by Jaime Lowe
I felt most powerful when I was so tired that I couldn’t move. After sparring some mornings I’d go home and crawl back into bed with an egg ’n’ cheese and spinach and watch a movie I’d already watched a dozen times. I had a rotation. Blue Crush—favorite scene, when she’s standing in the ocean and asking for guidance from a dopey NFL love interest and he says, “Be the girl on the beach who doesn’t ask the guy what to do.” Laurel Canyon—favorite scene, Christian Bale is talking down a naked mental patient. She says, “You don’t understand the naked. Naked is intimacy. I am here with you. There is no shame. There is no separation. And . . . I am not ill.” Bale responds, “Yes, you are ill, Gloria.” She says, “And I have no need for a green synthetic nighty used to conceal the essence of my simple skin and my aching soul in the barren desert that is this land.” And of course the sexiest Frances McDormand ever as Bale’s loose-cannon music producer mom. Or Tootsie—every scene is my favorite scene. I’d have a headache some days, I’d sleep three hours on other days. Bright lights were too bright sometimes. I might have been concussed. Sparring consumed me. I worried about my abnormal brain and thought, I dunno, maybe boxing is like a self-lobotomy? Maybe the exertion helped me calm down without anyone saying calm down. Maybe the discipline subdued a frantic personality. Boxing and my morning crew—Zerline, Cindy, Kevin, Ian, Fluff—gave me a place to go, something to do with my tensed-up fists. Life went on, inside and outside of the ring.
I was still working at Sports Illustrated but searching for music articles that felt important. My friend Max gave me his all-access badge to CMJ, and I went to the old Knitting Factory in TriBeCa. It was rumored that Ol’ Dirty Bastard might perform and as one a.m. approached, two a.m. followed, and by three a.m., he emerged. I wrote in the Voice, “He took the stage looking like he was fresh from a coma, tears trailing down his cheeks. ODB didn’t even seem to notice he was crying. The crowd chanted, begging for the hallucinatory diatribes from his drunk days. Buddha Monk and his Brooklyn Zoo posse filled in words when Dirt’s jaw was slack and his mouth open in exasperation. One dancer stripped. ODB didn’t even notice. He was paralyzed, lost onstage in a shell of what used to be. His eyes were quiet too.” He didn’t notice, I thought, because he looked like he was on meds or not ready to be onstage after being in prison. The Daily News and the New York Post had printed rumors that ODB was suffering from schizophrenia and getting treatment at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Randall’s Island. I felt that this performance did not bode well. The concert was a starting point for an article that led to the last interview with ODB and focused on his mental health and the stigma surrounding mental health—it ended up running in the Voice after he died of an overdose in 2005. I quit Sports Illustrated to work at Radar 2.0; Radar 2.0 folded (my magic as the black widow of magazines returned) and I considered a longer project on ODB. I thought RZA or GZA would have written something; they didn’t. And eventually the Voice article led to a book, Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, published in 2008. I loved ODB the rapper, but my interest in him was his magnetism and how his career careened into this tragic end. Of all the Wu-Tang MCs, he was the one to watch, the rapper that everyone thought was crazy. People called him crazy all the time. I thought he needed a diagnosis. That was probably overstepping since I am not a psychiatrist, but I was so interested in him and his behavior. For this little westside white girl from LA who was deep in therapy and looking for people to relate to, ODB was not the obvious choice. But I related to his outbursts and his self-destruction and his grand presentation; I related to his declarative state of being. He was ODB and no one would fuck with that. He was a walking manic episode in my mind. Obviously he had experiences and a life that I could never relate to, but for three years I tried to report everything I could on ODB. I shared an office with a promoter at Gleason’s and would write to the sound of the speed bag and the thumping of sixteen-ounce gloves connecting with flesh.
