Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  “Jesus, man,” says the head cook. “I was just trying to make conversation, you know?”

  “Chicken man,” I bark, then laugh too loud, too hard, too joy-lessly—really forcing it. “I get it, yeah.”

  “Hey, these are nice, but how many trays you done?”

  “Eight,” I say. “Eight.”

  “Eight?”

  “Eight.”

  “Yeah, you might wanna lay off now, huh? Do something else? I think that’ll cover us. By the way, Friday night? What happened to you?”

  “Left,” I said. “I was done.”

  “Well, that isn’t really your decision to make, is it? What the fuck, you think you can just leave whenever you want?”

  “I was done. No one needed me to stick around.”

  Which was mostly true. What was more accurate was that none of the other cooks had wanted me to.

  Home again, I’d taken a job at a thoroughly mediocre but well-loved neighborhood Italian restaurant walking distance from my folks’ house. I pounded out veal paillards, breaded chicken for parms, made thousands of really excellent gnocchi by hand—bringing the dough together, rolling it out, pulling each little thumb-sized blob across the tines of a fork to shape it. During service, I worked the pasta trench or the fryer station—low man again, the FNG—but couldn’t get into it. It all seemed so ridiculous, so pointless. And I was so angry all the time. I could do the job when I chose to—could go through the motions, watch the pastas, set my mise, keep the fryers rolling—but I took no joy in it. Those things that would once have thrilled me (the fine work of making the gnocchi, the precision and care of it, and breaking down the veal for paillards and the hectic pace of a busy line), I found only dull. Something was broken in me now; something had soured and cooked off in my head, some nugget of rot and frustration and rage that couldn’t be dug out no matter what I’d lost, how close to the bone I’d been trimmed over the last month.

  When doing prep butchery, sometimes you’ll find a piece of meat that can’t be saved. Cutting fish, you’ll occasionally find an entire loin or side ruined by some marine worm that has bored through the flesh to die, curled in a knot, deep inside the powerful muscle. It’s the kind of thing that can put you off fish for a long time. Breaking down beef, it’s usually a vein or artery that can’t be pulled without wrecking the steak or a hump of tough fat in the wrong place. And it doesn’t matter how good you are with the knife, how clever with your anatomy—it’s just bad, ruptured, decayed, tumorous, wrong, and you have to just let it go.

  That was me. All of a sudden I was showing up late, fucking with the radio too much, not pulling my weight during cleanup, and would occasionally just walk off for no reason. I was breaking all my own rules about conduct on the line, a disgrace to my borrowed white jacket. The owner was always pissed at me. The other cooks, likely smelling bad meat—that bit I was never, ever going to be able to dig out—wanted nothing to do with me. I never even learned their names and could go whole nights without talking (except to my ingredients). Those were the good nights.

  From the corner of the front parking lot, I could see Ferrara’s, where all this had begun. And usually when I disappeared, that’s where the owner or one of the waiters would find me: standing there, smoking a cigarette, just staring.

  MOST NIGHTS WHEN I GOT OFF WORK, I’d hitch into the city, to the Rose & Crown, where my buddy Sparky would already be waiting for me—hunched up like some kind of troll over his pint, a pub golem made of creamy black Guinness, stale pretzels, broken glass and wisps of cigarette smoke. He’d been haunting this particular stretch of long oak for years now, since the three of us—Sam, him, and me—had come back from California, living almost directly across the street, on the second floor of a rambling old Victorian made up of too many small, unusually shaped rooms all crowded with his stuff. He could walk to the Rose & Crown in the afternoon, stumble home after last call, and often did—having become the kind of guy who closes bars on a Tuesday night.

  I had no idea what he did for a living that wasn’t this. It wasn’t something we talked about. He was and sometimes wasn’t dating a girl who was and sometimes wasn’t a stripper. We didn’t really talk about that either.

  What we did talk about was the past. Constantly. Both our real pasts and an invented collection of pasts that we could shake up like a box of dominoes, pulling out one, then another, then another. Lay them out on the table and they made a story, a different one every time. We’d tell them for beers, for dinner, for kicks. We told them to each other when no one else was around like a two-man manic-depressive vaudeville act practicing, polishing up our licks and timing.

