and crab-shacks in Key West. After Labor Day, I got my chance to move
up for the last few weeks before the Dreadnaught closed for the year. I
worked the fry station, dunking breaded clams and shrimp into hot oil
for a while, racked up a serious body count of lobsters on the double-
decker steamer, and finally was moved up yet again to do a few shifts on
the mighty broiler. I cannot describe to you the sheer pleasure, the power
of commanding that monstrous, fire-breathing iron and steel furnace,
bumping the grill under the flames with my hip the way I'd seen Bobby
and Jimmy do it. It was tremendous. I couldn't have felt happier—or
more powerful in the cockpit of an F-16. I ruled the world for a few short
weeks, and I was determined to make that station my own the following
season.
Sadly, things didn't turn out as planned. The next summer, Mario bought
our faltering restaurant. Mario was kind enough to allow those of us
who'd worked there the previous year to audition for our old jobs with a
few shifts in his kitchen. I was thrilled by the opportunity, and headed up
to P-town that April filled with hope and confidence, certain I'd make
the cut, land that top-tier broiler job, the big money, the gig that would
surely make me one of the pirate elite, an ass-kicking, throat-slitting
stud who could lord it over the salad men and fry cooks and prep drones
at less successful restaurants.
I pulled into town, I remember, wearing—God help me—a spanking-new
light blue Pierre Cardin seersucker suit. The shoes, too, were blue. Here I
was, hitchhiking into a town that for all intents and purposes was a
downscale, informal Portuguese fishing village and artists' colony, a
town where people dressed unpretentiously in work clothes—denims,
army surplus, old khakis—and in some deranged, early '70s bout of
disco-inspired hubris, I chose to make my entrance in gull-wing
shouldered Robert Palmer-wear, just itching to show the local yokels
how we did it in New York City.
They were pounding veal in the kitchen when I arrived; the whole crew,