The Man Who Came Uptown

When Michael was working at his station he stood grounded on rubber mats and wore an apron. To his left was an iron spiral staircase that led to the dining room. Food runners had to negotiate it, as did he when he delivered the racks of glassware to the bar. The steps were textured like manhole covers to minimize slippage. A person had to be careful and in fairly good shape to work here.

In the morning before opening and whenever else it was necessary, he went outside, split the logs of kiln-dried oak, brought bundles into the kitchen, and stacked them by the oven. The kitchen workers constantly fed the wood into the oven, which ran up to eight hundred degrees. They used long-handled peels to get pizzas, calzones, and roasted veggies in and out of the oven. Their inner forearms were frequently marked with burns.

Michael had figured out everything his first morning on the job. Didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to learn how to wash dishes, and that was the disappointing thing, at first. There was nothing really to look forward to; it was strange to realize that he wasn’t going to have any more knowledge a year from now than he had acquired that very first day. But it was a paying job, and it was the routine he needed in his life.

The ladies in the kitchen, Maria and Blanca, were hardworking, devout Catholics and friendly to him despite the language barrier. He was cracking that pretty quickly too. He used mucho, caliente, rapido, para qué, and gracias, señora and sometimes señorita if he was being innocently flattering. They called him Miguel and “baby,” and he called them mamacita and “mommy.” They were in their twenties, had children, and already looked middle-aged, but they had light in their eyes and in their smiles.

The men who worked the kitchen were less friendly but not aggressively so. Maybe they had been tight with the man whom Michael had replaced. Befriending them would take more time. But Michael had made headway there too. One of the men, Joe, would greet Michael in a boxer’s stance and throw soft combinations at him as he passed. That was his idea of an olive branch. They called Michael el hombre alto. He towered over all of them.

On day and night shifts, the kitchen workers played their Spanish music through a Bluetooth speaker set up near the colds station. To Michael it sounded like he was at a party or a carnival all the time. After a day he tired of it and began to use earbuds to listen to his own stuff, a little go-go and hip-hop but mainly the R & B he had heard his mother play while he was growing up in her house. He could have listened to novels that way too, but he found he didn’t care for the experience. He didn’t read e-books either. To him, a book was like a painting that hung in a museum. It was like a piece of art. There was nothing that compared to holding a book in his hands and scanning the words on the page. It made him “see” what he was reading. It was how he dreamed.