Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  I KNEW THINGS WERE OVER between Sam and me on the dance floor of the Castle in Ybor City, the old cigar district, Tampa’s answer to Miami Beach, the French Quarter and Havana all at once.

  She looked beautiful on the night I’m remembering, lit from above by the club’s Intellibeams—white-hot, searching—and from below by the soft combined glow of hundreds of candles. And not to say there weren’t other times she’d looked beautiful. She could be stunning in instants, frozen forever by memory: the line of her jaw when angry, her eyebrows raised in surprise, tilt of a hip, color of her hair against a car window rimed with frost, the curve of her neck when she stretched to talk to someone behind her. But on this night, she burned like a nova—dancing, half-smashed already, the crowds on the floor giving her room to move. The music was thundering, repetitive, numbing like chasing a faceful of blow with ice-cold vodka. It was “Pure Morning” by Placebo. I’ve always liked that song.

  At the bar, I’d been buying another round: five Coronas and two shots, transporting them all in two hands through and around a mob dancing like a slow-motion riot, pierced by lasers, illuminated by strobes, wreathed in smoke. A life skill—to be able to do that without spilling, without freaking out. Maybe I was a cocktail waitress in a past life.

  But when I saw her—saw Sam picked out on the floor—the circuit closed in my brain. We were done. Standing still with the dancers surging around me and the music crashing down on my head, I watched as she seemed to recede. Or as I did. Whatever. It was like she’d become a balloon-animal version of herself, slipping whatever tether had kept her near me through the years and just gliding away. I felt that trapdoor sensation, that feeling of stepping off the stairs in the dark having miscounted by one: a sudden falling away of solidity.

  To my credit, I didn’t drop the drinks.

  SOME DEVELOPMENTS HAD LED UP to this moment at the Castle. It wasn’t coming to me completely out of the blue.

  We’d been having a rough few weeks, a difficult couple months, a pretty shitty year. Really, things had been not altogether good since we’d met, and had we met earlier, things would only have been bad for longer. When we were together, we were that couple who argued in public, who fought on the street, who made all their friends uncomfortable. Ever been stuck on a subway with a young couple who seemed right on the verge of strangling each other over some stupid little thing? The proper way to cut a lemon, perhaps. Or the capital of Iowa. Angry to the point where you can see their jaw muscles, the whites around their eyes? That was us. Or it might as well have been. If we’d been on that subway, if we’d been discussing lemons or geography, that’s how it would’ve turned out.

  Then, about a week prior to our night at the Castle, I’d absently been flipping through one of my notebooks and found a draft of a letter Sam (my fiancée) had written to David (my best friend) back in Buffalo. In it, she professed her love for him, her more or less total loathing for me, and apologized for ever having left home to follow me on this ridiculous, ill-fated, hopeless attempt at a fresh start.

  How many “fresh starts” does one man think he’s entitled to? she asked in the letter. And when is he going to realize that he’s never made a single one work? Meaning me.

  She’d closed by saying she was trying to make it home for Christmas (which was, at this point, in just over a month) with or without me (but preferably without) and, in any event, was never returning to the Sunshine State. It occurred to me then, as I sat there reading, that this kind of thing was probably going to put something of a crimp in our plans to wed.

  And while a lot of our problems were my fault, they weren’t all my fault. We simply did not match, her and me. And I think the only reason it took us five years to figure that out was that I spent so little time at home. Absence, heart, fonder—you know how it goes.

  But lately, I’d been home a lot—stationed on the couch rather than in front of a grill, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, watching daytime TV and sketching fantasy menus in my notebooks, dream lineups like some freckle-faced Midwestern towhead fielding imaginary baseball teams in his backyard, like a convict listing everything he’s going to do when he walks free.

  Risotto twined with saffron threads, bresaola with goat-cheese-stuffed whole Mission figs. White asparagus, peeled, rolled in oil and grilled, served in a bundle tied with a leek ribbon over a puree of white beans. White beans and onions tossed in vinegar and Chinese shu mai dumplings like the ones from the dim sum place where I’d eaten while negotiating for a job—so nervous, so unaccustomed to eating out (when would I have had time?), that I accidentally ate the flower garnish off a plate of tiny fried fish, not sure what on the plate was supposed to be food and what wasn’t . . .