  We were just doing it as a way to pass the time, the lies more fun than the truth, sometimes the other way around. And we did it at the Rose & Crown because the Rose & Crown was Sparky’s home away from home and because the Rose & Crown was where an entire generation of Flower City kids had grown up drinking, where they all eventually came back to when their lives elsewhere imploded and, like me, they came running back home, defeated. We’d sit about halfway down the bar, near the center run of taps, because from there we had a good view of the door without looking like we were looking to have a good view of the door. Sparky with his badly shaved head, sweatshirt hood up and Carhartt jacket on. Me with my long hair, bandanna, white button-down oxford and greasy blue jeans. Both of us wreathed in cigarette smoke, rolling single well whiskeys between our palms.

  But everyone, when coming to the Rose, was looking for someone. Even when people didn’t know they were looking, they were looking. Sparky and I just tried to be what they found, especially when they were people of the female persuasion, or people willing to buy drinks for two guys who maybe they knew ten years ago and now were here, telling stories about kitchens, about working one of those cannery jobs in Alaska or for NASA or whatever.

  When there was no one to talk to, we threw darts. Sometimes, when closing time rolled around, I’d crash at Sparky’s. Sometimes not. Sometimes I’d bum a ride from someone headed back out to the burbs. After Colorado, I didn’t have a car anymore, was shortly to lose my license as well.

  True, this made that whole NASA story a tough sell. You tell a bunch of people you’re a rocket scientist, they sorta expect you to have your own wheels. But whenever it came up, I’d just say my license had been revoked over multiple DUIs, which, by the end of almost any night out, was both perfectly believable and less embarrassing than the actual truth.

  BEFORE LONG, I got pulled off weekends at the Italian restaurant—a worse punishment than simply being fired because it was a highly public shaming in front of one’s peers, an acknowledgment that you just didn’t have what it took to hang with the swingin’ dicks on Friday and Saturday nights.

  “You come in here telling me you’re this Mr. Big-Time Chef,” the owner said, “and this is what I get? I’m not saying you lied to me, Sheehan, but just get out of here. Come back for Tuesday dinner.”

  I was fine with it. I just didn’t care. Weekends off gave me more time for hanging out at the Crown, for staying out late and feeling bad for myself. Misha (the long-lost high school ex-girlfriend) would sometimes join us and play along with our stories. Otherwise we’d meet her at the Bug (an old punk bar with Day-Glo decor and a good juke), have a few, listen to some music, then retire to Gitsi’s or Mark’s for eggs, fish fry, chili dogs and coffee, to Nick Tahou’s for Garbage Plates at two in the morning. We’d go to Joe’s—a coffeehouse down by the Eastman Theatre—and make fun of the slam poets there. We’d just drive, playing the same game we did at the bar, only now just for our own amusement, passing playgrounds and schools, buildings where we’d lived, train tracks and alleys, all of them blurring in the windows of Sparky’s car, seen through handprints, the smudge of our breath, these half-forgotten benchmarks of our childhoods.

  Mornings and nights, I had Laura for company: e-mails and phone calls, thousand-minute interstate phone cards burned through in a matter of days. Ours was becoming a kind
of old-fashioned/high-tech courtship. Love letters. Whispered conversations. My memories of the few days I’d spent with her out West still fresh and vital, my memory of leaving still an ache that wouldn’t go away.

  “You know what else would be cool? Gills. So I could stay in the water all the time.”

  “Really? Gills? No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid of fish.”

  Later, I would go to see her, back in Philadelphia—borrowed car, borrowed cash, borrowed time. We had a weekend, no more. She cooked for me (that took balls), and it was nothing complicated—rotini pasta with chicken, fresh herbs stripped from the stem—but I loved it. How long had it been since someone had cooked for me? In her bed that night, the two of us curled together, exhausted, forehead to forehead, like parentheses with nothing between, I smelled the sting of fresh thyme on her fingertips and never forgot it. Messed up as I was, that memory burned itself in deep. Ditto the memory of the next day when her ex showed up at the door, having flown in unexpectedly from Colorado with a ring and a proposal, trying to make the big romantic move. I stayed upstairs. She dealt with him in the basement. When the dust settled, I was the one who went to bed with her that night, the two of us laughing about it. No regrets.

