Monkey Dish

By Michael Curley

It's the spring of 1973 and Hank Morgan, a recently discharged Vietnam veteran, is bored. Looking to fill some time, he applies for a job cutting the grass at a country club. "We don't need any more groundskeepers," he's told, "but we do need a waiter."
Hank tells the club manager he has no experience in that line of work. He's a working-class kid from Chicago, who grew up eating meat and potatoes and little else. As he often says, "pizza was exotic fare in our house." His favorite restaurants were hot dog stands and diners.
"We'll train you."
And with that, Monkey Dish, a novel with a dash of cookbook and a generous helping of humor, follows Hank as he works his way through the restaurant world of the 1970s and 80s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Curley
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463213605

Book preview

Prologue

Holy shit! Ellie thought when she first saw me tied down in my hospital bed. They gave him a lobotomy!

"HANK! HANK!" She was shouting and shaking me when I finally came around. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. I struggled against… what? There was a wide, brown leather belt straight off Dr. Frankenstein's charging table strapped across my chest. My arms were bound to the bed rails. Ellie was pulling on me.

"HANK! HANK! Speak to me, Hank! Do you know me? Those bastards!"

Of course, I wasn’t lobotomized. But then again, from the looks of me, the restraints and a bloodstained bandage on my forehead just above a black eye, and the fact I was in a VA hospital run by the federal government, I guess a lobotomy wasn't such a stretch.

But no, all this was the result of my getting up in the middle of the night and stumbling around until I took a header, resulting in a small cut on one eyebrow and the aforementioned black eye. The restraints were there to prevent a repeat performance. The commotion brought a nurse who then went off to get a doctor needed to rescind the order for the restraints. Ellie followed her, peppering her with questions the whole way.

I had a few questions myself, like how did I wind up here? The last thing I remember, I was at the party. My party. A holiday eggnog party. It started out fine, as I recall, but didn't end well, apparently.

I fell back in the bed and dozed off. When I tried to sit up again, I was still tied to the bed. I could see Ellie and a young doctor out in the hall. Her hoop earrings bounced as she laughed and gave the doctor a playful shove with one hand.

Hey! I’m over here!

Right, yes, the intern said as he composed himself. He came over to my bed and began the drill. What’s your name?

Uh, wait a minute. I knew that when I came in.

Hank, Ellie poked me in the ribs, get serious.

That's it! Hank. Hank Morgan.

Do you know who the president is?

Uh, I know this one. That cowboy guy from Death Valley Days. John Wayne!

He’s messin’ with you, doc, Ellie said.

I've seen that movie, too, Mr. Morgan, he said, not amused. You can stay in the restraints if you like.

OK, doc, OK. Ronald Reagan.

Once I was freed from my restraints, I got dressed while Ellie filled in the blank spots in my recollection of the previous night. And believe me, there was a lot of ground to cover.

As I was checking out of the hospital, my last stop was to see a counselor. I assumed it would be about my VA benefits. The counselor turned out to be a shrink.

What was once called battle fatigue, he said, finally getting to the point, or shell shock, we now call Post Traumatic Stress. Sometimes these symptoms surface years after the fact. One of the most common symptoms is substance abuse, and, quite frankly Mr. Morgan, the tox screen we did on you last night was alarming…

I can explain everything.

…cocaine, morphine, cannabis, a very high level of alcohol.

Well, I know that sounds bad, but believe me, it's not a regular thing with me. I'm not a junkie. It was a one time thing. A Brompton Cocktail.

A Brompton Cocktail? What in the world…

A Brompton Cocktail, doc. It’s a concoction of morphine, cocaine, alcohol, and cherry flavored syrup. They give to terminal cancer patients when there's nothing more…

I know what a Brompton Cocktail is, Mr. Morgan. Where in the world did you get your hands on that?

I wasn't about to tell him and he didn't press it. He had bigger fish to fry.

Even so, he went on, your elevated liver enzymes tell me your drinking is more than a one time thing. Do you have a problem with alcohol? He didn't give me time to answer. Other symptoms are unprovoked irritability or extreme anger.

Well, that's certainly not me. I find it hard to get worked up about anything.

Extreme watchfulness for threats. Flashbacks.

I left everything back in Nam when I got home. I don't dwell in the past. No future in it.

Nightmares?

I thought about that for a second. I knew what he was getting at. Well, yes, I do, but…

Describe them for me.

