Chef

The Chef’s uniform, the one you see in clip art with the puffy, cloudlike toque and the wry mustache, perhaps being twisted by the owner upon serving the meal, isn’t just a caricature. There is a reason for all that stuff. The toque, though lately replaced by a kind of paper corrugation in the style of folded napkins, is there to displace heat in the kitchen and soak up sweat. The pants are thick and baggy so that you may sense contact with a hot stove before burning yourself on it. The jacket is also thick, and can be reversed to hide stains. And there are symbols too. Of course there are symbols. The kitchen is the warzone and the cooks are there to wage war with the organic. There is a strict rank in a kitchen, executive Chef, who’s name is on the door, sets the menu, arguably the make and break of the restaurant, and oversees everything from the hiring to the purchasing to the freshness of the rosemary sprigs. Mostly, the executive is to be found alternately schmoozing VIPs and running into the kitchen to scare the staff and maintain chaos.

Just under the executive is the Chef de cuisine, who runs the place in the absence of the executive, which can be from all the time to never, but is usually just most of the time. Under him are the sous Chefs, or usually is just the sous Chef. The sous Chef is the one with all of the responsibility, who runs the kitchen and beats his or her underlings down with an arbitrary and iron fist, is, in turn, the bitch of the executive and the Chef de cuisine. He or she must cover for the abhorrent behavior of his betters, doing everything from picking up their dry cleaning to mopping up their vomit before the customers smell it. The sous Chef, in turn, bullies everyone else into submission. It’s their ass in the sling if anything goes wrong.

Under them, through a complicated series of ranks and psuedoranks and subranks lies me, the line cook. There is only one answer to anything that is asked of the line cook to anyone who is not a fellow line cook or the dishwasher. Yes, Chef. Yes, Chef. This is a war and there is no time for argument. Chef, after all, means chief.

Milo is my Chef. A sous Chef, to be specific. The one hundred folds in Milo’s toque, etched onto his forehead in boiled blood at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, are symbols of the things that he can do with an egg. His jacket has his name on it, his rank and even a few ribbons, honors and ownerships and bitches he’s broken. He’s already at work, but he’s left an order behind on the scraps of ordering paper that we have all over the house. I read it and walk to the bedroom. Yes, Chef. It’s inserted and I stand straight, sweat appearing in bolt heads on my face.

Down the stairs and walking, the thing beats electricity into my legs. The pants, just lowly line cook pants, are baggy enough to hide my joy. The walk, the burning grin on my face, is only two blocks long, appropriately up a steep hill, which bounces the thing in my ass mercilessly. At the top of the hill is Ile-de-France, my own Pot au Feu, boiled down to my essence in my own blood. I enter through the back, the restaurant’s asshole, and I’m compelled to speak to a few specks, like me, dangling in the shorthairs.

“Hola, maricón,” Manuel says, and the rest of them laugh as if this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.

“Just because you keep begging to suck my cock every day doesn’t make me a maricón,” I answer in Spanish. The thing is, they can say the same thing every day, but you’ve got to come up with a fresh answer every time.

“Eh! Ehhhh! Maricón!” Chaco says, flipping his cigarette over the grease dumpster. “You like to suck the cock of Milo, yeah? I see you.” Bwwaaaaa ha ha ha! Funniest thing ever.

“See you cleaned up that pearl necklace I gave you last week, Chaco. Or did you save it in case you run out of truffle oil?”

This is enough for now. They don’t know about Milo and me. It’s just the standard insult for whitey in the kitchen. Milo’s pubes in my teeth, his balls against my chin. Same thing every day. The weight in my ass brings me up again. Milo is there, large, hairy, top-heavy like a bulldog and his own bolt-heads of sweat.

“Hey, you think you got some fucking baby shower to go to or something? Get the fuck in the fucking kitchen, you lazy piece of shit. Get to fucking work.”

I’m a half-hour early. “Yes, Chef.”

“Do I have to tattoo the time that you’re supposed to show up on your nuts or something?” My insides are burning. I can’t even look at him. “Get your mis en fucking place sometime before your cock draws back into a cunt and get the fuck going.”

I’m running as he says this, the slips on the relief mats not greasy enough to worry me yet. The nerves on the insides of my arms are tingling and I can’t remember a thing. His abuse is like wildfire in my pubes and I’m visibly sighing. I concentrate on it, what it’s told me I can do. Sauté station. Pans, bent into the grill, sauces, baskets, fresh meat to be checked, vegetables of all types and slices and spices and oil. It’s run back to the station, placed, unveiled, rejected, replaced and restocked. The hollandaise provided to me is broken. Milo sees this and throws it on the ground. It splatters up the inside of my pants leg and settles in my socks. I run to clean it up, but Milo says, “What the fuck are you doing? Make another batch, you fucking dog dick.”

