Today, we lionize chefs, celebrity and otherwise, but when I think about who I'd want in my kitchen in a super-busy restaurant in a pinch, I don't have to ponder long before I always pick the short-order cook who was in charge every Sunday at the joint I worked at in North Carolina years ago. Let's call him Gerry.

The thing about Gerry was that, like most kitchen staff I've known, he came with a lot of baggage. And I don't mean he occasionally lost his temper or had a wandering eye or a spiraling drug addiction. I mean that he had the kind of baggage that meant he could only work for us one day out of the week because the other six he was behind bars for trying to kill someone.

Gerry was the stereotype of a peckerwood good ol' boy, with greasy mullet, scraggly desperado moustache, pre-irony trucker cap, and faded plaid shirt with the sleeves ripped off to the shoulders. And he reacted to certain situations the way you'd expect from a caricature like that.

A year or two before, he'd been drinking beer at a bar out in the sticks when another man hit on him. Gerry dragged the offender over to his truck, opened the driver's side door, placed the would-be lothario's head within, and slammed the door shut several times, fracturing the poor man's skull. So when Gerry wasn't working at our restaurant, he was serving out a sentence for attempted homicide. Which, under those circumstances in that part of North Carolina in those days, meant a couple years in the kind of prison where you were allowed to leave once a week to work as a short-order cook.

The owner of the place I worked, a popular breakfast and lunch joint on the main street of the town I lived in, sprang Gerry from prison every Sunday morning like clockwork, drove him the hour or two back to the restaurant, and then left Gerry to his own devices. So the first thing Gerry did get was massively stoned, fill up a plastic quart container with beer from the bar tap, and get the kitchen started. By the time most of the wait staff was in, he and his small team had the kitchen humming along nicely.

Which might not sound like a big deal, but you'd have to compare Gerry to the other choice we had, a dimwitted, lecherous but otherwise amiable doofus I'll call Gale.

Many weekday mornings, instead of getting the kitchen ready for the breakfast rush, Gale would bumble around ineffectively with pots or pans or produce, ensuring that the first round of orders were late to the table, and usually send-backs. Worse, Gale had an uncontrollable penchant for women with enormous derrieres. It wasn't unheard of for the first server of the morning to walk into the storage room only to stumble upon him enjoying the intimate company of a large-ish woman who worked at a nearby Burger King, atop stacks of 50-pound bags of grits.

Gale probably doesn't sound to you like the kind of guy who had a lot of qualities women would find attractive. He wasn't. His particular method of wooing was to offer his paramours free rein at the prep bowls and hot-foods station before the owner came in--and after their own deed was done. So whenever we came in the morning and saw Gale's Burger King friend plopped down at a table and mowing her way through two or three mountainous plates of grits, bacon, cheese, eggs, and sausages, we knew that Gale was going to be in a good mood that day, and that he'd accomplished zero prep work in the kitchen.

Anyway, don't think that Gerry was any less an amazing cook because the point of comparison was a guy who didn't mind that the grits he was sending out had been warmed in the ass crack of a fast-food worker he may or may not have just knocked up. I'd be willing to wager my next month's wages that Gerry was, by any standard, one of the best short-order cooks to have ever picked up a spatula.

So after getting the kitchen ready for the Sunday-morning rush--and this place was a local institution, with weekend lines out the door--Gerry got down to the business of slinging Southern breakfast fare like Glenn Gould pounded out notes on his piano. In fact, I actually think he entered a kind of fugue-like state, and I sometimes imagined that as he folded omelets, crisped hash browns, meticulously arranged fruit garnishes, and sent perfectly cooked sunnyside eggs flying three feet across the kitchen aisle to land squarely, delicately, picturesquely on the exact right spot on the exact right plate out of a flotilla of plates awaiting their passengers, that some part of his mind was clicking along in perfect synchrony to the mathematical inevitability of Bach. But the tunes issuing from the grimy '70s transistor radio planted above the heat lamps were, needless to say, Skynyrd.

When Gerry was in the kitchen, orders never came out late, there were never mix-ups, and you, as a waiter, got early word when something was 86ed from the menu--in other words, you didn't have to crawl back to a table and sheepishly explain that the bill-inflating, berry-covered French toast you'd talked them into wasn't actually available. If an order came out wrong, there was never any question whether it was Gerry's fault. It never was. An order that came out wrong under Gerry's watch came out wrong because a server keyed in another side, or because, as happens more often than you'd think, the customer decided he didn't like what he ordered and was too embarrassed to admit he'd made a mistake.

Every once in a while, I've thought about what made Gerry such a great cook. Sure, he had near-photographic short-term memory when it came to tickets, incredible strength that belied his stringy frame, lightning-fast dexterity, laser precision, and a Coors-fueled invulnerability to heat. Those are rare enough alone or in concert. But, in my opinion, he had a secret weapon that elevated him from short-order superhero to kitchen godhood once a week, and it was marijuana.

