La Naranja and the Cosmos
Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 14
Tom Bass
La Naranja’s male customers tend to savor Dexter’s policy of hiring only women who he would like to bed if it were not for Ella’s watchful eye. They’re free to assume Alabama, Elaine, Rachel or Stephanie will not resist Dexter’s paws until the complimentary post-shift margaritas, courteously shaken together by Greg revisiting his sole story about pregnancy and love, and by then they might have arranged a date.
“I was shooting blanks, so it never happened,” he chuckles, smiling at the throng, confidently mixing a pitcher of tequila and Cointreau.
The cute hostess is having quite a time with the mass of people willing to wait two hours at the bar before sitting for dinner. The kitchen’s a long and narrow galley occupied by steam trays, a grill, ovens and a deadly fryer. Four men pirouette from hot appliance to stews, tortillas, stuffings and saunces. Pete flattens pizzas and responds to a plea for more corn chips. Sam sautés pans of fajitas and grills burgers. Juan Carlos had disappeared ostensibly to fetch more tortillas from the walk-in refrigerator, a welcome respite from the inferno too hot for even a Guadalajuareno. Toby’s role is to accidentally burn an anchovy and jalapeno pizza according to Greg’s specifications in exchange for some of the same margarita.
Bubbles of tasks are floating above Toby. They merge into a large, continuously rolling flowchart of actions that manage the information. Cooperation drives the bubbles and thus the meals forward. The chefs develop a cavalier invulnerability to the heat and knives. Toby pushes the grease and food parts from the cooling slit.
A band’s setting up on La Naranja’s stage. Dexter capitalizes on its location in the warehouse district—few neighbors, no law. People are already two-stepping in the parking lot. However, the situation in the kitchen is dire. Pete, senior know-it-all, insists everyone jam to classic rock as they dig through the orders flying like flags above the line. No indie, goth or new wave. Tonight the Creole band zithers and strums and the place slowly ignites as if turtles could dance to the swampy tunes. Dexter understands that music inevitably equals more drinks from Greg’s bar.
The orders will ebb incrementally after midnight and finally it’s the appointed moment to burn Greg a pizza. The bartering with the bar begins for greyhounds and a pitcher of beer. Leftovers are scraped together for the staff. Alabama and Stephanie are wrapping up cutlery, tipping out and fluctuating—whether to stay with the creeps left at La Naranja or go home and take a bath. Toby notices that the hostess is kind of sexy in a pert and serious way.
“What a ratio,” squeals Pete rubbing his brachydactylic fingers together and leering in a ghoulish way.
This ratio becomes dramatic once Dr. Ruffy’s released from prison. His license to practice medicine has been revoked, and he’s drug tested regularly so he cannot get high. Thus La Naranja (half his place after all) is his natural hang out. He spends as much time as possible reacquainting himself with the waitresses and looking for any opportunity to fire ugly, heavy-set Gina and replace her with rail-thin Tina, Hispanola dancer, who is much more into a celebrity guest, Bono, rather than short, horny Dr. Ruffy.
On one nonplussed night the remains of La Naranja congregate at a local pool. Relationships become less transparent as management, chefs, waitresses, customers and Dr. Ruffy swim together beyond the chainlink fence. Does Sam really want to spend his time with Rebecca or would he rather have Rachel, who has already had Pete and Mike and Mark and even Sam himself? Does he want her again? Sam has to work in the morning so he better not, but Rachel pulls him down into the grass next to the pool and rubs her neat little muff against his shorts. Sam gulps at his beer and Rachel goes down on him expertly in the grass, before saddling him. She pokes her fingers into herself and Sam sips the beer a little quieter and she latches on. Sam is still processing enchiladas he will make in the morning when he will stumble out of his beat-up vintage Dodge van.
