Gotta Lay Off The Peyote

Apparently I bought a still today. Yep, a still...as in moonshine. Whatever am I to do with it? Hmmmmmmm...

Days Off

Within 10 minutes of getting to work yesterday I knew one thing: three days off hadn’t been enough.

For one thing, it hadn’t really been three days off. Tuesday was Café Day, and we did have a pretty good time, but it was a lot more mellow than the last time: no one passed out by 4pm, there was no crying in the bathroom, there was no blood, there was no under aged drinking (that I noticed), and the police were not called…in other words, it was kind of boring.

I don’t really know why, maybe it was because some had classes or work the next morning…but that’s never really slowed anyone down…or maybe it was the presence of three little people who weren’t around last Cafe Day, two-year-old Zoe, five-month-old Noah, and tiny, five-week-old Ophelia…or maybe we’ve just spent so much time together over the summer, spent so many hours at the Café, and gotten on each others nerves so often that none of us really wanted to hang out there…together.
We did have plenty of beer, there were a couple of trips to the bar for shots, and we did cook steaks, brats, and ribs on the grill out front on the sidewalk, and had Wii set up for anyone who wanted to play. But for some reason, it was just…subdued…and that’s ok.

Wednesday was mostly a waste due to a cluster fuck involving our alcohol permit for Café Z. I did make it home before dark and spent a couple of hours reading on the couch, and I really can’t remember the last time I’ve done that, so it wasn’t a total waste.

Thursday morning I got up early and met Brett to finish what we’d been working on the day before, and then I headed to Albuquerque, a three hour drive. I ate miso soup, twice, saw 9, and I wanted to like it more than I actually did, but that’s happened before and I’ve ended up loving some of those movies. I ate raw tuna and eel, I drove all over looking for a great bookstore that I couldn’t remember the name or address of, heard a very offensive conversation a guy was having on his cell phone, ate vanilla ice cream on the sidewalk, and, not finding my great, unknown bookstore, headed to Page One. This, I thought might not be a bad thing, since they have used books as well as new, and maybe I’d be able to find the out-of-print book I’ve been looking for, but no. I know, I know, I could find the book with a couple of key strokes right now, but that’s no fun. I did get the second and third installments of the trilogy I’m currently reading (and why the hell do fantasy authors all feel like they have to write trilogies? I blame Tolkien), picked up a book for Danny, and by then was ready to start toward home.

I had thought about getting a hotel room near downtown and heading to this great, nasty little bar that throws a fantastic rockabilly night every Thursday, but I really didn’t want to face waking up at the butt-crack of dawn and driving home after all that, so I went home, watched TV, and then went to bed to read before falling asleep.

The next day, as I sat in the office and the staff was getting on my nerves as I tried to sort through last month’s paperwork, I was really wishing that I could have had a couple of more days like Thursday.

She only wants me when she's drunk.
Sounds like a country song.

Labor Day

Saturday hurt, but not nearly as bad as yesterday. I haven’t counted out yet, but Sunday looks like it was bigger and we did it with two cooks on the line instead of three.
Yesterday was just a blur, on a wait all day long, people waiting for an hour to get in and then another forty-five minutes for their food, and most of them did it in good humor, a welcome relief since the crowds all summer have been in pretty foul moods.
By the end of the night I was definitely feeling my age, my shoulders hurt from pounding countless dough balls flat and then tossing them out to size, the constant lifting of dough trays, pizzas into and out of the oven, and my legs and back ached from the hours of standing, interspersed with quick drops into a squat to grab something from the lowboy cooler.
Several of the chef memoirs that I’ve read compare cooking at this intensity to combat, the chatter of the printer spitting out order after order like that of a machine gun, and the cooks are often romanticized as soldiers. Cooking, they say, is the last meritocracy, where the only thing that matters is ones ability to produce quality quickly and consistently, and the ability to do it under miserable conditions or while in pain, emotional or physical.
That’s a load of bullshit. I also read somewhere that the reason male cooks have such high machismo is to make up for the aprons.
I was lucky, I never saw combat while in the army. I did see some nasty scraps and tense moments as a cop though, and cooking is nothing like that. Ok, there was this one time when a guy got so pissed off at the previous owner that he grabbed an olive oil-filled wine bottle and threatened him with it and we all ended up in a pile on an oil and blood-slicked tile floor. That was fun.
I have heard machine guns though, and you know what a printer sounds like? It sounds like a fucking printer, and I’m sure that plenty of other grunt jobs are meritocracies, the fact that you show up and do your job well far more important than who you know, what level your degree is, what color you happen to be, who you choose to sleep with, and whether or not you have a penis.
But we do have three bachelor’s degrees in this little restaurant of mine, all of them preferring the world of restaurants over the world of cubicles and weekly meetings. Things are different in this world of ours, a certain amount of drunkenness and debauchery are tolerated which wouldn’t be in an insurance office. Punching another employee in an accounting firm would be grounds for dismissal, and probably police intervention; here it would be a few minutes on the back steps to cool off…if there’s time. If not, we’ll sort it out later, now get your sorry asses back to work.
Now it’s over. Labor Day is done and summer is over as far as we’re concerned. We shut down it 3pm, ordered some burgers from the Quarters, had some shots and some beers and cleaned for a couple of hours. In the dish pit Randy and Danny are still at it. No dishes and no trash left behind as we’ll be closed for the next three days. Tomorrow will be Café Rio Fun Day…when we drag a grill out onto the sidewalk, drink in public, and play drunken Wii all day long. Wednesday and Thursday, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m thinking about finishing the tile in my kitchen…or going to Albuquerque and eating sushi ‘til I’m sick, catching some movies in a nice theater, and staying in a quiet, clean hotel room with the “do not disturb” placard displayed.
I’m thinking that the tile can wait.

