Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  I’d wanted to tell Jeff that I’d done my tour, that I’d seen enough; about fighting with Danny in the hallway—knock-down, drag-out, because he’d lied to me, called in with a bullshit excuse about hurting his ankle and left me a dishwasher short on a Friday night. I’d caught him out in his lie—someone else I knew having seen him out drinking on Friday, sans crutches, then snitching to me—and told him so. Called him all sorts of names. I couldn’t fire him. I needed him. He was a great dishwasher. So we’d fought instead, punching and wrestling and rolling on the floor until it became ridiculous and we started laughing. Where else but here are HR issues resolved so quickly? And I’d wanted to tell him about my late-night dinners with Indy—me making him burritos out of house stock and tortillas I’d brought in from the grocery store, or him offering me some of the food his wife had cooked for him: samosa and saag and biryani. We’d sit on the stainless and eat, cross-legged, talking about anything but work. Indy was married, had about seven hundred kids. He wanted to be a writer and was good. He would bring me things to read now and then because I’d told him that I, too, occasionally put pen to paper. He was Indian (hence the nickname), and his writing reminded me of Rudyard Kipling or that guy who wrote The Sheltering Sky. He’d collected rejections from The New Yorker, which he kept, proudly, because even if they were noes, they were noes from The New Yorker. We’d make coffee at midnight, one in the morning, and talk about writing. I’d encourage him, tell him that he had to keep trying because anything had to be better than this, right? Indy was the only one who knew I was planning on quitting.

  But standing there, my argument collapsed inside me. I don’t know why. I told him that I just had to go. West, I thought. Fast. And out of nowhere, a lie on my lips: “I’ve got a chance to become a food writer and I just can’t let that go without trying.”

  I had no such chance, no such opportunity. It wasn’t even something I’d been thinking about (much . . .) until right at that moment. To this day, I can’t figure where that thought had come from or why I’d given it voice. But there it was.

  “Food writing?” Jeff asked.

  “Yup.”

  He shook his head and looked away. “You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.”

  He asked if I could give him two weeks and I said sure. I think I gave him three. And when I left, I just left. Indy slid into my exec-sous slot, wished me luck, and I just stepped out the back door for one last time and was gone.

  A FEW NIGHTS BEFORE MY LAST NIGHT, I’d met Laura at the Rose & Crown after work with every intention of hashing out our travel plans over a few pints and accidentally asked her to marry me instead. I didn’t have a ring or anything, but I did have a few drinks in me and had seen her and some smooth-talking British fellow making eyes at each other across the bar. So really, it was a defensive proposal—much more civilized than just jumping up and punching the other guy in the face, I thought—and I did get down on one knee. She threw me by asking me to state my reasons for wanting to marry her. I told her it was because she was mine and I didn’t want some caddish twit with an accent and the gin sweats thinking he had a chance at walking out with her.

  Actually, what I said was “Because I love you. Because you’re the one I want. So marry me.”

  She smiled, shrugged, and said, “Okay.”

  And that was that.46

  We met my parents at a greasy chrome-and-Formica diner in Rochester a couple days before Thanksgiving and broke the news of our engagement over turkey loaf and watery coffee. We looked at it like a practice run, and in keeping with my character I botched it suitably—stammering, hedging and chain-smoking, saying something along the lines of, “So, Laura and I have been kinda thinking about maybe . . . ,” then hanging my head like I’d just copped to a bank robbery, or worse.

  I don’t know what I was worried about. The folks weren’t exactly keen on keeping me around. It wasn’t like I had a lot of other prospects. They certainly weren’t going to be having this conversation with my brother anytime soon—what with his penchant for waitresses, one-night stands and generalized debauchery. Plus, they were crazy about Laura, figuring her for a stabilizing influence and the kind of girl who’d handle the important stuff like paying bills and remembering birthdays while I was out there doing my little nonsense things with duck breasts and chervil.

