shocked and transferred in huge batches into steaming colanders, falling
everywhere, the floor soon ankle-deep in spaghetti alla chitarra, linguine,
garganelli, taglierini, fusilli. The heat was horrific. Sweat flowed into
my eyes, blinding me as I spun in place.
I struggled and sweated and hurried to keep up the best I could, Tyrone
slinging sizzle-platters under the broiler, and me, ostensibly helping out,
getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with every order. On the rare
occasions when I could look up at the board, the dupes now looked like
cuneiform or Sanskrit—indecipherable.
I was losing it. Tyrone, finally, had to help the helper.
Then, grabbing a sauté pan, I burned myself.
I yelped out loud, dropped the pan, an order of osso bucco milanese
hitting the floor, and as a small red blister raised itself on my palm, I
foolishly—oh, so foolishly—asked the beleaguered Tyrone if he had
some burn cream and maybe a Band-Aid.
This was quite enough for Tyrone. It went suddenly very quiet in the
Mario kitchen, all eyes on the big broiler man and his hopelessly inept
assistant. Orders, as if by some terrible and poetically just magic,
stopped coming in for a long, horrible moment. Tyrone turned slowly to
me, looked down through bloodshot eyes, the sweat dripping off his
nose, and said, "Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid?"
Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real
close so I could see them properly: the hideous constellation of water-
filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw
flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They
looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean,
knobby and calloused under wounds old and new. I watched, transfixed,
as Tyrone—his eyes never leaving mine—reached slowly under the
broiler and, with one naked hand, picked up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter,