Second Line by Poppy Z. Brite – Excerpt from D*U*C*K
Books, Excerpt | Jay Tomio | November 5, 2009 at 6:29 am
I. RICKEY TAKES OUT THE TRASH
Everything you’ve heard about summer in New Orleans is true. The only tourists who visit during that infernal season are hardy Germans and Australians, who can weather anything, and people from Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, who are used to it and don’t have far to drive. The deepest pits of Hades have nothing on your average August day in the Crescent City. (You can say Crescent City if you like, because the Mississippi River cups the city in a crescent shape. Say “the Big Easy,” or, worse, “N’Awlins,” and people will know you’re a tourist.)
Because of the sun pounding down out of the coppery sky—because of the stickiness that turns the air into a dishcloth from which you feel certain you could wring dirty water if only you could catch hold of it—because of that stink that rises off sidewalks and asphalt parking lots, choking the unwary with ghosts of shrimp shells, dogshit, burning tires and armpits—because the temperature seldom drops below the high eighties even at midnight, the people of the city try to keep their physical exertions to a minimum. In the heat of the day, there might be one old white man in a seersucker suit moving snail-slow along a sidewalk, or a group of black teenagers gesturing languidly at each other on the corner. Certainly there will be an ancient woman carrying a shopping bag and an umbrella; there’s no chance of rain, but she’s using the thing for a sunshade. These folks, you expect to see. The middle-aged man in the Broad Street neutral ground, standing motionless with a sign in each hand, occasionally putting one of them down to take out a handkerchief and blot the sweat from his smooth ebony dome—he is an unusual sight. His signs are handmade, but neatly printed. One reads THOU SHALT NOT KILL. The other says ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. You don’t see him every day, but if you’re from New Orleans or know the city well, you understand immediately what he’s talking about.
There will be these people, and somewhere nearby there will be a chef hard at work. Kitchen workers don’t have the option of keeping their labors to a minimum. Through sweat-soaked Julys and Augusts they preside over stovetop flames and the hot breath of ovens, swampy dish sinks and desert heat-mirages rising off grills.
On this particular August day, a chef named John Rickey was taking out a bag of wet trash, muttering and cursing over it with no idea that a few minutes from now he would be wishing his head were a little harder. He was muttering and cursing not because he thought a chef-owner was too good to take out the trash—he knew better than that—but because he had told one of the low cooks on his kitchen totem pole to do it an hour ago, and the cook hadn’t done it. Devonte was a hell of a lot more seasoned than he had been when Rickey hired him, but occasionally he just sort of … spaced. It might mean he was thinking about the tricked-out car he hoped to buy, or the pussy he hoped to score at his favorite hip-hop club, or nothing at all. This time of year, it might also mean he was thinking about basketball, in which case Rickey’s partner and co-chef, G-man, would probably be thinking about it right along with him. But G-man wouldn’t space; G-man was the solidest cook in the kitchen.
The whole crew was solid, even Devonte and the new kid, Jacolvy, most of the time. Still, Rickey missed Devonte’s predecessor, Shake, with whom he and G-man had been working for years. Shake had snagged a sweet sous chef position at La Pharmacie, a hot new restaurant on Magazine Street. The chef over there had basically poached him from Rickey’s restaurant, Liquor, but Rickey didn’t hold it against Shake: there wasn’t much room for advancement at Liquor and Shake had given them a good three years. He wished he had Shake back just for tonight, though; there were three major conventions in town, Liquor had two-fifty on the books, and they were going to get hammered.
Half-absorbed in these thoughts, still muttering about the trash, Rickey heaved the bag up and over the edge of the Dumpster. The ripe sour-milk smell of garbage wafted toward him, but he barely noticed it; just as the zookeeper ceases to smell elephant shit, this was one of the normal odors of his life. He was turning to go back into the restaurant when his world exploded with a tremendous crack that seemed to come from inside his skull. He felt his knees connect with the concrete apron around the Dumpsters. His field of vision went red, then turned to a field of glittering silver and blue stars that seemed to drip through the air before his eyes like fireworks … except that his eyes were closed, weren’t they? While he was thinking about this, the pain arrived, a huge pair of pincers that grabbed him by the temples and squeezed. Faintly he could hear somebody yelling: “How you like it now, you fucking faggot? You shitfuck! How you like it now, asshole?” Rickey tried to lift his hand to the back of his head where the pain seemed most concentrated—if his fingers encountered wetness and a hole, he would know he’d been shot—but before he could get his arm up, another explosion came. This one bounced his forehead off the concrete, and he passed out.
