CHAPTER FOUR
Eat to Live/Live to Eat
My friends at Fordham Prep mostly came from families that had all gone to college. There were a few exceptions, but everyone seemed to be on The Path—you got decent grades, you went to a good college, you got the dope smoking and keg parties out of your system, stopped fucking around and found a nice girl who looked good in tennis shorts, you got a white-collar job, joined the local country club, made babies named Troy and Whitney, drank too much scotch, and lived happily ever after. This was their version of the American dream, and after looking in my rearview mirror at a bunch of toothless Communists, no matter how successful my mom had become representing the old country, I was beginning to buy into it. The reefer and Jesuit philosophy went only so far.
Everyone I knew seemed to be applying to Georgetown or NYU or fancy Ivy League schools, the next chapter in the preppy handbook, so I sort of took their lead. It was still a little strange to me—you know, you can take the boy out of the painted denim jacket and the hoodie—but I was doing my best.
I decided that Boston was the right place for me. It had something to do with reading The Catcher in the Rye—I know, it took place in a boarding school in Pennsylvania and then New York City, of course, but the whole scene at his preppy private school and the bit where he goes to see his old teacher with the grippe just felt like New England to me. I really can’t explain it, but once I got it into my head, that’s where I was going. (And by the way, when did people stop having the grippe? I didn’t even know what the fuck that was until I got out of college—it was the only part of the book that confused me. I even knew where the ducks went in winter.)
Somehow I got it together to take the train up to Boston by myself to visit some schools—Boston University and Holy Cross. I kicked around the campuses, checked out the girls, tried to rate the possibilities of getting laid (I was smoking Benson & Hedges 100s Ultra Lights at the time, which probably killed any chance of that happening—but there were a lot of Irish girls in Boston so I thought I might have a shot). And one day, just for the hell of it, I took the T from BU up toward Chestnut Hill, to Boston College. I wandered into the admissions office, just kind of kicking the tires, and wound up meeting one of the heads of admissions, a guy named Father John Acres, a Jesuit who later left the society. And I told him my story.
I told him the story of my family, the restaurants, our crazy fucked-up background, what my life was like in Queens and up at Fordham with his brother Jesuits. He took a real interest in me—he might have heard of the restaurant—and for some reason he seemed to think he had a stake in my future. He guided me through the admissions process, and I got into Boston College, pretty much just like that. I literally just walked in off the street on a whim. I wasn’t even planning on visiting there. It all happened pretty fast, but it felt right. And that’s how my whole experience at Boston College began.
Fordham Prep was just the opening act. This was the main event. I thought I had some freedom before, but this was a license to really run wild. Though, ever the entrepreneur, I was there for only a short time before I started promoting for-profit keg parties out in the woods by the Newton campus.
Boston was an even greater departure from the very ethnic, son-of-immigrant upbringing I’d had in Queens. I thought maybe I could get the Bus Head DNA out of my system, that maybe there was a parallel universe where if I went to college I could get a job on Wall Street and get the fuck out of guido Queens. I was determined to prove that my life wasn’t snagged in this manifest destiny to work in a fucking restaurant.
It started in freshman-year dorm, hanging out with these guys who came from different parts of the country, from Ohio and Texas, with big bags of pot and money to buy beer. These guys got stoned every day—they just didn’t give a fuck. They were complete suburban Deadheads. I remember this guy Randall Huffington. His dad would come to Boston to visit and take us out to some stodgy, oak-paneled restaurant, and after a couple of perfect manhattans he’d start proselytizing on the virtues of fine living in suburban Indiana. “Joe, you gotta come out here. We got a pretty good lifestyle out here. Me and the family, we go out and shoot some ducks, then come into our very large home and sit with our very preppy children and discuss how fabulous life is as the snow falls outside, while you inner-city folks go out and murder each other and live in the filth and grime. Yes, we’re doing all right.” This was during Reagan’s second term as president of the United States—the whole culture was kind of blah. His kid would just roll his eyes, but of course this was his future; he didn’t even really want to escape it. As soon as he got done playing in the sandbox, he’d end up right back where he started from, in some horrible house in the middle of fucking nowhere with needlepoint pillows and completely undistinguished children, fucking his stupid Stepford Wife when she would let him, and selling insurance.