  So my mom got a little weepy from relief and smiled a lot, her voice rising several octaves whenever she tried to speak. And my dad, who never used three words when none would do just fine, said simply, “It’s about time,” then got down to business with his turkey loaf and pie.

  It was a short meal. No one lingered. And when we were done, on my way out the door, I caught myself wondering if there’d been anything important in my life that’d ever happened outside a bar or restaurant; if there’d been anything, ever, that didn’t have food at the core of it.

  It was a short accounting. I hadn’t really done much important. But the consensus of my jumbled, fucked and sour memory was no. Everything following the loss of my virginity (which had happened at fifteen, right about the same time I was discovering kitchens for the first time—food and pussy and fire and sex and knives and girls being the consuming and defining passions of that magnificent year) had occurred in a dining room, a kitchen, a bar, on a loading dock or in some filthy alley outside a restaurant’s back door. Somewhere in there, at the wet and meaty heart of everything that’d meant anything to me, was a meal. Perversely, this pleased me. It made me feel as though there’d been some sort of structure buried deep beneath the mess I’d made of myself, some purpose, however ridiculous or pathetic. Some people have church. Some people have large families, which form comforting parentheses around everything they experience. I had the galley, the floor and the long oak, and because I’d never been a man who’d expected much or wanted much until meeting Laura, it was enough.

  On my way outside, I stopped and patted the center post between the in and out doors like the restaurant was a dog that’d just brought me my slippers.

  In Pennsylvania, I went all old-fashioned and decided that I was going to formally ask Laura’s parents for their permission to marry their daughter. Then I blew the surprise by asking her brother first. I’d been Dutching up my courage for most of the afternoon, which might’ve contributed somewhat to my poor aim—red wine and bourbon making me think that maybe an ally at the table might come in handy. But when we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, I finally did it right: “I’d like to marry your daughter. Can you please pass the mashed potatoes?”

  Being prudent and rational people, her parents had a long talk with us about marriage in general and our plans in particular while the plates of turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce went round and round. And while Laura and I were deliberately vague about our plans, I had no problem talking about the various pitfalls of our impending connubial fusion. At this point, my courage was somewhere north of Amsterdam, so what did I have to lose? They asked how I knew that I loved their daughter and I told them it was because I’d never hated anyone quite so much as I could hate her when I was angry, and that no one can hate like that without loving a little on the other side. Her mom asked if I regretted not doing anything before deciding to get married, and I said yeah. I was a little disappointed that I’d never banged a cheerleader.

  After that, everything else was pretty much a blur.

  Still, they’d said yes and I was planning on holding them to it. Once again, to make things right, I cooked for everyone the next night. Laura’s mom had always told her that she was going to marry an Indian cook, someone who’d make her samosas and curried chicken salad. Instead, Laura had a hungover mick with a galley tan, fucked hands and bags under his eyes knocking around her mother’s kitchen making crème brûlée and something involving puff pastry, leftover turkey and cranberry rémoulade. Too late to back out now. The night after that, we all went out to celebrate at a restaurant in Conshohocken called the Spring Mill Café, where we ate bastilla and black bass in a sa
ffron broth and I decided it would be wise if I didn’t drink quite so much. The night after that, Laura and I went out to celebrate again in Chinatown, at Penang, over roti canai and curried-beef rendang and icy bottles of Tsingtao beer. Afterward, we stumbled around in the steam and chilly rain, ducking in and out of different shops, buying packs of Chinese cigarettes and chopsticks and Hello Kitty condoms, walking arm in arm until we were sober enough to drive.

  LAURA AND I DID HAVE A PLAN. We’d decided to move to California with the idea of renting a bungalow in some toxic suburb of L.A., running a gypsy cab service and becoming screenwriters. Not the rich and powerful kind, but shameless hacks, pounding out genre buddy pictures for C-list stars and shoot-’em-up action comedies while sitting beside a scummy swimming pool and drinking heavily in the sun. I’d buy a cowboy hat. She’d wear a Stars and Stripes bikini. We’d get a lot of plaster garden gnomes and a shotgun, which, for kicks, we’d use to shoot the gnomes when we got bored, blasting away somewhere out in the desert where we could do it naked.