  They were the greatest hits of my spotty culinary career—worldly, border-hopping, almost surrealist expressions of my past, words with the power to recall old friends, old times, to stop the clock and roll it back to what seemed (sitting there on the couch) better days.

  Barbecue cooked over a kerosene fire to give it that chemical stink just like at Hercules. Meat loaf. Saag paneer. Cream of broccoli soup. A bowl of littleneck clams and chopped sausage doused in cheap wine and lemon. Fillet of sole looking so simple on the plate, yet requiring the concentrated labor of three cooks cutting, adding fish velouté, fish glace, maybe a shallow, almost invisible tarn of lemon-scented, thickened cream . . .

  I’d been looking for one of these menus, one of these memories, one of these unspooling, stream-of-consciousness inventories when I’d found Sam’s letter. She’d written it in one of my notebooks. And even now, I half believe that it’d been deliberate, that she’d wanted me to find it and knew when it would be seen.

  Anything in a Madeira or a bordelaise sauce mounted with foie gras butter to give it a gloss like liquid velvet—one of the most beautiful things in the world. Apple fritters dusted with cinnamon. Red snapper in a sauce of butter, dill and anisette. Pho. Mexican pork chops and ice-cold gin. Fried chicken with late-tomato jam and Bresse chickens, split, rubbed with lemon, roasted slivers of black truffle pushed beneath the skin and served beneath a veil of sauce Périgueux. Bacon and eggs and bacon-wrapped sweet potatoes and soft-egg-filled Italian ravioli . . .

  The consulting thing had come to a crashing end just recently when, in the classic film noir hit man’s mistake, I’d let a job become personal. There was an Irish pub and restaurant just down the road from Kurt’s apartment—dark wood, long bar, Guinness on tap, live fiddle-and-bodhran music on the weekends and shepherd’s pie on the menu. Everything about the place was perfect except that it happened to be in central Florida, surrounded on three sides by the crush of strip malls and Bennigan’s franchises and backing up on a lizard-infested slough. It was a real neighborhood institution. The family who owned the place had had it for decades. They were honestly sweet, generous, hardworking people who wanted nothingmore than to keep the local Hibernian contingent liquored up and full of lamb stew, but had instead found themselves staring straight down the barrel of chain-restaurant fuck-u-nomics.

  I’d gone in with every intention of spending a week helping them design a new kitchen and a new menu to go with it—convenience foods, depending heavily on the fryers and flat grills. But a month later, I was still there, working with a guy who’d race frogs and lizards down a greased prep table to entertain himself on slow afternoons and cooking alone most nights to save the owners a few bucks.

  In a fit of idiotic inspiration, I figured that maybe playing up the whole Irish thing would help, so I started baking racks of Crucifixion soda bread, making pots of coddle, buckets of champ and colcannon, finding a supplier who could get me real Scotch sausages for bangers and mash, crusting expensive river trout in crushed walnuts and lacing them with whiskey-shot béchamel, doing fry-ups for the homesick Paddies.

  Nothing worked. A word to the wise? When trying to save a floundering restaurant in the tropics, Irish cuisine should be the last thing you try. No one wants to be eating boiled bacon when it’s ninet
y degrees outside and raining bathwater. Most people don’t want to be eating boiled bacon under any circumstances, but even the Irish won’t eat it once the mercury starts to climb.

  Still, I was knocking myself out trying to help, working all day and all night, spending the family money, and accomplishing nothing except making a bad situation even worse. There were busy nights, but not enough busy nights. A lot of the heavy business we did beyond feeding the regulars was cooking for the overflow crowds that couldn’t get a table at Red Lobster. And honestly, while there was nothing I could’ve done right that would’ve made the least bit of difference, doing everything wrong was certainly speeding the inevitable.

