Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  I did the best I could—about what I could’ve managed had someone thrown me, in my boots and blue jeans, onto the stage at Radio City Music Hall and told me to dance the fucking Nutcracker. I made maple–sweet potato dinner rolls that smelled like heaven but turned hard as rocks three minutes after they came out of the oven; a tiramisu that tasted wonderful and looked lovely but collapsed into liquid the minute it was unmolded. I learned that when translating on the fly between metric and American measures, one cannot just estimate. Or rather that one can, but that the resulting pâté à choux will be like eating cement, only less palatable. I worked Payard’s book to death, took it with me to bed at night, and did manage one decent dessert—poached pears crusted with icing sugar like ice crystals and set on a slant in a tarn of cabernet reduction sweetened with simple syrup—but could only pull that one off because I actually understood such words as poached, reduction and pear.

  After four days, Robert called me into his office and said, “I’m sorry, Sheehan. But it’s like you don’t know anything about baking at all . . .”

  Albuquerque is a great place to visit but a terrible place to live, and the trick is to just visit it every day without ever getting attached or drawn in. Because once you start living there—in it and in the moment—it tends to reveal itself, like an old man showing his ding-dong to Girl Scouts, as the obvious third-world city of exile and grim ending place it has always been. The Land of Entrapment is what the locals call New Mexico, and anyone who stays more than six months is given special license by the city to make vicious fun of all the Texans, Californians, New Yorkers and Sun Belt refugees, newly arrived, and still prattling on about all the charming architecture and inexpensive turquoise jewelry.

  Soon enough, they’ll be mugged. Soon enough, the cops will show up to raid the meth lab in that charming little casita across the street. Soon enough, they’ll leave, suitcases loaded down with faux-authentic Indian trade blankets and Kokopelli statuettes, taking their gringo dollars with them and leaving their credit-card numbers for the identity thieves.

  Albuquerque has a gang problem, the severity of which is complicated by the fact that most of the gangs there seem to be splinter sets composed of three guys with a broke-ass lowrider rolling on a doughnut spare and one pawnshop pistol shared among them. It’s also the only city in America where I’ve been beaten up for reading. Granted, it was probably my fault. It was a Friday night. I should probably have been out getting drunk on mouthwash, knocking up one of my cousins or robbing a bank like everyone else. And true, the book I was reading didn’t have any pictures in it, which could’ve been seen as provocative—as acting intellectually uppity by the standards of the 3:00 a.m. crowd at the Waffle House on Central Avenue, where I was sitting.

  But even I was shocked when the four-foot-tall cholo with the crazyweed eyes and yellow bandanna leaned over my table and yelled, “Hey! Wha’choo doing, mang? Reading?”

  I allowed that, yes, I was, in fact, reading. I even went so far as to hold out the book to show him. You know, in case he’d never seen one before.

  And he batted it out of my hand (on the second try), looked at me as hard as he could, and said, “What’re you, some kinda faggot?”

  Now, I’ve been called a lot of names over the years. Sometimes I’ve deserved them, sometimes I haven’t. But I was boggled by what leap of logic my diminutive friend must’ve made in that tiny, fogged-up little brain of his to equate reading with flagrant homosexuality. Sitting there, I tried to think how he’d arrived at one from the other, but gave up and instead shouted back, “Why? You looking?”

  He slammed his fists down on the table. I laughed at him. And he punched me square in the face. He was then immediately set upon by two waiters, a very large cook, three customers, and one homeless guy who dragged him, kicking and spitting, out the door and into the parking lot, where they proceeded to beat the mortal shit out of him and stomp half the teeth out of his head.

  Meanwhile, I went back to my book. I’d been going to that particular Waffle House almost every night for several months at that point and had made a lot of friends. I was a regular. My little buddy, tragically, was not.

  NOT UNTIL LATER THAT NIGHT, while walking home without even a black eye to show for my trouble, did I finally figure out the poor little fella’s logic. I’d been reading The Sailor on the Seas of Fate. The author? Michael Moorcock.

  Get it? Moor-cock?

  Shit, I thought. Maybe that little prick had been smarter than he’d looked.

