Everybody Must Be Stoned
My accounting software has an expense category called Employee Advances. Not long ago, as I was looking through the ledger and wistfully recalling past employees who’d once or twice requested a little cash before payday, I thought about changing the name of the account to Drug Money.
Practically everyone in it had a habit. They weren’t the most desperate cases, as drug users go. Only one of them ended up in rehab, and as far as I know only one needed to. But their habits must have been pretty ingrained nonetheless, because when your boss –- the person you try hardest in the world (after your parents) to keep in the dark regarding your extralegal proclivities –- has no illusions about how often you indulge and in what, and if you’ve talked to him while you were high, even though you’re pretty sure he couldn’t tell, then you’re probably letting the drugs take the wheel, and the odds are slim that they’re driving you toward really superb financial decisions. So when you wake up some afternoon to the sound of your roommate pounding on your bedroom door demanding your share of the utility bill, and you slowly come to realize that the eighty bucks you spent getting high with friends the night before was that very thing -- well, who else are you going to tap for a loan, Mom and Dad?
I can’t imagine a restaurant without drugs. I don't mean I need drugs to imagine a restaurant, just that I’ve never worked anyplace with a kitchen or a bar or a Bunn-o-matic that didn’t also have a thriving party scene. It might be the industry’s one true constant, the only rule that applies universally, irrespective of concept, tone, location or cuisine. Think the upscale places are any better? Maybe in terms of food, service and atmosphere, but in drug use they might be the worst. The pricier the menu, the more cash will soon be in the hands of adrenalized employees with few places to spend it. Just because a server is attractive, experienced, and smart enough to land a job in a posh restaurant doesn’t mean he doesn’t also enjoy getting high after work. Just because a cook can execute a flawless sear and reduce a pan sauce to ideal plate-clinging viscosity thirty times an hour doesn’t mean she isn’t also a tiny bit stoned at the moment, or planning to get so very soon.
In fact, some of my favorite cooks have been potheads. Take Kevin. I haven’t seen him in over a year, but I’m just about sure Kevin is stoned right now. He has to be, because that’s how he makes life work. Kevin’s one of those people who, thanks to some toxic reaction of genetics and upbringing, find themselves unequipped to handle even the most ordinary task without paralyzing anxiety. When it comes to treatment, like many other poor devils so afflicted, Kevin favors pot. Other options are available, of course. Where there’s an ill there’s a pill, and with a condition as commonplace as anxiety, you can be sure the pharmaceutical industry won’t let us want for choices. But why risk night sweats, suicidal thoughts, and impotence when all you need is a blunt?
Kevin’s anxiety is of the I-can’t-shut-up variety, so it was in everyone’s best interest that he remained lightly toasted on both sides for as much of the day as possible. During the year and a half he worked in my restaurant, you’d often find Kevin, obsessing over some new injustice, in relentless pursuit of an unlucky co-worker, who kept looking for something to do –- anything –- that would require him to be on the other side of the room. But a sober, worked-up Kevin was tough to shake.
“So it’s like, how am I supposed to know I’m in the wrong line if the person who tells you which line to stand in doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing?”
“Uh-huh,” the other cook would answer, doing his best to sound sympathetic without sounding exactly interested.
“It’s like, I’ve been here for forty-five minutes by this point, and now you’re basically telling me to start all over again. Which I can’t, by the way, because I have to get to work so I can make money so I can come back tomorrow and go through all this bullshit again, through no fault of my own.”
“Right?” says the other cook, as he rummages through a plastic bin looking for nothing in particular, besides maybe a portal to another dimension
“You know what I mean? It’s like, you’ve created this entire system, which I’ve got no choice but to use, and the system is me paying you for your time, basically, which I get. But when you waste my time, I don’t get to count that toward the time that I owe you for, supposedly?”
“It’s crazy.”
“You know what I’m saying? It’s like, I’m not the one who came up with the system, but yet still I’m the one who has to….”
By now the co-worker is wondering if there’s something on the roof he might reasonably consider himself responsible for, but it wouldn’t help. Kevin would be on the ladder right behind him, finishing his story. Marijuana and marijuana alone could soothe Kevin’s jangled nerves. To deprive him of it would be an act of pure cruelty -- and not only to Kevin. That’s why my policy on drugs in the workplace is essentially don’t ask, don’t tell. Why would I deprive somebody of the one thing that makes his presence tolerable?
Well, the answer is this: because a guy with a habit will always choose the habit over his job. Sooner or later he’ll find himself at a crossroads, and the restaurant will get screwed.
