Now They Call Me Gunner Read online

Now They Call Me Gunner

  by Thom Whalen

  Copyright (c) 2012 Thom Whalen

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, either in whole or in part, in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  In the summer of nineteen seventy-one, the head cook at Elsa’s Grill was a crazy man named Randal. I don’t remember his last name. Maybe I never knew it. It doesn’t matter because his name wasn’t important. His craziness was what mattered and it took me a while to find out how crazy he was and why.

  Elsa’s was a mom-and-pop diner in Wemsley, a small town in upstate New York, halfway between there and nowhere. Elsa’s was no different than any other little family-owned restaurant anywhere else in these United States.

  The grill was ageless. I never knew if it was a real grill or just a sheet of three-eights steel thrown on top of an old gas stove. But it had seen more liver and onions than I could stomach, even in my worst nightmares. And I have had some bad nightmares about the summer I worked at Elsa’s.

  The deep fryer was a real commercial model – you don’t mess with homemade equipment when you’re keeping five gallons of lard at three hundred and sixty degrees for twelve hours a day – but it was old. I think it had first seen service in World War Two. I could see a bit of camouflage paint on the back side when I got ambitious enough to mop behind there. Tan and brown, not black and green, so it hadn’t been Vietnam. Even the army, screwed up as it usually is, never used desert colors in the jungle.

  Mrs. Everett was fond of auctions. She never planned to acquire more equipment but, every so often when she saw something on the block and bidding was slow, she shouted a few bids and accidently bought something.

  Like the slicer where we make the slaw. We all knew which auction had sold that one and we were pretty sure that it had seen service in the morgue in the big hospital in Syracuse before it came to Elsa’s. Cabbage heads weren’t the first heads that it had sliced, if you know what I mean. I’d swear that thing was haunted. Randal lost a thumb tip to it once. Not a lot of his thumb, just an eighth. But it bled like a river. We served red cabbage slaw that day.

  Elsa’s Grill wouldn’t have been my first choice for a summer job – it wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice – but I was starting at Columbia in the fall and needed money bad. I was on scholarship – no way could we afford Columbia’s tuition without aid – but that didn’t include living expenses, which would be high in New York City.

  I started work three days before my last day of high school because Mrs. Everett said that she needed someone right away and she wouldn’t hold the job even a single day. It was the first time that I had ever ditched class and I didn’t like that. But I didn’t have any choice about it.

  She wasn’t there when I knocked on the back door at ten on Monday morning. And then knocked again. And then again five minutes later.

  “You looking for me, kid?” a voice said behind me.

  “I’m supposed to start work today.” I turned to look at a grizzled face.

  This was Randal. He never introduced himself to me. He didn’t have to. He could rely on other people mentioning his name as soon as he was out of earshot.

  Looking at him, I knew that he wasn’t normal but I couldn’t say why. He had an easy grin and stood in a relaxed slouch, but the impression that he gave was the opposite of casual disinterest. He seemed to notice too much, to be unstable, too quick to act.

  “Yeah,” he said with a slight grin. “Mary said we were getting fresh meat today.”

  Mrs. Everett’s first name was Mary. No one knew why the diner was called Elsa’s. I asked Mrs. Everett once but even she professed ignorance. And she didn’t profess ignorance about much, let me tell you.

  He unlocked the door. “You start when I get here. But you write ten on your time sheet. That’s the rule.”

  That was Randal’s rule, not Mrs. Everett’s. He had a lot of rules. Most of them made sense from his point of view, if not from anyone else’s. As the summer wore on, I was to learn that his rules were how he coped with a world that challenged him more than the rest of us.

  Randal was a stocky man. Not fat. Physically powerful.

  He didn’t eat much off the diner’s menu. That was another one of his rules. “What the customers eat, the cook doesn’t.” Actually, that one made sense to me. Everything on the menu was loaded with fat and starch. And sugar. You’d be surprised how much sugar we poured into the dressing for the slaw. Even the fries were coated with sugar before they were cooked. We served nothing healthy to our clientele.

  Randal ate a lot of the diner’s food, but he made his own recipes from the ingredients that the kitchen provided. He marinated cabbage and onions in vinegar, fried the julienned potatoes on the grill, and stripped the breading off the chicken breasts. Nothing from the deep fryer was ever going to pass between his lips.

  I don’t know if Mrs. Everett was aware of his creative ways or not. He never told me that it was a secret but he never cooked for himself when she was in the diner, either.

  I just kept my mouth shut and did as I was told. And if I wasn’t told explicitly, then I did as I saw Randal do.

  That first day, he handed me an apron and told me to wear it like he did. It was full length, but he folded the bib down and the bottom up to make a short apron that stayed out of the way. He didn’t care if his tee shirts got greasy. They were stained permanently grey across his gut so a little more grease smeared there was unnoticeable.

  The uniform wasn’t complete until a paper hat was perched on my head. “State law,” Randal said as he pulled a hat from the box.

  I was surprised that Randal knew the state law, much less gave it any weight. He had the aura of a scofflaw.

  He set me to work chopping cabbage, slicing tomatoes, and thawing meat. He showed me how to disassemble a head of lettuce by banging the stem on the table to break all the leaves at the base and then pulling it out – a skill that serves me well any time I need to use a whole head of lettuce at one sitting.

