Arbitrary Stupid Goal Read online

  Luke, the waiter, pokes his head in the kitchen and says, “Some asshole wants the eggs scrambled on their Blisters. I wouldn’t ask, but you always do it for Michelle.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll do it,” Zack says.

  I put down three corn tortillas for the Blisters and turn up the left side of the griddle because “BPFT—B” is also on the check.

  “BPFT—B” is Banana Pecan Brown Sugar Bread Pudding French Toast.

  “Be on guard. I really fucked with the menu,” my father shouts from his chair at the center of the dining area. This is my father’s mantra.

  I crack three eggs in a bowl and add some cream and vanilla.

  “If you get kids’ pancakes, I need to get up,” my dad adds.

  “You don’t want to know,” Zack says to me, making scrambled eggs.

  Zack has become the captain of The Store. He is the rock that cleans the grease trap and broils the brisket.

  I am not a rock. I am a tiny pebble that likes to cook very fast and only on weekends.

  A buzzer goes off.

  Cubed ciabatta soaked in French toast batter blankets the front of the griddle. I embed it with bananas, pecans, and sprinkle brown sugar on top.

  The buzzer is still buzzing.

  I flip the BPFT—B over with a giant spatula.

  To the right of the griddle is the steam table. It is where we keep stocks (veggie, chicken, beef) and a few base ingredients like marinara sauce or chili that my dad and Zack cook each morning. The flame needs to be turned on and off every half hour so the bases don’t burn or fall below temperature.

  I turn the steam table off and reset the timer for another half hour.

  The buzzing stops.

  Zack is going to an amusement park with his girlfriend tomorrow. She has never been. He is thinking of buying them a special ticket that lets you bypass all the lines, but there are different levels and he can’t decide if he should get the “Executive” or the “VIP.”

  I ladle black beans and ranchero from the steam table into a metal bowl with spinach, rice, and sliced jalapeño. This slurry is for the inside of Zack’s Blisters.

  Zack takes the tortillas off the griddle and lines a sizzle tray with them, pours the rice slurry down, tops it with the scrambles and some cheddar cheese. Then puts the whole thing into the broiler till it blisters. The dish is normally made with sunny eggs, and the trick is to make sure the yolks don’t get hard.

  I flip my BPFT—B over. The brown sugar has melted into trophy polish for the bits of pecans and chunks of bread.

  “Nice,” Zack says, ringing the bell for Luke to pick up his Blisters.

  Zack has gotten a lot of sleep. I can tell this because he will not shut up. It is sweet how excited he is for Jasmine to have her mind blown by the Kingda Ka. I totally agree. She is gorgeous; he is a lucky guy. Wow: two years you guys have been together. Yeah, I’d love for her to be in the family.

  I drip molten brown sugar on the underside of my wrist. Zack asks if I need the burn cream, with an inflection of, “Are you a pussy?” I am not.

  “Luke, this goes to the same place,” I say, and push my BPFT—B through the pickup window.

  My brother drinking till 3:00 a.m. the night before work sounds irresponsible and depressing, but when it actually happens it is great. He is less cocky and doesn't have the energy to tell me facts about the Mets and baby animals.

  “I got huevos,” my brother says. There are lots of items on the check, but only two are up for debate. The other is a country scramble with blue cheese. “Okay, I got the CS7. You got bacon and English muff,” I say, and put down an order of pancakes. It makes more sense for me to take the huevos, but: (1) His huevos are better than mine, and (2) He HATES blue cheese.

  Zack doesn’t like to talk about my dad dying, but he has told me that blue cheese will be off the menu before the body is cold.

  It is 10:10 and someone just ordered “Soup A” for breakfast.

  “Dad, you’re gonna have to get up,” Zack shouts.

  “Now? What is it?” my dad answers.

  “No, one check away, African Green Curry.”

  “You can come in now,” I shout, and flip my pancakes.

  “Let’s just finish this check first,” Zack says, lifting the lid to his huevos. I give him marinara, beans, collards, and chicken stock.

