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. 

My First Trip

School had started, and I was finally in the ninth grade.  There was no more getting stuffed in my locker, or having my books knocked out of my hand as I walked the halls between classes.  It was my third year at Millcreek Junior High and I was as old as any other kid there.  In fact, it was a great new start because for the first time I had something cool to brag about, my dirt bike.  Although, I still had to go to the office every Monday and pick up the free lunch tickets they give kids whose parents were on welfare.  However, it wasn’t as embarrassing as grade school when they would just hand them to you every day in front of all of your friends.

One day, I was in the cafeteria with Mike eating lunch when he told me that he got a new job at El Matador (a local Mexican restaurant) washing dishes.  He told me to come to work with him that day and that he would try to get me on.  I wasn’t going to wash any dishes, but I went down there to see if I could get a job cooking.  The kitchen manager was interviewing me when I told him that I had been the night manager of Sandwich World.  He started laughing at me, and reminded me that I was only in ninth grade.  I thought to myself, “Dude, I owned Sandwich World for a few weeks.”  It didn’t really matter that he was laughing at me, because he hired me as a prep cook.  Mike only worked there a couple of weeks but I stayed on all throughout the school year.

Sandwich World

It wasn’t until a year after I first started smoking pot, in the summer of the eighth grade, that I found some friends my own age to smoke with.  Mike was my best friend.  We would score a joint and ride the bus from Bountiful to Salt Lake to go to this park that had an empty swimming pool.  We climbed on the roof of the changing room, and hopped down on the inside to ride our skateboards.  Walk-Mans hadn’t even been invented yet, so we would just sing our favorite Kiss songs out loud as we skated. 

I got us both jobs at Sandwich World.  Microwaves were the new big thing, and this sandwich place would slap some cold meat and cheese on a bun and zap it.  People thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.  One time when we both were all stoned, Mike forgot to put a bottom bun on a hamburger and the guy burnt the shit out of his hand when he picked it up to take a bite.  He was about ready to slug us both in the face, but we couldn’t stop laughing. 

…and I have always been a junkie.

I am a natural born addict.  It is as simple as that.  When I was a little kid sitting at the breakfast table with my five other siblings, I would pour my own cereal and milk.  I don’t even know if you can call it milk, because it was that powdered stuff they gave people on welfare.  It truly tasted like shit.  I couldn’t wait to go to my grandma’s house, just so I could taste real milk.

“Todd, you have to stop drinking the milk like its water!” she would always tell me, but I knew I only had a short time to consume as much as I could.  So, I did.  I would try to remember how great it tasted when I was drinking the powdered stuff, thinking that perhaps it would help.

Anyway, when I poured my cereal I would place two heaping tablespoons of sugar in exactly dead center of the bowl.  I would then proceed to eat around it so that at the end I would be rewarded with a few soggy flakes that were totally drenched in sugar.  This was a wonderful ending to a crappy bowl of cereal.  Once in a while my mom would sneak behind me and try to stir it up.

“It’s my bowl of cereal! Let me eat it how I want,” I would tell her, freaking out.