Lexi and Lorraine were two of the things that were festering. Lexi was getting more and more discouraged by Drenovis. While Tommy would give her good shifts and do his best to make sure she could make money, he could not stop Drenovis from harassing her. Drenovis bothered her every chance he could get. He picked on everything about her beginning with her uniform choices. Eventually she settled into black pants and a white blouse which was never see-through and always buttoned to near the collar so she did not show cleavage. Even on the days that Drenovis was not there, he was there for Lexi because no one knew when he might show up. She was ever conscious of the fact that at any moment on any given shift the fat, greasy, slimy Drenovis might walk through the door. Worse, as he often did, he might sit himself on her station and force her to wait on him.
Over the years and through the course of his career, Bill would meet lots of different managers and chefs. One way or another they had their own styles of impressing their ways on their kitchens and/or restaurants. He found one chef making out with the secretary in the chef’s office which was located inside the main kitchen of one of the hotel’s many kitchens. They just drew the blinds and did it on the desk sometimes. Drenovis forced the waitresses into the back seat of his Riviera for his personal pleasure, this of course if they wanted to get good shifts. Another manager, one equally greasy and pockmarked as Drenovis, liked to take waitresses to his apartment in Manhattan. His co-manager simply liked them on their knees in the office.
Bill learned early on that it was a seedy business, one in which the only ones who thrived were the cooks, managers and owners. Waitresses were a dime a dozen and dishwashers, well they weren’t worth anything to speak of, that is if you were one of the ones like Drenovis. On the other hand, if you were a compassionate cook, and there were a few, they were worth everything. You couldn’t put up a meal without a clean plate. A waitress couldn’t serve a coffee without a clean mug or a cup and saucer. Bill also discovered that he could piss off Drenovis by feeding steak to the dishwashers, effectively accomplishing two goals with one action. He could ensure that he had whatever he needed from the dishwashers to be able to put up meals and he could irritate Drenovis all at once. Good business from his end, for sure.
Lorraine had met someone. She told Bill toward the end of January, one bitterly cold night when Ohio State was playing out of town and they were horribly slow. They were sitting out in the hall, Bill having cooked and cut her up a steak to eat. As he usually did, he was by the doorway so he could see if Tommy was coming through. Marie was sitting on her stool reading the newspaper. Jimmy and Grandma had already gone home and the night was winding down quickly.
“Want to hook up?” he asked her.
“Yes. But I have to tell you something.”
“Go for it.”
“I met someone. He wants to take me on a date.”
“Mazel Tov.”
“You’re not jealous?”
“You want me to be? Actually I’m happy for you.”
“He’s a customer. He’s a school teacher.”
“That’s great. Is it what you want?”
“Well, if you mean to date someone, I think so, but I don’t know. Meanwhile, he hasn’t actually asked me out yet. He said he’d come in to eat toward the end of the week and that we’d talk more.”
“So do you want to hook up later?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Lorraine said.. “I want to fool around. I don’t know if I want to date. Maybe I’m just afraid. I’m pretty much afraid of everything.”
“Finish your steak and get us a beer,” Bill said. “Welcome to that club.”
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First, he spoke to her. He sat her on the vanity if they were in the ladies’ room and stood between her legs where he could whisper in her ear. As he did this, he rubbed her legs softly, each stroke moving more and more up toward where they both knew he was headed. He would kiss and nibble on her ear, kiss all along her ear and slowly move his lips closer and closer to hers, all the while speaking soft beauty to her.
Then they would kiss and at these times they would kiss a lot. They would keep kissing even after Mary started to indicate that she was worried about time.
“Anything gonna burn?”
“No.”
“Anything gonna boil over?”
“No.”
“The hell with it then.”
For his own part, Bill would have offered her Quaaludes, but he was ever conscious of her vulnerability. Having lost Yulie to drugs, knowing she had kids and the kids were dependent upon her, he didn’t feel as if he should encourage any regular substance usage. She already smoked weed and drank beer, wine and bourbon. Bill reasoned that that was enough for her.
So he would hold her in place and kiss her face, all over, sweetly, lovingly. Then he would start kissing in other places, all other places.
Eventually, Mary would help him undo enough of her clothes so they were still on her but not in the way. Eventually, she would just close her eyes and lean her head back against the mirror over the vanity. Eventually she would simply allow him to do anything and everything he wanted to do to her.