Ronnie was another high-functioning drug enthusiast. He worked fast, worked well, followed instruction and showed initiative. He always made good decisions at work, even while on his own time he made the wrong one every chance he got. He was job-smart, life-dumb. The fact that he smoked a bowl every morning to maintain his impeccable composure was a mere character quirk, as far as I was concerned, about as consequential as a taste for the Game Show Network or chamomile tea. Then one day my manager texted that Ronnie was out pacing the parking lot, swearing to himself and threatening to quit. We’d had new shelves installed that afternoon, and Ronnie was convinced that one of the carpenter’s assistants had made off with the weed he’d left in the office.
“You had your weed in my office?” I asked Ronnie when I got there.
“It was the little guy with the bandana. He’s the only one that could’ve taken it. He kept going back to the office to charge his phone.”
“Why did you have your weed in my office?”
“I picked it up on my way to work. It’s never happened before, I swear, and I was planning on bringing it home right after work.”
“So you don’t ever usually have weed here in the restaurant, right?”
“Dude.” Ronnie looked at me as if that were the most outlandish scenario anyone had ever described to him. “Come on.”
I had pretty good reason to ask. A year before, then-chef Tyler had left a sandwich bag bulging with pot in the walk-in, innocently nestled in a case of bibb lettuce. It was supposed to be my day off, so when I dropped by unannounced, found the baggie, and quietly put it where he couldn’t find it, Tyler took on the stricken look of a sailor whose shore leave has just been revoked.
But whereas I didn’t like then-chef Tyler, I liked Ronnie a lot, and I wanted to keep him, and so I took a different approach. I asked Ronnie how much the weed had cost, and then I gave him enough to cover his loss.
It worked. Ronnie stayed on and cooked great food for another year, and he was probably stoned the entire time. That’s okay by me. I’m asking an employee for his best work, and it’s none of my business whether or not he comes by it organically. If banned substances are involved, I’ll probably look the other way, like Major League Baseball in the ‘90’s. I’m running a restaurant, after all, and law enforcement is best left to the professionals. Sure, I know the boys shouldn’t be using that terrible stuff, I'm essentially saying, but just look at all the home runs!
I’ll admit that I crossed a line in compensating Ronnie for his stolen weed. Turning a blind eye is one thing, but I’ve always made it pretty clear that drug use and possession at work were prohibited, however half-heartedly. Giving him that ninety bucks sent a strange and conflicting message: I don’t approve of your drugs, but I will insure them for you.
But where exactly is that line in the first place? When someone I know and care about needs marijuana to get through the day, then closes his local bar four nights a week, and does a little coke at the odd Friday party, am I enabling him by employing him, advancing him money against his next paycheck, no less? Am I feeding his habits, making it possible for him to avoid good decisions and opt instead for the sort of short-sighted behavior that will keep him broke, frustrated, and unfulfilled?
In other words, am I letting him be in his 20’s? I guess I am. When I see someone who’s in serious trouble, I don’t look the other way. If someone asks me for help, I give it. But Kevin and Ronnie had routine young man vices, and they made routine young man mistakes. We’re supposed to screw up in our 20’s. We’re meant to get in our own way, thwart our own ambitions and suffer the consequences. It’s a vital part of the human experience. It’s what separates us from the MBA’s. Be reckless. Feckless even, if you can pull it off. Stay out past dawn. Wake up on the floors of strangers. Treat work like something you stepped in. Discover your limitations by exceeding them, then retreat in fear and embarrassment. It worked for me, more or less, and I’ve seen it work for others.
Several of the cooks in that Employee Advances ledger left in a state of personal crisis. When the fallout from months or years of bad decisions finally accrued enough weight to break their youthful indifference, they blamed the job for their misery, and so they left. It’s hard to stay mad at your vices, after all. And besides, jobs are much easier to quit. But in almost every case, the cook got back in touch within a year. He let me know he had stopped using –- or at least really, really scaled back on –- the things that had led him off track. He’d found a new sense of purpose, rediscovered the passion he had lost, and he would like another chance. And in almost every case, I’ve hired him back.
And so if you drop by the kitchen this weekend, you’ll be in the company of young cooks in various stages of recovery and relapse. Most of them have drug-related arrests. Half of them have DUI’s. A couple are on their second or third tour with the restaurant. One of them has told me to go fuck myself. But all of them are, at least for the moment, in a good enough headspace that they can show up, do great work, get along well with each other, earn a paycheck, spend their leisure time in the usual age-appropriate pursuits, and still make it back to work the next day, more or less on time and almost completely sober.
It’s not Bear Stearns, but considering where they’ve been, this kitchen is a pretty good place for them to earn a living while trying to moderate those things they can’t outgrow, and to figure out what kinds of behavior will work for and against them in the next stage of their lives –- whenever they decide that should begin.
Welcome to the Halfway Café.