Well, all right. They’re not all exactly the same, but they are the same in a way. Sometimes they’re so real I wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat. And for a moment I think it's real.

What are you doing in the dream?

It’s terrible. Everything I reach for isn’t there. We’re out of everything. The noise is deafening. People are yelling at me. They’re furious with me. I’m overwhelmed. It’s too much. I can’t take anymore. I think there's a four top sitting at my kitchen table and I forgot to give them their salads and their entrees are up. I’ve lost all my checks and it’s fifty bucks for each lost check. I'm in the weeds deep…

What?

He's puzzled. I get these restaurant dreams. Everyone who works in the business gets them. He still looked lost.

I'm a waiter.

I

The shrink's looked a bit taken aback when I said I was a waiter. Even now, some fifteen years in the business, when I hear myself say it, I'm a waiter, it sounds a bit strange. A waiter. I never even knew a waiter, much less thought of becoming one, until I became one.

So how does a middle class, college educated white boy from a meat and potatoes family in a working class Chicago neighborhood become a waiter? I mean a professional waiter. Not an actor waiting for the big break. I'm not doing this while I figure things out. I don't see anything better coming along.

And when I say meat and potatoes, that's what dinner was at our house, mostly, meat and potatoes. That's what my old man wanted for dinner so that's what we got. Seafood was fish sticks or tuna casserole on Fridays. Pizza was exotic fare in our house. And yet here I am, working in white tablecloth restaurants, making Cesar salads and boning fish at the table. I can flambé Bananas Foster or Cherries Jubilee tableside, desserts I had never heard of before I made them.

And get this—I started day one as a waiter, never a busboy. I was never even a customer in the kind of restaurants I now feel so comfortable working in. I didn’t know a monkey dish from a manhole cover, but I took to it like it was the family business.

I can, however, tell you how. Purely by chance. I applied for one job and was offered another, completely unrelated one, in a city I had never been to before. Now that I think of it, I wonder if I would be a waiter today had I not met Virgil Hicks.

•Ft. Bliss•

It was the summer of '72. I had finished my tour in Nam and was attached to the headquarters battery of the 1st AIT Brigade, Ft. Bliss, Texas. As a hard stripe E-5 with just about six months left to serve, I mainly pulled CQ duty every third day or so, which at this headquarters battery meant being the night watchman. Once in a while, I marched in a retirement ceremony parade. Believe it or not, I liked marching. Add music and call cadence and I could march all day long.

What all this boiled down to was I had a lot of time off. Just home from Nam and a short-timer, I was pretty much left alone. I had time to reflect, and for the first time in over a year, I had a future to think about.

On an off day, I went to the brigade Public Information Office to fill out a Hometown News Release. My mom got a kick out of seeing my name in the local Booster. I knew better than to send it to any of the big Chicago dailies. The spec 4 behind the desk was filling out the release with me when an officer came barging in.

Hicks!

Captain Walker! The spec 4 responded with equal but, I assumed, feigned urgency.

You need to make yourself scarce, Hicks. The AG's on his way.

Without further discussion, the lanky specialist stood up. We can do this in the Day Room, he said.

As we walked along and I got a better look at him, I could see why his presence wasn't wanted when the brass came around. Hicks was out of uniform from head to toe: his thin blond hair and thick brown mustache were past due for a trim; his fatigues looked like he slept in them and hung on him like a scarecrow; his boots were scuffed and dull. He was a walking violation of the military dress code.

Drafted? I asked him.

Yeah.

Me too.

No shit? He stopped short and turned to face me. Well, slap my ass and call me Sally. I took you for a lifer. I'm Virgil Hicks, he said with just a hint of a southern drawl and stuck out his hand.

It was probably my starched khakis and spit shined low quarters that gave Hicks the impression I was a career soldier. I had just spent most of the past year looking and feeling grungy. Part of my feeling that I was finally, safely back home was showering and putting on clean clothes every day. I was STRAC. I sent my uniforms to the quartermaster laundry and broke starch every day.  My time's worth more than what it costs to send it out. Hicks didn't waste any of his valuable time on his laundry either. Nor did he waste any of his money.

In that case, he looked up and down the hallway then fished around in his shirt pocket and pulled out a joint, smoke?

•My Generation•

On campus, it was easy to tell who smoked dope. And not just because they looked like hippies. It was that ineffable quality you just knew. The little burn hole from a hot seed gone astray only confirmed it.

