The Spoiler Alert is the Hardest Part

Disclaimer: Don’t read this if you want to watch the show “The Bear” everyone is talking about and you don’t care for spoiler alerts. You have been warned.

I avoided the show “The Bear” at first, wary of anything set in a kitchen, having grown up in a family bar and cooked in restaurants. Will this be another make-believe kitchen that will attract the worst people to the industry? Will it make people think they understand my life without knowing anything about my life? Will it get it all wrong?

“The Bear” does a great job of portraying the daily life of a kitchen and the people employed at the Original Beef of Chicagoland. Original Beef isn’t one of the restaurants featured in Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Eater and Grub Street. It’s an old school family business, cash only, serving sandwiches to the neighborhood and working people of Chicago. Chicago has a lot of these places, they keep the lights on for a lot of folks. The kitchen staff rings true, mainly Black and Latinx characters, people who have worked together for years with a camaraderie to show for it. They yell across the kitchen, taking the piss out of one another as they work both lunch and dinner services. 

Throughout the eight episodes of “The Bear” I saw myself, the many kitchens I’ve worked in, my family and a lot of co-workers. The catalyst for the show is Michael Berzatto’s death, a self-inflicted gunshot to the head on the State Street Bridge. He leaves the family restaurant to his younger brother Carmen, who left Chicago to prove himself in the upscale dining world. Just as I recognize the Original Beef’s kitchen and staff, I understand Carmen’s flashbacks to the restaurant he left. The best restaurant in the world, the one he left to come back home, is all sterile, over-staffed, over-funded and zipped up. The head chef comes up behind Carmen finishing plates at the pass and whispers personal insults in his ear. You can’t help but think of the recent articles about Eleven Madison Park and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, tasting menus that cost hundreds of dollars from restaurants that pay minimum wage like it’s a gift. What the head chef says is more brutal than any of the hollering in the Original Beef kitchen. 

People think “The Bear” is about restaurants, but I think it’s about grief. I’ve been thinking about grief a lot. There has been so much loss from COVID, both collective and personal. We’ve seen the casualties mount over these two plus years in this country. The shutdown, the separation, the lack of one giant, physical, tragic event to account for these bodies, has made some people impervious to the staggering loss  a lot of others are experiencing. I am/was an essential worker, so I feel like I have internalized levels of trauma, carbon-dated stress, inside of me from going to work every day into the world during shutdown. These words sound so very dramatic right now, in a more social July 2022, but that’s how it felt at the time. These years have taken something from all of us, and I don’t know what we’ve received in return but I know it isn’t great for my blood pressure. 

Everyone in “The Bear” grieves the loss of Michael, and they are still at work. Michael was the center of the restaurant, the reason that brought them all together, and now he’s dead, but not gone. The dead are never gone, they just haunt us for as long as they see fit. In the last episode, Tina, one of the cooks, played by an excellent Liza Colon-Zayas, speaks with Carmen as he tries to understand his brother’s chaotic, cryptic accounting. The restaurant is in trouble financially, Michael borrowed a lot of money but didn’t pay any vendors. 

“You know how much I loved him, right?” she says to Carmen. 

“How much?”

“A lot. I loved him a lot.” Tina answers. 

It doesn’t sound like much here, but this is such a tender, quiet moment that carries a lot more weight than the sparseness of words. Tina is a tough lady in this kitchen, she doesn’t take any shit and she doesn’t give up any ground. This moment resonates with me on a cellular level, I see her grief, and I see someone who can’t take a day or week off to stay home or go somewhere to rest. Grief demands you feel it, it wants to be center stage. It doesn’t want you to cook the tickets or cut the onions or mop the floor. Grief is greedy. But so is the bill collector.

One morning ten years ago I received a call informing me of the death of a friend from cancer. It wasn’t a surprise, but that didn’t lessen the blow. This was at 9 am. I informed our friends, spoke with a few of them and then I went to work at noon, taking the three trains to the Manhattan restaurant. 

I told the chef my friend died while I prepped my station for dinner service. This restaurant was a very busy one, even in early January. There was no one to cover me, or at least no one offered. I wasn’t going to ask, I was there already. Working feels good for me when I find out someone dies, at least in the beginning. The distraction, something to do with my hands, something to occupy my mind, is welcome. Then the grief drags the hours, tires my body and exasperates my emotions. I remember breaking down the kitchen after service eleven hours later telling the young sous chef “I hope when you are 38 years old you don’t have to work service when your friend dies. That you can just stay home” as I pulled the blue tape off of a quart container and tossed it to dish. 

When my father died I was just finishing my first semester of college in Ohio. He died on Friday, December 13th in Maryland, I took incompletes on all of my classes to be there. He didn’t have a will, so as next-of-kin my sisters and I automatically inherited everything he had-–the house, the bar, the loans, the bills, the fight with the IRS. He died with a lot of debt. After the funeral we began the herculean effort of getting his affairs in order. 

