Tops & Tails, Trimmed & Tied

“God, it’s good to see you,” Kyle greets me on Christmas Eve Eve.

            “You just wafted a whole cloud of girl smell with you when you came in,” John tells me. 

            Yeah, JohnJack is back again this year!

            Tonight I said fuck it, I’m going to wear perfume, even if it doesn’t last.  At least I won’t smell like god damn chicken wings for a little while.  Ever since I got this bottle of grown-up lady perfume (the first I’ve ever bought), that’s all I’ve wanted to hear.  I’ve always wanted to be the one that people walk by and go, “God, she smells good!”  That’s the first compliment I’ve gotten on my perfume, and I’ve had it for almost six months now.

“Welcome to the mad house,” Gus adds.

I smile, “You think this is new for me?”

“Well it’s new for me.”  He already looks exhausted.

Tommy is gone, and there’s a large white lug on my side of the cutting board, filled with piles of meat.

“What is this?” I ask Gus.

He doesn’t know.

I ask Burt; he doesn’t know.
            Kyle doesn’t know either.

I ask Grace; it’s supposed to be odds and ends from ribeye roasts.

This is actually good.  I have several odds and ends in the cooler from doing orders last night; a lug to put them in would be useful.

I pull a slab of meat out of the lug and hold it up for Grace, “. . . this is a pork loin.”

“Yeah, well. . . .”  She walks away.

Well, I can’t cut anything until the board is cleared off.  Guess I know where I’m starting out tonight.

Inside this lug I find every single cut of pork and red meat possible, and very few rib roast ends. 

I wore my “This shit is going to be delicious” apron, and brought in my knife kit, since I’m working after close, and Tommy won’t be around to steal my knife and stab it into a bacon box in the cooler. 

Customers are still coming in for the time being (I showed up a little early, and no one’s bothered to turn off the “open” sign yet).

I’m still cleaning out the big white lug when a woman comes in to pick up an order that’s not due until tomorrow.

I’m gonna go ahead and take my time with this one.

Every time I clear off the board, someone throws something else down on it. 

Every time I clear off the wrapping station, someone sets a bunch of orders on it.

There is no other flat space on which to set things anywhere else in the entire store.

I am the zen master; nothing can bother me.

“Gus, can you get me a thing of au jus for this customer?” Nicole yells.  The thing about Nicole . . . she’s a loud talker.  Even when she’s just speaking regularly to you, she sounds like she’s yelling.  It might have something to do with her being friends with Grace all these years; Grace is notoriously hard of hearing. 

Without saying a word, Gus runs to the cooler and grabs the jug of au jus we keep in there.  He brings it over by the spice rack where we keep the plastic tubs we sell rub in.  He fills one of the small tubs with sauce, takes it to Nicole, and puts the jug back in the cooler.

Nicole is chatting with the customer while bagging all of her items.

“Oh well this isn’t gonna be enough jus for all that meat, you’re gonna need more jus than that!”

“Oh no that’s plenty—” the customer starts.

“Gus this isn’t enough jus can you get me another thing of jus for her?”

Once again without saying a word, Gus drops what he was in the middle of doing and complies.  Meanwhile, Nicole sits on her stool and continues chatting with the customer—the only customer currently in the shop.

When Nicole is finally satisfied and sent the customer on her merry way, she gets up to come say hi to me.

“Girl, I got here late today and I haven’t eaten or drank or peed since I got here!”

“You should go do all those things, because there’s pizza back there.” 

“There’s pizza I didn’t know there was pizza!” 

There’s been pizza here every day since I started working here again.  And I have eaten the pizza every day I’ve worked.  Between working two jobs, and my new training regimen, the food really hasn’t taken a toll on my body.  Right now I actually need to eat more in order to build healthy muscle, which is awesome, because I was tired of eating like a goddamn bird.  I missed potatoes!  The other awesome thing about strength training is that I’m not in pain all the time anymore from the muscle cannibalization that running causes.  Plus, picking up heavy things and moving them around and setting them back down again is fun!

Leroy is leaving only a little bit after I just got here.  “Steady Leroy,” everyone has taken to calling him. 

He’s been in the back trimming tenderloin all day, so they’re all ready for me to make filets.

Any time I walk past him, he’s always asking if I’m doing okay and if I need anything. 

I’m working on a filet order when he comes around to say bye and Merry Christmas to everyone.

“You know, I was just telling someone the other day, that you can always tell when a woman is doing the work, because it just looks . . . different.  Like more time and more care went into it.”  He has a soft, kind voice.

            “I put extra love into all of these,” I say, giving each one a pet.

            And then there’s these things.

           

            There’s a guy who comes in here regularly, who I actually know from several years ago—he’s a friend of my cousins’, so we hung out at a few parties and at my aunt and uncle’s lake house in Williamsburg.

            Last year I was trying to hide from him (standing really still and hoping he didn’t notice me) when he called me out.

He apparently found a recipe that calls for six pounds of tenderloin, tied every inch, and profusely apologized to Tommy for asking him to do it. 

            How convenient for Tommy that I am the one who ends up doing it.

            I wonder if I’ll get any credit when the order gets picked up tomorrow. . . . (I didn’t; when they got cooked, the customer posted a picture on Facebook and tagged Tommy in it, but not me.)

           

            Tommy is supposed to come back around 11:45 showered, rested, refreshed and ready to work overnight.

            Tommy comes in at 7:45 and starts throwing orders at me even though I’m still working on filet orders. 

            “Here’s an order for a four-rib and a three-rib,” he says, throwing them on top of a full seven-rib roast that’s already trimmed and tied. 

            “That’s nice.  Do you want me to do that for you?” 

