Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  “Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland.”

  I didn’t. I ended up here instead, following the sound of Captain Willard’s voice downstairs to where there was Café du Monde hot in a huge French press on the table and bodies scattered everywhere like the victims of a gas attack, sprawled where they’d fallen, in sometimes unashamedly intimate closeness. I’d gone down close by the couch, someone’s hand tenderly patting the top of my head as my consciousness fuzzed in and out like a radio station in the mountains. I watched as a dozen mouths, a half dozen, mine, too, all moved in weird sync. Everyone knew the words. They were dust on our tongues, spoken so often. Everyone played along.

  “PBR Streetgang, this is Almighty. Over.”

  And out. Way out. When I decided it was time to go, I left, saying goodbye like I was never going to see any of these people again. As things turned out, that was pretty fucking prescient of me because I never again did. Life went on. I found my car, got in it, got it started and headed back for Rochester—not realizing until I crossed the Pennsylvania state line near Erie that I’d gone the wrong way on I-90 and was headed for the Midwest.

  I didn’t bother turning around.

  PEOPLE WERE GATHERING IN SANTA FE. Old friends, mostly. Civilians from back in a time when I used to know some, plus Kurt, who was flying out from Florida. As I flashed past the wet greenness, melting snow and gray office parks on a good stretch of Pennsylvania highway almost completely devoid of traffic, I thought to myself, “How far can it be?”

  Thirty-two hours if you drive pretty much nonstop, riding a wave of borrowed chemical focus, adrenaline and the high, clear buzz of flight. One of the unexpected thrills of intermittent drug bingeing is finding out what’s in your pockets on the morning after. In a rest-stop bathroom with the door locked, I did a quick inventory and discovered that I’d walked off with a bunch of pills, three cigarette lighters, a badly rolled joint that sifted down dry marijuana dandruff when I twisted it between my fingers. Two bottles of Chateau Diana were in my backseat. Not bad. I still had some cigarettes and about a hundred bucks cash, no insurance and only a vague notion of exactly where in New Mexico Santa Fe was and where in the United States New Mexico was. I was golden.

  I CALLED MY DAD from Ohio to tell him I’d gotten sidetracked and was headed for New Mexico.

  “In that car? You’re never going to make it.”

  “It’s the only car I got, Dad.”

  He thought about this for a minute, but my logic was unassailable. “Okay, well, it’s your choice then. But you understand that you’re on your own. No one’s going to be able to bail you out this time.”

  “I know, Dad. Happy New Year.”

  • • •

  I CALLED LAURA from a Village Inn about twenty hours later, in bad shape.

  “How was Buffalo?”

  “I got lost.”

  “Lost? You lived there for years, Jay. Where are you?”

  “Rolla, Missouri.”

  I CALLED MIKEY AND RONNIE, at whose house the party was happening. I got Mikey—a nice guy, proud hillbilly, accustomed to strange phone calls late at night. Even though I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years (not since he and Ronnie had been living in Ann Arbor and I’d dropped in unannounced on another long, weird weekend with friends in tow), he acted like I’d just gone around the corner for a pack of smokes and some Doritos.

  “Where you been?”

  I laughed. “Everywhere, it feels like.”

  I gave him the short version of the story, including my current location. He asked if I wanted him to come and pick me up. For those of you as geographically challenged as I am, Rolla, Missouri, is about nine hundred miles from Santa Fe, but to him, that was nothing. He said he could be there in ten hours or so if I didn’t mind waiting—and meant it. I said thanks, but I’d try to get through on my own.

  “Be careful,” he said. “We’ll all be waiting on you.”

  I ATE BACON AND EGGS and drank a pot of coffee at the Village Inn, staring down at the imitation-wood-grain tabletop like it was TV. By this point, I was having heart palpitations and couldn’t get the stink of ammonia out of my sinuses, the taste of chewing old nickels off my tongue. I was suffering intermittent road hallucinations—weird foliage squirming inside the liquid shadows of the breakdown lane, creeper vine and terrible labial suck-flowers crawling along the edges of my vision like long tendrils of Gulf Coast bog flora reaching all the way up from Tampa to try and drag me back down into that swamp of Cuban sandwiches, palmetto bugs and betrayal.