After my book came out in late 2008, everything broke. The year before, I was fixed up with a friend of a friend who I fell in love with. We went to dinners, we ate hamburgers and Di Fara’s pizza, he met my family, we went to bars. I tried to encourage him not to go to bars. He was not the right person for me and I spent a year tethered to drama. I was proud of the relationship. My first one, at age thirty-two. We broke up in November 2008 and then again in December and then finally in January 2009. He had been cheating on me and I had been reading his phone obsessively, imagining him with others. Around the same time a ten-million-dollar lawsuit was filed against me in response to the book. The lawsuit—frivolous and dismissed—felt like someone slowly dripping acid into an open wound; the breakup was worse. The financial crash made working again seem impossible. In 2009, I made seven thousand dollars above the New York State poverty line. Adjusted to the city, I was just barely getting by. My brain was tangled. I couldn’t stop lengthy speeches from looping in my head. They were angry diatribes, reenacting conversations. Lines I wished I had said to various people. Anger and frustration that felt like shards of glass plunging into my brain. One neighborhood friend said he would see me walking around, talking to myself. I had nowhere to go, no boyfriend, no project, no future. I worked nights at ESPN as a late-read copy editor and my hours were lonely and disconcerting. I had been back on lithium for seven years and for the first time I was questioning whether it worked. I felt like I needed more. I needed something else.
I was desperately looking for a magic salve or a brainwashing routine that could quiet the storm of hating on my ex. I used to walk the bridges. It wasn’t aimless, I was looking for someplace to go. Something to do, to be needed somewhere. I kept boxing, sparring every Saturday at Gleason’s with my surly trainer. I would finish my workouts by stretching my body out long, looking up to the uncovered rafters, comforted by the parallel and perpendicular lines of the open ducts. It wasn’t enough. My brain worked overtime the minute the endorphins dropped. I looked for light in Zen Buddhism with intensely calm monks on State Street, meditating in the dark, while incense smoke wafted through crouched bodies. I learned how to breathe there and how to sit still. I learned how to say “I don’t know” and how to really mean it. I learned how to clear my head. Some days it worked; many days it didn’t. I remember one Sunday being terrified of meditation and going deep into what felt like a vision, a dance of some sort in the bull’s-eye of a Rorschach test. I would sit for hours with my eyes at half-mast and I would emerge less frantic. My friend Jeb said that when we spoke on the phone after those sessions, I sounded tranquil. I would try anything to lift the veil of my brain loop. I went to a scarf-laden lady who tried to sell me my future self downloaded into a crystal. I loved crystals and said sure. (Quartz crystals are made of lithium and I keep one strung around my neck at all times.) I mantraed under a Magnetic Rainbow Helix with 5-D Star Tet and Casual Ring. It was a mobile. But sure. I rode Harleys with the Iron Knights of Newark and I held my twenty-five-year-old neighbor’s waist for two hours as we raced the yellow-painted lane dividers. But not even a gang of men in leather could clear my cloudy heart and spiked brain. I surfed with dolphins and a longboarder named Chad. A man in a beret and a fake fishtail braid who reeked of Marlboro Reds read my aura for thirty-five dollars. He printed out my white-lavender computer-generated aura prognosis: “Others are instantly attracted to you as you sparkle and glow with a mysterious inner light. You also seem to be a magical fairy-like creature.” His assistant told me my head chakra was blocked. So she waved her hands around my head and said, this might hurt a little at first but you will be so much more open.
I wanted my head chakra unblocked so badly. Nothing helped.
CHAPTER 18
COPING SKILLS 2, CHOPPING MUSHROOMS BADLY
SARAH J. GAVE me a battered copy of Eat, Pray, Love, which I had ignored for all the years it claimed to be God’s gift to women. But when I started reading it, I was surprised, I couldn’t stop. I could relate to the way Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about bei
ng broken and I was envious of her solution. Obviously journeying to Italy, India, and Bali was not possible. I thought, I don’t need to travel anywhere, New York has all of what she sought out. I could do it myself, I had my days free. I had already found my Zen retreat with the State Street monks. After three months of spirit questing and meditating and granola making (I had some idea that I could parlay my granola recipe into a small business; this was not the case) and listening to Justin Timberlake (only one song, “What Goes Around Comes Back Around”) and Tina Turner (only one song, “Better Be Good to Me”), I was feeling better enough to get better.
One night, I ended up with my friend Karey eating my usual rigatoni with eggplant and ricotta salata at a back table in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood restaurant Noodle Pudding. We were both launching into our tireless updates of breaking up and breaking down when I heard a screech—like a possum being Tasered.
