“I think in life, they give too much to some people and nothing to everybody else,” he shrugs without bitterness. “Without work we are nothing.”
We linger over chocolate pot de crème and mascarpone creams and pistachio mousse.
Not visibly affected by the generous pourings of wine, Justo orders an espresso. Sits back in his chair, pleased.
“I got a good job. A good family. I live in peace.”
The Fish-on-Monday Thing
I was genuinely angry most mornings, writing Kitchen Confidential. An unfocused, aim-in-a-general-direction-and-fire kind of a rage only exacerbated by the fact that my writing “regimen” (such as it was) consisted of a five thirty or six a.m. wake-up, a hurried disgorging of sentences, reminiscences, and hastily reconstructed memories from the previous night (this after a ten-or twelve-or fourteen-hour day in the kitchen, followed invariably by too much to drink and a topple into bed). I’d spit whatever words I had quickly onto the page—no agonizing over sentences for me, there wasn’t time anyway—then off to work again: put on the sauces, cut the meat, portion the fish, crack the peppercorns, cook lunch, and so on. Three thirty, two quick pints down the street, back to Les Halles, either work the line or read the board, then off to Siberia Bar—or simply sit down with the remains of the floor staff for just one more—get drunk en place. Sagged down in the back right passenger seat of a yellow Chevy Caprice, legs twisted uncomfortably behind the bulletproof partition—that’s where I did my best work, thinking about what I was going to write the next day. Window half-cracked and me halfway or fully in the bag, I’d think about my life as New York City rolled by outside.
As I lived then in Morningside Heights, on the Upper West Side, by the time I got home, my taxi would have passed through a near-comprehensive landscape of greatest hits, all my sorrows, all my joys—as I think the song goes. A densely packed checkerboard pattern of mistakes, failures, crimes, betrayals large and small. The occasional happy spot with good associations would make me smile weakly—before plunging me in the other direction as I’d recall how things got all fucked up, went wrong, or simply just came to …this. I was always glad to see the spot on Broadway where my then-wife and I had set up our books and records for sale, happy that I wasn’t doing that anymore—and that there was no longer a need for either of us to adhere to that kind of unrelentingly voracious math. But I was still angry—in the way, I suspect, that mobs get angry: angry about all the things I didn’t have and (I was sure) I would never have.
I’d never had health insurance, for one thing. Nor had my wife. And that scared the hell out of me—as getting sick was, on one hand, just not an option, and on the other, increasingly likely as we grew older. A sudden pain in the jaw requiring a root canal would hit the financial picture (such as it was) like a freight train. Total destruction. It would mean groveling. Beg the nice dentist in the filthy-looking office on the ground floor of a housing project to accept payment on the installment plan.
Car commercials made me angry, as I’d never owned a car—or so much as a scooter—and, I was quite sure by now, never would. Home ownership was a concept so beyond imagining as to be laughable. I was so far behind on rent, so ridiculously in arrears on income taxes, that on the rare occasion when I went to bed sober, I’d lie there in terror, my heart pounding in my ears, trying desperately to not think the unthinkable: that at any time, either landlord or government or the long-ignored but very much still-there folks at AmEx could take everything, everything away. That “everything” amounted only to somewhere between fourteen and four hundred dollars on a good day was cold comfort. It was only a combination of rent-stabilized apartment, a byzantine, slow-moving, and tenant-friendly housing court—and a wife who could work the system that kept a roof over our heads. And that streak of improbable good luck, too, could run out at any minute.
So, I was afraid. Very afraid. Every day and every night and every time I bothered to think about these things—which was a lot, because that’s the way a responsible person with a job who doesn’t have a drug habit was supposed to think about things: realistically. Frightened people become angry people—as history teaches us again and again. Facing “reality” after a lifetime of doing everything I could to escape it offered no rewards that I could see. Only punishment. No solution presented itself. I couldn’t go back (that way was blocked for sure), and I couldn’t go forward.
I’d quit heroin and I’d quit methadone and I’d stopped doing cocaine and stopped smoking crack—like everybody tells you to, right? And yet there I was, still broke and still frightened and in a deep financial hole I knew I would never climb out of.
And I was angry about that. Very angry.
I was angry with my wife—very angry, a long-festering and deep-seated resentment that year after year after year she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t work. Strong, smart as hell, with a college degree from a Seven Sisters school, solid white-collar experience, and she’d long ago just…stopped looking. In nearly two decades, after a promising start, nothing but a couple of short-term, part-time gigs stocking books and sorting in-house mail for near-minimum wage. It made no sense to me and I resented it bitterly. To be fair, it consumed me out of all proportion, with the kind of smoldering, barely repressed passive-aggressive anger that poisons everything around it. And that, sure as shit, didn’t help the situation. Waking up and going to sleep with this basic fact—and the way I then handled that resentment—was contaminating everything. I just couldn’t get past it. I didn’t get past it. And I made things worse—far worse—in all the drearily predictable ways. Under-score that sentence.
