Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  And then it was 6:00.

  Viverito walked in the door looking utterly exhausted and pissed off because of it, but I understood why so many of the female students—and presumably some of the males—had strong reactions. He was a really good-looking guy: dark-haired, young, trim, and walking like the conquering lion of the fish world.

  It was the “young” that truly hit me. This guy was not older than I was. I guessed we were the exact same age, or that he might have been a year younger. A sense of dread and a small trickle of shame over my age and my circumstances began to assert themselves.

  “My name is Gerard Viverito. We’ve got a really busy week ahead of us, so I don’t want to waste any time. But a couple of things. One, do not—do not—be late to this class. Two, have your homework ready every day. Take notes. For God’s sake, take notes. I can’t believe how often I’m up here and I look out and I don’t see anyone writing anything down. That pisses me off. Three, your knives need to be razor sharp. And when you’re carrying a knife through the kitchen, you say ‘sharp, behind you’ as you go. Even if none of your peers care, I’m going to damn well find out why you didn’t let me know.”

  He went on and explained the grading criteria, the basic day-to-day schedule, a lot of minutiae.

  Then he picked up a fish. “Okay. This is an Atlantic cod. It’s got three segmented dorsal fins, two segmented anal fins. It’s got a chin barb—see, right here—a white lateral line along here, and green leopard spotting along here …”

  He put the fish back on the tray he’d pulled it from and got another. He went on for about forty-five minutes, explaining the physical characteristics of different fish, and then he showed us how to fillet a whole one. The technique he used was meant for hard-boned fish, like bass, a technique called “the up-and-over,” and it was, he said, the hardest technique to learn. Cut from behind the gill plate through the head. Roll the knife, cut back to free the fillet. Slice down the back to the tail. Flex the knife over the spine. Finish by flexing the knife over the ribs. Make sure the fish is “swimming” to the right. Make sure the dorsal fin is toward you. Their eyes stare at you the entire time.

  You need to be using your fillet knife and rely on its flexibility and the angle at which you hold it to aid in getting the fillet cleanly from the bones. If you do it wrong, the knife will pop out of the fillet’s other side.

  All of us found a space around the island of worktables running down the center of the room. It was crowded; we stood shoulder-to-shoulder. We were each given a fish. I got the sea bass. I was close to getting the first fillet off without an issue when I angled the tip of the knife too high. The tip stabbed through the fillet and cut for half an inch downward. Something similar happened with the second fillet. But I pressed the seams of the wounds together and laid the two pieces on top of each other.

  Viverito walked by. He had been circling the room, eyes focused on all our hands and cutting boards, like a shark, for the past fifteen minutes. He stopped at my board and looked down. He didn’t pick the pieces up to examine them. He just said, “Nice,” and walked away, suddenly stopping a few students down to berate them for doing exactly what I had just done. There was a tray on the other side of the room where the fillets were supposed to end up. I took them over immediately, feeling like a cheat and a fraud.

  “You know,” he announced loudly to the ceiling, “it sounds as if most of you need to take your knives to the stone. How the hell do you expect to cut these things if you couldn’t slice a stick of butter with those knives?”

  Later: “Anytime any of you want to come in after class and spend a few hours cutting fish, you’re more than welcome. And, my God, some of you better take advantage.”

  After we were done with the up-and-over we moved on to filleting salmon, which required a much more straightforward technique than the up-and-over. You needed to use your fillet knife for the initial cuts, then the solid, inflexible chef’s knife to remove the skin.

  I started on the salmon and for some reason, started doing the up-and-over. Viverito appeared besides me.

  “Oh, hi,” he said, with a superlative mockery in his voice. “Just for my own information: Why are you using the up-and-over on this salmon?”

  I didn’t answer. I actually couldn’t think of what to say. After I kept silent for a while longer, he said, “When you remember how to talk and figure the answer out, why don’t you let me know. In the meantime, try doing it the way you’re supposed to.”

  After the filleting, we were to remove the skin. When you remove the skin, the knife should be held perfectly flat. Viverito was walking around and then stopped at a vantage point where he could see us all. “Keep your knives flat,” he said quietly.