  But with a destination in mind (and some direction, courtesy of Mikey, who seemed to know where everything in the world was in relation to everything else), I was feeling okay. Like I could maintain. I gassed up the car at a truck stop where they sold elk jerky off a rack by the door and gravity knives and ninja throwing stars under glass near the register. For hundreds of miles, nothing was on the radio dial but sports talk and damnation.

  THEY HAVE A RULE IN SANTA FE that every construction—even things like gas stations and Denny’s franchises—must be done in keeping with a rigidly defined Southwestern “look.” Everything was adobe, red tile, rounded in a way that looked both sleek and ancient at the same time. It was like taking a wrong turn and ending up on a movie set. Or in a cult compound.

  Because of this, I found it difficult to navigate. How does one find his way when all the roads are named after dead Mexican revolutionaries or vicious desert foliage?

  Eventually, I found the right white adobe apartment complex, the right Spanish-style door, and knocked. I was still up—burning like an amphetamine supernova, all psychotic giggles and clenched teeth, twitching like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. Kurt hugged me like a long-lost brother even though it’d only been days since we’d last said goodbye and inside, the party was already in full swing. In an attempt to counterbalance my overintake of accelerants over the past fifty or sixty hours, I began self-medicating with red wine, verdant New Mexican reservation weed and Hamburger Helper cheeseburger casserole. When the crash came, I figured I was going to end up in the hospital and ruin everyone’s fun. An overdose on New Year’s Eve? How déclassé.

  Out in the living room, Mikey broke a glass, Ronnie was in tears. Things were unraveling. Sometime before midnight, I saw the fireworks, the ghost lights swimming behind my eyes, and felt my stuttering heart threaten to stop. The carpet boiled and twisted around my feet in fractal representation of infinite Fibonacci sequences. When I fell down, Kurt caught me, lit my cigarettes for me, talked me down to some cold and aired-out piece of real estate somewhere in the center of my brain: a solid toehold on sobriety, swept clean of junk or consequence, that would only grow as the New Year began. With my head on his shoulder and his hand on the back of my neck, he told me everything was going to be all right. I believed him because I had no other choice but surrender.

  I called Laura. We talked for a long time, listening to Mikey and Ronnie’s birds-of-the-world clock tweet and screech away the hours. Long after midnight but with the New Year still young, she told me to do whatever I needed to do to hang on in New Mexico. Lie, steal, murder. Be creative, she said. She was going to fly back to Colorado as soon as she could—a few days, week at the most—and would then be just a few hours’ drive away.

  “Come up and find me,” she said. “I’ll buy you a taco.”

  I said that I would, faked a coughing jag to cover the lump in my throat that wouldn’t go down. This relationship was still new. Without coming off creepy, I couldn’t tell her how happy she’d made me, how blissful and filled with joy. I had plans again. I had somewhere to be.

  Around dawn, I hung up the phone, curled up on the floor and slept until the following night. When I woke up, Mikey was crouched over me, having just taken my pulse to see if I was still alive. I was. He handed me an iced cappuccino fresh out of the blender in a big plastic cup with a clown on it, and a cigarette, then sat down on the floor next to me with his back against the cabinets.
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  “Man, you snore,” he said. “Loud.”

  I’VE FOUND THAT ONE of the other benefits of the indiscriminate drug spree—beyond pocket joints and the acquisition of too many Bic lighters—is a certain contrapuntal rearranging of one’s mental lawn furniture into patterns more in line with effective feng shui. It is purifying, so long as you survive. And if you don’t? Well, anyway, you’re cured of all life’s mortal sorrows.

  This time, I felt as though I’d come a little bit too close to the Big Black and, on a whim, quit the drugs. It wasn’t a resolution or anything. Just one of those things that happens. Suddenly, I had no taste for them anymore, and, believe it or not, since that night in Santa Fe I’ve managed to stay more or less completely away. Other than whiskey, rum and vodka, cigarettes and beer, tequila and mescal, Ambien and Prilosec, a variety of pills prescribed by actual licensed doctors, antibiotics, four or five pots of coffee a day and a little weed now and then, I haven’t touched drugs since December 31, 1998.

