Taking Out the Trash

“I’m not looking forward to taking out the trash in this heat,” said Cedric as he tied the full bags closed, hoisted them out of the cans, placed them on the dolly, and got ready to head into the dense August St. Louis night.

“Working in a restaurant kitchen is a tough job for someone who doesn’t like heat,” I joked. A year ago, I’d started working three night shifts a week as a line cook in hopes of providing some respite from my job as a nonprofit strategy executive. I loved the physicality of working a line, producing food quickly for other people, and avoiding the confusion of passive-aggressive office conversations. I preferred the sweltering temperatures of a restaurant kitchen over heated office politics any day.

“I don’t like heat because of the memories,” he said as he stared at the three sinks piled with dirty dishes. “I started picking cotton in Arkansas when I was nine years old. Did it until I was twenty-five.”

“Wow, I wasn’t expecting that,” I said. As I cleaned knives to place back on the cutting boards in preparation for the impending rush, I looked down at my hands, which I now proudly considered working-woman hands because of the slight burns and rough patches. I looked over at Cedric’s hands: bulbous knuckles holding together crooked fingers like a hundred-year-old tree’s branches.

“Well, kids got more pay than the adults, so my whole family picked together. My grandparents took us out at first. They made a game of it. But still, I don’t like the heat.” He reached down to steady the sagging bags on the dolly. “When I was in prison down there, the cell would get so hot, I couldn’t breathe or sleep or nothing. Sometimes the small space of this kitchen reminds me of that and I gotta take out the trash just to tell myself I ain’t there no more.”

To me, this kitchen meant freedom, peace from my mentally chaotic day job. I relished the order of the metal containers, each holding its own ingredients, reliably placed every night so that we knew without looking that the sliced tomatoes were in front of the cucumber, adjacent to the red onions and artichoke hearts. Every line cook comes to work with his or her own demons to overcome. Each of us tries to escape a heated past—whether earlier in the day or years ago. But mine didn’t seem so complicated or dire now.

“When I grew up,” I replied, “not having air conditioning in the car was a big deal.”

He smiled big so I could see the metal grill of his front teeth. “Damn, Deb,” he said and turned to slog through the sea of customers with the plastic bags of trash.

When I started working here, I had never cooked at a restaurant. For my family, every night for twenty years, yes, but not for the public. The kitchen staff trained me and let me try. I learned how to make crepes and pizzas and giant chopped salads. I cut pork with the meat slicer and put mounds of it on marble tiles, holding the mustard bottle just right to squeeze a snaked drizzle down beside the spicy meat and cheese.

At the restaurant, we shared trash duty, but Cedric refused to let a woman take it out—too disrespectful, he said. Each time I tried, he grabbed the filthy cans, stared at my face through his thick black-rimmed glasses, tensed his lips into a firm dry line, and said, “Come on, Deb, don’t even talk to me like that.”

When Cedric wasn’t there, I had to do it. I pulled on the plastic single-use gloves, trekked around to the three cans in the kitchen and the four behind the bar, heaving heaping bags of discarded food and empty wine bottles out of the bins and piling them on the dolly. I’m fifty-four years old and weigh 130 pounds, but no one else would help me. Bartenders, men in their late twenties, liked to wait until the bags were overflowing to let me know. “Come on, Gary,” I would yell, “you gotta tell me when it’s only halfway full. I can’t lift it out of the cans or into the dumpster when it’s this heavy.”

“Well, this is your job. I’m way past trash duty. So get over here and take it out,” he’d yell back. Gary had worked in the industry for over ten years and considered himself an expert and purveyor of all duties. Approaching thirty and prematurely gray, he had a wavy mass of hair and beard that looked like ribbons of salt and pepper. This thought kept me entertained as I rounded up trash while he watched and smoked.

With no back door, we had to weave through customers with all that trash, out the front. Pauly, the day cook, claimed he was on high alert at all times, ready to bolt if a fire broke out, because back of house (the cooks) would need to move fast to make it past everyone through the front door. Pauly came from fine restaurants. He could make blinis and hollandaise, and bone a whole fish. He was tired of being screamed at by anxious head chefs, so he came here to work in the bowels of a small wine bar, the galley kitchen like a submarine, no windows, no ventilation, and no back door. He led with his protruding belly when he walked, had no front teeth, and wouldn’t do tasks unless you forced him. “Unless someone rides my ass every day, I’m not gonna do shit,” he used to tell me. He acted nonchalant, but his face—sunken, pocked, and mushy as if deflated—showed what a lifetime of kitchen work can do to a person. He worked the morning shift, starting each day at 9:30 a.m. with a shot of whiskey stolen from the bar. Pauly was a good cook. He wandered around in the galley kitchen, licking his swollen lips, banging into me with his gut, and waiting to take another smoke break. He was supposed to take out the trash before the end of his shift, but when I arrived for the night, the cans were usually full. At first, when I asked him about it, he would look at me with mock surprise and say, “Sorry, hon, I forgot. I’m late for my night job now; I can’t do it.” I started coming in thirty minutes early so he’d have time to take it out when I asked. After that, he left notes cussing me out attached to the cans. Another thing I love about restaurant kitchens—a direct response from a pissed-off coworker.

James was the lead cook at night. He started to drink beers (only Budweiser—he had a fit if he was offered anything else) at eleven a.m. when he woke up, so by the time he came to work at five, he was already buzzed. He was always thirty minutes late and stomped in pretending to be mad about something so that everyone would be afraid to berate him for his tardiness. “If I act a fool, like an angry asshole, they leave me alone,” he told me. Once every four to six weeks, he just wouldn’t show up. Everyone would panic, call his phone, call his brother, call his girlfriend, sometimes drive by his house—“looking for Godot,” I used to say. Then, one or two days later, he’d saunter in for his shift as if nothing had happened. He’d get chewed out by the manager, be given some menial task as punishment, and then the cycle would continue. “I’m very sensitive,” he would say if I ever challenged him on his personal habits. He was six feet tall, over 250 pounds, could easily drink an eighteen-pack of Bud during a nine-hour shift and then go out afterward for shots of vodka. He never wore a seat belt, had crashed more cars than I had ever owned, and shuffled from one friend’s couch to another with his collection of sports-team jerseys and hats in cardboard boxes in his trunk. But he’s the one who taught me to cook.

