Oh my, why does not the cook stop using “fucking” when he speaks? Between each two words he inserts one “fucking”, without no specific reason. It does not help the grammar and seems out of place, but it is inserted, as if out of a sense of duty. The others(the others who help him) aren’t much better. Even some of the women do it, out of a sense of duty. Worst one is the little guy with beard and ever- present baseball hat and Harley-Davidson jacket. He tries to look tough, but poor guy, the eyes give him away. Eyes like a beaten dog with the tail between legs, head down, looking anxiously around to find a place to hide. He is released from jail every weekend to visit his family and he has to work here for some hours. He is not much communicative so you don’t understand how long he has to work, you only know he has to work here. There is a competition between him and the cook to see which one can insert more f words in their vocabulary. The others are not that bad, of course “f” word is one of the standards by which the class you belong to is recognized, like the “Sun” and the baseball hat. Even the women use it frequently, and please, I am not a male chauvinist, but I find it unpleasant when a woman uses the word, like the last bastion of politeness has also been defeated.
The kitchen is just a greasy messy and untidy place, with lots of empty cardboard boxes and chairs and tables stacked at corners, big garbage bins, and of course the ever spewing hotplates, hot tops, ovens, microwave and a big bread toaster which for some reason has the pride of place and is praised by the cook form time to time, as if it belongs to him . It does not create much of a delicacy. What they cook here amounts to hot dogs and some sandwiches and burgers in different shapes accompanied by toasts and breads, so the cook can not be considered a chef per se actually. He has been working here for at least 6 years now and has quite a reputation. He is somehow considered “cool” and liked by the people working here. There are informal meetings in the kitchen and you learn a lot about behind the scenes of this establishment just by listening to people talking to him. He is a sort of father confessor, or the unofficial boss here. Under his baseball hat which never is removed he must have some hair, or perhaps he has already lost it. Only thing I see are two short sparse ponytails hanging out. He is rather tall and skinny. That always strikes me. Why aren’t cooks all fat, after all, they are working with food all the time and they can eat as much as they want. Is it because they know what horrible stuff they concoct in the kitchen that they are not tempted at all to nibble at the food? Is it a sort of secret sect like oath they take when they begin their profession, like the doctors, that forbids them from eating in the kitchen? But working here I begin to understand the reason. It is just the ever present smoke and smell of grease, and the professional way you deal with the food. After a short time you come to look at it just as a mechanic looks at the car parts. Does he want to eat them? No! Same here, for the chef and the staff, food looses it’s luster as something delicious, it turns into a thing like paper for office people. It is just something you work with. After some time, even I start to feel the same about it, although at first I was wondering how people resist the temptation to eat from the meals they serve for others. I even throw out the spillage from the courses I serve into the garbage, instead of eating it.
There is a small fridge at the back, a sort of walking through fridge, where you go in and grab lard or margarine and bring in. Also it is used to save the cooked but not ordered burgers from the night for later use. Sometimes these poor things have to wait for three days to be re-cooked and served at last. Once when I ask the cook about them, he becomes nervous and takes the pain of explaining that they are quite clean and he has cooked them just a few hours ago and he never uses leftovers. He does not use gloves and I don’t know what things does he touch with his hands and fingers during the day, I hope at least he does not play with his genitals. But anyway, “the people at the other side” don’t care. They even drop by sometimes, the old customers, the professional small time gamblers, the ones that don’t have anything to do except bingo, bingo, and more bingo, the ones that really live in this place, instead of living at their homes and consider the whole body of employers as some sort of family. They drop by directly to order what they want instead of writing and handing it over to the cashier. They stay there, talk and joke and don’t seem to care a bit about the hygiene of the place. Oh well, I suppose if they don’t, why should anybody else?