  And I don’t miss them at all, except for almost every day.

  TRUE TO HER WORD, Laura bought me that taco. After I’d been in Santa Fe about ten days, she called to say she was back in Colorado, staying with her ex-boyfriend, and did I think I could make the drive? I told her I’d walk if I had to.

  I headed out for Boulder the next morning, wearing my only pair of jeans and a clean sweater that I’d found in my trunk and saved for just this event. It was a six-hour drive. I gave myself ten just in case. Also unnecessary. Other than work, meeting Laura was probably the first thing in my life I’d ever been early for. Also, probably the last.

  I drove around Boulder for a while, doing my best not to get lost, just driving in circles. It was gorgeous, idyllic, snugged up against the snowcapped foothills and sparkling like some hidden stronghold out of a fairy tale, only infested by hippies and their mangy dogs.

  We’d agreed to meet at the Dark Horse.39 I pulled into a parking spot with a good view of the door and settled in to wait, determined to get the first look at her, not even knowing if I’d recognize her after all this time.

  I needn’t have worried. I caught sight of her walking across the lot with her back to me, wearing a cocoa-brown leather pimp jacket from the seventies, the greatest pair of blue jeans in the world and a pair of stack-heel boots. She was shorter than I remembered, but her hair was short and flaming red, her skin like milk. I was actually up and out of the car before I even thought of getting up and out of the car, already striding across the ice toward her. I called her name and she turned to look at me. She smiled—a gorgeously mean and sardonic thing—while she looked me up and down.

  “You’re shorter than I remember,” she said.

  There was wind and then there wasn’t.

  Sheehan! Gnocchi, baby. Dragging ten. What’s up?”

  I’d been so good at this once. Ten gnocchi? Two-step prep. Step one: boil fucking gnocchi. Step two: plate fucking gnocchi, nap of red sauce, sprinkle of parsley. Put it to the rail. Nothing easier. It was a retard’s station, the pasta trench. Made for cripples, casualties. Just heat and serve, heat and serve, like slorking out cans of Chef Boyardee, only easier. How had I gotten so far down?

  “Thank you, ten gnocchi,” I parrot back. “Ten gnocchi, ten gnocchi, ten gnocchi, ten gnocchi . . .”

  “SHEEHAN! Anyone seen Sheehan?”

  I can hear them yelling for me. Can’t make myself care. Standing out back, sitting out back, folded up on an overturned milk crate, a broken chair, I’m staring at the grass. I’m attempting to close my nostrils against the scent of the breeze off the Dumpsters, the dusty gravel of the parking lot soaked down by grease and leaky trash bags. I’m watching a sparrow up a tree, its branches hanging spidery over the fence beside me, waiting to see if the bird will fly away.

  “Sheehan!”

  Bird flies, I fly. He goes, I go. But the bird is fucking stubborn. I smoke cigarettes I don’t want or need. Two, three packs a day, taking any excuse to step out front, out back. My throat is raw. My chest hurts. I stare at the bird, willing him to go, concentrating on the scrape of his bird feet, the tilt of his bird head.

  “What are you waiting for?” I ask him under my breath. “You’re a fucking bird. You can fly away.”

  “Sheehan! What the fuck?”

  One of the cooks pokes his head out the door, sees me, shouts at me to get back on station. The sparrow explodes upward off the branch with a fluttering thump of wings like a racing heartbeat and a rattle of disturbed leaves. I stand, grind out my cigarette with the toe of my boot and slouch back into the kitchen. What can I say? I’m a pussy.

  MY DAD HAD BEEN RIGHT about the car. It hadn’t quite made it home with me from Colorado.

  Laura and I had spent a night at the Dark Horse. We’d gone up into the Boulder foothills and, at some point, fallen into each other’s arms in the snow. Later, standing, leaning against a boulder in the darkness, she’d folded herself into my chest and the warmth of her body against mine was like an early spring. I wore the imprint of her shoulder, the point of one hip, the palm of her hand on my chest, like a tattoo for days. Later still, descending a switchback road in the dark in her car, I had a feeling like if she was to miss a turn and send the car slipping off into air, tires spinning, it would simply fall forever through a bottomless night, never touching ground.

