To be honest, it didn't start with what Jimmy said. It didn't start last night, during that long, ugly bar crawl. And as much as I'd like to lay it off on the drinking, or the coke, or the pressure of the busy season-it didn't start there either.
It was the lobsters. And that steak. I think that steak might have had something to do with it.
That's where things started to slide.
Understand; I've been killing lobsters for like, 22 years now. I've boiled them alive. Steamed them to death. I've torn them in half, chopped them into wriggling chunks for fricassee, for Lobster Americaine. Early in my career, when I worked at one of those seaside tourist traps, you could pick your victim out of a 55-gallon tank on your way in and I'd kill him to order, have him delivered to your table steamed, broiled, stuffed, or baked-your choice.
I killed them in dozens, stacked their struggling bodies in heaps, five-deep in the heavy stainless steel and wrought-iron steamer, slammed the double doors shut, turned the wheel, and gave them the steam. I racked up, in one year, a body count that would have been the envy of a company-sized unit of angry Serbs. I was the Pol Pot of Lobsterdom, and you could smell the brackish cloud from the stacks of the dead blocks away from my kitchen. The drains clogged with the milky white albumen which bubbled out from inside their shells-it clung to my shoes, stained my clothes, collected under my fingernails.
And I didn't mind at all. Not one little bit.
One of my early chefs, an affable Frenchman with a drinking problem, explained why one must section the hapless creatures while still alive for Lobster Americaine. "The meat," he said, "she become tough."
I said, "Oui, chef!" with no thought of my victims' pain, or of some Lobster Nuremberg in the future.
Other chefs I knew complained of bad dreams.
"I dream I'm in a sauna," said one, "and I look out the door through the little window? And there's a big motherfuckin' lobster and he's, like, turning up the heat, man. His antennae are twitching, and he's making all sortsa godawful screechin' sounds. There's a whole buncha his friends, they clappin' their claws together as he gives me the steam. Then, when I'm all pink and red and shit, they take me out and split me up the middle and cram hunksa crabmeat and bay scallops in my chest, and I'm flopping around and screaming on the cutting board. Payback..." shuddered my friend, "payback is a motherfucker."
Never bothered me, though. I didn't dream about lobsters. For two decades, it's been crunch crunch crunch, my 14-inch, German steel, chef knife coming down on generation after generation of bucking lobsters, cutting them into neat, one-inch sections. I prided myself on my precision, never overcooking.
Though I am not a cruel man, I felt perfectly detached from their misery. And not just them.
Shoving food down a recalcitrant goose's throat until his liver balloons into foie gras? Pas de problème. Ditto veal. Somebody's gotta lock up a calf in a dark shed, induce anaemia to get those buttery soft, pale pink scallopines. Tough titty. Whatever torments my meal had to endure on the way to my plate is just too bad-if it tastes good enough. It's a good thing New Yorkers haven't acquired a taste for live monkey brains, or I'd really have a lot to answer for. Sorry.
Fuck the lobsters, I always said. "They too dumb to know they dead," like my sous chef, Ricky says.
Lately, however, they've been on my mind. In disturbing new ways. And I don't like it.
Maybe it's the new presentation. I've been making bouillabaisse, you see. It's something of a signature dish of mine. At the restaurant, we get 32 bucks a pop for it. I don't just make money on the bouillabaisse, either. One guy comes in for the bouillabaisse, where the house makes, say, 66 per cent profit. You know he's going to bring in three or four friends, and they're gonna order chicken or salmon, or better yet, pasta-where I'm making 75, even 80 per cent. It's powerful math, but a losing equation for lobsters.
Bouillabaisse, at my place, is a bowl of Prince Edward Island mussels, some New Zealand cockles, a couple of head-on Gulf shrimps, and some assorted "garbage fish"-meaning less popular fish which nobody would order if they weren't accompanied by lobster. I lightly braise this in the classic seafood broth with saffron, garlic, leeks, tomatoes, a shot of Pernod, and by the time the customer has washed it down with some wine, had a cup of coffee and maybe a dessert, he's dropped a day's pay. At 32 bucks, though, he wants a show; some artful presentation. The restaurant business, after all, is show business.
The thing which really makes them oooh and ahhhh as my bouillabaisse goes sailing by in the dining room, is the way we arrange the antennae on the head, perched magnificently in the middle of the bowl. They spiral regally upward, in a bright, red, double helix, six inches long from the head, like an appetising-looking strand of DNA. Let me tell you: it looks damn impressive.
