by Mike Wehner
“Which old country?” I said.
“I have no idea,” she snorted, “it’s too late now, you think you would have won?” She really found herself funny.
“Maybe.”
The sun glared at me, knowing I was up to no good. I couldn’t tell if I was sweating or just wet.
I cupped my hand in the wind and held steady in the resistance. Erin’s bun jiggled, the pencil speared through it ticked a drum solo on the headrest.
I wondered what she meant by competition. When I wasn’t cooking, I was watching cooking shows. The one where the big-time chefs dueled semolina against potato gnocchi and the one where fledgling cooks had to make an entree out of peppermints, swordfish and beets. All of them. It doesn’t teach you anything about food but it’s addictive. I’d get caught up even though I didn’t have a team in the game, excited because someone had to lose.
“You didn’t have to do this you know, what we’re doing is like my weirdo version of game night.”
We’d been in the car for fifteen minutes and I had no idea what we were doing. Erin chit-chatted away, it didn’t matter how nervous or awkward I was because she didn’t need anyone to entertain her. She laughed at her own jokes and answered her own questions if there was more than a breath of silence.
It was a long way back into town. I lived in the cheap seats, thirty minutes east of the bay. The dot-commers looking for more room to stretch their legs had started to work their way out into the farmland, supplanting the vegetables with houses as big as the lots. “I thought we should get to know each other in an informal setting, things sometimes get nasty during service. I’ve lost some good cooks by being too fussy.”
“A chef with a temper, that’s original,” I said. I didn’t care if she was pleasant or a tyrant, being near her felt like the day after food poisoning. My body was rejecting her and also my mind. My subconscious couldn’t come to terms with the lengths I was willing to go to tear someone apart. It’s easy to buy a package of meat in the supermarket but not everyone can chop the head off a live bird, no matter how hungry they are.
Erin pulled into a Mexican grocer.
“Every few weeks we have these silly competitions. There’s always a bet and it’s usually friendly. Loser serves the winner and their friends a nice meal or whatever, but this week is different.”
“How’s that?”
“I fuck, fuck, fucking hate the other chef.”
I’ve seen this show and a million variations, the stadium kitchen, the battling chefs. It was a dream almost come true.
The grocery store was a brick box at the bottom of a steep hill, the side was plastered with a vivid graffiti mural of Mexican farmhands tending the fields. Inside hung a chandelier with dusty plastic peppers hanging where there once were candles. It looked like an old saloon where the long deli counter took the place of a bar. A plump coffee- haired woman in a red and white checkered apron seared meat in a cast iron skillet with her back to me. The air was filled with dry chili and burnt cumin. A small line formed to the right of a hand written sign: Meat Taco $1.00.
“How you decide who wins or what to cook?” I asked. Distracted by the excitement of the competition our conversation became organic, almost normal.
“It’s at my house, I pick the theme. It could be a regional style or a country or just a word.”
“Like Italian?”
“Yeah, but it could also be barbecue,” Erin tugged at two grocery carts that wouldn’t come apart. “Shit.”
I reached in and turned the plastic buckle from the child’s seat belt to free the carts. We wound through the aisles. Erin interrupted her own explanations with wide-eyed epiphanies followed by furious grabs at food stuffs.
“So you make something based on the theme?” Pops and sizzles buzzed in the distance and the smell of seared flesh and crushed spices waved up and washed down into each aisle’s valley.
“No, by chance. Everyone writes down an entree and it’s the luck of the draw. We make any appetizer we want to pair with the dish. No desserts.”
“Why?” I interrupted.
Erin was up on her tip toes reaching for crushed tomatoes. I grabbed two cans over her back making sure our bodies didn’t touch.
“Dessert isn’t real cooking. Shit tastes great if you put enough sugar on it. Every ingredient a savory chef is told not to rely on is a staple of pastry. The worst cake in the world can make someone happy, creating smiles out of asparagus takes real talent.”
Chefs had a hierarchy for everything, even themselves.
