Liquor Read online

  “So I guess you know my history,” Lenny said. “I was wondering about yours. How’d you guys come up? What’s your training?”

  “We’ve just worked at a bunch of places around town,” said Rickey. “We been in the business since we were fifteen. Started out as dishwashers and worked our way up. Most of what I really know about cooking, I learned from Paco Valdeon at the Peychaud Grill.”

  “I’ve heard about Paco. Talented guy. Whatever happened to him?”

  “Last I heard, he had a place on the beach in Mexico. Some crappy little shack serving grilled lobster and fish steamed in banana leaves. It sounds great, but I wonder if anybody down there appreciates him.”

  “I mostly learned to cook from my mom and sisters,” said G-man.

  “You come from a big family?”

  “Youngest of six kids.”

  “I thought I heard one of you went to CIA.”

  “That was me,” Rickey said. “I didn’t graduate, though. I left after a few months.”

  “How come?”

  “Well.” What the hell, Rickey decided; he might as well let Lenny know he was a degenerate from the get-go. “I kinda got kicked out for beating up a guy.”

  “No kidding? What’d you do that for?”

  “He was an asshole. He was always giving me a lot of crap, and finally I just punched him out in Skills class.”

  “Right there in the kitchen, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said Rickey. “You went to CIA?”

  “No, but I’ve visited the campus. So what kind of crap was this guy giving you? How come you allowed him to piss you off so much?”

  No way was he going to tell Lenny the whole story, at least not yet. “He didn’t respect New Orleans cooking, for one thing,” Rickey said. “He thought we were just some region of the United States. He acted like nobody from here could possibly be any good.” And that was true; that had been part of it.

  “You get this a lot? People taking a dislike to you for no reason?”

  “No. Just that guy, and now Mike.”

  “That’s cool,” said Lenny. “Anyway, I suppose you’re wondering why you’re here. To listen to the tape, sure. But you could have come by the restaurant for that. Right?”

  “I guess,” said Rickey.

  Lenny put the ribs on the grill and turned them with a pair of tongs, letting the flames lick every part of the meat. “So why do you think I asked you out here?”

  They glanced at each other. G-man shrugged. “I got no idea,” said Rickey.

  “Really? No idea at all? Or maybe you sort of have an idea, but you don’t want to say so until you see if it’s the same idea I have?”

  “No. No idea at all.”

  “OK. You’re being honest or you don’t quite trust me yet. Either one works for me.”

  Rickey was starting to lose his patience. “Lenny, are you just jacking us around or what?”

  “Easy,” G-man murmured.

  Lenny was unperturbed. “Yeah, I guess I am jacking you around a little. I like to do that when I’m thinking about working with somebody. To see how much I can get away with.”

  “Working with somebody?”

  “Well, maybe. If you’re interested. Like I told you on the phone, I’ve heard good things about you guys. And I like your restaurant concept.”

  Rickey stared wildly at G-man, who shook his head, signaling that he hadn’t been talking to anybody. “What concept?” Rickey said.

  “Very good. I could just be fishing, right? I might not know anything at all about this place you’re opening. I do, though. Liquor.” Lenny smiled at the ribs. “Liquor in every damn dish. I love it. It’s perfect for New Orleans.”

  “Goddamn it!” said Rickey. “Fucking Anthony B!” He couldn’t help it. It had to be Anthony; they hadn’t told anybody else about the concept. “So did you hear it straight from him, or is it all over town?”

  “No, it’s not all over town. Anthony and I go way back. He spent a summer up in Maine when we were sixteen—fell in love with my sister. She’s married to another guy now, but I kept in touch with Anthony. When I came down here, he introduced me to a lot of people. I don’t know if I’d be where I am now without him. He helped me out a lot.”

  “Yeah, I guess he’s still helping people out. Telling them other people’s ideas and shit.”

  “Aw, Rickey, don’t be like that. We drink, we tell each other stuff. If I wasn’t interested, I never would have called you. I’m not out to steal your idea.”