  DUMB, BRUTAL, POVERTY-STRICKEN AND CORRUPT, a city where you could be shot just for venturing into the wrong neighborhood in broad daylight and punched in the face for reading in public—but Albuquerque is a beautiful city, too, held in the embrace of the Sandia Mountains, surrounded by flat-topped mesas and the black snouts of cold volcanoes. You can’t walk a hundred yards without bumping into art—a gallery, a sculpture, the work of taggers and guerrilla muralists. When it’s not on fire (as it is two or three times every year), the cottonwood bosque along the Rio Grande is damn close to heaven.

  It’s a cheap city, so it tends to attract artists and writers, amateur thespians, young freaks and dangerous fringe elements; in turn attracting the kinds of businesses and services required by such a population. In Albuquerque it’s never difficult to find a futon, a payday loan, a gallery opening featuring photographic vaginal self-portraiture, a good jukebox, a fish taco or a pawnshop television. Usually, this can all be found on the same block if you know where to look, the mattress stores and fly-by-night shopfronts sharing space with Mexican panaderías, Eritrean markets, Vietnamese after-market auto parts shops and Korean bodegas selling lottery tickets, Enramex phone cards, Chinese cigarettes and baklava.

  It’s an international city. English is not its primary language. Or its second or third. And it can be an incredibly friendly and forgiving city when you least expect it. Shortly after arriving in Albuquerque, at the same Waffle House where I would later be assaulted for flaunting my literacy, I was relaxing at the counter with a bunch of locals, all of us talking about Christmas. When I mentioned that I’d just moved to town and that Laura and I were planning on spending a quiet holiday alone, three complete strangers each individually invited Laura and me to join them for the holiday at their homes, to share their deep-fried turkeys, chicharrones, posole and mashed sweet potatoes with them. A few months later, Laura and I would also accidentally find ourselves caught up in some other family’s Fourth of July celebration just because we were close by when the party kicked off—everyone lighting things on fire, singing mariachi music and firing their guns in the air.

  My favorite Vietnamese restaurant was also a regular stop for the teenage prostitutes who worked the stroll on Central Avenue, old Route 66. I also liked the pho shop that shared space with the crooked emissions-testing station that would sell clean inspections for forty bucks cash: Château Tailpipe.

  Laura and I couldn’t chuck a brick downtown without hitting someone selling tamales or shrimp cocktail out of a cooler, piñon off the bed of their pickup. We spent many long afternoons cocooned inside a knockoff Chinese tiki-bar restaurant on Central Avenue with soggy dim sum and glacially slow service just because it always felt as though no one who worked there had been allowed out since sometime in the middle sixties. To them, Kennedy was still president, the Beatles still a bunch of wild longhairs, the streets still full of sexy ’Vettes and pre-fastback Mustangs. When whole days and nights would go by without a single diner coming in, I could picture the entire staff—cooks and waitresses, the house band, managers in dusty tuxedos with frilled shirts, bartenders wearing arm garters—all sitting down and discussing in hushed tones whether this whole trend in Polynesian cocktails and Don Ho covers might finally be coming to an end.

  Just an hour south of the city, the greatest green-chile cheeseburger in the world was being made the same way it’d been since the 1940s—beef ground every morning and hand-formed, chiles roasted and chopped, shredded lettuce, m
ayo, onions and mustard, all slapped together wetly, overhanging the bun, and served with a side of green-chile beans. It was in San Antonio, New Mexico, at a dusty joint called the Owl Bar—a dim and rambling adobe roadhouse famous for many things, but mostly for having been the place where the Manhattan Project scientists working at the nearby Trinity Site came to live, eat, drink, carouse and use the phone. The detonation of the first atomic bomb was actually watched from the front porch of the Owl, the flash of white and towering mushroom cloud convincing all the residents of San Antonio (except the owner of the bar and a handful of dorky gringos packing slide rules in their pockets) that the Rapture had finally come.

  The Owl remains one of my favorite restaurants in the world. I’ve never found a cheeseburger I loved more.