  Then, a little louder: “Keep your knives flat.”

  Another moment passed. He picked up a chef’s knife the size of a scimitar, raised it up, and started pounding the side of the knife on the steel tabletop. “Keep! Your! Knives! Flat! Keep! Your! Knives! Flat!” he screamed. “Keep! Your! Knives! Flat! Keep! Your! Knives! Flat!”

  The sound of steel on steel with that much force is deafening. We were thrown entirely off balance. We stood shocked and staring.

  “So please keep those knives flat.” He left the room.

  WHEN WE WERE DONE fabricating our fish, we cleaned up and moved into an adjacent room for three hours of lectures: further points of identification; the history of cod and the routes of exploration the fish inspired; the pros and cons of farm-raised fish. Each day we’d have a tasting of different varieties of the same species: cod, salmon, clams, and on the last lecture day, we’d taste different caviars.

  We all took notes, of course. And I found myself filling page after page after page, in an almost incomprehensible scrawl, trying to keep up with what Viverito was saying. I was in awe; the guy seemed to know everything. He could go off on long, long tangents about the history of fish farming in Hawaii, countless ways of preparing catfish or crab, the disgusting conditions of shrimp beds in Vietnamese rivers.

  There was also a daily game of Jeopardy! He’d move alphabetically through the roster and we’d pick a question in a given category from the overhead slide projected on the screen behind Viverito’s desk. If you got it wrong, he went to the next name. You lost your daily quiz points. There were three slides’ worth of this stuff and it could be endless if people kept missing the answers. He’d go on until he proved his point or got bored. He sounded bored pretty frequently. Not with the subject matter. But bored with us as a group and the flubbed answers and the hacked-up fish. His eyes were always red, but if he fixed them on you, you knew you had done something particularly stupid.

  The first two days were dense with spoken and silent recriminations. But fragments of the guy’s personality began to leak out. One of the class members, Dylan, didn’t show up after the first day. Viverito asked where he was.

  Alyssa spoke up. “Dylan really wants to be here, but he isn’t the most ambitious student. He just … he needs to be more motivated.”

  “So why exactly isn’t he here?”

  Alyssa was a pretty seventeen-year-old, with a soft face. She looked distinctly uncomfortable right now. “It’s too early for him. He said he needed to switch into a later class.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head side to side almost imperceptibly. He didn’t say anything for a minute until he began that day’s Jeopardy!

  Everyone was fucking the answers up—me, Adam, Brookshire, Lombardi, all the kids.

  Finally, Viverito just couldn’t contain himself. “I have students that are really proud that they’ve never been into the library. They say it has nothing to do with cooking. My advice to you, and not just to succeed in this class, is this: figure out where that library is. It isn’t just the building you went to on your orientation. If one day you think that you haven’t really learned anything that day, pick up a cookbook and teach yourself something. Otherwise it’s been a waste of twenty-four hours.

  “Take
a calendar and block off class time. Then block off studying time. Then go to a vineyard and learn how a grape grows, learn how it’s picked, learn how it’s crushed. How it ferments, how it’s bottled. Go on all kinds of mini field trips. And relate them to what you learn. When I went to culinary school, I always said ‘God, I wish I knew more about this.’

  “Go learn so you have a basis of knowledge. We’re in the Hudson Valley—we’re at a great advantage. It breaks my heart when I hear a student say, ‘I’m so bored. This place is boring. There’s nothing to do here.’ It breaks my heart.”

  Obviously, I knew exactly where the library was, but I stayed there later that afternoon and going forward. My homework answers were exceptionally detailed and elaborate. I spent even more time studying. It wasn’t for Viverito’s benefit, however, and not because I was scared of him. The more hours I spent around the guy, I found it harder and harder to stomach the idea of being the person who took the shortcut.