The pink-cheeked woman sitting next to me burst into hysterical, high-pitched noises, the kind of bellyaching, screaming cacophony that was from either indescribable joy or burning pain. Her dining companion was a man who had been bringing out dish after dish from the kitchen, describing how each one was cooked—seared tuna, pastas, soups, small roasted vegetables, scallops, and grilled artichokes, tiramisu, and hot, hardened biscotti.
“What did you say to get her to laugh like that?” I asked.
“It’s the wine,” he said with a heavy Italian accent and a lisp. His eyes widened like punctuation, then narrowed. “You guys need more wine.” He waved over our waiter, who approached, bottle in hand. The restaurant was about to close, but you’d never know it.
At our table introductions ensued: The lisp man was one of Noodle Pudding’s chefs, Fredo.
He removed the potted plant between our tables. “Come, drink with us.”
He had been a photographer before he was chef. When Fredo talked of food, his arms took on a classical conductor’s poise—gesticulating with each ingredient. “When I was on vacation, I was staying on an island in southern Italy and though it was an island, the people were land people, farmers. So I went swimming off the coast and there were sea urchins everywhere, up and down the rocks. I jumped out of the water and got a table knife and plastic bag and jumped back in and hacked away until I filled the bag. I went home, made spaghetti with olive oil and garlic—just a little garlic, not the way you Americans use garlic—and opened each urchin and let the roe cook on the hot pasta.” Fredo then made a gesture from his elbow to his fingertips to his mouth, perfection. His lips were pursed together in a kiss as if tasting the dish all over again.
Fredo wrote out a menu of what he would cook for me if I ever agreed to have an affair with him, which I had clearly stated I wouldn’t. He asked for a date, to make out, to have an affair, to spoon, but it all seemed like a show, like he was coming on way too strong for it to actually carry meaning. He was playing a character. But when Fredo spoke of food, he was being real. Pure joy, hedonism at its best. The menu he wrote for me, which was a love letter that I’m sure he’d written to many, many ladies, was beautiful: oysters on the half shell with Franciacorta, an Italian champagne; crudo, raw marinated tuna, swordfish, snapper, scallops with citrus zest with a sauvignon blanc; spaghetti with sea urchins and more Franciacorta; whole roasted wild fish, red snapper with tomatoes, garlic, olives, and parsley; lemon sorbet, fresh fruit; “rest”; and coffee and grappa. The menu was written in block letters and he hunched over the paper thinking about the right combination as he wrote out each course. I was flush just from reading the meal. Fredo countered with flirtatious self-deprecation: “Eh, sex, I’m only good for one round. BUT it’s a bery, bery good one round, like at least seven minutes.”
He couched every advance with the proclamation, “No, I love my wife. I would never leave her for anyone and I hope to God she never leaves me. That is the truth. I love my wife and kids.” And then he quickly added, “C’mon, Yaime, please, let me give it to you once, why do you deny me ’appiness?” (Fredo never so much as tried to kiss me on the lips, now or then.) The attention, that night, felt good and unreal. I was happy and welcome among strangers and passing time at a restaurant after closing. I saw the veil lifted and, lo and behold, there was even more beauty behind the gauze. It was like being back at Moonwork—allowed into a space with new friends in an unexpected place after a period of darkness and isolation.
I don’t know how that night ended. I don’t remember, my brain was marinating in red wine and my intestines were indistinguishable from the mounds of pasta I had eaten. I got several texts from Fredo about playing pool on Monday, which I deflected. Every excuse I gave, he’d respond with perfect, fine, I can wait, we can do something after you make granola/box/levitate. Finally, I said, no, I really had to make granola. And he responded by saying, “You can cook in my kitchen, anytime.”
“Really?”
“Sure, come whenever,” he said.
So I did. Again, I had nothing else to do.
There are two Noodle Puddings—the one at night, filled with stories and Ella Fitzgerald and tea candles and hot plates of fish and pasta and cold plates of carpaccio and arugula often helmed by the restaurant’s owner, Antonio Migliaccio; then there is the daytime Noodle, the quiet, fast chopping of ordering and prep work and tasting and small intimate lunches of what wasn’t eaten the night before.
