An exercise in quick, informal personal sketches. I’ve changed names out of respect for the real folks. Enjoy!
One of the strongest work ethics in the kitchen belongs to Susie. She’s 57 and extremely open–at volume–about everything. Not just rough around the edges, but edgy through and through. She’s in another round of recovery from lifelong substance abuse which she traces back to the use of Perigoric at 3 weeks old. She was given opiates throughout childhood and entered adolescence as a fully fledged addict and has struggled ever since. She was a cheerleader in high school until she got kicked off the squad for smoking pot with the basketball team. (No basketball players were punished, of course.) Needless to say, she’s had a tough life, one which has included 2 prison stints and several periods of homelessness. She relates stories with casual ease, but also with chilling detail: like when she was working odd jobs, cleaning constructions sites for $20 a day, and someone stole her $20. She picked up a sledge hammer and threatened the thief even though she knew she’d never be able to swing that hammer. She got her money back and was able to get her fix. Her fix, but not her food. Her stories are grim and bracing. This job has helped her get out of a shelter and set up her own apartment and buy a reliable used car.
Her second stint in prison was due to a relapse on heroin provoked by a back operation: her doctor wouldn’t prescribe pain meds due to her drug history. The pain became unbearable so she called up an old dealer and got some H to help her with her pain—which led to her reincarceration. She reels off stories like it ain’t no thing: being a sex worker when necessary; being part of a trafficking ring; hiding various things in multiple orifices; running across the frozen Ohio River to evade the cops. She plays her music loud and practices her visual arts so that she can drown out the messages in her head. She’s clean and coping and admirable and self-deprecating in an endearing way. Her jokes are rough, her language rougher, and yet she is thoroughly charming in her obscenities. It’s all an art form, after all.
We’ve gotten really close as workmates: she’s kind of picked me as her backup, her street buddy, helping her get through the insanity of this kitchen. As she texted me one day, she and I were brought up with a completely different set of values, including work ethic. So yeah, when compared to the 20-somethings and flojos in the kitchen, she and I are a team. We were the main force behind the (really gross) brunch that the coop offers up on weekends. The brunch hot bar is way too much work for 2 people, with lots of managerial stuff being pushed downward onto us. She rebels through swearing; I rebelled by transferring out of the kitchen. She is continually being dumped on and ridiculed and harassed, and I give her credit every day for how far she’s come. Not many others do. It’s just, “Oh, that Susie.”
And her music, I should mention the music she plays here in the kitchen. She has a Bluetooth speaker which is frequently at tremor-inducing volume. She plays music off of Youtube, streaming a few playlists other folks have put together. Do I really need to hear Ballroom Blitz 4 times on a Saturday? Or Everybody Dance Now, by C&C Music Factory? Truly, I’ve come to appreciate the complexity of the production and ponder lines such as “I’m just a squirrel, trying to get a nut…” but I don’t need to ponder it a dozen times a day.
She absolutely loves, adores, worships AC/DC. Maybe I can dig a little Bon Scott, but Brian Johnson’s tonsil-shredding really does grate after a couple of verses. He sounds like Elmo with a 4-pack-a-day habit. And then there are John Fogerty’s meat-grinder vocals: I’ve heard Up Around the Bend and Born on the Bayou enough to do me a lifetime. The same for Steely Dan’s Do It Again. Tesla’s What You Give, perhaps the quintessential power-ballad—that’s not a compliment—comes round the bend way too many times.
Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It seems to be her theme song. She laughs deliriously as it plays, shouting along “push it real good!” She delights in provoking, and is good at it. But the song selection does wear over time. Especially Tom Petty’s You Don’t Know How it Feels and Manfred Mann’s version of Blinded by the Light. Ditto Kung Fu Fighting, Rubber Band Man, or Christina Aguilera’s version of Lady Marmalade. As I write this, I know that I’ll be hearing them all again tomorrow as I do the morning bake.
Music aside, when it’s all stacked up, she’s one of my favorite coworkers in the kitchen. She’s real and shoots straight. But you might want to duck now and then.
My primary bakery colleague is Evie. She’s about 28 or so, as best I can clue in from things she’s said. I guess that she’s about 5’7”, but she clears me by a few inches due to her (vegan) Doc Martens. She’s slender, so much so that she once remarked that she can’t give blood because her BMI is too low. She favors black attire (and therefore immediately garnered my respect) except for her bandana du jour, pink sparkly fingernails, and white socks. She might be in black skinny jeans or an ankle-length skirt, but all come from thrift shops. During the winter, she often wore knee-length button-up sweaters. Her mask is frequently black, often cheetah print.
Contrasting with the black clothing is her hair: ostensibly blonde but with frequently changing color splashes: My Little Pony pink or Frozen blue, or some other confection-inspired hue. She is the resident hair-color expert, and eagerly hands out advice to anyone who asks about a particular color, method, or salon. She does her own hair herself, thank you.
She is very fair-skinned, and this is important for the visual composite, for when she puts on vinyl foodservice gloves it appears as though she is wearing white lab gloves.
