Chapter 1 #2
Rick heads off, and Ben spends a lazy hour cleaning out his inbox, trying to decide how long he can linger down here before someone notices he’s gone.
All his important work for the next two weeks is already finished, but Ben’s learned the hard way that he’s a lot faster than bosses tend to expect, and also that if he lets on, they’ll start expecting the impossible.
Still, there are appearances to maintain, and usually, at least one of the higher ups gets a little squirrely if he’s away from his desk for too long.
He’s started bracing himself to ascend back into the nightmare realm when the email comes in from Rick.
Its subject line is Don’t say I didn’t warn you, kid :), and Ben snarls an incoherent little noise under his breath at the indignity of the diminutive in writing.
Then, to get a sense of what he’s in for, he downloads and opens the attached file, ominously titled, Pete Bailey—Gastronome—YouTube pilot raw footage—OHGOD.
In the first two minutes, Ben’s eyebrows go up.
By minute five, his mouth is hanging open.
After ten minutes, Ben pops into Formica’s terrible, buggy chat client, selects the thread for his office, types, Feeling kinda gross, thinking maybe I should head home?
into the window, adds a barfing emoji, and hits send.
It only takes forty-five seconds for Jessica, his germophobic boss, to reply with a link to an article about a recent norovirus outbreak and all-caps instructions not to return to the office until Monday.
Even faking sick is too easy at this job.
Ben knows he can’t get away with watching this anywhere that people can see or hear him, and he’s not going to be able to wait until his day’s done.
Ben packs up his laptop. He grabs an extra coffee, digs out his collapsible umbrella from the bottom of his messenger bag, and thanks God for the thousandth time that said bag is waterproof. Thus prepared, he takes to the streets.
They are punishing streets. They throw rain and slush into Ben’s face with all the gleeful abandon of a clown with a pile of banana cream pies.
It murders first his coffee cup, which he abandons in a trash can, and then his umbrella, which wasn’t doing him much good anyway, and finally his will to live, although Ben thinks that one’s less a murder and more a maiming, and that probably, in time, it will recover.
Still, he decides that in the circumstances, it might balance things out to indulge in an alcoholic beverage.
For fortitude. For strength. As this is the sort of decision Ben typically finds himself making once every business quarter at most, it necessitates a detour to the nearest bodega, where he spends several minutes dithering over canned mixed drink options before selecting one more or less at random.
Thus armed, he heads down into the subway and settles in at his platform to wait the typical small eternity for his train to arrive.
He finds the computer on his lap again almost without realizing he’s pulled it out and, wondering if maybe he’s remembering it as worse than it is, starts watching the footage again from the top.
The guy in the video—Pete—is handsome in that relaxed, unintentional way Ben associates with people who had a great time in high school.
There’s something about him that’s almost familiar, and he looks older than Ben, in probably his early thirties.
His dark wavy hair, faded tight on the sides and left longer on top, clearly just lies that way, in the sort of easy dishevelment no one can pull off when they’re trying.
As if all that wasn’t enough, he’s broad shouldered and well muscled—not a full gym rat like Ben sometimes pulls on Grindr, but definitely visibly toned.
It’s a look Ben associates with rock climbers, although admittedly that may be situational bias, because he is also wearing the type of T-shirt-with-sleeves-cut-off Ben associates with rock climbers.
However, the idiot has distinguished himself from the pack by electing to do this to a shirt with Ask Me About Canned Beans scrawled across the front in a gigantic, hideous font.
And Pete is, above anything else, an idiot.
Sure—he’s a little bit hot. Ben can admit that to himself, here in the safe anonymity of the New York City subway system, where anything could happen and does, every day.
Pete is a little bit hot. That doesn’t make it okay that somehow, despite having presumably been a talented enough chef to land one of the coveted, cushy positions as a Gastronome test cook, he has produced what has to be the single worst collection of cooking footage ever created by man.
“Hi!” Pete says, waving at the camera, in the first take.
