“What does he eat?”
I hesitated for a minute. Those confidentiality agreements were very explicit.
“Me, I don’t see much, either.”
“Oh, come on. Tell me. He eats bugs and rats and drinks blood?”
“He might, but I’m not saying.”
“Amigo, you can tell me, and this tale will stay in this kitchen.”
“You tell me something about the woman, and I’ll tell you something about what Monster eats.”
“Sí. That’s fair,” Manny said with a solemn nod.
“Most of the time, I don’t make him anything. I get notes about his ideas about food theory, but I hardly cook anything for him. Once, when he was back from tour, he asked for eggs and toast for breakfast. He wanted the eggs to be poached, just so, in white wine from the Santa Ynez Valley, and he has to have toast baked fresh each morning from organic whole grain flour from France. He’s obsessed with genetically modified food and doesn’t trust American flour. He never touched the eggs or the toast. He ate the butter and jam, mixes it together and spoons it out of the jar. Far as I know that’s pretty much what he lives off, and that’s why he looks like shit on a stick, ghastly pale. Mostly I cook for his wife. I suspect it’s kind of an experiment; I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect he feeds her what he thinks would be the best and healthiest, but for himself he goes to McDonald’s for Big Macs.”
“Oh,” Manny said, dejectedly, as though he had counted on confirmation that Monster snacked on raw monkey brains.
“Okay, about the woman.”
Manny looked about the room as though we were being spied on.
“She can’t talk.”
“What do you mean she can’t talk?”
“She is . . . How do you call it in English? You know, those people who can’t talk. Deaf?”
“No, deaf is when you can’t hear. You mean she’s a mute?”
“Does that mean she can’t talk?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“She can’t say a thing. Once she got lost on the grounds, not really lost, but Security was busy with Monster and the kids. They didn’t see her take the hillside path, the one that washed out, and she fell, hurt her ankle.”
“What happened?”
“She cried, but no words. I ran down the hillside from where I had been pruning trees. I asked whether she was hurt in Spanish and English, and she started with her hands and fingers, and I got nervous and called Security. I didn’t know this lady, but from the way Security acted she had to be somebody important. One of them used his hands the way she did, and they helped her into one of their golf carts and took her away.”
“I saw her yesterday. I didn’t say a word, but I made eye contact with her and she walked away. Then this muscle-bound black guy comes out of nowhere and does his best to stare me down.”
Manny nodded. “So you met Mr. Thug?”
“Mr. Thug? Is that Monster’s assistant?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“I don’t call that meeting someone. I mean all he did was stare at me, like he wanted to beat the shit out of me.”
Manny shrugged. “You need to keep away from Mr. Thug. He’s trouble.”
“Trouble? I wasn’t trying to make conversation with him. I wave to Mrs. Monster, she leaves, and he comes over and mad-dogs me.”
“Mad-dogs you? Yeah, that’s a good description of Mr. Thug. That’s why you should stay far from him.”
Manny finished the juice and nodded his thanks and headed out from the shelter of the kitchen into the bright and harsh afternoon sun.
The story seemed straight enough, and though I didn’t know Manny well, I had no reason to doubt him. I wasn’t surprised that Monster would be interested in a woman, though I assumed he was gay. Being filthy rich made anything possible, though. I was surprised he’d be interested in a mute. I figured him for the kind of star who would require a perfect trophy wife so he could have perfect trophy children and they all could live in his weird little kingdom of monsters. Maybe I had to reconsider him; he wasn’t a totally lunatic superstar, seeking perfection in everything in the blind hope that perfection would rub off on him.
