Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  IN THE ER, when my tox screen came back negative for everything but a couple beers and some tabbouleh, the doctor decided he wanted nothing more to do with me. He sent me upstairs for a CAT scan. An orderly with a gigantic Afro came to wheel me off and, when I asked, took me outside so I could have a cigarette.

  “Ain’t no rush,” he said. “Doctor thinks you faking it.”

  AN AMBULANCE RIDE OF FIVE BLOCKS in Buffalo cost $750 in 1999, making it the most expensive cab in the city. But then this also included all the crack medical care I received en route: the two full-bore IVs they stuck in me, stabbing me so many times trying to find a vein that the bruises didn’t heal for a month; the twelve-lead that required them to take a pair of surgical scissors to my favorite party jeans and the British SAS commando sweater I’d received as a gift; the fingertip pulse monitor that fell off during the ride, filling the ambulance with that screeching electronic eeeeeeeee sound that, thanks to the glut of hospital shows on TV, has finally surpassed the death rattle as the sound of impending mortality in this modern age.

  Sam, who was riding up front, heard that and freaked out—twisting in her seat and trying to claw through the partition behind her like a cat. A trainee on the rig, not thinking to first check the monitor, started chest compressions that nearly broke my ribs.

  THIS PART I REMEMBER CLEARLY:

  “We didn’t know what was wrong with you, but you sure seemed to be enjoying yourself,” one of the ambulance crew later told me, standing outside the hospital. They’d come back to check on me, which I thought was nice. He said I’d been laughing, telling jokes between blackouts, but not speaking any language he’d ever heard. Also, I’d pissed myself. And tried to bite one of the medics, for which I sheepishly apologized.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Happens all the time.”

  IN THE CAT SCAN MACHINE, I fell asleep and couldn’t be woken. That’s when the hospital called my parents in Rochester, waking them with the 4:00 a.m. phone call that they’d probably been expecting for years. As always, my mom picked up.

  Mrs. Sheehan? This is Buffalo General Hospital. We have your son Jason here . . .

  “GOOD THING WE’RE NOT GETTING MARRIED TOMORROW,” I said to Sam at some point.

  • • •

  I WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS WHEN MY FOLKS ARRIVED—coming out of it around six or seven in the morning with them already in the room and the doctor attempting to explain brain disorders to my mom.

  “A seizure can be triggered by many things,” he was saying. “At this point, we really don’t know what happened, but he appears to have had one large . . .”

  He paused here as if searching for a word that would neither confirm nor deny the veracity of what several different people had told him had happened to me, the validity of the eyewitness explanations, reports from the ambulance crew, the blood work, the tests that had shown my body to be completely spent and exhausted, if not in any specific way broken.

  “One large episode,” he continued, as if suddenly I were a super-size prime-time drama. “And about a dozen smaller ones. These are like aftershocks, but they seem to have stopped now.”

  Brainquakes. I liked that.

  “Jason hasn’t been very helpful,” the doctor added.

  My mom sighed scoldingly. I knew that sound all too well, having heard it roughly ten thousand times before this night. Lying there, I’m thinking, “Here it comes . . .” It was the perfect moment for her to swing into her routine, her whole You know, up until he left home, he was a perfect angel act. Never before had she been set up so cleanly, had an audience so willing—eager, even—to hear and have entered into the official record the full litany of mistakes, screwups, poor choices and bad behavior I’d engaged in since leaving her protective custody.

  But then, Mom has always been full of surprises.

  “Helpful?” she asked, fixing her eyes on the doctor. “Does it look like he’s in any condition to be helpful? Aren’t you supposed to be helping him?”

  The doctor made another attempt. “We’re trying to help him, Mrs. Sheehan. Do you know of any drugs he might be using?”

  “Drugs?” Mom laughed. “Oh, no. He might’ve smoked a little marijuana in college, but if he said anything different, he’s lying. I always say, it’s like he has this whole other life sometimes.” She paused. Through slit eyes, I could see her turn to look straight at me, half smiling. “This whole other, made-up life.”