  My dad comes in the kitchen. I shoot Zack a sorry face, because he was right about finishing the check. But I’m not sorry; my dad got up fast. That is a good sign.

  “Bok choy, broccoli, snow peas, cabbage,” my dad says, taking my spot in front of the griddle.

  Zack calls to the dishwasher for bok choy and broccoli from the walk-in. I reach behind my dad and plate my pancakes. Zack shakes his head.

  My father heats up a pan with olive oil. “Using the griddle, okay?” I say, and throw down corn tortillas.

  I put the last one down right as my dad turns to scoop his chopped onions, cabbage, bok choy, and any other green vegetables we have on hand in the pan.

  Zack flips my country scramble eggs and I add the blue cheese. The dishwasher gives me a tortilla holder that I fill and put in the pickup window. Zack rings the bell as he plates his huevos.

  “Did you do the bacon?” I ask Zack, and send the CS7.

  “Thai curry,” my dad says, adding a big ladle of veggie stock to the browned vegetables. Zack dips down in the fridge, and hands him a jar.

  I squirt pancakes on the griddle and ask Zack to make fried chicken.

  My dad hands me a whisk and says, “Mix in the curry and peanut butter really good. Am I done?”

  Zack scans the checks and says, “Yeah, you can sit down.”

  “Did you hear? Jasmine has never been to an amusement park. There are major upsides to growing up on an island,” my dad says, tucking his rag into his apron.

  Me and Zack clear a path. The space we cook is narrower than the aisle of a bus.

  “I want pictures. I want it of her face on the first ride. You can send the soup. Maybe put some spinach in the bowl,” my dad says, and heads for his chair.

  It is a light-years day. The soup is my sister’s favorite thing on the menu. A menu that is thirty-five years long.

  The buzzer rings. We have more to go, but it is late enough to just leave the steam table off. “Good day. Good checks,” Zack says.

  He says this at the exact steam table moment every weekend.

  He says it even if we have gotten in a screaming fight. If my dad has been belligerent and ornery, if I sat down on the floor and sobbed till my apron was soaking wet, if all the dishes went to the wrong tables, if the fridge broke, if he overcooked the brisket and the turkey.

  My brother loves The Store. The good and the bad.

  No matter what has happened, no matter if he insulted my dishes and secretly hoped my gravy would clump. No matter if he didn’t do my side of bacon. At the steam table point, when he says “Good day,” I love my brother.

  My dad is in his chair talking to a woman he tried hard to kick out for bringing an outside coffee in. She threw it away and apologized. He has been talking to her for half an hour.

  “Dad, I have kids’ chocolate chip pancakes,” I shout from the kitchen.

  He doesn’t want to get up, and tells me that I need to make three baseball-size pancakes and then put a stick in each.

  My dad warns that it might not work, he has not tried it yet.

  Zack shakes his head.

  I can’t find the sticks.

  “So fucking stupid,” Zack says as he finds the sticks for me. The bag is unopened.

  One time, Zack stopped talking. Not just hangover-level volume, which still has a few comments and baseball facts. This was mute. The only exchange unrelated to cooking was when he thought my dad had called for him, but then it turned out my dad had just said, “Exactly.”

  “I fucking hate that word!” Zack screamed.

  Be careful what you wish for. I cooked for as long as I could stand.


  “Zack, are you mad at me?” I asked.

  “No,” Zack said.

  “Did Dad lay into you bad this morning?”

  “No.”

  “What the F is going on?”

  “Nothing, let’s just cook.”

  “Really?”

  “Let’s just cook”? This is not what Zack believes in. I think I said, “Really, c’mon,” twenty times till he finally broke. “My kickball team captain was screwing another team’s captain. They stopped fucking and now neither will play. It is so fucked up.”

  It took me a while to understand. There were rules about the number of girls per team. I don’t really understand still. But I understood that the kitchen without Zack was no fun. I told him, and just like that, the day turned. The items broke even between griddle and stove. Now and then my dad would pop in and join the line.

