Free Way to Go by Tom Ryan Page B

you think JP will be okay working with me?”
    â€œActually, it was his idea. He thinks part of the reason that you are such a shitty dishwasher is that you spend half your time watching him cook, so we might as well put you where you might actually learn something.”
    I felt as if I’d won the lottery. Big-time.
    The next morning, I came to work an hour early so JP could give me a rundown of some basics.
    â€œOkay,” he said, “first things first. You don’t touch my knives. You touch my knives, I cut your thumbs off, I go to jail, Denise has to close the restaurant, you have no thumbs, and nobody wins.”
    JP’s knives were his babies. He’d transported them from Montreal in a metal briefcase that looked like it held a nuclear detonator, and he kept them next to the stove in a wooden block.
    He reached up to a shelf and pulled down a stained, tied-up bundle of cloth. “Go ahead,” he said, dropping it in front of me, “unroll it.”
    It was a set of five knives, much older and more beat up than the ones he used. The handles were mismatched, and there were spots of rust on some of them.
    â€œThis is my backup set. I used these way back when I was a young kitchen slave, like you. You can use them for the summer. They don’t look like much, but they’re good knives. These are real steel; none of that stainless bullshit. That’s why they’re kind of rusty. You have to keep them clean and dry, and you rub oil onto them every night before you leave the kitchen.”
    â€œCool,” I said. They were pretty shitty-looking knives, but I wasn’t about to complain. Anything to keep me out of the dish pit.
    JP grabbed a ten-pound bag of potatoes from the corner and dropped it on the counter in front of me.
    â€œFirst lesson.” He picked up the smallest knife in the bundle. “This is your paring knife. Small, but very important. This little guy will do delicate work, like making garnishes, and it can do stuff that bigger knives can’t, like getting the seeds out of a pepper. But first things first.” He sliced open the bag of potatoes, grabbed one and peeled it perfectly in about ten seconds. He did another one, slower, showing me how to hold the knife and move the potato, and then he got me to try. I was slow and choppy, and cut several chunks out of the potato in the process.
    â€œWouldn’t it be a lot easier to use a peeler?” I asked.
    â€œOh yes, much easier. But what would you learn?” He patted me on the back. “You do this whole bag, and then we’ll see what’s next.”
    I looked at the gigantic bag of potatoes, took a deep breath and started peeling.
    JP was right; by the time I’d peeled twenty pounds of potatoes, I felt as if I’d actually learned something. Over the next couple of days, I peeled what felt like hundreds of carrots and thousands of potatoes. It was boring and repetitive, but I kind of enjoyed the rhythm of it, and by the end of a few days of nonstop peeling, I felt as if I really knew how to use that paring knife.
    Over the next week, I slowly graduated to doing more complicated prep work. I wasn’t actually learning to cook yet, but I knew the difference between a slice, a dice and a julienne. Depending on what JP needed for a particular dish, I did plenty of all three.
    JP showed me how to pull the hairy little beards out of mussels, and how to devein a shrimp. I used my hands to break apart endless heads of romaine lettuce, wash out all the dirt, and rip them into little pieces for Caesar salad. I learned to crush cloves of garlic with the palm of my hand so that they would slide right out of their skin, and to mince them into tiny piles of fragrant mush that went into almost everything JP cooked.
    The kitchen had become fun again. Now that I was helping him, JP was able to relax a bit. When he was relaxed, he listened to music. Lots of music. When we had a rush, and