up, getting high at work, behaving insolently and fomenting dissent
among his co-workers. Convinced that the whole kitchen revolved
around his station, his mood swings and his toil, he felt free to become a
raving, snarling, angry lunatic—a dangerously loose cannon rolling
around on deck, just daring his chef and his co-workers to press the
wrong button.
After a no-show and a late arrival and yet another ugly, histrionic
incident of insubordination, my friend had no choice but to fire his
cocaine-stoked and deranged employee, telling him, in classic style, to
"Clean out your locker and get the fuck out!"
The cook went home, made a few phone calls, and then hanged himself.
It's a measure of what we do for a living that this kind of a thing could
happen—and that my friend, on his next visit to my kitchen, was greeted
with gestures of mimed strangulation, cooks and waiters holding a hand
over their heads, sticking their tongues out and rolling their eyes up,
tagging my friend, to his face, as "serial killer" and remorselessly
teasing him. My friend had worked for me for years, and had, at various
times, caused me much grief and frustration. Since becoming a chef in
his own right, however, he'd taken to calling me at intervals—to
apologize for his past bad acts, telling me that when faced with
managerial problems of his own involving personnel, or "human
resource difficulties", he'd seriously regretted all the pain and worry he'd
caused me.
Now he knew, you see. He knew what it was like to be a leader of cooks,
a wrangler of psychopaths, the captain of his own pirate ship, and he
wasn't liking that part of the job very much. Now somebody was dead
and there was, inarguably, a causal relationship between the event of the
troublesome cook's firing and his death by his own hand.
"The guy was fucked up anyway, it's not your fault," was the standard