“I provide the pantry, that’s why we are buying all this stuff. If there is one lemon then we split it, no bullshit sabotage.” She tossed four cans of black beans into the cart.
“What’s the theme?”
“Tex-Mex, which is interpretable. What do you think it means?”
“Fajitas, shredded cheese, chili,” I said. “You can turn anything into a taco.”
“What if they ask us to make tacos?” Erin said.
“Tacos get turned into salad, obviously.”
“And if it’s taco salad?” she said, laughing.
She was charming and I hated it. Her looks were easy to deal with. The only way she could be pretty is if you projected her shadow onto the wall, then she’d look like a woman. Chipped nails. No makeup. A tangled, twisted mess for hair. A loose shirt flecked with cornmeal. Is that what John saw in her, the potty-mouthed charm?
I couldn’t picture them together. Maybe she was different now. Maybe killing someone changes you. I wondered how it would change me as I got behind her cart and pushed.
“What if you don’t have the right protein?”
“Make something up. The diners aren’t that stupid, nobody wants moulet frites without mussels.”
We wandered the aisles and Erin grabbed what she deemed to be the essentials of Mexican cooking. In the background were rapid, authoritative stabs of Spanish fired back and forth between happy ladies that were pressing tortillas.
At the counter the matron helping us pulled her upper lip at me when I asked to taste some of the dried chilies, like I was the first to ever do so. Poblano, serrano, habanero, garden picked and sun dried—we got them all for pennies per handful. Erin said she had cilantrophobia, that it tasted like soap to her and if we cooked with it I’d have to do the tasting. Then she told me about capsaicin and how it made food hot. She knew the hows of cooking and the whys. I compared miniature cans of pickled jalapenos while I listened, trailing behind her. I watched her gait, listened to the rhythm of her voice. It’s hard to take something apart if you don’t know how it works, the game within the game. “Where to next, Chef?” I said, hands racked with plastic grocery bags.
“When I think Texas, I think beef,” she said.
When I thought Texas I thought Chainsaw, but beef made sense too. I couldn’t get a handle on Erin, she was a tomboy one minute and a food scientist the next. She moved through space like the outer world wasn’t observing her, neither elegant nor crude, it showed an ambivalence that I envied. She shuttled me around town and offered a rundown of local barbecue spots and the best late-night sushi. Part of what made the left coast so good was that it didn’t have sacred food traditions that weren’t allow to evolve, BBQ was but one example. The sticky sweet of Kansas City coexists with thin Carolina vinegar. Smoked Texas brisket, black Korean short rib. They all were here and nobody called anyone inauthentic. Good was good, the way it should be.
“The Chef coming tonight, Jamie, is such an asshole,” she said.
“You mentioned you didn’t like him, or is it her?”
“No, what I said is that I fucking hated him.”
◆◆◆
The car bumped up on the front lip of her driveway. Erin lived on a freshly built row of houses that looked like they were transplanted from an affluent Midwestern suburb, shoved real close together and then dipped in a saturated Californian hue. The second floor windows were close enough to pass eggs between neighbors, a nice idea
for a modern Rockwellian painting. The designs varied but each had fat white pillars in front that stood in contrast to their surf guitar colors. Aqua blue, seafoam green, candy apple red. Erin’s was deep purple, a bruised face with four long white pillars for teeth.
“How do you know him?” I walked the groceries in from the garage and Erin put them away. This was the most normal thing I’d done in a year. The lugging, the listening. I knew I was a part of something horrible but I felt good to be a part of something at all. To have a purpose.
“Jamie and I have a mutual friend, this hyper Japanese girl he used to date. She took me to his restaurant,” clunk, “Red Apple, up near Napa on the Kingsbury Farm and I hated it. I told her this throughout the meal and she promised,” knock, “not to repeat what I said, but she did the moment their relationship turned. One of the courses was just butter. He thought he could serve a spoon with three different butters because the cows were outside. That’s not cooking,” she said and smashed another can on the counter, thack. Her voice was up to a rant. “I hate farm-to-table. All food comes from farms, it’s goddamn nonsense.” Blood was trickling out of the package of brisket in her hands.