Sadly for the lobster, this effect is not easily attained. It requires me, each morning-after a coffee, a couple of aspirin, and a cigarette-to assemble the lobsters on my cutting board, and cut them in half. While alive.
You have to keep the antennae supple. So you can weave them into that stylish, concentric spiral. Some chefs will tell you that by stroking the lobster's back you can put him to sleep before doing the deed. I don't do that. It humanises them too much, I think. And anyway, it's too damn time consuming, singing lullabies to an oversized insect. I simply whack them in half, as quickly as possible.
And it's not the wriggling and flip-flopping that get to me-the way the severed halves move independently of each other, claws still opening and closing, tail skipping around blindly, seeking a brain to tell it what to do. It's the next thing that spooks me.
When I've got the hollowed-out heads lined up before me, like crippled soldiers in a row, their still-brown and limp antennae awaiting my attentions-here's where the trouble starts. You see, in order to get those antennae up, to hold them in place, to retain that graceful sweep skyward when I throw the whole head into the boiling fat-frying them so they turn red and firm-in order to do that, first I have to drive a bamboo skewer right between the lobster's eyes, into its empty, but still twitching skull.
It's that one horrible moment when the skewer is hammered home, burying itself deep in the lobster's empty brain pan, when the lobster's eyes cross for just a second: that's what's got me fucked up lately. That's what's been bothering me. It's the expression on the lobster's face as he goes cross-eyed-like he's getting the message now for sure. I always expect him to say "Yikes!" or "Duhhhhyeahhh!"
What would I feel? A flash of steel-blue? The taste of metal in my mouth? Then oblivion? I don't know. But I think about it a lot. I even, in some sick, cynical bone-tired part of myself, yearn for that feeling-whatever it is-for deliverance, an end to consciousness, a blissfully vegetative state. Even the thought of my own stupid head, propped up in a bowl of fish broth and inexpensive seafood, my hair teased into a vertical, if grisly, final affront to the dining public whom, in my heart of hearts, I have come to loathe and despise with a burning, purple passion, even that whimsical image gives me a shudder of pleasure.
So it was this lobster thing. I blame that for my unravelling. For my violent reaction. The steak had something to do with it too. But I'll get to that.
I haven't been any crankier at work. I was and still am, I think, a terror on the floor staff, an enigma to my boss, and "Dad" to my crew. Maybe I've been drinking a little more, but not during the shift, when I still confine myself to one shaker glass of margarita and two, maybe three pints of beer. I work in a busy establishment, even if it's a failing one, and one needs to modulate one's natural, homicidal urges. It would not do, as one of my fellow chefs recently did, to leap over the line in a rage, bury my teeth in a particularly slow-witted waiter's nose and shake him like a dog. I never did anything like that, until last night.
No, I was managing to fall apart in private ways. Crying on the subway, for instance. I catch a glimpse of a newspaper headline which says, "Tots Killed in Fire," and I start weeping. At home, on my day off, I'm laying around, smoking a nice fat spliff of hydro, watching the tube, and I start bawling over a commercial for long-distance telephone services. Those always get me. It's pathetic. A warning sign.
I haven't been answering the phone. I listen, on the answering machine, to the wails of my dwindling number of friends, and I lie there, immobile and terrified, as their pleas to "pick up, pick up... I know you're there..." turn to frustrated, defeated, droning. "Pick up, pick up, pick up..."
I never pick up. I just can't. I'm too... fragile lately, in my off hours. At work-that's different. I can still bully a waiter or a line cook into tears. But at home, outside my kitchen, I'm five foot ten inches of exposed nerves, hurt feelings, suppressed rage, envy and fear. If they knew how I felt, these people calling, believe me, they wouldn't be trying to reach me. You want to talk to me? See me at work. I know how to behave there.
Fucking lobsters. Cross-eyed, cannibalistic, dirty, carrion-feeding... you don't bind their claws with thick rubber bands, they'll tear each other apart. And they got me all fucked up.