  But it couldn’t last. After spending a few days with her, sleeping (sometimes with her) in the basement of her ex-boyfriend’s place, I decided it was time to go home. The living arrangements were getting weird. Not weird-dangerous, just weird, period. The three of us—Laura, me, the ex—had all gone out for Chinese food one night and had nothing that we were willing to say to each other or in front of each other. Just trying to figure out who was going to sit where was so complicated it was like dancing.

  On the day I left, I decided to take a northern route back East and try to rush out ahead of a wicked storm that was blowing in,40 but that hadn’t worked at all. I made Cheyenne okay, turned right, and drove smack into the worst blizzard I’d ever seen. For the past several months, all I’d had to contend with were the daily four-o’clock rainstorms in Tampa. They happened every afternoon like clockwork, lasted ten minutes, and were vicious—the rain pouring down like the clouds had been unzipped, like rain was a new trick they’d learned and couldn’t wait to try. But when it was done, everything would be a little better. The smell would get beaten down, the dust knocked off all the limes and palm trees. If nothing else, all the lizards would be washed off my car.

  But this was apocalyptic—serious Old Testament shit, merciless, devoid of all the Hollywood fire-and-brimstone pyrotechnics. One minute, Wyoming highway in the dark. The next minute, white blindness, ice and frigid silence. It was spooky beyond words.

  I ended up spending the night in a truck-stop parking lot barely fifty miles away, at first trying to sleep in the car under my borrowed blanket, then giving that up, kicking my way out through doors that’d been glazed shut with ice, and sleeping inside the truck-stop restaurant. It was twenty below zero. No one got moving again until late the next afternoon, and only then with the help of generator trucks, engine blankets and a wrecker.

  I’d survived, but the car had developed a tick in the engine that slowly became a knock, then rather quickly became a cataclysmic banging—blown gasket, thrown piston rod, maybe worse. I’d made Indiana by this point, which wasn’t bad. Muscling the dying car into a gas-station parking lot just off the interstate, bringing it to a chugging, final stop, I was already thanking the machine for getting me as far as it had.

  Still, a dead car is a dead car. I sold it on the spot to a tow-truck driver who’d stopped at the same gas station for coffee, asking $200 and a lift to the state line, taking his counteroffer of $150, then sorting quickly through my belongings, taking only what was absolutely necessary. The rest I left behind, my possessions being winnowed by circumstance, and climbed into the truck’s cab.

  The driver took me as far as the
Ohio line and left me by the side of a four-lane frontage road. I hitched the rest of the way to Rochester, arriving once again on my parents’ doorstep unannounced, this time without even the car I’d left with.

  Every time I went out, it seemed I came back with less—less people, less cats, less stuff, less large American automobiles. I was okay with this. It felt appropriate somehow. Like butchery, like taking down a nice steak, I was only losing my fat cap, my chain, my inedible silver skin and rind, and I trusted (hoped, anyway) that there was still good meat in me somewhere, beneath all that trim.

  My folks thought differently, though, and my dad was angry that I hadn’t at least had the common sense to pull the plates off the car before handing over the keys.

  “SHEEHAN, CHICKEN?”

  The head cook is talking to me, nominal chef, maybe even a short sweat-equity partner with some piddling 2 or 3 percent, which was still more of anything than I’d ever owned.

  “Chicken, man? You hear me?”

  I do, but I am not responding, staring at the side of his face as he stares down at the sheet tray in front of me, neatly laid out with chicken breasts, immaculately cleaned, butterflied open, half of them already split along the thin hinge of flesh where the breastbone would’ve been had they still been possessed of their skeletons. I have the knife in my hand—my knife, a solid and beautiful Henckel classic with the little finger hook at the butt end of the grip—and am watching the play of muscle under the head cook’s clean-shaven cheek, the lines of veins and tendons running down the side of his neck.

  “Chicken man, get it? Chicken man Sheehan.” He chuckles to himself. This is the eighth sheet tray of chicken breasts I have done this morning. Not because we needed eight sheet trays of chicken breasts for parms and paillards, but because I’d just sort of gotten into a thing. A rhythm. When he looks over at me, I don’t look away. Our gazes collide like two cars on a blind corner, with their full weight and violence.