Sam enters La Naranja and he reeks of chlorine, pussy, cigarettes and beer. His hair dangles in his eyes. He could be either Jim or Paul or Matt or Jay, the self-destructive, over-intelligent, sensitive fellow who scams and skives to get even for being too well balanced. The women who fall into his orbit of freak and radical culture might not see the traces of resolution in his eyes. The underground’s a kind of solution, but in fact it is equally prejudiced as any other actor, no matter if Sam is Jim, Paul, Matt or Jay.
Toby has already prepped the eggs and a few customers are sitting in the sunlight. There are a few clinks of glasses from the bar. The senoras press the corn and flour tortillas and blend the last of the salsas. Sam’s bloodshot eyes tell Toby that he will be making most of the food that morning. Sam will be reading the paper out in the dining room and nursing his hangover with Kahlua, vodka and soda, otherwise described by Greg as a mind-eraser.
Sam makes up for his absent performance with an invitation to his tiny apartment across town. Toby admires Sam for his shy looks and his keen sense of fun that inevitably attracts the opposite sex, and despite the lure of beefing up on his college reading, he accepts Sam’s apartment as a logical destination for Sunday afternoon. Maybe Toby can learn something there. Sam parks the van and they walk up the narrow landing to number four, a cubicle permeated with the smell of fish and steak from a restaurant downstairs. Sam’s apartment roils with acrid smoke and he calmly opens the few windows and turns on the fan, knowing the smell will not abate. He digs through his paraphernalia and locates the bag of dried caps, then drops some into a pair of mugs.
“Dig around in the freezer, will you?” Sam says, popping on the kettle.
Toby opens the fridge and spots the Tupperware filled to the brim with black grass. A bud finds its way into each mug.
“Let it cool down and we’ll add these,” Sam says, producing a blue baggie of dried shroom dust.
As Sam predicts, the psilocybin and sensi infusion is excellent. Soon they are giggling jelly on a patch of the kitchen floor—Rachel and Dr. Ruffy are their targets, along with anyone else who has been fatuous enough to tangle with the La Naranja kitchen.
The clapboard neighborhood pants around them. The houses are reverberating, breathing, hungry. Sam leads the way, then he’s diverted by an old lonely manor, the empty lot spiked with myrtle, pecan and magnolia. They sneak through the fence, cross under the trees to the house, cautiously step into the dark interior as alluring as nectar. The floorboards creak a beat and the stairs are rotten enough that Toby’s foot shoots through. The shadows scurry and hide like humans and Toby bugs out and shoots out to the yard. Sam can do whatever he wants inside.
Later, Sam jabbers at the perimeter of 7-11 as he slugs a quart of malt liquor by the dumpster. In the interval the psilocybin has imbued them with elfish invulnerability as he tumbles down to the creek below. Toby climbs a sapling and swings in the thin pendular branches. Dogs loom from the darkness confusing him with an opossum. Geckos stick to the trees. Toby stirs through the canopy.
It is the fresh taste of beer, extended from Sam’s hand into the trees, that reminds Toby that he is indeed real, a human of liquids, solids and breath, a human apparently slumped on the floor of Sam’s apartment.
Sam, ever popular with the girls, unruffled, untiring, but definitely bleeding, says, “Maybe I should call some girls?” He scratches his balding blond patch.
“You’re in no shape for them,” says Toby.
“Oh, you’re right, dude, too much trouble.” Sam’s in no shape to woo anyone. “Don’t you think a change of environment might take the edge of our trip?”
They pile into Sam’s beat-up van. Sam is soon swerving to the south of town, in search of a particular bar that serves as the headquarters of a violent, reputedly political motorcycle gang, the Banditos. Their sense of adventure considers this a great idea, and in no time Sam and Toby are working through a bottle of Jack D, an elixir to their mad-spore guts, and casually talking to a lean man in the honky-tonk interior. They’ve already tried out the electronic darts in one corner. Sam dials up Les Paul from the jukebox and then lines up a sequence of Johnny and Hank.
