was required: total dedication. Forget the loved ones. Forget the outside
world. There is no life other than this life. I didn't spend much time
trying to figure it out. The man scared me. Years later, I got another
perspective on things. I opened the Post to see a photo of my old boss's
wife, draped over the awning of a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East
Side. She'd apparently performed a double-gainer from the window of
her high-rise apartment and not quite made it to the pavement. So I guess
she wasn't that happy after all.
All in all, I was at the Rainbow Room for about a year and a half before
elections for shop steward came around. When one of the garde-manger
guys suggested I run for the position, I was only too happy to give it a
shot. Luis, after all, was a disgrace. I was, by now, an accepted, even
popular, member of the Rainbow Room crew, a dues-paying, card-
carrying union member, and as a young, semi-educated firebrand with a
couple of years of college under my belt, a fine private school
vocabulary, a culinary degree and a predilection for left-wing politics, I
assumed I'd be a welcome addition to the restaurant workers' union—a
young man with the workers' interests at heart, a fighter for the
downtrodden, an activist who could get things done, someone who could
lead and inspire, help to achieve better working conditions and benefits
for one of the largest union shops in the country. Certainly the union
biggies would be pleased to see the dipsomaniacal Luis replaced by a
young go-getter like me! And I wanted to see the mysterious "contract",
the Rosetta Stone of our union benefits. According to our little union
books, any union member could inspect this important document at any
time—yet none of us had ever seen it. Our rights as employees of the
Rainbow Room, as negotiated by our duly elected representatives and
officers of the union, remained a matter of rumor and conjecture. I
wanted to clap eyes on this thing. So I ran.
I won handily. Luis, strangely, didn't even put up a fight. I figured that
my shanking him with the meat fork had something to do with his
reluctance to mount a campaign, but I was wrong about that. After a