HUMAN WRECKAGE

Ew! Ick! THAT Smell

Olfactory time travel. I know I can never fast-forward just as surely as I can never know what will take me back.

There was a time in Canada’s major cities when “downtown” really was as magical as Petula Clark’s song. Perhaps only because I was just a boy back then. Neon signs, cinemas, nightclubs, musical traffic and swanky department stores - Eaton’s was one of the latter in Montreal. My first properly documented paying job, requiring a social insurance number and everything, was toiling in the kitchen of Eaton’s Tea Room, a gorgeous and narrow art deco space beneath a soaring curved ceiling up on the ninth floor of the downtown flagship store. (The only comparable room I’ve ever seen since is the bar of the Oxford Hotel in Denver, CO.) It was Montreal’s Olympic summer, 1976. I was 16; I was paid $3.55 an hour, significant cents above minimum wage.

Your grandmother enjoyed high tea there twice a month with the members of her bridge club. Your mother took your sister there on a special occasion for a special treat. The waiters and busboys wore black pants, white shirts, red vests, black bowties and white boater hats with red and white striped bands. I wore a khaki uniform and a disposable white paper hat. I stacked dishes, wheeling steel carts of searingly hot clean crockery into the main kitchen where the chefs worked plating meals. I sorted dirty dishes and cutlery into trays to be run through the dishwasher. I scrubbed French onion soup bowls clean by hand. Mostly I busied myself decrypting Mick Jagger’s enunciation: Was it “Marching, charging feet, boy” or “Marching, charging people (pee-pull)?” “Tumbling Dice” became something of a passion project. The ladies I worked beside on the line, as attractively adorned as I was but with hairnets, fetching Eaton’s couture, yelled at me in machine gun joual for working too fast. A non-union shop with union sentiments, prolong drudgery, stretch it out.

What looks large from a distance…In my memory the dishwasher was a massive silver dynamo, ten yards long. Compared to the relatively new Bosch in the kitchen of the Crooked 9, I’m talking IBM mainframe to an Apple iPad. Walter was one of its two operators. He seemed ancient to me and his first and only language might have been Polish. The other guy was Danny, a big guy, a couple of years older than me from a less affluent and much tougher neighbourhood than the one I’d grown up in. He was perfectly bilingual and so I’ve no idea what language he spoke at home. One of the waiters, a thin grey man, skin and hair, displayed an unnatural interest in my bare flesh. He liked watching me change into my uniform. He was overly curious about the growth pattern of my pubic hair. Danny had a quiet chat with him at high volume. (Should I ever experience the misfortune of being sentenced to hard time, I shall require an advocate and bodyguard like Danny. I hope life shook down favourably for him.) Neither Walter nor Danny worked Saturdays and so that’s when I got to run the great machine. It was a prime gig, almost fun, no sorting or stacking dishes, no scrubbing pots. The drawback was closing time for the Tea Room and the store, I had to clean the goddamn thing.

The kitchen in your home must be configured like Ann’s and mine. There are two main work areas. There’s the stovetop and the oven, and probably a smaller microwave-convection unit. Then there’s my turf, the sink with the dishwasher hard by, and the bins in the cupboard under the sink, garbage and compost. All very ergonomic. Ann and I usually host family dinners Sunday evenings, three generations around the table. You can eat off the floor here Monday mornings but not in a good way. A few weeks ago, we served a larger than usual crew, visiting relatives, invited friends. Chicken and salads and a delightful feta cheese and spinach dish – more brownie cake than spanakopita – and I can’t remember what else. The menu took a lot of planning and work. And clean up. Our party days are over, adults dislike staying up too late on a school night and, anyway, the toddlers must be put to bed. Guests began to drift away around the time when I start thinking about maybe eating my own supper. There’s a Crooked 9 family compact: Ann cooks and I clean.

“I got this.”

The kitchen garbage bin was stuffed with juicy chicken unrecyclable Stryofoam trays. I scraped the dirty plates into the green food scraps bin. I rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher. I filled it, so I ran it. I washed the indelicate IKEA wine glasses by hand. I work to rule and so I took a collective bargaining agreed break on the front porch with a cigarette and a beer before shaking out the dining room table’s cloth and power washing the highchair and carrying both down to the basement.

By this time our dishwasher, a miraculous pandemic purchase because it was not only on sale but in stock, had just completed its cycle. It’s an incredibly efficient machine. Works fast at a high temperature. When I opened the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, the smell of overheated, almost steamed, garbage and food scraps overwhelmed. That awful smell, not like somebody else’s vomit or shit, or rotten potatoes, but near enough, tripped my gag reflex down memory lane. Rancid organic waste.

Eaton’s industrial dishwasher incorporated a system of traps to catch debris as the water drained. They were steel baskets that could’ve done double duty in a deep fryer. Maybe they did. They were almost but not quite too hot to handle; my hands had toughened up over the course of the summer. What plopped out of them was revolting, the entire Tea Room menu compacted into perfectly formed ziggurats. These stinking, steaming clumps were generally a tinned pea or seasick green. They went straight into the garbage bins which already stank.

The only waste separation I ever saw in the kitchen of Eaton’s Tea Room had to do with untouched bread rolls. If the busboys weren’t “in the juice” they’d take a couple of extra moments to compete, lobbing elegant arcs of white or whole wheat in to the garbage from five, ten feet away, underhand and overhand. Swish! One less task for me. Laughter and banter. Well, didn’t the manager walk in on one game, an impromptu inspection. Maybe her blue hair was curled, waved and sprayed a little too tightly that day. She lost that prim, formal composure that was supposed to be maintained and constrained by her cream hued dress decorated with a brooch, a flower or an insect, pinned above one spinster breast. I didn’t know where to look while she screamed at the busboys to fish the perfectly good buns from the bins for replating. She was a close friend of my aunt’s, a fellow Anglican church lady, glasses of Heinz tomato juice and a ring of Jell-O shrimp salad for a family dinner, praise Saint Peter for Miracle Whip and Velveeta, which was how I got the job. I really didn’t know where to look, up, down, left, right, behind? To this day, I will not eat complimentary rolls in a restaurant, but I will puncture their crusts with my thumb.                             

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.