The man claims he’s Coyote; he does have a wary disposition on account of the large pistol tucked into his leather pants. His face is scoured with lines from too much of everything and two of his five gnarly ex-wives are hanging in the vicinity. He’s the boss of the outfit, and his aptitude for justice can order execution a good deal faster than the Texas prison board.
A blonde woman enters through the swinging vinyl door; she’s too fresh and beautiful to be a regular. But she walks right up to Coyote, gives him a hug and compliments.
“Hi Dad! Who are these dudes?” she asks.
Much to Sam’s consternation, a goofy guy tags along with her but everyone’s soon ineptly chatting about his saltwater fish tanks thanks to his garrulous nature.
“They’d make a fine addition to the bar,” says Coyote.
He pauses and nods with a gravity that means everyone get.
Toby swallows the last of Jack D and profusely thanks the old wild dog, not wanting to chalk up any disfavor with the chief Bandito.
“Want to visit ours?” asks the blonde girl outside in the parking lot. “Well, you boys follow us.”
Sam and Toby lurch after the white Bronco. They park outside a rundown duplex next to a motel and an elevated portion of the highway.
“I’m Tony,” says the goofy guy before they head inside.
Tony proudly shows them his 300-gallon saltwater tanks alive with corals, anemones and fish. He adds, “They’re stunned with a dilution of cyanide and harvested from the reefs of the Philippines or Australia or Egypt.”
That’s not enough for Tony, resident show-off.
“Come upstairs,” he says.
Toby stares at the sodium lights and breathes the exhaust of the NO2 canister as Tony explains the advantages and perils of cloning until he interrupts himself to call his dog, a big purple vizsla he assures them, until he realizes that his dog’s missing, and it seems the impromptu party’s headed to a halt.
Sam and Toby are about to nod off from cumulative effect of fish and ganja, but Tony’s distress about his lost dog is so palpable they have to pitch in. Once Tony remembers to check the backyard, everything’s resolved.
“How about some barbequed steaks to celebrate,” he suggests to the two lumps.
“You can set your hand on fire and because of the vapor your hand doesn’t burn,” Sam nonchalantly declares having located the lighter fluid, his hand roasting and flaming like a firecracker.
Everyone is soon trying Sam’s pyromaniac trick and Tony has the bright idea to light the beef on fire in the same manner until he realizes that it is not going to taste very appetizing like that. Neither is his hand.
People arrive from the darkness, plain or ostentatious in style, spicy or mellow in mood, maybe even an altruist who sacrifices his credit card as collateral for the keg and tap so everyone can collect near the good liquid Feng Shui packed in ice in a PVC trashcan. They gab on about skated pools, psychedelic bands, the skinny-dipping sinkhole, the best ribs, fucking in space, the choices between speed, black tar, horse tranquilizers or dropping acid in your eye from this excellent little bottle?
The fuel-flavored beef runs out and the drugs and alcohol soak in. A cassette tape of Joy Division auto-reverses into the Cult. Tony warns everyone that his vizsla is not to be eaten but a fish is okay. Tony extracts a beautiful grouper from one of his tanks; he proudly grills it. They’re too lashed to stop him. Its smell blackens the backyard already stinking of herb and beer. People settle on the skateboard ramp that occupies one part of the muddy yard. The ramp affords an excellent view of the neighboring motel and a few spectators have a grand time watching a Hispanic couple drilling one another in one of the dirty rooms and climaxing, not until the first light fills the sky and keg runs dry. Sam’s left to whatever quick romance he’s engineering on top of the skateboard ramp, spurred on by the Hispanic couple that have returned to their passionate labor, before he too must join morning's soggy heat.
Each afternoon Wolfgang strides into La Naranja under the pretext of ogling the waitresses like any other male, but he’s really interested in the beer and tequila that he tips up to his pug-like face. The chef’s costume—starched white jacket with Wolfgang embroidered on the lapel, black and white hound’s-tooth pants, clogs—adds a touch of sophistication Wolfgang might not necessarily have. He doesn’t see anything wrong with adding to his plastic cup of tobacco spit at his elbow when he offers Toby a job at the Cosmopolitan Club.
