So I compensated by taking my final cooking job as (I assume) the only colonial-French-trained chef and published food writer ever to work the short-order line at a Waffle House.
Yes, this was the same Waffle House where I’d been punched in the face for the blatant faggotry of reading on a Friday night, the same one where I’d been a regular since arriving in the Land of Enchantment. For all the months I’d spent looking for work, this was the one place I hadn’t thought to try until I walked onto the night-shift line one evening to help out a friend and liked it so much I just decided I’d stay.
It was a great job, the best send-off the industry could possibly have given me. I had a plastic name tag. I wore a paper hat like a 1940s soda jerk. I worked right out in the open, just on the other side of a high counter, with no checks and no dupes—just called orders from the waitresses for hash browns, scattered, smothered and covered, shouted over the din of a cramped bar rush; a half dozen egg pans all going at once, grits boiling over on my flattop and sweet-smelling waffle batter scorching in the tiered ranks of presses. I did my own dishes, hustled the drunks, poured the coffee, hung out with the nighthawks, and, in the dead zone between four and six in the morning, wrote out most of my restaurant reviews longhand, hunched over in the farthest back booth, scribbling with a cup of thick, double-brewed, trucker-strength coffee in one hand and a cigarette in my teeth.
I worked both the Alibi critic’s gig and nights at the Waffle House pretty much until the day I left Albuquerque for Denver. As a matter of fact, my writing for the Alibi and for Westword overlapped by a couple weeks in July of 2002. I was commuting six hours, back and forth across the Raton Pass, handling final details in ’Burque for four days, then spending long weekends in and around Denver, eating and trying to get my legs under me in yet another new city. Even after settling in Denver, I moonlighted a little under an assumed name—covering my absence in Albuquerque with a pseudonymous me who never admitted to being hundreds of miles gone.
So, sometimes, it’s who you don’t know that matters, too.
I’D ACTUALLY APPLIED for the Westword job over Memorial Day weekend 2002. Laura and I, both sick to death of working split schedules (her on days, me on nights) and of seeing each other only over work dinners, when she was always tired and I was always bad company (focused on memorizing menus, details of the decor, our waiter’s name, or trying to figure out why my crème brûlée tasted like ham), had decided to take an eighteen-hour vacation to Boulder. We’d drive up, get a room, go to Juanita’s (a divey, cheap and storied Mexican restaurant on Pearl Street, where, once, we’d spent some time together falling in love), drink too much, eat some flautas, then stumble around drunk on the pedestrian mall for a while, watching the buskers and eyeballing the trust-fund hippies.
And that’s just what we did. We made the drive, got the room, settled in at Juanita’s and started knocking back Coronas and shots of tequila until the world had gone just the right kind of blurry. We had a little something to eat and tried to relax once more into each other’s company. It started raining, but when we were ready, we headed out into it anyway, oblivious. The storm had chased just about everyone else inside, and we had the Pearl Street Mall almost to ourselves so walked along it arm-in-arm, leaning on each other, kissing in the dry spots under awnings or in doorways—playing at being in a love story quite different from the one we were living. Sweeter maybe, and certainly more kind.
Because I am a gentleman (though often latent in my manners), I eventually ducked out into the downpour to grab Laura a newspaper to hold over her head. There was a profusion of free weeklies to choose from. Westword just happened to be the one I grabbed.
Sobered up somewhat and soaking wet, we drove back to the hotel. Laura and I have always been good in hotels. They are our truest element.
While I was taking a shower, she lay on the bed flipping through the paper we’d carried in with us. She was the one who found the box ad saying that Westword was looking for a new restaurant critic. She was the one who said, “Hey, you should apply for this.” I had other things on my mind.
I don’t remember much else after that. But apparently, during the night, I’d crawled out of bed and started writing a letter. Hungover the next morning, riding south again with Laura behind the wheel, I finished it. And that night, with a few fresh beers in me, I typed it into the computer and fired it off as an e-mail to Westword. It was a cover letter, more or less—nine pages long with no résumé attached, no clips, no nothing. Once again, to say that this was the wrong way to go about applying for a job would be a colossal understatement. There is a process, with newspapers, as in any trade, a dance as formalized as an Elizabethan galliard. I’d come in doing the Lindy Hop.
