*
My body pulses in time with my heart as soon as I lay in the shadows of my room, covering my like a heavy blanket. Most nights now I am too exhausted to even fold down the comforter or sweep the mound of pillows off the bed with my arm.
I know I need a thicker skin, a skin that is nearly impenetrable. Skin like hide, tough and sustainable to lashes and beatings. Pig, horse, cow, animals of the farm, poked and prodded, whipped to be controlled.
Wikipedia
Pig (also know as Swine)
“Despite its reputation for gluttony the swine is actually a social and intelligent animal.”
*
His hands are rough but warm, like a leather interior of a car sitting in the sun. I have one resting in my palm, our wrists touching pulse points. Maybe it was just an excuse to touch him, or maybe I wanted to see what the hands of someone who used them so often felt like. The muscles resting just below that slight layer of skin are taught like rubber bands, little nodules hidden, wedged between the striations, I could imagine. I worked the pad of my thumb into the circumference of his hand and tried not to explore the pattern of scares and cuts there.
“Jesus, Dan you have some serious calluses going on there,” running my thumb over the hardened patch of skin just below his ring and pinky fingers.
“Yeah man I know.” I half expected him to pull his hand away but he let me keep hold.
“Dave, you get your knife callus yet?” Dan pulls his hand closer to his face to inspect his battle scars, my hand loses grip and his knuckles slip past my fingertips, raw and scathed from hours over flame and waves of heat from opening and closing oven doors.
*
“Yeah? So what’s your kryptonite?” He cocks his head to the left for a minute, as if he’s listening for the answer from the next room or some unknown presence.
“Hmm…damn, I don’t really know man.”
“Oh come on, there has to be something. You aren’t a superstar as much as you may think you are.”
“Sassy much?” he looks at me briefly as if he’s thinking about smiling but doesn’t. “Yeah I guess terrines. I hate that shit.”
I want him to pick up the electric guitar that lies beside him like a sleeping lover. The next day he will show me a photo on his phone, of the collection of guitars hanging on his wall. He will ask if it looks familiar, in front of the whole kitchen staff and I will say yeah, your basement. The guys will all snicker into their plates of curry and rice.
My father has a way with his hands. His large, deceivingly nimble fingers, the way his surgeons grip handles tools. Dan’s hands tinker and sashay the way they do on his guitar. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised but the array of electric guitars on his wall makes the muscles in my legs tighten and twitch.
*
Filet m/ wp/ mush/oysters
Tomato sal/ lob.
Chop sal no onion
Four Sisters
I envy Ashley who can make notes in her head where I take pen to paper.
*
“Brad, are your ears burning?” The polishing rag makes my hands soggy.
“Huh? I know somethin's burning. Look at all this smoke!” The apple wood charcoal and wood chips smolder beneath the grate of the grill where the slabs of meat sit smoking and cooking with scents of pork and cow juices seeping upward in curls of haze. The kitchen has a cloudy aura to it.
“Brad we were talking about you.”
“Yeah what about?"
“I was saying how my new tattoo is going to be your name on my shoulder because you a meat grilling god machine.” He laughs and uses his wrist to scratches at his red smattering of whiskers. The color of his hair seems to match the tint of the meat the butchers.
Blade
Brisket
Chuck
Fillet
Flank
Fore rib
Leg
Neck
Rump
Shank
Shin
Silverside
Sirloin
Thick rib
Thin rib
Topside
It’s the ABC’s of meat, of the slaughter, of the grilling and chewing and savoring.
“I’m serious. You cook meat perfectly, flawlessly with a consistency I’ve never seen before and that I probably won’t ever see again.” Brad hacks into a piece of porterhouse and smiles, hold his gaze and pauses to not and say thank you. I know he is sincere; his nod is brief but consoling. He is humble.
The bones of the short rib protrudes in bowed ivory like a rainbow, marbled layer upon layer of meat red like Brad’s his cheeks and nose. When I watch him hack into that thick hunk of pork I wonder what its like, using your own body against the grain of another animal’s. Lacerating the layers of muscle, fat, tendons, the blade of the cleaver slashing through easily in some places, others getting stuck at a stubborn piece of tendon sweat gathering on your brow from the blows.
*
“Dan…what part of her would you eat?” The lower half of my body is wrapped in a wrinkled comforter. Dan places one hand on my ankle and the other on my thigh just above my knee.
