The Ticket Out

My name’s Matt, but my friends call me Charlie. You may be wondering: how do you get Charlie from Matt? Well, it’s a funny story actually. You know that book? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl? You didn’t know it was a book? Okay, well then, you know that movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp? Yep, there it is, now it’s ringing a bell. Seriously, you should read the book, but we’ll talk about that another time.

Anyway, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For those of you who don’t know it, let me give you a run down. Boy (Charlie) is poor. Boy lives in town with chocolate factory. Owner of chocolate factory (Willy Wonka) makes chocolate bars, hides golden tickets inside five of them. Winners of the golden tickets get to go inside the factory. Boy wants to win, but boy can’t afford chocolate. Boy finds money on the street. Boy uses money to buy a chocolate bar and wins a golden ticket. Him and four others go into the factory. He’s the last man standing; don’t ask what happened to the other ones, it’s not important right now. Owner of chocolate factory gives boy the whole factory.

Now, I’ve left out a lot of nuances: the importance of family in Charlie’s life, Mr. Wonka’s daddy issues, the hundreds of Oompa Loompas inhabiting the factory. Nonetheless, those aren’t essential details for our purposes.

I didn’t come from money. I grew up in a boys’ home on the north side of Colorado Springs. It was a decent house—you could tell it had been nice at one point. A woman once told me that it used to be an old folk’s home, and it was kept in pristine condition. Once us boys moved in it went to shit. We spent the days listening to music, playing basketball, skateboarding, and throwing the football around. I liked the guys I grew up with in that house—we all looked out for each other, and we were never short on friends to hang out with. But when I did have a moment to myself, I didn’t waste it on basketball or football. I cooked. I loved cooking. Before I lived in the home, my mother had taught me to make all kinds of traditional Mexican foods. Fresh tortillas, tamales, mole, churros, chilaquiles. Cooking did make me feel closer to my mom, but I also just felt at home when I was in the kitchen, a feeling that was sometimes hard to find given my living situation. So, I spent my teen years cooking for the boys in the house, trying out new recipes, and repeating the old stand-bys. My mom had left me a small black notebook with all of her recipes in it. Now covered with food stains, I made sure to write down my new recipes and mark any revisions I made to the old ones.

Eventually, it was nearing my eighteenth birthday, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I couldn’t stay in the home forever; but, my job as a dishwasher in a kitchen hadn’t amounted to the full-blown chef position I wishfully anticipated when I took it two years prior. I didn’t have much money saved, and I didn’t know where to go.

It was late January as I walked down the slushy sidewalk back home after my shift. I noticed a piece of paper shining in the streetlight, stuck in a mound of snow. I bent down and picked it up—a lotto ticket. Some of my buddies were into lotto tickets, but if there’s one thing my mother instilled in me in my short time with her—besides cooking of course--it was that lotto tickets are a waste of time and money. I thought about my mom as I pocketed the ticket and walked the rest of the way home.

As I got into bed that night, I remembered the lotto ticket in my jacket pocket. I retrieved it and scratched at the surface with my house key. Once it was all scratched off, I stared at it. I had never really looked at one before, so it was taking me a minute to decipher it. When I finally did, a lump arose in my throat. My face felt hot, and my hand began trembling. I had won $20,000.

I’m going to skip ahead now—I don’t want to bore you with the details. I used that $20,000 to buy myself a food truck. I worked everyday by the green, engulfed in the smell of corn flour and chilies, spreading the gift my mom shared with me. I wasn’t going to get rich off of it, but I was making enough money to get by, and enjoying every minute of it. One day, a man, who I’d seen at my truck multiple days in a row now, approached me. He was the owner of a high-end Mexican restaurant downtown, and they were looking for a new head chef. I call this guy my Mr. Wonka. I was a little torn; I didn’t want to stop cooking the recipes passed down from my mother, but he insisted I could incorporate my own recipes into the menu. I took the job, and that’s where I’m at now.

So, you see, that’s why my friends call me Charlie. My lotto ticket was his money on the street. My food truck was his golden ticket. And my restaurant was his chocolate factory.