On the surface, cooking wasn’t too bad.

As far as standards went, there weren’t any. When I put food on plates, people rarely questioned it. Loose hair? No problem. Sweat? Who cares? Accidentally spilled grease on a plate? Call it a dipping sauce.

Regulations or none, it was a demanding job. The hours were long. The heat was draining. The kitchen felt like a sauna built inside a dumpster—steam rising off the fryers, the air thick with oil and body odor. The walls were stained yellow from years of smoke and splatter. The floor was always slick, no matter how many times we mopped it.

Rick and I were the only guys working at that location. Since he was the manager, I had to do a lot of the heavy lifting he didn’t want to do—or the girls couldn’t. I was the workhorse.

“We need two number Twos with extra sauce!” Rick yelled from the opposite end of the grill.

“We’re out of sauce!” I shouted back.

“Then make some more!”

It was another day at work for me. It should’ve been my off day, but that Sunday was so busy they called me in. I wasn’t required to come in if they called, but Rick knew where I lived. He knew Nick and I were homeless. My boss didn’t need to call. He could’ve walked across the street and yanked me out of the car. But it would never come to that. I needed the money too much to avoid work.

“Where are the onion rings?” Mabel, one of the lightly dressed servers, ran into the kitchen yelling.

“They’re coming,” I said, mixing secret ingredients to craft the secret sauce.

It was a combination of Thousand Island dressing, mayonnaise, bacon grease, and unmarked spices. That sauce was the key to Beef Babys’ success—along with high cholesterol and low standards.

“They should’ve been out ten minutes ago,” Mabel snapped.

Beef Babys was a relatively new restaurant in the early 2000s. Back then, it wasn’t a fast-food place. The menu was extensive, and orders were longer. It was hard to keep up with tickets when Rick refused to let half the staff do anything in the kitchen. “Women are for looks, men are for cooks,” he’d always say.

“Tom!” Mabel shouted two feet from my ear like I hadn’t heard her the first time.

“I’m coming! I’m coming!” I said, but she wasn’t the only person on my tail.

I’d already been working full steam for five hours straight. My body was dead, but worse—my mind couldn’t take much more. The heat, the noise, the constant barrage of orders—it was like being trapped inside a pressure cooker with no release valve.

It was a considerable risk, but I stepped out of the kitchen to take a break outside.

My hands were shaking. My legs were buckling. I might’ve cried if there’d been enough water left in my body.

“Four more hours. Just four more hours. You can do this. Don’t fuck it up,” I told myself.

I wondered how Nick was doing at his new job. I could only hope he was less miserable than me. He had to be—his job wasn’t in food at all.

“Did I say you could take a break?” Rick came busting through the door, scaring the shit out of me.

I nearly fell over. As he came closer, I was too afraid to move. I wasn’t scared of him—sure, he was a mean-looking fucker—but I feared how much control he held over my life. And it wasn’t his fault. Rick didn’t put a leash around my neck. But I needed that fucking job. BB was shit, but out of the three jobs I had at the time, they paid me the most. They were also the most demanding, and eventually became too overwhelming for me to keep my other jobs. That pink and blue grease trap had me by my balls, and there was nothing I could do about it.

“I was just—I needed—” I stumbled.

“We’ve got tickets stacking up, and you’re out here taking a piss?” he scolded.

I hadn’t taken a literal piss all day. I wanted to say that, but before I could, someone else joined us outside.

“Rick,” Paula said just behind his back, then added, “Lay off him.”

He turned his attention away from me, but I wasn’t out of the fire.

“Why aren’t you taking orders?” Rick barked.

“We ran out of the secret sauce. People are going home,” Paula explained.

Rick looked at us both, grumbled something, and walked off.

It took a moment for me to breathe after he was gone, but Paula stayed.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet. He’ll only be harder on you tomorrow,” she said with a grin, the first she'd ever given me that didn't feel forced.

My hands were still shaking. I couldn’t hold them steady enough to hide my anxiety.

“I’m fucking up, aren’t I?” I said.

“Tom, the last cook we had quit after three days. You’ve been here four weeks. That’s longer than most of the girls—and all they have to do is look pretty,” she said, untying my black apron and taking it off me.

“I’ll do better,” I said.

“Go home. Take a shower. Try to get some sleep. Rick ain’t getting rid of you—not if he knows what’s good,” Paula said, pushing me to leave.

She didn’t know I lived in a car.

I was sure clocking out before the night’s end would only piss Rick off further, but I didn’t argue. The only issue was, when I got home, I still felt low. Going to sleep in the Mustang’s backseat wasn’t easy. My mind couldn’t rest. And worse, I still needed to take a piss.