SPICED BHINDI AND EGGPLANT
SERVES 4
4 ounces bhindi (okra)
3 to 4 cloves garlic
Extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO)
3 shallots, peeled and diced
½ teaspoon cumin seeds
4 ounces mini eggplant, chopped
1 large heirloom tomato, finely chopped
¼ teaspoon turmeric
Salt
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
¼ teaspoon garam masala
½ teaspoon coriander
¼ teaspoon fresh Thai chili, minced
1 tablespoon cilantro, finely chopped
Juice of 2 limes (freshly squeezed)
A few hours before cooking, wash and drain the bhindi; remove and discard the heads and tails; and slice the okra into 1⁄³-inch rounds. Also beforehand, slow-fry the garlic in EVOO. Remove and mash the garlic, reserving the EVOO.
When cooking begins, warm the reserved garlic oil in a nonstick pan or wok over medium heat and sauté the shallots. Add the cumin seeds and when they begin to crackle, add the garlic; sauté for 30 seconds.
Add the bhindi and eggplant and mix well. Cook on medium heat, stirring often, until the eggplant and bhindi get color, about 7 minutes. Add the tomato, turmeric, and salt; cook until the tomato is tender, about 2 minutes. Add the paprika, garam masala, coriander, and Thai chili and mix well. Cook for about 1 minute over medium heat. Toss in the cilantro. Add the lime juice.
Optional: Garnish with micro cilantro.
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER BREAKFAST I USUALLY TENDED THE herb garden. Mornings were pleasant as I warmed in the sun, smelling rosemary and thyme in the air, on my fingers. Mornings made Monster’s Lair seem a good place to work and my life sensible, though there’re only so many times you can rearrange a kitchen, sharpen cutlery, clean and reclean surfaces so as to make them antiseptic. Eventually, I had a dozen kinds of yeast, six kinds of salt, more kinds of vinegar than I would ever need. I made sure to stock up on all the trace elements that the chemistry of Living Food required: talc of mustard seed, pregnant nut extract, dried blackberry juice.
Though I told myself I would not mull, it wasn’t humanly possible to escape doing so. I came to the conclusion that the real reason for my job was to be a placeholder and keep the kitchen occupied because Monster could afford me, and since he had the money, he had to have a chef. And if that chef, even with an arrest record, once was somebody, he needed me on his payroll.
I was an ornament on the Christmas tree of his success.
Monster became more a presence than a real human employer. Some nights I’d see lights flash by as a caravan of limos made their way onto the grounds. I thought then I’d get the call to be ready to serve Monster, but it didn’t come. Maybe he brought home takeout or stopped at the Carrows off the 101, but I doubted that.
I worked for a ghost, an invisible man.
But in the mornings unease about a ghostly employer felt silly.
At night it was a different story. When it’s dark and cold and the fire dies down in the hearth, yeah, imagining what went on in that mansion wasn’t pleasant at all.
I heard a gate open and turned from tending the herb garden to see Monster’s wife, now heavily pregnant, meandering in the rose garden. Her nurse, a big-haired white woman, hung back, fumbling with a magazine on a bench beneath a tree. Monster’s wife slowly cut roses, smelled each one, and dropped them into a wicker basket. Hand on her back, she waddled from plant to plant, taking a stem or two. She had to be maybe eight and a half months’ pregnant, and she looked striking, with her blond hair glinting gold in the gray, moist morning air. She stopped the trimming of roses and stared at me.
I stared back. I wasn’t supposed to, not after that situation with Thug. I didn’t want that fool causing me gr
ief.
It was all very clear to me now: Don’t address Monster’s wife; don’t talk to the children.
Mind your own damn business.
She held a white rose to her nose and sniffed and sneezed.
I laughed, and she looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“Sorry,” I said with a shrug.
Frowning, she turned toward the mansion and waddled away.
My stomach sank. I imagined her using sign language to convey just what a pig I had been.
Thug would return with Security and have me hauled off to the dungeon. No, they’d just fire me and I’d be back on a plane, flying to New Jersey to return to the halfway house.
I was so lost in thought that I pretty much denuded a rosemary shrub and didn’t see Monster’s wife return with paper and pen.
She flung open the wrought iron gate separating the staff from the inner courtyard. She made her way to me, scribbling ferociously.
