It’s funny when I think about those days now.  All I remember is the food, and it was the bomb.  The food that was served at the Hotel Utah in the late seventies was as good as or better than anything I have seen to date.  Learning how to cook there has been the gift that has kept on giving, my entire culinary career.  Everyone was French, and it was exactly like learning to cook in France.  One thing about the Mormons is that they can afford to hire the best, and they did.  My training was regimented, complex, and diversified.  The kitchen brigade commanded respect, even if we were stoned all the time.

I was nine months into my apprenticeship when the Conference buzzes starting infiltrating the kitchen.  Conference is a four or five day period held annually in the Spring.  Essentially, Conference amounts to vast amounts of Mormons, from across the world, converging in Temple Square to eat, drink, and listen to their prophets speak.  The hotel would do over a thousand meals a meal-period through four different avenues: The Coffee Shop (called “The Coffee Shop” despite the fact that it didn’t serve any coffee), banquet halls, room service, and the gourmet restaurant at the top of the building, appropriately named The Roof.  We would start prepping four days in advance of the five-day conference, totaling nine days of continuous eighteen-hour shifts.  I was intimidated just thinking about it.

On the first day of the conference, I was scheduled to flip eggs on the breakfast line at 4:30 AM even though I had closed The Roof the night before and, of course, went out with the other apprentices afterwards to smoke joints and drink beers. That night, I got home just in time to hop in the shower and go back to work.  The only comforting thing about this was that when I hit the line, all of my friends were there, every bit as burned out as I was. 

Hodgi, the executive sous chef, walked down the line inspecting us and our stations before the guests arrived.  We were all lined up in a row.  I, being the newest and youngest, was in the corner at the end.  Then, in order of seniority, he walked up to each apprentice, placed something in their hands, and said a word or two in their ear before moving on to the next.  When he finally got to me, I was so curious I couldn’t stand it!  He took my hand and placed four white cross-tops in it.  In nine months, I had smoked a lot of pot, dropped acid maybe three times, and tried a line of coke twice with these people, but I had never seen speed in the workplace.  I did as I was told and swallowed all four of them right there.  He whispered in my ear that he would have a few more for me just before we started lunch.

I don’t know if it was the Mormons, the old people, or just an older style of eating, but back then people had twenty different ways to eat their eggs.  By this point, I had already completed the mandatory three months of egg flipping for my apprenticeship, and I liked to think that I was good at it.  Yet, what happened in the next few hours was utterly amazing.  At exactly 6:00 AM, six hundred Mormons lined up outside the coffee shop.  All of them wanted breakfast.  I had learned to work three or four pans simultaneously, but now I was working seven.  I don’t know if it was the cross tops or my fear of slowing down the line, but I was freakin’ flying.  The eggs were basted, sheered, soft-poached, hard-poached, over-easy, over-hard, hard-boiled, soft-boiled, three-minute, or scrambled.  I was rockin’ out more eggs than I had ever seen in my life, and flying just as high on speed at the same time. 

The result of all six of us having the same dose was astounding. We worked together like a well-oiled machine.  From 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM, the wheel was wrapped with tickets.  Not one of us said one unnecessary word or even thought about stopping.  Not one of us went to the bathroom.  Not one of us had a smoke.  We just rocked, for four straight hours. 

The other cooks had set us up for lunch in the back.  At 10:30 AM, Hodgi came around and gave each of us two more hits, and we did it all over again.  At 3:00 PM, we shut down our stations, went outside to the van, and smoked about five joints, trying to take the edge off.  No one even thought about trying to eat; we just went up stairs and started prepping our stations.

“I wonder if all of these Mormons know how fucked up their cooks are right now.” I thought to myself.

We started to clean up at 11:00 PM, and I was still flying.  We went to Shane’s house after work.  Shane was Roget’s first apprentice.  He was the golden boy and my new best friend.  I was cracking open my first beer, still feeling totally amped out after the most amazing day of cooking in my life, when Shane gave me a Quaalude.

“Where did you get this?”

“Hodgi gave me six, one for each of us.”

I hadn’t even had three beers before I passed out on the couch.  Next thing I knew, Shane was waking me up at 4:00 AM the next morning, telling me to get in the shower.  All I could think was that I sure as hell hoped that Hodgi had more speed for me when I got to work.  Of course, he did.

We did this for five days straight.  By the fifth day, I was turning into a miserable prick.  I kept thinking that all of these fuckin’ losers were exactly like my mom.  They took pills to get going everyday and took more to come down at night.  Now, they were trying to make me that way too.  The only difference was that when conference went away, so did the speed and the Quaaludes.  I never saw them again until next year.  If I had only remembered what they taught me during my apprenticeship about drugs, that there is a time and a place for everything, then maybe I could have maintained.