Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  But after that, I left—abandoned my post, thinking, “You know what, fuck it,” and just walking out the back door. This was something I would never have done two years before, three years before. I would’ve stuck it out like that night in Buffalo—cooking one-handed so as not to fuck my guys on a busy Friday by leaving them short-handed. Like all the other cooks and chefs I’d known who played hurt, who soldiered on no matter the damage, who treated every night like it was their last one on earth—not wanting to miss one minute of the fun. Down in the trenches, in the muck and the heat and the fury of it, the impulse to just keep cooking is, I imagine, a lot like that thing they say about soldiers at war. They don’t fight for a cause, for a flag or a country or a commander. They fight—and keep fighting even when everything around them is going to hell—for the guys squatting next to them in the foxhole, crawling next to them in the sand. They do it because it is assumed that the guys next to them will do the same, because the thought of possible death and certain horror is not so bad as the sure knowledge of personal cowardice and absolute weakness. Soldiers fight because it is worse not to. Cooks cook because to give up means knowing forever that you backed down when things got bad and having to live with the cold wisdom of failure.

  Even though I know why I did it—why I left, why I walked away on that night—and even though I can rationalize it (it was a slow night, the rush was pretty much over, I just didn’t give a fuck), I am still ashamed of myself even today. I’d done a lot of bad things in my life. I’d become something of a flake over the past year. But that irrevocable step out the back door of the Ranch was worse than anything else. It was like a negation of all the good I’d ever done. This was the life I’d chosen, that I’d worked for. I loved the kitchen the way any man loves his work when he is happy and productive and useful. I loved the kitchen for what it’d made me, how it’d saved me more times than I could count. I loved it for breaking me and burning me and screaming at me, for shaping me and giving me a language and a family and a home. I loved it for being my life, for seeming, in its best moments, a good life, and in its worst, always offering a second chance at something better tomorrow for those who could just pick themselves up, brush off their whites, pull the crab leg out of their hair and stand once again at their station, waiting for greatness.

  Walking out the door was a betrayal of all that. And even though I did go back the next night and did stand my station like a man, the damage had already been done. I knew there was a point in me now where I would break and give up and surrender, and felt exponentially weaker for having to carry that knowledge in me.

  AT THE RESTAURANT, I got a call from one of the local TV stations asking if I could do a three-minute live cooking spot to cover some dead zone in the middle of the morning news broadcast. I said sure. No problem. Since I didn’t faint when the red light came on, one segment led to another a week later to fill in for another local chef who’d bailed out at the last minute, and that led to a regular, twice-a-week slot with me bantering with the anchors and lighting shit on fire.

  I had no illusions. I knew these callbacks had less to do with my winning personality, sweet voice and telegenic good looks than they did with my always bringing extra supplies and making lunch for the news team. But the hustle worked. I always wore the pristine white jacket with my name stitched over the breast pocket and my Ranch baseball hat. The lead-ins and walk-offs always sold me as “Jason Sheehan, chef at the Ranch Restaurant.” So no matter how much it cost the owners in product or how much the exec was bothered by my name being associated with the restaurant instead of his, there wasn’t dick anyone could say about it. The free publicity was too good and the floor counts went up by a significant percentage on the nights following every broadcast.

  Moving dangerously close to small-time, whorish celebrity chefdom, I then started teaching cooking classes at a show kitchen downtown, extolling the virtues of gas cooking for the local utilities company in trade for three hundred bucks an hour handed over at the end of the night like a mob payoff in an unmarked envelope. Again, in my starched white jacket and a ridiculous soufflé hat, I’d titillate and horrify packed rooms populated mostly by bored yuppie housewives, grandmothers and couples desperate for a night out by making jokes, simple desserts and sauces that required eight pounds of butter, then telling half-raunchy stories about life in professional kitchens before sliding into my smooth pitch for open-flame gas cooking over electric or induction elements.

