ATLANTIC CITY HOTEL KITCHEN

There are kitchens and then there are KITCHENS. There’s my mother’s kitchen with the pink Westinghouse stove, the dinner plates from the A&P collection circa 1955 and the kitchen table that my mother still considers new because it’s only 50 years old.

Then there’s the huge Hotel Morton kitchen in the late 60’s Atlantic City where I worked two summer breaks from college. Today it’s probably a penny slot machine parlor at the Trump Taj Mahal, since it was torn down to become a casino.

I was Billy Pancake back then because I worked the breakfast rush in the pantry making row after row of pancakes. Flip them over when the batter bubbles burst for 15 at a time.

For the dinner rush I dipped ice cream and cut pies, cakes and juicy Jersey cantaloupes, while my associate, filthy finger nailed Dorothy, tossed the salads in the sink. Once she scooped up the drain plug plus chain for a customer’s fork to bounce off of when diving into his delicious house salad.

Before entering the kitchen you changed into your white uniform in the locker room, with my boss Bob often modeling his latest underwear for you.

There was old Pop, who looked about 70, moved like he was 90, but had a 30-year-old’s chiseled chest with bulging forearms. He was stooped over, bald with wisps of white, bespectacled and ripped like Arnold in his Mr. Universe days. He was the strangest contradiction I’ve ever seen.

You burst out of the locker room into the bustling greasy floored kitchen to face the big smoking stoves and the cooks on your right, the steaming dishwashers on your left, the sweaty waiters and waitresses zipping in and out of the swinging dining room doors and the rectangular pantry straight ahead.

My favorite job of all time was riding the overflowing smelly garbage can on wheels from the pantry to the trash shoot in the front, where I dropped the garbage down the hole, individually lobbing the bottles to crash in a splattering splash on the concrete floor below.

The kitchen was flush with urgency and hot meals, full of characters I’ll never forget. There’s something about being young, single and aimless that makes the strangest people seem almost normal in the course of your work day.

There was a dishwasher named Jim, who ran me down all the time until I challenged him to meet me in the alley sometime. That was easily the dumbest thing I’d ever done, because with his bodybuilder strength he could have mopped the floor with me and kept my remains as a souvenir in a bucket. But he never showed.

There was Bonnie and Sue, who were runaways that I helped get a room. Sue’s mother had the police chasing Bonnie for taking underage Sue with her. Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

After they left the hotel to work elsewhere, Bonnie wrote her mother saying she was marrying me, because I was the only guy she’d mentioned in her letters home. So on her wedding day the police came to town looking for me. I cut the cantaloupe rather raggedly that day waiting for the police to show, but they never did.

Then there was the lovely laughing waitress Eddie, my summer love that blazed and blistered under the steamy August sun, only to flicker out and freeze over in the ice snowball that was our January reunion. I got my Dear John letter leap year day with a request to mail her class ring back to her.

Since the last page of a love letter is usually the most passionate before a lover bids adieu, I buried Eddie’s ring beneath a pile of her letters’ last pages in a box, so she’d see what she was missing as she dug frantically for her ring to put back on her finger and put her back on the market. However, she hasn’t missed me in over 40 years, so I’m beginning to give up hope.

I had a big old ball in that crappy crowded kitchen. I found friends, love and treachery, while single handedly integrating it, by being the only white person on the actual kitchen staff, at a time when life lay before me like a sumptuous buffet of choices, with free refills on the pop.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN COMMON GROUND MAGAZINE