The day I started working in the kitchen of a local, popular family restaurant, I was informed of the two principle rules:

1. No knives in the sink
2. The customer is always right in some cases.

I worked there summers and weekends starting when I was eleven and ending when I was eighteen. In the seven years I spent in the kitchen, I never saw anyone put knives in the sink ever, and it turns out the customer was pretty much never right.

Three of us worked the line. Lainey was the head cook, she did the eggs. Homey was the expeditor, working the toaster, interfacing with the waitresses and putting the plates together. I did pancakes, french toast and breakfast meats.

When I first started on the line, I could not keep up. If we got really slammed, I would get pulled and banished over to the prep table until the grill calmed down a bit. This banishment was a real insult to me a real pain in the ass to the rest of the staff so Homey devised a way around it. When I started to lag behind, he would put his spatula on the grill with a weight on top of it, letting the blade of the spatula heat up, and this was a warning. If my pace did not improve, he would take the superheated spatula from the grill and burn my arm with it.

And so, after a while, I got to be a pretty good line cook. And after a while longer, I got to be a great line cook, like a prodigy line cook, and I still think that might have been one thing I was truly gifted at. In fact, once, quite a few years later, I was offered 800 bucks a week, cash, to cook breakfast for a summer in a different local restaurant.

At that time in my life, I really needed some way to be tough that didn’t involve sports. I found it with work. And these feelings betrayed an underlying cause: I really liked being a line cook. After I had been there a few years, I could snatch a french fry from the fyer with my bare fingers. I had burn marks all over my arms -- not from Homey, just from the inevitable grease explosions and hot pans -- and what’s more, when I was being burned, I could finish whatever task I was performing before dousing the burn. Think about that. I considered the plate of hash in my hands more important than my own skin when grease splashed up from the grill and started to burn me. Or when I picked up a pot from the stove and misjudged the temperature, I would hold on and let it burn me until I found a safe landing zone for it, rather than drop it and risk a spill.

This was my introduction to the nihilism of kitchens. A linecook busts ass in awful heat with no breaks to prepare food for customers he hates, and as soon as this food is prepared, it is gone. Off the grill and through the service window into the waiting belly of some asshole tourist who will shit it out a few hours later.

There was no rational explanation for the efforts we made. We still got paid no matter how long the food took, and what's more, we were in no risk of getting fired because of tight labor markets in a seasonal economy and stuff like that. So we worked eight hours straight without a break, and we ran instead of walked, and this was nihilism: all that effort, all that sacrifice, for nothing.

Ostensibly, all of this was done for the customer, but as I have said, we didn't really give a shit about the customer. In fact, problem customers were dealt with accordingly, and here is the secret that every cook on every line in the United States knows: the customer is always right in some cases. In the other cases, any of the following might happen:

1. Food is dropped on the floor, a clean plate is readied, and food is retrieved from the floor and sent back on the new plate, with a new garnish, depending on the type of food, it may also be kicked across the floor. I admit to having kicked my share of pancakes.
2. If the customer is lucky, the food may only be farted on, a largely symbolic gesture;
3. The food may be spat upon. But I stress this is only in sever cases and in eight years I only saw this happen once.
4. The same food will be microwaved and sent back.
5. Depending on what materials happen to be on hand at the time, any type of spontaneous, unique, malfeasance could be employed.

What made this kitchen environment strange is that when the workload slowed down, we did not take advantage of that time to rest. Instead, we did we did anything to maintain the rush. I learned the proper way to open a loaf of bread in the kitchen is to slice the bag widthwise with your knife and fold the bread back onto itself so the two halves can sit upright on the counter, and the last two slices of bread you get to are the heels. Once a bag was depleted, the plastic bag was wrapped tightly around the wadded-up heel leaving a tail like a comet and you had yourself a weapon for intrakitchen warfare. This bread-comet was usually hurled when someone had their arms full of something which, if dropped, would be disastrous. One of the prep jobs that really sucked was filling the portion-control cups of tartar sauce with a spoon from the huge Sysco tub. To do this job efficiently meant laying out 120 empty cups on the counter and then going at it all at once. Almost every time I would have 120 empty cups laying on the counter and had the tub of tartar sauce in my arms, a bread-comet would come flying over from the line and send my PC cups off in an explosion like smashing an atom. And these bread comets weren't just flung in the general direction of the other cooks. We aimed to hurt, hurling them as hard as we could and aiming for the throat. The same was true with rubber bands, raw scallops, and the plastic bread bag tag ties which you flick on your finger.

And when we weren't hurting each other we were engaged in awful games of sport. When a fly was caught midair with your hands, you were rewarded with the respect and praise of the other cooks, which was ample. But the other great thing about catching a live fly was that you could play the Fly in the Fryer Gambling Challenge. With fly in hand, you would remove the baskets from one of the fryalators. The other cooks would gather round and you would make wages on how many seconds the fly would struggle in the hot grease before dying. Two seconds was a safe bet, but someone always bet one and someone always bet three. The fly would then be thrown into the fryer and the counting would begin. And for the record, the carcass would subsequently be fished out and disposed off. We weren’t barbarians.