  Two or three weeks after being fired as a baker, I took a job as chef de cuisine at the Ranch—a restaurant loved and respected by the locals, offering comfort food and New Mexican cuisine, downscale charm and fine-dining quality. In style, it reminded me a lot of La Cité: rustic but polished, the dining room done all in bold primary colors with plates to match and cowboy-kitsch knickknackery hanging from the walls. The food hit that sweet spot of American appetite: a fixed point stuck halfway between haute and coddling, a classless middle-mark of caviar pretension cut with meat-loaf dreams. Chefs and owners in Albuquerque and Santa Fe—in the West in general—are masters at hitting that bull’s-eye because of the West’s essential cultural disconnect: the prevailing wisdom that the best dinner you’re ever going to have is one eaten off fine china while wearing your favorite blue jeans.

  So the Ranch did meat loaf and mashed potatoes by the ton. It did flat blue-corn enchiladas with chile-marinated chicken flashed under the salamander and chimis with fried potatoes on the side in a one-off riff on Michoacán cuisine. It also did a perfect pork loin, wild-mushroom polenta, rough-cut filet mignon under a glaze of maître d’ butter, and trout with poblano-corn relish. After being hired and doing a week’s immersion training at a second Ranch location out in Bernalillo (which consisted mostly of a crew of serious, name-taking asesinos teaching my punk white Frenched-up East Coast ass exactly what a burrito was supposed to look like, what an avocado was, how to make a proper posole and what it meant when a check came off the printer saying XMAS48—all invaluable lessons), I took the sauté post on the dinner line at the Albuquerque location and went to work. I cooked every night, handled specials, did ordering and costing. Figuring to load most of the weight of change onto myself at first, I started doing scratch sauces, fruit chutneys for the pork, and bringing tough, durable fish onto the menu: halibut cheeks with dill and lemon, sea scallops dressed simply in a grapefruit mignonette, sometimes just a squeeze of lime, served over jicama slaw, and blacktip shark marinated as a kind of demi-seviche, then seared in a pan with salsa cruda for upscaled shark tacos.

  I probably pushed it too far with the poached lobster tails plated curled around a dollop of Japanese squid salad over a fan of perfect soft green avocado slices. That may have been a bit esoteric, a bit Alfred-Portale-at-Gotham, for what was essentially a jumped-up three-a-day New Mexican diner. But I didn’t care. The specials always moved, even when the traitorous waitstaff went around making fun of me to the customers. The parking lot was always full. The dining room was always crowded, always loud, and when the rush came, it would hit like a wave—building and building until it broke over the kitchen in a wash of cursing, spinning and droning house music pulsing from the greasy galley radio. In the kitchen, we worked with a giant skull-and-crossbones pirate flag hung on the fryer end of the line and comported ourselves accordingly.

  IT’S FUNNY HOW CHEFS AND COOKS of a certain age love and know by heart Apocalypse Now—the movie that most speaks to our condition, to the total freak-out madness, stupid macho bullshit and occasional lost-outpost resignation of even the most successful among us. In Buffalo, at La Cité, we would start off some nights with Jim Morrison singing “The End” on the galley radio and lighting the trench on the flat grill with 150-proof rum or cooking vodka in homage to the opening scene: the napalm strike lighting up the treeline. When we were feeling particularly expressive, Matty and I would pack the trench first with mesclun greens or broccoli florets, then pour on the liquor and FOOM! This is the end, my only friend, the end . . .

  It’s funny how many cooks I know who love the book Dispatches by Michael Herr and feel that, more than any other writer (myself included), Herr got it just right. He nailed the language, the shattering dislocation, the weird, kinky, hateful love of doing a terrible thing with terrible consequences night after night after night. And, yeah, he was writing about men at war, but that’s only a detail. Take away the guns, the choppers, the bombs. Put all the grunts in white jackets. Dress the VC like a hungry pretheater rush, and he could’ve been talking about us.

