Soul Kitchen

1-2

Back in the kitchen, the famous chef winced as he bent to retrieve more eggs. A small hiss of pain escaped him. G-man, who was now cooking French toast, heard it even over the sizzle and bang of the kitchen. “Dude, what’s wrong with you?” he called. “You been gimping around all morning.”

“Nothing,” Rickey said. “Just twisted my back a little. I’m fine.”

In fact, the pain had increased so much that he felt a little nauseated. He wasn’t about to say anything, though. He might tell G-man what had happened later, after the shift was over, but cooks in the kitchen didn’t cry about their injuries. Burned yourself? Consider the weal a badge of honor, like the tattoos most of them had. Sliced your finger open? Slap on a bandage or some duct tape, maybe Superglue it if it’s really bad, and get back to work. Most of them had cut off at least one fingertip during the course of their careers, and all had ladders of burn scars on their forearms, hot-fat spatters on the backs of their hands, and feet that looked as if somebody had worked them over with a hammer. It was a painful line of work, but in the hyper-macho pirate crew atmosphere of the typical restaurant kitchen, complainers were apt to be mocked without mercy or hounded right out of a job.

G-man looked searchingly at Rickey over the tops of his shades, but said nothing; to challenge Rickey on this point in front of their crew would seriously violate the rough etiquette of the line.

“Anyway,” said Rickey, “we only got a couple more hours. The Chalmatians gotta stage way the hell down on St. Claude, so they’ll all be out of here by eight-thirty. We can break it down and get gone by nine.”

“Y’all gonna watch the parade?” said Tanker.

“Aw, I don’t know. My mom wants us to,” (G-man rolled his eyes at that us) “but there’s gonna be all that Zulu traffic.”

“Just go on down Broad Street,” said Marquis. “You can cut over to St. Claude after Jackson. Zulu don’t go no farther than that.”

“I know, I know. I been getting from Uptown to the Lower Ninth Ward all these years, I guess I can do it on Fat Tuesday. But it’s gonna be a huge clusterfuck, and there’ll be no place to park, and—”

“And waa, waa, waa,” the other three cooks and the dishwasher chorused. Rickey frowned, then grinned reluctantly.

“Go see your momma,” Tanker advised. “Live it up a little. Catch you some beads.”

“Just what I need. I don’t even like Mardi Gras, and we still got three garbage bags of ’em in the attic.”

“All New Orleanians gotta have at least three garbage bags of beads in their attics,” Tanker said. “It’s, like, the law. Otherwise you’re some kinda Communist.”

*

As it turned out, nobody got out by nine; after a morning of serving up splooge to drunk Chalmatians, they needed a few drinks themselves. Cooks and waiters alike congregated in the bar, where Mo opened beers and poured bourbon over ice. She was dead on her feet, but as long as she didn’t have to see another mimosa or celery stalk, she was happy.

“I think that was my worst shift since Escargot’s,” said Rickey, sipping his Wild Turkey. Escargot’s was the hotel restaurant where he’d worked as a saucier before he and G-man began developing the Liquor concept.

“Hell, it was my worst shift since Tequilatown,” said G-man. He and Rickey had worked together at this French Quarter tourist trap and been fired, along with the rest of the kitchen crew, for drinking on the job. It was this indignity that had spurred Rickey to come up with the idea of a restaurant where the food would actually encourage drunkenness.

“Worst job I ever had was at a place called the Nouvelle Orleans,” said Tanker. “It was actually a revival of this old-line restaurant from the 1800s, where this famous gangster, Golden George Costello, used to hang out. Owners always pronounced ‘Orleans’ the French way, you know, Orly-AWN, and they’d yell at you if they heard you say it different.”

“What was so bad about it?” asked Marquis.

“Well, it started out OK. It was, like, Mediterranean food with a Creole influence. I was sous chef, and we couldn’t go too wild seeing as it was in the Quarter, but we got to be a little creative. Did some garlic shrimp with black rice paella, lamb tagine, that kinda stuff. We reviewed well, got a good customer response. Then management started getting scared. ‘It’s too weird! This ain’t how Golden George liked to eat! We gotta get back to our roots!’ Pretty soon it was crawfish étouffée and chicken Pontalba, just like every other damn restaurant within a two-block radius of Bourbon Street. You know why I finally left?”

“Why?” said Mo obligingly, even though she knew the story.

“The GM found out old Golden George used to hide diamond rings in ladies’ food, right? Like if he had some ho he wanted to impress? So they started this contest where they’d stick cubic zirconias in the desserts. If you found one, you got entered in a contest to win a real diamond. I quit after the second fancy Uptown dame broke her tooth on a fake rock. Figured they’d be sued into oblivion pretty soon anyway.”

“Man,” said Rickey. “Once in a while I get to worrying that our gimmick is dumb, but we’re f*****g geniuses compared to that.”

“Our gimmick’s not dumb,” said G-man, finishing his second beer. “It could be, but as long as the food’s good, we got nothing to be ashamed of.”

Rickey nodded. Then, thinking of the food they had served today, he gulped the rest of his drink.

*

When the truck parade rolled at noon, Rickey and G-man were on the downtown riverside corner of the neutral ground at St. Claude and Tupelo, just as Brenda had instructed them to be. They’d ended up parking at G-man’s parents’ house, only a few blocks away. The day had warmed up nicely, with enough cloud cover to keep the heat down but no real threat of rain. The crowd milling around the corner was as varied as it got in New Orleans, black and white, young and old, costumed and uncostumed. People didn’t mask on Mardi Gras as much as they used to, but here and there were skeletons, drag queens, distinctly unsavory-looking baby dolls, and one sinister character in a rubber Nixon mask.