There is also a door at the back, which is used mainly for getting out for short smoking breaks by the people working in the kitchen. There is no place for people to sit and wait until the next serving session. It works like this, between the bingo sessions the kitchen is nearly lifeless and workless. The cook goes around, talks to the other employees, and the kitchen gets empty and soulless. The hands also get out for a smoke, or just hang around. I take one of the chairs from the tall column of old greasy chairs and sit down and start to read my book. It must be a strange sight, but nobody complains or says anything. Actually the hands are very formal, no camaraderie here. They look like people who don’t know how to carry their bulk, where to sit and where to stand and where to wait for the next order to be delivered. There is just one small narrow table by the wall next to the ovens with two chairs next to it. People often hang their jackets on it and you don’t dare sit there in case their jackets are creased. Sometimes when you get your miserable lunch or dinner you sit there by that thing called the table and gobble it up between the orders. The employees also sit there for their food. The only free food here is the beverages like coffee or pops. The coffee served is the worst imaginable type, a boiled water coffee soup, despite that, the customers don’t care and don’t complain. Anyway, the generosity of the Bingo house towards its employees only extends to the drinks.
There are two halls here, the larger one belongs to who else than the smokers, it is always blue with smoke, and smelly, and crowded, the non-smoking areas are usually relatively quiet and empty. It shows the types of people that usually go to bingo. There are vending machines, some old gambling machines and one of those bunny and teddy bear grabbing machines. Between sessions, the obsessive gamblers go to the machine and try their luck, it seems they can’t tolerate even a few minutes without the thrill of losing and losing more. There is one window to another world, and that is the window that opens to the hockey arena beneath the Bingo hall. Sometimes people stand there and gaze into that different world of sports and health, but then they come back mechanically to their own familiar world of bingo papers and markers and balls. Sometimes when I am tired I look through the window into that other world, usually there are people playing there, mostly young kids, mostly white, no immigrant stock there.
And what a pathetic bunch are these, customers of this bingo house. It is the saddest sight in the world to behold. Before seeing them I did not know that life could be so pathetically meaningless. can life be so miserable, so meaningless, so empty of joy and happiness? Is life meant to be spent in a smoky hall eating French fries and putting marker points on cheap checkered paper, machine like, soulless?? I wonder, between the delivery sessions, when I lean on the counter in the small shop area and look at these people, a sort of dark depression comes over and gets hold of me. Is this what humanity and life is all about? This place is the domain, the palace, of sad old fat women, smoking tons of cigarettes, wasting centuries of time. If Freud was alive today, he would call this place the temple of unsatisfied sexual desires, the replacement masturbation.
There are some permanent customers, some people that come virtually every day and sit at the same seat and repeat this meaningless pursuit day by day. They smoke, they mark, they eat cheap junk food, they play cards between the sessions, or do crossword puzzles, or play some board games, they have their cello tapes to stick the paper to the table so that it does not wiggle when they mark it. They spend most of their waking hours here. They must hate their guts, I can’t imagine why a healthy human being would spend hours here smoking or inhaling the smoke of others sitting motionless on a chair and mark endless papers like a machine. With a little change they could make at least some money, contracting out their movements to some packaging or data entry company. The most eminent one among these is an old emaciated woman in the last stages of decomposition, unkempt with cheap sports trouser and T-shirts, dirty, hair never combed, not taking any care of herself. Everyday she is there earlier than us, same clothes, same seat. I have enquired from other employees, they say that is her routines, she is here everyday. She always sits at the same chair and table in the smoking area. She sometimes plays cards with some regulars. Most of the time she is smoking cigarettes and after each session her ashtray is full. I don’t know how long is she going to live with this exciting and healthy lifestyle, but she seems to enjoy it. She must be losing a whole lot of money, where does she get the money from? She must be one of those compulsive gamblers. Some people hate themselves, or drown their sorrows in alcohol, this little woman seems to drown them in bingo.