My father was a hoarder. There was stuff everywhere. Literally everywhere. My mother and sisters and I hadn’t lived with him for over 8 years. My father had no governor for how he lived, he was just left to his own devices and created a crazy sprawl of belongings. 

He always carried two separate rolls of money on his person. His was a cash business, no bars took credit cards at that time. He also had his own side cash business as a bookmaker. The first roll was singles, fives, tens and twenties, walking around money, always in his front pants pocket. The second roll was the real money, fifties and hundreds. It could be in a suit jacket, an inside coat pocket or another pants pocket. 

We took shifts cleaning the house. One morning I was there with my cousin, she was off in another room. I was in the bedroom, sorting through my dad’s clothes and his collection of weird things stored together in velvet Crown Royal bags. My favorite combination was bullets and fireworks.

There’s no note from Michael in the beginning of “The Bear”, another mystery to surround him. A note addressed to Carmen is eventually found, and episodes later given to him in the last one. It’s a classic index card, on one side Michael writes “I love you dude. Rip it up.” The other side is the recipe for Family Meal Spaghetti, 10 cloves of garlic, basil steeped olive oil and two 28 ounce cans of San Marzano tomatoes. Not the more efficient, economical 10# cans, the 28 ounce cans, because “the smaller cans taste better.” This recipe answers the riddle of why Michael bought the smaller cans, something that has plagued Carmen. 

Carmen makes sauce, emptying the can of tomatoes into the saute pan. There’s a wad of hundreds, maniacally and safely wrapped in plastic inside the can of San Marzanos (also, for the record, the right tomato for the kitchen.) Carmen yells for back-up and everyone grabs the rest of the cans to open. Every single can has a wad of plastic-wrapped cash in it. The entire staff opens them, then they close the restaurant for the day and eat together. There is a future. 

I found it, I found my dad’s cash. It was in the inside pocket of a custom hot pink jacket he had specially made for him, with the label “Specially made for Bobby Souris” sewed against the satin lining printed with foxheads. He liked to wear it when he was tan. I took it to my mother’s house, we drew the blinds and she and I counted the money, facing the bills because that’s what you do with money. It was close to $10,000. We never told anyone because we didn’t know who my dad owed money to, beyond the IRS. (That statute of limitations has to be way over, right?) We needed that money.

We took a hundred bucks and went wild at the local seafood carry-out place Ocean Pride, treating ourselves to steamed shrimp, crab cakes and macaroni salad. My mom paid bills so my sisters and I could go back to college and I returned to the liberal arts school in a very snowy Ohio a few weeks later with my own roll of cash and a few cases of top shelf booze. 

I went back to Ohio in the middle of January to make up for my first semester of missed exams and papers. I had taken an introductory literature class on William Faulkner, taught by an old white professor who looked like Colonel Sanders. We didn’t care much for each other. When I met with him, he said “I know you’ve been through a lot, but now it’s time to focus.” Like this paper was important. My father had died less than a month before he made that statement. And I took that to heart, I took it all to heart. That I was to go back to this place where no one knew me longer than four months, where I didn’t have the support I needed, where I just had to keep going through my days and pretend like I hadn’t just been cut down by a massive loss. I was worried about how we were going to unload my dad’s house and who we owed money to while everyone else seemed carefree and fun. Everyone told me to keep going, because there was no other option. 

The paper was about Faulkner's work “The Bear”, and no, I am not making this up. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, so I tried to bribe a classmate with a bunch of that top shelf booze to help me out, not write the paper but explain this baroque Southern family to me. This fellow was from a family of teachers and since he believed in academic honesty, he declined my offer. I don’t know what I believed in at that moment, just trying to survive I guess. 

I feel that from “The Bear”, a group of people trying to survive through the trauma they’ve just experienced. Everyone is barely holding on, emotionally, physically, financially. There’s an element of loss though that we don’t discuss that much, and that is when you just have to go back to work, to life, because there are no other choices. You can’t call in and you can’t no show. You don’t get to take the semester off from college and not finish the first one because that would be an epic waste of money. We don’t get mental health days, because if you can wake up in the morning you can go to work. Beyond the losses we experience in life, I feel like this defiance of the grieving process is detrimental to ourselves, our bodies. I never used to think of my nervous system until these past few years. That is, I never used to consider my nervous system until these past few years when just breathing the air with other people could kill you. I can’t count the number of times I have learned of a loved one’s death, right before work or during, and just kept going. 

I’m not sure this writing is something I should necessarily publish. It’s not really a review of this show, and part of me is aghast that I’m writing something so on trend. I usually avoid the popular world, we’re not fans of one another. There’s plenty of articles about this show. I watched this show during a really tough few days recently, and my mind was blown by what I saw. Not only a really good representation of real kitchens, but something that looks like my life, my family, my grief and trauma that I know my body holds. I also felt some sort of epiphany when I remembered the paper was about “The Bear,” and another when the canned tomatoes were full of cash. The simpatico! How could I ignore it! 

Maybe this shouldn’t be published, but it needs to be written. And that's why I started this Substack.

“The Bear.” It’s good.