“What was that last one, son?”
“CopyofGourmetmagazineplease.”
“One more time? I can’t hear you.”
“Gourmet magazine! A fucking copy of Gourmet! Just put it in the bag, old man. And stop looking at me like that, okay? It’s not for me. It’s for my”—mom-dad-brother-grandma-friend—“for my cousin. My girl cousin. From Canada. Magazines cost more up there, you know. Oh, and how ’bout throw in a twelve-pack of condoms, too. Ribbed, please.”
ONE WEEK, quite to my surprise, the folks announced that we were going off to New York City on vacation. As with so much else in my life, I remember nothing about the trip except dinner—the tuxedoed waiters at the hotel restaurant, French service all the way, the whisper of soft-soled shoes on oxblood carpets and the flutter of hands suddenly appearing over my shoulder to clear plates and silver and drinks. I remember being told I could order anything I wanted and the way my parents—my plain old day-in/day-out, everyday suburbanite parents—looked like royalty under those lights, in the candle glow and warm halo of fawning attention from the staff. It was magic. The lobster came under a silver dome. The little pats of butter were molded into pictures of mermaids curled around their own tails. Desserts (which we didn’t order) were wheeled around the dining room on a cart alongside cheeses even Danny Wegman had probably never heard of.
I’m sure I was a little bastard that whole trip, but for the two-or three-hour stretch we spent in that restaurant, I was happy—idiosyncratically at ease and engaged, and perhaps even smiling. All of which no doubt had my parents completely flummoxed and wondering whether I’d been hitting up the minibar when they weren’t looking.
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN OR SEVENTEEN, I convinced a bunch of my friends that we should all bake cookies and give them away as Christmas presents. Among my friends, this was not an easy sell. We could use my mom’s kitchen, I told them. We’d save a bunch of money not having to buy flowers or stuffed animals or jewelry for girlfriends. Besides, I argued, chicks dig cookies, right? This’ll get us laid.
The truth? I just really wanted to bake cookies. And frankly I was already starting to miss the bash and clamor of a working kitchen, so why not populate one of my own, at least for one day?
Around the same time, I started boosting my parents’ car in the middle of the night—waiting until long after they’d gone to bed, then easing my way out the front door, going down the steps like a suburban ghost, popping the family station wagon into neutral and pushing the behemoth halfway up the street before daring to start the engine.
Sometimes I’d just drive. Sometimes I’d go to the diners and doughnut shops to hang out among the righteous drunks, the old men, taxi drivers and criminals. But most of the time I’d beeline it from my neighborhood in West Irondequoit into the heart of the city, to Hercules Chicken and Ribs, for barbecue.
The place was beautiful, all lit windows and bodies and clouds of thick, heavy, oily smoke; jumping at one, two o’clock in the morning, filled with big women in enormous hats and men dressed like fire-and-brimstone tent preachers gone wrong in sharkskin and leather, gold watches, pinkie rings, silk ties and stack-heeled ankle boots. The awnings were bright yellow and lit from within by some unnatural conflagration: kerosene fire maybe, a million captive fireflies, or just some kind of terrible static voodoo that was, in any event, irresistible to me, calling me down like a moth to a porch light. There was broken glass in the parking lot, bullet holes in the ceiling, and music drowned out by voices drowned out by laughter drowned out by shouting drowned out by the buzz in my head of being a kid who’d wandered into a right place that might’ve looked like a wrong place but was maybe the best place in the world for him just there and just then.
I couldn’t quite understand why I wasn’t stomped, beaten, thrown out on my ass. And while I have talked and bluffed and wormed and wheedled my way into many strange places since—everything from private Chinese poker clubs and Russian mob bars to locals-only karaoke joints, Ghanaian house restaurants, African goat butchers and the haute palaces of cuisine where my type (whatever the hell that is) are most plainly unwelcome—Hercules was my first.