Now, some people, when they roll a scoop of cookie dough between their hands, do so in a horizontal fashion with their thumbs slightly akimbo, if you will, and move vigorously to soften the dough for flattening. That would be me, for example…gotta lot of work to do! Gotta roll these cookies and get them in the oven!
Evie, however, is straight up vertical. She rolls with a deliberate larghetto rhythm, hands nearly touching, one ebbing while the other flows. So, to put it all together: black clothing from the neck down, splash of color spilling from her bandana, knee-length sweater which resembles a lab coat, and those white scientific gloves moving slowly and mysteriously against one another. When rolling cookie dough, some of us look goofy. Not Evie, that’s not her style. She looks like she’s hatching another plan for world domination.
Even though she might roll the cookies slow, she is quick and somehow runs [Zen] circles around me. I am usually amazed at how much work we’ve done at the end of a shift. I am aware of what I’ve done, but where did all this other stuff come from?
We fell in pretty quickly to the instant improv of kitchen choreography: I know she needs something on my undershelf, I smoothly step to my left; she takes the things she needs, I step back right. We hardly ever have to say, “excuse me, I need x…” We just have the telepathy between us. It’s nice when that happens, and rare that it happens so quickly.
We interlace our work effortlessly: I might use the butcher-block table first to work up a bread dough, then yield to her so she can make some scones. I take it back for shaping baguette, pita, or focaccia, then she steps in to make up croissants. Most of this occurs without us making a detailed plan or chart. We touch base in the morning on what we need, then get our work done efficiently.
She studied dance. I’ve been in a lot of bands. The result is that we work together well as a team, pull our own weight, and care about the outcome. We brainstorm on problems, look for good solutions, not just our own solutions, and try to always improve. We work ahead when we can.
So yeah, she’s an overachiever, not unlike myself on a good day. There aren’t many people in the kitchen who care about what they are doing, so working with her on 3 of my 5 days has been really serendipitous.
She has a habit of getting flour all down the front of her apron and into her boots, which she wears loosely-laced and open at the top. I asked her once how she keeps her boots so clean and shiny, like does she go home and wash them nightly. The answer: yes. Once she dropped an institutional tub of baking powder on the floor. As the dust settled, she had powder up her sweater, down her boots, and all over the tile floor. I grabbed the broom while she ran to the hand sink to wipe down her Doc Martens.
She’s always late: we’re scheduled to be in at 6am, but she shows up around 7, 7:30, maybe 8. I consider this an asset, for it gives me a chance to get some bread work done. On the other end of the shift, she usually leaves abruptly. When the work runs out and there is no more cleaning to do, she’s outta there. She loathes boredom and inactivity. I hear her on that.
She’s very quiet even when she speaks up. When getting things out of the oven, she follows protocol and calls out “hot!” But you can only hear her if you’re standing next to her. In fact, the only time Susie is quiet is when she’s imitating Evie getting something out of the oven. Evie and Susie do talk at times, on topics such as Goodwill and hair color (Susie’s has been blue, purple, pink, and other colors in the short time I’ve been here). I once overheard Evie and a retail clerk get positively giggly over stickers.
Now, I should go back and change all that to past tense, for Evie left two weeks ago.
Her experience with Shannon (deli ops manager) has been frustrating, even demoralizing. After being passed over for shift lead once, she decided not to go for it when the position opened up again. She resigned and worked out her two weeks, then started her new job: cake decorator at a Lexington ice cream franchise. I learned a couple of days ago that that gig work out, and she’s now a cashier at Kroger. So much talent going to waste!
Shannon has shuffled the schedule around a little, and now I am solo on 3 days and I work with Norma on 2 days. She was previously on evenings so we only knew each other in passing. Having worked a few shifts together now, I really, really value my solo shifts. She can’t do simple math: she frequently asks me what 24+8 is. How many cups in a quart? Is corn meal the same as corn starch? Do I think she should do x or y first? I’ve gone from working with a somewhat gifted and charmingly eccentric baker to tending a coworker who can’t tell if muffin batter is mixed properly: she thinks it’s done when the oil is pooling up on top.
In the meantime, Susie’s playlist has expanded ever so slightly. Tell Me Something Good. Ventura Highway.N.B. Some Kind of Wonderful. One Way or Another. Barracuda and Magic Man. Come Out & Play by The Offspring, not Billie Eilish or Twisted Sister. Banana Boat Song and Senora, and for the latter of which I hope Belafonte gets due recompense someday. Susie fully realizes and relishes the perverseness of playing Come On Eileen back-to-back with Mama Told Me Not to Come.
I have thought about making requests to get her out of her same old playlists, but I dread the possibility of her liking Kick Out the Jams so much that I hear it 3 or 4 times a day. She’d probably identify so closely with Roky Erickson that I’d be tired of him in a week. So I keep the ones I like to myself and let Susie be Susie.
N.B. “Chewin’ on a piece of grass/walkin’ down the road” ranks right up there with “nibblin’ on sponge cake/watchin’ the sun bake” and “suckin’ on a chili dog/outside the Tastee Freez” as motivational, oral-fixation song starters. Which is quite likely the reason Susie loves these songs.