Hot Mess. Emily Belden

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       6

      I like going to work for two main reasons. First, it’s a place I can go to escape my strange home life. The near-constant sound of a blender, prep bowls always piled high in the sink and the occasional sous chef asleep on the floor is enough to drive anyone crazy. Here in my River North office, I can table what’s going on in my world and tune in for eight hours to what other people, sometimes worlds away, are going through. Granted, these online conversations are almost always about cotton swabs, but I still find ways to engage with hordes of people who seem really nice, really normal. Sometimes I wonder...do any of them have a Benji?

      I’m good at what I do, too. So that helps. Our boss, Connor, doesn’t spend a ton of time with our social media department—he’s got bigger, more corporate fish to fry. But he checks in with us formally every six months to see how we’re feeling about things and where we want to go with our jobs. He and I last met together five months ago, when I hinted at creating a new role for myself: Creative Director. Essentially, I’d step back and oversee Stacey and Dionte, our graphic designer and copywriter, respectively, then lead a team of monitors who would divvy up responding to all the social streams. Though I’ve been a little distracted with my home life, I plan to pick up the conversation with him during our next one-on-one review, and remind him he’d been tentatively on board.

      The other main reason I like coming here is that people ask me about Benji. And because there are only a few office-appropriate sides of him that I can discuss with my coworkers, my office is a place where I get to bask in the more delicious reasons I love him. When I can only talk about the good, it helps me reaffirm that my feelings for Benji are stronger than ever.

      “What’s for lunch today, Allie?” Stacey asks, waiting her turn for the microwave.

      “Um, not too sure. Looks like Benji reimagined some of our dinner leftovers,” I say as I stir them around and nuke them for another fifteen seconds.

      I’m not giving the man enough credit, I just don’t know the technical terms for what he concocted and threw in a Tupperware for me. I do know, though, that whatever it is is a long way from barbecue sauce and mac ’n’ cheese—the first things he ever learned to cook on his own from scratch.

      I’ve never asked him to explain the history of his culinary career to me because I feel like that’s a job for a fawning food blogger—not his other-side-of-the-industry girlfriend. But I know his first kitchen job was when he was in high school. His dad left his mom for a much-younger woman and Benji wrote him off completely. He chose to live with his mom, who moved them to a small apartment in Austin, Texas. That’s when he got a job as a dishwasher at a BBQ joint to help her with the rent.

      A few months into the gig, the owners gave him a bit more responsibility—let him toy around with rotating chickens in the smoker, stirring the vat of coleslaw every thirty minutes so it wouldn’t crust over, things like that. One area they did not let him play around in so freely was the bar, but his teenage angst led him to a habit of topping off his free shift fountain drink with a shot of Jim Beam when no one was looking. One day, he got a little more buzzed than usual and decided the mac ’n’ cheese tasted like shit and the barbecue sauce was bland. So he afforded himself the liberty of redoing them both and sent the next twenty dishes out to the dining room with his altered menu choices. Regulars started complaining that something was different, which was when the bosses figured out the root of the problem was the teenager in the kitchen who smelled like whiskey.

      From there, Benji bounced around at a few more restaurants. Meanwhile, his mom became depressed and started acting crazy and belligerent from all the medication she would take mixed with the vodka she kept on her nightstand. She was impossible to be around, according to Benji, so he started hanging out with the cooks after work instead of going home. From them, he adopted new kitchen skills along with some bad habits.

      Eventually, he tried coke. The drug allowed him to be fearless behind the stove, unintimidated by any ingredient and never in the weeds despite his age or lack of any traditional training. No one could deny that Benji had talent. Talent that went beyond just scrubbing dishes or spicing up a few condiments. But no one in the Greater Austin area was willing to let a teenager who required two smoke breaks an hour be in charge of the kitchen.

      At eighteen, he packed up the same black duffel bag that’s currently in my apartment, left his mom $500 cash and bought a Greyhound ticket to New York City. Through the power of social media, he built a following and made connections, setting up a staging gig at a new restaurant every year in all the major foodie destinations. Next came DC, then San Francisco, Miami and Vegas to name a few.

      One hot spot at a time, he added skill after skill to his culinary repertoire. One hot spot at a time, he added drug after drug to the shit he was willing to try, ultimately always coming back to coke. Lots of it.

      Ultimately, he wound up in the Windy City. He says that’s because it’s the capital of modernist cuisine. I say it’s because Chicago is the capital of girls who put out for chefs. (Guilty.) Regardless, he came here to “settle down”—meaning, to take his first ever full-time cooking job. While the same people who offered him the gig ultimately let him go, it was the first and only time he could really say he made it as a chef.

      “Oh my god, that smells amazing,” Dionte says when he happens to catch a whiff in the break room. I have to admit, I feel special. Food may be the way to a man’s heart, but as my colleagues assemble around me, I’m convinced it’s the way to a woman’s ego. It’s like I’m dating da Vinci and I’ve just hung the Mona Lisa in my cubicle. Everyone is oohing and aahing, reminding me just what an awesome perk it is to be dating Benji Zane. I’m the cool kid at the lunch table, just like I was at Republic.

      “What did he make?” Dionte asks.

      “She’s not sure, but it looks like ditalini pasta with cream and pancetta,” Stacey answers for me. It’s like they’re gathering enough info to send TMZ a tip.

      “You’re so lucky,” a girl from a different department gushes from the kitchen table. I don’t even know what her name is, but she begrudgingly stabs at her lackluster salad and shoots jealous death rays my way.

      I escape the public scrutiny of the lunchroom and return to my desk to eat quietly alone in my cubicle. Words cannot describe the peace I feel in this little cubby. I used to think my apartment was my own safe haven. Now? Not so much. My cubicle, though, that’s indisputably mine. All twelve and a half square feet of it. I close my eyes and inhale a big whiff of the ditalini-whatever before taking a bite. It is pure heaven indeed. My mouth waters and I am reminded just how talented this beautifully flawed man is. And just like this lunch, I’m not sharing.

      I go to throw away my brown paper bag and a few scribbles of black Sharpie marker catch my eye. I flatten the bag out on my desk. A love note.

      Allie Simon. Every day, I thank СКАЧАТЬ