Mine was the only white face in the house most nights, mine likely the only station wagon in the parking lot and certainly the only car with a stick-on Garfield in the window. I would show up alone, late at night, in a neighborhood that was one of the worst in a city full of bad ones, where most of the doors were boarded up like rotten teeth in a mean smile and even the boxing gym across the street had bars on the windows. And yet, I was unafraid. This was not because I’m some kind of knuckle-dragging badass. I’m about as tough as grilled cheese. But the way I figured, all these people were coming here for a reason. It wasn’t to fuck with me. It was because they knew something. And I wanted to know what they knew, so I stood in line that first time same as all the rest of them, and ordered chicken and ribs, beans and greens, sweet tea. I waited. And when my food came? Well, then I understood, too.
It was barbecue, the be-all and end-all of American cuisine. And as with Danny Wegman’s sushi, I know now that it was terrible barbecue, smoked in an old oil drum set up in the parking lot, the fire fed with two-by-fours or particleboard and whatever scrap lumber the pitmen could scrounge on top of what was probably an oakwood fire that made all the meat taste like blood and scotch and acetone. But that didn’t matter because it was my first barbecue and I had no idea at the time that it was supposed to taste any different.
Also, this was the only barbecue there was.7 It was here and nowhere else, and that was the secret—the thing all these people knew that I didn’t. You do what you gotta do and you go where you gotta go for barbecue because once you get barbecue, for five minutes or ten minutes or an hour nothing else matters. You got barbecue. Everything is gonna be all right.
I spent maybe forty-five minutes there my first night and left with smoke in my blood, barbecue sauce in my hair and a lifelong addiction I pray I never shake.
After that, I went to Hercules a lot. The only people who ever even spoke to me were the girls who worked behind the counter and the big, sweating men in broad-shouldered suits who’d take my hand between their hard, dry palms and ask me if I wanted to get to know Jesus.
I’d say sure. But not tonight. And I’d ask if they had barbecue in their heaven since, from my experience, us mick Catholics had only fried fish, casseroles and beer.
“Boy,” they’d say, “Jesus was a black man. Of course there’s barbecue in heaven. It wouldn’t be heaven without.”
I WENT AWAY TO COLLEGE IN 1991, right on schedule, following a couple of my more respectable high school buddies, John and Dan. We’d all applied to the film school at Ithaca College, just a fast couple hours’ drive south from Rochester. And while this may have been a perfect fit for them (what with their being smart, responsible, talented and, in fact, interested in the celluloid arts), for me it was unwise in more ways than I can even count.
But still, it was an out. Or so I thought. The rest of my delinquent friends weren’t doing much of anything. They were all, to a man, waiting around for their still–in–high school girlfriends to graduate, working dead-end jobs for rent and beer money, hanging out down in the park or by the railroad tracks, drinking plastic bottles of no-brand bourbon and lighting shit on fire, rolling into the back parking lot at Ridge Billiards on fumes, trying to sell the stereos from their own cars—their speakers, their floor mats—for a few bucks’ cash to pay off The Man. Some of them would end up in jail. A couple would be dead. And most of the rest would simply settle, finding better company among Hooters waitresses and the beauty school dropouts humping the pole down at the Klassy Cat, bars where they could have their own personal beer steins hung on the wall and entry-level jobs at Kodak or Xerox that must’ve looked both sweet and lifelong until the day came that they weren’t either anymore.
John got into the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College because he’d already been making films for years and some of
them were good.
Dan got into the Park School because he was a great writer, smart, what Woody Allen would’ve been had Woody been a short, bespectacled, working-class Polack. Dan’s entrance interview, from what I understand, ran like a tight ten-minute stand-up routine with the school’s representatives playing his unwitting straight men. When it was done, he probably made them all balloon animals or something.
I got in because I wrote a good essay and because I had a couple letters of recommendation from high school English teachers who (at my suggestion) played me off like some kind of latent Andy Kaufman: brilliant, but wildly unstable and badly in need of the firm, guiding hand of a respectable faculty to keep me on track.
Getting them to write the letters had been an easy sell because they were at least half true (the “wildly unstable” part) and because those kindly teachers and I both saw my onrushing future the same way. At the time, I was just a couple of steps from the parking lot at Ridge Billiards myself.