  She looked back up at the doctor. “So tell me, if you don’t know what’s the matter, can we take him home?”

  Making one last feeble effort, the doctor asked again, “So, no drugs then?” He had his pen poised over his clipboard, his eyes on my mother, waiting.

  And Mom paused a moment, tilted her head, looked at the doctor with a quizzical eye as if to say, Who is this little man that makes me repeat myself when I am in a rush? When she did finally speak, her voice had grown perhaps half a decibel louder and the ambient temperature in the room had dropped five hundred degrees.

  “Can we take him home now?”

  WE WERE GONE FROM THE HOSPITAL in about twenty minutes. Dad helped me out to the car, stopped on the way out of Buffalo so I could pick up a couple of gas-station sandwiches and a pack of cigarettes, but I was asleep again before he even made it out of the parking lot.

  Having never had health insurance before, I went on Medicaid. Once I had my wits about me somewhat, I was not much other than tired. Well, tired and pissed. Because of the nature of my hospitalization, the DMV pulled my driver’s license for six months, pending a doctor’s note promising I wouldn’t seize behind the wheel and run into a bus full of nuns. I felt as though my second-favorite organ was betraying me with its weakness, further screwing up my already amply screwed-up life.

  Three days later, I went back to work at the Italian restaurant, and it happened again. Again, it came on out of nowhere. Dizziness, cold sweat, a wave of nausea and the smell of cooked wiring, then out. This “episode” was different only in that the cast of guest stars had changed—cooks now, not yuppies—and there wasn’t that sickening crack in my head, no flopping around. I went down on the flattop this time, on my left forearm (where I still have the raspberry-colored scar), and slammed my head on the edge of the cutting board behind me. I was carried off the line and dumped outside the back door. Bad meat. Nothing for it but to toss it aside and move on. Again my folks were called. They picked me up. And I never went back to that restaurant again, either—something that was, at this point, becoming a pattern.

  Two days after that, I was having a cup of coffee and reading the paper at the diner when I felt the panicky sweats wash over me. This time I had the presence of mind to drop a couple bucks and make a dash for the door. Almost made it, too.

  After it happened again (at a hamburger restaurant this time, with me fading to black in the back parking lot), I stopped leaving the house alone, wouldn’t go anywhere without chaperones who understood that I might, at any moment, just hit the ground and start swimming away. For a week or so, I was afraid. Subsequently, only annoyed.

  That’s why, when I was out at the bar with Sparky, I’d tell people the reason I needed to thumb a lift was multiple DUIs. It might not have been the truth, but it sure was an easier story to tell.

  Besides, I wasn’t really a motherfucking rocket scientist either, was I? Or an ex-con, or fresh back from the bayou or whatever other story Sparky and I had decided on telling that night. I wasn’t even a cook anymore. I was just a goddamn cripple. And no one wanted to hear that story.

  I never really cooked again seriously after that.

  I mean, I cooked. And I would collect a paycheck, at least for a couple more years. But the fire and the magic had gone out of it for me—had gone out of me, really. The food was still food, was still as good or as bad as it’d always been. Only now I looked at it with dull eyes rather than love, and at kitchens mostly with dread.

  I remember wishing (for the first time, not the last) that I
had pictures of me and my time spent on the line, in my whites, a pan or a knife in my hand; that I or Sam or Matty or anyone else had thought to just pick up a camera and snap a couple. Something to look at—to seed the memory, make it all come back in a cold rush like those weird intersections of meth and memory where you’d end up taking a bump that would trigger some amphetamine-fueled cascade effect of devastating perfect recall. I didn’t realize it then, but I was already chasing a past so recent the scars had hardly healed; trying to scramble over the wall and back into the garden of better days. It was an addict’s mind-set: constantly reaching for the voodoo of that first, best hit. But no matter where I was, where I went, on what line or in what galley I found myself, I would be disappointed and was always looking for a way out. Always found one, too, right up until the moment I found the last one: final back door, last goodbye.