“You don’t think the intention is good?”
“What intention? Every chef I’ve ever met tries to find the best ingredients they can. That course was the equivalent of a painter putting a can of the finest red paint in the world on the wall and telling you to admire it for what it is.” She was almost out of breath. “You’ve got to paint!”
“Easy you maniac, calm down,” I said. She tilted her forehead at me.
“An ingredient isn’t better just because you plucked it off the tree.” I had some thoughts on the matter but Erin was so worked up she answered her own questions before I could get out a sound. Even when I wanted to talk I couldn’t. “Horseshit,” she continued, “I want to taste something new or something ancient or something that I’ll never want to taste again but for god’s sake don’t give me a piece and call it complete.” All of the cabinets were open and she collected the plastic bags from the counter and pulsed them like a stress ball.
“If you hate this guy so much then why invite him over?” I moved the milk and other perishables to the refrigerator while Erin yammered. Inside was sparse but clean, she didn’t spend a lot of time here. The cool air rushed over my arms.
“I think he wants to embarrass me. He bad mouths Essen even though he’s never eaten there. I confronted him and a mutual friend suggested we settle our differences with food, so that’s how we got here.
“The bet is that the loser has to post signs on their bathroom billboards saying the winner’s restaurant is better. Jokes on him though, we don’t monetize our customer’s bowel movements. He’d know that if he’d been to Essen,” she said.
“If this is such a big deal to you then I’m not the guy you want helping, you should have gotten one of your more experienced cooks.”
“My cooks take enough shit from me, if they come here it’s to eat.”
“Miguel mentioned your kitchen demeanor too, it’s nice to know you’re self-aware.”
“My sister is usually my second pair of hands but she isn’t allowed to use the big knives if you know what I mean.”
My own idiocy slapped me in the face. I’d forgotten my knives and knew nothing about a sister.
Eight
Erin settled the group by shushing and flapping her arms, she was on her third Moscow Mule and her skin was beginning to look sun-burnt. The room fell silent save for the rustle and ting of copper mugs sipped and set back on the table. I sat with the other guests looking up at our host.
She sliced limes and addressed the room, “I want to thank everyone for coming, each time we do this it’s in good fun but tonight is special because the stakes are especially high.” Erin downplayed the seriousness of the underlying tiff with Jamie so when she got to the part about the bathroom signs the room let out a sarcastic gasp. A silver cup of golf pencils sat in the middle of the group along with a stack of oddly cut paper rectangles. “The theme tonight is Tex-Mex,” she said, “write your entrees down and get them in the bag.” Erin pulled a velvet whiskey sack from her back pocket and tossed it on the table.
More than a dozen people were stuffed into a slim formal dining room, the treadmill of the modern home—often owned but seldom used. The furniture was sparse, a sign that her family didn’t care about her. Every good person has an ugly curio cabinet from a decrepit aunt or an oversize coffee table that grandpa made—literal burdens of being close with your family. Gifts so heavy with guilt that you can’t move them no matter how long the giver’s been dead.
The dining table looked like a battering ram, thick rustic beams were bound together with faux-tarnished bolts and metal plates. The wood was worn and beaten and thick beyond purpose. A slice of brilliant polished teak ran down the middle of the table as a trivet.
Some of the guests were cooks while others told me they were chefs, I had trouble grasping the distinction between the two. One guy introduced himself as a cook but I overheard someone call him a chef which was doubly confusing. Erin was too busy playing host to parade me around for introductions and I did my best to keep to myself and observe the strange world I’d worked so hard to be a part of.