  It was, in short, the perfect scheme. Love would get us by. And when love inevitably failed, there would always be the drinks, the gnomes and the typewriter to pay the bills. From our stools at the bar in Rochester, lying together in bed on Sunday mornings, sitting against the steamy windows at our favorite Chinese restaurant drinking rum-heavy umbrella drinks under the buzzing neon while it pissed down mercury rain outside, it’d seemed infallible. Absolutely flawless from any perspective.

  Where we ended up was Albuquerque, New Mexico, because Albuquerque, New Mexico, is where a lot of high desert trash blows up, where a lot of dreams go to die, and where the most recent in our long string of four-hundred-dollar used cars crapped out on us. We took a room at a pay-by-the-week motel full of alcoholics, recent divorcées and itinerant construction workers, figuring we’d only be there long enough to figure out how to get the hell gone. But one week turned into two, and two weeks turned into a month, and before we knew it, we were living in Albuquerque—neither of us exactly clear about how it’d happened but knowing it had something to do with New Mexico being dirt cheap, always sunny, full of really great places to eat tacos, and the closest a person could get to living in Old Mexico without filling out any paperwork.

  From our little third-floor efficiency, we could step out onto the walkway and watch the prairie dogs zap themselves on the electrified fence, the roadrunners get squashed beneath the massive tires of the construction workers’ shiny new six-wheel pickups. In the morning, we could see the sun rise over the trash midden in the vacant lot next door. At night, we drifted off to sleep to the sound of accordions, gunfire and Indians beating the crap out of the drunken cowboys in the parking lot, rolling them for their wallets and fancy silver-tipped ostrich-skin boots. It was delightful.

  We moved into an actual apartment just before Christmas when I got a job working at a place called the Blue Crow. An Italian guy, an East Coast transplant like me, ran it, now doing Nuevo Latino cuisine for tourists who didn’t know chili from chile. He hired me even though he had no place for me on the line—seeing the back-East area codes on my résumé and thinking he’d found a kindred spirit, I guess. Another shit-talking, name-taking, no-nonsense mercenary who’d somehow gotten blown West and decided to stick it out. He brought me on as a baker/pâtissier because that was the only slot he had open, but promised he’d find a real kitchen position for me eventually.

  “But I don’t know how to bake,” I told him, thanking him for the offer but being very clear about what I saw as a fairly serious flaw in his reasoning.

  “You’ll do fine,” he told me. “Make some table bread, some rolls, do a couple desserts. It’s easy. Then you can help out the guys during dinner.”

  “I’ve never done any pastry work.”

  “What?”

  “None. At all.”

  He seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, “Well, you’ll figure it out. You can do all your own ordering, right?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. I’ve been in town a couple weeks. I don’t know any of the suppliers.” It was like talking to a robot, programmed to give only positive responses and vague encouragement.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Draw some cash, get some supplies and get going.”

  IT OCCURS TO ME, looking back on this now, that the chef (Robert, I think his name was) was probably as confused as I was by this exchange. He was a fairly young guy with maybe five or six years on me, tops. He’d probably come up the way I did, been trained in a similar fashion, had the same kind of rough education. But I remember that his kitchen at the Blue Crow was staffed with a surprising number of white kids for its being in the Southwest. I remember that they threw around a lot of French culinary terms and wore their uniforms spotlessly—pressed and ironed and turned out in a certain way that said that they were serious about their business and the way they looked while doing it. Serious the way a marine will look on the parade ground. Serious like they’d been taught. These were probably not the kind of guys who were collecting their paychecks on Friday night and blowing the rent money on cases of Labatt’s Blue and scag. They were the kind of guys who thought it would be a kick to stay late after a full-book Thursday and just play around in the kitchen—practicing their tournée cuts and frenching lamb chops and using the pastry station to make bombes for show.

