Liquor

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Upon entering the big turquoise-painted Victorian building, you came into a pretty little foyer that was usually packed with tourists and rich locals. To your left was a cabinet full of awards the restaurant had won. To your right was an etched-glass window through which you could see the main dining room. Directly in front of you was the reservations desk. If you were a regular person, the maître d’ might suggest that you go through the kitchen to the bar and have a drink while you waited for your table. If you were Lenny Duveteaux, you were greeted quietly but effusively and shown to your table at once.

  The main dining room hadn’t changed much in ten years. The patterned green carpet was still marshmallow-thick underfoot, the walls accented with dark wooden paneling and softly lit paintings of Louisiana swamp birds. Balloons and ribbons festooned the tables of parties celebrating special occasions. The hum of conversation and the clatter of dinnerware were lively but not distractingly loud. This room could seat about 120, but somehow it still had an intimate atmosphere.

  Rickey was wearing the only jacket he owned, a navy-blue affair from high school, too short in the sleeves and uncomfortably tight across the back when he tried to button it. G-man, bereft, wore the dreaded green House Jacket provided to underdressed male patrons. His customary dark glasses didn’t help the look. Lenny sported an expensive-looking white silk jacket and a candy-striped shirt with too many buttons undone. The other two men at the table, Lenny’s lawyer and business manager, wore conservative business suits.

  “So,” said De La Cerda, the lawyer, “we’ve got quite a few things we’d like you to look at—”

  Lenny held up his hand. “Not yet, Oscar. They want to check out the menu.”

  They had a round of Bloody Marys made with the restaurant’s own Worcestershire sauce, then placed their orders. A few minutes later the waiter set small plates of butterflied shrimp in front of them. “Chef Jamie sends these out with his compliments, Mr. Duveteaux. Our shrimp and tasso Henican. Enjoy.”

  Rickey took a bite of the appetizer. The tender Gulf shrimp were spiked with tasso ham, tossed in a spicy beurre blanc, set atop a pool of five-pepper jelly, and garnished with pickled okra. The dish had a bright, complex flavor: first you tasted the sweetness of the shrimp and butter, then the gastrique’s sourness and the tart burn of the peppers. Rickey suspected he might be in the presence of genius. This was a worshipful presentation of shrimp, not just bringing out its best qualities but actually improving them. Of all the cooks he’d known, only Paco Valdeon had had such a gift for exalting his ingredients.

  Rickey finished his appetizer in four bites and glanced around the table to see if anyone was watching. When he saw that no one was, he used the side of his finger to scoop the remaining sauce from the plate. Just as he put his finger in his mouth, G-man looked up, saw what he was doing, and nodded emphatically.

  Lenny looked at their two spotless plates. “You like that, huh? You do as well with this restaurant as I expect, you can eat here any time you want.”

  “If we do as well as you expect, we’ll be at our own restaurant all the time,” G-man pointed out. “So was that Crystal hot sauce in the beurre blanc, do you know?”

  “Yeah, it was. Good palate.”

  The waiter brought the first courses. G-man had foie gras on brioche with a Sauternes sauce. Rickey had the turtle soup again.

  “Sherry, sir?”

  “You bet.”

  The waiter set down a small silver pitcher, and Rickey poured its contents into his soup.

  “Another Bloody Mary?”

  “Sure.”

  “Me too,” said G-man. “Please.”

  The soup was as thick, salty, and savory as Rickey remembered. G-man passed him a bite of foie gras. Beneath its seared surface, it was meltingly tender. When Rickey looked up and saw Lenny watching them, he had the disconcerting feeling that Lenny knew they had eaten here exactly once between them.

  That was one of the problems with Lenny. Rickey usually thought of himself as smart—smart enough to get by, anyway—but Lenny made him feel stupid, like somebody who didn’t know a damn thing about food or restaurants. It wasn’t anything Lenny did; he wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe it was just that he had expected Lenny to be kind of a dope, and Lenny had turned out to be anything but.

  He was getting a little drunk. He took a sip of his water, and a back waiter swooped in and replaced it with a fresh, ice-filled glass.