Everyone grabbed papers and began to write. The woman across from me tapped a pensive pen on her chin like choosing an entrée was an important answer on an exam. As far as I could tell there were only two people there who didn’t work with food professionally. The first was Erin’s sister, Emily. Emily was smooth and polished, everything that Erin wasn’t. Her stringy teal necklace matched her nails which matched her shoes. Soup was her favorite food and she wanted to know what my favorite German soup was. I told her French Onion, she laughed and our feet slid together. Emily’s friend Mike wrote with his paper up on the wall behind me. He was soft spoken and sarcastic, his body loomed large, thicker and more imposing than any modern man needed to be. He kept saying things I knew were funny, but I didn’t laugh out of spite.
Emily lived there with her sister. This meant that Erin was so important that she left behind whatever life she’d started in Virginia and followed her to the other side of the country. They looked the same age but I could tell Erin was older by the way she reminded Emily that the knife she was using to cut strawberries couldn’t go in the dishwasher when we’d first arrived. Emily sat at the kitchen island while we put away groceries inspecting each sliced piece of fruit. She ate one half and put the other in a bowl. She was too pretty to question.
Mike took Emily’s seat the moment she fluttered off to chat and smile at someone else. He introduced himself with the handshake of a father on prom night.
My hand in his he said, “I know you.” I loosened my grip, his held firm.
“How’s that?”
“You’re the guy who regrets getting roped in to this circus.” He pushed my golden cup to the side and replaced it with a Budweiser from his back pocket.
“Almost, I’m the guy who regrets being one of the performers.”
“Oh shit, which team you on?”
“Home, I’m the new cook at Essen.”
“That’s a shame, I hate foodies.” He reached to take back the beer.
“I’m not a foodie,” I said, snatching it back.
“You cook for a living even though the pay sucks and on your night off you’re cooking for your boss, for free. Seems like foodie shit to me.”
He and Emily were the only interesting people at the table because they weren’t talking about food, they were making fun of it. Emily jammed herself between us and in the shuffle to make room a wine bottle was knocked out of the rack behind us. Emily snapped her head towards the noise and a shining twirl of blond hair flung out from behind her ear. A cold-shower-shock clung to the front of my body. The hair on my arms stood up. I turned my attention to the paper below then wrote “General Tso’s Chicken” to make myself feel better. I tossed it in the bag with the rest.
Chef Jamie stood at the other end of the table with a haircut so stupid I wanted to punch it. The tight combover was slicked to the right with a sharp, shaved part. The hair underneath was buzzed down to the scalp. He wore black skinny jeans below his puffed gut below his double chin. His fat wasn’t made out of grease and candy bars, it was made of spicy Australian Syrah and elderberry tortes.
Jamie hid his lumpy neck with a blanket scarf. In the crinkled paper silence of passing around the purple bag I imagined a loose thread on the scarf catching fire while we cooked, the flames rushing up the synthetic fabric and exploding majestic in whatever beard butter he used to tamp down the tangle he’d grown to give shape to the nebulous mass he called a face.
“Tonight,” Erin said, her hand puffed and stirred the sack with a dramatic pause, “we will be cooking, chili!”
Gilded chili, interesting. Jamie had a puzzled expression on his face, like he didn’t know what chili was.
“Good luck chef,” I said and pulled my legs from under the stout table one at a time. I weaved through the crowd pontificating how chili could be improved.
“I hoped for something, uh, less Kansas family reunion,” Jamie said. He gave a hiss to the words that I’d often heard from people on the crooked fringes of our country. The ones that thought California and New York were the only states with indoor plumbing. The middle has the exact same crap as everywhere else, it costs less but you have to drive a little farther to get to a museum.
I slid my way through the crowded room and joined the other cooks in the kitchen. Erin directed traffic in a black and white polka-dot apron so cute she merely looked wretched. Jamie and his assistant took notes as she assigned prep and cook space to each team. Erin instructed us to use the countertops as cutting boards because they were non-porous, a statement that made me want to vomit. There was a large rectangular island with a second sink, plenty of room for the four of us to cook while guests passed through to get chilled beer or wine from the garage. We had ninety minutes to cook an appetizer and chili for more than a dozen people.