As with marijuana, my generation didn't invent Rock and Roll, but we took to it as if we did. It became our own when we started making it ourselves. The music matured right along with us. In fact, it may as well be our banner, The Rock and Roll Generation.

I dislike the label Baby Boom Generation, always referred to as those born 1945 to 1965. How can I be part of a generation that accepts people not yet born when The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show but does not include Hunter Thompson, Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, or, for that matter, John Lennon? My Generation is a state of mind. If you have it, you're in no matter when or where you were born.

Our values were different. We had our own newspapers, free underground newspapers. FM stations, also called underground or deep cuts radio. They accepted no prerecorded commercials. The DJs read all the ads.

We were The Counterculture. More like The Subculture. Something underneath the radar. Hippies were a part of it, but just that, a part. The best guerrillas can operate in the system.

At least that's how it was in the sixties and early seventies. For some of us, anyway. Not all of us. Not even, apparently, a lot of us. How else do you account for Nixon winning the '68 and '72 elections?

Virgil Hicks from Selmer, Tennessee. In McNairy County, he said, the home of Buford Pusser. He was definitely a member of my generation, Southern edition.

We were both seniors in college the night in December 1969 when the first draft lottery since World War II was held. We watched it on television as did most of the draft age men in the country. 366 plastic balls in a big glass jar. Your future to be determined by the luck of the draw. We graduated in the spring of 1970 and immediately lost our 2-S draft classification, S as in student. No more school, no more deferment.

It started. First, a questionnaire which resulted in being reclassified 1-A, A as in Available for Military Service. After that a physical examination. Here's what you do, my uncle Mike told me. The night before your physical, when you go to bed, you put a bar of soap in your left armpit and tape it so it stays there while you sleep. It'll give you a heart murmur.

I took a pass on the heart murmur.

Then another questionnaire.

You can always go to Canada. Or go to jail, I thought; neither one appealed to me.

Why don't you join the Reserves?

Are you kidding? The National Guard, all the Reserves are all filled up with the fortunate sons of politicians and millionaires. Besides, the guard or reserves are for six years. Enlistment is for three or four years, draftees serve only two years active duty.

I hate to say it, but what it boiled down to was I just didn't have anything better to do. Things were getting uncomfortable around the old homestead. My hair was too long. I didn't have a job and I wasn't looking for one. And I had a feeling I was going to get a free haircut and a government job in the very near future.

And here's the thing: for every soldier in combat, there are ten behind the lines. The chances of me ending up with a rifle in my hands were about one in ten. My old man was drafted in WWII. He never left The States. I was in The Battle of Los Angeles, I heard him say more than once. We fought the Zoot Suiters every Saturday night.

I figured I'd take my chances. I'd soon find out. December brought a season's greetings for me from The President of the United States mixed in with the Christmas cards. Report to the Induction Center, 615 W. Van Buren St. at six o'clock in the fucking morning. I was gone in January.

After basic (boot camp is for the navy and marines) you get two weeks leave and your orders telling you what you'll be doing for your Uncle Sam. Draftees have no say in this. Some, in an attempted end run around the Selective Service System, enlisted for three or four years with the promise of a job, a safe job, guaranteed by the sergeant at the Recruitment Office.

•11Bravo•

There must be some mistake, I heard more than one guy say when he looked at his orders, this says Fort Polk, Louisiana, Infantry Training. I'm supposed to go to mechanic's school. The recruiter told me…

Do you have a Recruitment Agreement?

A what?

A contract.

Huh?

You can guess where that was going.

I looked at my orders, MOS: 11B. Infantry. I was off to Tigerland. One in ten, that's me. I took it in stride, but I could see how my going to Vietnam affected my mother. She knew what war can do to people. Her brother survived the Bataan Death March, but came home a broken man and eventually drank himself to death. The Japs finally got him, I heard my old man say at his wake.

The night before I left for Nam was like a wake. I was hungover from the night before with the guys. My Uncle Mike came by. , he said and then took me aside. Don't trust the gooks, he said in a low voice, not even the ones on our side. You'll do all right. You're a tough kid, right?

I would do all right because I am tough. And I came through it tougher. But I saw what it did to my mother. I could feel her anxiety. For that alone, I hated who or whatever it was that sent me there. Eisenhower's Military Industrial-Complex. Chief Broom's Combine. Big Brother. The Man behind the curtain throwing switches and turning dials.