  Then came the morning that I went into work feeling a little tired and achy and, ten hours later, was carried out, semiconscious, stone-blind and burning with fever. When one of the waitresses came looking for me and found me passed out with my head on a chair next to the dish machine, everyone had panicked. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t see. They’d barely been able to get me up off the floor. Someone called the apartment. Kurt came to pick me up and bring me home. I went to bed. According to later reports from him and Sam, I ran a consistent temperature of 106 or better for three days. They doused me in ice baths, rubbed me down with alcohol, forced aspirin and water into me, took me down like mall cops submarine-tackling a teenage shoplifter every time I made a break for the door. Shivering, quietly humming Bing Crosby Christmas carols, totally gone in delusional fever-dreams and full Technicolor, Dolby-sound hallucinations, I didn’t even know where I was. My theory: having finally given up on my body’s ability to leave in the traditional sense, my brain—in a desperate attempt at getting out of Florida—had simply decided to stew itself into a coma fantasy of gentler climes and tall, straight pine trees dusted with snow.

  The only thing Kurt and Sam didn’t do was take me to the hospital. I’d never had health insurance in my life. We had no money for doctors. So as a result, I cooked internally for seventy-two hours—poaching my brain in its own vital juices, low and slow like a sous-vide lamb chop. And it wasn’t until the fever broke that I agreed to go to one of the Tampa free clinics, where I was thankful for all the Spanish I’d picked up over the years.

  No one in the place spoke any English except the young Indian resident who gave me my final diagnosis: double pneumonia, three ribs cracked from coughing, probable brain damage from the fever. He gave me ten days’ worth of antibiotics in foil sample packs and a referral to a neurologist. I took the pills, tossed the referral, called the owners of the Irish pub and told them I was sorry—really, truly sorry—but I wouldn’t be back. I’m positive I still owe them some money on an old bar tab. Maybe they’ll find me when all is said and done.

  I recovered slowly. For the first time since I was twelve or thirteen, I went two weeks without a single cigarette. It didn’t make me feel any better. Rather, it made me wonder whether nicotine could be administered rectally, what would happen if I just ate the fucking coffin nails in a salad.

  Once I was able to stand and take a deep breath without doubling over in pain, I took a job at the local Village Inn and flipped pancakes for eight dollars an hour, twenty hours a week. After years of sixteen-hour shifts and 115-hour weeks, it was the closest thing I’d had to a vacation. But it also gave me a lot of time at home, and really, that’s what ended Sam and me: proximity.

  Well, proximity and David.

  THERE’D BEEN SOME PERSONAL STUFF in that letter, too. Things that led me to suspect (but did not damningly prove) that my fiancée and my alleged best friend had already had a relationshp before I’d packed us off for these terrible Southern latitudes.

  And by relationship, I mean him fucking her, of course. I already knew there was a relationship—that they were friends, went out drinking together, bowling sometimes, that she spent an inordinate amount of time on his couch watching Melrose Place and putting away dime bags and once in a while slept there on nights when there was no chance of my coming home. But I’d thought that all so innocent, so platonic—was happy, in a way, that she wasn’t just sitting around waiting on me every night because that would’ve made me feel guilty about all the hours I wasn’t there for her. In the past, when I’d thought of the situation at all, it’d been confidently. I was glad I had a good friend like David who could watch out for my girl while I wasn’t around. I pictured the two of them sitting together on the couch, laughing at the TV, pulling tubes, occasionally glancing up at the clock, noticing the late hour and commenting on what a responsible and hardworking fellow I was. I might just as well have imagined the two of them throwing quilting bees, floating around on magic ponies or lawn bowling with invisible teddy bears.

  In any event, this had made the letter somewhat difficult for me to read, so, after poring over it only fifteen or sixteen more times, I stopped, closed the notebook, put it aside. I lit a cigarette.

  I had finally become exactly what I’d set out to become all those years ago: a fucking mess. I was (and remain, to some extent) an obsessive, self-involved, needy, shamelessly egotistical, short-tempered prick; a workaholic who defines himself by his job to the near absolute exclusion of all else, a borderline drunk, a control freak. If I’d ever had a feeling that wasn’t lust, hate, rage, envy or unconsciousness, I’d surely never shared it with anyone. Like any field commander, I was accustomed to having my orders obeyed unquestioningly and reacted badly when they weren’t, when people (Sam, a traffic cop, the teller at the bank) would bristle and ask me to, please, back off and not tell them how to do their jobs. I was a chef. I’d learned from chefs. I was awful. I get that. You know what was the final thing I now had in common with all the rest of them?