  Some weekends, I’d take the Greyhound bus to Buffalo to see my buddy Gracie—a civilian with a grillardin’s heart and tastes in everything from music to booze, who I’d met while he was still in college and liked immediately because he was just as profane, black-hearted, miserable and funny as most of the cooks I knew, but was just smart enough to have found something better to do with his life than cooking dinner for strangers.

  Sometimes I’d see Sam. Sometimes not. Mostly not. I’d walk around the city, ride the subway, sit in the diners. I never had to worry about where I was going to sleep because by this point I wasn’t sleeping much, sometimes at all.

  I wasn’t well. I was getting fevers that would come on out of nowhere, have me boiling in my skin like a steam radiator sweating through its paint, then break and vanish a few minutes or an hour later. I was talking to myself (which I originally chalked up to my being alone all the time, until it occurred to me that I wasn’t actually alone all that much and that sometimes I’d be chattering away to myself while surrounded by other people) and seeing things that weren’t there. Sometimes I’d just space out for an hour or so. Sitting in a restaurant, my coffee would go cold in my hand. Often, I’d just stand there. It wasn’t a problem unless I was on a bus or walking—suddenly coming back to myself in neighborhoods where I’d never before been. In any event, I was keeping it all to myself pretty well. I was handling it. More or less.

  ON MAY 1, I had plans to spend the day with Gracie in Buffalo. May 1 was the day before Sam and I had originally planned to wed, and I think most of my few remaining friends had been waiting on the call, the request for company. Gracie was just Mr. Lucky.

  I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I had no intention of getting all weepy or maudlin. Things had ended. That was that. Really, I just wanted someone to hang out with. I even had other plans to meet with David and Sam later that night. We had tickets to see the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow,41 all of us together. Though I don’t recall exactly why any of us thought that would be a good idea or a nice time, I believe it had something to do with Sam and me feeling that it would be a suitably ironic way to celebrate the dissolution of Us. We could all say goodbye and good luck and, along the way, watch a man eat lightbulbs. Fun for everyone.

  I left for Buffalo in the morning by Greyhound, arrived in the city around noon, stopped at a liquor store between the bus station and Gracie’s second-floor apartment on Main Street—situated above the hippie coffee shop and Chinese herbalist’s store—and carried two six-packs of Killian’s the rest of the way. Gracie and I had a couple of beers at his place, sitting in his window frame and taunting the Deadheads and poets arrayed below, the hairy-legged girls all trying to play Ani DiFranco tunes on their rattling pawnshop guitars. When that got dull, we went down the street for a late breakfast at Amy’s Place—a great, dirt cheap Lebanese diner always full of radical feminists, student Buddhists, hungover professors of cultural anthropology from the university down the street and tables crammed with anarchists all drinking watery tea and sharing a single plate of hummus.

  Some friends of Gracie’s met us there. We spent the afternoon relaxing, hanging out in the sun, just knocking around the city. It was one of the better days I’d had in a while and I was feeling fine.

  Night came. I thanked Gracie for his company and for drinking more than his share of the beer I’d brought, then left to join Sam for dinner. We talked lightly about the good old days, joked about our various failures, were both self-deprecating and sweet. Later, David42 met us at the club where the show was happening. We found our reserved table, ordered drinks and some snacks, made (I assume) some slightly uncomfortable small talk. And then, at around eight-thirty, just before the show was supposed to start, some vital system inside me finally failed and all my lights went out.

  I REMEMBER FEELING A LITTLE ILL, like maybe I was going to throw up. I was right in the middle of telling a story about New Year’s Eve in New Mexico, and I can recall, with sometimes uncomfortable clarity, the sudden rush of cold sweat. I remember thinking, “Man, I better find the bathroom.”

  Like now.

