Kitchen heat, p.1
Kitchen Heat, page 1
Kitchen Heat:
A Restaurantland Romance
Kathleen McFall
Clark Hays
Copyright © 2023 Kathleen McFall
All rights reserved
Pumpjack Press
Portland, Oregon
ISBN: 979-8-9882974-0-6
Also by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall
The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection
A Very Unusual Romance
Blood and Whiskey
Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
The Last Sunset
Bonnie and Clyde
Resurrection Road
Dam Nation
Radioactive
The Halo Trilogy
Gates of Mars
Scorched Earth
Mars Adrift
CHAPter ONE
EXT. HOLLYWOOD MOVIE SET — DAY
(February 1996). A seasoned Hollywood REPORTER interviews a debut SCREENWRITER about her hot new film.
“Kassi Witmire, tell me all about your new movie Kitchen Heat. You’ve finished the second month of shooting and it’s getting unusually great buzz for a new screenwriter.”
Kassi leaned back and tried to steady her breathing. She centered her mind on his large, odd handlebar mustache. He looked like a character in an old-time silent film, the dastardly villain who ties the damsel in distress to the train tracks.
But he was not a villain. The reporter, Mark Hessian, was from Filmmakers Quarterly, one of the most influential magazines in the industry. He was the last interview of her media junket day, and the most important.
Of course, right on cue, Kassi was having a minor panic attack despite her best efforts at mustache distraction. She could feel the heat starting on her chest and creeping up her neck, approaching her earlobes. If it made it to her scalp, it was all over. The sweat would turn on like a faucet and the biggest moment of her life would be ruined.
“It all feels like a dream,” Kassi said.
Not a great response, she thought, but at least she managed to formulate a thought and say words out loud. A catastrophe averted equaled success in this case.
“It’s unusual for an Oscar-winning director to sign on to a small art-house project,” Mark said. “With a debut screenwriter, no less.”
Kassi nodded. That was the understatement of the decade, she thought, and not an actual question.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am to be working with Jane. She’s an amazing director.”
Okay, that was good. She was calming down and her breathing was slowing. This would be fine.
“The buzz around town is that your script captures what it’s really like to work in a restaurant, that it’s authentic. The pace, the artistry, the chaos.”
The sex too, she thought, assuming he’d added that in his head. He would eventually get to that question. They all had. The sooner the better. Sex sells.
Kassi fake-laughed and slipped into an alternate persona like the public relations coach taught her yesterday in a half-hour speed training session mandated by her agent. Pretend you’re an actress and it will all go fine.
She settled on what she hoped was a combination of her favorite film characters: Louise, Susan Sarandon’s confident and wise waitress character from Thelma and Louise, and bubbly Cher played perfectly by Alicia Silverstone in last year’s movie Clueless.
“Mark, you hit the nail on the head. Perfect description. It is indeed chaotic work, and that frenetic energy shapes the people who are thrown together in a restaurant. It’s half fun, half soul-crushing, always boomeranging between boredom and pure adrenaline. There’s no middle ground.”
“Sounds like you have some real-world experience in food service,” he said.
Kassi took a sip of water. “I’ve worked in plenty of restaurants in my time. Most recently, at the Rose and Thorn in Portland, Oregon. I wrote the screenplay while I worked there.”
“Writing scripts is hard work,” said the child seated next to her in a miniature director’s chair.
“Is this your agent?” Mark asked.
“I’m her daughter. My name is Samantha, and I’m four. I’m writing a script too.” She was holding a tattered notebook in her lap decorated with stickers of horses and butterflies.
“I see,” Mark said. “Has it also been fast-tracked into a major motion picture?”
“Not yet,” Samantha said, returning her attention to drawing in her notebook. “But it will be.”
“I’m sure it will,” he said. “How are you and your mom liking Hollywood?”
“It’s a little bit lonely. Mommy drinks more wine here. And the food isn’t very good. Not like Cooker makes.”
“Okay, honey,” Kassi said, feeling a neck flush threatening to rise again. “Why don’t you let me answer the questions for a little while?”
Samantha’s nanny wasn’t on shift for another hour. Kassi had no choice but to bring her daughter to this interview. She hoped the crayons would distract her enough.
“Sorry,” Kassi said.
“No problem at all.” Mark smiled and glided seamlessly, graciously, to the next topic. He must be a dad, Kassi thought. She warmed to him.
“Insiders report there’s a killer love story at the heart of the screenplay, very hot, maybe even skirting an NC-17 rating, along with several supporting characters, restaurant workers and customers, who fall in and out of love, and in and out of bed. Are restaurants really like that?”
The sex question. There it was. Kassi looked at Samantha, who was now, thankfully, totally ignoring them, immersed in her coloring. She wanted to get through this part of the interview quickly, while her daughter’s attention was focused elsewhere.
She needed to handle this question perfectly. Sex was a pivotal element of the movie’s plot and of restaurants more generally. For better or worse, sex in restaurants was something Kassi knew plenty about. Still, she stayed in her Louise-Cher persona. It was easier to talk about sex if you pretended to be another person.