And that’s exactly what he would do at times like this. Since he’d learned, and after all he was a college graduate, exactly what she liked and how she liked it, at times like these he did those things he knew completely crazed and satisfied her, and he didn’t stop until he knew she was completely satisfied. He knew when she was completely satisfied because that’s when she would say “goddammit,” pushing him away with the word but pulling him closer with her arms and all of her womanhood. That’s when she was ready to be even more satisfied with him satisfying himself within her.
At some point Bill knew he should never have allowed himself to be in such a situation. On some level he knew he should never have fooled around on his fiancé, not ever, not with anyone. Still and all, on some whole other level, he was just twenty, soon now to become twenty-one and a young married man who had virtually no experience to speak of with women except for the live-with girl Pam. He kept thinking there had to be more, there had to be things he was meant to learn and experience.
That his fiancé might be thinking the same things never occurred to him. He didn’t think much about that. He didn’t think much about that because overall he was angry, very angry deep inside himself. He was angry that his mother left him. He was angry that he couldn’t approach his father to get help when he needed it, that in effect his father had left him too. He was angry the cops had lied and the judge knew the cops were lying. He was angry that it didn’t matter that he hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. He was angry that he had actually done something really good, really altruistic, and that regardless, he had to pay for it with his life, with the direction into which his life was forced.
Shit.
So that’s how he reasoned all of what he should never have been doing in the first place. It wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t so bad and somehow he and Mary were meant to have found this time to be united in the ways they were united.
But things were festering. They were festering all over the place.
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So the more Mary got into her own head, the worse it was for her. If she were into her own head, into her thoughts, and Bea happened to go downstairs with Bill, or after him as she actually did it so she could get some, the thoughts got worse, more and more dark. Mary was a person generally prone to dark thoughts anyway, and her imaginings of Bea and Bill together in the storeroom, or maybe her on the counter or against it in the staff ladies’ room, put her into a morose humor. Then, when Bill would come upstairs, she would take it out on him, even when he assured her he was only doing work and Bea’s being down there was simply coincidental.
Those times were coming more and more often now. But they were not without their own pleasurable, maybe even truly meaningful, results. If nothing had happened, which more than most likely was the case—after all Bill had promised Mary he would be ending it with Bea and was actually actively working on it—Mary would be open to cajoling such that Bill could, with special effort, calm her, assure her, appease her and excite her. It was kind of like make-up sex even though they hadn’t fought and mostly he had not done anything he shouldn’t have done.
He would start with a gentle shushing her. Then, after she was finished with a scornful pushing him away, he would hold her close to him taking her close enough so that he could whisper in her ear the things he really wanted to say to her just like that, meaning without having to have some reason to say them other than because he wanted to. Left to himself, in this world there was no way he could just tell her he loved her, he cared for her, he didn’t want her just sexually. No. Like for Mary, it had to be a forced action or an existential one.
When he had her calmed, appeased, softened, they would make a time to meet downstairs or set it up by him saying he was going down to cut meat and her telling him she needed some things from downstairs. She would make sure nothing on the stoves would burn or get ruined and he would help her with anything that needed to be done immediately.
At these times, times which were unintended consequences of Bea’s actions, they would lock themselves in the ladies’ room downstairs and Bill would slowly, softly, carefully, minster to her.
Everyone knew where they were. Tommy knew. Drenovis knew they did this, but they never did it when Drenovis was there. That would have been tempting the devil. Not that Drenovis could have actually done anything other than possibly embarrass and humiliate them. Or he could have. He could have fired them both or fired just him or suspended them. But Robert would have intervened and Mr. Bowman would have had to make another trip out east to set the crew and Drenovis straight. In any restaurant there is only one main goal and that’s to get the dinners up on time every time and every time the same way.
Ministering to Mary meant easing into taking care of her. She would be ready by the time they would get to whatever space they were using, always. So Bill could have just taken her and pleased her that way. But in his own mind that was never enough for what he wanted to do. He wanted to let her know that with her it meant something, that she meant something, that she meant more than just something.