  I do remember standing up, but at this point, the clock is running down on lucidity. I remember excusing myself politely from the table, turning and feeling the whole room twist like a Möbius strip. I remember the sudden tunnel vision, the fireflies in my eyes, a sickening, loud bang like a lightning detonation somewhere deep inside my head, and lurching crazily toward a four-top of horrified yuppies all frozen with shock.

  Miffy, Buffy, Biff and Chet certainly hadn’t anticipated this. They’d come here looking for some tame, cultivated freak-show experience—to see the fire-eaters and Mr. Bendo at a comfortable distance, giggling behind their hands while they drank their white-wine spritzers and ate their ahi tuna appetizers. But now, here they were, about to receive a highly personal lesson in inevitability; watching me come toward them with mounting horror, maybe even thinking, right up until the last instant, that I was a part of the show and would stop at a respectful distance and pull a bouquet of flowers out of my ass.

  No such luck. I hit their table going down—groaning, clutching at them—then slid off and, seeking shelter, dragged myself underneath. I knew something had gone bad wrong inside me, but knowing it, I had no idea what to do about it. Pushing legs and feet and ankles out of my way, I wrapped my arms around the table’s center post, hanging on like a tempest-tossed sailor to the mast, blubbering and speaking in tongues. I was scared. I had no idea what was happening to me.

  And after that, all I remember is the hospital.

  ACTUALLY, I don’t really remember the hospital, but I remember being there because I remember leaving, because I’ve been told I was there, because, somewhere, there’s paperwork that proves it.

  The human brain has this remarkable ability to edit out pain and trauma—a mercy of limited recall that keeps us from obsessing over every hurt, little or large, which is the only reason any woman has ever had more than one baby and why Evel Knievel kept jumping his motorcycle over buses and vats of flaming badgers well into his middle age.

  The problem is, the brain is an indelicate editor. It spills a lot of Wite-Out and, in excising the bad stuff, inadvertently takes a lot of the laughs with it, a lot of the sweet detail. For me, the forty-five minutes or so immediately following my one-man gravity demonstration are almost completely gone. Things are spotty for a couple hours before (like, I can remember eating dinner with Sam, but not where; I can remember meeting David, but not precisely when). The six or eight hours after are something of a wash, too. The part of my brain skilled at stringing moments together into scenes, and scenes together into a story, had checked out. All I was left with were the loose moments, free of context. As
a result, it’s quite possible that some or none of the following things truly happened, and it’s absolutely true that plenty of other things happened that I’ll never recall.

  Regardless, here’s what I know.

  THE ER DOCTOR WHO FIRST SAW ME was absolutely convinced I was fished out on drugs when I was brought in. Five months earlier, this would have been a fair diagnosis. But since January I’d remained remarkably clean. Hunched over me, his face way too close to mine, knuckles digging into my chest, he demanded loudly that I tell him what, exactly, I’d taken and in what amounts. I thought he was going to slap me when I insisted I was sober.

  THE OWNER (OR POSSIBLY THE MANAGER) of the nightclub where the show was taking place had been walking from the bathrooms back to his office when he saw me go down. Thinking I was drunk, he’d first moved to call in the bouncers, but then he saw me twisting and flopping around on the floor and knew I was having a seizure. He ran over, scattered the yuppies and the gawkers who’d gathered, grabbed me under the armpits and dragged me into the office, my heels furrowing the carpet. He was also the one who’d called the ambulance.

  I was laughing hysterically, speaking what he thought was French and pouring sweat like I’d just run a marathon. Every time he tried to put me in a chair, I’d fall out.

  He told all this to the paramedics when they arrived, asking, “Is he gonna die?”

  THE PARAMEDICS WERE UNABLE to get any information out of me because all I would do was mumble, laugh and seize. Twice, while they were attending to me in a back hallway outside the club, I snapped into what appeared to be total consciousness, leaped up, thanked them for their concern and efforts, then tried to run. I’d black out before I got far, but it was always a surprise, so when they got me on the gurney, they put me in restraints. Outside, it was snowing. Seems like a rare thing in May, even for Buffalo, but that’s what I remember. Everything had a beautiful halo around it and it was bright as noon. I tried to catch snowflakes on my tongue.