Blade!

I'm procrastinating: I should be working. I've got an essay to write, and, whether through alchemy or incantation, that essay must find a way to complete itself by Friday. I'm placing my bet on incantation; alchemy demands too much work. Better just to shout out a few words and wait for the puff of smoke.

So I'm not writing that essay. Instead, I'm using the time to reflect on why I chose this career in the first place, rather than, say, working in a kitchen. I harbor no illusions that I might have been happy, or successful, as a cook. Rather, as I mentioned in a post the other week, it's because I spent just enough time working as a line cook to develop a complex about it.

Why do we work? We sell our time, our labor, our youth, in order to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. Right? Yes, but the more successful we get, the more we allow ourselves to forget these basic reasons. We psychologize; we aestheticize. We love our jobs because they make us feel smart. Or rich. Or loved. Or important. Or like we're saving the world. Or at the very least, they give us something to grumble about. This is how we enter the happy bourgeoisie.

Working as a line cook brings the equation back to its essentials: there is little illusion that what you do when you work in a kitchen is anything other than selling your labor. The work pays for the roof, the food, and for the margin of excess beyond that. This usually means booze.

I'm not getting all Marxist here. On the whole, kitchen labor is hardly proletarian, despite what George Orwell suggests in Down and Out in Paris and London. In return for working in a kitchen— and this why I have a complex about it— you get a little share of what it is you're helping to make. I don't mean the food, or the profits, or anything quite so literal. Rather, what you get is an experience of the restaurant-machine itself— the line— in which you play a part. You're a grunt, but not a cog. Your peculiarities play a part in the machine, and the machine adapts itself to you, just as you're forced to adapt to it. This is a pretty wild ride, as tiring and as short-lived as it may be.

To be more specific: when you work on a line, your personality falls away in a flash as soon as there's a rush of orders. Once you get slammed with orders, you're nobody. And if you can't keep up the pace, you're replaceable. But the difference from any true assembly-line is that this pace isn't constant. As soon as the pace shifts, the whole workplace changes. Before the rush, there's one system: preparing, chopping, stocking, and the like. It's like a band tuning up for a performance. Here, personality and peculiarity are tolerated in moderation, provided that they're an accompaniment to work. After the rush there's an entirely different system. When all that remains is to clean, to break things down, to regroup: this is when personality rears its head again, and opens its lungs.

This lifestyle of varying speeds works like a drug. The other elements of your life recede and fade in importance. What looms instead are the immediacies of the evening ahead: the impending rush, and the impending release. What might otherwise be mere embellishments take on supreme importance: banter, gossip, harsh words, pranks. This forms the fabric of experience, turning your thoughts back to the immanence of work. You go home afterward, but for what? To rest up for another day. To drink off the stress. To pay bills.

There is no question like "do I really love my job?" No; you hate the job. It steals your life. But it owns you, it possesses you, and you live for it. This is a wonderful way to spend a summer, or a few romantic years. It's a tough way to grind out a living.

There was a loud-mouthed, slop-bellied chef at Tonya's Roadhouse who was my hero. His name was Jim, but everyone else required a new, better name than the ones they had. My nickname was derived all too conveniently from my surname: Burn! A swell tag for a greenhorn fry cook.

"Burn! Drop another Fristo!" You get the idea. Jim was the perfect kitchen organism: he was well-trained and could more or less sleepwalk through an evening of baked scrod and prime-rib dinners. The rest of the time he was as high as a kite. Some people can handle the cycle of addiction. As a result, Jim's adaptation to the diurnal rhythm of kitchen work allowed his mind, and his mouth, to roam freely throughout the evening. He played air guitar, he played jokes, he befriended all the waitstaff. In his spare time he showed me how things worked.

My friend Todd, who joined the staff as a dishwasher during my second summer at Tonya's, never graduated from the dishwasher station. It was awkward; I could see him to my left as I worked on the line, observing him at work from my position of relative privilege. Jim had trouble nicknaming him.

One day, though, Todd either cut himself with a chef's knife, or— my memory's a bit cloudy here— was perhaps talking about knives. Todd had an extensive collection of sharp things: butterfly knives, throwing stars, and various other flea-market ninja gear. So perhaps he was talking about knives. From this moment on he became "Blade."

Now, whereas the cry of "Burn" was uniformly followed by a set of instructions or a list of orders, a dishwasher is a dishwasher. There's neither need nor profit in instructing a dishwasher to do anything; he simply does his job. So Jim would simply yell out Todd's nickname at random. "Blade!" he'd should when Todd arrived at work. And whenever the rush of orders risked becoming overwhelming, or whenever tempers started to mount, Jim would simply should out "Blade!" at the top of his lungs.

Todd loved this. He started calling himself Blade during our off-work hours. He even said it with Jim's special inflection. This might sound silly, but it's part of the drug.