  “Look, you want to cook like a pro? You want your sauce to taste like the sauce you had at the restaurant last week? Then you gotta have fire”—pause to upend the bottle of cooking wine, flaming the preheated pan I had set up and making an enormous fireball that tickled the hoods—“there simply is no substitute.”

  While all this was going on, Laura and I were making wedding plans. We were going to do it small, in Las Vegas, at the Treasure Island Casino because there were pirates there and I (obviously) liked pirates and everyone else loves pirates, too. After that, we had a big reception planned back on the East Coast, just outside Philadelphia. We hoped to honeymoon in Bali, in a little hotel on Monkey Forest Road. We had the chapel booked for mid-September 2001. Then, a couple months before the wedding, everything that’d been going so well started falling apart.

  It began when, in a fit of unwise (but entirely justified) pique I quit my job at the Ranch. Over the past few months everything had been coming together. Business was good. The TV spots, the cooking classes, and in particular the daily ops at the restaurant were all ticking along smoothly. I’d been talking with the owners about special-event menus and possibly collaborating on a cookbook. But the one thing I’d forgotten to do was ask for a raise. And when I finally did ask, I (again unwisely) went to the executive chef, not the owners. It’s the white jacket and the title, man. I’m a sucker for them every time.

  I caught him in his office during a lull between services, hanging out in T-shirt, shorts and sunglasses, using the computer to download music. I made my pitch, and unsurprisingly, the exec (who was hardly ever at the restaurant anyway—always either away on vacation, recuperating from some mysterious injury or “in meetings” all day—and who’d laughingly passed on both the TV gig and the cooking classes, thinking them below his station until, all of a sudden, it was my name, not his, on TV and on the big sign out front of the restaurant) refused my opening shot: a request for salary-plus-benefits commensurate with his. Sort of surprisingly, he also refused my compromise position. Then, just to be a dick, he said he thought he might be able to see his way clear to offering me another fifty cents an hour. A dollar, though? That was out of the question.

  I was currently making nine bucks an hour. I told him to go fuck himself. He just leaned back in his chair and smiled as I pulled off my apron and stormed out.

  ONCE MY JOB AT THE RANCH WAS GONE, so was the TV gig because now, rather than being “Jason Sheehan, chef at the Ranch Restaurant,” I was just “Jason Sheehan, long-haired weirdo who’s touching your food.”

  With the regular TV spots gone, so went the cooking classes. It was a trifecta. In the course of about two weeks, I’d lost everything. Again. Though really, at this point losing was less of a shock than a habit to me. I took it all with what I considered remarkable equanimity.

  Laura, on the other hand, regarded my apparent lack of concern, this grinning, mercenary élan I’d worked so hard to cultivate, as just maddening carelessness and irresponsibility. But one of the things that normal people don’t understand when dealing with enduring fuckups is that the last pride the fuckup has is in not showing just how wrecked he is by each successive failure. The fuckup has seen this coming, of course. The fuckup is prepared. The fuckup can say, with mordant aplomb, that these things just happen—truly believing that they simply do—then move on along to the next job, relationship, term in the White House, whatever. It’s a calculated pose, dignified only in that it is a denial of panic (which is worse), even though those who affect it (like me) are oft
en just too fucking dumb to know when they’re licked.

  It was like this with Laura and me—one of the many imbalances in our bond that kept us forever orbiting at a wicked tilt. Despite all her own endemic oddness—and perhaps only because I’m measuring her against myself—she was, at the time, the normal one in our relationship. The rock, in the same way that, if presented with a pile of mud and a plate of Jell-O and asked, “Which one is a rock?” a person would have to say the pile of mud, if only because of the chance that, someday, the mud might become a rock while the Jell-O is never going to be anything but dessert.

  Laura got things done. With her around, bills got paid (most of the time), dishes got done (most of the time), birthdays got remembered, plans got made and (most of the time) were stuck to. She finished things—jobs, chores, college degrees. When she left a job, she gave reasonable notice, filled out all the necessary paperwork and was missed after she was gone. My life she didn’t understand at all and saw each of my concurrent losses as a hammer blow to our plans. Biting her lip, making her eyes anime-big, she asked me what we were going to do now.

