Part Twenty Seven

In 1964 Kevin Douglas knocked up his girlfriend, an art major at U-Dub named Susan Frey. Kevin was a poli-sci major himself.

Kevin was more devoted to not being drafted than to Rousseau, it’s safe to say. The arrival of little Sarah Ruth Douglas on the scene accomplished the same thing and the moment he held her in his arms he decided it was something he should have done a long time ago.

Now if he could just find a job…

Susan said to him, baby, do what you want to do. Follow your heart. But also put food on the table for your little girl. Since she’d let him override her choice of names (Burning Freedom Douglas had such a nice ring to it, she thought) he figured he’d better listen to her.

What he wanted to do… what he wanted to do… he walked around campus and through Seattle and realized that the thing he enjoyed most at school – aside from Susan – was cooking dinner for his friends. Nobody had any money for restaurants and besides, their hair was getting longer and their clothes scruffier as the Sixties progressed, and so it was getting harder and harder to get served…

He looked up and he was in a part of Seattle that consisted largely of warehouses and longshoreman’s bars. And there just a few hundred feet from the Sound was a ramshackle building whose owner was trying to sell it before the city condemned it.

Susan and Kevin went to her parents and negotiated a compromise: they would get married, if her parents would pay for a big wedding… except they would get married at the courthouse and use the wedding money for the down payment on their new restaurant.

For some reason the Freys went for it, and the Wine Dark Sea was born. The building’s owner even threw in the about-to-sink houseboat foundering at the pier behind the about-to-be-condemned warehouse. And thought he had put one over on the young couple, who (he thought) would now get stuck with the bill for having the wreck hauled away.

But somehow they got the building fixed up. And the boat, too. And Susan created a whole visual experience for the restaurant to go with the menu, which was heavy on seafood and other regional ingredients, and always had plenty of vegetarian dishes. At first the Wine Dark Sea served an uneasy mix of stevedores and college students but eventually the mix got easier. They moved out of the houseboat and it became the home of the first chef they hired who wasn’t Kevin. And the neighborhood changed throughout the Seventies, and ever few years Susan would completely remake the look of the place, and the menu got more sophisticated, and the dockworkers stopped coming around as much, and so did the college students, both replaced by a lot more people with a lot more money…

Kevin and Susan pretended for the longest time that they were still, at heart, just cooking dinner for their long-hair friends. But when Sarah came back from college and her internship at a three-star restaurant in France she pointed out to her parents that they did, in fact, own and operate a fancy restaurant.

Kevin’s first impulse was to sell his Mercedes, but he sublimated that into a practice of hiring vagrants for non-existent jobs, which is where Preacher Haywood comes into the story.

It is a crisp (for Seattle) fall day in 1989 and at first light Kevin goes to the fish market and meets up with Jimmy Raines, the current head chef at Wine Dark. They inspect the day’s options. And both of them notice that there is young man standing there, drinking a cup of coffee, and just watching. They don’t recognize him, he’s not with any restaurant or vendor, he’s just… there. And he’s there the next day, too, standing and watching and doing nothing, just drinking it all in. And something about the young man reminds Kevin of… well, of a young him, and he starts talking to him.

What, he asks, is the story? What brings you here this early in the morning?

And Preacher says to him: I’m practicing my only job skills.

What are those?

“I can wait,” he says, with a trace of a smile, “I can think, and I can fast.”

Quoting Herman Hesse to an ex-hippie like Kevin Douglas is pretty much like dangling a steak in front of a lion; Douglas hires him on the spot, forgetting that he has promised his daughter (now the manager of the restaurant) that she will be making the hiring decisions from now on.

When he returns to the restaurant Sarah is just emerging from the recently re-renovated houseboat and heading into the restaurant. She is tall and loose-hipped; her nose is a little large for her face, her hair is dark and elegant. A bit icy; at 25 she knows she would have trouble getting the staff to take her seriously, to take her as anything but a kid playing in her parents’ sandbox. But she has a degree in restaurant management from UNLV and a head for business and she is convinced (correctly, as it turns out) that she can do the job, and do it well.

Her father tells her that he just hired a new busboy, some guy he found wandering down by the docks; she rolls her eyes, she sighs, but this isn’t the first time, and she can always find room for another busser, because the turnover’s so high, and if he’s anything like the other hobos her dad keeps hiring, he won’t last a week.

That night Haywood shows up, clean, shaved, appropriately dressed, polite, articulate… and a hard worker.

