C.M. Rivers
Why Am I Telling You This?
Bittersweet: A Portrait of Professional Cooking
The kitchen end of the restaurant business is a fascinating industry to work in, if you’re fascinated with minds warped by the toll of long hours, intense stress, and hearing the same songs ooze out of grease-addled radio speakers.
Then there are the bodies attached to those cerebral cortexes – bodies beaten into submission over time, driven to require daily doses of pain pills, anti-inflammatory drugs, and – in the case of a couple of Bosnian guys I worked with – horse tranquilizers. In every cook’s toolbox or knife roll, a bottle of something nests between the tomato shark and the channel knife, especially if the cook is upwards of forty years old. He or she may likely find themselves in physical therapy, trying xi gong, having surgery, or all three.
Of course there are chef gigs that are purely administrative, but there will still be days when you find yourself back at the burners because your sous chef couldn’t make it, and tonight’s service will likely spiral out of control if you don’t step in and run the show. C’est la vie.
Do you fancy yourself a foodie, keeping up with the trendy, the unusual, or whatever recently photo-shopped ingredient excites you from brains to bowels? Do you adore playing with multifaceted colors, textures, shapes, and flavors? Gastronomically phenomenal – come and join us. Just be warned: it may not be quite what you think it is. Kitchens worldwide are havens for burnouts and criminals – there are plenty of weeds among the flowers in the garden of Food and Beverage. I’ve seen fresh hires on day one go out for a smoke and never come back. I’ve seen room service guys offer up sexual harassment to their co-workers, regardless of gender, the likes of which cannot be uttered here.
Once I had the privilege of watching a cook from Argentina throw a knife at a busboy from Peru: the result of some sparkling insults. The knife missed the busboy and they were both promptly fired.
Another time, working at a ritzy hotel chain, I asked where the head chef had gone for vacation. I’d only been there two weeks, but hadn’t seen the chef for days (the sous chef was running the kitchen). I learned that the head chef wasn’t on vacation. This man – who had interviewed me, who I viewed as professional, who everyone addressed as “chef” – had been promptly fired and escorted off the property, after a female dishwasher complained that he had taken out his genitals and shown them to her. I guess the ugliness of the human race can’t be stifled by the simple construct of a glamorous establishment, even with its lush fountains and marble floors.
But a big part of me loves the restaurant business, and you might too, if you’re crazy enough. Just know that hunkering down to clean out the grease-trap while you gag on the smell (the dishwasher no-called no-showed and there’s nothing to do but roll up your sleeves and do it yourself) might be a hard pill to swallow. Stomping down the overflowing trash in the dumpster because the owner of the restaurant won’t pay for an additional weekly garbage pick-up – well, it might leave a bitter taste in your mouth, one that doesn’t jive with that killer chimichurri you so enjoy making. You may not be able to cope with an old-school chef giving you a public-school ass-chewing, but hey, you probably asked for it.
It is certainly true that a wisp of satisfaction and a share in the stock of Art graces the shoulders of the chef in a spare-no-expense operation, or a high-end restaurant with its own garden out back, cheese ripening in the cellar, and cooks who are so passionate and dedicated to their craft that they are like mini-chefs themselves. This circumstance affords the chef an opportunity to touch tables, hob-knob, sponge compliments, urinate leisurely without any sting, and take more fully into consideration the feedback of the orally anal diners (or privately choose to write off their comments as trite excrement).
Other than that, my young Trotters, it’s back to a never-ending onslaught of administrative tasks mixed with cartilage-grinding labor, traditionally served with good ol’ American bureaucracy.
Stillness
Like so many things, it comes when I have given in, given up the search, released the desire, turned my attention elsewhere. It comes in crumpled-up moments – in splintered, fickle doses.
It’s as if my expectation of it is the very thing that prevents it. I might be on the town running errands, ticking them off the list one by one, when something else happens, something unplanned, something unscheduled, a canceled appointment that cracks open a half-hour like a chest of impossible jewels.
This is how it comes to me. Not on my knees begging, no, but rather when I have laid down the obsession gently on the ground and carried on.
Yet even then, stillness (like an alley cat or a bird or a whale or a poem or sun on a cloudy day) might show itself, or it might not.
Prayer
May I see through the dark, without even looking.
May I hear above the noise, without even listening.
May I know beyond a doubt, without even thinking.
May I trust in myself, without even trying.
Through the Door
We live in the crook of fortune’s flexible arm, an arm that winds up at a predetermined and rigid hand. We live both sides, both ways, each a tiger, surveying from ripples wound about the tightened stake of natural selection.
We’d love a look at the other side without going through, a rare and much sought-after mystical optometry, but it’s better not knowing.
We live as long as our hearts pump blood and not a minute longer. Science reclaims us when the coast is clear, our little magic motor shot.
