Trampled Underfoot Update

Hello Readers!

So, I realize that it has been over a month since I posted a new excerpt on Trampled Underfoot. There has been a cumulations of events (including getting terribly sick, hosting my father-in-law for a weekend, and visiting a remote lake with no internet connectivity for memorial day) that have preventing me from spending my weekend time on Trampled Underfoot.

However, do not fret! I have begun working on a project to get the entire work published and available for sale online. In addition, because my father would like to share his story with the world free of charge, I will also be providing a soft copy download of the work for those who do not want to purchase the hardcover book.

It may be some weeks before the book is polished enough for publishing. In the meantime, I will continue to post new excerpts here on the Tramped Underfoot blog site.

We appreciate all of your feedback (positive or negative), so please feel free to post your comments!

Thank you for reading our story!

Happy cooking always,

Chelse

The Anatole

The year was 1984, and fourteen countries had just boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. There was a new girl on the music seen that called herself Madonna, and everyone was playing “Like a Virgin.” It seemed as good a time as any to get the hell out of Utah.

My sister Cindy was so excited about the possibility of Stacey, Chelse, and I coming down to Dallas that she had taken my resume to this super hotel with three thousand rooms and fourteen restaurants, called The Loews Anatole. I had three or four telephone interviews with this guy named Morris, the area director of banquets at the Anatole. Morris offered me thirty five thousand dollars a year to be a sous chef in charge of banquets. I accepted. After all, it was ten thousand more than Max was paying me.

Kicked Out of the Nest

The last year of my apprenticeship was totally different than the first two and a half years. Suddenly, everything had changed. Hodgi started to deal coke more and more at work. He got John, the director of food and beverage, hooked so bad that he was outside the hotel in his BMW waiting for Hodgi to get off every single night. John had a master’s degree from Cornell in hotel management. What a waste. He got fired and a couple of years later he decapitated himself in a single car accident flying down a canyon going to get just a little more from Hodgi. Hodgi was fired shortly after, and within a couple of years he was pulled out of a lake with a bullet in his head.

The Line Brigade

When I got back to the hotel Roget had already put the word out to everybody to not say a single word to me in regard to the food show. He could be kind like that sometimes. I guess he had figured that I had been embarrassed enough for one day. It didn’t last long.

A couple of days later Dorothy Hamill was in the Hotel for Ice Capades. You would have thought she was Mick Jagger by the way Roget was going off. She ordered a Seafood Louie salad. You don’t see it very often now, but in the seventies that salad was on every menu.  Roget had told me to make a perfect Louie. Tom quickly jumped on my station to try to hog some glory. Roget had gone to his office to get this book that he had famous people sign whenever he fed them. When he got back to her table with the book, we had already served the salad. Right after she signed it, she took a bite and quickly spit it out. We had served Dorothy Hamill rotten crab! Roget calmly walked back to the line.

The Smokey Hollow Gang

I had looked at high school differently than most of my friends. I would never cut class unless it was my day off from work and there was fresh powder to ski on. During my junior year of high school the counselors and teachers started to become very cool. There had been a newspaper article, “Four Apprentice Chefs Honored,” of which I was one of them. I had four semesters of college credits under my belt with good grades, and I was already on Vo-Ed, a program where you left early everyday to pursue your career.

Mr. Homer was the vice principle of Bountiful High School. My first year he was a total dick, but after he found out about my apprenticeship he became very cool. He allowed me to have my first period as a study period in the library to get caught up with my logbook and homework. He couldn’t imagine why I hung out with all of the burnouts when I seemed to have so much going for me. He did not understand that they had been my friends for years, and that they were the bread and butter of my business.

First place. First bust. First syringe of coke.

I started selling quarter ounces at school and work for thirty bucks. Mike had dropped out, and was working with his dad putting glass in buildings. It only took me a month of selling quarters to get together enough money to rent a three bedroom house for Dawn, Mike, and me. We must have looked at a hundred houses before we found someone who would rent to two seventeen-year-olds in Bountiful, Utah. Dawn and I went to school every day, and I had a great business selling pot. It paid all of the bills plus bought food and clothes. This was great because it meant I could spend my paychecks from work on my new girlfriend Stacey.

It was getting too cold to ride my bike to work so I rode the bus. One time I left my backpack on the bus, and it had thirteen quarter-ounces in one of those fake oilcans designed for stashing shit. I called my mom from work and asked her to go to the bus station and pick up my backpack for me. She went there with my Grandma and when she tried to pick up my pack there were cops there trying to arrest her. I guess they figured out the oil can.

My Exit Strategy

I had spent my spring break and my seventeenth birthday constantly working.  I hadn’t been home in a week.  I decided to go home since I had school the next morning.  I remember thinking on the way there that all I wanted for my birthday was more than three hours of sleep. 

When I got home, there were some birthday cards on the kitchen table and a film container filled with pot from my oldest sister, Kris.  I noticed that there were also some suitcases in the living room.  I wondered who was there. 

Conference

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.

Candy

The year was 1977, and this new job just rocked my world.  Not only was my world changing, but everyone’s world was changing.  There were gay people proudly waiting on every table.  There was a new drug on the street called cocaine, and the Rolling Stones (my favorite band) had just sold out to this new kind of dance music called disco with their new album release Some Girls.  Everything around me was different, except my home.  It was the greatest summer of my life. 

Every day, all six apprentices would take our break at exactly 4:30 PM, marching out of the kitchen in a single file line.  We walked right past security to go sit in a van that was parked right in front of the Mormon temple.  We would smoke out, listening to the Grateful Dead.  I loved my new friends, they were all in their mid-twenties and they treated as if I was as old as they were.  I tried as hard as I could to act the part, thinking about every word before it came out of my mouth.  This, in turn, led me to say very few words at all. 

Sharon #48

My mom was never home then.  All of my older brothers and sisters had moved out, and my little sister had gone to live with her dad.  So, I pretty much spent all of my time at school and work.  My mother had been taking Black Beauties every morning and sleeping pills every night for years.  I can remember both bottles being on her night stand throughout most of my life.  I didn’t understand it then, but I now know (from my own experience) that you can’t make your body go up every morning and down every night with artificial stimulus without it taking its toll on those around you.

My mother loved to fight.  She was married five times to five different men, and she fought like cats and dogs with all of them.  When all of the men had left her, she started fighting with my older brother and sisters.  It wasn’t long until they all moved out, leaving only my little sister and me.  My little sister said that she couldn’t take it anymore, so she went to live with her biological father.  This, of course, left me alone with Mom.