It's a badly kept secret that a lot of the guys and gals who are preparing your meals for you in restaurants are stoned when they're doing it. That goes for the minimum-wage undocumented workers squeezing all the juices out of your "medium-rare" burgers to the perfectly coiffed pretty boys who spend more time expounding on the science of sous vide on reality shows than cooking in kitchens. The ritual before dinner and lunch service with one chef I worked with, now an A-lister, was to spark a joint with his sous and pastry chefs and a couple privileged waiters, and readminister as needed throughout the following hours in a back alley. I bought weed from his sous chef, who I think sometimes brought in more money wearing that hat than wearing a toque. For a decade, almost everyone I knew who worked in a kitchen was stoned (or something else) most of the time.

I also probably don't need to tell you that people react to pot differently. It puts a lot of people to sleep. For others, it switches on all the lights in the left hemisphere of the brain, and they become repetitive-task-oriented robots. Gerry, as you've figured out, was one of the latter.

The downside to Gerry's android-like altered state was that, when the restaurant was packed to the gills and everyone else in the place was in the weeds and he was the only guy holding the place together, Gerry moved so fast that it became all about the rhythm and the motion. Food became a blur. And that's when I saw the only chink in his armor.

The place we worked at was owned by a perpetually irritated eccentric I'll call Brion. Brion came off as a cross between Shelby Foote and Gary Busey, mumbling and shambling from corner to corner of the place in his Bermuda shorts, white sneakers and tucked-in sailing shirt, his white hair a bird's nest and his glasses on his nose only thanks to the safety cord they were attached to. As a young man, he'd been a promising pianist with a bright future ahead of him until decades of hard work and countless hours of practice collapsed on him at his first concert performance, when he suddenly, catastrophically, realized he had an incurable case of stage fright. His musical dreams dashed, he ended up as the owner of an aged local eatery known more for its Southern charm than its food.

For the staff, Brion, like most owners, was the kind of owner who gets in the way. He puttered around the place muttering complaints that you could never quite make out, and for the most part, everyone ignored him. He had two tasks he insisted on doing himself, though, no matter what: He was in charge of the music (always the same four CDs, usually Chopin, played ad nauseum), and he was our resident bug hunter.

It was an old restaurant, and it was the South, and that combination usually means that, despite your best efforts, there will be a pest issue that crops up from time to time. But Brion's way of handling bugs wasn't to quietly call an exterminator to come in on an off-day, it was to whip out a can of bug spray in the middle of a service and go hunting.

On one of the busiest Sundays we'd ever had, one where we were so slammed that the line reached the next block and even Gerry seemed to show signs of being in the weeds, Brion had gone overboard on his most recent roach hunt, and the bugs were now coming out of every nook and cranny of the place, apparently deciding that dying a public death was the cruelest revenge.

Gerry was in full robot mode, barking only a couple of the most necessary words to the wait staff, which was unusual--he was, despite what you might think from his rap sheet, usually a mellow guy and fun to chat with. This morning, he had an especially large array of pancakes going on the flattop, in various stages of doneness. His mind, however, was on a dozen different areas of the kitchen, so he might be flipping the pancakes with his left hand (knowing instinctively by feel when they were ready) while tending to the eggs Benedict with his eyes and right hand. In other words, he was multitasking, something a short-order cook--hell, anyone cooking--has to do.

And that's when the roach that had been crawling around on the ceiling above the flattop decided that it was a perfect time to die.

"Flip now!" Gerry's computer-controlled left brain ordered his left arm, as the rest of him tended to the Hollandaise sauce. The pancake with fresh blueberries became a pancake with fresh blueberries and freshly entombed cockroach, and in one way it's a testament to Gerry's dazzling efficiency on the busiest day of the summer that the plate was out the door before anyone noticed.

The customer, who looked before she leapt, was very discreet about sending the pancake back.

But that was the only problem I ever heard of when Gerry was in charge of the kitchen, and, though most of you will disagree with me, considering the circumstances of that day I'm not holding that one time against him as a cook.

On most Sundays, after the brunch rush, as the last patrons staggered out the door patting their full bellies, the wait staff who'd finished their side work early would join Gerry and the rest of the kitchen in the cage, the room in the back of the dining area that we used for big tops, where he'd be downing his last quart container of beer and, if Brion wasn't around yet, topping off his high with one last joint. We'd count out our tips and payouts to bussers and bartender while Gerry regaled us with stories, usually involving getting blind drunk at bars that didn't have paved roads leading to them. Then we'd say so long, and see you next Sunday, and Gerry would catch his ride back to prison.

Gerry was a cook, not a chef, a disintinction I'm sure he'd be proud of. When he worked, he wore a wifebeater, not the white uniform with his name and title embroidered on it. There were beat-ass sneakers or boots on his feet, not clogs that came in colors like blaze orange. And it was a backwards cap that kept his hair back, not a toque. But Gerry taught me that it's cooks, not chefs, who make most restaurants run.

I never heard what happened to Gerry after I left. (I haven't kept in touch with many of my friends in North Carolina. That's not because, as they likely assume, I turned into a raging asshole after I moved to New York. It's because I was always a raging asshole, and they were just too good to notice it. I'm sorry, you guys.) But I hope that's Gerry's still exercising his talent in the kitchen, that the radio's still playing Skynyrd, that he's finally out of prison seven days a week, that he's learned that being hit on by a gay guy doesn't mean you might be gay, and that he knows now that car doors shouldn't be used as lethal weapons.