Summer was half over, and I still hadn’t found the courage.
It was 1986, and I was a high schooler, no longer a sophomore but not quite a junior, working in a restaurant kitchen where one of the tasks was to run down “the line.” On one side there was a monster stove bank pulsing heat, on the other a stainless steel counter of hot plates. In between, a trio of fast-moving guys—sous-chefs—twirled skillets of hot fat in a kind of frenetic dance as they prepared foie gras and ocean scallops, which they deftly transported from stove side to counter side, before clattering used skillets into bus pans tucked under the stove. It was my job to get those pans out.
To do this, I was meant to yell, loudly, confidently—to bellow, really—“COMING IN!” and then dart through the chaos, skirting the chef’s bodies, avoiding the impossibly expensive dishes, and crouch down, grab a bus pan full of still-sizzling dirty skillets, and race back out without hurting myself or, more importantly, causing undue disruption to the highly serious business of feeding the monied diners of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
A few times, I’d stood at the edge of the line, feeling the heat pulse at my face—and hesitated for too long. “I’ll do it,” a co-worker would say, pushing past me, shouting deeply down the line as he barged in. At 16, I wasn’t sure which part was more intimidating: the risk of colliding with one of the flying skillets or the embarrassment of shouting authoritatively to a group of men.
My colleagues in the dish pit were an old Portuguese man whose name I can’t remember, a young black guy named Columbus who was always spectacularly late and finally got fired, and a blond kid named Hank who had a Roman numeral after his name and went to one of the better private schools in the Northeast. Hank’s father required him to work summer jobs to build his character, he informed us, even though he’d probably follow in that father’s footsteps and land the kind of corporate career that would one day allow him to buy a house of his own on Nantucket. My own father hadn’t said anything about my character, but I was required to contribute $1,000 to my tuition at a much less esteemed private school than the one Hank went to.