  The prep never varied from one day to the next because the menu was fixed. Mrs. Everett didn’t believe in daily specials. “Every item we serve is special,” she said as often as she could.

  But I suspect that she didn’t serve specials because Randal wouldn’t cook them. “I cook what I cook and nothing else.” He was not a flexible man.

  At eleven, a woman, maybe in her early thirties, appeared. She was wearing a knee-length black skirt, tight white blouse, and sensible shoes. Obviously the waitress.

  “You’re the fresh meat?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “I hope you cook better than Nate,” she said.

  “Who’s Nate?” I asked.

  “That’s the one you’re replacing. Right now he’s on a bus somewhere in Mexico. Good place for him. He always burns the grilled cheese. You got to watch the grilled cheese. It goes from good to burnt in a flash and I don’t serve black grilled cheese. Nobody ever tips a waitress who serves them a black grilled cheese. And don’t you try to scrape the black off, neither. That makes a mess and I don’t serve messes to anybody.”

  “Because it messes with your tips?” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t let nothing or nobody mess with my tips. You remember that.”

  “Okay.”

  In some restaurants, the waitresses share thei
r tips with the cooks. That gives the cooks an incentive to please the customers.

  Elsa’s was not one of those restaurants. Our only incentive for pleasing the customers was to avoid the wrath of the waitresses. Which turned out to be incentive enough.

  As the waitress tied a frilly apron about her slender waist, she said, “Are you a virgin?”

  My mouth dropped open. The only sound that I could utter was a low, “Aaaah.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s a condition that’s easy to cure.”

  She walked out to the front.

  I looked at Randal.

  He shrugged. “I never get between a man and the woman that’s tormenting him.” That was another of Randal’s rules.

  Half an hour later, Mrs. Everett arrived. “I see you’ve met Randal and Gwen,” she said. “You can learn a lot from them. Pay attention.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A trickle of customers soon became a flood as the place filled for lunch. I spent the next two hours learning to stay out of Randal’s way. He was a black belt with a spatula and handled a chef’s knife like a samurai sword. He could cut a three-quarter inch slice of meatloaf to the nearest thirty-second as quick as a blink.

  “See how it’s done?” he asked when lunch was over.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Great. I take my break from one-forty-five to two-fifteen so you’re on.”

  He threw his paper hat and greasy apron on the office desk as he walked out the back door.

  As far as Randal was concerned, I was trained.

  Gwen jammed an order on the wheel and said, “Grilled cheese.” She looked at me, alone in the kitchen, and added, “Don’t burn it.” Her voice was strict and hard. “I’m going to check both sides.”

  That grilled cheese was the first order that I cooked by myself at Elsa’s. When it was on the grill, I watched it like a hawk to make sure that I didn’t burn either side. I wondered if that made me any less of a virgin in Gwen’s eyes.

  Though not nearly as popular as the chicken and fries, the liver and onions were popular enough to surprise me. Even as I remember back, I’m still surprised. A scoop of coleslaw on every plate. Pickle spear with every sandwich. Gwen didn’t have to remind me about the garnishes too often in that first half hour even though I was terribly distracted. Every time she shoved another ticket on the wheel, I wondered if she were the nurse who would cure my virgin condition. She was at least ten years older than me, but she was trim and had nice features. I found her looking more and more desirable as the day wore on.

  She had me hooked but good.

  By the time Randal came back, Gwen looked more like Jane Fonda than Jane Doe in my imagination. Barbarella had nothing on her.

  Mrs. Everett left when Randal came back from his break. As soon as she was out of sight, he put a chunk of roast beef on a hamburger bun and smothered it in fried onions. The customers got hamburger on hamburger buns and roast beef on sandwich bread and fried onions on liver but Randal didn’t eat what the customers ate, ever.

  It also turned out that he never ate on his break. Breaks were his time. He preferred to eat on Mrs. Everett’s time.

  My break followed Randal’s. When I started, Randal asked me if I wanted to work split shifts instead of taking a short break – we weren’t busy between lunch and dinner and I wasn’t needed – but I wanted to earn as much money as I could so Randal and I both worked long days. Nobody got overtime pay. I was exhausted at the end of every day.

  Dinner was busy, but not as busy as lunch. We served more meals in the evening, but dinner was spread out over a longer period so we didn’t have to rush as much as during the noon hour.

  After close, Mrs. Everett reconciled the accounts and then took the day’s deposit to the bank. Gwen tidied the front while Randal and I cleaned the kitchen. She left before I lifted the chairs onto the tables and mopped the front. The twenty-pound cotton cord mop was too heavy for the women when it was wet, so the one and only task in the front that fell to the cooks was mopping their floor.

  As Randal’s assistant and the junior member of the staff, I expected to be stuck with all the cleanup but it turned out that he wasn’t shy about pitching in and doing his share. I respected that.

  By the close of business at ten that night, I had more questions than answers about Randal. I didn’t know if he had ever been married. I didn’t know if he was a drug addict. I didn’t know if he had ever been in prison. I didn’t know if he’d ever killed a man. I dared ask no questions of him, though. There was an air of imminent violence about him at all times.

  I hoped that I would learn more about Randal as the summer days marched past.

  In fact, all my questions would be answered.