  “I guess not,” said Rickey. In truth, he didn’t know what to think, but there was no point in pissing Lenny off. “You don’t need to steal my idea, you got plenty ideas of your own. It’s just, well …”

  “It’s just, well, you been working for assholes too long, and you know this is a good idea, and you’re afraid it might be the best one you ever have. Right? I hear you. I’ve been there. I wasn’t always a rich dickhead with three restaurants. But I don’t worry about it. I’m doing all right, huh?”

  Lenny actually seemed to expect some kind of reply, so G-man jumped in with, “Yeah, Lenny, you’re doing great.”

  “Pretty great, anyway. I’m not so sure about Sundae Dinner. I think that might have been a dumb idea. Liquor, though, that’s brilliant. You guys will make a fortune.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Rickey. “All we’re doing now is cooking in a bar. We got no money. I got no idea what permits we’d even need. You’re taking this way too seriously.”

  “And you’re not taking it seriously enough,” Lenny told him. “Don’t you see? Your concept is so perfect for this city, I can’t believe nobody came up with it yet. You can’t afford to fuck around. You need to move on it before a bigger asshole than me hears about it, decides to swipe it from you, and makes all the money that should’ve been yours. Hell, Anthony B only told me about it because he’s worried. He thinks you’re going to bring in too much business. He loves his little bar, you know? He doesn’t want to turn it into some trendy restaurant. But he wants to see you do well with this, and he knows I can help you.”

  “But why do you want to?”

  “Three main reasons. Anthony thinks you’re serious cooks. I respect that. Also, I know people think I’m just cooking for the tourists, but I really love this city. I realized it would be stupid to pour my money into some cash-cow place in Vegas when I could be investing in young chefs right here.”

  “What’s the third reason?”

  “Well, it’s not as important as the other two.” Lenny finished searing the meat and closed the grill top. “But Mike Mouton really doesn’t like you, Rickey, and I wouldn’t mind spiking that weasel-dick bastard. Somebody sure needs to. Speaking of which, these ribs have awhile to go yet. You want to go in my office and listen to that tape?”

  The tape was worse than Rickey had expected. From the moment it clicked on, when Lenny said “I’m calling about a reference for your saucier” and Mike replied “Where do I even start?” Rickey doubted he would be able to keep his hands off Mike’s throat if he ever saw the guy again.

  “I’d never have hired him if I’d had a better candidate,” Mike said. “You know where his last job was?”

  There was a rustle of papers on Lenny’s end. “Says here he was sauté cook at Maison Dupuy.”

  Mike laughed. “Not hardly. That was his second-to-last job. His last job was in the kitchen at Tequilatown, and he got fired. He didn’t mention it when he applied here either, but somebody told me about it. I got a lot of connections, you know.”

  “Know what they fired him for?”

  “Drinking on the job,” Mike said ominously.

  “Oh yeah, I think I heard about that. The whole crew was fired, weren’t they? Some stupid rule about not even drinking one beer.”

  Mike hesitated, then said, “Well, but he lied on the application.”

  “Lied? He omitted a credential. That’s not lying. Hell, I’ve done it myself. Do you have some kind of grudge against this guy?” />
  “I wouldn’t exactly call it a grudge,” said Mike. “Rickey’s got a bad attitude, is all. My whole crew does, but Rickey’s the worst of them. They’ve all been mouthing off to me more than usual since he got here.”

  “So he has a bad attitude. What about his kitchen skills?”

  “He’s nothing special in that department. Typical New Orleans line cook—does the least he can get away with, tries to hide it when he fucks up.”

  “Does he fuck up a lot?”

  “Let’s just say we’ve had a lot of complaints about the food since he started working here.”

  “Uh huh. How many complaints did you get before he started?”

  “Aw, you know the tourist crowd. Somebody’s always bitching.”

  “What does Chef Roger think of Rickey?”

  “Fucking Roger, he acts like his whole crew is perfect because it means less work for him. Hell, Lenny, I do most of the work around here myself—I gotta have a little pick-me-up to keep these jerks in line. I don’t know if you know Roger, but—”

  “He’s actually a friend of mine.”