When I was first learning, he talked out loud as we made everything, so I could hear the ingredients he was adding. He showed me how to make crème fraîche designs on a smoked fish plate, how to chiffonade basil, and how to test a grilled steak’s temperature just by touching it with my finger, to feel the amount of give. He laughed at me the first time I mopped the floor. “You don’t know how to use a professional mop, do you? You got to push it back and forth, not side to side. Otherwise, we’re gonna be here all night.”

He also liked giving me tips on taking out the trash. Sometimes he’d help me load the bags onto the dolly before I wheeled it out past the seemingly oblivious customers at the bar. “Say Excuse me real loud if they don’t move,” he told me. “If they still don’t budge, flex your body a little, and they’ll get scared and move out of the way. If that still doesn’t work, tell them to move the fuck over. They’ll feel uncomfortable. They’ll move.”

“But I’m half your size and a woman. They won’t move for me.”

He laughed, his broad lips parting and his eyes turning down toward me. “Yeah, you’re right. Well, can’t you throw your privileged weight around? You usually get what you want. Can’t you get them to move? I’ve seen you with all that confidence sitting at the bar talking to everyone around you. People like talking to you. You know that.”

“Yeah, but taking out the trash is different,” I said. And it was. Walking out of the kitchen in scuffed Converse sneakers, sweaty in old jeans and a tank top, hair pulled up and a towel dangling from my back pocket, dragging bags of garbage between drinking men and women in their tight jeans, high heels, and shiny hair, I was someone they didn’t notice or didn’t want to. When I was a customer sitting at the bar, clean clothes and cowboy boots, curly hair bouncing on my shoulders as I talked, people stopped to chat and look at me, wanting to make me smile. I’m the same person, I used to think as I maneuvered past the crowds who now pretended I didn’t exist—who tensed their bodies as I moved by, as if I were dirty like the trash—why do you think I’m not worthy to share your space now?

I had my own issues thrashing around back there in the kitchen. When I’d started cooking two nights a week, I’d rush in after work, change in the bathroom out of my professional uniform—dress, tights, heels, and jewelry—into my line-cook garb: old jeans, baggy T-shirt, and ratty stained sneakers. It felt great. But it also felt great to sit at the bar sometimes on my day off, meeting a friend or talking to other regulars around me. I liked knowing I could (and did) straddle both sides of the bar. However, after working in the kitchen about a year, I didn’t want anyone looking at me anymore, and I craved anonymity: I’d been laid off from my nonprofit management job, and I didn’t trust my worth to sit beside the well-dressed and the smiling any longer. I needed the grime of the kitchen, the misfits, the angry, and the trash. My professional workplace had thrown me out, yes, I’ll say it, like trash. Not worth keeping around.

So I stopped coming in for a drink on my days off. Instead, I picked up more shifts. Not because I needed the money but because I wanted to hide, and as I became aware of later, I really didn’t want to go home. I also wondered whether these men in the kitchen could teach me something. If they could survive all the fuckups and imperfections, maybe I could survive my own. Maybe they could show me how.

I even picked up a few daytime shifts. Pauly wasn’t happy because he thought I’d tell on him for taking whiskey shots all morning from the bar. “If my stomach could handle alcohol at ten a.m., I’d probably be drinking too,” I said.

“Lightweight,” he muttered and poured me a coffee. He made scrambled eggs and fried potatoes for us as we waited for the morning deliveries. When the crates of produce, fish, and meat came in, I hoisted them onto the counter and began unpacking. “Slow down, cowboy,” he scowled. “We’re here all day.” Pacing, I thought, maybe that’s the secret.

The next night when I took out the trash, after hurling the bags into the dumpster I suddenly became overwhelmed. I crouched down on the ground—which was dirty, reeking of urine, and sticky—put my head on my knees, and sobbed. I guess I was there for a while because James sauntered out and tapped me on the back. “Hey, get up. You hurt?”

“Emotionally, yes. I’m a mess.”

He walked away. Great, I thought. No one really gives a shit. But then he was back with two beers he had taken from his supply in the back of his truck—sacred stuff. He handed me one, waited until I had drunk half of it. “Look, you get one day. Feel sorry for yourself for one day. Then you have to get over it and keep going. It’s the only way.” He took one last big swallow, tossed his empty bottle into the dumpster, and continued. “When I got out of prison—”

“Wait, you were in prison?” I couldn’t help cutting him off. Him too?

“Yeah, for assault with a weapon—anyway, when I got out, I had thirty dollars and nowhere to go. I mean nowhere. My wife left me while I was incarcerated, I lost my kids, the house, all of it. But I pushed my way back.” He glanced back at his truck where the beer was. “Yes, I drink too much. Yes, I get angry and act a fool. But I’m here. I ain’t been back to prison. I work. I have a relationship again with my kids. I give them what they need. And I’m here. You’re gonna be all right.” And he hugged me. I felt the steadiness of his body, the warmth of his arms. He wasn’t holding me up. He was telling me I was strong enough to get up on my own.

When we walked back in together, Cedric winked at me. He had known I needed to take the trash out that night, and the three of us—two compassionate felons and a laid-off nonprofit manager—got back to work filling orders for the fancy people sitting at the bar.

Read more from Issue 19.2.