03/29/20
I didn’t quite know what to expect when he asked me to the office. I knew I technically wasn’t supposed to be drinking at work but I wasn’t slurring my words and my work was still getting done. It was just heresy at this point, right? I could tell by the veins pulsating on the sides of his head that he wasn’t happy with me. He began to scream at me as if I had just slept with his wife or wrecked his Mercedes or something. He told me how inconsiderate I was and how he had given me a chance and that I fucked it up. I don’t know if it was the scotch thinking for me that night or If I didn’t think he was serious but when he told me to hand him my coat and get out of his kitchen, I looked at him and chuckled. This infuriated him. As steam practically starting shooting from his ears I stood up and took my coat off and tossed it on his desk and walked out.
I kind of wish now I wasn’t such a hard headed little prick back then. I ended up loving that job despite how I started out and those men had groomed me into the Chef that I have become. In a sense, they were like a family. A few months later, I found out through the grapevine that Chef had told one of the other line cooks that had I apologized, he would’ve let me slide. I blamed everyone but myself. I must’ve cursed the server who pointed me out to the Chef for 2 years straight but in reality, I had nobody to blame but myself and I still had a long road ahead of me before I’d ever come to grips with that.
I spent a couple of weeks lounging around after I got fired. I was smoking weed and drinking myself to sleep damn near every night at this point. I half-ass applied to a few jobs to keep my parents off of my back but didn’t expect to even get a call from any of the places that I applied. I’d struggled with depression for most of my life so to me, being a bum wasn’t as low as I had been before I could potentially be. My life was in full fledge party mode. My daily routine consisted of waking up around 1 or 2 in the afternoon and spending the majority of my day getting fucked up or finding someone or something to get me there. The sad part of it all was I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Anyone who tried to point it out to me had a problem not me. How delusional could I possibly be?
A Chef's Journey 