Randall was one of those guys who came to college with an army trunk full of cassette tapes of every Dead show from 1968 forward, all labeled supermethodically, all superanal. A lot of Deadheads were completely overorganized in their drugs and music—they’d have enough pot and psychedelic mushrooms to get through the week, and then it was all about budgeting it. They really were their parents, but they were just doing it in a different way. They were trust-fund Deadheads then, and now they’re bona fide rich dudes. They were never part of any counterculture, not really, but they pretended because they could afford to buy into the romantic part of it without having to make any sacrifices. Then, the second they got out of school, they went back to who they really were, because money and comfort are the ultimate draw.
But at the time there was something very alluring about that whole specific situation of the Grateful Dead and their road show. It was a very good time for me, the drugs and the euphoria of having no real responsibility, and at the heart of it was this music, which has affected all my musical taste since then—Hank Williams and lots of roots music, and bluegrass and blues and folk. Classic hippie rock. It really wasn’t that far from the southern rock I used to listen to in the park in Queens. Funny thing is that I knew a lot of Deadheads who would flat-out say, “I don’t like country music,” or “I don’t like the blues.” I should have known right then that these people were full of crap.
Twenty-five years after being in that scene, I still take the good parts with me. The effect was profound; I just learned how to separate the good shit from the bullshit. It was all very earthy, and it was right at the time. The girls were loose, the weed was good, and it was a fair enough rebellion for me, against all my parents’ values—it was the ultimate waste of my heritage, my culture, and my mom’s money. It was very liberating. The whole scene was a little bit cultish, maybe a little creepy, but there were Deadheads that no matter where you went, there they were, and they were welcoming. Now I could be part of my own community.
One of the good lessons of being a hippie was to try not to affect the world in a negative way. You wanted to be conscious of your consumption and keep it all natural. That opened up the sensibilities to organic food and wine, which stayed with me forever. Whether you can maintain those values once you get out of college and have to work to make a living and have kids to feed is another question, but I have certainly tried. You won’t be eating any processed crap in any of my restaurants, and without a doubt, no matter what became trendy in the food world later, for me those values began with my family and were reinforced in my hippie phase. They stirred a sentiment in me that I had already known very well—that having what you need should be enough. It was a strange nexus of hippie and immigrant survival instincts: You don’t need more food than what can sustain you. You needed only one pair of jeans. You needed only one Hacky Sack.
I began to prioritize things in a different way. You take all the stuff that the Jesuits had taught me about free will, throw some magic mushrooms into the mix, and you’re starting to get somewhere. Once you move away from that primal urgency to survive passed on by immigrant parents, then
instead of being stuck in the politics of personal survival, you can open up to the politics of the world at large and the smaller world around you, and start thinking about how the decisions you make affect the world that you live in beyond immediate choices, like what you’re going to have for dinner. Living out of the moment. So instead of thinking about next week, or next month’s rent, you’re thinking about the next ten years. Thinking about the planet.
But then I started seeing that there was a false bottom—you know, the doors of perception swing both ways—and of course the obvious first thing you become aware of is the bullshit of mass corporate capitalist culture and authority. Eventually I saw how the entire 1980s Dead scene, no matter how earnest it seemed—and it was genuinely positive, for me, at least—was a world pillowed by more levels of financial stability than I could have imagined. These were people who’d had money for generations. They never had to think about anything—if one generation fucks up or doesn’t work…well there’s enough money in the trust funds to keep it going for another generation. It wasn’t anything like hand-to-mouth; no one had ever even conceived of the possibility of starving. The alternative to life was not death, the alternative to life is a slower life, or an easier life, or a lazy life. The life of a Deadhead.
