For Today I Am a Boy (11 page)

“Sorry,” Simon muttered, squeaking. “I'm just trying to work.” He tried to push past Chef again. “I need more onions.”

Chef held him by the collar of his jacket. His voice changed. “Stop being such a macho fuckup and ask for help when you need it. That's my fucking job, to help you. Don't go running off to the cooler when your station looks like this—send someone. You hear me?”

I slipped away from the pit. The dishes were almost cleared. The rashes on my arms had begun to peel and weep pus. Inside the cooler, I filled a new insert of chopped onions and brought it over to where Chef and Simon were now cooking elbow to elbow, working to finish all the sauté orders.

“Thanks,” Chef said, surprised. He nodded at Simon. “Maybe we should give Wong your job.”

Simon pretended to laugh in his high, wounded voice.

 

In the front seat of Ollie's truck, I changed from the work clothes that my parents saw into a T-shirt and sweatpants. Ollie ate handfuls of raw almonds out of a bag on the dashboard while he drove. My unstrapped body flung around with each sharp turn. “What are you going to do after graduation?” he asked.

“Culinary school.” It was the nearest approximation to what was expected of me that I could handle. My parents might be able to understand. It had the word
school
in it.

“My brother went to university,” Ollie offered. This was still unusual in Fort Michel.

“So did both of my sisters.”

“I know. We have that in common.” He gave me a moment to digest that. “I'm going to follow him after I graduate. He lives in Montreal.”

Ollie's gym was a storefront in one of the strip malls at the edge of town, its emptiness visible through the windows. We parked right in front of the door. “My brother says it's, like, the best city on earth,” he continued. “The hottest women. The craziest parties.”

We hopped out of the truck. He unlocked the door to the gym with his member's key. Though there was no one around, it still smelled powerfully of sweat and bodies at close quarters. A poster by the door showed a woman doing some kind of twist, one foot in the air. She wore red spandex shorts and a halter bra, her defined abs and cleavage oiled. “How do you look like
that?
” I said aloud.

Ollie took the question at face value. “Diet and exercise. I'm doing a bulk. If you want to look like her, you'll have to keep your body fat quite low.” He didn't seem to think there was anything strange about my wanting to look like her—like it was as legitimate as his desire to be hulking and large. Another thing we had in common: we wanted different bodies than our own.

He called on me to watch and learn as he started loading weight onto a bar. My eyes kept drifting back to the poster of the girl. When I looked at it again, I couldn't tell if was in fact oil or if she was just that slick with sweat. Droplets clouded the air around her ponytail. “What about her legs? How do you get legs like hers?”

Ollie hoisted the bar behind his neck and started doing squats. He talked only on the exhale. “Your legs are already . . . as thin as hers. You just need to build . . . muscle on your ass.” He lifted the bar back onto the rack.

I searched his face, looking for judgment. His expression was as resolute and unemotional as when I'd watched him running with his former teammates. He had me try squatting the empty bar. My knees bowed outward after only three, and he pulled it off me quickly.

I continued to scrutinize her legs as Ollie did his second set. The hair on my legs grew long but relatively sparse, compared to my sisters', and mostly on my shins. This girl was hairless as a seal. I imagined running my hands down my thighs and feeling no friction. I imagined the curve of my ass popping straight out in short shorts as hers did. Ollie made it seem achievable in the most matter-of-fact way.

 

Simon dumped a pile of sauté pans into my sink. I had begun to think of it as my sink, even though the middle-aged Sri Lankan dishwasher worked fifty hours a week to my eighteen. “I need these right now,” Simon said. He hurried back to his station before I could say anything. I still hadn't gotten used to his voice that grated like nails on a window; it made me wince each time.

I kept on filling the glass rack; the bar had been reduced to serving wine in water glasses. Simon came back after only a couple of minutes. “Hey. I said I need these right now.”

“I'll get to it in a second.” I slid the rack into the dishwasher and went to lower the doors. “Move your hands.”
Or they'll get chopped off,
I thought.

“You should have done it when I asked you to. Now I'm completely out of pans.”