  I WATCHED MY BLOOD trickle bright and red under the heavy fluorescence of the CIA fish room. The gills of a fish—a sea bass, in this case—are heavy, crude syringes, livid with bacteria. There’s nothing on them you want introduced under the skin. I’d been scaling the fish; I’d been careless—it was 6:15 and my alarm had gone off at 2:36 a.m.—and the spikes punctured deep into my thumb. I dropped the scaler to the red tile floor, stepped away from the sink, and barked an obscenity. In five minutes my hand would feel like it had been drenched in acid. Minute by minute the pain graded up. Before long, it was exquisite, total. My eyes watered. A little drum of nausea beat in my stomach.

  Adam walked up to me, pulled my hand in front of his face, whistled, and said, “Prepare yourself—that’s going to hurt like a bitch.”

  Since the cutting part of the class had started, most of my fillets had been looking like roadkill. I was at that second trying the up-and-over on an undeserving fish.

  And then Viverito took a moment from his rounds to stand at my shoulder and ask, “What the hell are you doing?”

  I squirmed, just a little bit. What the hell was I doing? I had a cold fish under my fingers, and scales stuck to my forearm. I had a knife in my injured hand. I’d just started cutting away the flesh from the bones. I was also so tired I couldn’t recall my middle name. I was angry, because I was so tired. I was full of ire at being made to feel uncomfortable, and, with this man at my elbow, beginning to feel frayed. My mind had gone tabula rasa; there was nothing there. What the hell was I doing? I went for honesty. “I don’t know.”

  He stared me down. He was about six inches from me; I could feel either heat or hostility radiating off him. He kept staring. I noticed that his eyes were seriously bloodshot. I forgot completely about my hand. His lips pursed, and he looked like he might spit bile. His breathing picked up speed. He said, “Yeah—no kidding you don’t know.”

  When this guy cuts a fish, the flesh seems to just swim away from its body. The bones and ribs are bare, and you can hear a chorus of mermaids and sirens singing through the mists. But I was the one cutting, and now he was glowering at me and all I could hear was the sound of everyone else’s knives. I shot a look around; I had never seen my peers as focused on anything as they were right then on their fish.

  He began speaking a mantra: “Fish to the right. Fish to the right. Fish to the right. Fish to the right.” Every syllable was a drill right into whatever confidence I owned before class started. “Where’s your right hand?” he asked. I had no idea. My head buzzed with static. I moved a hand. He pushed it away. “No, not that right hand. Your other right hand. Come on. Oh, for God’s sake, come on. I said, ‘to the right.’ ”

  I felt different emotive sparks start to flicker all through my head. I wanted to turn and grind the fish in his face. I wanted to drop under the table and crawl away. I wanted to fall to my knees, kiss his hand, and beg him to leave me alone. I wanted to cut the freaking fish correctly. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to remember where my right hand was. All these things in turn, in reverse, simultaneous.

  I started flopping the fish around. At some point, I must have gotten it right, because he walked away. My hearing came back. I heard him yell at someone: “If I ever see you pick up a fish by its tail again, I swear I’ll stab you.” And then to someone else: “This is a really easy technique if you know what you’re doing. Which you obviously don’t.”

  My hand had reverted to a high alarm of pain.

  I began thinking more about acting. I know everyone has a role to play. His was to be the Idi Amin of this chilly, fishy Uganda-in-a-basement. He wore scales instead of medals. My role was to be cowed and terrified, and to grope around my guts for some kind of grace under pressure. Strike the last one. I got the first two down, though. I knew he wasn’t like this outside of the room. Probably. But for me and everyone else: what I was in the classroom is what I’m like outside it, only distilled. Ever done anything you’re ashamed of? Something rotten you surprised yourself with? You wonder how you could have sunk to doing it. It’s not so dissimilar to the feeling of seeing your masks dismantled and getting a good glimpse of the sun-deprived skin underneath.

  I had a neighbor in New Hampshire, an older guy, whose lawn I used to mow when I was a kid. Once, he said this to me: “Jonathan, never try to teach a pig to sing. It frustrates you and annoys the pig.”