Three nights later Kevin is walking across the floor and hears his new busboy recite the very lengthy specials list at a table. He collars Haywood and asks him why he was doing that.

They asked, Preacher says.

And how did you know it? You’ve only been on 20 minutes.

I memorize the specials board each night.

You’re a busboy.

But sometimes it comes up. Like right there.

A week later he is waiting tables.

Sarah doesn’t like him – let’s be clear about that. A little too smooth. Plus, she didn’t hire him. Plus, her father too clearly likes him. But he is a hell of a waiter. And the kitchen staff likes him, too. He shows up early and talks about food with Jimmy Raines. Jimmy wants to hire him as a prep cook. Sarah steps in – he is too good with the tables. Keep him out front.

At first he lives in a rooming house uniformly described as “horrid.” Then he rooms with a couple of other busboys – “an opportunity to brush up on my Spanish,” he says. Then after a misunderstanding involving the sister of one of his roommates, he finds new quarters near the University of Washington campus with a couple of graduate students.

Reluctantly Sarah gives him more responsibilities. She uses him as an expediter. He does some prep work. Discusses menus with her and Kevin and Jimmy.

(Jimmy Raines grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and learned how to cook from his grandmother, and then from Uncle Sam when he did a stint in the Air Force. When he got discharged he kept on cooking. And he got his job when Kevin and Susan were on vacation in Charleston, dined at the little hotel grill where he worked, and had the best crab cakes on earth. Outside of Maryland. He was a big, ebullient man, and his kitchen was always immaculate.)

Sarah decides Haywood is OK. Dependable and hardworking. Still a little too cocky. Looks her in the eye a little too long. In fact he’s just a little unsettling all around. She calls the restaurant in Annapolis to check his reference. They confirm it, ask about him, tell her how great he is. She’s still not entirely comfortable around him. Maybe he’s not OK. He keeps trying to make her laugh. And, damn it, he keeps succeeding, which is not the way to keep the staff in line.

After he’s worked there a few months he helps her lock up and asks her out on a date. She declines. He asks her again a few weeks later. She declines. A few days later she overhears a bosomy blonde waitress named Claire Elliott waxing rhapsodic about going to see the BoDeans and Treat Her Right with Preacher the night before..

The next night she has him busing tables again.

He doesn’t complain, doesn’t say a word. Works just as he always did. Jimmy complains to Kevin but he, wisely, defers to his daughter in this. At the end of the night Haywood asks her out again.

She says, lips that touched Claire Elliott’s will not touch mine.

Who said anything about lips? he says, with that wry grin that she always echoes and then scowls away, embarrassed.

Seriously, she says. I can’t be with someone if I don’t respect his taste in women; I mean what does that say about me?

Yeah, yeah, I’m a big disappointment, he agrees dismissively. I’m off tomorrow. Take the night off yourself and I’ll take you to see the original King Kong.

Didn’t you hear me? she says.

No lips. I heard you. I promise. No lips.

She glares at him. They are both silent. She searches his eyes intently.

Where – she starts to say, and Preacher interrupts her mid-syllable.

The Egyptian.

OK, I’ll meet you there.

The next evening, after three outfit changes, it occurs to her that she could just ditch him. But she shows up.

They go for drinks afterwards. She likes being the driver. Gives her a feeling of control. Haywood tells her that he’d had a jeep but that he’d given it to his college roommate when he came out to Alaska. She tells him about the year she spent in Lyons for her restaurant apprenticeship. He tells her about his summer there. His French is better than hers. Late in the evening when she returns from the ladies’ room she gives him a long, slow, gentle kiss.

I thought no lips, he says.

Changed my mind, she says.

She decides the unsettled feeling he elicits is a good one.

A month later he’s spending most evenings on the boat.

She complains that she has no sleeping attire that was suitable for having a housemate. Lingerie is too uncomfortable. Sweats too unbecoming. A long t-shirt nightgown was neither comfortable nor attractive. She is the sort of person who will obsess over this.

He shows up at her door with a pair of men’s flannel pyjamas. This is sexy? she says.

You have so little imagination, he tells her. If you alternate between the tops on one night and the bottoms on the other…

(She will learn over the years that, in fact, virtually every man polled agrees that alternating halves of pajamas are far more… inspiring to them than the sexiest of frilly lingerie. And she finds it quite comfortable, after some initial awkwardness about going topless. In fact she will tell someone, years later, that she attributes three of her four children to her choice of sleepwear and its effect on her husband.)