DURING FRESHMAN ORIENTATION, the college threw an old-fashioned ice cream social. And though, like me, everyone was trying to act as though they were way too cool for that kind of thing, what was funny was watching the ebb and flow of the line as kids away from home for the first time—all flexing their new stick-on personas at each other and trying to come up with these wild, on-the-fly imagined histories of themselves that would free them from whatever they’d been in high school—would slink and sidle up to the counter where the ice cream was, quickly grab a bowl, and spoon it up like each bite was a last, frantic, comforting taste of their rapidly retreating childhoods.
Me? I had three bowls. But then, I really like ice cream.
That night, I think there was a dance, a band, some guy doing terrible David Letterman impressions. I chain-smoked half a pack of cigarettes on the back patio of a cafeteria building, sitting with Dan, who made hard and unusually cruel jokes all night to anyone who’d listen. I met a couple of the guys I’d be living with for the next several months, and all of us drifted off across the quad, hauling up in front of one of the school’s picturesque fountains because there were girls there. Then more girls. Then just one girl, sitting close, knees to my knees and actually talking to me—one girl I was no doubt charming the socks off with the way I would smirk and snarl and stare at my boots every time she tried to catch my eye. She would tilt her head and look across at me quizzically through a red-brown fog of barely grown-out curls and I would look away, checking out some unusually shaped pebble on the ground or scrap of trash blowing by. She was pretty. And though I’m not at all shy, I’ve never really known what to do with pretty girls who want anything whatsoever to do with me.
“I bet I can tell you three things about yourself without even talking to you first,” she said.
I shrugged coolly, lips pressed into a thin, tight line.
And then she did and she was right and I was impressed, though I would never have shown it. I’m not going to tell you what the three things were, but suffice it to say, she saw through the layered flannel shirts, torn blue jeans, combat boots and Mohawk to the huddled-up, ice-cream-sticky geek inside me. And that was impressive. I’d worked hard over the summer to finally beat my inner child into a sort of cringing submission. I thought I’d done a pretty good job.
When she was done reading my mind, I snorted, looked up at her (finally), and took a contemplative drag off my four hundredth cigarette of the night. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, you’re smart. Now if you could just put your feet behind your head, you’d be the perfect woman.”
She smiled sweetly. “I can. Want to see?”
FOR WORK-STUDY, I was put into one of the cafeteria kitchens.
I walked in on my first day, ten minutes early, and was horrified. The kitchen was huge and filthy and smelled like an oyster midden buried under a pile of wet, smoldering hair. It looked like a sanitarium with everyone dressed in white smocks, shambling about aimlessly with looks of hopeless desperation on their faces. There were no knives, no pans,8 no utensils that weren’t blunt and smooth-edged, and, most noticeably, no actual food. What there was in place of food were boxes, bags, cans, bladders, mixes, concentrates, vac-pacs, cryos, pouches, powders, cartons and sacks.
I found the quote/unquote Food Services Director I’d been instructed to report to, and he handed me a blank name tag, a short-sleeved polyester shirt, a pair of safety scissors with tape-wrapped handles and a hairnet without even looking at me. He pointed to an open shipping box set on one end of a rickety, gimp-legged prep table. The box was full of plastic freezer bags, their thawed, room-temperature contents all wet and red and sloshy.
“Dinner,” he said. “Lasagna. Open the bags and pan ’em. Some-body’ll be by to ship ’em into the ovens.”
“I quit,” I said, handed back the shirt, the scissors, the hairnet. I pocketed the name tag and walked out the door. Elapsed time: five minutes, give or take. The Food Services Director hadn’t even seemed surprised.
I DO NOT RECALL MUCH ELSE about my year away at college. I quickly lost track of both Dan and John amid the scrum of campus life and the quick hustle of trying to find a peer group to call my own. I had a car, a knack for graft and an expertly chalked ID, so I was in charge of procuring supplies: a hundred beers and one medium pizza. I also always seemed to be the last man awake at the end of the night so I was in charge of collecting on debts—real and imagined. My friends thought it was insomnia or a high tolerance for shit lager. It was neither. It was amphetamines. We threw big parties that banged back and forth between all the cell-like cement rooms on our floor and always seemed to degenerate into drinking games that would end one step shy of an orgy. After a while I learned to always play to lose. More fun that way. Better stories come Monday morning.