I left the door dangling dangerously. I gave one of his pans a quick pass with the steel wool, a blast from the hose, and then held it out for Simon to take.

“I don't need
one.
I need all of them.”

“Take one for now.”

“Then you won't do the rest of them for hours. Wash my pans right now.”

At this point in the night, the scabs on my forearms were on fire, and my toes were numb from standing. “Wash them yourself. You don't seem to have anything better to do.”

“It's your fucking job.”
Fucking
sounded like a squawk.

Chef yelled for Simon. “What are you doing off the line? We're getting slaughtered up here!”

“I'm out of pans!” Simon yelled back. “Peter fucked up!”

Chef came over, tossing shrimp in a large silver bowl. They hovered in midair at the top of their arc, spices falling around them like snow. “Get out of the pit. You piss off the dishwasher and the whole kitchen falls apart. Take the pan and get back onto the line.” It occurred to me that Chef looked the way Ollie wanted to: Nobody would fuck with him. And not merely because of the muscles and the tattoos.

In spite of what he'd just said, Chef hung around the dish pit after Simon left. He continued to lazily coat the shrimp. That same redheaded waitress appeared at the pass to gather plates. Chef gestured at her with his chin. “Hey, Wong, would you fuck her?”

They played this game all the time. I repeated one of the most common responses. “Too fat and too old.”

Chef laughed. “She's barely thirty. Women don't know their shit until then. And did you see those tits? You could hide your head between those.”

These conversations sometimes sent heat into my hips, just below my stomach and above my crotch. I used another one of their stock lines: “You wouldn't know what to do with her.”

“I'd squeeze her tits together and fuck 'em with my balls in her face,” he said, like it was a challenge. He held the bowl against his body with one hand and squeezed the back of my neck with the other, brushing the bottom of my hair. My lips curled in. I resisted the shudder. “Come on, haven't you always wanted to fuck a redhead?”

The question struck me as somehow ungrammatical, subject and object reversed. Like Ollie's question:
Do you want girls to suck your dick?
I realized what I had been picturing. Large breasts sliding sideways on my chest, his hands—those hands—stopping their momentum. Men squeezed each other's necks. “Sure.”

 

I'd assumed Ollie's girl from Innisfil was an invention—who
didn't
have an out-of-town girlfriend?—but she materialized at our fourth workout. She looked enough like Ollie to be a sister or cousin, the same small eyes squashed under her eyebrow ridge, the same scrawny frame topped by thick, oak-colored hair. The effect, on a girl, was even more rodent-like.

She was in the center seat of the truck. She chewed a wad of bubblegum and knocked her knees against the gearshift between them. “This is Jeanine,” Ollie said. She might have smiled. The movement was too lazy to tell for sure, dominated by the gum stretching behind her teeth.

Our routine didn't change. Jeanine ran slowly on a treadmill that had a bump where the belt had kinked, taking an extra leaping step each time it came around. Ollie started back at the bar. I sat on an empty bench. “She seems nice,” I said.

“I'm thinking of breaking up with her,” he said. She was only a few feet away. She continued to snap her gum and jog.

“Why?”

Ollie gestured at the room, like what was wrong with Jeanine was all around us. He lifted the loaded bar from the floor to his waist with a grunt, then from his waist to over his head with another. I was still trying to puzzle out the gesture. Maybe he meant Fort Michel, and Innisfil, and our provincial lives.

As though reading my mind, he asked, “Where are you planning to go to cooking school?” He dropped the bar and started the motion over again. I was struck once more by the focus and intent of his expression, probably the same one he'd had when he sliced through the Achilles tendon of a former friend as easily as through taut string.

“Not sure.”

“You should come to Montreal with me. My brother will let us stay with him.” His arms trembled from the shoulders. I could tell he wasn't sure about that second part.

“So you're quitting this year?” Most kids at Brock stayed on for the full five years, some for six. A couple of the football players who attacked Ollie were on their second victory lap, barrel-chested men with full beards. They filled the width of the hallway like overgrown trees: in need of pruning, trimming back. I'd stacked my schedule to get out in four years, as Adele and Helen had before me.