It's gotten worse and worse, right up until last night. The chefs' night out, when a group of Manhattan's finest culinarians got together (as we often do), and bounced from one chef-friendly establishment to another, eating for free at 13 Barrow, then drinks at Bar Six, then pool at the Stoned Crow, more drinks and some cocaine at The Nursery, finally ending up at the shuttered, but still open for business, Siberia, on the 50th Street subway platform: six stools, a jukebox, a bleary-eyed Irish bartender. That's where the final conflict occurred between good and evil-where in one senselessly brutal moment, I resolved the eternal struggle, and cold-cocked that yellow, rat-cocksucker with an ashtray, making myself the subject of restaurant legend for years to come.
There was me, Bobby, and my sous-chef Ricky. There was Ronnie, known as the "grill-bitch" and Jimmy Sears with his cute new pâtissière, and Laurent, a taciturn chef from the Gascogne, Maurizio, the Tuscan, and Alex, the master of Flintstones food.
We had been discussing other chefs. Chefs not present to defend themselves. You hang with chefs, you better know that about us-that when you leave the table to take a piss, we're gonna be talking about you. Like a cabal of small-minded, provincial grandmothers, or Alzheimer-ridden retirees at some Florida compound, we'd rather gossip than chat about lofty culinary concepts over a snifter of Calvados.
By the time we hit Siberia, half-mad from tequila shots and endless pints, and the occasional sniff of Ricky's blow, the mood was even more mean-spirited than usual. Jimmy, I recall, was going on about Brendan Ford-nominally his best friend, a revered elder statesman of the NYC chef scene. Jimmy didn't think much of Brendan's new menu.
"It's gay!" he explained. "It's food for pussies! There's... there's nothing... nothing to eat!"
"Cocksucker can't cook!" said Ricky. "What's he good for? Walkin' around the dinin' room with a motherfuckin' clipboard?"
"He can cook," said Laurent, weakly. "He just doesn't lately. He's at... he's at... another level now."
Ricky, a lifetime line-cook and heavy lifter, didn't want to hear it.
"Yeah? Well I tell you, man... I ever go to prison? I hope Brendan's my cell mate. I be in smokes for the whole fucking jolt, sellin' that boy's ass. Last time he worked the line, Jimmy Carter was president!"
I didn't like this. The part about Brendan not working the line. I think a number of us at the bar were made uncomfortable. It's a measure of your studliness, the hours spent behind the line, and I hadn't been back there-meaning actually cooked ? la carte at a station-for quite a while. We all, I think, looked around, tallying up which of us still spent time behind the line; Ricky looking smug, his arms crossed, the comment about what he'd do to Brendan in jail made especially pungent by the shared knowledge that he'd done five years for burglary.
Fortunately the subject of conversation changed. To pussy. Jimmy, a self-described expert on this subject, regaled us with a recent adventure. Rather tastelessly, I thought, as his newest conquest, the cute pâtissière, was sitting right next to him. She nursed her beer while Jimmy described for us how he came all over a hostess's face. "She looked like a glazed doughnut!" he guffawed, going on to detail how he'd walked her around the room like a wheelbarrow. A few civilians melted away from the bar while Jimmy pontificated on the comparative merits of rear entry versus stand up and carry, but all the chefs stayed.
You work 14 hours a day, six days a week, come home smelling like you've been rolling around in sheep entrails-sex is not generally the first thing on your "things to do" list. Most of us at the bar had less than active sex lives, and even more pathetically, we lived that part of our lives vicariously, through Jimmy, a notable exception to the rule. Jimmy would fuck a barbershop floor if there was enough hair on it. Thin girls, fat girls, smart, stupid, fabulous-looking or ugly as hell, Jimmy screwed everything. Married, living with a woman, still sleeping with his ex-wife, and juggling two or three regulars; how he managed it all was a miracle of logistics. Even more unbelievable was that anyone would sleep with him in the first place. Everybody knew how Jimmy talked. To fuck Jimmy was to share the excruciating sexual details of the experience with half the cooks in New York.
Music was blaring from the Siberia jukebox and my mind began to drift away from Jimmy's grunting and whinnying. A few more restaurant types arrived; a saucier from the Hilton came over. I'm usually a happy drunk. A sentimental drunk. When I've had too much, I get quiet, then reflective, then sad. But this time I could feel the evil genie slip out of the bottle. I knew that something ugly was coming.
Sure enough, that was when somebody, maybe one of the recent arrivals, mentioned the review.
I flinched like a gut-shot dog. Didn't say anything-just moved back and away. I took a sip of vodka and saw that conversation had stopped, everybody looking. Ricky, a perceptive young man, tried to change the subject back to pussy, but it was no go.