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At her age, Mary thought a lot more about loss than Bill did at his age. He would discover later in life that everyone had loss, some of us more than others, and some people’s losses were worse than others. His, for example, would be pretty severe by the time he put them up against some other people’s. Already he had experienced his mother dying overnight, healthy one moment and dead the next. Later he would suffer the loss of his father in a hit and run car accident where his father was a pedestrian. And so it goes. He would come home from being out with his wife that night to discover that his father had been killed. This was still many years off in the future and something he would not know about until it happened.
Bea, for her part, had not had much loss. She hadn’t had any miscarriages or abortions. Her husband had not left her. Her children, well, she didn’t have any children and that was by choice. A good choice, she would say to anyone who would ask her. From there, her response included some choice negativity regarding children and sensual positivity regarding not having anyone to have to support other than herself. Life was pretty good for her, and it was even better when she was getting some from Bill which she began demanding more and more the more she understood that Bill could usurp her kitchen power and the more she understood that Mary truly cared for him.
If something was festering with Jim, the dishwasher, something surely was festering with Bea, the salad lady, the lady in charge of the kitchen. She had no designs on Henry Lee and could care less if he was doing Marie or anybody else. She had no designs on Bill either except getting it from him when she wanted. She liked the strange and she liked the vigor of his youth. And she liked the white boy, her lollipop. She liked her kitchen power too, and keeping that was of primary importance. Once they’d offered Bill the management job, she felt threatened
Mary was much more pensive than Bea ever was. Mary was heady, like Bill was. In order to do something such as be with Bill, it had to be an existential decision. She had to reason that in the end it didn’t mean shit to a train, that it was a what-the-hell. But even when she reasoned it this way, it wasn’t that. For Bea, it didn’t matter how long or how many times she enjoyed Bill’s sex. It was just sex. For Mary there was an intimacy about it and that intimacy translated to emotion and that emotion ran to…
Goddammit, Mary would think many times in her quiet time. Just plain Goddammit. Then she would get down on herself, ask herself why she had to start up with him in the first place, why she let herself get sucked into him. It ended in tragedy for her. She knew that right from the start. For Bill, he and his fiancé went away, wherever they went, and she was left there alone, left alone like she’d been when Yulie killed himself.
Worse, there was her boy, Eddie, who hated Bill just because he was white, who hated her because she allowed herself to be with a white boy.
“Why you gotta go with a white boy?” he had asked her several times already.
“Ain’t I taught you we all the same?” Mary replied. “Ain’t I taught you that color don’t make no difference?”
“But it does,” Eddie would say. “I hate him, I hate you and I hate Mr. Charlie.”
“That’s a lot of hate for a boy young as you,” Mary would say when Eddie would let her. She would try to hug him, to hold him close to her, but that was getting harder and harder.
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The rest of January was fickle. One day was relatively mild, just as a tease. One day was wintry, but not too bad. Snow fell three more times, but no big accumulations. Enough snow fell for one of Bill’s friends, the one from Miami with no experience driving on snow, to rear-end a car while it was sitting at the end of an exit ramp from the highway. Bill told him he had to brake, told him when to brake, but like any true know-it-all, his friend knew better. It was an exercise in futility. The only saving grace was that no major damage was done.
The tenderfoot. It reminded Bill of the famous short story they’d studied in school, the one where the tenderfoot died because he scoffed at the experienced locals, the one where the dog who didn’t want to set out in the first place knew better than the tenderfoot and managed to survive. So he, not the dog, started the fire in the wrong place. That was after he’d done a few other stupid things.
Bill could relate to stupid things. He could relate to doing stupid things. He could relate to not listening to people who knew better in kitchens. Maybe if he’d been experienced that first day, he wouldn’t have burned those fingers and would still have the feeling in them. But that time he hadn’t ignored experienced advice. He just didn’t know better. It simply happened.
Throughout his career Bill would run across cooks who were dangerous. They were dangerous for the very same reason that the tenderfoot in that story was dangerous, for the same reason his friend had had the car accident. In the kitchens, when the experienced cooks ran up against a dangerous one who wouldn’t heed advice, they distanced themselves.