“Yes, Chef.”

I turn, panicked, to the walk-in and slip in the filth. I fall to the relief mat and don’t say ouch. The vinegar and rancid lemon falls into new cuts, but I’ve got to get the stuff. Milo walks off to go at someone else.

The doors open and the tables fill. Somewhere, a few hours later, my lamb noisettes are found wanting and thrown in my face. Linguini is dribbled, in onion and butter, down my front. And I’m in a trance, on, the food a blur and my mind in a state of half-conscious production and losing time. The cold piece of metal in my ass is a metronome, a cock that never loses blood, in half-erection all day, kept at respectful distance from the flat top.

I know it’s about 9:30 when we begin to slow, when the world beyond the six square feet just in front of me begins to reappear in blotches of stainless steel. I have one moment to myself and take it back to the walk-in, to restock the fennel and the lamb chops, and perhaps to give my face and neck a good wipe. I’m at the shelves, holding plastic bins and turning around when I’m taken by the shoulders and run backward to a metro rack. His, Milo’s, hands take my bins and place them to the side. He adjusts me until my ass, and its attachment, are level with the metal on the shelves. The cold radiates, penetrates my sphincter. My knees wobble.

“Take your pants down.”

“Yes, Chef.”

He has a squeeze bottle of oil and points it at me. It squirts and inhales. “Do it,” he says, his quiet authority in silhouette against the light bulb at the ceiling. His arms are folded. My cock jumps at the cold, but goes quickly hard in my hand. “Can’t you go faster?” he says. I reluctantly nod. I’m going swift as an immersion mixer, the metal in my ass biting in hard. I’m watching him and begging in my head. Let me. Let me.

He stops me. “That’s enough,” he says. He slaps it. I don’t say ouch. “Pull your pants up and cook something.” I suit back up and grab the bins with shaky hands. He takes the ring on the metal in me and turns me to the door. “And try to keep your pigtails out of it, you little girl.”

I want to take a moment to recover, but he kicks the handle of the door and pushes me out, the air hot as a deep fryer, the sweat melting immediately and dripping down my neck. I move to my station and press my pelvis into the stove. I don’t say ouch.

“Maricón!”

“What, Efrain?”

“He take you the cooler and makes you suck his cock?”

Ah ha ha ha ha!

“No, Manuel was in there getting stuck like pork on a spit, so I let them have a moment.”

“Maybe some time you suck my cock, eh?”

Ah ha ha ha ha!

“Your cunt might get offended.”

And that’s enough. I look at my arm. I’ve got a new burn, a pink slash welting up where I’d touched the burner. He’ll like that, I think.

The night goes by slower and clearer now, until news trickles in that we’re done, the hour of cleaning ahead and the disinfectant in my oily wounds. I’ve been here eleven hours and they went by like five. I can feel them only when I lean on something, my hips seeming to creak. My hands are coming apart under the silver roughage of a steel scrubber, when I hear, “Travis!”

“Yes, Chef!”

“Come.”

“Yes, Chef!”

He leads me, his ass like two roasts under the seam of his jacket, to the dish room, which has been empty for a half hour.

“Strip.”

“Yes Chef.”

I lay my clothes on the main machine, but he throws them onto the ground. The floor is clean, but it’s still wet. I await his orders. He stands me in the center of the room and hits me with the dish sprayer.

“What will you do for me!” he yells.

“Whatever you ask, Chef!”

The water is a little hot.

“Good. And what will I do for you?”

“Nothing that I don’t earn, Chef.”

“That is the right answer.”

He sprays me and sprays me. I feel it in cuts and burns, sores and rashes. And I feel it in the toy, the radiation of the heat in the metal. I stand with my legs apart, panting. He looks at me in appraisal. I hope I pass.

“You wore the toy,” he says, dropping the spray onto it from behind. “You did well tonight.” He approaches me, wraps his clothed body around me, still full of grease and splatter, the jets directly on the toy now. “You can come.”

It’s hard to admit what he’s done to me, but there they are, near tears of thanks. He has an oil bottle and coats my cock with it. I go to spread it in and begin, but he slaps my hand away.

“Learn,” he says. He holds the ring of the toy in my ass and twists his hand, covered in scars and the pits where fingertips used to be, around my cock. Then, strongly, he pumps. It’s a few seconds or two minutes, time blurring here too, before he kneels suddenly at my feet, as I come on his face, his expert timing pulling the toy out just at the right moment, and his tongue, what’s made him the man he is, now licking my sauce out of his beard.