But he’s holding a spoon in his waving hand, and it goes flying and hits someone nearly out of frame in the back of the head, and they yelp, and someone else off camera yells “CUT.” With no pause for recovery, it’s the next take, and Pete says, “Hi! I’m Pat,” and then, “Wait, no I’m not,” and then, nervously, like he’s not quite sure it’s the right answer, “Pete? I’m…
Pete.” They cut again, and then it’s the hideous take after that, in which Pete holds up a bunch of greens and says, “This is kelp—kelp—KALE. Good God. But could we make it with kelp, do you think? I never thought about kelp—aw, wait, these are collards, actually. Uh. Are we still rolling?”
Ben misses his train. It goes whooshing by as Pete very earnestly tells the viewers that he thinks everyone can learn to cook while, next to him, a piece of notebook paper that clearly reads, DEAR PETE, REMEMBER: BUY TARRAGON, TOILET PAPER.
NO MORE HOISIN! LOVE PETE inches towards the stove.
It catches fire at the same moment Ben realizes that it’s a local 1 train pulling away, and he releases a little gasp of surprised annoyance in the exact moment that Pete does on-screen.
That disquieting moment of similarity is enough to get Ben to close the computer.
He tells himself he’s not going to open it again until he has his mysterious mixed drink in his hand to dull the pain but only lasts five minutes before he finds himself reaching for the laptop again.
An express 2 train chooses that exact moment to turn up, running as always on a secret schedule known only to itself, which is all that saves Ben from spending the next several hours on the platform.
Instead, he spends the standing-room-only ride back to his apartment stewing about the video, and how on earth Pete even got a job, and how on earth he, Ben, is supposed to do his job and edit this nightmare into watchable content.
He walks the six blocks back to his apartment quickly, eager now to see the rest and assess how bad the damage is, and whether he has anything at all to work with.
He gets the file cued on his home computer—which is two computers and a server, but who’s counting—and says hi to Roux, his cat, who is nowhere to be seen but surely lurking somewhere.
Then, knowing as he does it that he’ll regret it afterwards, he hits play.
The two and a half hours of footage take an eternity to pass.
Ben drinks his whole mixed drink as he watches, in a half-numb stupor at the horror of it, blindly groping for the can because he can’t tear his eyes away, not tasting what he swallows.
It’s… so awful. In his time freelancing, Ben has edited footage of weddings, school plays, speeches, concerts, recitals, dance performances, sports events, terrible student movies, a few low-budget web series, and one really upsetting video essay for a kid in his film program he never spoke to again.
He’s seen drunk people on camera, and awkward people on camera, and high school students on camera—Pete is worse than all of them.
Pete is worse on camera than a drunk, awkward high school student. It absolutely boggles the mind.
At 5:15 p.m., Ben, who doesn’t typically drink, stands up in mild outrage, wobbles somewhat, realizes perhaps he should have taken a closer look at the ABV on that can, and then decides it hardly matters, in the circumstances.
He yanks his phone from his pocket, pulls up Rick’s email, clicks on the phone number that Rick included at the bottom, and puts the call through.
“Richard Raleigh’s phone, Richard Raleigh speaking,” says Rick, which is when—very belatedly—Ben realizes that Rick from Brew is Richard Raleigh, the famously private, famously photo-shy editor-in-chief of Gastronome.
All those insipid conversations over lattes, and he was Richard Raleigh the whole time.
“Have you always been Richard Raleigh?” Ben thinks, and also says, because he’s drunk.
There’s a pause, and then Rick starts laughing. “Since the day I was born, kid. I take it this is Ben?”
Ben thinks, somewhat hysterically, You were Richard Raleigh the whole time you were telling me about the slippery fish?? Through heroic effort, he does not say this. Instead, he says, “Uh, yeah,” and then, remembering why he was calling, adds, “Hey! This footage is a car wreck!”
“I tried to tell you,” Rick says, still laughing.
“Look, don’t sweat it. I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe it’s for the best it’s bad.
Might buy us another year or two before we really have to start producing consistent video content.
God knows the staff don’t want to do it; Pete about pitched a fit when I told him he was the one on the chopping block—”
“Why was he the one on the chopping block?” Ben demands. “Surely, the best thing to do here is to get one of the other test cooks to do it? Or, I mean, grab a pigeon off the street and put it in a little apron. It’s bound to do a better job!”
“I like you, kid,” says Rick, chuckling. “You’re a riot. But it’s gotta be Pete; that one’s out of my hands. The bosses like him for it.”