  A divorce. Or at least as near to one as mattered.

  And if it seems from the way I’ve told Sam’s part of the story that every moment was bad from start to finish, that’s just bullshit—a function of soured memory and my own malicious nature. I’ll say that my time with her was like Disneyland in reverse: all I remember are the lines. But buried in among all that is the way we fit perfectly together while sleeping, the smell of perfume behind her ear, the nights I’d come home late and find her there, awake and waiting, and how we’d sit staring out, through the snow and ice, at sunrises taking the dark from the sky. We’d imagined great things together, and what I was feeling that night at the Castle, I think, was simply the ruin of potential—the sure knowledge that we’d made none of them work and now never would.

  As for David? We never really spoke again. We’d lived together, drunk together, traveled together, done everything together. We’d been best friends since grade school. Now that was over. A few days before Christmas, Sam and I drove back from Tampa. I left her in Buffalo at David’s front door with her things in boxes, in plastic trash bags. Then I drove off, doing another exhausted sixty miles on an empty interstate and ending up in the only place I had left to go.

  The houses were all lit up for the holiday. Tiny candles in paper bags lined the street and all the driveways in the neighborhood, glowing warmly in the darkness. Around 9:00 p.m., standing in the falling snow just twenty-four hours out of Florida’s heat, carrying nothing but one backpack and one duffel bag, I rang the doorbell at my parents’ house on Belcoda Drive and asked if I could come home.

  In retrospect, seeing as it’d been almost five years since I’d spent more than a couple hours under their roof or said more than a dozen civil words to them in a row, it might’ve been better if I’d called first.

  IN MY LAST WEEK IN TAMPA, I’d gotten a strange e-mail, totally out of the blue, from a girl I’d known forever ago. My mom (perhaps understanding somehow, even from a thousand miles away, that this was going to fuck with my head) had called me at Kurt’s to warn me it was coming. This was also rather completely out of the blue. We hadn’t talked in quite some time.

  “Do you know someone named Laura?” she asked.

  I was high and playing video games. It was four in the afternoon. I said no, that I certainly d
id not.

  “Well, someone named Laura called. She was looking for you.”

  “I’m not difficult to find, Ma. Did you give her the number here?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She huffed, exasperated. “I don’t know, Jay . . . Some girl calls here looking for you, what was I supposed to do?”

  I chuckled, said, “Give her the number, maybe?”

  Mom was quiet for a minute, seething. “She said you knew each other at college,” she finally said.

  I froze up a little inside, carefully set my PlayStation controller aside, and waved the pot smoke away from the phone as if, from several states away, mom might still be able to smell it. “This mystery girl have a last name?”

  “It was something Russian. Wait, I wrote it down.”

  I said the name under my breath.

  “That’s it. So you do know her?”

  Remember the girl who could put her feet behind her head? The one who didn’t know how to make a woo-woo?

  “No,” I said. “But I remember her.”

  Mom had been right to call.

  • • •

  THIS MYSTERIOUS RUSSIAN GIRL had sounded funny35 to my mom over the phone so, in her usual paranoid, protective style (and likely assuming this was just someone I owed money to, or worse), she hadn’t given up my phone number, just an e-mail address. So we’d emailed back and forth a couple times, this funny-sounding Russian girl and me. At a totally inappropriately early moment, I’d spilled for her all the nasty details of my situation: Sam, Kurt, David, the letter, the pneumonia, the Village Inn and my comprehensive loathing for every oozing, stinking, humid, lizard-and-tourist-infested inch of the state of Florida. She responded by totally inappropriately spilling for me the details of the bad place she was in. Our stories were somewhat similar—both involving illness, penury, betrayal and exile. She was in Colorado, suffering the dissolution of a five-year relationship, seeing to the equitable disbursement of cats, televisions and bedroom furnishings. She told me to call her, gave me three different phone numbers with three different area codes, said that she’d be at one of them. Maybe.