  And when the steam table moment hit, Zack said, “Great cook, good checks,” and we bumped knuckles.

  “We were wrong,” I say to Zack as I plate the kids’ pancakes and ring the bell.

  They get a “Whoa” from Luke.

  “How did they come out?” my father asks.

  Zack pops out of the kitchen to check on the item.

  He reports back: the kid is eating the pancakes just like a lollipop. Our dad is a genius.

  BUCKETS OF GRAVY

  The first time John Belushi came in to The Store, he ordered an egg sandwich.

  John looked at the sandwich, raised his eyebrows, and took a huge bite, filling his cheeks like a chipmunk.

  He went through every sort of emotion you could have while chewing. Then he spit the huge bite on the counter. “That’s fucking terrible,” he said, smiled, and watched my mom and dad fall in love with him.

  He had a key to The Store just like half the block. Sometimes my dad would open in the morning and find John asleep in the rocking chair, a pack of Bounty towels acting as a pillow.

  Famous at this point, John tried to take people from his regular life to help them out or just to have them around. He asked my dad to cater the set for his movie Neighbors that was filming on Staten Island.

  My dad would wake up at 5:30 a.m., slicing cold cuts and making salads, but mostly he made melon balls. That was what they wanted. Honeydew, cantaloupe, watermelon, all placed in separate containers. He made gallons of them, and quickly became an expert, cutting the melons just so, ensuring there were no seeds in any balls.

  Why did they want melon balls? My dad says they were all on coke. He says this like it is a simple equation. Two plus two equals four—cocaine plus Staten Island equals melon balls.

  John told him to charge as much as his imagination could create for the catering, and then double it.

  At the end of the first week, my dad got a check for $1,500. The raw materials (aka melons) couldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars. My father had never made that much profit in his life. He was excited, and bragged about it to Bobby the Teamster.

  Bobby the Teamster was John’s driver. Bobby’s father was a teamster chauffeur too. His brothers and uncles were all drivers as well. It was some sweet deal, but Bobby was a nice enough guy.

  “You know that’s what I make every week, and all I do is sit in the limo and get stoned,” Bobby said. Which was true. He drove John to the set, and would then just do cocaine and eat melon balls for the rest of the day.

  At first my dad felt like a sucker, but came to the realization that keeping score with money was meaningless. He had a lot more fun learning how to get balls with no seeds than Bobby had sitting on his ass in another planet.

  On the first day of shooting Neighbors, the lead actress’s husband said he wouldn’t let her leave the hotel until he got $14,000 in cash.

  John set up a time to drop off the money.

  A man named Bill Superfoot was guarding John at the time. Not against other people, but against himself.

  In the mornings when my dad would find John sleeping at The Store, it was bittersweet.

  Sweet: John looked cute fast asleep hugging a pack of paper towels to his face.

  Bitter: John was there because his wife, Judy, had locked him out of the apartment. And Judy had locked him out because John was using drugs.

  When the time came to drop the $14,000 in cash, John went up to the hotel room with Superfoot.

  They didn’t bring any money.

  Superfoot “had a talk” with the husband. The actress went to the set. She was wonderful, the movie started on time.

  The Armenian who sold The Store to my dad had run the place for sixty years.

  Along with the inventory, equipment, and lease, my dad got two days of training.

  One of the things the Armenian taught my dad was to add a tiny touch of salt to the coffee before you grind it.

  Why? It didn’t matter. My dad added a tiny touch of salt every time he ground the coffee.

  My parents hired a sweet delinquent named Dominic to be a delivery boy and store clerk. They taught him to do the daily tasks like breaking down boxes and grinding coffee.

  One day a customer complains that the coffee tastes strange.

  The next day my dad watches Dominic dump the coffee beans into the grinder, carefully check the grind knob, and slowly sprinkle way too much salt in. Dominic starts to close the lid, and reach for the “on” switch.

  “Wait!” my dad shouts.