The dangerous ones were relatively easy to spot. They generally had disregard for advice. They generally thought they knew better than anyone else. They generally were rude, loud and abrasive in their personalities. They generally made rookie mistakes like tossing things into hot grease or placing them in in the wrong direction so that they splashed forward instead of back toward the splash wall. It was bad enough when a cook burned himself, but when a cook burned another cook, that was worse, and when he did it wantonly, or stupidly, that was the worst. That caused fights. That caused cooks to get fired. Disrespecting hot and sharp meant tragedy sooner or later. Bill would see his share of tragedy in his career. When all was said and done, Bill would see his share of cooks with less than ten fingers. And personally, he would have stitches several times.
February was a bitter month. It demonstrated the city’s worst winter characteristics. Not much snow fell. The winds kicked up pretty bad and the temperature hovered close to zero for long periods of time. The only good thing was that Ohio State was holding the lead in basketball and so it was drawing phenomenal crowds for the games. This meant that both restaurants, despite the nasty weather, did great business. Henry Lee and Bill spent a lot of time in the meat room cutting steaks. Bill became quite proficient at meat cutting. He also spent a lot of time with Mary doing the prep cooking. He became fully versed as a prep cook and there were days when Mary allowed him to do all the prep work. On those days, Mary stayed downstairs with Henry Lee. She sat, like she always did, up on the stainless steel counter, swinging her legs and lost in her thoughts. Her thoughts were mostly about Yulie and the loss when he killed himself with the overdose.
“I seen enough over there,” Yulie would say.
Mary would run her fingers through his hair. “Lord have mercy,” she would say.
Lately, thinking about Yulie, more about the loss, her loss, loss, she was thinking about Bill. The clock was running. It was dead of winter now, but in a few short weeks…
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To All My Friends and Followers:
I’m taking a short vacation and will be away from posting here for about a week. Bill Wynn will return then.
Thanks to all of you who read the blog. Please feel free to reach out to me at
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Until then…
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Bill Wynn: The First Hundred
Almost expelled from Ohio State University for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Bill Wynn accepts a plea deal to ensure graduation. But having a police record prohibits him from utilizing his degree in the professional world.
Robert Moman, the broiler cook at one of the local steakhouses, is busted for running numbers. Sweeping out the City Hall Annex while on his work detail, Bill recognizes the workhouse blues. There to visit his probation officer, Bill’s soft heart and empathy cause them to meet.
Neither of their lives will ever be the same.
Pick up a copy of all my published works here:
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Bill Wynn: The First Hundred
Almost expelled from Ohio State University for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Bill Wynn accepts a plea deal to ensure graduation. But having a police record prohibits him from utilizing his degree in the professional world.
Robert Moman, the broiler cook at one of the local steakhouses, is busted for running numbers. Sweeping out the City Hall Annex while on his work detail, Bill recognizes the workhouse blues. There to visit his probation officer, Bill’s soft heart and empathy cause them to meet.
Neither of their lives will ever be the same.
Pick up a copy of all my published works here:
Books by Peter Weiss.
It snowed. And it snowed. And it snowed some more. Bill did trip and it didn’t matter. They were so s!ow Bill and Marie could have both disappeared from the kitchen and not have been missed for long periods of time. Only two waitresses worked, the two who lived closest to the restaurant. Bill was too blitzed for most of the evening to worry about how he was getting home. Mary, Bea and Henry Lee left as soon as Jimmy got in. The west side did not bother to come for steaks and decided they would simply use up whatever they already had.
Winter. But then, by the weekend, the streets and highways were cleared. The city settled into its usual harsh winter pattern of bitter cold with brisk winds and an overall sense of barrenness that didn’t seem to pervade other cities in winter. Or, as Bill thought about it, the city had all of the bad parts of winter with just about none of the good parts.
Ohio State did play three straight home games, Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Not that Bill particularly cared, but they won all three and were having a good season thus far. Their having a good season meant good crowds at the games. Thursday and Friday saw early dinner rushes before the games and a late push afterward. Saturday was a gangbuster day. They got busy after the game cleared out and they stayed busy all night.
Bill was doing his best to keep Bea at bay, but she was getting antsy. Being busy was a blessing since no one had time to really fool around. Even Bill and Mary were all about business. Henry Lee and Marie were too.
On Saturday, when Alfrieda came with the van to pick up meat for the west side, she was perky and pesky. She bothered Bill every chance she could get. That was whenever Henry Lee was not around, like when she was behind Bill going up the stairs while he was carrying meat trays. Then, when they were on the van and he was stacking the trays he’d carried, she felt him up shamelessly. He repeatedly told her to cut the crap, but the more he said something, the more brazen she was.