What I didn’t know was that Patty—my soon-to-be chief—had already more or less made up her mind on who she was hiring for the critic’s job. She’d narrowed down hundreds of applicants55 to three strong contenders and was planning to make her final decision after returning from a journalism conference. She was on the road when my ridiculous, ranting cover-letter-slash-curriculum-vitae arrived at the office and got it forwarded to her the next morning.
She wrote back to me directly, asking for writing samples and a résumé as quickly as I could get them to her.
I sent her some samples (including the butter essay, which I now considered a good-luck charm) but, for reasons I can’t explain even today, refused to send a résumé.
Patty wrote back, telling me she really needed a résumé, like, immediately. “I don’t care what’s on it,” she stated. “I just need to know what you’ve been doing for the past ten years. Were you in jail? Abducted by aliens? Not that either of those would disqualify you from writing for Westword. I just need to know.”
So, embarrassed, I banged out a résumé, miserably trying to stitch together a skein of names and dates and places, to cover all the blank spaces where I’d been sick or wandering or unemployable, to organize the thirty-odd kitchens I’d worked in into some semblance of a life. Though not a deliberate attempt to mislead—just from poor memory, zero record keeping and a fervent desire not to look like a schnook on paper—the thing was a total work of fiction. But I sent it to her anyway. There were phone calls, I think. I was called up to Denver for a face-to-face over beers and fat steaks at a restaurant that I hated. But most of what came next was just waiting.
For a month. Just long enough to forget. I’m no better at waiting now than I was when I was fourteen, but at fourteen I hadn’t yet acquired the bad habits and cushion of disappointments that make waiting easier. I settled back into my routine of review dinners and night shifts—waking to late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows, walking across the street to the 7-Eleven for beer and beef jerky, smoking the rag ends of joints and lying on the couch watching old Czechoslovakian hard-core porno tapes that I’d picked up somewhere, Apocalypse Now, Repo Man.
Sometime around the Fourth of July, I got the call. It was afternoon. I was sleeping, the ringing of the phone penetrating my dreams like a lancet through the skin of a boil. Staggering and still half-asleep, I found the cordless buried under a pile of papers and laundry near the computer and listened while Patty told me the job was mine if I wanted it: salary, health insurance, 401(k), very generous expense account, an office. I blithered out some kind of thank-you, said I’d be there tomorrow if she needed me to, then hung up the phone before I either said something to make her reconsider or fell down.
Which was good because in my cotton-headed, half-dreaming haze, I’d thought she was calling from a restaurant, was a manager or HR person telling me that I was finally going back to the trenches again. For a minute or two, my only thoughts were about my chef jackets, my knives, my gear. During one of those bad months, I’d packed it all away somewhere just to get it out of sight—probably the only cleaning I did that entire time. I started shaking, pissed that I couldn’t remember where I’d put my knives, pissed that they were gone, pissed about everything.
I sat down on the couch, lit a cigarette, switched on the TV. Repo Man was in the VCR. Rubbing my head, scrubbing my fingers through my recently shortened hair, I slowly pieced things together. I didn’t need my knives, my jackets. I wasn’t going back. I was going away again, to Denver. I looked around at our crappy little apartment cluttered with all our crappy thirdhand, pawnshop and discount-store stuff. Down in the parking lot were two broken cars suffering from more vehicular maladies than we had credit to fix. I understood, in a postmodern sort of way, that this was supposed to be one of those moments when I took a deep breath, looked around, and realized that I really loved all my things, my home, the trappings of Laura’s and my combined poverty—the broken cars and cracked dishes and thrift-store chairs.
