Chapter 20: Petty Tyrants

Midtown isn’t really any closer to this part of the city than anything else, but it has that funky, branded name that shows up when some developer gets it into their head that they can turn several commercially developed streets into one unified property with new sidewalks, new restaurants, and lots of parking. I’d been there before, trying the noodles. I was told they were good, that they were “authentic ramen,” and I tried it. It’s strong, but not really…ramen, to me. Ramen is meant to come in little crunchy squares. Anything else needs a different name.

Still, I like the sidewalks. I kind of like the new street signs. I’d gone biking around after dark once and I could see everything, and all the bugs were up at the lights instead of down on the sidewalk with me. I could just breeze through the empty, cool night air as fast as I wanted. It’s the little things that make you feel free.

I had never been to the smoothie store, but as so often happened, Toby wasn’t having it. Something about his personal ethic just didn’t jive with the idea of getting something for himself while his friend watched without. So, I left with a blueberry smoothie. It was yogurt and delicious.

From there it was a short walk to the Burger Barn. The theme was clearly more Burger than Barn. They had a mascot, “Burger Bob,” holding a weird-looking burger with skinny buns and a whole lot of greenery on top—Farm Fresh. As I passed the cheesy promotional material, I could tell it advised the reader that, among other things, Burger Bob wanted them to care for their teeth. “Always brush your teeth after eating pineapple,” said a speech bubble. “Dentist’s number one recommended brand is Colgate.” And, “Eating healthy is only one part of a holistic lifestyle for being a better you.” Haha, okay, Burger Bob.

Dan Perrigrossi turned out to be a tall, spare man in his 50s. He wore a hairnet, was clean-shaven, and had that whipcord-thin look of someone who probably runs for fun. Gross. He shook my hand with passably feigned enthusiasm when I introduced myself. “Delighted,” he told me. “Walk and talk.”

I followed him, waving goodbye to Toby.

“Obviously there’s food in the kitchen,” he said, “but we don’t normally bring in outside drinks.” I gulped my smoothie and discarded it with a faint frisson of regret. I barely knew you, smoothie. At least I didn’t waste it. “Very good,” he said approvingly. “Now, I’m given to understand that you are soon to graduate high school. No previous experience, but no black marks on your record either?” I nodded. “Okay, we can work with that. Teaching new people from scratch is often easier,” he told me. “No bad habits to unlearn. You know how to cut an onion?”

The knife in his hand was a blur, producing perfectly even slices, each about half as thick as I would typically expect on a fast-food burger, all rendered from the same onion within a minute. “Not really,” I admitted. “Well, that’s the sort of thing we can teach you pretty quickly,” he said. “Just remember: choke up on the knife to control it, mmm? For most of our stuff, you can just use the mandolin, though. Greens will always need chopping: basil, arugula, cabbage, lettuce.” As he walked, he indicated the various ingredients with his knife before setting it down on a steel work surface, safely away from the walkway. “Just realized I was waving around a knife,” he said. “Hardly a friendly way to greet the new help.”

“So, listen,” he continued. “We do everything here in a very exact way, follow a very specific process, and we do that for a reason. This machine here,” he said, indicating what looked like a large meat grinder, “is a jacquard. Flesh goes in, tenderized chunks go out. That could be your finger, the jacquard doesn’t know the difference. Don’t do that—ruins the meat, ruins your day, makes typing harder.”

He laughed at his own dark little joke.

“The chunks get pressed into discs, killed in the blender...” He indicated a meat slurry. “...and the final output is nice and tender beef. We use cube steak. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it; it’s not tender at all, which means it’s very cheap. But it is nutritious. It’s perfectly good meat, just needs a little TLC in our jacquard here. Big companies won’t invest in the machines. The upfront cost is too high for their quarterly reports. But for a craftsman, you can amortize—that means spread out the cost of the machine over years—and make it a worthwhile investment. By that alone, I turn a bad input beef cut into an industry edge. They prefer chemistry instead of physically tenderizing it. You know why that’s worse?”

“Because then the customer eats the chemicals,” I said.

