Snapbatter

By CK Wilde

I was 20 years old, living and working as a cook in a Colorado ski resort. The practice of which had been mightily hyperbolized by my roommates Zeke and Steve. As it turned out, it meant long hours on my feet, minimum wage, and squalid living conditions. Plenty of beer and swimming in frigid mountain rivers with breathtaking scenery eased the bite of it.

We all worked in food service; and would come home stinking of a smell only familiar to those who have worked in kitchens… a funky sharp smell like vinegar, rot, sweat, carbon, a lingering deliquescence…

We’d be bone tired but still managed to rage and party into the mornings. A case of Moosehead beer was $5. Sticky purple and chartreuse nugs were on menu, and occasionally, a fungus course. We were young and full of energy despite our exertions.

I was a line cook. Previously I had been hired to be a sous chef but I was too slow. My lack of knife skills was a big deficit, as was my tendency towards perfectionism. Line cooking was perfect for me because for the entire shift I would be occupied. Total immersion into the timing of the items in my pans and grill, their agitation, the tenderness of the flesh. It required focus, any lapse in attention would be rewarded by inedible food, and burns or cuts on my hands and arms.

My hair was long and back in hat with ponytail combo, or up in a dambanna do-rag. Breaks would find me smoking out back with the dishwashers, sometimes a joint would be passed to help pass the time. A single boombox above my station blared out local radio morning noon and night.  Cleaning the surfaces of my station was a nightly ritual, hosing out the rubber stress mats, scraping and degreasing the grill, scouring all the cutting surfaces. The stainless had to shine. This caught the attention of the head chef de cuisine.

Chef Klaus was a compact red faced  maniac, a wild man with an oversized head, like a bobble head doll. A wild fly away of wispy red hair tamed by white toque. Always sweating and swearing, and smelling of alcohol. He had a strong musical voice easily heard everywhere in the kitchen. A distinctive south Louisiana accent, and a ribald sense of humor. He was unapologetically filthy in his patter. Equally at home in Spanish he would scandalize and bring to hysterics the Latinos working the kitchen. When the kitchen was slammed with orders he would sing/yell his orders as encouragements, threats, exasperated taunts, and desperate pleas.

There is a lot of substance abuse in the food service industry. Addiction and alcoholism are very common. Certain allowances are made as long as the work gets done. I was relatively unaware of what that actually meant for the people who were trapped in the nightmare of addiction. The brave resignation to what seemed like fate. The resilience of the unfailing worker, day after day. The lead weights of despair and self pity. When I think of the people whom I worked with back then I realize now how many of them were in active addiction. Heroin, cocaine, meth, alcohol, pills, nicotine, caffeine… and a few of my coworkers: all of those at the same time, every day.

But none of my colleagues brought the manifestation of their disease to such baroque levels as the head chef Klaus. Some days he would be a black cloud of whispered orders through gritted teeth. Other days he’d skate the length of kitchen singing at the top of his lungs. His loquacious non stop chatter would be punctuated with a song of his own devising sung the tune of Camptown Races: “Snapbatter juice for the Who Rah bone, doodah!doodah! oh my doodaah day!…”

One late night after our shift was over, he and I sat in the dark bar to have our shift bonus pitcher of beer and two whiskeys. I missed the last bus down the mountain. After polishing off the booze Klaus offered me a ride. I gratefully accepted. He had been drinking all day and was drunk, and now so was I. We wobbled to the parking lot to find his hopped up pipestone red jeep. We jumped in, strapped the lap belts, he turned on the radio full blast, and revved the engine. The lights from the dashboard gave us both a twisted crazed look. We set out and floated down the sinuous two lane mountain road.

Hugging the folds of the mountains’ mantle the road was perched over steep rocky plunges. Deep mysteries forested among the indigo shadows swept by the bright lights of our hurtling rattletrap conveyance. I was suddenly terrified at our speed and casual relations with the flashing center line of the road. Klaus was singing at top volume while fiddling with something under the steering wheel. He pulled a long flexible tube from the recesses of the dash. He proceeded to put one end of the tube into his mouth, then he pulled the stem of the windshield wiper. A gurgling noise, then like a suckling goat he took a mechanized shot of whiskey. He had rerouted the windshield cleaner fluid tube and filled the receptacle with bourbon. I was astonished at his practicality, ingenuity, and the depths of his demoralizing addiction. He offered the tube to me,  I took it and a motorized mouthful of warm booze. I laughed and held on for dear life as we careened down into the valley, laughing and singing.