  When the appetizer plates were cleared, Flanagan retrieved a leather portfolio from the floor and extracted a slim sheaf of paper. He glanced at Lenny, who nodded. Flanagan cleared his throat.

  “First we’d like to show you some figures—we feel you should understand the potential here. These are last year’s sales figures for the Duvet Corporation—the combined proceeds of Lenny’s, Crescent, and Sundae Dinner.”

  He handed the sheet to Rickey. Rickey looked at the bottom and saw a figure he would never have associated with restaurants. The cost of a B-2 bomber, maybe, or the debt of a very poor Third World nation, but not restaurants. He passed the sheet to G-man, whose eyebrows rose above the tops of his shades.

  Flanagan handed him another sheet. “This is a rough monthly breakdown of the restaurants’ costs.”

  These figures—percentages of money spent on food, labor, utilities, and so forth—were a little more familiar. Food costs in all three restaurants hovered around 26 percent, a figure Rickey found low. “We’d want a little bit higher food costs than this,” he said.

  Lenny grinned as if he’d guessed Rickey would say that. De La Cerda looked at Flanagan, who said, “That’s doable.”

  Flanagan removed another item from his portfolio, an eight-by-ten color photograph. “This is the property we’d like you to consider taking over.”

  Rickey studied the picture. For a few seconds it was just a photo of a building on an oak-lined portion of St. Charles Avenue. He knew it was on St. Charles because he could see the streetcar tracks in front of it, a leftover string of Mardi Gras beads dangling from the overhead wires. Then it hit him. “This is Sundae Dinner.”

  “That’s right,” said Lenny. “I’m closing the place down. I want you to take over, make it into your restaurant.”

  “Oh no. Oh no no no.” In his dismay, what little tact Rickey had completely deserted him. “That place is gonna have the Bad Restaurant Curse. No way are we taking over that spot.”

  He knew Lenny understood exactly what he meant. The Bad Restaurant Curse was universally acknowledged among restaurant people. It could haunt locations for years after the first bad restaurant closed. There was a pretty little storefront over on Prytania, no less desirable than any of a hundred other locations in the vicinity. The first bad restaurant there was opened by a woman who had spent several years writing vicious restaurant reviews for the Cornet, a weekly free paper. Her menu was Asian Eclectic: eighteen-dollar noodle bowls, pot stickers in cilantro pesto, curried calamari. The place was universally shunned and went broke in a matter of months. The second restaurant was an earnest, mid-priced, family-run tapas bar. It reviewed well and the dining public seemed to want to like it, but it closed within a year. Now a young chef named Cole Parker had taken over the space, renamed it Poivre, and started cooking excellent French country food there. He seemed to be doing all right, but it could take years to see whether the Bad Restaurant Curse was truly broken.

  To his credit, Lenny didn’t try to act as though he had no idea what Rickey was talking about. Nor did he seem offended. “It wouldn’t be a bad location for you,” he said. “I know Sundae Dinner was a dumb idea, but my dumb ideas make more money than most people’s good ones.”

  “That’s true,” said Flanagan. “He’s raking it in. Duvet Corporation just includes the three restaurants. He also gets cookbook royalties, product endorsements, consulting fees, a lot of miscellaneous stuff.”

  “I got offered the chance to do a show on the Food Network,” Lenny said. “I didn’t do it because I would’ve had to spend t
oo much time in New York. But I could have. I’m not bragging … well, not too much. I just want you to understand where these things can lead.”

  “We don’t want to do a TV show,” said Rickey. “We don’t even want to have three restaurants. Just one. Just one damn restaurant that isn’t piggybacking on somebody else’s reputation.”

  Lenny templed his hands in front of him. “Rickey, haven’t I made myself clear? I don’t want you to piggyback on my reputation. I specifically do not want that. I see Liquor attracting mainly a local crowd. I wouldn’t even want New Orleanians to know I was associated with it. They hear my name, they’ll assume it’s just some flashy tourist joint.”

  “You don’t think people will find out you’re backing us?” said G-man.

  “Sure they will, eventually. But if we handle it right, you’ll already have a crowd of regulars by that time. They’ll want to keep eating there, so they’ll justify my involvement by seeing it as exactly what it is—you using my money without letting me fuck up the place.”