Then we exit through the door, move down a new path, maybe without a top or bottom, maybe without sides and in-betweens. There are no maps or manuals, though we have spent our lives hearing about the place.
Sometimes A Rainstorm
Sometimes a rainstorm reminds me to sit in easy solitude as you have shown me. They might assume you were once a bohemian clown with squash blossoms braided around your ankles, the way you lean back and cross your legs, bringing that demitasse cup to your lips, followed by a forkful of smoked cheddar omelet with saffron and wild scallions. They might assume I was a one-eyed raven sitting atop a totem pole beneath frayed curtains of gray cloud.
Sometimes a rainstorm puts me in the mood for bread and butter, stew and beer, after which I madly wipe the table clear like Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces famously ordering a sandwich. Then I unroll the scroll of an old tattered map with torn edges, eyes burning like a gold-prospector’s, at which point I try not to forget that empires only do two things: rise and fall.
Poseidon
Dear Diary, rainy morning, early, dreary. The light coming through the water’s surface was the loveliest I’ve seen. I’m exhausted, drained. Aphrodite took it all out of me, then she took me on a wooden ship and showed me the absurdities of Men. Now the mermaids are upon me again, but this time my hair has grown white. I never wanted the mermaids, but do you think my brother cares about anyone but himself? Even my prayers are swollen. A flaming heart is like the milk of a flower, and the feathered followers of nine-hundred moons take shelter in the shadow of Fate’s wings, throwing themselves upon their dreams of Achilles, as if the dreams were swords.
Six Thoughts On Mary Oliver
Mary, who helps us remember tenderness when we find an insect on our pillow, or a bat in the house.
Mary, who reminds us of a hundred walks in the wilderness, even as we stare at lamp-lit sheetrock and worry about work.
Mary, who tells us what we knew the moment we were born but have forgotten.
Mary, who makes us feel less alone beneath the ripening grapefruit moon.
Mary, honor student of botany, biology, ornithology.
Mary, whose words are chosen and ordered as if by a kindly saint.
Constance
Here’s a little something I wrote in honor of my high school English teacher, Constance Person. It was a big class in a big high school in the big city, and I was terrified of being called upon. I was a shy country mouse who was used to small classes in a small school in a small Oregon town, but after my mom passed away I went to live with my dad in Portland.
Mrs. Person had a habit of arranging the desks in the shape of an enormous square, with an opening at one side so she could access the chalkboard. She spent most of her time in the center of the classroom, lecturing and facilitating discussion.
Mrs. Person was getting along in years. I later learned she had retired the very next year, and passed away only a few short years after that. I am deeply grateful to have been counted as one of her students.
Constance
Always at the center, whirling, twirling, you set minds ablaze, a fountain of sparks, wise queen who ruled your class with knowledge and experience. Small in form, colossal in spirit. Next thing I knew, you stood behind me, your gnarled gardener’s hands upon my shoulders, driving home the possibility of what I might become – a writer. I reddened and sweated.
You addressed the class, gripping my shoulders, steering me. A boy slides down in his seat, feverish, cloaked in black, blown apart, wrecked. A boy’s heart cries out Mercy, Mercy!
Your confidence unfolded the delicate paper of my awkwardness. I, a drooping flower starved for water, restored to health by the nourishment of your faith and sight. Now I turn toward you as a sunflower to the sun.
A man stands up and says thank you, thank you, thank you.
A Child’s Christmas in Oregon
In our little country house in the sopping-wet Willamette valley winter, heat radiated from the woodstove as my mother rubbed a cast-iron pan back and forth upon it, one hand holding a lid down tight to make popcorn the old-fashioned way. I’d lay on the floor and play with the cat, listening to my mom’s old vinyl record “A Christmas Carol”, featuring Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge.
Mom would tie little bundles of cinnamon sticks with red and silver ribbon, nestling them among the boughs of the tree. She would press cloves into oranges, covering their entire surface to make pomander balls. I lit candles and kerosene lamps, and mom put up vintage Christmas cards from the thirties and forties all over the house. We always had a real tree trimmed with old-fashioned ornaments, and a wreath on the door. My mother’s holiday aesthetic was a fusion of country-living, bohemian, and vintage.
We’d always open one present on Christmas Eve. Sometimes we’d go to church, sometimes not. Every year we’d drive around the well-decorated neighborhoods looking at light displays and singing carols together in the car. Then, on Christmas Day, it was off to my great-grandparents old farmhouse, over the hill and through the valley, where I would feast, play, and listen to the way old people talk.
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“If every 8-year-old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.” – Dalai Lama
“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe. Tiny, but useful.” – Mary Oliver
“Who has not felt the urge to throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence.” John Muir
C.M. Rivers 