“Bingo. Whereas if you mash it down to a paste, it’s a little extra work, but it doesn’t put any new ingredients in. The customer gets exactly what they expect. Beef. By the time we’re done with it, it’s going to have the texture—not the taste, mind you, but the texture—of filet mignon. For flavor, we go to our good friend butter.”

“I thought butter was bad for you.”

He waved a hand in a balancing motion. “It’s not as bad for you as people say. We use ghee—that’s just clarified butter without the milk proteins. Slightly better for you, but mostly, just like with every food, the question is how much are you eating. So, instead of covering a griddle surface with an ocean of butter, we brush it on the food. Same coverage, less butter.”

The butter was red. “Paprika,” he said in passing.

“And it’s not just the burger patty. We make our own flatbread here. It’s harder to make than a normal bun, but it’s smaller, so it doesn’t overwhelm the mouthfeel. The flavor can be balanced so you can actually taste the greens and onion. If you can’t taste them, why are they there?”

I shrugged.

“I see I’m losing you.”

“No,” I said. “It looks like you’re making an artisanal burger, and I can see why you’re doing what you’re doing.” I gestured at the pineapple rings. “The bromelain in those breaks down the meat further, right?”

He smiled, a very slight, close-mouthed smile. “Yes, pineapple. We can just say pineapple juice, it’s fine. The flavor ties everything together and breaks down the meat a little bit more.”

“Thus the toothbrush commercial from Burger Bob,” I said.

“Sure! There’s no point in running a healthy alternative to fast food if we’re just going to pump out unhealthy customers,” he said. I could respect that. “Anyway, we’re not going to just talk about it.” He presented me with a finished sandwich. I called it a sandwich because it certainly wasn’t a cheeseburger—there was no cheese. It was piled high with basil and other greens I didn’t recognize. “Watercress,” he said. “Gives it that special zesty crunch.”

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I tried it. The man was on to something. This was the best burger I’d ever taken a bite of.

“Take it to go,” he suggested. It was a very big burger. I nodded at his wisdom. “So,” he said, “that’s what we do here. Just three menu items: The Burger, The Burger Plus with fries—fried once and then toasted, but still better for you than McDonald’s—and Dan’s Way, that plus a side dish I rotate from time to time. Right now it’s onion soup.” He must have seen my interest. “Try it on your way out.”

“But now,” he said, his tone shifting, “we need to talk about some hard truths before we get too excited and throw an apron on you. The fact of the matter is, this is an industry where drug use is expected and normalized. Cocaine is rampant among cooks. It’s the lifestyle, the hours, the rush. I don’t believe in rushing—haste makes waste—so I don’t believe in cocaine. So, there will be a drug test. I understand that weed is legal, though you are a little young for that, and while that will come back on the test, I will not fail you for it.”

I controlled my face very carefully.

“It’s the hard stuff that I can’t have in my kitchen,” he continued. “So I’m requiring both a urine test and a hair follicle test. That will give me a longer-term idea about your drug history. There was a fire once. I’m not going to go through that again. The company invests a lot in you once you’re onboarded. Insurance, with a premium for the jacquard because of finger safety.” He held up his third finger, which was a bit squared off at the tip, and waggled his eyebrows. “Death and dismemberment. For our ladies, we have maternity leave. It adds up. I’ll be putting about $10,000 into you once you’re onboarded, and I don’t like to waste $10,000. So. You don’t do coke, do you? No blow? No nose candy?”

I shook my head.

“Well, thank goodness for that,” he said. “You’re way too young. All right.” He clapped his hands. “Wash up. I’ll get you an apron. I’m going to teach you how to cut greens.”

Working in the kitchen was stressful. Perhaps he didn’t believe in haste, but he didn’t believe in being slow, either. Every movement needed to be efficient and effective. Don’t chop it and then scoop it; chop and swipe, takes half the time. Don’t sort through the leaves and remove the bad ones; just take all the good ones off the branch from the get-go. I think of myself as capable of efficient activity, but I was slow. Everyone in the kitchen was faster and more adept than I was. And there were all these mysterious little things to learn. “Don’t put your hand under there.” There was a purple glow around the drying rack for the dishes. “I’m not a radiologist, but I don’t think that’s good for you. Cleans the dishes, though.” That kind of thing.

