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Up All Night
It is difficult for me to recount the friends and co-workers I have lost somehow to drugs. Not because it is too emotional a memory, (though it is) but because there have just been so many. The food industry is stress incarnate. It's almost tangible. The long hours and the constant pressures are taken on only by the strongest of us. But many of us can not handle the overwhelming magnitude and responsibilities that go along with the beauty of the food we put out. One of my first big jobs was at a grand resort in North Carolina. It looked like something out of 'The Shining'. It's prestige and heritage still raise eyebrows when I list it on my resume. I was assigned to the Garde Mange kitchen. There was a young chef there, only a few years older than me, who was weeks away from becoming the new Garde Mange chef. He was a good looking and amicable guy with a great sense of humor. Within a few weeks of my working with him I noticed that he would constantly be running late and always looked tired. I asked him what had been happening? He told me that he had met two girls that liked to party and he was going home to them every night. I looked on and listened in awe to his stories. Two beautiful young girls with loads of cocaine partying until the break of dawn every day! One day he didn't show up for work. He called the next day and said he was sick. The next week he didn't show up at all. One of the cooks from another kitchen said he saw him and two girls at an off ramp gas station, asking people for gas money. Collection agencies came to the resort looking for him. No one knew a thing. The guy just vanished. He gave me his leather knife roll up kit a week before he left work. I still use it and think about where he is. One of my best friends while working in San Francisco admitted to me point blank that he had a drug problem. He told me he could not top but he wanted to. He was a young chef, already at the top of his game, and could have done anything he wanted to in the industry. I lied to him. I told him that while in college I had a drug problem and that I beat it and I that would help him through any bad time that he was going through. He gave me a heartfelt embrace, but everyday he would come to work with the same unshaven face, telling stories of coke parties, pill popping, and all night drinking. He quit his job and moved to Hawaii. Last I heard he stopped cooking and ran a sunglasses counter at the airport. Some of my former employers laugh loudly and love to tell stories of how they would all do coke in the wine room of this and that famous restaurant. They would tell me about how the health inspectors would tell them not to leave open dishes of "flour" in the walk-in. I laugh with them, appreciating their memories as they were trying to make it in the industry, but I always crinkle my nose in inner disapproval as I walk away. Waiters do it, cooks do it, GM's are infamous for it. I have never been in a restaurant where there wasn't "the guy" you got your stuff from or "the guy" who everyone knew was about to lose it. I am an optimist at heart, but I know that as long as there are long hours to be worked and hundred of covers to be served°there will be drugs to be abused and misfortunes to be had. --Cory Marcus |
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