There was a lull in service that night, one of those all too brief periods of about ten minutes when the floor staff is busy trying to turn tables, and even though the bar is packed three deep with waiting customers and there's a line out the door, the kitchen is quiet. While busboys stripped and reset tables outside the kitchen door, the cooks, runners, and sous-chef swilled bottled water, wiped down their stations and bullshitted.
Geller stood in the doorway to the cellar prep kitchen and smoked a cigarette. It was that eerie eye of the hurricane calm. In ten minutes, when the next hungry wave of the public had been seated and breaded and watered, there'd be a punishing rush. The slide would be filling up with orders all at once, the action swinging from station to station, boiling up the line like a Drano enema.
First, the salad guy would get hit, then the saute station and finally the grill, until everything came down at once. The whole bunch of them in that cramped kitchen sweating and cursing and moving out orders as fast as they could without falling in the weeds. Only a few moments of peace to go and he smoked and fidgeted and half listened to what his crew was talking about. A calmingly familiar dialogue, and that was when he realized that fuck, he'd been listening to the same conversation for the last two decades.
The art of cook talk was like poetry for the deranged. Similar to locker room talk but with more fluidity. It required, out of historical necessity, reference to all things concerning involuntary rectal penetration, penis size, physical flaws or annoying mannerisms or defects. It can be confusing. Can sound homo-phobic and sub mental at best. It was insensitive to gender preference and uncaring of the gorgeous mosaic of an ethnically diverse work place.
But what all of this seeks to do, what it requires, is someone anyone who can hold up his station, play the game without getting bent out of shape and taking things personally. If you are easily offended by direct aspersions against your lineage, the circumstances of your birth, your sexuality, your appearance, the mention of your parents possibly commingling with livestock, then the world of the professional cook wouldn't do fuck all for you.
For Geller however it was everything. He could shout "alright cock suckers time to ride the cyclone" as he put out his cigarette in a bucket of sand by the door and headed back in to join his crew. Hands were washed quickly then wiped on the front of his bloodstained white apron.
This was not a place for the week or faint of heart. In the cramped, clustered, hotter than hell enclosure of this kitchen were a group of men who stood on the front lines of a five hundred table turnover. Ten against five hundred. And fuck them for good measure. The response he got was a laughing "Screw you cabron" from his half Puerto Rican runner as he ducked his headband sporting head down beneath the cold prep line to grab a dish of mota for the plating that was to come.
Why did Geller, an educated sort of swine, take such unseemly pleasure in the guttural utterances of his largely uneducated foul mouthed crew? Why, over the years had his own language skills become so crude and offensive that at a family Christmas he had to struggle not to say "Pass the fuckin' turkey cocksucker"?
Who knows, but he did love it. Wallowed in it just like all the other sounds in his life. The hiss and clatter and spray of the dishwasher, the sizzle as a fillet of fish hits a hot pan, the loud yelping noise - almost a shriek - as a glowing sizzle platter is dropped into a full pot sink. The pounding of a meat mallet on cote de boeuf, the smack as finished plates hit the window.
The goads, curses, insults, and taunts of his wildly profane crew were like poetry to him. It was Whitman and Frost and Plath all rolled into one. Beautiful at times, each tiny variations on a classic theme like some Beat era jazz riff. There are, it turns out, a million ways to say 'suck my dick'. Most of the people in his kitchen could do it in Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali, and English. Like all great performances it's about timing, tone, and delivery. Kind of like cooking. Other people didn't understand it, and he didn't ask them to understand it. He just reveled in the ride because all too soon it was coming to an end.