There are other interesting personalities here as well. The woman that sits with her back to the hall and the people, in the smoking area, mechanically marking her papers. She seems to have a grudge against THE people. Always on the same seat, far corner of the hall, north east. Now this is a corner seeking creature if there is any. Then there is this shaky-head daddy. I call him by this name. Most nights he is here. Like other regulars, he sticks to the same area night after night. Always black dress, sort of western cowboy style, just without the hat. They all have a special area that they protect dearly and other regulars don’t dare to take, I guess they even mark it like dogs or cats from time to time. He wears a dark glass and shakes all over. His head shakes, his hands shake and his legs shake too. But he manages to mark anyway, and I think that is enough in this place. Oh, and of course, the Teddy bear woman. She brings a different teddy bear every night, has it sitting next to her cards and touches it from time to time. Come intermission, the Teddy is being rubbed all over her face, like a small baby. She cuddles and kisses it. I guess it is her lucky Teddy bear. Talking of luck, some people bring strange lucky stuff with them. There is this woman that lines up a whole menagerie of little figurines on her table, funny little statutes of people and animals. The other one has some sort of shiny stones museum that are lined up in front of her. From time to time she rubs them like a magician or witch, I guess they have some luck locked into them and by touching them, it moves to your arm and body and your marker and from there spills into the paper. You see some old gentlemen in full dress, ties and jackets and all? Cologne smell around them, coming for the Bingo, I don’t know if they manage to pick up any of those fat old sad ladies or not, but for their sake I hope they do. Some of them are too old, for example this old lady comes there with a stroller and can barely move, she comes up with the elevator, buys papers and stack them up on their stroller and walks slowly to the smoking area and drops herself down in a chair. And then there is the Halloween night. The young sleepy girl at the counter has got her white angel wings at the back, some others come with demon dresses. The funniest ones are the three old black ladies with full costume, red demons with even the forks.
Most people here are old, retired sort, but sometimes you see some younger ones. The saddest sight of course is of the ones sitting alone by themselves all through the session. I pity these bunch. Don’t they have any friends? Why should somebody come here all alone by herself/himself, sit in a corner and waste his/her precious time like this. Something strange I noticed here is some couples, the woman is visibly older than the man. The man is a young guy in funky dress, the woman old and fat smoking type, and definitely not his mother. Other thing you notice, there are no immigrant faces among the customers of this bingo hall. You don’t see one Chinese and Asian, or any middle eastern, or south American, or Russian. They are all Canadian-born. There are not even blacks among them. They are a homogenous bunch.
What I do here? I sit in the kitchen and serve the food to the customers. Most is ordered in the smoking area. Somehow they eat more, or are more extravagant and easy with their money. The non-smoking area does not order that much, it just nibbles some snack. Most of the time I am in the smoking area, when I come back home I reek of smoke. It just sticks with you and does not go away, it sits right there on my smell buds, even next morning I still feel it. One other duty I really hate and try to dodge as much as I can is emptying the ashtrays, after I do it, it seems like I have smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. The smoking area is large and after each session the ashtrays are full and you have to go table by long table and empty the ashtrays is small buckets, the bucket fills up quickly and you have to bring another bucket. I also wash the dishes and skin the carrots from time to time, not very difficult, but the difference with washing at home is that the pots and pans are huge, fortunately there are no patrons dishes as everything is served in paper plates and cups. Speaking of paper cups reminds me of this stupid young boy that usually serves the ground floor salon. Yes, there is also a little ground floor salon, dark and with no windows, but some people actually use it, I don’t know why on earth one wants to sit there. Anyway this boy has one very interesting character. he eats paper cups, after he drinks his pop, he starts to chew on the plastic cup and chops off big pieces and chew and gulps them down. he says it is delicious, I think he is stupid. He also collects coins, whenever he receives coins from customers, which is many times, as he uses to sell paper and food in the halls, he checks them and from time to time he comes up with something interesting. He is also somehow interested in the chubby young lady at the counter, both are the same age, but apparently the young one is not interested at all. She is the only one without tattoos, and the only one that does not smoke, a bit strange in this place.
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