As partners in crime, we’d been—in my mind, anyway—a Great Couple. As solid citizens? Neither of us seemed to know how.
I was angry, too, that all my little-boy dreams of travel and adventure would for absolutely sure never come true—that I’d never see Paris as a grown-up or Vietnam, or the South Pacific, or India, or even Rome. From my vantage point, standing behind the stove at Les Halles, that much was perfectly clear. And, to tell the truth, I only became angrier when my boss, Philippe, sent me to Tokyo for a week to consult, because now I knew what I was missing. Which was—as anyone who’s been lucky enough to see those places knows—everything. It was as if someone had opened a happy, trippy, groovy, and exotic version of Pandora’s box, allowed me to peek inside, into another dimension, an alternate life, and then slammed the thing shut.
I’m sure that many middle-aged, divorced guys could describe a drunken snog with a female croupier in similarly lush—and even apocalyptic—terms. And any “epiphany” I had in Asia was, at the end of the day, already the subject of about a thousand not very good movies. I can only say that once I’d stumbled around Asia’s impenetrably “foreign” streets, surrounded only by people whose language I would never understand, nostrils filled with strange and wondrous smells, eyes boggling at everything I saw, eating things I’d never dreamed could be so good…well…I was doomed. I would ultimately have done anything to get some more of that. (Not that anyone was offering.) I knew, too, somewhere deep inside, that sharing would be out of the question. That’s a bad thing to learn about yourself.
I was angry, too, in the usual ways: with my mom for having me, for being stupid enough to love me. With my brother for not being a fuckup like me. With my father for dying.
And, naturally, I was angry with myself most of all (people like us always are, aren’t we? It’s a Lifetime movie almost anyone can star in)—for being forty-four years old and still one phone call, one paycheck away from eviction. For fucking up, pissing away, sabotaging my life in every possible way.
Five years earlier, after the kind of once-in-a-lifetime, freakishly lucky breaks that have been all too common in my life, the kind of thing most aspiring writers only dream of, I’d published two spectacularly unsuccessful novels that had disappeared without a trace, never making it into paperback. This, the general wisdom taught me, effectively finished me in publishing. About this—and maybe
only this—I was actually not angry. It had been a nice ride, I’d felt, one on which I’d embarked with zero expectations. I’d kept my day job—never imagining I’d do otherwise. The whole enterprise had dropped in my lap, felt like a scam from the get-go, so I’d thankfully never suffered from any delusions of being a “writer.” Two uninterrupted hours of sitting at an empty table in a Northridge, California, Barnes and Noble on a one-stop, crackpot and equally crack-brained, self-financed book tour had quickly disabused me of such notions.
When I sat down at my desk every morning to write Kitchen Confidential and began clacking away at the keyboard, I was both gloriously free of hope that it would ever be read outside of a small subculture of restaurant people in New York City—and boiling with the general ill-will of the unsatisfied, the envious, and the marginal. Let it be funny for cooks and waiters—and fuck everybody else, was pretty much my thinking at the time.
Which worked out okay in the end, as I never could have written the thing had I thought people would actually read it.
So, the result was an angry book in a lot of ways—and, over time, that’s what people have come to expect from me. The angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on Top Chef—and I guess it would be pretty easy to keep going with that: a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. “Rachael Ray? What’s up with that?!” (Cue snare drum here.) To a great extent, that’s already happened.
But looking back at those hurried, hungover early mornings, sitting at my desk with unbrushed teeth, a cigarette in my mouth, and a bad attitude, what was I angry about that I’m still angry about today? Who, of all the people and all the things I railed at in that book, really deserved my scorn?
I certainly wasn’t angry at Emeril. And the many dreamers and crackpots I wrote about who’d employed me over the years—whatever their sins—are certainly no worse characters than I’d been. In fact, I loved them for their craziness, their excesses, their foolishness—their shrewdness or guile, their wastefulness, even their criminality. In almost every case, their choice of the restaurant business as a lifestyle option had cost them far, far more than it had ever cost me.
I wasn’t ever angry with any of the people who worked with me. Not in a lasting way. It was they, after all—all of them, heroes and villains alike—who’d kept me in the business all those years. I may have called waiters “waitrons” and joked about abusing them, but I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.
No. I instinctively liked and respected anyone who cooked or served food in a restaurant and took any kind of satisfaction in the job. Still feel that way. It is the finest and noblest of toil, performed by only the very best of people.
Okay. I am genuinely angry—still—at vegetarians. That’s not shtick. Not angry at them personally, mind you—but in principle. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have come to my readings, surprised me with an occasional sense of humor, refrained from hurling animal blood at me—even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one, truth be told. But what I’ve seen of the world in the past nine years has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who insists on turning their nose up at a friendly offer of meat.
I don’t care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality—the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience—of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with spluttering indignation.
No principle is, to my mind, worth that; no Western concept of “is it a pet or is it meat” excuses that kind of rudeness.
