A long, long time ago I spent a summer working at a golf club in Oakville, just out past Mississauga, also known as the boonies back then. This was right after graduating college and my buddy Pete, who had worked there the previous summer, asked if I wanted to come out and work hard and have some laughs...you betcha!! And so began the last true summer of debauchery before the whole adulty thing began.
Working with Peter was and will always be one of my fondest memories coming out of college. We went into business not long after this adventure but this is where we cemented our friendship and drove our boss a little crazy in the process. We worked monster hours that summer, par for the course (pardon the pun) in the chef world. But honestly it never seemed like a lot of work, we simply buckled in for what we had signed up for and learned as much as we could while having a good time. This by the way is the key to working life success...work hard and try to enjoy what you do with a few laughs. Go home alive. Rather, rinse and repeat.
Peter and I shared a certain sense of humour that borders on the asinine with healthy doses of brilliance and wit. Our opportunistic forays really were about entertaining each other and ourselves as best we could. For example. We had a small elevator, dumb waiter, that led up to the dining room from the kitchen. That is how food went from our stoves to the waiting maws of the golfers, lovingly carried from said elevator to the table by some old school servers. Lena and if I recall right, Ted...or maybe Ed. Maybe Henry. Doesn't really matter, they were a piece of combined work. Slightly older than Moses and blessed with the bitter acerbic way that only the living dead can pull off, they were a joy to behold. And a joy to torment. One night we sent some steaks up on the lift and dutifully pushed the intercom buzzer for a pick up. "Yeah" came the surly reply from Tenry, "steaks are on the lift". "Mistakes! We don't make any fucking mistakes! You god damned cooks make all the mistakes!" How do you not love that?
I mentioned before that I was a Big Brother to a kid named Christian. On one of my rare days off I brought him to the club for an outing. As one would expect from a guy like me I sent him up on the lift for a little surprise to lovable Lena. "Food order on the lift Lena" was the intercom communique. And forgetting that there wasn't anyone in the dining room at the time or not even knowing where she was, she slid the door open and let out a little yell at seeing the little black kid smiling up at her. Or the time we sent up live lobsters....something truly satisfying about hearing that shrill yelp from above.
In the midst of all this we actually did cook some food. A lot of that food revolved around tournament bbq's that we both loved and hated. It got us out of the kitchen and surrounded by the intoxicating smell of burning charcoal and sizzling T-Bone steaks, but it meant having to talk to some incredibly ignorant and rude members that seemed to feel that they were the funniest guys on the planet. One such fellow we hated above all else, let's call him Mr Johnson. Johnson had the same stupid jokes as we waited his turn for his steak, "just rip its horns off and wipe its ass boys" when asked how he would like his steak prepared. Obviously not aware of the important work of enzymes in the ageing process we simply looked for the rarest piece we could find to hand over. Except this one last time. Peter nudges me and points to a pair of tongs he has in the embers of the bbq, "watch this" he says. Boy oh boy! So when Johnson offers up his plate to receive the ceremonial dead beast, Peter, using the slightly warm tongs ensconced in the red hot embers, flips the steak onto his plate being sure to kiss Johnson's thumb with the edge of the tongs. Plate went flying out of his hands and the steak flew over the balcony to the ground below. Pure poetry my friends.
Somehow our boss had given us both three days off together so we made the most of it with pursuits of scholarly endeavours. Oh wait, wrong story...we went to visit our friends up at Deerhurst Resort and spent the days and nights pretty well pickled. We tried to learn how to water-ski. We used up 50,000 pellets on our buddies air rifle, shooting out cans and dropping them between the cracks of the decking. Getting to hang out with our school buddies and meeting the cast of characters that can only survive in settings such as these. Lanka, the knife wielding hard as nails cook that shared a nearby cabin and had a proclivity for some sort of warm knife activity. Jacques, maybe not his real name but it should have been, the French Canadian butcher that looked a little like Mad Dog Vachon. Seriously? Where in the world do these people come from...oh right, right here in our own little corner of the world. Good times to be sure.
I guess some of our craziest misadventures revolved around the biggest event of the year, the Wimpey Construction Company Tournament. The owner of the company was also the owner of the golf course and our boss went to the nines for this event. I was warned by Peter to be ready for this thing, it was a beast with three straight days of work simply to get ready for the tournament. Truth be told we could have done everything in a day or two if we only worked smarter and didn't let our boss create the Fruit God. No word of a lie, he used up two rolls of aluminium foil, balled up into this large roundish sphere that he proceeded to cover in glazed lettuce and then stick with fruit skewers. Kind of old school even back then, now simply unbelievable. But that's what he spent a lot of time on while we all went about producing massive amounts of food to throw out later.
Somewhere out in the universe is video that Peter had taken of this day, and on that video you can witness my not entirely slow slide into insanity. I was tired and thus, silly. For whatever reason we had latched onto the Looney Tunes "duck season, wabbit season" routine, so from time to time you could hear any number of us, in that cartoonish voice yelling out "It's duck season!!" from various areas of the kitchen. The reply came "wabbit season" followed by a chorus of "shoot him now!!" The video had me, nearly buried in mounds of spinach, literally losing my marbles as I recited the whole spiel myself - SHOOT HIM NOW!!!!!
At the end of that night, as Peter and I went through the fridges, organizing and consolidating the massive amount of food left over we can be seen on video poking some fun at each other and our boss, especially around some of his favourite catch phrases such as "save that, I'll make something out of it." By this time we knew full well that we would be throwing out that little smidgen of zucchini in a week but we were saving it. It was funny to us, not so funny to him as a few months later when we all got together for an end of season party and that video was played....errrrrrrr
In the end some great bonds were built between us all. While life has taken us in new directions and places I would like to think that we all remember this time fondly. Here we made our bones.
Ciao
D
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