I heard, through the blood rushing in my ears, the words, "New York Times," a few excerpts-words burned into my brain weeks ago. I heard the word "steak." Then there was a pause. A long one. Even the waitress-bartender contingent saw that something was up, moved in closer, everybody sneaking looks to see how I was going to react. It was me they were talking about, after all. That fucking review, that motherfucking steak! My restaurant. My kitchen.
My comments were wordlessly solicited.
When I still said nothing, just knocked back my vodka and stared dreamily into space, that-that was when Jimmy, ill-advisedly, filled the silence with his pithy if rhetorical question.
Addressed directly to me. So there was no avoiding it. So, of course, I had to respond. Which I did.
Truth: i hate the general dining public. I think people should be licensed to eat in a good restaurant. Yeah, a long, and irritating process of testing and certification should be required of every would-be diner. To thin out the herd.
The nauseating refrain, "The Customer is Always Right" is exactly wrong. The customer is rarely, if ever, right. This is, it is said, a "service" industry. Jimmy says this all the time. Has no problem with it. Maybe that's why Jimmy is a success and I am not.
Serene, in his spotless double-breasted chef coat, his name stitched in Tuscan blue over the right breast, Jimmy's got no problems administering roughage to the annoying foodies, trend-seeking Wall Street suits, blue-haired theatre-goers, and the rest of the waterheads and whiners who make up the great unwashed horde of dining public.
I explained my plan once to him.
Vouchers, I said. You waddle into my restaurant, and you present your papers to a trusted lieutenant. Should they not be in order, say you failed the how-to-eat-with-a-fork part of the certification exam or a low score on the seafood section, that's okay. You won't go hungry. You will be offered another kind of meal to replace the one you have been politely refused. A nutritious, protein-packed sludge is yours, for a reduced price, to be administered, say, in the rear loading area of the restaurant, out of view of the certified diners. Administered by trained nurses. Rectally.
Jimmy just snorted, scoffed. But he can afford to. Jimmy, you see, is a brilliant cook. A theoretician, an innovator, a visionary, on the cutting edge of what the foodies call "Asian Fusion," and what Ricky calls "Pacific Rim-Job." Give Jimmy a couple of coconuts, frozen shrimp, a few sprigs of lemongrass, a jar of red curry paste-he'll have half of Manhattan lined up to suck his dick.
I work for a living. I've got to work harder to get by. So much of what we do is a hustle, a con, that when honest, beautiful food, conscientiously prepared, is ignored, or worse, destroyed by some ignorant shit-stain of a customer, the pain is near unbearable. Bouncing from restaurant to restaurant, year after year, my motley crew of talented young thugs and hooligans in tow, I've come to feel like the Flying Dutchman of the professional cooking racket. Always arriving too late. My latest owner, always looking doom-struck and trapped, his entrepreneurial dream of empire circling the drain for the last few times. We're the pros from Dover, me and my boys, here to get you back on track. But we know you're never getting back on track. There's no hope. Like the lobsters: chances are, you're dead-you just don't know it yet.
But I take these jobs anyway. I need the money. Got to take care of my crew. That the latest ill-fated adventure will surely end in bankruptcy for my new master is beside the point. We're used to that, my crew and me. We can, at least, be counted on to perform honourably, to go down with the ship. We give it our all, willingly suspend disbelief, work each day like this is the big one. We fight the good fight in the face of certain defeat. Dien Bien Phu, seven days a week. It's what we do. Feed on the remains of dying restaurants, the last scraps of expiring dreams.
My latest boss-let's call him Squirrel Balls (it's what the floor staff calls him)-just last week, he's telling me his master plan to "turn things around." We're sitting over coffee in the empty cocktail lounge of his flagship restaurant-nightclub-the one that only a year ago was going to be the jewel in the crown of a chain of Squirrel Ball conceived restaurant-nightclubs which would span the globe... anyway, he's sitting there bemoaning the weekend receipts, and I'm making the appropriate sympathetic noises, when he tells me about "Cabaret Night."
I hear this, and I want to leap across the table and twist a fork into his carotid artery. I've been through this part of the terminal stage before, at other places. My last restaurant tried this gimmick-invited a bunch of never-will-be performers to "entertain" our already diminished clientèle. These inept yodellers would open their mouths, let loose with some nasally inflected medley from Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the dining room would empty like someone had let loose a cageful of ebola-infected spider monkeys.