When I arrived, the restaurant looked closed and the windows were locked. Everything was still and stacked like furniture Jenga. But below there was activity—the metal rabbit hole that connected the sidewalk to Noodle Pudding’s basement kitchen was flung open, tempting curiosity. I looked through the open passageway and saw a splintered plank and stacks of vegetables, roots poking through cardboard, leafy greens itching to bust out of their crates. I walked into the silent, wooded room, the polar opposite of the night before. There was the hum of the espresso machine and the walls still vibrating from the previous night’s conversations. I saw Fredo, hunched over the paper tablecloth tallying the checks, writing on the back table the food that was eaten, the food that needed to be sold—meals reduced to chicken scratches, meals reduced to brass tacks. He looked up.
“So, Betty Blue, you want to learn to cook. You want an espresso first?”
We walked to the brass and copper antiquity that sat on the bar and he cleaned it and made a shot.
“Sugar?”
“No, I take it black,” I said.
“You should take sugar, it’ll make you sweeter.”
He handed me a spoon, which I rested on the saucer. I don’t put sugar in my coffee.
“So, you want to learn how to cook?” he said again, surprised. “Okay, let’s start, here’s an apron.”
He took me to the kitchen and showed me the small stations for cutting, peeling, and dicing; he showed me the two overheated ovens and the stovetop. He stood me in front of a cutting board, which had already been placed on a wet napkin so that the board stayed in place on the metal counter.
“I am not a chef, I have never been trained; you want to learn how to make French food and French sauces, go to the Culinary Institute. Here, I will teach you how to love.”
And with that Fredo gave me a sharpened knife and introduced me to the prep cooks Poncho and Cunyado. In between speed bouts of slicing and grilling, they’d look at me suspiciously. They’d half smile and pretend to understand but really they just wanted to get through the vegetables, the deboning of the chickens, the red sauce, the stocks, the lettuce, the chard . . . the prep. I tried to focus on my tasks and whatever was on my cutting board. I helped make a cold snap pea soup by shelling the peas, blanching them, and sieving them through a metal cone that looked like a contraption from my grandmother’s kitchen. I drained the blood and fleshy juice from a rack of pork ribs by running my fingers perpendicular to the bones, and then I sliced them, three ribs a portion, and prepared them to be braised. Fredo took me downstairs to gather ca
rrots, celery, and onion for stock and we stopped to examine the fish being delivered hours after the morning catch.
“Look for clear eyes and a dark red behind the gills. This is beautiful, perfect fish,” Fredo said.
“Probably a good test for boyfriends as well,” I said.
“Mmm? You want a boyfriend? Why can’t you American women just have fun?”
We put the black cod, brook trout, and headless salmon on ice to be descaled and filleted by Juan when he arrived at four. We gathered the celery, carrots, onions, and parsley in the basement fridge, which was the size of my kitchen and stocked chock-full of fresh vegetables from the Queens market. Most of my first day I was reprimanded for not knowing how to cut . . . anything. First Fredo showed me on carrots: “Like this, your fingers go like these, otherwise you end up in the ER. I’m not going to the ER today.” I tucked my four fingers under and chopped very deliberately.
“Ugh, you are bery, bery slow. Like this.” And the pile would vanish in seconds. I would resume at a glacial pace only to have Fredo clucking behind me.
“I don’t like the way you cut. Your body positioning is all off. Do it like this.”
He demonstrated again, and again cut a hundred carrots and lifted his hands to display the same pile I had been laboring over for an hour, only now diced to pieces.
“Protect your fingers and you won’t get cut, you work too hard with the knife, make it easy. Eh?”
I stood in front of the window and chopped. I tried to make it meditative, but I wanted to chop correctly, like Poncho and Cunyato. I could see them arriving from downstairs with whole vegetables in the tubs and leaving with those same vegetables finely chopped. They were machines. I’d already helped prepare two entrées, the soup, some stocks. Slow chopper was okay for day one; no one really cared what I did or how fast. The space was calm in every way, except for the cartoonish stovetop, which was crowded with overflowing pots and pans and cauldrons filled with lava-like sauces. There was a pot of red wine on fire, luminous with blue flames circling the alcohol, and a giant cauldron of Bolognese that took two men to carry—a vat of slow-cooked meats and fats and tomatoes.