Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

I don’t know why any of us like or dislike people based on so little. Why I might love Chef as zealously as a supplicant loves a god, why Ollie would be my friend and Simon my enemy when they were both small-hearted, dangerous men. Why I felt like Jeanine was an intruder on a world I had barely entered, glimpsed through a doorway, seen through the steam of a high-pressure hose.

On a quieter Thursday night, before the quiet nights started to worry the management, Chef asked if I would come work for him full-time after I graduated. I told him what I planned to do — maybe culinary school, maybe Montreal with Ollie. He objected to the first option. “Nah, nah. Don’t do that. You’ll have debt up to your ass and no one will respect you any more than they did before. You gotta pay your dues.”

He yelled his life story at me from a distance, turning steaks for the broiler cook. At the end of the night, the arm he used to hold the tongs would be completely smooth, all the hair burned off.

Chef started in the dish pit when he was thirteen. At sixteen, he hitchhiked through the farmlands of southern Quebec, offering to cook and work the fields in exchange for food and a bed. He went to Europe without a visa and hopped from one cook job to another, learning that most countries don’t refrigerate eggs and will scoop ants from the cooking oil and flies from the red-wine silo with a pool skimmer. He stayed in Budapest the longest because of a girl. She worked as both a bank manager and a nude model — he described the process of her undoing the buttons of her double-breasted suit at great length while the broiler cook and the two hot-appetizer cooks hollered — and then died in a car accident, her red Citroën AX crushed like a ladybug by a delivery truck. The girl’s mother came and shooed Chef out of the apartment they’d shared, and he came home to Canada.

“To Fort Michel,” Simon chimed in, his painful contralto appropriate for once.

No, there were a lot of years in between, so his dead Hungarian love had had time to become just another flicker in an erotic slideshow. There were a lot of kitchens before he was a head chef, and many more before the investors in this restaurant asked him to lead their new property. Culinary school was not a shortcut to Chef’s life.

“But Montreal,” he said, abruptly turning back to me, though I hadn’t spoken in nearly half an hour. “You should definitely go. It’s like… Paris, only lamer. Great food, good wine, beautiful women, and no one sleeps.”

“My friend said the same thing.” But when Chef said something, it carried more weight. I had discounted culinary school in an instant.

“I fucked a guy in Montreal.” He plated a steak that had been resting, the juices flowing back to its center, and passed it to Simon. Simon fumbled for the plate. He was behind on the vegetables that were supposed to go with it, and a hard look passed between them.

The expeditor tapped his fingers on the pass window, glowering at the servers about the finished meals that were waiting there. “You tell this story all the time.”

“Wong hasn’t heard it,” Chef said. He leaned over and put a cover over one of Simon’s pans. “Speed it up, Squeaky.”

“Tell me,” I called feebly. The dish pit was larger than the rest of the stations, at the very end of the line, hidden in a web of hoses and pipes. Standing there made me feel disconnected.

“Not that much to tell. I met a girl, I fucked her, and she turned out to be a he.”

Simon had had enough of being humiliated for rock-hard carrots and green beans. “Okay, wait just a minute. How the fuck does that happen? How did you not know?”

Chef shrugged. He watched the blood and clear juices beading up on the slab of meat, knowing the color inside as clearly as if he had cut into it. “She was gorgeous. I was wasted.”

“No. I want more details than that.” Part of me was glad that Simon was pursuing this line of questioning. “How exactly did you manage to start fucking him without noticing that he didn’t have a cunt? ”

“We went to her place. She went into the bathroom and came out in this short, sexy kimono thing.” Chef made a round shape in the air with his tongs that could have meant any number of things. “I was so drunk I could barely stand. She lay down on the bed on her stomach, pulled her kimono up, and told me to fuck her in the ass.”

“Her hairy man ass,” Simon said.

“Nope. Smooth as a baby’s. Greased up. Like perfect, firm pillows and round as peaches.”

“Squats,” I offered. The broiler guy laughed.

“And then what?” Simon pressed. He lifted the lid of the pan, slid the vegetables onto the plate, and passed the dish to the expeditor behind him.

“If they complain that the steak is cold, comp their drinks,” Chef said. The expeditor nodded, wiping the edge of the plate with a cloth. “And then I fucked her, Squeaky. What do you think?”

“And he leaped up afterward and waved his cock in your face,” Simon guessed. He grabbed his crotch. “‘Ha-ha! Gotcha!’”

“No, she rolled over to yell at me for getting cum on her kimono, and I realized something was off.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

Chef’s muscular shoulders rolled under his jacket as he put more steaks and chicken breasts on the grill. The alcohol in the marinade dripped off and flared up on the coals. “What do you mean? Nothing to do. A good fuck’s a good fuck. Didn’t change that.”

We went on chopping, frying, washing, stirring, but for a few moments, no one spoke, absorbing Chef’s words: A good fuck’s a good fuck. Simon took a peeled clove of garlic from his station and whacked the side of a knife against it, crushing it, then threw it into a pan. “I would’ve cut his fucking balls off,” he said. He smacked another clove. “Wants to be a woman that bad, enough to trick normal, God-fearing, pussy-loving men into having sex with him — I’d fucking help him out.”

Unrattled, Chef said, “Just focus on my side dishes, Squeaky.”

One morning, a Saturday, I awoke with a fever. For a couple of years in my teens, I sometimes got fevers, with no other symptoms, that lasted a day and a half — thirty-six hours, like clockwork. My mother said it was related to growing; my father said it was a sign of weakness, of a delicate constitution. Some people, he said, mostly women, got sick whenever they were needed, when there was work to be done — vague, mild illnesses that let them continue to do things they enjoyed, like lying under fresh, cool sheets and complaining. “Sick in their heads,” he said.

In the afternoon that Saturday, I called into work and told the waitress who answered the phone that I wasn’t coming in. She passed the phone off to Chef. My father walked into the hallway. When he saw that I was on the phone, he came and stood stonily nearby. Chef shouted over the clamor in the kitchen, so my father was able to hear both ends of the conversation.

“We need you, Wong.”

“Sorry, Chef. I’m really sick.”

“Well, get better, kid. Hope you’ll be in tomorrow.”

I hung up. I shivered as I padded back to bed, my father following close behind. The hot, dizzying exhaustion let me ignore him as I crawled under the covers. I would normally have stood straight and waited for him to speak.

The curtains were closed, but the bright afternoon leaked in, murky and mustard-colored. My father appeared as a dusty shadow. “Why aren’t you going to work?”

“Because I’m sleeping,” I murmured. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying.

“Have you ever seen me miss work?”

I didn’t answer. The bed felt good. Firm but lulling, like strong arms lifting my back.