But all I wanted was to burn the place to the ground with everything in it, push the cars off the edge of the mesa and walk away clean. I just wanted to get gone. Because, fuck it, being poor is only noble when you’re not. It only looks good in movies. In real life, all you are is hungry a lot and walking.
IN MY DEBUT COLUMN FOR WESTWORD (which was supposed to be a catchall restaurant-news and industry-gossip roundup, like Page Six but with foie gras) I wrote about myself. I told the story about the strawberries and punching the produce supplier, talked about my likes and dislikes, my pet peeves, about sneaking sushi in the parking lot at Wegmans when I was a kid, how much I hated celery (except in mirepoix) and what dried blood smells like crusted on a chef’s whites on a ninety-degree night. All I was trying to do was introduce myself to my new city, my new community of chefs and food people. I thought it was actually rather restrained. My first proper review was a lightweight knock-around of a popular neighborhood Italian restaurant in which I wrote primarily about the handmade lobster ravioli, growing up on the East Coast and the anti-Semites one table over.
We were seated next to a couple sharing what appeared to be their 130th wedding anniversary and very loudly discussing the trouble with people of the Jewish persuasion. Only they weren’t using the word Jewish, but rather a slur rhyming with bike. Charming, right? Actually, only the husband appeared to have problems with bikes; the wife seemed merely embarrassed by the mention of them. I should also add that [Laura], coming from a family of partly bike-ish descent, was ready to put a cocktail fork in this gentleman’s eye, and a gross display of physical violence was barely averted by the timely arrival of our server.
The death threats56 started arriving a couple days after my first review hit the stands. I took the phone calls and thought it was funny until it wasn’t anymore. The letters and e-mails we ran in the paper.
“This is good,” Patty told me. “Now you’ve got their attention.”
I wrote about green chile and zombies and punk rock; about fusion cuisine and bull testicles, fish eyes and roasted field mice. I ate sliced sea cucumber and cold pig’s-ear salad at a blowout Chinese New Year feast that I’d gotten myself invited to incognito. I worked anonymously, with reservations made under the names of long-dead character actors and a wallet full of credit cards obtained under various noms de guerre. I never went in for disguises, for elaborate ruses. I’ve always been a big fan of writers like John le Carré, so modeled my tradecraft along the lines of the Cold War spies: going for misdirection over costumes, crowds over cover, and sowing befud-dlement among the enemy by the expeditious use of false identities, penetration agents and overt propaganda.
With a rented tux, borrowed shoes and a pocketful of business cards that identified me as a wine importer from New York, I infiltrated a Les Amis d’Escoffier57 dinner where the chef had spent thirty hours straight prepping and cooking a multicourse dinner in strict accordance with Escoffier’s recipes—not an easy thing to do under the best circumstances since the big man tended to demand ludicrously intricate prep work, nearly-impossible-to-procure supplies (such as caul fat and baby starlings), and had a Frenchman’s obsession with minuscule detail. Still, it was the best potage queue de boeuf I’d ever tasted (oxtail consommé filtered through three different rafts), the best pigeonneaux en compote. I was seated across the table from two chefs who I’d recently mocked in my column for their bad business practices and retarded cruise-ship cuisine, then drank my way through nine of ten flights of wine, capped off by cigars, dirty jokes and nips from a bottle of century-old bourbon. I had to call Laura to pick me up. When she did, I was three-quarters unconscious, sitting on the curb on Colfax Avenue singing old Irish drinking songs to myself.
It had been the bourbon that put me over the edge. But what was I supposed to do, say no? Not on your life. I’d had the same problem at a Vietnamese restaurant some months prior, having gotten into a conversation with the owner and the cooks, then hanging around late after the place had closed, eating a shift meal with the crew and drinking. When the owner went behind the bar and pulled out the bottle of snake wine—a literal ball of snakes, preserved in the bottom of a bottle of what tasted like kerosene—I knew I was going to have a bad night. I also knew I had to drink, because this was something special, something extra—an opportunity that might never present itself again. Out of this came a sort of mantra for the way I would ever after do the job and live the life: Always drink the snake wine.