II. THE LURKER BY THE DUMPSTERS
Rickey’s croutons were burning. G-man could smell them from all the way across the kitchen, where he was prepping fresh porcini mushrooms to go with tonight’s duck special. “Rickey!” he hollered. “You got shit on fire in here!”
No answer. G-man sighed, crossed the kitchen, and pulled the sheet pan of croutons out of the oven. They were a few shades darker than they probably should have been, but with everything else that needed to be done today, he wasn’t going to throw them out. Where was Rickey, though? It wasn’t like him to walk off and leave his prep work to die.
“Rickey!” he yelled again.
“I think he took out the trash,” said Devonte, coming in from the hall that led to the walk-in cooler, employee restroom, and office.
“Coulda sworn I heard him tell you to take out the trash a while ago.”
Devonte looked away. “I got to doin somethin else and forgot. Sorry.”
“Yeah, well, I just want to know where Rickey is.”
G-man laid his knife on the cutting board and headed for the back door, limping a little on the foot that had been bothering him for a couple of months now. It was no big deal, just a bone that felt like it was going to pop out of place every now and then. If he sat down for a minute and flexed his toes the right way, it usually faded to a dull ache. He had just turned thirty-two, Rickey would catch up with him in September, and they had been working in kitchens since they were fifteen: plenty of time to build up a generous assortment of aches, pains, scars, and calluses.
He whacked the pressure bar and stuck his head out the back door, expecting to see Rickey talking to some purveyor who’d just pulled up with an order: that seemed the likeliest thing to delay him. Instead, G-man couldn’t immediately process what he was seeing. Because his eyes were weak and light-sensitive, he always wore dark glasses in the kitchen, and for the first couple of seconds after he opened the door, the relentless sunlight blinded him: he just saw dark shapes and bright patches. Then the picture resolved into something horrible. Rickey was lying prone on the ground between the Dumpsters and the restaurant, his face against the hot asphalt. A big guy was standing over him kicking him in the ribs. Lying on the ground beside Rickey’s head was a two-by-four with a smear of blood on it.
G-man turned in the half-open doorway as if he was planning to go back into the restaurant. “TERRANCE!” he shouted as loud as he could. “HELP ME!” Then he darted back around the door and into the parking lot. The guy had already taken off running, but G-man caught him easily, rabbit-punched him in the back of the neck, then spun him around and kneed him in the balls. The guy staggered for a second, then fell to the asphalt groaning.
G-man ran back to Rickey. Terrance, their 280-pound grill guy, was already there. “Grab that asshole!” G-man panted. “Don’t let him get away!” He dropped to one knee beside Rickey, who was already trying to push himself up onto his forearms. A thin trickle of blood ran from one nostril and his eyes were like twin zeroes in a slot-machine window. “Fucker got the drop on me,” he mumbled. “Burned my fucking croutons.”
“Yeah, you did. Don’t worry about it. Here, lay your head on my leg.”
Rickey did, and blood began to soak into the houndstooth fabric of G-man’s chef pants. Meanwhile, Terrance had lifted Mr. Two-By-Four as easily as he would a fifty-pound sack of oysters and dragged him back over to the Dumpsters. “You know this asshole?” he said, cuffing the guy on the side of the head to make him turn his face toward G-man.
G-man found it hard to look away from Rickey, but he made himself squint up at the guy’s face. Yes, he realized; he did know this asshole. Had, in fact, handed him his last paycheck not two weeks ago, after Rickey had fired him.
Rickey wasn’t too tyrannical as far as bosses went, but he had a few strict rules, most of which were directed at waiters and other front-of-the-house staff. It wasn’t that he failed to discipline his kitchen crew, but that he tended to hire kitchen people he already knew he could trust. The front of the house was trickier. Neither Rickey nor G-man had much experience handling it; as lifelong kitchen guys, they were naturally suspicious of waiters, whom they secretly believed to work half as hard as cooks and make twice as much money. The waiters sensed this ill-concealed animosity, and the turnover rate among Liquor’s servers was higher than Rickey and G-man would like it to be.
