I hadn’t heard from my old buddy Geschlevsky for eons it seemed, so when I opened up my e mail and saw a note from him, I smiled to myself.

My mind went racing back in time to my ill spent youth back home. It wasn’t completely ill spent, but we wandered off the path of righteousness more often than our parents cared for.

I smiled again as the doors of the old memory vault burst open.

Geshlevsky and I were suddenly back in our youth, doing things that were for the most part harmless if somewhat across the line that separates the sane from the slightly less than stable.

I recalled one summer when we were working together at The Tavern. I can’t recall what fool was responsible for it, but we worked in the kitchen that summer. Well part of the summer anyway. We were the dish washers, a truly important job in the dining and drinking business, at least in those types of establishments that serve food on real dishes.

Real, breakable dishes! We were pretty proficient at that part of the job.

We always wondered why they called it a Chef Salad, when we were the guys that made them. I suppose now that something called a Dish Washer Salad likely would not have sold very well.

You hear horror stories about what goes on in the kitchen at some eateries but they are for the most part complete misrepresentations of the reality of Kitchen Life. The worst thing we ever saw in the place was the way they made the coleslaw.

It was ghastly. Geschlevsky and I knew it was ghastly because we made the coleslaw as well as the Chef Salads. Every morning after donning our uniforms which consisted of stupid looking blue and dark blue striped pants and fancy white double breasted jackets, we would haul in the twelve cases of cabbage, which we proceeded to shred to smithereens, in the big machine that goes “RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”. (It paints a more vivid picture if you make the sound like you’re choking).

After shredding the cabbages in the big machine that goes “RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”, we would transfer it and deposit the cabbage into a green plastic 45 gallon garbage pail, which was ok because that was the only purpose that it ever served. Then we added all of the other ingredients to the pail and, just like in an old style pizza joint, the concoction had to be hand tossed. So Geschlevsky and I took turns at the helm and with rolled up sleeves, would toss away to our hearts content under the watchful eye of The Chef.

The Chef was a French guy, just like everyone else in the kitchen except for Geschlevsky and I. We were the token Anglo square heads of the kitchen, and all the French guys would laugh as they watched us toss the slaw.

I never tried the stuff because I knew where it came from. Geschlevsky had REAL HAIRY arms and I wasn’t going to take a chance that he wasn’t in shedding season, so I skipped that course when I ate there.

The kitchen was the hottest place on the entire island of Montreal. We hated that part of it. The flame of the grill melded together with the heat the dishwashing machine stoked out, running with water that was 365 degrees.

Lunchtime was a madhouse in the place and it was normal to serve 600 meals at lunch. Now you have to take my word, but that adds up to a lot of dirty dishes, no matter if they are counted in French or English.

The French guys were always trying to get our goats and everyone in the place knew when it was working, because Geschlevsky and I got very adept at dropping a dish on the floor with the angle necessary to fire the shrapnel in the direction of whichever one of them was being an asshole.

Well, at the end of the day, we were pretty much dehydrated. So working in a Tavern was a good fit for everything. We would grab a table and start ordering mugs of draft beer in a valiant attempt to rehydrate.

I guess we did too good a job of rehydrating ourselves every day. Sometimes an effort that went late into the evening, which apparently didn’t go over very well with Geschlevsky’s mom. She is an absolutely wonderful lady, with absolutely no sense of humor.

Well that isn’t completely true, now that I think of it. Geschlevsky would pick me up in the morning and drive us to work. He had a white 1960 Studebaker Lark IV with manual overdrive which was given to him by one of his uncles. It was in mint condition except that if you went over 50 miles per hour, the interior cloth roof would balloon down on our heads. I think it was, perhaps, the advent of the air bag.

One morning, as I stood at the end of my street waiting for his arrival, a car turned the corner, and I was completely blinded by the glaring reflection of the morning sun off the car.

Geschlevsky pulled to a stop and I hopped into to his now silver sedan. I asked him why the car was now silver.

“That crazy woman was mad at me for coming home with beer breath so she decided to teach me a lesson. She spray painted my car last night after I went to bed. She’s crazy Steve. I’m living with a crazy person!” he screamed and began to cuss in German.

“Take it easy man.” I told him as we drove toward work. “It actually looks kind of flashy. Maybe the French guys will think you’ve turned bilingual or something. All you need is a little ball fringe around the windows and a statue of the Virgin Mary on the dash. Instant, total french guy.”

It turned out to be a good day for me because Geschlevsky was so mad at his mom that he tossed all of the coleslaw by himself to work out his anger issue, as I stood with the French guys and laughed at him.

I told The Chef what had happened, and even though he was a French guy, he bought us each about six mugs of draft at the end of our shift.

Yeah, I sure do miss Geschlevsky these days!

But I will nevermore miss Hell’s Kitchen, nor the bloody machine that goes “RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”