The waitresses had cans of whipped cream they used to garnish hot chocolate and pie. When a can was kicked, the waitress would put the empty can in the service window and the cook who could grab the can first would get to do the whippet. The rules for the cooks were based on the rules of hockey. You could employ a shoulder or hip check to knock another cook out of the way, but high-sticking, cross-checking, tripping, slashing, biting and kicking were frowned upon. The one who retrieved the Readywhip can from the counter was allowed to put it unmolested in the poached egg pot to free up more of the gas, and then indulge in the whippet. Cooking would be on hold for however long this took.

Joints were smoked by the dumpster only when we predicted the shift would be slow enough to warrant it, and I almost never partook out of fear that we would get busy and I wouldn't be able to handle it. On days we knew were going to be busy, we'd pop "beans," either diet pills or asthma medication with enough ephedrine to make Red Bull look like a glass of warm milk. Beers were drunk in the walk-in, but only in seven ounce bottles because you could never tell if things would get instantly busy and you wouldn't want to waste beer.

All of the kitchen indiscretions were carefully planned out so that they couldn't inhibit the work that needed to get done, all of our chaos had a sick order to it. And if taking speed walked the line between work-enhancing and recreation, that was just a coincidence. Everything was done 100 percent, even the shenanigans, so when the orders started coming in fast again, we would still be in the right speed.

And my relationship with Lainey and Homey became something like I hear old-timers describe when they recall their buddies from the war. Homey was short and scraggly with black teeth and tattoos. Lainey was severely obese, and they were both in their forties and some of my best friends. They had been working in kitchens forever. When Lainey started, she bragged, her boss had to get an apple box for her to stand on so she could reach the grill. Homey would give me advice like, "Don't ever work in a kitchen where they want to pay you in drugs. Work for money and buy the drugs yourself. Believe me." And Lainey would drink water from those 99¢ gallon jugs and every single time she would take a huge pull, Homey and I would successfully make her laugh until she sprayed water from her nose. Every time. We accomplished amazing things in that kitchen, from days when the line out front went around the block and the slips piled up for hours straight, to when we made Lainey throw-up by making her smell some shrimp that had rotted in the cooler.

Lainey and Homey made constant attempts to teach me things, like "Don't ever get married, Shawn. And whatever you do, don't ever have children." Both of them were married, and Homey had children who he never talked about. When Lainey's husband died suddenly one night, I was called in unexpectedly to work, and subsequently worked on the anniversary of his death for the next few years.

And this is when things started to break down. It wasn't just that Lainey lost her husband, it was pandemic. Homey left his wife for a waitress. The owner -- who was having an affair with his bookkeeper -- fathered a child with an ex-employee and while nobody was supposed to know who the father was, the baby was born with a mustache a spatula and an apron. I attributed the breakdown of our crew to the work itself, as if watching the food we took such irrational pains to prepare come back on the bus-tray, half eaten and mangled, only to be scraped off into a slop bucket, turned out to have a tolerance half-life. Or maybe the work was just too much and too fast for someone to endure for too long. Or maybe it really was the external things like death and infidelity that disrupted the delicate balance of our nihilistic system.

Whatever.

When Homey quit, I told our boss that I wouldn't be returning next summer and I went out and found a different kitchen, down the street. But something was wrong. Nobody fought. Nobody cursed. They didn't hate customers, they worried about health inspectors and presentation and "FIFO." And perhaps worst of all, even when it was busy, it was slow. It was less dire, not frantic, and very very boring. I quit.

When I was a freshman in college, my Work/Study agreement had me working in the dining hall, and before my first shift I was a little excited that I might relive some of my former kitchen glory. But this hope was shattered when, on Orientation Day, they attempted to "teach" me how to hold a chef's knife. So I became the worst employee I could. I sighed and rolled me eyes at the incompetence of my supervisors. I befriended the employees, some of who turned out to be real cooks. I engaged in vegetable chopping races with the staff when I thought a supervisor might be watching, and I consistently won. I punched in four minutes late and punched out four minutes early because they had a written system of rules where it took a full five minutes to be considered late. I had entered kitchen hell and I would have died of embarrassment if Homey or Lainey had ever seen me working there. Until daylight savings.

I showed up for work four minutes late and noticed that not a single cook had showed up. I realized that nobody had remembered to set their clocks back, and I smiled grimly because in 56 minutes, the dining hall would open for breakfast and there was no food in sight. This is when a supervisor approached me and I heard that frantic warble in her voice, the one that signified a crisis, a crisis the type of which I thrived on for years in the kitchen back home: "None of the cooks have showed up. You have restaurant experience, don't you?"