A BIT OF HISTORY: While at Ithaca, Laura and I had had something of a thing. It wasn’t a romance because I was never really nice to her, and it wasn’t really a friendship because we didn’t much like each other. I once burned her quite badly on the hand with a cigarette just to see if she’d flinch. She didn’t. And she mocked me mercilessly for pretty much everything—from my silly haircut to my taste in books and movies to my owning more coats than I did shirts and not changing my bedsheets often enough. Or at all.
But we also shared an attraction that I would, in later years, finally be able to adequately describe only as atomic. Hers were the ions that filled my outer valences, the heavy element made to complement and replenish whatever kind of straight freak radiation I was throwing off. And me? I was just the bad thing she was looking to do while away from home.
We both acknowledged this attraction. We talked endless, panting circles around it and, at least a little, got off on thinking that nothing was ever going to come of it. She wasn’t ready. I had a girlfriend. There was altogether too much static. The two of us together? When people walked too close, their balloons would stick.
Flash forward a year or so. I’m working at China Town. She calls, says I ought to come down for the weekend to Philadelphia because Peter Gabriel is playing at the SuperUltraMegaDome or whatever and she has an extra ticket.
So, okay. Why not? I tell Barney and Jake I gotta go see a girl for the weekend. They make many dirty jokes, and I go—six hours’ drive all hopped up on goofballs, arriving cranked-out, fucked-up, twitchy, sweaty and gross. But she’s beautiful, sweet, happy to see me (which made me suspicious right from the get-go), and we have a good time. We see Peter Gabriel do his thing from decent seats on the upper deck. She gets us a couple waxy buckets of beer, which is a nice move seeing as she’s as underage as I am at the time. Together, we sit there, wrapped up in the peculiar sort of pulse-racing bubble of hormones that often surrounds two young people in imminent danger of doin’ it.
Did I mention that she was a virgin? I should’ve mentioned that she was a virgin. That’s important to know here.36
The concert ends. Walking down the long sweep of steps in front of the arena, she gets a little bit ahead of me, turns, looks back, and I see her smile at me, her eyes flashing, face lit by the lights of passing cars. It occurs to me that of all the people surrounding her—the surging crowd, the mob all making for their parking spots—she’s the only one I’d give a second glance to. Now, true, this could be saying something bad about the people of Philadelphia in general, but I prefer to think of it as saying something really good about her. The way she looked when she smiled at me? I liked that. A lot. And even as it happens, I know it’s one of those moments that’s going to hang with me, burrowing into my head like one of those ear weevils in Wrath of Khan, impossible to dislodge. When I tell her this, she gets my weird Star Trek reference, laughs. Even more points in her favor.
We stay up all night talking. Some stuff happens. I’m not going to say what. But in happening, said stuff cements certain things about Laura in my memory forever. The powdery warmth of her skin. The expressive geometry of her face. The appearance of her disappointment.
At this point I go all weird. I freak the fuck out, say I gotta go, and—still not having slept a wink—literally run for my car. Confused, Laura asks me to stay, says we can just hang out, play Nintendo, have a nap. Anything. She wants to know what has so suddenly gone wrong.
But it doesn’t matter. I’m in full flight mode now. Nothing short of a dart gun full of elephant tranquilizers would’ve brought me down. I mouth a couple stupid things about calling her, seeing her later, and that’s it—I am out like bell-bottom pants. About halfway up the Pennsylvania Turnpike, doing ninety miles an hour trying to outrun my own bad decision-making and regret, fighting the urge to turn around and try it all again, I fall asleep at the wheel and drift off onto the shoulder, clipping a road sign.
I flee that accident, too; sleep a couple hours in the car on some frontage road, make it home, shower, change, go to work, and that’s the night Stacy shows up, telling me all about this friend of hers named Sam.
LAURA AND I DIDN’T SPEAK AGAIN for almost six years. Over the phone in Florida was the first time I’d heard her voice since flannel shirts and Pearl Jam were hot.
