Leaving the Big House

History has taught us that hostages and captives over time often come to identify with their captors, to the extent that upon their release they find it difficult to leave. After years of separation from their families and society, their most basic rights taken forcibly from them, these damaged survivors find themselves powerfully bonded with those who provided their only human contact, however dire the reality of their confinement. I think that it is called the Stockholm Syndrome.

With this, you can understand how hard it was to leave the hotel after ten years and walk blinking into the daylight of a Monday through Friday gig. When the time came to walk across the loading dock and climb on my scooter one more time, I had physical difficulty leaving the building. I felt like somebody had buried one of those invisible fences around the perimeter and it was hitting me with just enough juice to keep me from trying to cross the line again. So instead, I wandered the bowels of the place for a full hour after I had left the kitchen, walking the service corridors and saying more goodbyes, postponing the inevitable.

Let me try to put it in perspective. I started in that house as a breakfast cook when I was 26, childless, and fresh out of culinary school. I have really never known another job for any significant length of time. I worked every position in the operation, from graveyard cook to saucier to restaurant chef for the five-star dining room. And for the last three years, as executive sous chef, I lived and breathed that operation twenty-four seven, period. Thirteen hours was an average day,fifteen not unusual, and I would still come home with my laptop and a pile of schedules or reviews to knock out on the couch with the TV on as background noise. I worked every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every New Years Eve since 1998. Without exaggeration I spent more time these last few years with my Exec Chef than with my own wife, and likewise him with me.

The job, in short, was eating me alive, and something had to give. I was a minor league player called up to the majors and fighting every day to hold his own, unwilling to admit that some of us are meant to be happy playing AAA. I clung to it at first because I thought it was what I wanted and later, as my depression pulled me further into the abyss, I clung to it because the routine, however brutal, was at least safe and familiar and in its own way comforting.

It took six months of therapy and industrial-grade meds to bring me around, but somehow things all fell into place. They always have, that's the rub. Just as the economy was teetering on the brink and the luxury hotel sector along with it, I got an offer to go out to Redmond and run a facility for Microsoft. Forty-five hour weeks. Holidays off. Home for dinner every night. Great money.

So, you're asking, what was the catch?

Here's the scary part. There wasn't one. These people were serious.

So why, then, was it so hard to leave?

Truth be told, even if you have been getting hit between the eyes with a two-by-four every day for ten years, there is a certain solace in knowing which two-by-four it's going to be and who will be swinging it. Better the devil you know. After a decade in the Big House, I understood its inner workings like the custodian of a medieval clock understands the vagaries of its mechanism. I knew the secret repositories of power and influence, and where everything was kept within the labyrinthine back-of-the house passageways that spanned twelve floors and an entire city block. The engineers trusted me enough to lend me tools, the security guys kept an eye on my bike for me, the admins would happily take on massive photocopying and collating projects for me. In so many ways, I had it wired.

In so many other ways, though, I didn't -- at least not sufficiently to earn the approbation of my boss, who was both a genius at his job and a borderline psychopath. Every decision, every action, every project invariably led me down the road of ridcule and abuse until I simply expected it. My day to day life had become a self-fulfillying prophecy of Sisyphian proportions, and yet I kept going. If I focused on the restaurants, I lost control of banquets. If I focused on banquets, I lost track of what was happening in the restaurants. Each week I went through the exercise of scheduling forty-two people in five different areas across three shifts in a terminally short-staffed kitchen, and every week I unfailingly fucked it up, either blatantly or in some barely perceptible way which would then be elucidated to me in painstaking detail. At the end of every month, I frantically slashed labor in order to make our forecast, often covering double and triple shifts myself to save the hours, only to start the next month by fighting tooth and nail for a budget that would keep us from landing in the same situation yet again. I was expected to be on the floor more or less nonstop, accountable for every scrap of food that left the kitchen, yet the avalanche of paperwork never slowed down; hence the evening laptop sessions. And through it all, I never gained an inch.

So now you're thinking I must have been nuts to even consider passing up the chance to escape. But look at the flip side.

By the time I left, I had personally hired almost half of the cooks in the hotel, and had come up alongside the rest of them until I took the precipitous leap into management. For the rookies, I embodied the totality of that kitchen's day to day operation, and they couldn't conceive of the place carrying on without me. For the veterans, I was a dependable presence, the guy who was always there to troubleshoot or lend a hand, the guy who generally had the answers, and most important of all the buffer between then and the outright volatility of the Chef. I was the balance wheel, and these people counted on me. They needed me. And we all like to be needed. Would anybody need me quite so much anywhere else? Doubtful.

In the end, of course, I left.

I had cleaned out my office gradually over the course of my final two weeks, so on my last day I left empty-handed. Ireturned my laptop to the IT guy, and my backpack felt oddly light without the familiar weight. One more time to the locker room, where I changed into my riding gear as I had every night for what felt like a lifetime. Once more to the laundry to turn in my dirty uniform, but without the continuity of picking up a clean one. Once more through the tunnel that runs to the loading dock, where I had parked my bike in its accustomed well-protected corner. And once more the reverberation of exhaust noise against the garage walls as I rode out, the sound throatier and louder than it was when the pipes were ten years younger. One left turn and two quick rights put me onto I-5 northbound, headed for home.

I haven't looked back.