  And it’s funny how kitchens—or at least the ones I’ve known—are so much like the fighting ships of the British navy as described, say, by Patrick O’Brian in his Lucky Jack Aubrey books: so full of strange vernacular, stranger tradition, both equally loved and fiercely kept. There is an element of the piratical, the tyrannical, a sense of always being called upon to do the very nearly impossible on short supplies, while desperately undermanned, with no hope of relief in sight. As on the lower decks, we had harsh discipline, our own superstitions, our own jet-black humor, our Sunday plum duff in the form of staff meals (fine or foul, depending) that would cause harsh feelings when denied, and our daily ration of grog, which translated into the shift drink—one freebie, on the bar, at the end of a long night. A shift drink could easily become five or six if the bartender had been properly inducted into the galley family, would be added to all the regular drinking done in the course of any night’s service (of the cooking vodka, the beers squirreled away in lowboys, the speed pourers of gin and tonic or cheapjack tinto de verano of red wine and orange soda mixed up by the bus crew).

  It’s rum, sodomy and the lash on Saturday nights. Anything—any threat, any promise—to keep a line going through the last hard push, final tables, last calls. I’ve seen chefs hit. I’ve seen them scream (never knew one who didn’t). I’ve seen them pay cash to guys just to keep them on the line for twenty more minutes and seen them carry off the casualties (of heat, drink or misadventure) on their own shoulders. I’ve done all the same myself in my time. And as in the navy, the hope always is that you have a good captain at the wheel, a lucky one, one who has all the knowledge, the training, the dirty tricks and just plain illegal skills required to make a kitchen run smoothly in rough waters. You hope he’s a guy who came up through the ranks himself, who understands the heat, the noise, the furious pressure; who knows what it’s like to go home—bloody, exhausted, stinking of truffles, liquor and rancid grease—at the end of the night to a woman (or a man) who doesn’t get it at all, who wonders why you don’t just take a luff gig folding T-shirts at the mall, who complains incessantly about the stink, the suppurating wounds, that time you came home with a mauled chicken foot stuck in the tread of your boot. You hope you find yourself laboring under a chef who loves it as much as you do.

  At the Ranch, I had a sense of almost coming back to myself, of almost finding the groove again. But the vibe in Albuquerque was too diffuse, the work—even on the busiest nights—too simple to be engaging on the gut level I’d once known. I tried, but I couldn’t get into it deep enough that the job took on a life of its own—became the thing that I was, not just the thing that I did, showing up every day for a paycheck.

  I remember a night, a few months in, when I burned myself on a pan handle. It was the veg pan—a big, heavy saucier full of butter and mixed vegetables, squashes and corn and chiles and what-have-you—and it was a slow night, lots of enchiladas, lots of salads. I don’t know how long the pan had been sitting there undisturbed, racked up on a back burner, waiting while the smaller sautés got juggled across the front six, but it’d been a while. The handle, which should’ve been turned out to hang above the cool o
f my sauté mise, had gotten bumped or moved and was, instead, toasting like a marshmallow above the blazing flame of an open burner. Ten minutes it’d been there. Maybe fifteen. Loaded with veg, it probably weighed six or eight pounds. Then there’s me, not thinking, needing to flip the veg in the pan so it doesn’t scorch, in a rush and reaching back, grabbing the handle bare-handed (stupid, I know—should’ve used a side towel) and lifting it right off the burner. I didn’t feel the heat for about half a second—long enough for me to bring it across the stovetop and near my body, to start the motion of flipping. But when the pain came, it was awesome.

  I dropped the pan, spilled the veg all over the nonskids, bellowed like a wounded bull and went down to my knees—ruined hand clamped between my thighs, short of breath and wide-eyed from knowing, almost instantly, that this was going to be a bad one.

  The story here is not of the burn. The burn itself was meaning-less—I’d gotten them before, had survived, had certainly hurt myself worse. All part of the action. The story is in how I reacted.

  I went home.

  Not immediately. I iced the hand (palm burned slick and shiny and white, not even blistered but hardened—like some kind of antique hand under a thick coat of varnish). I got a wet towel and swabbed it down, calmly assessing the damage, impressed by how the actual shape of the pan handle had been burned neatly into my flesh, complete with the oval hole at the end of it and the faint tracing of the embossed maker’s name tattooed now on my hand. I swallowed six ibuprofen, and with a side towel full of ice gripped in my claw, fingers forced to curl as the skin tightened, I stood another hour or so at my station, sweating through the pain, thinking of my father, who I’d once seen tape one of his own fingers back together after cutting it halfway off, then go back to work without a word, and cursing my own stupidity and weakness under my breath.