My feet hurt from standing in one place. I was advised to get better shoes.

I learned that they freeze-dried their own spices for incorporation into the patties. I learned that chopping cabbage is slower than taking a grater to a head of cabbage. I learned about the big press-down blender that could also knead dough with a dough hook. And at the end of the day, I learned that he was planning to start a new franchise. “There will be room at the top,” he said. “I tell everyone. Nobody wants to work somewhere without room for growth. Not even me.”

I also learned how to mop, which was embarrassing.

I had to leave early; there was no helping it. On a bike, there was just no way to get to the drug test on time otherwise. It was a very long bike ride, and I still smelled like paprika at the end.

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The testing building turned out to be one of five suites in a small, rectangular brick building by the name of Greenway Suites. I ended up waiting a good twenty minutes, despite there being no one else there when I arrived. Finally, they took me back and gave me the bad news.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No, I’m sorry. We can’t take a hair sample if it’s been bleached or dyed.”

“Then you’ll have to take some body hair,” I said, already not looking forward to this.

“No.” The lab technician stared at me blankly. “I can’t collect that. And I can’t verify where any hair you give me originated.”

“You don’t have any female technicians?” The answer was likely no.

“I will have to mark this as non-compliant,” he said, ignoring my question. “We won’t be able to run it.” He handed the sheet back to me. “We will run your urine test and get the results back to your employer.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said. The jars on the shelf behind the technician rattled. Oops. I was pulling in too much power. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with it, I just wanted to hit him. My vision began to blue, then strangely to purple. I had never used aeromancy before, but that’s what this was. Wind picked up around us, billowing my clothes and snapping the lab technician’s coat like a flag in a gale.

All of this was very irregular, since we were inside, with the door closed.

“I can’t do it, I’m sorry!” he said. He was trying not to look frightened.

“I want to talk to your supervisor,” I told him.

He left at a run. Well, that did it. Oops.

“Just give me a moment.” The woman who came out a few minutes later, whose nametag read Priscilla, looked me up and down, then looked at the other technician as though he were a complete idiot. The wind had died down, my temper now under control. I felt vaguely ashamed of how I’d acted.

“It’s not our policy,” she said, “to perform a follicle test on body hair.”

“But you can use body hair,” I pressed.

“It’s not our policy,” she told me in exactly the same tone of voice, without any modulation at all.

“I need this for my job.”

“You should have thought of that before you dyed your hair,” she said.

“But look, it’s growing out!” I showed her the top of my head, where an ombre was starting. There was perhaps an inch of undyed, unbleached hair at my roots. I couldn’t afford to get it dyed all the time.

She leaned forward. “You’ll have to get a haircut.”

“It’s not your policy,” I said, looking back at her, honestly confused now. “To use unbleached head hair?”

She stared at me, stone-faced.

“Ma’am, how long does the hair have to be? What is the shortest sample you can accept?” I asked, trying a different tack.

She didn’t engage with me, which was smart, because I knew the real answer had to be less than an inch. I knew ‘Dad’ had talked about drug tests before, and he always had a crew cut. Instead, she said, “We cannot do your hair follicle test.” Her lips thinned. “We’ve already taken your urine sample, so you’ll need to leave, or I’ll call the cops.”

I called for the magic, but it didn’t come this time. The room just began getting colder again. My breath came out frosted. I’d never noticed before, but when I did that my eyes glowed a bit. I could see myself in the mirror behind Pricilla. Well, that was good to know.

I saw a flicker behind myself in the reflection, and glanced back—but saw nothing.

She was going for her phone when the first pipe exploded, water rapidly clouding a portion of the tiled ceiling grey before tiles popped out and water began to fall.

As I left, the glass on their front door shattered from the thermal contraction. So did the windshield of a car in the lot. It could only have been hers; there weren’t very many cars. Good luck proving that was me.

As I biked away, I saw them looking at me through the open doorway. When I found out I was special, that I had power, I’d sort of wanted to be Spider-Man. Just a little nobody who sometimes did good things around the neighborhood, kept my head down. I wanted to be a hero. But every day brought me closer to feeling like Doctor Doom.