Wolfgang comes often enough to remind Dexter that Toby’s leaving La Naranja. However, Toby doesn’t want to leave La Naranja that fast, it having supplied him with a friend (Sam), pussy (his turn with Rachel and the hostess), alcohol (Greg’s margaritas) and tips (tax-free money). Wolfgang gives him two weeks to wrap up.
Toby hesitantly accepts Wolfgang’s offer to work afternoons and weekends at the Cosmopolitan Club located in two floors of a moderate skyscraper. Floor twelve is the health club; floor thirteen is the upscale cafeteria and party zone. An aerobics class is booming downstairs and shaking the kitchen tiles.
Wolfgang plunks into the chair in his office. Like all good executive chefs he does not really work in the kitchen. He administers from his office—he faxes orders for stock, signs the receipts from the food distributor, researches recipes for a wine tasting or wedding. He only steps into the kitchen in order to fuck with everyone, mainly Craig the sous-chef, his white proxy who rules over the Mexicans doing the rest of the labor. Wolfgang’s a tyrant when the shortcut to béarnaise does not pan out.
As Toby punches in his timecard he catches Craig finishing an air guitar solo to a skuzzy ballad. He, too, remorselessly prefers the greats of rock. Today, Craig’s arguing with Jim, the floor manager, if Pete Seiger is not better than Leonard Skynyrd or if the Stones are better than Led Zeppelin. Neither Jim nor Craig knows that they are all from England.
The Cosmopolitan’s a plain, dry lemon, but slowly Toby’s responsibilities expand under the supervision of Juan and Jose who speak to him in a strange mix of dual languages: marking meat on the grill, piping out Duchess potatoes so they can be chucked in the ovens, prepping garnishes, draining the stock pot, cutting crudités, reducing sauces, icing down seafood, sweeping up the office, warning the waiters to keep out of the walk-ins, flipping omelets out in the dining room for the Easter weekend breakfast buffet, rolling salmon roulades, decorating goose liver canapés, skinning fifty beef tenderloins, deboning four hundred chickens that come in a two wet boxes, shucking sacks of oysters. All the tasks add up in a view vital moments when the chefs plate out the meal. Sometimes Toby is in charge of the steamed asparagus in the whisky orange sauce. Sometimes he just does the decoration with the edible flowers. Sometimes he’s the one to drip the sauce on the edge of the plate.
Against his better instincts, Toby takes on the assignment of pastry chef. Toby clinches the job when he mistakenly bakes the inaugural cheesecakes not with eggs but yogurt, the mushy cheesecakes collapsing from the forms as the dinner party of twenty-five commences, table-side Caesar dressing and Zinfandel poured by Marcus, piqued and nasty from snorting too much cocaine with his wife during his split shift. While the party eats tenderloin with wild mushroom demi-glace, Toby whips the baked remains into a mousse, pipes them into glasses with raspberries and Frangelica whipped cream in the interim. Wolfgang thinks it’s not so bad, taking a break from encouraging Marcus, generous with the booze, to re-air the homemade porno of his overly tan body conjoining with that of his skanky wife filmed by Marcus’s half-brother, Terry, head waiter with the Fawcett-like hairdo and dong centered in his Armani pants, who waters the stock in the bar. Either brother will suck a finger for a hundred dollar tip.
Most of the members are Toby's enemy: lawyers, politicians, doctors, lobbyists and brass keen to have their wedding receptions and Christmas parties at the swanky, prestige-laden club—key word for incompetence and bogusness. The Cosmopolitan Club is but one part of an international corporate cartel of clubs, spas and golf courses. Managers and executive chefs revolve through the system and tend to the logistics of feeding legions of the enemy. Toby needs to peel 5,000 shrimp for the Freeport McMoRan party where they will toast just how well they have gutted the aboriginal population of Papua New Guinea in exploring for oil.