One of Rickey’s most holy rules had to do with chewing gum in the dining room. Some of the servers liked to do it so they wouldn’t breathe halitosis fumes on the customers, but Rickey thought it looked tacky and forbade it. He even bought tins of Altoids and left them at the wait station, which mostly got the message across, but apparently this guy—Dave, G-man remembered, his name was Dave Hammond—didn’t care for Altoids. The first time Rickey saw him chewing gum on the floor, he gave him a warning. The second time, he lurked in wait behind the kitchen door, and when Dave came through, Rickey smacked him on the back of the head so hard that the wad of gum flew out of his mouth and stuck to the opposite wall. Only Dave’s pride had been hurt, but apparently the message still hadn’t gotten through, because Rickey caught him folding a stick of gum into his mouth during service a couple of weeks later and gave him his walking papers.
Rickey and G-man had grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the scrappier parts of a generally scrappy city, and knew how to hold their own in a street fight. G-man was a basically peaceful soul, but even after having most of his rough edges smoothed off by the comparatively genteel world of restaurant ownership, Rickey was maybe a little too inclined to use his fists. No waiter could have put him on the ground in a fair fight, G-man knew that much. Guy must have hidden behind the Dumpsters and waited for Rickey.
“Call the cops,” he said to Devonte, who’d just come out the back door. Then he glanced down at Rickey, who was bleeding freely from a gash on the back of his head. “And an ambulance.”
“No cops,” Rickey gasped. “No ambulance.” By gripping G-man’s forearm, he managed to lever himself into a kneeling position. Those twin-zero eyes settled on the bloody two-by-four. He groped for it, grabbed one end, and, using it like a cane, pushed himself to his feet. G-man hovered behind him, ready to catch him if he went over backwards. Instead he advanced on Dave and half-raised the board. The waiter struggled in Terrance’s massive grip.
“How many times he hit you?” said Terrance. “I’ll let you get your fair licks, but I ain’t gonna hold him while you beat his head in.”
“Let me go, you damn …”
Terrance put his face close to Dave’s. “Damn what?”
The waiter seemed to consider what he could get away with. “Dishwasher,” he said finally.
Terrance laughed. “Ain’t been a dishwasher for three years now. Not since that guy you just clobbered hired me to work the grill.”
Rickey took another step, hesitated, then dropped the board, spun, and stumbled. G-man caught him by the waistband of his pants and held him as he doubled over and threw up on the side of one of the Dumpsters.
Approaching sirens split the heat of the day. Terrance met G-man’s eyes and sighed. “Ain’t this some kinda fuckarow,” he said.
———————————————————————————————————–
Poppy Z. Brite’s fiction set in the New Orleans restaurant world includes Prime Liquor, and Soul Kitchen. She has also published five other novels and three short story collections. She lives with her husband Chris, a chef, in New Orleans. Second Line was published in October by Small Beer Press.
Book Synopsis:
These two short novels bookend Poppy Z. Brite’s cheerfully chaotic series starring two chefs in New Orleans. The Value of X introduces G-man and Rickey, who grew up in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and who are slowly realizing there are only two important things in life: cooking and each other. Rickey’s parents aren’t quite so taken with the boy’s plans and get him an impossible-to-resist place at the Culinary Institute of America.
In D*U*C*K, Rickey and G-man’s restaurant, Liquor, is doing well but there are the usual complications of running a kitchen: egos get bruised, people get fired . . . and then Rickey is jumped in an alley by one of their ex-waiters.
On the mend, Rickey takes a side job to cater the annual Ducks Unlimited banquet, where every course must, of course, include the ducks the hunters have bagged. Rickey’s crew are ready to meet the challenge, but Rickey’s not sure he can do it all and deal with the guest of honor—his childhood hero, former New Orleans Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert.
An Excerpt from D*U*C*K, copyright © 2009 by Poppy Z. Brite, taken from Second Line: Two Short Novels of Love and Cooking in New Orleans, Small Beer Press, 9781931520607, November 2009.
Tweet This
Digg This
Save to delicious
Stumble it
RSS Feed
