Hot Mess. Emily Belden
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to Benji, so he started hanging out with the cooks after work instead of going home. From them, he adopted new kitchen skills along with some bad habits.
Eventually, he tried coke. The drug allowed him to be fearless behind the stove, unintimidated by any ingredient and never in the weeds despite his age or lack of any traditional training. No one could deny that Benji had talent. Talent that went beyond just scrubbing dishes or spicing up a few condiments. But no one in the Greater Austin area was willing to let a teenager who required two smoke breaks an hour be in charge of the kitchen.
At eighteen, he packed up the same black duffel bag that’s currently in my apartment, left his mom $500 cash and bought a Greyhound ticket to New York City. Through the power of social media, he built a following and made connections, setting up a staging gig at a new restaurant every year in all the major foodie destinations. Next came DC, then San Francisco, Miami and Vegas to name a few.
One hot spot at a time, he added skill after skill to his culinary repertoire. One hot spot at a time, he added drug after drug to the shit he was willing to try, ultimately always coming back to coke. Lots of it.
Ultimately, he wound up in the Windy City. He says that’s because it’s the capital of modernist cuisine. I say it’s because Chicago is the capital of girls who put out for chefs. (Guilty.) Regardless, he came here to “settle down”—meaning, to take his first ever full-time cooking job. While the same people who offered him the gig ultimately let him go, it was the first and only time he could really say he made it as a chef.
“Oh my god, that smells amazing,” Dionte says when he happens to catch a whiff in the break room. I have to admit, I feel special. Food may be the way to a man’s heart, but as my colleagues assemble around me, I’m convinced it’s the way to a woman’s ego. It’s like I’m dating da Vinci and I’ve just hung the Mona Lisa in my cubicle. Everyone is oohing and aahing, reminding me just what an awesome perk it is to be dating Benji Zane. I’m the cool kid at the lunch table, just like I was at Republic.
“What did he make?” Dionte asks.
“She’s not sure, but it looks like ditalini pasta with cream and pancetta,” Stacey answers for me. It’s like they’re gathering enough info to send TMZ a tip.
“You’re so lucky,” a girl from a different department gushes from the kitchen table. I don’t even know what her name is, but she begrudgingly stabs at her lackluster salad and shoots jealous death rays my way.
I escape the public scrutiny of the lunchroom and return to my desk to eat quietly alone in my cubicle. Words cannot describe the peace I feel in this little cubby. I used to think my apartment was my own safe haven. Now? Not so much. My cubicle, though, that’s indisputably mine. All twelve and a half square feet of it. I close my eyes and inhale a big whiff of the ditalini-whatever before taking a bite. It is pure heaven indeed. My mouth waters and I am reminded just how talented this beautifully flawed man is. And just like this lunch, I’m not sharing.
I go to throw away my brown paper bag and a few scribbles of black Sharpie marker catch my eye. I flatten the bag out on my desk. A love note.
Allie Simon. Every day, I thank my lucky stars that you are making me a better man. Deciding I wanted to do what it takes to be with you was the best thing I’ve ever done. I LOVE YOU. -B
My favorite three words from this man (other than dinner is ready). The first time he said it was when I was sitting there on the floor with puffy, red eyes in an oversize college hoodie, stuffing my face with thousands of calories of pizza and wondering how the hell this thing was going to work, but not really worrying about it either. Because next to me, tucked away in our own little enclave in the city, was somebody I was never supposed to meet but was always meant to have.
A few things have changed since then; some for the good, while others...well, like I said, the momentum is rolling and it’s hard to know whether I’m keeping up or falling behind. But a surprise note like this tells me that, for the most part, he’s keeping his promises. He makes my lunch most days of the week, keeps the place (somewhat) tidy and has (sort of) figured out what he wants to do. Or at least, he had that last part figured out, until Miss Angela Blackstone decided to come out of nowhere and dangle a restaurant in front of his face.
I finish my lunch and I still haven’t heard from Benji. Under ordinary circumstances, I would take the silence to mean the worst: an overdose or an arrest during a drug deal gone bad. I know I saw him just hours ago and he was totally fine, but I usually hear from Benji at least five times by lunch; his addict’s personality makes him incessant. Everything he likes, he loves. Everything he hates, he abandons. Everything he wants, he needs now or better, yesterday. And most days, what he wants is to talk to me. All the time.
But today is different. Today he has his meeting with Angela, and I’m sure she’s still blowing smoke up his ass or I’d have heard from him by now.
I look her up on LinkedIn to verify she is, in fact, the chick who scolded me for leaving the money unattended. I’m in the social media business, after all, and frankly curiosity got the best of me.
From what I can tell from her profile, Angela checks out—which is both a good and a bad thing in this case. I mean, according to her résumé she worked where she said she worked during the times she said she was there. And she was definitely a manager, too. Not just some entitled server who appointed herself with a new title after claiming to “practically run the place.” No, she’s a bona fide back-and front-of-house professional with ten people who have written recommendations for her. Glowing ones, too.
In the time it takes me to rinse out my Tupperware and return to my cubicle, I somehow miss six calls, four texts and an email from Benji. Apparently, Benji’s meeting is finished.
Of all the communication, the email is the most frantic. It says: Why the hell aren’t you answering? Bout to call your desk phone.
I’ve made it very clear that Benji is never to call my desk line. For one thing, I don’t have a direct number, which means to reach me, you have to call our receptionist, Linda, and ask specifically for me. Then she forwards the call to my landline. He did this once a while back that day he wanted permission to splurge on cable. I was busy in a meeting, away from my desk, email and cell—but that didn’t stop him from asking Linda to personally go find me for a wellness check. I’ll never forget Linda’s face as she stood outside the all-glass conference room and tried her best to nonchalantly get my attention. I thought there was an emergency. I thought my dad’s blood pressure problems had finally gotten the best of him.
Benji seemed baffled that in the corporate world, you can actually be fired for having your boyfriend pull you out of a meeting to find out what channel Shahs of Sunset is on. But once I explained that no job would mean no way to make rent for our cute little Lincoln Park abode, he cut the shit. Since then, he’s been pretty good at steering clear of Linda and my landline, but that doesn’t stop him from blowing up all other mediums of communication.
His texts grew more frantic by the second—literally:
Yo. U around?
Hello??????
ALLIE. WHERE THE HELL R U
Ugh, just checked Locator. I know UR @ work. CALL ME.
I know it sounds insanely controlling for him to track my locale with an app. But adding Locator to our phones was an even trade; I’d put it on mine if Benji put it on his. I rarely check his anymore, but I used to, just to confirm he was always near Lakeview and Diversey, the intersection of my apartment. And before you tell me the plan is flawed because an addict could just leave his phone there while out hunting for drugs, let me remind you that Benji wouldn’t part with the device that links him to his social media feeds. Plus, how do you complete a drug deal without unlimited texting?
Relax, was eating, I write. Call u in a min.
K. Love u.
Like most things concerning Benji, communicating with him while at work takes a bit of science. I used to chat with him on Google Hangouts. I thought that was safe because I could just minimize it when someone