“All of this dude, all of this. The shank, most muscular part, most flavor.” Dave nods in agreement and I’m blushing
His fingers maneuvered my own over the bass guitar’s strings earlier. He’s hard to read, hints flickering a crossed his face for milliseconds before flitting out. I played three notes, he played times infinity, I kept the beat and his fingers plucked and fluttered over the neck and strings like I wish they would down my spine. His touch is quick and hesitant, as if he’s afraid to be burned if he even grazes any part of himself against me. He plays with fire for a living but steers clear of all parts of me.
*
They scrub down the kitchen, suds slopping over the stainless steel counters, the same color of my nails.
The floor is soaked, puddled in a faux orange zest scent, coating the tiled floor in bubbles. I reach down to the pocket of my apron for a pen to close out my last tab but for the third night in a row they have somehow disappeared. I started with 5 brand new Zebras and am now left with zero. Travis pushes his way through the stainless steel doors and I notice 3 identical pens are tucked neatly into the front of pocket of his jeans. But I don’t say anything.
*
The night hovers just above the brevity of mid afternoon. 3-4 PM sits in its own fermentation, waiting for someone to add spice to it, or fleur de self, give it another layer of flavor and punch that only the evening can taste like.
I sliced a chunk out of the tip of my thumb. It was Monday, I had no tables. I sliced bread until the serrated edge like razors found my skin and mistook it for the raw crust of multigrain. My blood came is increasing drips of red. Dotting the white cutting board, crumbs pooling with the red itself. I saw the flap of skin, the running of blood before the pain, just stared for a moment, aware of my body’s response to injury, the release of elements from inside of me, offered to the open air.
Then pain coming instantly, a heartbeat in my fingertip.
*
I am cold when I am not in the kitchen, goose bumps until the heat of a rush comes.
Part of me wonders if I let the knife slip, to give myself a wound, a remembrance of this place and time, a scar to catch a glimpse of when I’m writing of driving or perhaps in the wake of a morning that has left me aching and worn. I’ll look at that scar, put it to my teeth and pause there to bite the discolored, hatched skin
*
His calluses are like scars, pieces of warped skin from where the handle of the knife slipped and rubbed incessantly during each maneuver. Hours of rapid fire mincing, his muscles tensing into steel like contractions, Japanese steel, the kind his knife is whittled from. He opens the knife case, unrolls it like a carpet, his tools placed discretely in proper holsters, different gradations like an amp or seismograph. He removes each one, runs his thumb slowly a crossed the blade to the tip and when I watch him sharpen the steel I wonder about the day he bought those knives. Maybe he wandered up and down the isles, shelves and such glistening with Japanese steel, angels and points in perfect lines and he’d test each one, running his thumb down the blade like I imagine he would over the line of my body or full bottom lip before he devours me.
*
The back of my throat burns from trying to hold in frustration through tears, I pray to some higher power that the dampness rapidly pooling in my eyes won’t spill over and stain my cheeks with black lines. Movements and actions don’t connect; I’m reaching for silverware I don’t need and scrambling for the expo. screen which looks like a jumble of neon nonsense. Laura steps up beside me to grab a marking plate. I can feel her pause in her usual mechanical motions.
“What’s wrong, boo?” Her gentle hand settles onto my wrist, halting the jerky movements brought on by the customer who just can’t be pleased.
*
Your hands are cracked around the edges, on the pads of your fingers, in white lines, like dusty strands of hair left in a corner. Pink fingers with scathed patches of skin. You hate how they feel, thirsty for sweat or oil. Something to penetrate those dried up lines like tiny parched tributaries, skin that feels as if your outgrowing it, stretching over the frame of your body, you can nearly hear it creek when you clench your fists, wrap your fingers around large plates, rubbing and burnishing silverware until its luster is unhindered of fingerprints and watermarks.
It tightens until you can nearly feel it rip in the thinnest places, like at the place where your knuckles join and bend, you have expected to see exposed bone soon.
Water from kitchen faucets is deceptive. You flash your hands quickly there to rinse excess butter or foodstuff or ketchup and the temporary dampness reminds you of a burst of cool air on a humid, sticky afternoon.
But the relief vanishes.
Moments later, your hands even more chapped than before. The heat from the large porcelain plates, the heat lamps at the runner station sip and suckles ever last drop of moisture from your palm to fingertips. Yet passing by a window or glass floor you see your face, sheen with a mist of its own oil and sweat. You are perplexed, and rub your hands together, hoping they do not spark.
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