It's no use trying to reason with Squirrel Balls. I have to let him live in hope. I mean, let's face it-if he knew the truth-if he had any idea of the truth, he would have shut the place down six months ago, cut his losses, stiffed his creditors, and run off to an Indonesian archipelago island with the few bucks left to him. Sad fact is: I need him to stay stupid. So I shut my mouth. Later I'll have a margarita.
Now, Jimmy. My friend, my mentor, former patron, former chef-gave me my first sous chef position, taught me everything I know about jasmine rice, vertical food, infusions of herb... that Jimmy... he owns. He gets equity in his place. His place will go bust too. Difference is: Jimmy'll be fine. By the time the place goes down, he'll have raked off so much in inflated salary, pilfered equipment, kickbacks, and "consultant" fees, he can take a year off. His partners won't mind a bit. They'll have had a few good years playing Good-Time Charlies, buying drinks and meals for their pals, getting furtive blowjobs from the never-ending supply of waitrons. When Jimmy comes back from Hawaii or wherever, announces he's gonna open a new venture, right across the street; his old partners might even put up some more money. It's fun to be associated with a winner. And Jimmy, though he's never shown a dime in profit, is a winner.
I told him so. Just before I hit him.
I said, "You're a winner, Jimmy. Everyone says so."
Then I cold-cocked him. Clubbed him on the head with an ashtray, right there. He went down like a tranquillised rhino on one of those nature shows fronted by a bucket-head in a safari jacket.
Afterwards, I "went through the system," as the arresting officers called it. When Squirrel Balls, always the optimist, bailed me out, he wondered if "this could be a good thing for us. The publicity and all. You could say it was a fight over principle. He stole a recipe or something. You could say that."
No way, I said. Unethical. Even for me. It was me, after all, who'd been stealing Jimmy's recipes for years. Over time, I'd seduced away his sous chef with an offer of more money. Stolen his best line cooks whenever I could. I'd even suborned one of his prep cooks, so he'd feed me information on what was going on in Jimmy's kitchen. I wasn't going to say Jimmy stole my recipes. That would be wrong. There's a limit. Plus nobody would believe it.
The truth is, Jimmy said something to me that pissed me off. And I hit him. Hard. Maybe too hard. The way his head bounced off the bar on the way down, eyes blank.
Information out of the hospital is sketchy. They have him listed as "stable." My prep cook source paid a visit, says that Jimmy is talking again, that he recognises friends, knows who the president is. That's good. I am not a bad person. I'm glad I didn't kill him.
But even in a business where talking shit is an approved form of self-expression, Jimmy stepped over the line. And the threshold is pretty damn high. Verbal abuse, in our life, is an art form, practiced at a very high level of expertise, a culmination of a centuries-old tradition of invective which dates back to the first cave-dudes, smashing shellfish into the first bisque. It's a secret language, where "hey, maricon" means "hello, comrade" and "suck my dick" means "no thank you, valued co-worker" and "gimme that fucking sautoir, you steaming puddle of reptile vomit" means "hand me the pan, please. Thank you."
But some things are off-limits. You don't insult anyone's mother. And the word "wife" is never to be mentioned at all. You can use the word "mother," but only in Spanish, or as part of a larger word ("motherfucker" is used as punctuation, not as a noun). You don't want to break these rules. Not in an environment where it's 110 degrees and crowded, and where everybody carries knives.
Jimmy didn't say shit about my mom. He said something else entirely. But I don't think my reaction was disproportionate to the offence. Even if I am flaking out a little bit lately. Even if I cry on subways. Jimmy was still in the wrong.
Since the incident, Ricky, my director of covert operations, has been burning up the phone lines. A sous with a criminal mind is one of life's great joys, and Ricky understands the importance of a well-timed campaign of disinformation-the necessity of getting our version of events out there before Jimmy gets out of the hospital and starts putting his own spin on things. Ricky's a natural at this shit: "Motherfucker deserved it. I heard him say some shit about his mom," Ricky's telling someone. "And Bobby's mom's got cancer, too. Can you believe it? Yeah. Stomach, I think. Damn right! I'd be pissed too. Shoulda seen Jimmy. He was cryin' like a little girl. Sayin', 'Not the face, not the face...'"
