Painting with Fire

I once heard a rule that to be a successful painter is to return home with no paint on his clothes. Not studio artists, though it may still apply, but men and women who paint houses, radiators, barns, billboard signs or boats. I certainly failed this rule. And honestly, you are bound to get a little paint on you if you spend an entire summer restoring houses. I wore these wounds of poise as badges of honor; returning home declaring a fantastic job had been carried out, smelling of chemicals, dust, sweat, and metal. Washing skin and hair to remove these greasy stains was an act of forlorn futility; they would remain for several months no matter how hard I scrubbed. To me, a burn is no different.

It is rare for a cook to never experience a burn. You may try your hardest to wedge a pizza into the oven, straining your arm all the way in, right shoulder included, to fit that ‘pie’ in the last open corner. But it’s surrounded by super heated metal, air and steaming hot food. The heat intensifies like a crescendo, hair on your arm being singed away, and then climaxing as you can almost feel lightning wrapping around the bones in your arm. You can rip your arm out of the oven to end the pain, but spilling a small plastic bucket full of blistering cooking oil on your arm offers no immediate remedy. All you can do is plunge your arm into the sink and massage, face contorted as a waiter-friend nearby laughs at your misery.

What causes me to continue this self cruelty? Why do I continue to throw my arm into Dante’s Inferno, suffer the humiliation of my co-workers or bear the scalding oil dripping down my arm? I am an artist.

An artist of a different sort. My fingers grip the frosted and freezing pan, sticking to its chilled metallic body. I place the pan on the counter with a crunchy rip as I tear my fingers away. The counter is my easel and the dough my bare canvas. The order ticket are my colors, it tells me what ingredients to use, but it’s up to me in how to use them. Monet was an impressionist, Picasso at one time a surrealist. I use my own form of symmetry. It is an almost obsessive-compulsive feature of my cooking, trying to create the perfectly balanced pizza which has the same amount and placing of pepperoni or pineapple on one side as the other.

My style is so ‘perfect’ in fact, that my boss and co-workers have even commented on it. One busy night as we struggled to keep orders cooking smoothly and customers content, I calmly spread ingredients around on my sauced dough. My co-cook took notice of this and asked if I, using a more appropriate word, enjoyed ‘massaging’ my pizzas. Other than a frown I paid no heed, completing my masterpiece.

Placing the uncooked pizza in the oven does not end the painting process. The oven acts as my pottery wheel. Though my pizzas do not spin as much as clay, I frequently peek inside and turn them to ensure not one side has gotten more cooked than the other. After minutes of heating, golden brown cheese and crust is the sign that the work has been completed.

I bear my burns with pride, like I did with paint during summers. On my pants, shirt and hat I can tell you the different objects I have painted, just like I can tell you what food I produced from a scar. Co-workers may despair at the thought of entering the oven, and many waitresses won’t even dare look inside (scalding eyebrows and eyelashes away), but I silently enjoy my toil, even if it means returning home smelling like sauerkraut and feeling sticky from grease.