  We cracked two beers, sat down on our thirdhand couch in front of our pawnshop TV, put our feet up on the cardboard box we were using as a coffee table and I told her we should go to Juárez for tacos. It was just a few hours’ drive south of us, and, come on . . . no problem seems too serious when looked at from Mexico. I said we’d figure everything out when we got home.

  I HONESTLY WAS NOT WORRIED, because I had no cause to worry. I’d been through this before. It’d always worked out okay. I used to look at it like this: Being a cook is a great way to live but a terrible way to make a living. Cooks don’t get benefits. We have no retirement package. Most of us have no union looking out for us. We’re on our own. The pay is crap, the work is hard, the hours are long, our masters are often dumb or crooked or out-and-out criminals, and our fellows—those with whom we surround ourselves daily—are often worse. But we do all have one thing going for us, which is that whenever things get too harsh or too intolerable in one kitchen, any cook out there worth his whites can simply quit, walk out the door on a Thursday afternoon and be reasonably sure, if he’s not too picky, he can have a new job by first seating Friday night.

  That’s job security right there. That’s comfort like you wouldn’t believe. And I was confident in my view of the industry because I’d done exactly that a half dozen times or more. Granted, this mercenary mind-set had landed me in some fairly shitty posts (that St. Paddy’s Day Irish joint in Buffalo, Jimmy’s, working at a place that specialized in pizza and burritos made by guys who, culturally speaking, had probably needed to look both words up in a dictionary before their first shift just to know what they were going to be cooking), but work was work—was a paycheck, new friends, new connections, a continuation of the lifestyle, which, in many cases, was what I and a lot of guys like me were signing up for in the first place. One of the toughest things about being out of work? Having to pay for my own drinks like some kind of friendless schmuck. Another drag? Not knowing where to find a drug dealer when I needed one, a cheap used car, a lawyer, bail bondsman, quick loan, new bird’s-beak parer or a computer that’d fallen off the back of a truck somewhere and was now being sold for a hundred bucks out of the trunk of some dishwasher’s Honda Civic. When I was working, I could find all of that in one place, plus a hundred other things. A kitchen could get me drunk, get me high, get me laid, see me fed, find me a fight if I wanted one or a shoulder to lean on. Without one, I suddenly had to read the classifieds if I needed a car, go on dates if I wanted my junk touched and score on the corner or down in the park. And you know what? That shit is scary. The kitchen is a game preserve for the weird. But like any game preserve, it comes with walls, protections, dikes against the inrush of reality. As weird and wild and dangerous and frenzied as the back of the house could get, it was also insulating and comforting and coddling to those on the inside. Once you become acclimated, it’s easier to be in a kitchen than not. Kind of like jail or a mental institution: all one’s needs are seen to by professionals.

  In Albuquerque, though, something went wrong. Once Laura and I got back from Mexico (where we’d found not only tacos but a million piñatas, dusty backstreets full of pharmacies, girls in white church dresses and dudes on Japanese street bikes making deliveries for Pollo Loco with the grace of motorized dancers, dollar Coronas at any bar outside the American quarter and seventy-five-cent packs of Marlboros being sold out of briefcases on the street), I started making the rounds, but somewhere along the way, I’d become kryptonite. Suddenly, no one wanted to talk to me, no one returned my calls. I’d walk into a place, introduce myself to a chef or an owner, swing into my jive and watch the lights go out behind their eyes.