When Ricky gets off the phone, the whole episode will have been written down in restaurant folklore as a win for the home team: Hero Chef Bobby Meyers, five-foot ten, spindly Jewboy, Strikes a Blow Against Elitist Media-Whore, the unstable Jimmy Sears. Defends Honour of Working Cooks Everywhere, by beating him with ashtray. Story to follow.
I make a face at Ricky when I hear this. My mother's fine. She lives in Florida now-and Jimmy didn't have time to say anything once I picked up the ashtray. Still, you've got to admire Ricky's creativity.
I did not set out to be this way: a bitter, envious, ageing crank-a journeyman chef with a record for assault. Since the lobsters started looking at me funny, I've gotten a little thin-skinned. Abject humiliation tends to change a person. It changed me.
My early decision to become a serious, school-trained, European-style chef came after one particularly painful humiliation. 1973, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I'd been working a summer job as a dishwasher in my first restaurant. Elbow-deep in dirty pots and pans, I'd look back over the line at the cooks, and envy them; swaggering, piratical princes. They ate whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. They drank free of charge, fucked the good-looking waitresses, stayed up all night shooting craps, snorting coke. They smoked expensive, seedless weed, filled their refrigerators at will with stolen sirloins, lobsters, boxes of shrimp and champagne. They carried big, baddass, razor-sharp knives in leather roll-up cases which they slung over their shoulders like disgraced samurai, and they dressed in outlaw style: artfully ripped jeans, faded Viet-vet type headbands, martial-looking double-breasted chef-coats, casually spattered with gore. They were cool.
So the first time one of them went off on a bender and didn't return, I stepped in-volunteered to work what was called "the berry station." I cracked oysters, made salads, plated desserts, picked spinach, peeled potatoes and did the scut-work for the big boys.
When the summer came to an end, when the regular crew began to fade away, off to work ski resorts in Colorado, charter boats in the Caribbean, restaurants in the Florida Keys, I got my chance, and moved up for the last few weeks before closing for the season. I worked fry-station until the broiler man got pinched for a parole violation and my moment arrived.
I was given charge of the broiler. The sheer pleasure-the power of commanding that monstrous steel furnace, bumping the rolling grill under the flames with my hip-it was delicious. I couldn't have been any happier in the cockpit of an F-16.
The next summer, my restaurant was bought by the owner of the better, larger and busier restaurant across the street. Ciro, the new owner, was kind enough to allow us to audition for our old jobs. I headed up to the Cape from New York, filled with self-confidence, looking for the big-time broiler job that would make me the studliest motherfucker on Cape Cod. I was so full of myself I could puke.
My audition took place at the usually jam-packed Ciro's. They were pounding veal in the kitchen when I arrived, the whole crew, on every horizontal surface. The testosterone level was very, very high. My last crew had been adorable amateurs. These guys were pros and they knew it. The floor staff, the management, even Ciro, the owner, visibly cowered in their presence. Only I was too stupid to see how over my head I was.
I'd served a few hundred meals at a relaxed pace, in a not very busy joint, in the off-season. These guys drilled out four, five, six hundred fast-paced high-end meals each night. Here it was: Friday, an hour before service, and I was informed I'd be working with Tyrone, the broilerman. I remember Tyrone as nothing less than eight feet tall and 400 pounds, with a shaved head, a prominent silver-capped front tooth, and a gold hoop earring the size of a door knocker. He was big, black, fearsomely muscled, his size 48 chef coat stretched tight across his shoulders.
Unintimidated as only the ignorant could be, I started shooting my mouth off. Yapping about my old restaurant, what king-hell bad-boys we were, regaling my new comrades with humorous anecdotes designed to shock and titillate, generally portraying myself as an experienced, street-smart gun-for-hire.
I ignored the signs-the rolling eyes, the tight smiles-and plunged on, oblivious to the huge amounts of food the other cooks were loading into their stations. I missed the determined sharpening of knives, the careful arranging of sidetowels, favourite pans, back-up supplies of everything. They were like marines digging in for the siege at Khe San, and I registered nothing, blinded by stupidity and self-love.
I should have seen the practiced choreography of their movements for what it was; understood the level of experience which allowed these giants to dance wordlessly around each other in the cramped kitchen, turning from stove top to refrigerator to cutting board with breathtaking economy, enduring my self-aggrandising line of chatter without comment.
