Michael Schulman You can see everything you ever wanted to know about Michael and maybe more, including links to his published work, at his website: http://www.manforallseasonings.com.

Dude, Go Get Ice! (December 20, 2010. Issue 23.)

“These people are so weird,” one of the college students I hired to help cater a party says as she returns to the kitchen with a decimated tray of hors d’oeuvres.

Luke and Matt exchange glances. “They aren’t weird,” Luke says. “You have no idea.”

“The men are flirting with me—and even some of the women—”

“That’s not weird,” Matt says. “Trust me. Tell her the story,” he says to me.

*

“Can you cater a vegetarian wedding?” the woman asked me over the phone. When I said we could she asked, “For ten dollars per person?”

That being 1994, the specialty of my company had evolved from “beautiful, delicious food for all occasions—from our palette to your palate,” to “surviving in a recession.” So I told her, “If you have a hundred people, and want a simple buffet with disposable plates, we can do a vegetarian meal like Vegetable Cheese Strudel, Rice Pilaf, a Marinated Vegetable Salad and Hot Herbed Bread. You get the cake and the soft drinks.”

“Vegetable Cheese what?”

“Strudel. It’s a recipe I adapted from The Moosewood Cookbook. It’s like spanikopita but instead of feta and spinach she uses broccoli, mushrooms and cheddar. To accommodate the recession, I use cheese we have on hand for cheese trays, and vegetables from crudité platters, so each strudel is slightly different. You end up getting something that we could never afford to give you at that price if we started from scratch, but with a huge variety,”—or vai-er-ity as Luke called it—“of vegetables and cheese.”

“That’s perfect! Exactly what we want! No alcohol. Oh, one more thing. This isn’t exactly a wedding. It’s a commitment ceremony. Do you know what that is?”

“I do.” A gay wedding. “No problem. We’re doing more and more of them.”

“My parents want to pay for this, but then I’ll have to wear a white dress and serve salmon and tenderloin and have all kinds of other stuff shoved down my throat. So we’re paying for it ourselves. And we don’t have a lot of money.”

“We do this kind of thing all the time. We look at it like a corporate lunch, and one hundred people at ten dollars a head is fine.”

When she received my contract outlining the menu, times, costs, terms and staffing, she called. “Forgive me if I ask stupid questions, or sound like I’m challenging you. But I’ve never done this before—and I hope I never do it again.”

“Ask away.”

“I see you’re charging for three staff. That sounds like a lot to me. Is there any way you can do it with two?”

“What I can do is charge for two and a half. Which means I’ll come with my staff and set them up, then leave once everything is under control.”

“Great. One last thing. If I’m out of line asking for this just tell me and I’ll shut up. But it’s my wedding and I want to make it special. Is there any way you could send two cute dykes to serve?”

“I used to have a cute dyke as my sous chef, but she met Ms. Right and moved south. Now I have two boys. Very cute, but very straight. You’ll love them—everyone does, even the lesbians.”

I explained all this to Luke and Matt while we were making the final preparations that Saturday morning. They followed me as I drove to a down-scale suburb that probably would never be gentrified. The directions the bride sent said, “When you pull up to the house, please park on the left—not the right. It’s a sacred Native American Medicine Circle.”

We pulled up to their ramshackle house, with an un-mown lawn, and a pile of rocks in the driveway. Nothing remotely resembling something sacred, ceremonial or Native American.

The doorbell was broken, so we knocked until the door was opened by one of the brides: stocky, hairy, and wrapped in a towel. “I’m about to take a shower. I don’t know if you guys are early or I’m late, but here’s the kitchen. It’s pretty self-explanatory. I’ll be out in a while if you need me.”

In the ultimate drop-dead gesture to their parents, they hadn’t cleaned the house. We wiped down the countertops with one of their moldy sponges, then set the food into the oven. The house’s only bathroom was just off the kitchen, and while we were working we thought we heard her revving up a motorcycle. But it came from the bathroom, while she sat on the toilet. And we prepared food for her wedding.

As we were trying to absorb that, the shower water started.

“Oooohhh. Ohhhhh. Ahhhh. AAAHHH!” There was no escape from hearing it.

Luke looked at Matt, Matt looked at me, and I slapped them on their backs and said, “Good luck, boys! I hope you get a tip!”

The following morning I arrived at our kitchen early to prepare for the next wedding. I was kneading dough for a giant sunflower bread when the boys arrived.

“How was the wedding? Did you get a tip?”

They both turned bright red. “You tell him,” Luke said to Matt, with an edge in his voice.

“No, it happened to you first—you have to tell him.”

“I ain’t tellin’ him nuttin’.”

“What? Tell Uncle Mikey.”

Matt found some courage. “They had a keg of beer and—”

“Do not tell me you served alcohol.” Our insurance didn’t cover it, and I constantly drilled this prohibition into the minds of both staff and clients.

“Nothing like that. They needed more ice, so they asked us to go downstairs to the basement. Luke went down, came back right away empty-handed and said,

‘Dude. Go get ice.’ I said, ‘I don’t need to go. You just went. Why didn’t you bring any back with you?’ And Luke just gritted his teeth and said, ‘Dude. Go. Get. Ice.’ At the bottom of the stairs was a small cellar with an old furnace, water heater and a busted bicycle. The ceiling was kind of low, and I had to stoop. At the other end they had built a wall with cinder blocks, then broken through it, leaving rubble all over. I climbed over the debris into the second area, where there was a fridge from the 1950’s. And a mattress on the floor with horsehair spilling out of it. And a box spring. With handcuffs on the four posts.”

“Tell him about the wall.”

“On the wall they had a pegboard, like the pegboard we have in the kitchen here. But there were tools that we don’t know what they were, and we don’t ever want to know what they were.”

“You mean like S & M stuff?”

“Much worse. Not whips or chains. More like medical things. Some of them even looked like they could have come from a kitchen.”

Oh, gynecological instruments. Um, Ew.

“What did you brave lads do?”

“Luke freaked. He wanted to leave. But I realized these women weren’t remotely interested in us, two straight suburban boys. So we just served the food and cleaned up.”

“And they gave us a killer tip. But I ain’t never goin’ back there again.”