  “That’s kinda harsh,” said Rickey.

  “I’m doing one type of thing, you’re doing another. There’s plenty of room for both.”

  The salad course had been served while they were talking, but no one had touched it. Now Rickey looked at his plate and saw a glistening pile of romaine lettuce with golden-fried oysters arranged around the periphery. He picked up his salad fork, speared one of the oysters, and ate it. It was perfect—the seasoning, the breading, the oyster itself. He was starting to feel demoralized, both by Lenny and by the parade of exquisite food. What the hell made him think he could open a restaurant anyway?

  “Wow,” said G-man, who had a salad of fried chicken, roasted red peppers, and Bibb lettuce. “This blue cheese dressing is almost as good as mine. Not that I’m bragging or anything.”

  It was hard to tell with the dark glasses, but Rickey was pretty sure G-man had just given Lenny a sly look. If so, Lenny either hadn’t caught it or didn’t care. “Yuh,” he said through a big forkful of crabmeat, “your chicken wings are terrific.”

  “Aw, they’re just bar food,” G-man said modestly.

  “Nothing wrong with great bar food.”

  “I like some good buffalo wings,” said De La Cerda, and everyone nodded as if this were a scintillating conversational gambit.

  The salad plates were cleared, the chef came out to say hello to Lenny, the pace of the restaurant whirled around them, and Rickey ordered another Bloody Mary. He knew he was drinking too much, but he felt too depressed to stop. Depressed wasn’t even the word; he felt torn. One part of his mind was busy resenting Lenny and the two suits. Another part realized that Lenny was, in fact, making them a very generous offer; that part was experiencing a craven urge to accept Lenny’s backing on Lenny’s terms and make a shit-load of money. Yet another part—perhaps the most basic—was simply enjoying the meal, wishing he and G-man could be sitting here eating it without having to talk to these clowns.

  So it could not be said that he was precisely in his right mind when he sat up in his chair, stared Lenny in the eye, and said, “I just can’t do it.”

  For the first time, Lenny looked a little nonplussed. “Do what?”

  “Open there. Where Sundae Dinner is—was—whatever. I can’t do it, Lenny. I know you want to help us. That’s pretty cool. I used to think you were kind of a jerk.” From the corner of his eye he saw G-man wince, but he kept talking. “You’re OK, though. I could probably go into business with you. I could even listen to your advice, although I’d probably ignore most of it. I could do all that, maybe. But I can’t open my restaurant in the Sundae Dinner space.” He poked the table with his forefinger, clumsily, three times. “Can. Not. Do it.”

  “Can I say anything to change your mind?”

  “No. No way.”

  “OK. So you open somewhere else.”

  “… Huh?”

  Lenny shrugged. “It would’ve been easier to use property we already have, but it’s not essential. We’ll break the lease on that building, find a new place, transfer whatever equipment you can use—you don’t have any objection to using some of the equipment, I hope?”

  “No,” said G-man, seeing that Rickey was speechless. “Course we don’t.”

  Flanagan and De La Cerda sat silent, impassive. Rickey guessed they had known Lenny was prepared to make this counteroffer and had just been keeping their mouths shut waiting to see if it happened.

  Now Rickey felt, if not exactly trapped, then obligated somehow. He’d come into this meeting with his mind as open as he could make it on the subject of Lenny and his money. He’d been horrified by the Sundae Dinner possibility and convinced that Lenny wasn’t really interested in them at all; he just wanted them to revitalize his crappy gimmick restaurant. Now Lenny had countered with evidence that this wasn’t the case at all, that he would do whatever it took to win them over.

  As the waiter returned to the table with the entrées and began to remove the metal hats from the five plates, Rickey gazed at Lenny with grudging, drunken, but genuine admiration. Maybe they could work with this guy after all.

  By the time they left Commander’s Palace, Rickey was not so much drunk as saturated—with vodka, with great food, with information and possibility. He was only vaguely aware of saying goodnight to Lenny and the suits. The cab stand was right across from the kitchen door, and he hoped no one they knew was working in that kitchen right now, maybe stepping out for an after-service smoke, only to see G-man pouring Rickey into a cab.