  Robert had hired these guys. Robert had no doubt shown them the ropes. And I’m thinking that Robert had come to a point in his career where he just assumed that everyone coming up below him and now asking him for a job was coming to him out of culinary school where no one—not even the most serious, dedicated and brilliant grill artist or saucier—would’ve made his bones without doing the required courses in baking and pastry, without having had at least some glancing contact with a piping bag and loaf pan.

  What I think he must’ve assumed I was saying was that I didn’t like doing pastry or perhaps considered myself not good at it. What I was actually saying was that I didn’t know the first thing about baking or pastry—was as deaf, dumb and blind as Tommy when it came to the gentler side of the menu and couldn’t have made him table bread or a couple simple desserts if he’d put a gun to my dick and said, “Bake.” No lie, had someone told me back then that they needed me to pull some sugar, I would’ve gone into dry stock, taken a bag of sugar off the shelf and set it on the floor in front of the shelving unit because, to a cook, that’s what “pull some sugar” would’ve meant—take it down from its place in storage and put it where the person who will come along behind you needing it will be able to find it easily.

  Realizing this now only makes what followed next even funnier to me.

  AFTER GETTING MY ORDERS, I did the only thing I could think of: I drove to the grocery store, bought them out of baking supplies, loaded my car down with fruit, then stopped by one of the big chain bookstores to buy a copy of Payard’s pastry cookbook.47 Flipping through it in the parking lot, I started taking notes, trying to cram an entire pastry and baking master’s class worth of knowledge into my head in a half hour while also desperately attempting to translate the language of bakers into cook-ese.

  It was like trying to teach long division to a hamster. Cooks and bakers are two totally different breeds with two totally different brains. Cooks work from the gut, from sense memory, by rote, blind but focused repetition. Cooks taste and adjust flavors on the fly, can improvise, riff, repair mistakes; are constantly tinkering, working a thousand variations on “crispy outside, soft in the middle,” which may as well be our guild motto because it’s the most succinct explanation of our primary duty and an apt description of what we’ve all dedicated our lives to accomplishing.

  But bakers are just magicians. Scientists. The Jedi knights of the kitchen. Their work is mysterious and arcane and precise. They measure things, use scales, work from recipes, do math more complicated than trying to figure a three-way split on an eight ball or how to stretch the last six ounces of sauce in the lowboy
across four plates for the last table of the night.

  Theirs is also a more pure galley faith than that of cooks because it encompasses daily miracles of transubstantiation. When I make a beurre blanc, a béchamel or espagnole, I am intimately involved in every step of its creation. I watch it coming together in the pan or pot, tasting it all along the way, adding salt or fat or stock or cream—babying it and shaping it into something that eventually matches the image of sensual perfection I have in my head. Cooking professionally, after a certain amount of time, becomes mechanical. Foie gras is only exciting the first couple times you work with it. Truffles, too. And doing the job well on the line requires, more than a passionate love for food, the masturbatory intensity of the stage magician practicing endlessly in front of a mirror, his passes and fakes worked out a million times until they are flawless. The cook is in the same position, shaving seconds and motions away from his nightly act until a kind of elegant conservatism results. It’s grunt work, miraculous only at table, only by dint of all the work you, the dining public, don’t see.

  But a baker or pâtissier puts a vat of liquid in my oven, walks away, and when he comes back to pull it out, it’s a soufflé. He lays out an ugly, pale, scraggly twist of gloop on a glossed baguette pan and an hour later it’s a steamy, light, gorgeous loaf that tastes of butter and yeast and life and sunshine. A baker must have trust and confidence, must know when to step aside and let his ingredients be. They are Buddhists among the kitchen’s rough pagans, Kinsey to us hopeless sluts, carefully observing, taking notes, beginning reactions that take hours or days to reach fruition, then just walking away while those of us left on the line are still taking it in the ass from the early pre-theater dinner crowd for fifty bucks a day plus lunch.