  “Oh! He’s not so bad. Nice guy, you know? Just doesn’t ride ’em hard enough in my opinion.”

  “OK, I’m a little confused, Mike. I’m getting some mixed messages. You keep telling me Rickey’s a fuckup, but I’m not hearing where he’s actually fucked up.”

  “Well …” Rickey could almost hear the wheels turning in Mike’s mind. “He ruined an expensive piece of equipment not too long ago. A puree wand. He left it in the oven overnight, then turned on the oven and melted it.”

  “That’s a fucking lie!” Rickey yelled, springing to his feet. “Somebody on the PM crew left it there, and he goddamn well knows it!”

  “Take it easy,” said Lenny, who was lounging comfortably behind an enormous desk. “I know Mike Mouton’s a liar. Don’t worry about it.”

  Rickey sank back into his chair. On the tape, Lenny was saying, “So, for the record, you think I shouldn’t hire Rickey?”

  “Absolutely not. I don’t mean to bad-mouth the kid—I’m just trying to do you a favor here, Lenny. I’m gonna fire him myself, soon as I find—”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Lenny told Rickey and G-man, turning off the tape recorder. “The rest of it’s just Mike setting race relations back a hundred years. I don’t feel like hearing that again.”

  “Jesus,” said G-man. They both turned to look at Rickey, who was contorted in the big leather chair, his fingers snarled in his hair so deeply that he might have been trying to rip it out by its unbleached roots.

  “You guys ready to eat?” said Lenny.

  chapter 5

  We make a version of this salad at Crescent,” Lenny said. “It’s a little too nouvelle-ish for Lenny’s. Good, though.”

  It was good, a wilted-arugula deal with big Gulf shrimp, toasted pecans, and a red pepper-bacon dressing. G-man put some more on his plate and watched Rickey gnaw on a pork rib as if it were Mike Mouton’s jugular. Rickey hadn’t even cringed at the word nouvelle-ish; he must be really pissed.

  G-man could see why, more or less. Of course Mike’s lies were infuriating, but they’d worked for assholes before. Rickey had a good résumé; it wasn’t as if he needed Mike’s reference. After the things they’d talked about today with Lenny, they might not need anybody’s reference. But Rickey said little and smiled less. He sat at the picnic table with his legs crossed and his shoulders hunched, barely touching the salad or the asparagus Lenny had roasted, just gnashing on bones.

  G-man couldn’t stop eating. He hardly remembered the last time he’d had asparagus, and he was excited by Lenny’s interest in Rickey’s idea. Sure, they’d made fun of Lenny, but was that any reason not to let him set them up with the restaurant of their dreams? G-man didn’t think so.

  He was worried, though, about what Rickey thought. He hoped this wasn’t going to become an issue of integrity, with Rickey saying stuff like “We don’t need his fucking money!” They couldn’t afford integrity. With no cash and no prospects of their own, they most certainly did need Lenny’s fucking money, or somebody’s. But Rickey could be stubborn about things like that. G-man liked this quality to a point, since he himself was more easygoing. If Rickey wasn’t a bit of a hardass, he supposed, they would be at the world’s mercy. Just now, though, he was worried that Rickey might throw away the chance of a lifetime because he was pissed about Mike, or because he thought Lenny was trying to steal his idea, or whatever damn thing had upset him. Though he’d been having a pretty good time, G-man was almost relieved when Rickey pushed his plate away and said, “I think we better go.” It was rude as hell, but it was better than saying something he wouldn’t be able to take back.

  Lenny didn’t seem offended. “Sure, you have a lot to think about. Let me know when you get your menu up and running at the Apostle. I’ll come by and check it out. We’ll talk soon.” He gave them his business card, which featured a little cartoon of himself in a toque and kerchief, and walked them to the door.

  “Bye, Lenny,” said G-man a little sadly. It really was the nicest outing he’d had in a long time.

  “Byyyyye, Lenny,” Rickey mocked in a high voice as soon as the door closed.

  “Aw, fuck you. You wanna tell me what’s wrong, I’ll be happy to listen. But don’t start with a bunch of crap, because I’m not in the mood for it.” G-man turned and started for the bus stop.

