. Your beaches here don’t know. In Brazil there are guys who come up to you and sell you beer out of a cooler and the girls are walking. Man, here people just lay around and you can’t drink or dance. Here I just work and there are no girls, man.”
“Yeah, but you’re making money.”
“Money, yeah, man. But there are no girls. What do I say to American girl, man? I know English only for kitchen. What do I say when I want to go out with them? You want special salad? Man, you have it easy, you speak English.”
“Your English is fine.”
“Marcello’s right,” Gleason said. “You have it easy.”
“What are you talking about? You run the line. You make more money than me.”
Gleason just laughed and went back to making demi glace.
DePuzzo used to run the line, but then he got Gleason. Gleason was fresh to the Cape, called up by his brother who thought he could get him a job at the fish market where he worked. He showed up to the Cape, but it turned out there wasn’t any work at the market for him. Gleason beat doors for two weeks before DePuzzo took him on as a dishwasher. All the time he was spraying dishes and racking them, DePuzzo taught him the details of prep cooking. How to move fast, how to set up the line for the service so that they didn’t start calling for more ingredients until the end of the night. DePuzzo worked Gleason up a little at a time, knowing that he needed the money and wasn’t dealing drugs out of the back of the kitchen or snorting up his paycheck like the last two cooks. There’s a lot of coke on the Cape, bad during the summer, even worse during the winter. It’s cold and there’s no one. You lose a lot of line cooks that way. You lose a lot of college girls that way. I got lost that way.
Gleason worked his way up, and about the time he made prep cook, Rener and Marcello came aboard. They all knew each other back in Brazil. DePuzzo showed them the ropes, let Gleason teach them some, and kept his kitchen tight. He skimmed off their paychecks but they were working on other people’s Social Security numbers so they didn’t say anything. That’s how they do it. They come in on a visa and when the visa runs out and an employer asks for a Social Security number to keep INS and the IRS