  I was wondering if there was any point being in this class, any point being in school. Exposure to knowledge, to technique, did not mean you were going to pick it up, be able to put it to any use. There might be no point in trying to teach me to sing. But I still stayed after class was over, in the library, looking up the answers to the study questions and writing them down in minute detail. It was hard to write; my hand was killing me.

  The next day, we took a break during lecture and everyone left the room except me, Alyssa, and Viverito. She asked him: “What do you do when you aren’t teaching?”

  He looked irritated, then, all of a sudden, he didn’t. “I don’t know … I try and teach myself something every day. I work in my garden. If I have nothing to do, I’ll spin a globe and stop it with my finger, and if I don’t know anything about the culture and what they eat where my finger’s pointing, I’ll look it up. Sometimes, I go and see music.”

  People started coming back into the room. “What sort of music do you like?” Alyssa asked.

  “I used to follow the Grateful Dead around, but, obviously, I can’t do that anymore. But I went and saw RatDog a few nights ago.”

  RatDog: Bob Weir’s solo project. I couldn’t help myself. “You saw RatDog? Were they good? Do they do original stuff, or is it all Dead material?”

  “All Dead stuff. And Dylan. You a Dead fan?”

  “Yeah. I never followed them around, but I’m pretty fanatical. I always loved the Dead, and they were great when I saw them. But I came of age listening mostly to punk stuff.”

  “Really? I grew up in DC, and I went to a lot of punk shows. I used to listen to the Bad Brains, Black Flag.…”

  “So did I … I still do.”

  “I saw the Rollins Band, Fugazi—”

  “Me too …”

  “Jane’s Addiction in a tiny club. Back in the late ’80s. They were amazing.”

  “I saw them in a tiny club also. And they were amazing.”

  He looked at me for a second.

  “Yeah—I’m old,” I blurted out. He kept looking, then shook his head, as if he was trying not to laugh.

  “Okay,” he said to everyone. “Let’s get back to shellfish depuration.”

  And there he was at my shoulder again, just as a fillet came free from the side of a haddock. I put the knife down. He picked the fillet up. Then he picked the bones of the haddock up and ran his finger over the big scraps of meat I’d left clinging.

  “Poor thing,” he muttered as he put the fillet back down. He made a scratch on his clipboard.

  During lecture, Viverito stopped what he was doing and asked us, “Who’s going on Chef Sebald’s chicken
slaughter this afternoon?”

  About five of us raised our hands.

  “You should all be going,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that chicken doesn’t originate wrapped in plastic. If you’re going to eat it, which I assume most of you do, you need to see what it’s really like to take those chickens down.

  “Man, I have to tell you—chickens are dirty, filthy, disgusting animals. Those of you who are going will find out. But you’ll definitely learn something. And Chef Sebald—he might look like an old man, but when you see that guy maneuvering half a steer carcass, you know he’s no joke.”

  AFTER CLASS, WE ATE lunch and scattered for an hour or so. We were to be in the parking lot at 1:00, at which point we’d meet Sebald and carpool into New Paltz.

  I had changed out of my uniform into the grimiest, most ripped jeans I owned and a T-shirt I’d used all summer to paint in. I’d brought an extra, just in case I got sprayed with blood. I’d spent a long time the night before sharpening my boning knife on my water stone.

  I sat on a bench at the edge of the parking lot with about fifteen minutes to kill. I saw my friend Brian walking up to me. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the end of academics. He was wearing jeans, distressed sneakers, and his white chef’s coat.

  “What’s up with the coat?” I asked. “That’s going to get ruined.”

  “I just realized I’d forgotten my T-shirt.”

  “Are you naked under the coat?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got no choice.”

  I gave him my extra T-shirt. He offered to launder it before he returned it, but I thought of the shirt being covered with chicken viscera and told him it was a gift.

  Adam and Lombardi appeared.

  Brian was explaining that while we had started this block of classes with Sebald and meat, he was in a group of students that had started with fish, then switched to meat, and that Viverito had been his instructor. “That guy’s the shit,” Brian said. He was full of admiration.

  Adam got right to the heart of the matter: “What was the final like?”