  • • •

  I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL AGAIN when Laura called from Colorado, my skull covered with mad-scientist electrodes, long hair chunkily gummed down with sticky, milky conduction jelly that made me look like the victim of a particularly well-attended gang bang up in neurology. By the time I got home (Dad and me stopping on the way for McDonald’s cheeseburgers and coffee, eating together in the car in the parking lot, happily not speaking at all about what’d just happened and how bad I looked), Laura was already booking a flight back East. She was using the computer only because it was easier for her to lay hands on than a pistol, buying a ticket because one was available and because it was quicker and less complicated than hijacking, which she later told me had been her first instinct.

  She flew to her folks’ house outside Philadelphia and made the six-hour drive to Rochester in a rented car, twice in a week, arriving determined and with an air of cool, green-eyed competency, meaning to do what, for centuries, women have done to cure and comfort men who’ve been broken. It didn’t take, but I sure did appreciate the effort. Since she’d also brought magazines and snacks, beer and hotel reservations, we spent a lot of time lazing around in a big hotel bed eating beef jerky, flipping through Hollywood gossip magazines and watching Red Dawn on cable. Her considered and well-researched opinion was that no malaise, spiritual or physical, can’t be fixed by a change of zip code and room service.

  Failing that, there was always brain medication, which she took in the form of prescription mood stabilizers and tequila. Chasing her own elusive happiness, she’d been to Munich, Salzburg, Zurich, Gstaad and Saint Moritz, the Virgin Islands (both British and American), Key West, Aspen and to the offices of a variety of medical professionals who specialized in difficulties of the noggin. The doctors had been a waste, she informed me. But a passport cures everything.

  She spoke fluent German. She knew the names of beaches in the Leeward Islands, hotels in Morocco and the capitals of all fifty states. Her makeup was better traveled than I was, and I was jealous of even just the airline tags on her luggage. She claimed to have never once been lost in her entire life and that she could go coast to coast, Philly to L.A., in thirty-eight hours flat with no map. She’d spent the intervening years—the ones between Ithaca and the Dark Horse, the ones I’d spent learning only how to cook—teaching herself all those things she thought might be necessary for living an interesting life, things that included, but were not limited to, playing blackjack, how to drink a man under the table, knowing the names of weather systems and the proper way to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Being as equally dislocated as I was—a true child of the interstate—her things were currently scattered across three different addresses in two states, and she was terminally short on underwear because she’d packed most of it away, then immediately forgot where the box had gone.

  I had a few good stories, I thought. A couple, anyway. But mine, at that time and in that place, couldn’t even compete with her underwear. Having always seen myself as a man who could not stand to see an opportunity pass, a bad idea go untried, this left me floored. How had I missed out on the kind of life that she’d already had? What was wrong with me that I didn’t know the name of a good hotel on the rue Michelet in Algiers?

  Cooking, which I’d always seen as a sort of concentrated form of life—a distillation of its best bits, the sex, drugs, blood, fire and rock and roll, a reduction of the stuff of it down into a glace de viande of experience—suddenly paled a little. Had it really been all that? Or had my time in the back of the house been an evasion of life, of responsibility and growing up? There’s a Peter-and-the-Lost-Boys vibe in the best kitchens, a kind of J. M. Barrie sense of great and piratical adventure. But it is also isolating, insulating, an outright and considered rejection of straight and normal life in favor of a few loud, uncertain hours of action: playing with knives and fire, shouting, hitting people, staying up late, reaching for excess and doing everything a proper grown-up isn’t supposed to do. Hook once asked Peter who and what he was. Peter haughtily replied, “I’m youth, I’m joy.” He might just as well have added, “I’m rage, I’m violence, I’m the blood-mad, knife-crazy, firebug junkie boy in all of us who, for some, refuses to ever go away.” I loved my time on the pirate ship so much that I never noticed it hadn’t ever gone anywhere.