The Mexicans are employed within this matrix for little money and a five-day paid vacation. Juan and Jose hold knife-sharpening contests and alternately talk about hookers, beer, baseball, pick-up trucks, police, the INS, Cesar Chavez, Guadalajara and family in the course of prepping, searing, chopping, dicing and mixing whatever is required for the daily lunch buffet the members come for. The busboys are shooting up or smoking crack in the bathrooms. The consequences of Senor Sol’s arrest for driving while intoxicated again is a chronic shortage of pots and dishes. Toby makes a very poor dishwasher.
But the Mexicans aren’t having problems adapting, especially when an argument is raging in the kitchen between Angus, maitre d’, HIV-positive and very queeny, with burned-out Craig about the demerits of Ronald Reagan and the invisible posse of devils beneath him.
What can Juan and Jose contribute with their head’s down, constantly working the knives, acutely listening? They’re already buying themselves houses and pick-up trucks. Craig can’t admit that this is a sign of progress.
Like Wolfgang, Craig adores conflict and is soon razzing the hirsute Israeli health club manager who denies doing the coke-freak catering manager who trembles and rubs her nose on a second-to-second basis when she appears in the galley kitchen hunting for a cookie. Craig hassles Juan and Jose to not ride the clock and punch out, lunch’s over.
He chides everyone for not liking his overdone steamship of beef. He threatens to stab the manager, Jim, over his complaint that the chanterelles sauce is scorched. He has a particularly good time with any target who appears to be gay like Angus and shouts as many slurs and oaths as he can. It’s a mistake to sympathize or argue for diversity.
The forum of experience Toby imagines is not quite what Craig might consider kosher. Can Craig or the others understand what a person can be and discover just how strong he wants him or her to be? He’s not like Toby who doesn’t have any borders, a dot without any edges. Toby moves from girlfriend to girlfriend to an invitation to do it with them all; he tries out what it means to swing and films it; he discovers how many times he can snort cocaine and not explode; he tastes his piss or semen or shit; he calibrates what are the limits to his emotions and just what he is capable of when it comes to games of love and hate. His revenge on the Cosmo for its conservative views consists of awarding himself carte blanche to loot the premises.
His flowchart blinks and sounds with tasks as he bakes the cakes, cools them, slices them into layers, cooks the Italian mousse, guts cherries and keeps the mixer running with activities with egg, sugar, flour and cream. His spatula lifts the last streaks of batter from the bowl; he updates the flowchart. Toby’s sweet-swollen face reflects in the doors of the convection oven. Domes of sugar and flour and eggs are reacting. The forms pop; the disks cool; assembly is to come later, at the penultimate moment before the commencement of Lobster Night. The rolling pin grunts over the peeling marzipan. Toby’s job is to do everything.
The lobsters have arrived via courier for the big night and Toby resembles a clown juggling proportions and formulas. Shaved dough mixed with raisin, prune, walnut layers and meringue is addenda to lemon curd, whisky ganache, groggy genoese, peach and blueberry cobbler, walnut-pistachio torte and strawberry diplomat. Mint is stuck to his palms and teeth. Yeast eats the sugar residue from his hands when he attends to the dinner rolls. The funnel fills with a lather of cream, the pipe gushes and traces thorny roses. Metal bowls multiply on stainless tables, warmed or chilled as required, and the batters are poured. The oven purrs. Cream filling is adjusted taste by taste. Hot sugar whips into an Italian meringue. Toby delivers a few crude glances at the waitresses trolling through the kitchen for a scrap of something when he takes a break.
Chocolate dust melts on his knuckles. He cleans and arranges for assembly and makes space on the refrigerator racks for the cakes to come. The layers come with a steady, forceful twirl and sliver of the wrist, disks of fresh cake, morsels of wet sugar delight folded by the steady atomic bulb of the mixer. Jose assists with cutting with a quiver of knives in a bain marie of hot water and a supply of towels.