The irony here is that it got me right back onto the fast track toward douchebag preppydom. I started kicking the Top-Siders and gave up the dirty blue jeans. People thought I had gone over to the dark side, but I was still just trying to find the right track for me. I didn’t all of a sudden give up on my hippie values; I only wanted to get focused and quit screwing around, maybe put up a wall between me and a bunch of people who I figured ultimately weren’t really helping my cause. I bought my first pair of khakis and started rocking the pink Brooks Brothers shirt. Do you remember the multicolored Brooks Brothers shirts? There were a bunch of different striped patterns, and then there was one that had some kind of quilty pattern, and each patch of it was a different color? Ugliest fucking shirt ever, but back then it was the signal point of my transition. After that I was doomed.
I ran for student-body president and almost made it. Man, I hated losing that election. It was the first time I did anything like that, putting myself out there, really trying to bust free of the herd. There was a certain amount of ego involved—it was really just a popularity contest—but I asked people to judge me, and I lost.
Dave Lynch was my campaign manager. I met Lynch in my dorm. He lived downstairs in a cryptlike basement room, and I lived upstairs with this complete Masshole—he used to get dressed before he went to bed, in his Members Only jacket, acid-wash jeans, and Reebok white high-tops with the Velcro straps, the same kind that yuppie women wore to go to work, and he went to sleep like that. Fully dressed. When the alarm went off, he’d just sprint out the door.
Lynch, on the other hand, was an aspiring stoner who had a giant poster of Jimmy Page hanging on the wall—the one with Jimmy in the dragon jumpsuit playing the big double-neck guitar—so I figured we had an understanding. Pretty soon we fell in with the trust-fund Deadheads and became great friends, even though we weren’t really cut from the same corduroy—he was from Glastonbury, Connecticut, and I was from Queens. But we were both always a little bit outside looking in; we never had the sense of entitlement that a lot of these other kids brought with them. We shared a lot of insecurities about where we came from.
The first night in my new apartment sophomore year, we had a bit of a party. He passed out on the couch and woke up covered in puke. After that we called him Dave the Wave and used to hum the theme from Hawaii Five-O to make fun of him. Later, of course, he would become a James Beard Award–winning writer, not to mention the wine director and general manager of Babbo, and truly one of America’s greatest wine professionals.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t completely abandoned the values that the Jesuits had taught me—I was getting more serious, but I still clung to their nonpragmatic freethinking approach. I was still rebelling, but the form that my rebellion took was becoming a bit more rarefied—I wasn’t fucking around with phonus-bolonus faux hippies anymore.
I became a philosophy and political-science major and was lucky enough to run into even more astonishing Jesuits—Frank Kennedy and James Bernauer—in a program called Modernism in the Arts, a four-year curriculum with an ultra-liberal-arts focus. It was modeled after Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind—he even came and lectured. The concept was that a fundamental and profound education in the classical liberal arts—through the major art forms of music, fine art, literature, et cetera—is really all you need in life. At the time this was pretty out-there thinking.
Bernauer was a freethinker in the very spirit of the Jesuit tradition. He embraced a type of postmodernism and was able to open me up to the music of Wagner and the philosophy of Foucault, to help me learn how to make the transition from an ideological to a nonnarrative way of thinking. He was the leading expert on Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political theorist who had escaped the Nazis during the Second World War and went on to write about freedom and authority. He talked about Germany and how anyone could possibly reconcile a God-driven world with the atrocities of the Holocaust.
He introduced me to a very powerful strain of heavy philosophy that I spent a lot of time thinking about—I was really interested in the intersection where philosophy meets social science, writers like Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Tocqueville. It was a kind of applied philosophy, and the idea was how modern society and the structure of government both enslave and liberate man simultaneously. What is true freedom? The immigrant who comes and fights for survival and succeeds in an immigrant world? Or is it the person who comes through a well-to-do family with lots of education? These were all “states of nature,” but you could change your circumstance, and you could sacrifice or gain advantage based on what state of nature you put yourself into.
