Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

They would do their work while giving me small tasks to keep me occupied and out of the way.

I never got a toy Easy-Bake oven or a play kitchen. I played every day at the Achatz Café surrounded by my family and a town full of people who knew my name.

As I grew a bit older I graduated from pot washer to vegetable peeler and eventually to chief egg cracker. The egg station, two portable electric burners with not much more power than a coffee warmer, was situated at the front of the restaurant in front of a few large windows overlooking Main Street.

There was a lot of foot traffic on Main during the warmer months, and people peeked in to see me sitting on the counter next to my grandmother, cracking eggs into the pans for her.

“We got an ‘over hard,’ Grant, you’re up!” she would call out. I would then run over to crack a few eggs. With the over-hards it didn’t matter if the yolks broke. But through time I broke fewer and fewer, and one day my grandmother called me over and said, “This one’s over easy.” I cracked carefully, aware that the customers were watching. A bit of pride welled up in me. I was the little kid who could cook—I was at the top of the egg-station now, doing the over-easies.

In February 1980, when I was seven, my parents borrowed $5,000 from my grandmother to open their own restaurant.

Mickey’s Dutch Treat was an ice-cream parlor right next to the train tracks that divided the small community of Richmond, Michigan. My grandmother’s sister had heard that the owner wanted out and mentioned it suggestively to my father. Dad was hanging drywall at the time, but he had worked in restaurants off and on since he was sixteen. The dream of self-employment was something he always fostered, and cooking seemed as logical a choice as any other for a business.

The new restaurant was given a quick once-over, and the Achatz Depot was born. It was open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week—and my dad didn’t skip a day that first year.

From the start the Depot was busy. The Achatz name was synonymous with food in the area. There was of course my grandmother’s place in Marine City, and ten miles to the east in Armanda, Dave Achatz—my dad’s first cousin—owned a very successful diner. Irene’s Catering, my great-uncle’s business, had been feeding people at weddings, graduations, and funerals for years. The Achatz family fed the community, cradle to grave.

Achatz Depot grossed nearly $200,000 its first year, all the while paying the enormous rent of $300 per month. That is good money now, and in 1980 it was a huge success. Dad worked eighteen hours a day then, but he didn’t seem to mind it. Success has a way of making the work seem less like, well, work.

Much like his mother’s place, the general hiring strategy was to find the closest family members and put them to work. My mom was there while I was at school. Two of my dad’s brothers, a couple of sisters, a cousin, and my mom’s brother also worked there. The Achatz Depot was more like the Achatz Family Reunion with a shifting cast of characters, depending on the day and time. And like before, I came in whenever I could during the week and all day on the weekends.

It felt like home.

“Just take the burger blanket, stick three or four fries in the middle, and wrap that sucker up like a taco and eat it.” Burger blankets were thin-cut, half-dollar-sized pickles that we put on nearly every sandwich.

Uncle Norm demonstrated the process of eating his creation with exaggerated gusto. He tilted his head to the side and looked like Ozzy biting the head off a bat, complete with growling sound effects. These kinds of things can leave an impression on a young boy.

Norm, my dad’s youngest brother, was baby-faced, but big. Tall, thick-boned, and bordering on rotund, he was the archetypal mean uncle. He was the relative who would wrestle a bit too hard and hit you on the shoulder when you weren’t looking, leaving a serious mark. A headlock followed by some SNL noogies were standard protocol every chance he got. “This will toughen you up, you spoiled brat.”

Norm was my godfather. He was also a surrogate big brother, a sibling that I never had. I loved him a lot despite, or perhaps because of, the tough love. Like most of my extended family, Norm worked at the Depot as a line cook between his own drywalling jobs. He was definitely rough around the edges—he had a raspy voice from years of drinking and cigarettes, callused hands from hanging drywall and cooking most of his life, and a fading, crappy tattoo on his forearm that read simply, NORM. Occasionally, when there were a few moments to spare and Norm and my dad shared a beer or two, they would spin tales of pool games and bar fights, and to my eight-year-old ears it seemed that Norm was indeed a good coach for learning to get tough. He lived alone and spent much of his free time hunting and fishing. Norm basically lived a Hank Williams Jr. song, and whenever possible, I tried to tag along.

“Grant, you just try it. Trust me, it’s good,” he chuckled in the way that usually meant anything but “trust me.”

I was pretty sure this was a mean prank to gross me out. I backed away slowly, out of arm’s length, and bought some time to see if he made himself another of these strange concoctions. He did, over and over. He genuinely seemed to be enjoying them. Eventually I got curious enough to try it.

I took the first bite carefully and braced myself for a putrid taste. But somehow it was good. No, it was really, really delicious. I reached for another.

“I told you. See, you should listen to