  Normally, I’m unshakable when I’m talking. I can slap backs, buy drinks, make hard jokes and still come off charming. I know the language of cooks and kitchens and the right answers to every question a chef or owner can throw at me. I’d never been more than a couple days without work before. Not once I started looking in earnest. But this time around the block it was harder, so after the first dozen or so no-thank-you’s (and a few stop-calling-me’s), I started getting desperate and sniveling. I would laugh too loud and try too hard and basically come on like a drunken skank at a rodeo bar—leading with the tits and sequins but too quickly resorting to offering clumsy hand jobs in the alley to anyone who’d take me home. It was ugly and bad and embarrassing, and having seen this same kind of sick neediness in other guys coming through my door when I was the one doing the hiring—shattered survivors of something that I didn’t even want to begin hearing about—I knew how bad I must’ve looked. Walking in the doors of these restaurants, I must’ve been like poison on two legs, and by about the second month I wouldn’t have hired me either. Actually, I knew myself pretty well. I wouldn’t have hired me on day two. Much as I wanted it, much as I needed it, I was a little bitter and a lot tired by this point—seriously burned out and not-so-secretly sick of picking up the pieces, starting over again. FNG one more time.

  On the downward spiral, I used fake names and applied for work at bars and diners and strip clubs featuring twenty-cent hot wings and all-you-can-eat prime rib on Tuesdays. I tried to go ethnic, asking for jobs on the line at the kinds of places where the strip-mall Italian menus of spaghetti and meatballs and chicken-parm sandwiches were rounded out with Chinese egg rolls, tamales, pad thai and samosas, but was thwarted by being unable to speak Russian to the owner or Mandarin to the kitchen manager.

  Laura and I started fighting even more than usual. Which basically meant that we were in the ring going flat-out, bare knuckles, every minute we were together. It got so bad, we should’ve had managers and cut men standing by and someone to ring a bell just to lend some false semblance of civility to what was essentially a nonstop death match. We called each other every name we could think of. And when the English language proved too gentle and lyrical an instrument, we just started making up things to call each other. When our creativity was exhausted, we resorted to throwing stuff.

  One of the good things about being poor? You don’t have much to throw. And those things you do have are generally lightweight and poorly made. A woman simply cannot do that much damage to her loving man by beaning him in the head with a promotional plastic Batman cup from the 7-Eleven, you know? Though all credit to Laura, she did certainly try.

  WHEN I FINALLY GAVE UP and applied for unemployment, I thought I’d hit bottom. It was my first time—first time I’d ever even considered it—and driving to the office, I thought about calling my mom and asking her what she thought I should wear. You know, first impressions and all.

  Come to find, though, a whole superloser subbasement was dug out beneath the unemployment office. And while standing in line, nervously clutching a stack of paperwork in which I’d been forced to dissect my every failure as a human being over the past five years, surrounded by a shuffling legion of wastrels, check scammers, bums and p
eople like me forced to beg nickels off the state just to keep the lights on, might’ve seemed like the bottom, it wasn’t. Not quite.

  Applying for unemployment is bad. What’s worse is being denied. What’s worse is standing before that little goddamn window, feet itching, hoping, praying, for a check because you don’t have money to buy toothpaste, running uneasy fingers across the shelf in front of the window and thinking how much it reminds you of a galley pass rail, then having some hatchet-faced spinster with bouffant hair and the smell of mothballs and death on her look over your information, shake her head and hand you back the computer printout that says, essentially, “The State of New Mexico cordially invites you to fuck the hell off.”

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Your denial. Next, please.”

  “Wait a minute. My what?”

  “Denial. You haven’t worked long enough in New Mexico to qualify for unemployment, Mr. Sheehan. Next!”

  “Wait. How long do I need to have worked here?”

  “Minimum of a year.”

  “And how long does that say I’ve been working here?”

  “Ten and a half months,” she said, her voice clipped like the sound of papers being squared up, tapped neatly on a hard surface, filed away and immediately forgotten.

  “That’s not enough, then.”

  “No, Mr. Sheehan. It’s not.”

  I felt the pit opening beneath me, smelled its heady vapors, closed my eyes and went in headfirst. Screw it, I thought. Fuckup like me? I don’t really deserve the help anyhow.

  “Now if you’ll take that form over to that office over there, they’ll help you apply for out-of-state relief.”