Two reps, and sweat beaded up on his nose and forehead, wet the collar of his gray T-shirt. “Yes,” he panted. This time he moaned as he dropped the bar.

“Maybe you should use less weight,” I said, like a child pointing out the obvious.

He shook his head. “The plan I'm on, you have to add weight every time. It's the same one Schwarzenegger uses.” He did one more, making a long, low, guttural sound. The weights clanged onto the floor. “It'll be great. We'll party every night. Meet hot French chicks.”

We left the loaded bar where it fell and went to another rack so I could do squats. Ollie didn't bother to spot me this time. He just sat dripping on the bench. Ollie wanted me to face the mirror to see my form, but I refused, facing the treadmills instead. The girl in the poster with her prodigious spandex-covered breasts and ass. Jeanine's upper thighs, skinny as Ollie's, jiggling on the bone as she ran and chewed. “What will you do for money?” I asked.

“I'll get a job. I'll work construction or some shit,” Ollie said.

I thought about living with Ollie. I imagined the kind of apartment I'd seen on TV, with a big living-room window framing a cityscape. I thought about having Ollie on my side. My loyal monster. “Ollie,” I said, “when . . . when you . . . in the locker room . . .”

“I told him I'd cut his throat or his ankle. He chose. He bled a fuck-ton.” Ollie was watching my knees in a protective way, making sure they were steady. “It made a loud noise. It was weird. Like when you pluck a guitar string and then stop it really fast against the wood.”

I wanted to be horrified. I felt nothing. I looked at Jeanine, chewing away; Ollie would never tell her what it sounded like when a tendon snapped. I racked the empty bar myself after five squats. Ollie said, “You're getting stronger.”

 

I don't know why any of us like or dislike people based on so little. Why I might love Chef as zealously as a supplicant loves a god, why Ollie would be my friend and Simon my enemy when they were both small-hearted, dangerous men. Why I felt like Jeanine was an intruder on a world I had barely entered, glimpsed through a doorway, seen through the steam of a high-pressure hose.

 

On a quieter Thursday night, before the quiet nights started to worry the management, Chef asked if I would come work for him full-time after I graduated. I told him what I planned to do—maybe culinary school, maybe Montreal with Ollie. He objected to the first option. “Nah, nah. Don't do that. You'll have debt up to your ass and no one will respect you any more than they did before. You gotta pay your dues.”

He yelled his life story at me from a distance, turning steaks for the broiler cook. At the end of the night, the arm he used to hold the tongs would be completely smooth, all the hair burned off.

Chef started in the dish pit when he was thirteen. At sixteen, he hitchhiked through the farmlands of southern Quebec, offering to cook and work the fields in exchange for food and a bed. He went to Europe without a visa and hopped from one cook job to another, learning that most countries don't refrigerate eggs and will scoop ants from the cooking oil and flies from the red-wine silo with a pool skimmer. He stayed in Budapest the longest because of a girl. She worked as both a bank manager and a nude model—he described the process of her undoing the buttons of her double-breasted suit at great length while the broiler cook and the two hot-appetizer cooks hollered—and then died in a car accident, her red Citroën AX crushed like a ladybug by a delivery truck. The girl's mother came and shooed Chef out of the apartment they'd shared, and he came home to Canada.

“To Fort Michel,” Simon chimed in, his painful contralto appropriate for once.

No, there were a lot of years in between, so his dead Hungarian love had had time to become just another flicker in an erotic slideshow. There were a lot of kitchens before he was a head chef, and many more before the investors in this restaurant asked him to lead their new property. Culinary school was not a shortcut to Chef's life.

“But Montreal,” he said, abruptly turning back to me, though I hadn't spoken in nearly half an hour. “You should definitely go. It's like . . . Paris, only lamer. Great food, good wine, beautiful women, and no one sleeps.”

“My friend said the same thing.” But when Chef said something, it carried more weight. I had discounted culinary school in an instant.

“I fucked a guy in Montreal.” He plated a steak that had been resting, the juices flowing back to its center, and passed it to Simon. Simon fumbled for the plate. He was behind on the vegetables that were supposed to go with it, and a hard look passed between them.