  As they rode uptown, Rickey thought about how nice it was to be able to afford a cab. Then he thought about how terrible it would be to throw up in one, especially after such a meal. He closed his eyes, slid down in the seat, and tried not to think at all until they got back to Marengo Street.

  He hung up his jacket, draped his shirt and pants over a chair, and fell into bed. The last two courses of the meal—potato-crusted Lyonnaise drum and bread pudding souffle—still weighed heavily in his stomach, but he no longer felt sick. Though he knew he ought to be thinking about Lenny’s offer, he couldn’t get his mind off the food. It didn’t need any clever hooks or gimmicks. It was simply awesome, about as good as he imagined food could be.

  G-man came in and began to undress. “That drum was so moist,” he said. “The potatoes were golden, but the fish wasn’t dry at all.”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking about that.”

  “It’s the potato crust. The water in the potatoes crisps them and steams the fish at the same time. Real simple, but smart.”

  “You’d want to have your heat nice and high in a real heavy pan.”

  “Was that a caper beurre blanc, or were the capers just scattered over it?”

  “Just scattered over it. But they were, like, toasted or something.”

  “Toasted capers,” mused G-man, sitting naked on the edge of the bed. “They do some wild shit.”

  “They really do. It’s traditional, but it’s also wild as hell. I’d love to do stuff like that.”

  “Looks like you’re gonna get your chance.”

  “Oh, God,” Rickey moaned. “We didn’t actually agree to anything, did we?”

  “What, you don’t remember signing that contract?”

  “Dude—”

  “I’m just fucking with you. We didn’t agree to anything. You told Lenny you’d call him. That’s it.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think we should do it. I’ve thought we should probably do it all along—you know that.”

  Rickey put his hands over his eyes. “It makes me feel like a whore.”

  “Well, would you rather stand out on Burgundy Street and give three-quarters of your money to some pimp, or would you rather have your own whorehouse?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we are whores, in a way. We work ourselves half to death for other people’s pleasure, and we give up big chunks of our lives to do it. How many Thanksgivings and Fat Tuesd
ays have we worked? How come we got no savings, no health insurance? When did we ever have a vacation? And going to Gulfport for the day doesn’t count.”

  “We gotta make a living,” Rickey mumbled. His head was beginning to ache.

  “You think whores say something different? My point is, you want to open this restaurant, and I don’t see any other way to do it. If we’re gonna be whores, let’s milk the johns good instead of settling for five bucks a throw.”

  With that, G-man stretched out on the bed and went quickly to sleep. It appeared to be an untroubled sleep, and Rickey envied it.

  chapter 11

  The madness that gripped New Orleans for two months of each year had finally receded. It was now possible to drive somewhere without first consulting parade routes. No one but the occasional clueless, straggling tourist still wore beads. Public drunkenness was as prevalent as ever, but no longer mandatory. Mardi Gras was over.

  Rickey had dropped a thousand dollars—the most money he’d ever spent at once—on a 1973 Plymouth Satellite with a two-tone paint job, black and gold. The color scheme, the ancient fleur-de-lis-shaped air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, and a paper bag with cutout eyeholes in the glove compartment made Rickey think the car’s previous owner had been a Saints fan. He hadn’t seen one of those bags since he and G-man were kids, when the Saints had a 1-15 season and local sportscaster Buddy Diliberto started wearing a brown grocery bag on his head during his TV segments. A sizable contingent of fans followed Buddy’s lead and became known as Bagheads.

  At first it was thrilling to have transportation any time they wanted it. He and G-man had been able to use the family cars when they lived with their parents, but since they’d moved out they relied on the streetcar, the city bus lines, and their own feet. Now they no longer had to limit their grocery trips to what they could carry. After they closed the Apostle Bar’s kitchen, they’d sometimes drive out to Lake Pontchartrain and dangle their legs over the seawall, staring out over the dark polluted water and talking about their plans, often until the sun came up. When they needed something for a recipe, Anthony would offer the use of his Continental, and Rickey loved being able to say, “That’s OK, I’ll take my car.”