An hour later, the board was filled with more dinner orders than I'd seen in a lifetime. Ticket after ticket coming in, tables of ten, tables of six, deuces, three-tops, twelves, all containing dishes I'd never heard of. Waiters screamed. Flames three feet high leapt out of pans. The broiler was crammed with rows and rows of steaks and veal chops, fish filets and lobsters. Pasta was blanched and shocked and transferred in huge batches into colanders, falling everywhere, the floor ankle deep in linguine, tagliarini, spaghetti ? la chitarra, and the heat was horrific.
I struggled and sweated to keep up, Tyrone slinging sizzle platters under the broiler and me ostensibly helping out, getting deeper and deeper into the weeds. On the rare occasions when I had a second to look at the row of fluttering orders, the dupes looked like Sanskrit-indecipherable. I was lost. Tyrone, finally, had to help the helper.
Then, grabbing a saut? pan, I burned myself. I yelped, dropped the pan, and as a small red blister raised on my palm, I foolishly, oh-so-foolishly, asked Tyrone if he had some burn cream and maybe a Band-aid.
This was enough for Tyrone. It went suddenly quiet in the kitchen. Orders, as if by magic, ceased to come for a long, horrible moment. Tyrone turned to me, looked down, smiling now, and said, "Whatchoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-aid?"
Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, so I could see their hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the raw flesh where steam and hot fat had made the skin simply roll off-they looked like the claws of some monstrous sci-fi crustacean. I watched, transfixed, as Tyrone reached under the flames of the broiler, and with one bare hand, picked up a glowing sizzle platter, moved it over to the cutting board in front of me.
He never flinched. The other cooks cheered, laughed their asses off. Orders began to come in again, and everybody went back to work.
I had been shown up for the loudmouthed little punk I was. Identified as a pretender. Humiliated.
Ciro ended up kicking me down to prep crew at my old restaurant, and I slunk home that night hoping I'd die in my sleep. After a day or two of sulking and self-pity, I resolved to become a chef.
I would go to school. I would apprentice in France. I would let a procession of evil drunks, crackpot owners, sadistic sous chefs work me like a Sherpa, until I became a chef. I would do whatever was necessary to become as good as, and better than, Ciro's crew.
I would have hands like Tyrone's.
Some day, I would get to humiliate some other loud-mouthed punk. So I became a chef because I'd been humiliated. I became a chef out of spite. And I stayed a chef, for nearly two decades, until Jimmy Sears, for one second, made me a punk again.
One motherfucking star. The steak. The New York Times...
Let me explain. One star is a death sentence. Not an immediate death, mind you, it's a long lingering passing, a coughing, wheezing, blood in your stool, gradual slide into obscurity and disrepute.
Here's how it works. Every Wednesday morning, every chef, sous chef, restaurateur, cook, and serious foodie in New York City picks up the New York Times. They don't start by reading the front page. Oh, no. Armies from disgruntled former Soviet republics could be swarming across Europe; it wouldn't detain anybody for a second. They, we, all of us, do the exact same thing: turn directly to the weekend section, second to last page, where the restaurant review appears.
We want to see who got reviewed. We want the guilty frisson of pleasure that comes when an enemy, a rival, or better, a friend, gets trashed in the Times.
We know what to say if a friend gets a bad review. The usual platitudes: "Don't sweat it, man, nobody reads that shit," or "it's not that important. Column's gone downhill since the last reviewer left." We've mouthed those words of hollow comfort many times, while snickering privately up our sleeves.
Fact is, of course, that everybody does read it. It is that important. She does know what she's talking about. If you get three stars in the Times, your business triples overnight. You get two stars-you dodge the bullet; you can go on as before. But one star? One star: you may as well carve a swastika in your forehead and rub a nice steaming loaf of shit in your hair-'cause everybody you know, everybody you love, hate, respect, fear, is gonna read it and laugh. If they're like me, they're gonna hang it in the kitchen, so their cooks can get a laugh too.
One star is a disgrace, a bad odour that will exude from your kitchen for years. Your cooks will look at you with shifty, injured expressions, like sailors considering mutiny. R?sum?s will be secretly faxed. Other chefs will circle your staff like buzzards, waiting to separate out the disillusioned, to pick off your saut? man, your butcher, your sous, one by one.
So imagine. Late one Thursday night, not too long ago, I open up the Times and see my restaurant's name on the second-to-last page, see my name, with one cancerous star above it. Imagine how I felt, reading: "a hanger steak, ordered medium rare, arrived rare... Returned to the kitchen for more cooking, when it came back, it was still underdone."