  “You know what’s wrong!” Rickey said, following. “You were there!”

  “Rickey, I realize this may come as a shock, but I don’t always know what’s going on inside that little head of yours. Once in a while you just gotta grit your teeth and tell me. Is it Mike? Did you really let him get to you that much?”

  “Dude—” Rickey flung his arms wide, as if overwhelmed by the enormity of his troubles. “Where do I even start? Am I just nuts, is that why I have to tell you what’s wrong? Let’s see. I got Mike out to stab me in the back. I got a self-proclaimed rich dickhead maybe trying to steal my idea before we even get started. I got your retard boss—”

  “Anthony’s your boss now too.”

  “Yeah, great, thanks. I got our retard boss telling my business all over town. Is that enough, or should I try to think of some other things that suck?”

  “Well, that’s just it—you were sitting there thinking of things that suck, back at Lenny’s. I could see you doing it. What if Lenny really does want to help us? You know of a better way we’re gonna get this thing started?”

  “I know we need money. I just wasn’t planning on getting it from Lenny Duveteaux.”

  “You see anybody else offering?”

  “No, but maybe we could get a bank loan or something.”

  “Yeah, right—couple of slackers, no house, no car, no credit—they’re really gonna be lining up to give us a big wad of cash.”

  “My mom has her house, she got it in the divorce. Maybe she’d cosign.”

  “Dude! What the fuck is so bad about Lenny that you’d let your mom put up her house rather than just take money he can afford to give us?”

  “I don’t trust him. I don’t want to be in debt to him.”

  “I don’t think he wants us to be in debt to him. He wants a piece of Liquor because he thinks it’ll make money. He’d make money too. How would we be in debt?”

  “We’d just owe him,” said Rickey. “Don’t you see? Debt isn’t all about money. He’d have helped us—we’d owe him.”

  “I don’t see what would be so bad about that.”

  “You want to owe your success to that guy?”

  “Look, if we make this thing work, the success will be ours. Your idea—our food—period. We won’t owe it to anybody. But we gotta get a leg up from somebody, and I wouldn’t mind if it was Lenny. I didn’t think he was so bad. I kinda liked him.”

  Rickey did not answer. He just looked helplessly at the sky, as if hoping God would answer for G-man’s untenable and inexplicable opinion.

  �
��C’mon, what was so bad about him? He tried to do you a favor.”

  “What, playing me that tape?”

  “Well—yeah.”

  “You really think that was a favor? You’re not kidding me? Then maybe we don’t even need to be having this conversation, because with that kinda mentality, maybe you’d be happier just working for somebody else all your life.”

  They boarded the bus without saying another word and sat silent and scowling across the aisle from each other all the way back to Marengo Street.

  G-man lay awake in the dark. A glass of cheap bourbon and ice sat dripping on the floor beside the bed, but he had hardly touched it, figuring that even if he drank himself to sleep he’d just wake up with a headache in a couple of hours. He could hear Rickey in the kitchen, banging sheet pans around, slamming the oven door. When Rickey was upset, he almost always made cheese straws. They were one of the first things he had ever learned to cook, and making them seemed to comfort him.

  So, he wondered, how was it that you could know a person well enough to predict what he would cook at a difficult moment, but not to understand why the moment was so difficult? Maybe Rickey was right about him—maybe he would be better off always working for somebody else. Maybe he didn’t have what it took to run a restaurant. He’d always assumed that if they had their own place, Rickey would be the chef and he’d be the sous chef. That was how their relationship worked. Rickey had always been a little smarter, a little more in charge. But did that mean G-man wasn’t chef material? He thought of something his own mother had once pointed out to him: The trouble with you, Gary, is when your friend Rickey says something, you take it as the gospel truth.

  He wondered whether that really was his trouble. All in all, it seemed that his life with Rickey had been remarkably trouble-free. There had been all sorts of outside trouble, sure, ever since they were teenagers and their families plotted to send Rickey away to culinary school. That had come pretty close to separating them for good, but nothing else ever had.