In my senior year in the program, I had to do two semesters with a focus off campus—they were very serious about the applied part of the philosophy. It could all have been a lot of lip service, but they really wanted to walk the walk.
I went to a jail for violent juvenile offenders in Roxbury, to talk to people who were in a very different state of nature from anything I ever could have imagined. Going into a high-security prison, getting strip-searched, locked down, locked in, locked out, and being in a room with a seventeen-year-old kid who had bashed in another kid’s head with a crowbar—holy shit, it was the exact opposite of anything I could call into my experience. These people were not trying to quell their pussy-shit inner struggle of being a spoiled trust-fund hippie versus their natural disposition toward upper-class complacency and capitalism—this was the wild, the truly untamed jungle of people totally stepping out of any prescribed laws and limitations.
It was very emotional. No matter what you see on television or in the movies, it’s hard to believe that this level of humanity could even exist. I remember taking the T to Roxbury every day and walking across these frozen fields on December afternoons when it was dark at four o’clock. And then the glaring fluorescent lights, and the baby-blue-painted jail halls with Newport cigarette butts on the floor, and the desperate, stale smell of the place. I felt like it was the loneliest place you could ever find yourself on earth. It was hopeless. It was very powerful, very moving. When I was there, I kind of felt that I shared in the isolation and desperation of the place. It was the extreme opposite of all these other influences—with the Grateful Dead everything was so optimistic. Drugs, music, and dancing were the answers. The experience made me determined to work harder and head relentlessly into the next phase of my life.
From hoodies and Timberlands to Capezios (never to be mentioned again), to then trying to find myself in the Grateful Dead world—and learning a lot and gaining a lot of values that I still keep with me, but ultimately finding it about as shallow as a fucking puddle—to my new role as khaki cowboy, this was obviously the fucked-up trajectory of a guy from Queens trying to find h
imself. But at least you could say that I had an open mind. And I had successfully removed myself from my parents’ world. Well, more or less. When I was in full hippie mode, we’d go see the Dead in New York or New Jersey and then we’d roll into Felidia, superstoned, for dinner with eight people—a bunch of unwashed, privileged kids eating piles of antipasto off the table and washing it down with Barolo. Thinking about it now, I am completely fucking mortified. If I were my mom, I would have thrown us all out on the sidewalk. We rolled like we owned the world, no respect. But my mom was always very hospitable. She didn’t know we were stoned. She just thought we were happy young boys, and she wanted to feed us.
A little later, after I had ditched the tie-dye, I would take my Wasp girlfriends out to restaurants in the North End of Boston, where a few people knew Felidia and would give me the VIP treatment, maybe a free bottle of wine. I still wasn’t beyond using my pedigree in the New York restaurant world to take advantage up in Boston and act like a big shot.
What the hell—as much as maybe I pretended to fight it, I knew the power of good food. I knew that it could turn dark into light—a bit of perfectly grilled fish and a bittersweet soda could make you forget all about Grandma’s piss bucket. Food could blow minds and dissolve your problems, at least for a while, and I had a strong suspicion it might help get girls into bed. In college, cooking was second nature to me. We had a kitchen, and I’d make family-style pasta, simple stuff, with a lot of cream and butter. Stoner food. Spaghetti carbonara and shit like that, and it made me very popular. It always shocked me what incredibly poor food culture the people up at college came from. How they ate—or didn’t. Robert Mancusi would sit there with a can of Cheez Whiz and spray it on his finger and eat the whole thing—that would be his dinner while he watched TV. That was how he was raised—I think my mother would have had a coronary. A lot of these people I met up in Boston had no ethnicity, no tradition of family dinner, no experience or love of the matriarchy that was based around the hearth of the kitchen, which put into stark contrast the food background that I came from. It was a shock to me how little food could mean to otherwise affluent, intelligent folks. They basically ate to live, while we lived to eat. The larger significance of that still didn’t hit me, though. I thought that to be successful I had to work on Wall Street. I was so fucking dumb.
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