Most of the time, he was fine. Chill, even. He had this laid-back Jamaican vibe and sometimes we’d be bonding, shooting the shit, laughing in between plates and then, out of nowhere, he’d say something savage that left me feeling like a deflated balloon.

He was the kind of guy who’d tell you exactly how to cut the tomatoes. You’d do it his way. The next day, he’d casually tell you they looked like shit and give you a whole new method, as if it had always been obvious. Said never to put the knives in the dishwasher, then turned around and dropped one in himself. He’d explain something down to the detail, then tear into you for following those instructions to the letter. Once, I suggested reorganizing part of the kitchen. He looked at me like I was a complete fucking moron for even bringing it up. The next day, I overheard him proudly explaining how he’d stayed up all night thinking about a brilliant solution, the exact idea I’d suggested.

If you tried to defend yourself, he’d flip it, get defensive, act like you were the problem and send you on break like a scolded kid.  And when shit hit the fan, he was the one losing his mind, barking at you to stay calm.  But when the dust settled, he strutted around like he had a ten-inch cock, acting like he crushed it, hyping himself up like nothing ever went wrong.

As much as he drove me up the fucking wall, I could look him in the eyes while he was tearing into me and still see the armor. Thick and sturdy, built from decades of pain, insecurity, and constant fighting to keep his place.  Sure, seeing that made the jabs, the mind games, the venom a little easier to stomach, but they still landed,  like wasps stabbing at my chest, twisting my gut into knots.  Add to that the sleep deprivation from Lou crying at night and I felt  raw and exposed, completely vulnerable to his attacks.

Yet despite all of it, I couldn’t help but admire the way he laid on that thick, Jamaican-accented Bernese Swiss German with the customers. A linguistic unicorn, throwing in Italian here and some french there, and people lit up around him.  I saw the way it made them smile, how they lingered longer to chat as they picked up their food.  He told me he’d come to Switzerland as a refugee from Africa over 25 years ago, still basically a kid.  Based on my own experience here, I can’t begin to imagine what that must’ve been like.  Starting over from scratch in a foreign land, no language, no safety net.  A Black man in a very white world, trying to survive and stay standing.

I treated that job like a personal test. Like he was some kind of twisted guru disguised as an angry little chihuahua, constantly nipping at my ankles, testing my patience, my self-control, my ability to stay calm under pressure.  I’ve always believed that people like that cross our path to teach us something before we can evolve.

And then one night, it all came to a head.

I was on dish duty, busting my ass to keep up with the pileup of returned plates and cups, trying to keep the return table clear for customers.  He came over and asked for help, he needed tubes of salad dressing filled and immediately.  He’d already made the batch and needed it transferred into old-school squeeze bottles.

I dropped what I was doing and jumped in, filling them as quickly as I could.  But while I helped him, the dishes inevitably piled up.  When I returned with the full bottle, instead of thanking me, he lit into me. Cleared the return table by tossing the dishes into the sink and thoroughly slammed me for letting the counter overflow.  Reeming into me that I needed to keep the space clean, smile at customers, engage with them, thank them, just do my fucking job.

It nearly broke me.  I took it as a deep slice.  He’d been head chef at this pop-up for over three years.  He knew the flow. And in that moment, I believed he’d set me up, ordered me to help knowing it would make me fall behind, just to have a reason to tear me down.  It didn’t feel like a coincidence.  It felt like a calculated, psychological jab.  And that kind of thing wasn’t rare.  It was just one example.  So after the wave of customers, I took my dinner break and started planning how to talk to him, not to attack, but just to tell him how it made me feel. 

But when I walked back into the kitchen, I saw him, sleeves rolled, busting ass at the sink.  On his knees, scrubbing under the shelving unit.  Doing my job.  Doing any job to finish the day as soon as possible.  And seeing that shifted something in me.  Maybe it hadn’t been personal.  Maybe he hadn’t set me up.  Maybe that was just the way he moved, intense, reactive, tunnel-focused.  But one thing was clear: the man worked. Hard.  And from that moment on, I saw him differently.  He wasn’t too proud to do the dirtiest jobs.  He was there to grind.

Since then, we’ve slowly come together.  Found a rhythm.  I stopped resisting him and just started doing what he told me to do.  As time passed and I began to see the bigger picture of how the kitchen runs, I realized there’s a method to his madness.  The problem is, he’s just an absolutely terrible communicator.  His ideas make sense; his way of explaining them, dog shit.  But now that I’ve learned the flow, understood the logic behind the chaos, there’s not much left for him to say to me.  We just work.  He’s seen my work ethic. I’ve seen his and somewhere in all that, a mutual respect took root.  I’ve come to genuinely enjoy his presence, even look forward to it.  He pulls me out of my head, opens a release valve for the pressure I carry.  And damn, the man works. He works both smarter and harder than most people I’ve ever met.

There’s something raw about his hustle, this edge, this grit that comes from having to fight for everything.  He’s always dropping stories, nights in jail, life on the street, navigating the system as a refugee, working odd jobs with others in similar positions.  Through him, I’ve come to understand just how little I really know about the rest of the world.  I grew up so focused inward, taught to see America as the center.  Meanwhile, people like him cross oceans, borders and lives just to find a foothold.  His world, refugee centers, underground economies and navigating language barriers is something most Americans never think about, let alone understand.  

But he’s lived it.  And hearing it firsthand, seeing it in motion, I can't help but respect it.  Behind the contradiction, the chaos and the blunt delivery is someone who’s fought for every inch of his life.  Watching that up close reminded me what resilience and adaptation actually looks like.