I learned a few things, though none of these lessons (other than how to ask for a pack of cigarettes in Russian and how to mix an artful martini) came courtesy of the classroom. I learned that when everyone else on the floor is getting smashed on Rolling Rocks and a passed bottle of Southern Comfort after a long night of playing suck-and-blow with the girls from down on six, and then a collective decision is made that it would be a bonding experience to all go out and get tattoos, one should try to be the most sober guy in the room. For one, this will probably keep one from doing something dumb like getting a gigantic American eagle tattooed on one’s ass. It’ll also make it much easier to convince one’s roommate—Chris, the accounting major from Acton, Mass.—to do something really cool like getting a gigantic American eagle tattooed on his ass.
I learned that when facing down four-to-one odds in a street fight, one should always try to joke one’s way out of it or, when that fails, run like the devil knows you did it. No matter how pretty the girl is that you’re trying to impress.
I learned that three of a kind beats a full house when the guy holding the eights and aces is too drunk to argue, and that when trying to decide whether to cheat on your high school girlfriend with whom you are trying to maintain a long-distance relationship, you should always cheat. Seriously, always.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot that I was also expected to go to class once in a while. My theory? I was doomed anyway, so why not enjoy the ride.
BY THE END OF FRESHMAN YEAR, John and Dan were already winning awards for their films, crewing for upperclassmen, lining up internships and generally doing all those things that make for a successful and career-oriented college experience. I, on the other hand, was spending all my time at the State Diner, crouching on the fold-down jump seats, guzzling black coffee and recording my jagged, inconsequential thoughts in notebooks. I’d decided at some point during the year that I wanted to be a writer, so was making a go of it. If I remember correctly, this mostly entailed sleeping till noon, stumbling dazedly around the campus, playing video games and trying to track down my dealer—a Cornell student who fancied himself a kind of latent beat poet but was too shy to read his work in public. Instead, he read his poems to me. I gave him enthusiastic encourag
ement, and in exchange he supplied me with black beauties and white cross, Benzedrine,9 fat orange tabs of Dexedrine and, when that all ran out, crystal meth. The first bump I ever took I was crouched down between two cars in the side lot of the State Diner, and I remember thinking at the time what a bad idea this was. I recall thinking that there must be some way I can fake this, that I can pretend to hoover this shit up while actually, you know, not. It never occurred to me to simply say no.
I came to love both the chilling, fast, itchy ride to the top and the long, slow, bone-weary slide down the other end a day or two later. Thinking about it now, I can actually still feel the way the crank would mount my spine, spread out across my shoulders like wings, and open a direct circuit between brain and balls that made me twitch and fidget with fierce, uncontainable energy. If I close my eyes, I can still see the stuff—piss-yellow and crunchy like raw sugar—can still taste it the way someone who has recently beaten the flu can still taste the foul, tinny flavor of mucus in the back of the throat, can remember the way the pills would sometimes make my heart palpitate with anticipation even in the instant before I popped them into my mouth. It was good, except for those days when I would miscalculate my tolerances and end up asleep in the candy aisle of the twenty-four-hour grocery store at four in the morning or in the men’s room throwing up blood because I’d ingested nothing but black coffee, cigarettes and cold medicine for the past ninety-six hours.
IN SCHOOL, when I could be bothered to attend, I was making films cobbled together from the cast-off work prints left behind on the floors or in the garbage cans of the film lab because I’d spent all my stock money and had convinced myself that constructing a ten-minute loop from other people’s trash was a visionary statement.
My professors did not see it that way. Neither did anyone else. This was probably because they hadn’t all been awake for the past hundred-some hours, jangling themselves to pieces and chewing the points off the collars of their slightly used Swiss Army wool overcoats. I cursed them for their lack of vision, their inability to understand how beautifully the multiple leaders, the tight shot of the meat loaf on the cafeteria table, the long, underdeveloped pan across the night sky and the image of the crazed, laughing woman with the socks on her hands all blended together, then slept through most of my exams during finals week and woke up thinking that now might be an excellent time to leave.
Cooking Dirty Page 6