“Mark, restaurants are like that, honestly. Not just sex though, it’s love and romance too. It’s partly tied up with the long hours, the nutty pace, the drinking after shifts to bring down the adrenaline, not to mention the high turnover, which means there’s almost always someone new being added to the already-steamy mix.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned in.
“On top of that, there’s the sensual, intimate nature of cooking and serving food, of nurturing people. Even if you’re not into the gourmet side of things, these are very personal acts. The icing on the cake, so to speak, is the way waitresses, and waiters too, need to sell themselves. You know, flirt with customers to increase their tips. Put all that together, repeat it day after day, and it’s a romantic pressure cooker. Wait, that was a terrible pun. Don’t write that.”
“A romantic pressure cooker. I love it,” he said, laughing. “You’re making my job easier. Does the plot of the movie match your, shall we say, romantic experiences at the Rose and Thorn?”
She paused. Too long. It was noticeable and awkward. The flush crept back up her neck.
“No,” she said at last. “It’s just a movie.”
“That’s not what the rumor mill is furiously churning. Are you denying that the central romance and the hot sex are autobiographical?” He whispered the words hot sex so Samantha wouldn’t hear.
“I made it all up, totally fictional,” she said, this time too quickly.
Thinking back, Kassi now wondered if she had made it all up, if by writing about their love, by capturing it in a screenplay, she had somehow changed their reality, changed their outcome.
“I don’t want to spoil the movie for my readers, but are you saying that the incredible ending, the one that has everyone talking, the big surprise, isn’t your story?”
She smiled but shook her head, wishing it were otherwise. “That’s why we love the movies, right?”
CHAPTER TWO
INT. ROSE AND THORN RESTAURANT — DAY
(Nine months earlier, May 1995). KASSI, twenty-eight years old, enters the eclectic restaurant. The dining room is crowded but not with customers. She’s got competition.
“You here for the waitress job?” a dark-haired woman asked. She was in her mid-thirties wearing a light-yellow summer dress with white polka dots that perfectly set off her dark complexion.
Kassi nodded. “Yes.”
“Come in and quit blocking the door. We might have actual customers trying to get in behind you.”
The woman tore a ticket off a roll like a carnival barker and handed the ragged stub to Kassi.
“Number twenty-seven. Sit at any of the open tables in the back. Nick the manager will call your number if he wants to talk to you.” She looked Kassi up and down. “He probably will. You’ve got experience, right?”
“Tons.”
“Fill out this application.” She handed Kassi a double-sided form.
Kassi did a quick scan of the dining room. Up front where she came in, there was a bulletin board thick with flyers for local rock bands, psychic readings, domestic abuse hotlines and birthday clowns. On the far side was an elaborate playroom for children, currently empty. In the middle of the dining room was a salad bar, bigger and more complicated than any Kassi had ever seen. The furniture was unremarkable—standard composite dining tables, a few booths, a glass refrigerated case with desserts, floor-to-ceiling windows that were mostly clean. All told, the place had a friendly charm. Welcoming.
A woman bumped into Kassi from behind. She giggled an apology as she pulle d off her headphones and turned the volume down on a Walkman that was hooked to the strap of her ripped blue jean overalls.
A second woman came in behind her. She had long hair pulled into a high ponytail and was wearing a skinny black leather tie, a crisp blue blouse and a black leather skirt. She looked like an indifferent punk rocker.
“Here,” the dark-haired woman said, ripping off two more tickets, after giving them both the once-over as well. “Numbers twenty-eight and twenty-nine. Fill out this application and please get the hell out of the reception area. Customers get priority.”
Kassi and the two women moved to the rear of the dining room. Applicants one through twenty-six were already crowded around a half-dozen tables, each clutching a job application and ticket stub as if they were badges of honor.
“Hard to believe how many people need this job. President Clinton should fire Greenspan,” number twenty-nine said as the three women sat together at a four-top.
“I don’t know who that is but firing people is not nice,” number twenty-eight said. “I’ve been fired and it’s awful. Still, I sure hope there’s more than only one open position because this is a ton of people.”
Kassi felt a stab of fear. Her limited funds were running out. She needed a job badly.
Number twenty-nine started filling out her application. The woman with the headphones, number twenty-eight, smiled again at Kassi. She had red hair, a kind face and artfully applied blue eye shadow with matching dark-blue mascara. Kassi took the smile as an opening.
“Is the job situation in Portland so bad?” Kassi asked, fishing around in her bag for a pen.
“It’s not great but this crowd size is probably more on account of the fact that the Rose and Thorn has an amazing reputation,” the still-smiling number twenty-eight said. “A really good place to work.”
“How so?” Kassi asked, emptying her purse onto the table. Keys, a notebook, Vaseline, a stuffed octopus, a package of baby wipes, fish crackers in a plastic baggie, two expired bus tickets and a handful of dirty popcorn.
No pen.
“I’m Kassi, by the way,” she said, sweeping it all back into her bag.