I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d love seconds.”
I guess I understand if your desire for a clean conscience and cleaner colon overrules any natural lust for bacon. But taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry. I feel too lucky—now more than ever—too acutely aware what an incredible, unexpected privilege it is to travel this world and enjoy the kindness of strangers to ever, ever be able to understand how one could do anything other than say yes, yes, yes.
I’ve tried. Really.
I can cheerfully eat vegetarian food and nothing but for about five days at a clip—if I’m in India. And I’m open to the occasional attempts by the opposition to make their case.
Unfortunately, those attempts don’t always end happily.
A very nice, truly sweet guy, the boyfriend of a producer I was doing business with a few years back, went out of his way—as gently and as undogmatically as possible—to bring me over to the other side, making it something of a personal mission to get me to acknowledge the possibility of a delicious all-vegan meal. Let me repeat that this was a nice guy, who’d made his choices for what was, I’m sure, a visceral abhorrence for meat. When he saw a pork chop on a plate, I have no doubt, what he really saw was a golden retriever that had died screaming. I’d seen the genuine love this man had for his dogs—the way the poor guy would just tear up at the mention of some awful shelter on the other side of the country. I couldn’t find it in my heart to refuse him. I went out to dinner at what was said to be New York’s premier fine-dining vegan restaurant, a favorite, I was assured, of Paul McCartney’s (not exactly a selling point—but a measure of how earnest were his efforts to get me in the door). The food was expensive and painstakingly—even artfully—prepared, and, admittedly, it did not entirely suck.
Over organic wines and much convivial conversation, I even passed on a suggestion (via my dining companion) to “Sir Paul” that I thought might be helpful in his very public efforts to save cute animals. I ventured that if he seriously wanted to see a lot of the rarest, most beautiful, and most endangered animals live longer, healthier lives—and maybe even multiply and prosper—he should, I advised, buy a few million dollars worth of Viagra and Cialis, start spreading that stuff around for free where it mattered, with accompanying public service announcements, in the parts of Asia where they think bear’s paw, rhino horn, and tiger dicks are good boner medicine. Unlike these stratospherically expensive traditional Chinese remedies—the end-products of an enormously profitable black market that rewards the killing and even slow torturing of endangered animals—Viagra will actually make your dick hard, and for cheap. Hand out a few million little blue pills to middle-aged Chinese dudes—maybe even throw in a hooker, to boot—I suggested, and you’ll see some changed hearts and minds. Break a centuries-old pattern of truly monstrous and extreme cruelty to what are often the rarest and most beautiful of animals! (I was later told that he’d actually passed this idea along. A conversation I would like to see a videotape of someday.)
After a surprisingly serviceable meal, I felt pretty good about things. I’d been a nice guy, I thought, had made an effort to be open-minded. The meal hadn’t sucked. We’d even managed to find some common ground.
But then, months later, the poor bastard sent me an e-mail asking (innocently enough) for some statement of support—I think, for the Humane Society. Now, I like the Humane Society for the most part. I may disagree violently with their policy on—and activities on behalf of—anti–foie gras legislation, but I do like cats and dogs. (I’ve adopted one shelter cat after another for much of my life.) I’m supportive of any effort to stop dog-fighting, to spay animals, and to prevent abuse of domestic animals.
I don’t like circuses and, given the chance, would probably vote against the indenturing of elephants and lions and tigers, or any other animals they might w
ant to stand on chairs or train to juggle. I frankly think Siegfried or Roy—whichever one of those guys got mauled by a tiger—got what he deserved. Tigers, to my way of thinking, like to maul people, they’re certainly built for the job, and anything preventing them from doing that on the one hand—while tempting them with a German in a sparkly, cerulean blue suit on the other—is clearly animal cruelty. Somebody who abuses an animal for the sheer joy of it—or solely for purposes of entertainment—should receive, at very least, equal ill treatment.
I’ll go further into PETA territory:
I would have preferred that Steve Irwin, “Crocodile Hunter”—regardless of his saintly conservationist prattle—had ended up as “Crocodile Chow.” That would have been some rough but entirely appropriate justice. In my opinion, the loud, irritating little fuck was in the business of disturbing, poking, tormenting, and generally annoying animals, who would have surely been far happier had they never met him. And if Bindi Irwin lived in my neighborhood, by the way, I would have called Child Protective Services on her parents years ago.
So, contrary to my reputation, I’m like Saint Francis of Fucking Assisi compared to what you might think—a friend to animals large and small, feeder of strays, adopter of runt kittens. A man who, though opposed to vegetarian orthodoxy, is still a reasonable fellow, willing, at least, to listen to the other guy’s point of view.
Until, that is, I got back from Beirut, fresh from a war zone, to find in my inbox an earnest plea for support from my vegan dining companion. The urgency of his tone as he described what was happening to stray cats and dogs somewhere grated on me badly. As I read on, I found myself becoming angrier and angrier—soon becoming furious.
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Page 26