I waited, wondering what she had written, what kind of trouble she was about to inflict on me. She thrust the paper into my hands.
She had written in a flowing hand, You were laughing at me!
“No,” I said.
She shook her head and pointed to the paper and handed me the pen.
I wrote quickly.
I wasn’t laughing at you. I just thought you looked beautiful. Mothers-to-be are beautiful.
She seemed to hiccup, but then I realized it was a giggle.
I scribbled, When are you due?
She took the paper from me.
Three weeks.
You must be very excited.
She took the paper from me and wrote, Yes!
Do you like my food?
It’s much better than the last cook’s.
Who was the chef?
I looked at her fingers as she passed the paper back to me. They were long and strong, and her nails were the same color as the rosemary blooms.
An Italian guy. He didn’t last long. He drank. Then we had a Japanese woman, who was very good, but she just disappeared.
That’s bad luck. Sometimes that happens in the restaurant business, a run of bad luck and you just about have to shut your doors. I wrote in response.
She wrote something and passed it to me.
Do you know how to sign? I’ll teach you.
Took me a minute trying to think of the best way to explain it.
It’s my contract; I can’t fraternize with family or friends.
She shook her head, then signed her name and repeated it a couple of times in sign language until I caught on and signed Rita to her delight.
She scribbled another note. I don’t want to talk about rules and how things are done. I will teach you every day in the morning.
My first lesson had ended, and she patted my hand, took the pen and paper from me, and waddled off into the inner courtyard. I glanced up and saw Security looking at me from a second-story alcove equipped with a camera and telephoto lens, studiously recording signs of my disloyalty.
Manny was right. When Monster was done with the world tour, business junket, pleasure cruise, whatever he was doing, he came back like the president landing on a carrier, sock stuffed deep into crotch. A helicopter circled the Lair a few times and settled on the great lawn in front of the manor house.
Security appeared and gestured for the staff to come out to greet the return of the conquering Monster.
He sprang from the helicopter like all the cameras in the world were focused on him, waving and beaming, wearing the biggest pair of aviator sunglasses I had ever seen and a bomber jacket that looked big enough for two of him.
He stood there giving us a stadium wave, and we waved back even though the helicopter blades kicked up a wall of stinging dust.
Security surrounded him, a circle of men in gray jumpsuits, and escorted him into the enveloping privacy of the Lair, his sanctum sanctorum.
Now that Monster had been back for a few weeks, the pressure of the job was no longer busywork, my need to appear useful even if it was a demonstration for nobody but myself.
Monster discovered my number and kept me on my toes by being demanding in this odd, jellyfish-like way. He didn’t complain, didn’t fire me, nothing obvious, but I felt myself being weighed down by the oddness of his needs.
For some reason he took an interest in the time the garlic was picked. Before dawn was the best, but he’d accept the hour after dusk. He needed to see my logs for substantiation. It was that important to him. That was only the beginning. Soon I was keeping extensive notes on all the herbs and vegetables I picked in the various gardens. I didn’t need to know why, really. It was all about keeping everything right for Monster.
But I knew it had to do with some new age mysticism, homeopathy.
Then I realized that food to him was more like the Eucharist was for me as a child, mysterious and symbolic. Monster wanted food to transform him into something better. He needed me to be the high priest of his stomach. But then he changed up on me, wanting more variety. I guess all that juice gave him the runs.
I had to be inventive with my menus. Every now and then another note from Monster would mysteriously appear, taped onto the refrigerator by hidden kitchen operatives. That’s how I received the directive to expand the Living Food menu, and for it to taste better, throwing down an impossible challenge, like imagining a five-sided square. He also pointed out how important it was for me to keep Rita from backsliding. Since she was carrying their baby, he wanted her to benefit fully from his eating regimen. Rita had spent a few days showing me the various ways to sign how much she hated the stuff. She passionately conveyed in writing how she refused to eat uncooked spaghetti squash. I agreed, and rededicated myself to making it easier on her, to break new ground with semiliving cuisine. I wanted to get to the point that she’d feel good about swallowing it, but I doubted that she would if she wanted much more than salads and cold soups. Monster liked the idea of sunbaked breads and rices for philosophical reasons. It’s so unadulterated! he wrote in his last note.