If I was her, I would’ve spent those intervening years building some sort of small satellite equipped with a laser capable of burning a man’s genitals off from orbit. If it was me, that phone call would’ve only been a ploy to get a positive fix on my location so a final aiming solution could be calculated. Then, bingo: instant eunuch, a radical wang-ectomy from space and no way to trace the crime back to me.
But for whatever reason, Laura wasn’t like that. There was no space-borne anti-penis laser, and I appreciated that because she’d been on my mind, too. Not a lot, but sometimes. She’d become my what-if girl, my fantasy of an alternative life, like I wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t been such an enormous, spastic asshole back then?
In my last e-mail to her before leaving Florida I kinda sorta half-apologized for my past behavior, explained that I was driving Sam back to Buffalo and that I had no earthly idea what was going to happen after that. Maybe I would keep heading north and find myself an island somewhere in the Maritimes where I could wear a sweater every day, cook mussels for lunch and live in a small shack by the sea. Failing that, I’d probably be staying with Mommy and Daddy, too humiliated for human contact. Figuring that this time I’d do the gentlemanly thing and warn her in advance, I told her I’d probably never talk to her again, again.
Christmas in Rochester was strange, subdued, uncomfortable, but only slightly, with more left unsaid than said beneath the dulling morphine of family tradition. Waking on Christmas morning, I felt like a child waking on Christmas morning, only twenty years too late—missing the pad of footy pajamas on the stairs so going outside on the front porch for a first cup of coffee and three cigarettes instead. The tree was lit, the breakfast was laid out—coffee cake, eggs and bacon, slabs of ham left over from the night before, coffee in the same mugs my parents had been using since before I’d left: shallow things like teacups, twined with a flower pattern. From the stoop, with the heavy front door closed behind me, I marveled at the silence of the neighborhood, its blanket of snow unbroken by the gentle scars of footprints. It was nice in an Armageddon kind of way, a sense of my being the last man on earth complete but for the family gathered on the other side of the door, the countless other families behind other doors. Dad gave me a couple minutes of peace before following me out onto the steps, standing beside me, the two of us not speaking, the steam and smoke of our breath twining upward like Christmas wishes, roundly ignored.
Two days before New Year’s Eve, I drove to Buffalo thinking maybe I’d see how Sam was settling in (read try to get laid one last time) and, when that didn’t play out the way I’d imagined, decided to have dinner instead.
I went to La Cité, hoping to reconnect with some of my old friends, but trying the restaurant was a mistake. I barely recognized anyone. The menu had been changed. Even the smell of the place was wrong. Kitchens have an animating spirit the same way that people do—have living inside them better angels or worse, some spark of vitality or pulse of doom that is the attitude and temper of the chef, the cooks, the galley at large. La Cité used to be alive with it. This husk? Something had died here and I couldn’t leave fast enough.
But at the bar down the street (old stomping ground for me, my crew, all the crews of all the restaurants in the neighborhood) I recognized absolutely everyone. Faherty’s hadn’t changed a bit. I opened a tab and just started buying. Matty was there, Al, Andy, Jose the prep mercenary and dishwasher, Max, Amy the waitress, Louis, Gay Jasie—everyone. It was just like a bad movie, like one of those things that never happens in real life. It was as if no one had ever left, which, I came to find out, was more or less true.
Squeezed in at the long oak, muscling my wa
y through the press of other cooks and crews, crammed into a booth along the wall, I felt so happy, so buried in friends and good cheer. Washed by spilled lager and cigarette smoke, telling stories and roaring with laughter. It was like homecoming, only without the letterman jackets and date rape. The juke blared, beers were bought. I drank fast and recklessly, feeling the sizzle of carbonation against the back of my throat and tasting, vaguely, the caramel coldness of the beer, but having one of those nights where the alcohol just seemed to dissipate, floating up and out of my body like a ghost.