New Mexico

Listening: Cake
Breakfast: Amstel Light

This morning I just wanted to mention a few things about New Mexico that rock.

1. Breakfast burritos with chorizo. Nearly every convenience store in the state sells breakfast burritos, they’re always big and the best ones are filled with chorizo, a spicy Mexican sausage.

2. The light. The early morning light is breathtaking. This morning at 7am the hills were a bright golden green. Often, this time of the year, the sky will be covered in dark clouds, it will be raining, and everything will be lit up from the sun peering underneath the clouds from one side.

3. Green chile roasters. I’ve said it before, but the smell of green chiles being roasted is one of the greatest smells on earth and right now our home-grown Hatch chiles are tumbling in roasters all over town.

4. Pinon smoke. It’s getting cool at night, soon I’ll walk out of the restaurant at closing and someone nearby will be burning pinon in their fireplace, the fragrant smoke lying close to the ground in the cold air.

5. The grim pride that comes from living in a fly-over state. We’re not chic New Yorkers, cool Californians, or prideful Texans, but plenty of New Yorkers have come here to write or paint, plenty of Californians have moved here to live better, and nearly one hundred and seventy years ago when the Republic of Texas decided it wanted Santa Fe it was a handful of Nuevo Mexicano militia that stopped the invasion. We also tend not to die from things like the latest flu-of-the-week…we get stuff like the Plague.

We arrived in Oklahoma on April 1st, April Fools’ Day. Dad had committed to going back to work in California that first summer and sometime in July we followed by bus for a visit.
I don’t remember much about the bus ride, other than thinking that the driver looked really cool in his uniform; that there was an English guy with B.O. who tried to teach me how to play backgammon; that we stopped in Flagstaff during a torrential thunderstorm; that one night a car went off the road and then flipped right in front of the bus; and the layover at the Los Angeles bus terminal.
The L.A. bus terminal was, and I’m sure still is, a huge shit hole. I remember being fascinated by the little coin operated TVs, the vending machines full of sandwiches and slices of pie, and the dirty desperation of the whole place.
We were stuck there for several hours and at one point I had to pee really bad. Mom didn’t want to let me go in the bathroom by myself, but, at ten, I was a little big to be taken into the women’s restroom. I remember the restroom was filthy, full of men not using the facilities, and I remember my mom standing just outside the door with Kelli until I was done.
After that I guess she decided the neighborhood surrounding the bus station had to be safer so we went outside and walked around for a while. The bus station was in a Hispanic neighborhood and the sidewalks were full of people. We stopped in a little Mexican bakery that smelled of yeast, sugar, and caramel and bought some pan dulce and ate it on the sidewalk. I had never seen pan dulce before and was amazed by the pastel colors and the lightly sweet taste of the bread.
Later that night as the bus rolled through Hollywood I looked for movie stars but saw only poor people.

Does anyone else ever have the desire to run away to someplace where no one speaks English, where you could sit in a cafe and not understand any of the conversations around you, where the most mundane or hurtful conversation would only be pleasant- sounding background chatter?
I'm looking at this little place in Uruguay.