Don't Try This at Home by Kimberly Witherspoon, Andrew Friedman Page A

Steven
     peel off out the back door—which meant he was probably going to score—and from the way Frankie was working his jaw muscles,
     half the cooks were well into the coke already and likely looking for a re-up.
    When the produce order came in, it was getting toward panic time. Two cases of oranges, a case of lemons, ten cases of mache
     (lamb's lettuce)—which, at least, we could clean—Belgian endive, fennel, wild mushrooms, the ubiquitous baby zucchinis, yellow
     squashes, and pattypan squash and baby carrots that Bobby so loved. Dry goods followed, an impenetrable heap of long-haul
     purchases: fryer oil, salad oil, vinegar, flour, canned goods. There was no way of knowing what was for today and what was
     for next week.
    We peeled the carrots. It was two o'clock now, cocaine and indecision grinding the heart right out of the afternoon. And still
     no Bobby.
    Truffles arrived. Nice. Then the fish. Not so nice because it was Dover sole—a bitch to clean and an even bigger bitch to
     cook in large numbers. Orlando, Frankie, and I got down on the sole with rubber gloves and kitchen shears, trimming off the
     spines. Matt and Dougie cut chive sticks and plucked chervil tops and basil flowers and made gaufrette potatoes for garnish,
     because we knew—if we knew anything—that we'd be using a lot of those. Dog Boy was relegated to fiddling with the dial on
     the radio. A new hire, Dog Boy was a skateboarder with a recently pierced tongue and absolutely useless for anything—he could
     fuck up a wet dream—so it was best that he was kept safely out of the way. Adam, at least, knew we'd need bread, so he stayed
     reasonably busy balling dough and putting loaves in the oven—which was ironic, really, as Adam was usually the last person
     to know what was going on about anything, and here he was, currently the best informed person in the kitchen.
    By four o'clock, with still no evidence of Bobby and no word, the mood was turning ugly. Dougie's neck and cheeks were red,
     which meant he'd been hitting the sauce somewhere. Frankie was retelling, for the umpteenth time, the story of how he had
     communicated the plot to Cliffhanger to Sylvester Stallone during a three-second near-telepathic encounter by the men's room of Planet Hollywood, his previous
     employer. He'd as good as written that movie!—despite the fact that he couldn't even pronounce it, calling it " Clifthangah" —and one of these days, he'd get paid for it. That's if Sly's "people" didn't "get to him first." Frankie, while high on blow,
     was often under the impression that various "agents of Stallone" were "watching him" as he clearly "knew too much." When we
     all started laughing (and how could we not?), the by now manically high, dangerously paranoid Frankie began to tweak. This
     was not good. As Frankie was taller and bigger and stronger than all of us (over six foot six) and a vicious hockey player
     sensitive to criticism, things could get really crazy.
    "Fucking Bobby," muttered Dougie again. Dougie, at least, wouldn't get violent. He was more of a sulker. But he might very
     well just disappear if discouraged. He'd done it before—just walked out the door and disappeared for a few days.
    I nervously looked at the clock and debated doing exactly that myself. Happily, when I looked back, Matt was doing his pitch-perfect
     Frankie Pentangeli imitation from The Godfather II: "Oh . . . sure, senator . . . sure . . . that Michael Corleone . . . Michael Corleone did this . . . Michael Corleone did
     that," which always gave Frankie the giggles. Violence, for now anyway, seemed to have been averted.
    Time passed. We continued to set up as best we could. At five thirty, Bobby finally rolled in. I say rolled in because he
     was (not unusually) on Rollerblades, wearing a new Blues Traveler tour jacket he'd scored off a private client and that charming little-boy smile that had so successfully helped convince a
     legion of hostesses and floor staff to