“Who comes to a waitress interview without a pen?” number twenty-eight said, giggling and handing a pen to Kassi. “Sorry, green is all I got. I’m Rosalyn. Most people call me Roz.”
Kassi thanked her, took the pen and started filling out her form. Name, birthdate, places she’d waitressed before. How was it possible she’d already worked at six restaurants and she wasn’t even out of her twenties?
At first, it was to make money for teenage things, then four more restaurants over the four years it took to put herself through college to earn her impractical degree in film history. Those were the years she figured out how to make good money waiting tables, how to move fast and work the customers. Still, while she was good at it, she gladly gave it up after the wedding, happy her serving days were forever behind her. She was wrong. Kassi was back at it right after her marriage collapsed.
Even though she didn’t much like hauling food and making nice to customers, she knew waitressing had saved her, keeping her and her daughter from being homeless, or worse. So far, it was the only thing she was any good at, and she was grateful to have the skills now when she badly needed them.
Still, the chance of getting this job today didn’t seem high. The six restaurants where she worked were all back east, so tough to verify her past employment, and she had circled days-only in the availability section of the application. She couldn’t afford a night babysitter and Kassi wasn’t going to leave Samantha with Barry any more than necessary. But mostly, she wanted to be around to tuck her little girl into bed.
A waitress who doesn’t work nights is a waitress who doesn’t work, she thought. She looked around at the sea of hopeful faces and considered leaving. Maybe it made more sense to try the temp agency, get a secretarial job. Wouldn’t pay nearly as well as working for tips but it would be steady, and not nights.
“You’re not from around here, I take it,” Roz said.
“That’s so obvious?”
“You talk kind of fast.”
“Is talking fast bad?”
“Not bad, just different. East Coast different. People ‘round here talk more slowly,” Roz said, emphasizing her slow lilt for effect. “What brought you to Portland?”
“I needed a change,” Kassi said, avoiding the real reason. She moved to Portland because her estranged husband got a job here and Kassi felt she owed it to her daughter to take one last shot at reconciliation, however unlikely it was. Two weeks after she uprooted them both and moved across the country, it all went to hell.
Her mother had warned her.
“What makes the reputation of the Rose and Thorn so great?” Kassi asked.
“You know anything about Portland?”
“Only that it has a lot of roses so that’s why they call it the City of Roses, and it rains all the time.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Roz said. She giggled again, not nervously, but as if laughter was the natural way to finish her sentences. “This place is super well-known in Portland, at least in certain circles. It’s a safe place for gays and lesbians, and battered women, other victims of mostly male violence. Anyone can hang out here if they need a ride or help or whatever. No one will hassle them and no one gets kicked out until they have a plan or a place to go. And it’s real pro-woman. Like, the owner is a single mom and she tries to hire single moms whenever she can.”
Kassi brightened at that piece of information and wrote in caps at the top of the application that she was the single mom of a preschooler.
“Also, the food here is good for you, more or less,” Roz said. “Organic and healthy, with stuff for macrobiotics and vegetarians, all those weirdos with their weird diets. From a tip standpoint, in my experience, healthy weirdos are happy people, at least more so than most, and happy people tip better.”
“Don’t forget the legendary Hungarian mushroom soup,” said number twenty-nine, as she finished her application and joined the conversation. “I’m Meredith.” She stood and held her hand out to collect their job applications. “I’ll run them over. Make a personal pitch. College isn’t cheap. I need to work every angle.”
Kassi and Roz gave her their forms but watched Meredith to make sure she didn’t somehow “lose” theirs on the way over. All’s fair in love and job searches, Kassi thought. Meredith took the high road though, delivering all three applications to Nick, the manager—a frumpy looking ruddy-faced middle-aged man in a brown sweater vest—with a flash of her killer smile and a wink.
As Meredith returned to their table, a woman—forty-something, stout with short gray hair, wearing baggy tan corduroy pants and a red and black plaid flannel shirt—burst through the swinging kitchen doors and stood for a moment, hands on hips, looking at everyone.
Glaring, more accurately.
“That’s Molly, the owner,” Roz said.
The manager jumped up from his seat and walked to her side, clutching the stack of job applications. Kassi watched them confer and look over the applications. The dark-haired woman who had been handing out numbers and forms earlier joined them. The trio huddled and whispered, occasionally looking up at the applicants.
“I don’t care!” Molly shouted, quieting the entire room. “Just make it work.”
She marched over to the salad bar where a bearded man wearing a white apron was spooning out fresh tomato wedges into the refrigerated serving container. Molly stuck her face above the sneeze barrier and peered in at the offerings, then turned and grabbed his shoulder.
“Dave, the cucumbers are so old they’re transparent. Transparent!” she yelled. “Fix the damn cukes!”
Dave stood motionless for a few beats watching Molly leave. He turned and looked at the cucumbers, then back at the crowd of job applicants now staring at him. He smiled, his white teeth gleaming through the curls of his beard. “As you wish, my liege,” he said loud enough for all to hear, bowing and tipping his hand toward the office. “Thine cucumbers shall not disappoint.”