Still, we drank until we were full, then stepped out into the alley to pass a joint and just kept moving. It was like trick-or-treating. We’d stop at one house, pick up a sous-chef and a bag of weed, move on, trade the sous for two sauciers and an eight ball, move on. Eventually, we ended up in someone’s attic chopping lines of cocaine mixed with ephedrine37 on the frame of a foosball table and snorting it through rolled pages torn from a TV Guide. Tabs of ecstasy were being passed around, hand to ruined hand, prescription painkillers, bottles of terrible Greek white wine (Chateau Diana, with a screw top), Ritalin and pale orange and dusty Dexedrine the same color as an old Flintstones chewable vitamin. We were celebrating something, but I couldn’t tell you what. The New Year maybe. Maybe just a Wednesday. Since restaurant people work while the rest of the world relaxes, cooks tend to invent their own holidays, generally focused around any time or place where two or more have gathered with a bottle between them. Sometimes these revels spin quickly out of control.
Actually, most of the time they do. Pretty much always.
I WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, back sleeping again in the childhood bedroom I’d left at fifteen, the shelves crammed with my books, the dresser’s lowest drawers still holding some of my cast-off clothes, the desk crowded with pictures in stand-up frames, in albums, in pewter hearts from Things Remembered, bordered by cheap black photo matting board. The house was small—a hobbit house made up of three-quarter-size rooms and narrow, low-ceilinged hallways perfect for turning out bonsai Irish with small goals, small dreams, low expectations. Unlike most prodigal sons returning to the womb after a long and confusing absence, I never found this a surprise. The house had always felt small to me, cramped, turned inward so that even the smallest of the rooms felt smaller for being clenched against the outside world.
In the hallway by the stairs, there was the Wheel O’ Jay. In the closets, forgotten Christmas sweaters, broken model tanks, a Cub Scout uniform, an old Misfits T-shirt with one sleeve split at the seam that had immediately been drafted into service, bringing my current wardrobe of shirts to two.
Mornings, I’d wake early to the smell of coffee and my father’s music on the stereo—the Chieftains, the Pogues, Black 47 and old R.E.M. in heavy rotation on WDAD; the kind of folk music that only serious audiophiles ever even hear, let alone own, with songs about tree-huggers, Irish Republican martyrs and dead smoke jumpers in the Pacific Northwest.
Dad was on permanent disability—multiple sclerosis—but was handling it well. He’d quit smoking after a lifetime of Marlboro cigarettes and his pipe, but along with the habit had lost the smell of burley and bright I’d so long associated with him. He filled his days now with painting, woodwork, carving, carpentry—anything to busy his hands, covering every flat surface in the house with ducks and dragons, bobcats and faeries. When the flat surfaces were all used up, he covered the walls. When the walls were full, he started on the garage. On nice days he’d get this wild look in his eye and I’d be worried he was thinking about paneling the lawn.
Mom was working full-time and then some at a marina on the bay, doing the books for the owners and learning TIG welding from the guys in the yard. Bren was off somewhere living his own life. So mostly, it’d been just me and my dad for the few days after Christmas, before I left. Other than laments for Bobby Sands and dead firemen, the house was very, very quiet. If we talked about anything at all during the day, it was books,38 the weather, his newest projects (“I’m thinking of carving tree stumps into bears with my chain saw. What do you think?”), or me when I was a boy. It was nice. The funny thing was, even when Mom was around, no one asked me what’d happened in Florida. No one mentioned how I’d left with a car full of stuff, two cats, and a fiancée but come home empty-handed and without.
And despite my overly dramatic musings in Florida about becoming a hermit in Canada and saying I would probably never speak to her again, I’d called Laura the minute I was through the door. She’d gone to Philadelphia, retreating to her own parents’ house without telling me, to her own childhood bedroom, which I had her describe for me in great detail once I’d figured out which of the three numbers was her parents’. Her room sounded much cleaner than mine, but her TV didn’t get cable.
I called her again. She called me. I called her, mostly late at night. It was rude, but she kept a cordless on the white table beside her narrow bed below the painting of the irises so she could pick up before the ringing woke her folks. Also, she had the sexiest voice I’d ever had in my ear. Especially when she was whispering.
“Say my name.”
