Departing cooks and favored waiters, on their last day of employment,
were invited to nail their grotty work shoes to a Wall of Fame by
Sammy's cellar office. As time went on, row after row of moldering
work boots, shoes and sneakers were I pounded into the wall, a
somewhat grim reminder of departed friends. On slow nights—and there
were, disconcertingly, a growing number of these—we'd have fun with
food color and sweet dough. Dimitri, it turned out, was remarkably adept
at crafting life-like fingers, toes and sexual organs from basic
ingredients. He'd fashion frighteningly realistic severed thumbs—skin
rudely shredded at one end, bone fragments made from leek white
projecting from the wound—and we'd leave these things around for
unsuspecting waiters and managers to find. A waiter would open a reach-
in in the morning to find a leaking, torn fingertip, Band-Aid still
attached, pinioned to a slice of Wonderbread with a frilled toothpick. A
floor manager would be called down to the kitchen in the middle of a
dinner shift to find one of us standing by a bloody cutting board, red-
smeared side-towel wrapped around a hand, and as they approached, one
of Dimitri's grisly fingers would drop onto his foot. We experimented
constantly, finding to our delight that not only did the sweet dough look
like flesh when shaped and colored correctly, but it drew flies like the
real thing! Left overnight at room temperature, Dimitri's fake digits
could develop into a truly horrifying spectacle.
Eventually, when every member of the staff was thoroughly inured to the
sight of a severed, fly-covered penis in the urinal, or finding a bloody
finger in his apron pocket, we moved on to even greater atrocities. One
night, with his full cooperation, we stripped Dimitri naked, spattered and
filled his ears, nose and mouth with stage blood, and wrapped him in
Saran Wrap before helping him into a chest freezer in the dark, rear
storage area of the restaurant, his limbs arranged in an unnaturally
contorted pose—as if he'd been rudely dumped there post-mortem. We
then called the manager on the intercom, asking first if he'd seen
Dimitri. We hadn't seen him in hours, we explained, and we were