St. Claude was an avenue that had seen better days, but a few grand old oak trees still stretched their gnarled branches over the fly-by-night car repair shops and dilapidated corner groceries. As the trucks rolled, some of the beads flung by the riders caught in the branches, where they would hang for months or possibly years. The air horns seemed to split the day in half. Between them and the cacophony of the crowd, it was impossible to make oneself heard to the krewe members, but Brenda knew where they were. The theme of her truck was “What’s Cookin’?” and she and her fellow riders were dressed in white aprons and chef’s toques. They deluged Rickey and G-man with fancy beads: long metallic ropes, beads with blinking medallions attached, a huge pair of pink pearls decorated with plastic shrimp and white shrimpers’ boots. Brenda also managed to paste G-man right in the face with an unopened package of beads that weighed more than two pounds, bending one earpiece of his glasses a little, but he charitably allowed that this had probably been an accident. Getting creamed with a whole package of beads was just one of the many hazards of Mardi Gras.

They went back to the Stubbs house for a late lunch and another round of drinks. G-man’s parents, Elmer and Mary Rose, were watching Mardi Gras on TV. The various news channels had reporters on the scene at the major parades, on a Bourbon Street balcony, along St. Charles where families were having cookouts on the streetcar tracks. After lunch, Rickey and G-man tried to sneak out without their beads, but it was no good. “You boys gotta take them beads with you,” said Mary Rose. “We already got seven bags in the back room.”

By the time they reached their little shotgun house on Marengo Street, it was early evening. G-man found a basketball game on TV. Rickey stretched out on the sofa to rest his still-throbbing back and fell asleep halfway through the second quarter. When he woke up, the game was over and G-man was flipping through the channels. He paused on WYES, the public broadcast station, where a glittering Carnival ball was in progress.

“Aw, not this s**t,” Rickey moaned sleepily. “It’s so boring. Nothing but a million debs getting presented to Rex and Henri Schindler talking about how Carnival is a butterfly of winter.”

“No, look, they’re finished with the debs. They’re about to have the Meeting of the Courts. This part’s kinda cool.”

“About as cool as my left asscheek,” Rickey said, but he settled down to watch the pomp and circumstance. It really could suck you in if you let it.

Here was Rex, the King of Carnival: a rich and well-connected New Orleanian transformed for a day into an actual monarch, a golden Arthurian legend. His identity was kept secret until Fat Tuesday morning, when he and his court paraded from Uptown to the French Quarter, then held their ball at the Municipal Auditorium that night.

Comus was the darker face of Carnival, not a king but a god. He wore a smiling mask that was designed differently every year, and his name was never revealed, though he was generally known to be an even richer, better-connected citizen than Rex: the power behind the throne, as it were. The most ancient of the old-line Carnival clubs, the Mistick Krewe of Comus had ceased parading in 1993 after a city council ordinance forced all public organizations to integrate. Rather than suffer the possibility of a black man in their midst—in a city that was three-quarters black—they had withdrawn from the streets. Now they only held their ball. The two courts met at midnight to declare Carnival over for another year.

Rickey and G-man watched with tired eyes as Rex in his white tights and gold crown approached the throne of Comus. Comus stepped forward and lifted his silver cup to toast the monarch, and because gods outranked kings, Rex bowed.

“I know who that is!” Rickey said, sitting bolt upright.

“Duh,” said G-man, “it’s Alfred Gremillion. His picture was on the front page of the Times-Picayune this morning, just like Rex always is.”

“Not Rex. Dude, I know who Comus is.”

G-man glanced around the living room a little nervously. Comus had always struck him as a sinister figure, and the refusal to integrate hadn’t helped any. “Nuh-uh,” he said. “That mask and wig, all those weird-ass capes and s**t? He could be anybody.”

“No, man. Look at how he kinda slumps over and holds his left arm up. That’s Clancy Fairbairn.”

Clancy Fairbairn was one of those New Orleans businessmen who seemed to have an interest in every moneymaking local company without being strictly associated with any of them. He was on the directors’ boards of Entergy, the Downtown Development District, the Pot O’Gold casino boat, the Audubon Institute, and just about everything else that was currently turning a profit or overseeing someone else’s profits in New Orleans. He was also a regular at Liquor, the type who always demanded that the chef make an appearance at his table, and so Rickey knew that he had a withered arm as a result of a childhood bout of polio. He’d also seen Fairbairn lifting a cup or two.

“I guess it might be,” G-man admitted as the camera panned over Comus’ face. “Those kinda look like his eyes. Mean and smart.”

“Dude, it’s totally, definitely him. Comus eats at our restaurant. Far f*****g out.”

“Big deal,” G-man said. “Most of the rich bastards in town have probably eaten at our restaurant.”

“Yeah, but Comus eats there like once a month.”

“Quit calling him Comus, would you? You’re not supposed to know who Comus is.”

“What difference does it make?” Rickey stood up, then paused, winced, and put a hand to the small of his back. “It’s not like he can hear me.”

“I know it,” said G-man, but his eyes flicked around the room again. His Catholic upbringing had inclined him to worry in the presence of gods, even once-a-year ones. “Hey, you never told me why you were gimping around in the kitchen, and now you’re doing it again. What’s the matter?”

Rickey explained about the oyster sack. Of the two, G-man was usually inclined to be more lenient with the crew, but he scowled at Marquis’ negligence. “That damn kid. He shoulda took care of his business.”

“Aw, it wasn’t his fault, G. I mean, he left it there, but it’s not his fault I lifted it bad. I’ll be fine in a couple days. C’mon, turn this s**t off and let’s go to bed.”

As he thumbed the remote, G-man caught one last glimpse of Comus’ mask before the slanted eyeholes and slyly grinning mouth dwindled away to darkness. Clancy Fairbairn? he wondered, then pushed the thought away. He really didn’t want to know who Comus was.