And she would. Then I’d say hers. Then we’d talk about anything—her ex, food, Star Blazers, what we’d each thought of such and such a song or such and such a movie that’d come out during the years we hadn’t known each other. Mostly, we talked about failing.
“The problem was, my mom and dad always told me I could do anything I wanted. They never stood in my way, told me I should be, I don’t know . . . that I should just do something with computers.”
“Mine, too! I mean, my mom would tell me I should get a good job on an assembly line or something—for the benefits, you know? But, no, they never told me I couldn’t be something.”
“If they’d ever just said ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that’ I might’ve been inspired to actually do something else.”
“Or if you had, like, one leg or flipper hands.”
“Right! If I had flipper hands and the doctors told me they were very sorry but now I could never be a painter, I’d be a motherfucking painter right now.”
“Yeah. Flipper hands would be cool . . .”
I’d told her I was going to Buffalo, but not why. I think she had some ideas of her own. She’d been cold to me on the phone the night before I left, an edge of pained bitterness in her voice.
“Just don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
• • •
BY TWO IN THE MORNING, the attic was crowded with bodies and the air heavy with smoke. Tom Waits was singing “Innocent When You Dream” in one corner, and somewhere else a radio was playing the New York Dolls, a duet of line cooks singing along, becoming a sextet, an octet on the chorus, the scream: And if I’ve got to dream / baby baby baby yeah / I’m a human being.
I was on a gut-sprung couch, anxiously flipping through old copies of Saveur as torn up as roughly used pornography, the pages just as sticky. Because I felt that I had nothing to lose, I had no fear, so I kept drinking, kept taking whatever was handed my way, reaching for something beyond the bottle, the straw or the roach, but getting the paraphernalia every time.
For most of the people there, this was a final hurrah before a grinding, long weekend. New Year’s Eve prep would’ve already begun at most of their houses. Some of these guys would be working straight through for the next thirty- or forty-some hours, counting down to the prix fixes and parties meant to bank enough green for their owners to keep them solvent through the lean weeks ahead—five months of low counts and slow nights broken only by the saving graces of Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
For me, it was . . . something else. I had nowhere to be, nothing to do, no plans. Eventually I got just epically fucked-up. And why not? Tomorrow, all my friends, my guys, this adoptive dysfunctional family of cooks and chefs, prep specialists, mercenary bakers, floormen, sur de la Frontera asesinos and black-eyed, rough-handed frog-humpers who’d taken me in time and time and time again, who’d forgiven me every quirk, perversi
on, trespass and personality defect, who’d worked with me and for me and beside me until all those kitchens I’d been in bled together into one enormous, smeary flashback-kitchen full of sound and fury, blood and fire, the stinging scent of hot wine, boiling vinegar like tear gas, old sweat, garlic in the pan, howling punk rock in one ear, the rattle of the ticket printer in the other and the sweet cant of the wheelman, “Firing six, twenty-two, eighteen and twenty-two and service, please! Oh, you motherfucking darlings, service!” Tomorrow they’d all be headed back to their own kitchens and I’d be nowhere again—headed back to Rochester, to Mommy and Daddy’s house, to loose ends and a life apart that I didn’t quite know how to continue.
Maybe. Maybe all those things. But in the meantime, another line. Another moment of feeling like I was a part of something that I no longer was or, at least, of feeling nothing at all.
In the sour gray light of dawn, those of us still conscious (plus the bakers and pâtissiers who were already due in at work) were downstairs watching Apocalypse Now on an ancient floor-model TV—the kind with the stick-on wood-grain exterior and faux-scrollwork mesh over the single speaker. I was on the floor, head resting against a couch cushion, barely able to see, mush-mouthing lines of dialogue along with everyone else.
“Saigon . . . Shit, I’m still only in Saigon . . .”
Whoever’s house it was, I’d already thrown up on their cat. I’d already blacked out in a hallway trying to find some door or another, some way out, walking with my cheek pressed against the wall so I wouldn’t get lost. I’d already thought I was going to die a little.
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