  To this day (because even though I know better now, I still essentially remain the lurching, provincial, mush-mouthed dumb-ass I was then) Laura is the worldly half of our crooked dyad. In airports, over dinners with friends, she can speak about Pacific beaches and streets in Austria, about properly made crêpes suzette and troubles with passports. All I can talk about is the pirate ship and what I saw there, who I knew and what I made for dinner.

  WE SPENT MOST OF OUR TIME TOGETHER AT THE HOTEL, but did manage to get out long enough to go and have a few drinks at the Rose & Crown one night. I smoked cigarettes and we tipped pints, fed the jukebox until we’d run through everything good and closed the place. I wanted to drive around with her until the sun came up, to show her my hometown, the places where I’d grown up, in fits and starts, a little bit at a time. I wanted to keep her talking, to keep me talking. I wanted to stop time and stay in this moment, living perpetually in the embodiment of some midnineties power ballad—dopey, loud, timeless and just a little bit sad.

  I wanted all of this, but I felt awful. Shaky, sweating, exhausted, sick, my internal architecture and the good face I’d been putting on things for most of the night rapidly crumbling. We ended up parked under the shattered streetlamps in an alley near Sparky’s place, her rental car nosed up against a Dumpster, the two of us kissing with a starving hunger like we’d just discovered it; like we were the first two people on earth who’d ever thought of doing such a thing.

  And while it might be cute or poetic to say that, after that, I was cured, it would be a lie. When does real life ever really go that way? I ended up half-conscious on her shoulder, gasping for a breath I couldn’t seem to catch, mumbling stupidly to myself. She took me back to the hotel, helped me inside and put me to bed—joining me, curled like a question mark against my back, only when she was sure that I wasn’t going to die on her.

  When she packed up to go the next morning, I thought I was never going to see her again. I hadn’t exactly been the most charming company. As things turned out, she was gone for only about twenty-four hours before turning right back around and coming back. I asked her why. She said she’d missed me and had nothing better to do.

  This time around, we didn’t bother leaving the hotel at all.

  I USED TO HAVE THIS RECURRING DREAM, and I think it started around this time. I would be sitting in a room. Bland, boring, like the waiting room of a small-town dentist’s office or the kind of place you’re forced to sit while being turned down for a car loan. Paintings of seashores, hung perfectly; dull plastic flowers; the walls done in the kind of pastel shades used in hospitals or medium-security psychiatric facilities—meant to induce calm, achieving only a blunted sense of crawling paranoia.

  The room was small, yet, in dreamland physics, every animal I’d ever killed was in there with
me, waiting. Every lamb whose loin or chop or gigot I’d ever prepared was there; every cow that I’d ever called in a hit on—talking to my meat guy on the phone, asking for a hundred pounds of ground, two cases of T-bones, tenderloin, shoulder, steamship round. All the pigs who’d given up their bellies, backs and trotters. The veal calves. The ducks. The rabbits whose necks I’d broken with my own hands (the sound like cracking stalks of celery, the feeling like breaking a green twig wrapped in a blanket). And the chickens? God, the chickens. All those breasts. All those wings. All those tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of eggs. I was the chicken Hitler in my time. My name the one that mama chickens invoked to scare baby chickens who wouldn’t behave.

  They were all there. And they weren’t angry at me. They weren’t threatening. Like me, they were just waiting. Resigned. And we would sit there, all of us together, listening to the Muzak, until finally a door would open, and on the other side there would be a kitchen. Sometimes it would be a crazy kitchen—bloody aprons and gouts of fire and everyone screaming, cooks with their heads thrown back in gory exaltation, impossibly wide and insane smiles on their faces; a huge, massive industrial kitchen that seemed to stretch away into infinity, all stainless steel and nonskid mats and roaring, grinding machinery. But most of time it was just a plain kitchen with a few guys quietly working at their boards, and I would stand up and all of the animals I’d killed for dinner would stand up and I would walk into the kitchen and all the animals would follow along behind me, all of us knowing that we’d never really had a choice in any of this. That this was simply what we’d been made to do.