The first lobsters, blue and black and red and spiny in their Styrofoam crates, are crying in the mattress-sized brassier turned into a lobster kettle for the night. Juan is happily cracking the first beast, smearing it with clarified butter and lemon when you wheel out the dessert. The steam trays of boiled lobsters are coming; the members in the queue cheer for tails, claws and heads. All four dining rooms on floor thirteen are reserved. The kitchen has just made it, and this is only the start of the four-hour lobster fest.
Toby has a moment to chug a beer distributed by Marcus. The hirsute Israeli health club manager who misses a bit of gore from Zion has brought the catering manager on a date and her nose’s bleeding. She’s not going to eat any lobster. The lawyers and doctors are tucked behind their bibs, chucking claws and chitin into paper buckets, snapping the arthropods in half, stirring brains and gills and offal; their kids are too horrified by the slices of beef, bone and shell.
The guests make regular checks to the powder room cum vomitorium. Toby’s desserts are sweating and melting, certainly more lopsided than they were an hour ago, but the production is working. Someone’s child has inevitably started the cobbler. No one is leaving with an empty stomach for $19.95. More lobsters are boiling in the brassier. There are five more crates to go. A tiny Asian woman eats eight of them. Craig and Wolfgang are schmoozing at the podium with a well-lubricated member speaking in a deep twang that indicates he is far from benign. Juan or Jose alerts Toby that the chocolate fudge walnut cake is the first to need replacing. Senor Sol has clogged the drains with lobsters, so a clean dish or plate or glass is a problem, and it’s Craig who receives a verbal tonguing from Angus about flunking Lobster Night.
Wolfgang notes the arrival of a prominent gubernatorial candidate, for what better opportunity than Lobster Night to press his fellow friends, contributors and supporters than within the bounds of the Cosmo when the election is near? His security detail clears a path through reception and he glad-hands his way through the dining room, lisping, barely able to form more than a compulsory “How are yah?” He slaps the sweaty backs of the diners who gulp down the crustaceans and rush to offer a hand with the words, “You gonna win, George.” George does not turn down Karl or Ken’s buttery lawyer-like palm that he has certainly shook more than once. Lobster night is just one stop in the dynasty.
Toby hides out in the kitchen and slices more desserts. Now they are properly cool and right for serving. The mood in the kitchen has calmed. Two crates remain. Craig makes the decision to transfer the lobsters to two plastic tubs that Toby fills with water and drags into the freezer after returning from a session on the veranda next to the AC. They have been working for sixteen hours. Juan and Jose are breaking down some of the kitchen in tribute to Craig’s mantra, “A happy kitchen is a clean kitchen.”
The hose is out and all the refrigerators are heaved away from the walls. The filters are pulled out of the ducts. Toby returns to the dining room with a trolley of cakes, quickly dismembered and covered with drool, and then assists serving the last of the lobsters. Anything’s better than cleaning the kitchen, even consorting with the enemy.
The security detail guides the politician to the lobster serving area. Then it hits him. This is George Walker Bush, his square raptor-like head swallowed by a vast white cowboy hat. He grins at the beast from Maine. Toby realizes that he has been too complacent: the enemy is closing in. It’s not only George but all of the cronies spread though the dining rooms. He has been paying far too much attention to his secure domain of pastry and the monster has spawned in Toby’s batter. He glares into George’s beady hollow eyes that mark him out as he hands over the verdict of boiled beast.
“Somethin’ wrong, boy?” George asks, his breath sticky and pungent like crude, and Toby cannot even stammer a reply.
From that moment with George, Toby’s ambivalent and incorrigible. For a moment he has understood everything, and it’s devastating. His tone changes; his once-quelled anger rises to the surface. He spits on cars and people in the street as an expression of his disproval. He demagnetizes his mind and trashes the data of what he had ever been. His borderless dot consolidates and hardens as he tries to manufacture a magic ticket, a paper talisman that will allow him passage.
Up next: Hellalula
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