I purchased a solar-powered glass oven that worked very well on sunny days, but on overcast days I’d just toss everything into the brick oven.
I prepared lunches for the staff too, but other than Thug’s fresh steak, nothing that bled was allowed anywhere near the kitchen. I grilled on a little hibachi on a worktable near the toolshed, where I kept a small refrigerator stocked with my meats. I ate a lot of bacon, probably too much, and steak. Maybe I wanted the stink of it to annoy Monster’s True Believer employees, who were happy to sustain themselves on carrot juice, ground chickpeas, and heaping teaspoons of sawdust. They wanted to be as much like Monster as possible.
I worried about Rita.
She needed a diet that wouldn’t starve the baby. I read that the first thing that’s affected by malnourishment is brain size. Seemed to me that any child of Monster’s would need all of its faculties to have a shot at a normal life. Luckily, Santa Ynez had more kinds of goat cheese than anywhere else in California. Cheese-filled dumplings, cheese breads, and rice cheese soufflé, I made it all for her because Rita needed those calories that Monster shunned.
I THOUGHT MY RELATIONSHIP with Monster would remain the same. He’d be somewhere in the Lair, producing new music or writing, but whatever he did, I imagined that his time was so valuable he wouldn’t have a moment to spare, so I was surprised when, one particularly overcast afternoon, Monster appeared in the kitchen with two blank-faced assistants whom I took to be Security without the gray jumpsuits. This was the first time I saw him close-up and in decent light. I tried not to stare at him, but it was hard; his skin glowed oddly, almost as if it were internally illuminated, and his eyes were large and beautiful, like the eyes of a girl in Japanese animation. His lank-limbed body resembled a boy’s more than that of a man.
“Good morning, Mr. Stiles,” I said, but Monster and his attendants watched me silently, without response. I stood with my hands dangling at my sides until it became uncomfor
table and I began to feel ridiculous. I turned and picked up a handful of radishes from a green ceramic bowl and sliced them on the chopping block.
“Call me Monster,” I heard from behind me, so I turned to see Monster dismiss his assistants and lean against the sink, as though he was prepared to stay a while in the kitchen.
“I want to watch you cook,” he said with a smile.
I shrugged, feeling naked to his eyes. The kitchen, my kitchen, was a refuge, but with him standing there, an unwanted guest, I had to accept the fact that I was paid help, that I didn’t own anything in that kitchen other than the knives I had brought with me to the Lair.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you I hate radishes,” he said, as though it pained him.
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
Monster shrugged. “Rita likes them in her salad.”
“Good,” I said, wondering if he had anything else he wanted to mention about my cooking.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just watching you,” he said, with the words hanging in the air.
“You’re interested in cooking?” I asked, but Monster didn’t reply; after a moment or two I glanced up to see him still watching me like a freakish hawk. I began dicing onions and mincing herbs and started a vegetable stock, anything to keep busy.
“You know, I miss those breakfasts of toast and jam, but Mr. Chow, my herbalist, refuses to allow me to eat that anymore.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“If you don’t find Living Food satisfying, you can find an alternative.”
Monster shook his head.
“I’ve already caused so much damage to my body and spirit. Mr. Chow insists that this is my last chance to help myself achieve unity.”
“Well, sometimes you need to live. If you deny yourself all the pleasures in life, it’s no good, you’re just torturing yourself for no reason. No one can live like that,” I said, with all the earnestness of a reformed drug addict looking back at the good old days of excess.
Monster thought about it for a second, then disappeared down the hall. He returned after a few minutes and gestured for me to follow him down a grand hallway to the main entrance. There a Rolls-Royce sat idling in the long driveway.
Monster's Chef Page 5
