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was horrific. Sweat flowed into my eyes, blinding me as I spun in place.
    I struggled and sweated and hurried to keep up the best I could, Tyrone slinging sizzle-platters under the broiler, and me, ostensibly helping out, getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with every order. On the rare occasions when I could look up at the board, the dupes now looked like cuneiform or Sanskrit-indecipherable.
    I was losing it. Tyrone, finally, had to help the helper. Then, grabbing a saute pan, I burned myself. I yelped out loud, dropped the pan, an order of osso bucco milanese hitting the floor, and as a small red blister raised itself on my palm, I foolishly-oh, so foolishly-asked the beleaguered Tyrone if he had some burn cream and maybe a Band-Aid.
    This was quite enough for Tyrone. It went suddenly very quiet in the Mario kitchen, all eyes on the big broiler man and his hopelessly inept assistant. Orders, as if by some terrible and poetically just magic, stopped coming in for a long, horrible moment. Tyrone turned slowly to me, looked down through bloodshot eyes, the sweat dripping off his nose, and said, 'Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid? Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real close so I could see them properly: the hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new. I watched, transfixed, as Tyrone-his eyes never leaving mine-reached slowly under the broiler and, with one naked hand, picked up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter, moved it over to the cutting board, and set it down in front of me.
    He never flinched.
    The other cooks cheered, hooted and roared at my utter humiliation. Orders began to come in again and everyone went back to work, giggling occasionally. But I knew. I was not going to be the Dreadnaught's broiler man this year-that was for damn sure. (They ended up kicking me back down to prep, one step above dishwasher on the food chain. I had been shown up for the loudmouthed, useless little punk that I was. I was, I learned later, a mal carne, meaning 'bad meat' in Italian, referred to as 'Mel' for weeks after. I had been identified as a pretender, and an obnoxious one at that.
    I slunk home that night in my blue Pierre Cardin suit as if it was sackcloth and ashes. I had not yet found a summer rental, so I was sleeping over the walk-in in the back room at Spiritus Pizza. My torment, my disgrace was complete. After a few days of sulking and self-pity, I slowly, and with growing determination, began to formulate a plan, a way to get back at my tormentors. I would go to school, at the Culinary Institute of America-they were the best in the country and certainly none of these P-town guys had been there. I would apprentice in France. I would endure anything: evil drunk chefs, crackpot owners, low pay, terrible working conditions; I would let sadistic, bucket-headed French sous-chefs work me like a Sherpa. . but I would be back. I would do whatever was necessary to become as good as, or better than, this Mario crew. I would have hands like Tyrone's and I would break loudmouth punks like myself over the wheel like they'd broken me. I'd show them.

Kitchen Confidential
    INSIDE THE CIA
    BURNING WITH A DESIRE for vengeance and vindication, I applied myself to gaining entry to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. My Vassar friends-those who remained on speaking terms with me after two years of truly disgusting behavior on my part-thought I was out of my mind, but then they thought that anyway. I'm sure that there was a collective sigh of relief on Vassar's rolling, green, well-tended campus that I would no longer be around to cadge free drinks, steal drugs, make pointedly cruel remarks and generally lower the level of discourse. My idols