All the waitresses worked Saturday night. The poor business days they’d had on the snow nights were quickly forgotten and the university basketball crowds more than compensated for the slow nights. Everyone worked hard and everyone was about business. Even when it slowed down late Saturday night, everyone was too tired to mess around. The waitresses ordered their dinners and quietly sat to eat. The cooks rested in the hall. Marie sat on Bea’s stool and read the paper.
Lorraine came in around eleven with a beer for Bill. He had not gotten high at all and he had not had any bourbon. When he knew they were going to be really busy, he played it straight for the most part. It was bad enough when they fell behind. It was worse when it was because he was messed up. Bill didn’t ever want to give Drenovis a reason to get on his case. If Drenovis wanted to start stuff, Bill wanted to be sure he could give it back and was not in any way vulnerable.
So mostly the weekend, beginning with Thursday that week, was all business. It was fast-paced, even hectic. At times it was frenetic. Bill and all the cooks earned their pay and then some. The waitresses made out like bandits. The dishwashers ate steaks and had unlimited sodas. Bill made sure they were well taken of and had everything they needed. Jim complained again, several times, about not having a beer when he saw Bill drinking one.
“Really think you’re something,” he said to Bill. Jim was more agitated than usual and once again Bill sensed something was festering.
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“What do you have to do for the afternoon?” Bill asked Mary. He stood close by her by the screen door, close enough so that she could feel him against her. He felt her shift on her feet so they were not touching.
“Nothing too much,” Mary said. “I got enough of just about everything until tomorrow and I’d rather start fresh tomorrow when we have more business. This way you can throw away a lot of the leftovers tonight without wasting much.”
“Think we have enough prime rib?” Bill asked.
“I think we should use up what’s there. If we run out, we run out and that’s best.”
“Henry Lee and I don’t even have much meat to cut,” Bill said. He leaned in close to Mary and whispered in her ear. “I think I’m gonna trip.”
“I think you are tripping,” said Mary. “And don’t be coming around rubbing all over me, either.”
“What you mad at?”
“What was you and Bea doing in the store room?”
“She was getting salad dressing. I was rotating stock that should have been rotated and re-stacking what I had to move to get to it.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“Well you can bet on it.”
“The bitch.”
“It’s not her I like.”
“But you still hit it, don’t you?”
“It’s easier than not. Turning her away is gonna make a fight I don’t need to fight in here right now. Give me a little time to put her off.”
“You would do that?”
“Of course. You’re the only one I care about. You know what I mean. I care about Lorraine, but that’s different. She’s different.”
“Why you care about me?” Mary asked.
“If you have to ask, you really are stupid,” said Bill. “And I know you’re not stupid.”
The snow started to fall again as the lunch was ending. The lunch was abysmal and Tommy was clearly unhappy. He came to the table where Bea, Henry Lee, Mary and Bill were eating. His first question was quite simple, about how much food they had left over. Mary looked down into her plate when she told them they hadn’t sold much of anything. The steamship round, she told him, would be enough for the next day so that they didn’t have to cook another one. The lunch special was hardly touched. She was thinking about what she could make it into for a special for the dinner.
Henry Lee reported that they hadn’t sold many steaks either. He said he didn’t have to cut much for the evening and that he would talk to Robert about what they needed over on the west side. He said he couldn’t imagine they needed much over there. He said he didn’t want to get too far ahead in the inventory, but that they could probably make up some of the lost business over the weekend when Ohio State was playing basketball at home. That of course would depend upon whether or not it snowed anymore.
Bill, as usual, ate very rare roast beef with lettuce, tomato, pickle and mayonnaise on a hamburger bun. Mary and Bea ate tuna fish salad sandwiches. Henry Lee ate a steak. Like any good meat cutter, he would make sure to get an extra steak out of one of the top butts to make up for the one he was eating. Here, at Suburban, the cooks really looked out for the owner. Altogether, this was a small operation, two stores, and the kitchen crews were pretty much interrelated. They knew as a unit that their livelihoods depended upon the success of the restaurants. None of them wanted to lose their jobs. They might complain about how hard they worked, how little they were paid and what a pain in the ass Drenovis was. But despite the snow, life was good.
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