            “I’m just saying, here’s a four and a three, that seven will work for these.”

            “Okay.  Do you want me to do that when I’m done with filet orders?  Because I’m kind of tied up with those right now.”  The zen master is getting a little frustrated right now.

            “Do whatever you want, I’m just saying. . . .” and with that, he walks away, leaving the unfinished orders on the board.

            He walks around for a little while, smokes in his office, walks around some more, gets into a fight with Burt or Grace in the cooler, then calls a cab and goes back home.  He doesn't come back the rest of the night.  

            Gus is carrying a heavy lug of tenderloins back to the smoker when Nicole yells for him from Grace’s office in the back.

            He stops in his tracks, sets the lug down, runs his hands through his hair, and gives me the thousand-mile stare. 

            I know that stare.

            I’ve done that stare.

            “Don’t take it personally; it’s not worth it,” I advise.  I did that once; wanna know what it got me?  It got me to quit.

            “How long are you staying?” he asks me.

            “Till about eleven.”  I’ve got a Christmas Eve eve date.  My Christmas starts tomorrow morning; Frank and I are exchanging presents before he goes to work. 

            While Nicole is counting down the register and Gus is out of earshot, I approach her.

            “Hey.  Maybe lay off Gus a little bit; he’s starting to look like he’s gonna lose it.”

            “Yeah he does look like that doesn’t he,” she shouts.

            “Just . . . take it easy on him,” I gently request.

            She randomly observes, “He’s such a good-natured kid.”

            I agree wholeheartedly.  “Totally; he’s a sweetheart!”  Now leave him alone so he can do his job.

           

            Now that the customers are gone, Kyle and Gus decide to take stock of the orders and see how much tenderloin we have to smoke tonight.

            They’re at it for about 45 minutes, while Grace and Nicole hover around asking questions:  “Did you move this; do you have this; where are these orders; what orders are you looking at right now?” 

            Finally they proclaim their assessment:  “We don’t have enough tenderloin cut, and we’re gonna be here smoking all night.”

            I won’t be here all night; this ain’t my shop.  And it ain’t yours, either.

            So Leroy cut tenderloin all day, and it’s still not enough to fill the smoked orders.  Classic.  And we don’t have enough rib roasts to fill all the rib roast orders.  Hilarious.  There are a lot of four rib roast orders, and very few two or three rib roast orders, which means that a whole seven-rib roast is only going to fill one order most of the time.

            “Next year,” Kenny says, “I’m gonna be in charge of orders and inventory.  There’s this app you can get for your phone—”

            “What, you mean that taking handwritten orders and throwing them in a box and never keeping an inventory spreadsheet isn’t an efficient way to run a business??” I sarcastically interrupt him.

           

            “You’re gonna wind up running that place,” Frank says when I tell him all this later on.

            Without hesitating, I reply, “Me?  No way.”

            Last night all I did was cut orders and throw them on top of the case with their tickets; Nicole and Gus wrapped everything up, assigned it a number, and a place in the cooler or case.

            Tonight, Nicole bails early because she didn’t take care of herself during the day today, so her tank is on E.  And Gus is engrossed in the smoked orders now; he has taken up Leroy’s position in the back and is trimming feverishly. 

            So I’m on my own.  I’m cutting the orders, seasoning them, wrapping and bagging them, but I don’t know anything about the number system they’ve been using for all the orders, so I throw all the finished bags in a box.  Much fewer orders get completed this way.

            Now I need to move the box into the cooler somewhere.

            Correction:  I need to find someone strong enough to lift this box and move it into the cooler somewhere.

            I’m the only one up front right now . . . Burt is alone in the back room . . . I open the back door and see Kyle, Gus, and John taking a break by the refrigerated truck.  The instant I opened the door, I had the sensation of walking into a room full of people who were either in the midst of talking about me, or who had just gotten done smoking a bunch of pot.  I didn’t smell any pot. 

            “Uh . . . hey guys!  When you’re done with whatever you’re doing here, could one of you please help me move something heavy?”

            “Kyle’s the strongest, Kyle you go help her,” Gus kindly volunteers. 

            So Kyle puts the box of filet orders in the cooler and I slap a sign on it that says, “Filet Orders,” and hope that whoever’s working tomorrow is smart enough to figure it out. 

            I tell Kyle that I’m going to start cleaning up so that I can get going.

            “You just keep cutting meat, I’ll clean up for you.  We need you to—I can’t cut as good as you.”

            “Okay. . . .”  Reluctantly I grab a few more fresh orders; I can probably only finish three or four in the next half hour.  I feel bad leaving a dirty board and knives for the next person.  I haven’t saran-wrapped the trays of meat in the case yet either.

            I knock out the two rib roast orders that Tommy left sitting on the board, and a couple tenderloin orders.  The tenderloins this year are huge. 

            “Where are the little tenderloins that I’ve been cutting all year??” Gus asks in awe.

Typically, an uncut tenderloin starts out at about six pounds.  By the time I’m done trimming one, it will weigh between three and three-and-a-half pounds.  For Tommy or Leroy it’s probably between three-and-a-half and four pounds. 

            These tenders are between four and five pounds, trimmed. 

            So while they were taking orders for one five- or one six-pound tenderloin, they’ve been talking all these customers into getting two “normal” tenderloins, because the big ones that size don’t exist.  I’ll be damned, but I’m sitting here cutting tops and tails off of trimmed  and tied tenderloins in order to get the weights down for these orders.

            I get done what I can, and label everything as best as I can.  Whether or not it’ll be good enough . . . I’ll find out after Christmas.  In the meantime, I’m not going to worry about it too much.

            Merry Holiday to all.