  Dominic freezes. My dad grabs a spoon and opens the lid. He goes to scoop out the extra salt, looks down, and sees that Dominic has drawn a perfect “D” out of the salt.

  My dad always eschewed publicity. By “eschewed,” I mean actively fought against it and blacklisted anyone who wrote about The Store.

  When The Store became a restaurant, it became famous for not wanting to be reviewed or talked about. People would call, and my dad would say, “Sorry, Shopsin’s is out of business. New York City rent, ya know.” If they asked my dad, “Where are you located?” he would answer, “Next to the phone,” and hang up.

  Every commercial business in NYC had to take care of the garbage they made. Some owners hired a private company to pick the trash up weekly or daily, keeping the bags in their basement, putting them out at night. Other owners put the bags in the trunks of their cars and drove them home to Queens.

  We had a dumpster. It was forest green and pressed against the wall around the corner from The Store. A company would come pick it up once a week.

  Our dumpster was in a sad state. It had been dropped so many times. Wheels had been broken off. The lid was bent. One day the garbage company replaced the dumpster. It was a gift from the gods. My dad was excited. The dumpster wasn’t refurbished or repainted; it was brand-new and brought him pure joy.

  Later that same day a sanitation inspector comes into The Store. “I’m giving you a violation,” the inspector says. “The lid to your container is open,” he continues.

  “Show me,” my dad says.

  They go outside, and the sparkling clean dumpster lid is open. The dumpster is empty except for one small clear bag of garbage.

  “It’s not my garbage. I didn’t leave the lid open,” my dad says.

  My dad is right. It is not restaurant garbage, no way, no how. Goldilocks has left us her apartment’s trash and didn’t even bother to close the lid.

  This is the drawback of a dumpster. Your basement doesn’t stink, you don’t need to put the bags out, but people think the dumpster is free like air. It isn’t—we had to pay by the pound.

  The inspector said he was giving us a ticket anyway. My dad asked to speak to his supervisor, to which the inspector said the supervisor was not available.

  It got very quiet. My dad went inside The Store. He came out with a huge handful of flour and threw it in the inspector’s face.

  Six cops showed up, guns drawn.

  The sanitation inspector had called it in as an assault.

  One of the cops was happy when he figured out what had happened. He had a sister who owned a hardware store. Next to
her store was a little vegetable grocery, and the sister was going nuts from all the sanitation tickets for orange rinds and banana peels left in front of her part of the sidewalk.

  The sanitation inspector is still covered in flour. A few guns are still drawn, though the cops seem to be on my dad’s side.

  The writer Calvin Trillin shows up to get lunch, and without a skip asks my mom, “What’s the charge, assault with intent to bake?”

  The case was settled with a “consent decree.” All my dad had to do was agree never to throw flour at a sanitation inspector again.

  The lawyer that won the case was a beautiful woman named Valerie. She represented my dad for free.

  Valerie was a regular in The Store. The regulars were always giving us things. Free meals at restaurants they ran, Rolling Stones concert tickets for my mom, computer programs for my brother, dental work, theater tickets, T-shirts, shoes, a tour of a television studio, a laser printer—the list goes on forever. I call them regulars, but they were more than customers.

  Sometimes we would barter. A trip to St. Barts was paid for with a year’s worth of Burmese hummus and shrimp gumbo.

  My dad had a standing deal with Calvin (Bud) Trillin. Publishers were always sending Bud cookbooks to review. Now and then Bud would bring big stacks of the books to The Store in exchange for food credit.

  My dad would pore over the cookbooks, putting his own version of a recipe on the menu. He would get a Greek cookbook from Bud, and the next week, as soon as he figured out where to get the best feta, the menu would double in size.

  The Store’s kitchen wasn’t in a separate room. All that stood between my dad and the dining room was a stainless steel shelf and a specials board. The shelf was propped up with cans of black beans that no longer had labels. The specials board was written in every color of dry erase marker that my dad could find. This was only six colors, but it looked like more.