Read Life, on the Line for Free Online Page B

stay on the dean’s list the entire time I was there. I had nothing but my pride to wager, but my dad offered up his 1985 Corvette, along with a personal restoration and paint job—any color I wanted.
    During my entire enrollment at the CIA I received only one mark below 85. Most of my scores were in the nineties, and I was confident I would finish my first six-month semester still above water on the car wager. The only class remaining before we went on our six-month externship was AM Pantry.
    AM Pantry was basically cooking breakfast. It was going to be a lay-up. If there was one thing in the kitchen that I felt comfortable with, it was eggs and frying pans.
    We had to wake at 4:20 every morning and make our way into a cafeteria-style kitchen, where we were lectured on the proper way to cook hash browns and flip eggs. I got a better course on that when I was seven years old. The instructor tried to humiliate the students one by one, and when she was done we would cook breakfast for the rest of the student body, manning the cafeteria line shoulder-to-shoulder to scoop the food out institution-style.
    â€œWhy don’t you show the group how well you can do this,” she snarled in my direction.
    â€œOkay. How many orders do you want?” I asked as I reached across the stove for more pans and turned the gas on to fire up a few more burners. I really didn’t like this instructor and had decided to show her how to cook eggs. “You want humiliation?” I thought to myself. “Game on.”
    I dipped the ladle into the clarified butter and splashed it into two pans. As I started for the third she physically stopped me and said, “Why don’t you start with just one?”
    I ignored her, grabbed two eggs in each hand and with a swift, smooth motion cracked them simultaneously on the edges of the pans. My fingers hinged the shells open one egg at a time, while keeping the other eggs at the ready. Five seconds later the eggs were in their respective pans—boom, boom, boom, boom. I dropped the emptied shells in the garbage and repeated. The eggs bubbled in the butter. She was pissed.
    She leaned in close to the pans to find eggshells that had fallen in.
    Nothing.
    I flipped both sets over, waited forty-five seconds, and flipped them back. Then I turned them onto the awaiting plates. They were absolutely perfect, the best I could do. I quietly stepped back to the group and Don gave me a big smirk.
    I got a C minus in AM Pantry. But it was worth it.
    Â 
    The CIA required all students to leave the school and gain practical experience at an accredited food-service establishment for the six months directly in the middle of the eighteen-month associate-degree program. Even though I wasn’t entirely convinced that I needed or wanted any more practical experience, I started doing research on my externship early. Don kept trying to convince me that this was an opportunity to head to a warm-weather climate for a season, so I applied to a series of large hotels and golf clubs around Florida: the Fontaine-bleau, The Breakers, and the Sawgrass Country Club, amongst a host of lesser names. None of them bothered to respond to my inquiries.
    I sent fifteen letters out. I got exactly one response: the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I wasn’t thrilled. Grand Rapids is definitely not Florida, and certainly not warm. I had never heard of the Amway or heard any talk about its culinary reputation. But it was close to home, it was close to Cindy at Michigan State, and it was my only option.
    I picked up the phone and called the executive chef of the hotel, Steve Stallard, to confirm the details of my externship. He seemed cold, distracted, and wholly uninterested when I reached him. “Another inexperienced CIA extern that we’ll throw in the banquet kitchen,” is all he could be thinking. Midway through the call he suggested I speak with the current CIA extern at Amway,