Now, I remembered that order. I still do. I sure as hell didn't know it was the Times critic: but it wouldn't have mattered. I swear to God, on my first-born male child, that motherfucking steak was medium rare. It was medium rare the first time. It was drop-dead perfect medium rare the second time.
You know how I felt? Reading that review? You don't have to imagine. I'll tell you exactly how I felt.
I felt like I had suddenly, inexplicably, put on a fluffy crêpe and organza cocktail dress, a rubber clown nose, roller skates, wheeled out into the centre of Times Square, and allowed myself to get butt-fucked by a procession of crack-heads and circus freaks. On national television. That's how I felt.
When the review came out, Jimmy said nothing. No conciliatory bullshit phone call, no knowing references. During the whole evening, last night, of drinking and gossiping, he made no reference to my expulsion from the firmament of culinary stars. Maybe he didn't mean it to slip out exactly the way it did. But then, maybe he did. Maybe he waited until he had an audience-Maurizio, Laurent, Ricky, the grill bitch, all the various kitchen hooligans there, all watching when he finally let it go, stopped biting his tongue and said what was on his mind.
When he stood there at the Siberia bar, looked me in the eyes and said: "How does it feel to be a one star chef." That was when I said, "You're a winner, Jimmy. Everyone says so," and hit him as hard as I could with a heavy glass ashtray.
I was trying to kill him. Certainly, if the ashtray had pushed right through his skull and popped out the other side, I would not, at that moment, have been disappointed. I put everything I had into it.
Afterwards, though, when old Jimmy still hadn't come around; when he hadn't responded to the water thrown helpfully into his face by Maurizio, Laurent gone, others melting away from the bar, the grill-bitch arguing with somebody over whether to call an ambulance... that's when I started to worry about maybe I hit him too hard, started to take stock of my situation and wonder how bad it was going to be.
Connor, the Siberia bartender, suggested strongly that I disappear. There was a lot to recommend this strategy-Jimmy's pâtissière, I noticed, was gone-to call the cops, I imagined. I had only a few minutes if I was going to hot-foot it out of there. But I looked around, and knew, in an instant, that somebody here would blab. Running would make things worse. I pictured myself getting hauled out of work during the pre-theatre rush, shackled and in handcuffs through the crowded dining room. It wouldn't look too good.
So I had a couple shots of vodka, stood there waiting for them to come. Connor, quite nicely, refused money for the drinks. Ricky, slapping me on the back, covertly whispered, "Good one, Dad," in my ear.
Two paramedics arrived first, with two paunchy uniform cops right behind them. Jimmy was loaded onto a gurney, hauled up the steps, bundled into an ambulance. I saw the blonde pâtissière follow them.
When the two cops began to take statements, I could see the unease on my friends' faces when they asked the big question: "Okay. Who hit him?" Faces turned away, eyes drifted down to the floor.
I made it easy for everybody, raising my hand weakly, a sheepish smile on my face.
It was the lobsters' fault. The way their eyes crossed when I drove the skewers in. In my mug shot, I had much the same expression on my face.
And that fucking steak. What I would give for that not to have happened.
When I got out of the lock-up, I went straight to work. Got a standing ovation from my crew. Ricky looked happy. He will dine out on this story for a long time. He'll get laid off of this story. He deserves to. His version, with any luck, will become the authoritative, official version. By the time Jimmy gets out, whatever he has to say will seem like whining. I hope he's okay. I'd like to think he's making a full recovery.
I'm not a bad person. Really. Things just got out of hand. I was vulnerable cause of what's been happening lately. Jimmy hurt me. I hurt him back.
God, please don't let Jimmy turn into a vegetable.
Don't let him sue me.
Let me bring honour to my clan.
Let my customers eat specials-the whole roasted sea bass or the osso bucco in particular.
Please, God, strike down my enemies-but make sure I've got an alibi when you do it.
Save me from vegetarians and the lactose-intolerant. Deliver me from the tyranny of the food critics, for they know not what the fuck they do.
Allow me, at all time, to see into the hearts and souls of my crew, so that I can better guide them to my way of thinking.
Keep me from treachery and mass defections.
Protect my sous chef from harm or temptation.
Save my pitiful, failing restaurant.
Let the lobsters feel no pain nor malice 'cause of what I do to them.
I swear, before God: that steak was medium rare. n