WORKING FOR WESTWORD was like being an East German CIA station chief crossed with a crime reporter working the Chicago city-hall beat in the 1920s. I made a lot of unusual friends, knew more than I could ever put in print, and was watching more pies than I had fingers to stick in them. I had informers in some of the best restaurants in the city, commando eaters who could be sent in on a moment’s notice to do my recon for me, and took a lot of phone calls in the middle of the night from numbers that came up blocked on my cell phone.
“Is this Sheehan?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Get a pen . . .”
At the center of all of it, though, was me. Me and Laura. Me and Laura and a solid core of mercenary eaters—most of them former chefs, bakers turned used-car salesmen and crazed gastronauts doing it for the free meals and booze—but mostly me and Laura. We were our own best field agents, out on the town so often that many weeks our refrigerator held nothing but Styrofoam take-out boxes, beer and fifteen different kinds of mustard. In our busiest weeks, we were eating more than a dozen meals out, keeping track of our reservations and plans on a calendar marked with restaurant names, aliases, times, party size and method of payment so we wouldn’t use any one card too often. I had restaurant owners who were trying to follow me around for a picture, who offered bribes for a face-to-face meeting, who hired private investigators to tail me. It’s the kind of job where you learn as you go—dirty tricks, dodges, escape and evasion and covering your tracks. I still fuck up now and then, get caught out, make mistakes. But I get a little better at it every week. And I’m still learning.
THE JAMES BEARD AWARDS IS THE BIG ONE—the Academy Awards for food people, minus the gift bags and the red carpet. There are two ceremonies, one for writers and media people, another for chefs. Early in 2003, I was nominated for my first Beard Award for restaurant criticism, for three pieces I’d written during my first couple months on the job in Denver. It was funny: I’d never made it to the Beard House as a chef, wouldn’t ever have made it while cooking—not in a million years. But apparently the minute I took off the whites, I was able to sneak in the back door with the journalists and hacks. Actually, I’m not sure whether that’s funny or just a little sad.
Laura and I flew out to the coast together, then drove into Manhattan for the awards gala. Having never before been to a gala and unsure what one was supposed to wear (tux? chaps? would spats and a top hat be too much or not enough?), I’d called up one of the other nominated writers who’d been before and who was up against me in the criticism category that year. With complete innocent earnestness, I asked him what the appropriate attire was.
“Oh, you don’t need to dress fancy,” he’d said. “It’s a bunch of writers. It’s not like everyone’s going to be in tuxedos or anyth
ing.”
Taking my cue from him, I’d bought a twenty-dollar dress shirt at JCPenney and a tie to match. Laura wore a suit, black on black on black. Walking into the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, where the shindig was being held, we (of course) saw everyone in jackets and ties, polished shoes, half the men in penguin suits. I grabbed Laura’s arm and held on tight as we plunged in, whispering in her ear that it was her duty as my wife to hunt down that other food writer and kill him should I die before I had the chance.
We knew no one, were known by no one. I was wearing this ridiculous-looking NOMINEE ribbon that made me look like I’d just won third place at a grade-school spelling bee. We each had one drink, sat in a corner, and were totally overlooked. So much so that no one even noticed when we ducked out and went across the street for sushi and tea, making it back just in time to find our seats in the ballroom as the ceremony (and dinner) was starting. Because we worked for the same company, I was sharing space at table with the guy who’d told me I didn’t need to wear a jacket. You know what he was wearing? A fucking jacket.
But let me say this. There is one thing that can make a twenty-dollar button-down from Penney’s look good in a room full of expensive suits and ball gowns. Can you guess what that thing is?
A fucking James Beard Award.
When they called my name, I went up onstage, let them put the medal around my neck (it reminded me of the closing scene from Star Wars where Luke and Han Solo and Chewie are all getting their medals), thanked Laura, and got the hell off before I said anything to embarrass myself. By the time I got back to my seat, Mr. Don’t Dress Fancy and his date were gone. I kissed Laura, then we ate their desserts.
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