Life, on the Line (2 page)

My mom worked weekends for Grandma Achatz at her restaurant in the riverside town of Marine City, Michigan. A village of four thousand, Marine City sat just across the border from Ontario, Canada. Mom baked pies and cooked short-order breakfasts while I was given a few dishes to “wash.” The Achatz Café was tiny. The whole place was basically just eight bar stools and a kitchen, which wasn't much aside from a tabletop griddle for the hash browns, bacon, and sausage links; a few small residential refrigerators; and a beat-up stove. The design was Americana, circa 1965.

My dad's sisters Liz and Patty cooked while Aunt Cathy waited tables. 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 your uncle Norm more often. I have a few things I can teach you.”

“It's so weird, though, right?”

“Not really—you put ketchup on your fries, right?”

“Yep.”

“Well, what's in ketchup, Grant?” He said this with a swooping voice, emphasizing that he was stating the obvious.

“I don't know, tomatoes?”

“Well, yeah, but what else? There's a ton of shit in there, right?” He walked over to the shelf and grabbed a bottle of Heinz. “Here, read the label, little man.”

“Tomatoes, corn syrup, vinegar, salt, sugar . . .”

He cut me off, “Right. And what is in pickles?”

He grabbed the five-gallon bucket of “burger blanket-style” pickles and put it down on the stainless-steel counter with a wallop for emphasis.

“Okay. Now read these ingredients to me.”

I started, “Cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, sugar . . . hey, what is that?” I pointed to the calcium chloride.

“No idea! Come on. See what I'm getting at? All the same stuff in there. They just swapped out the mashed-up tomatoes for some cucumbers, and bam, you get a pickle. In London they shake vinegar on their fries.”

“Really? Gross. But this tastes good!”

“Of course it does!” he bellowed as he flipped his side towel off his shoulder, twirled it up, and snapped me in the thigh.

 

By the time I was nine the Achatz Depot had settled into a steady and more predictable pace, and my dad put the systems in place that allowed him some free time. He was still working eighty hours a week, but he found time to spend with me outside the restaurant.

He enrolled me in karate, and every Tuesday night we'd go together to the dojo.

We'd strap on our helmets and I'd jump on the back of his Honda V65 Magna, wrap my arms around his torso with a death grip, and we'd shoot down St. Clair Highway. He would yell over the noise from the air whizzing by our heads about how to improve my form or the strategy needed for an upcoming sparring session.

One night he was explaining how you don't have to hit someone hard to take them down.

“Aim for the nose or the solar plexus, and down they go.”

He was midsentence when he stopped instantly. In the newfound silence, he pointed out a deer standing in a cornfield. The man noticed everything. He was aware. He had an attention to detail that I marveled at.

I loved the competitive environment of karate, but more than anything I was just trying to find something that I was really good at. Success in karate seemed simple to me—you trained, learned the required forms, and tested for belt advancement. It was clear at a glance who was better than you were because they were wearing the proof around their waist.

On sparring days the goal was even simpler, if a bit more brutal : beat your opponent. Victory provided instant gratification. I was fiercely competitive, accepting challenges from older kids, knowing that I would get my ass kicked, but knowing too that I would get in a few good blows.

I also knew that my dad was watching.

 

With the Achatz Depot thriving, my parents tried to buy the building, but the owner refused repeated requests to sell. Minor problems that could be easily fixed turned into bigger problems, and the irritation of having a landlord took a toll, even though the rent was cheap.

Once they realized that the purchase would never happen they began looking for a bigger space to capture the excess demand. A co-op-owned restaurant that was inside of a 95,000-square-foot farmers' supply store a few miles away presented an opportunity to expand.

My parents made the move.

When we took over the new space it was a complete disaster. The owner wanted to be gone in a bad way, so he literally walked out to the parking lot and handed my parents the keys, leaving garbage in trash cans and food in the refrigerators. A small team was hired to begin the cleanup while the current crew kept the Depot running until the new restaurant opened. I helped my parents clean the filthy kitchen and declared the walk-in refrigerator my personal project. I went in armed with rubber gloves, a bucket of soapy water, and a jug of bleach. The previous owner had only been gone one day, but what I found there made it seem like it had been months. Five-gallon pickle buckets sat one-quarter full of tomato sauce with a thick moldy crust on the surface. Iceberg lettuce heads were liquefying in the cardboard box they came in. Then I came upon a partially unwrapped hotel pan of what seemed to be a meatlike substance that smelled so bad I ran out of the cooler to keep from vomiting. I took a deep breath, ran in to retrieve the pan of rotting flesh, and ran out to the Dumpster as quickly as I could. It was the single most disturbing thing I have ever seen in any kitchen, and the smell haunts me to this day. Some people just don't have standards. I learned that at an early age, spending the better part of three days scrubbing down that walk-in until the smell lingered no more.

The Achatz Family Restaurant opened one month later in March 1983 to a flood of business. Revenue grew 30 percent that year and the next, and when, after two years, investors bought out the co-op, the opportunity to expand presented itself once again.

My parents borrowed $175,000 from a local bank at the stratospheric interest rate of 17.5 percent, signed a ten-year lease, and expanded to 4,000 square feet. The dining room was gutted and all-new booths, fixtures, carpet, and wall coverings were added. After a major six-week renovation, the place could now accomodate 165 people. Our little diner was not so little anymore.

When the restaurant reopened, the whole town showed up and pretty much never left. My parents had to hire nearly every one of our relatives to keep up with demand, and the Achatz Family Restaurant had its first $1 million gross revenue year.

Things were good in the Achatz household.

 

I arrived home from school one afternoon when I was eleven to see what looked like a spaceship parked in my driveway. The sleek silver object glistened in the afternoon sun. The doors, hatch, and hood were all open. I ran up to the car, stuck my head in the window, and was struck by the smell of new-car leather. As I was pulling my head out to run around back, I heard my dad say, “Pretty cool, huh? Nineteen eighty-five Corvette. Check out the gauges. They light up like
Knight Rider.
”

My dad closed down the doors and the hood, and I hopped in the passenger seat. The engine rumbled. I was in heaven. He slowly backed out of the driveway and I heard my mom yell from the house, “Put your seat belts on! Don't drive crazy!” We both laughed. My dad crept down the street away from our house and turned the corner—he was taking it easy while my mom could still see us.

And that moment, blasting down the road in a brand-new Corvette . . .

M
y paternal grandfather died at forty, when my father was very young. I think my dad was determined to enjoy his success—after all, it was hard-won from hard work. Nothing was given to us, and we all contributed.

But my dad had a hard time with success.

My mother and father were married in August 1973, exactly eight months before I was born. It isn't hard to do the math. My family was stable as long as the work was hard and steady, but marital turbulence was frequent during my childhood. My dad's drinking was the source of many temporary separations between he and my mother, although I was largely unaware of the problems.

By 1986, three years after my parents' restaurant opened, the stresses of running a demanding business coupled with my father's increasingly heavy drinking led to a split that became a divorce. By this time I had graduated to working the line during the weekends, but once my parents separated, my mom stopped going to the restaurant, and so did I. The weekends that were normally filled with flipping pancakes, French toast, and hash browns were now consumed with riding dirt bikes and hunting with my cousin Tim at his house in the country. These were my first real idle weekends of just hanging out with friends in the neighborhood. But it didn't seem as satisfying.