Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  I opened my eyes. “Out-of-state what now?”

  “Unemployment insurance payments from New York.”

  “Really?”

  “Next, please.”

  I COULD’VE KISSED THAT BEAUTIFUL OLD CRONE. Kissed her right on her embittered, shriveled-up, Curse of the Mummy face. Because what she was telling me was that instead of collecting unemployment on the nine dollars an hour I’d been making at the Ranch, I’d be collecting against the executive-sous-chef salary I’d been drawing at the hotel in Rochester. In thirty seconds, I’d gone from too broke to buy soup to being the richest gringo in my housing project. I pretty much danced through the next line, filled out the new paperwork with a song in my heart and went home to tell Laura the good news.

  “Look, honey. The State of New York is going to pay me to sit on my ass and watch cartoons all day!”

  She was so proud.

  Once the money started arriving, I started sleeping all day. I watched talk shows and ate cereal for lunch. I used the State of New York’s mercy funds to buy beer and beef jerky and stopped even pretending to look for a job. Nights, I’d hang out with Laura until she got sleepy, then duck out for the Waffle House with a messenger’s bag full of legal pads, pens and paperbacks and either read or write a little or just sit there bullshitting with the nighthawks—the working girls and car thieves, drunks and crazies, night cooks and Backpack Jack, who lived in the Dumpster corral next to the grocery store across Central Avenue and, for a time, was my best friend. He taught me many important things. Such as how to get blind drunk on Listerine without actually going blind, how to suck eggs and sneak weed onto an airplane and cook corned-beef hash on the engine block of a truck.

  I’d been keeping night hours for so long that I didn’t know how to live any other way. I think there was something about the smell of the Waffle House flat grill and the grease traps, the open short-order kitchen, the closeness of the cooks when I sat on my stool at the counter right in the middle of the Friday-night bar-rush action, that I found soothing. I never ate there, of course, but I could sit all night with my strange friends on a bottomless cup of coffee and pretend that was some sort of a life. Coming home with the sun, I almost felt like I’d been doing something. Like I’d really made good use of my time.

  Most girls don’t dream at night of finding themselves a depressed, unemployed ex–line cook to marry when they grow up. I’m pretty sure Laura didn’t either. But that’s pretty much what she got. There are days that I think she married me just so she wouldn’t have to forfeit the deposit on the Treasure Island wedding package; that maybe, right up until the very end, she was hoping someone better might stumble along.

  A LOT OF THIS WAS BECAUSE I needed a vacation. Not even a real vacation, but just some time away where I wouldn’t have to think about food, talk about food, eat and drink food, dream about food, breathe food, worry about food and cook food twenty-four hours a day until, cycling between the up-and-down crashing high of adrenaline rush and total exhaustion, I would find myself running around like crazy in my own skin even when standing still, trying to run in eight different directions at once and grab for pans with arms that I didn’t have.

  I wish I could remember who in the restaurant business told me this, but it was good advice: If you’re not in your own place by thirty with your name over the door—if you’re not at least on your way there or in the ranks of the kitchen you plan on staying in for life—just quit. Thirtieth birthday? Just walk away. Find Jesus, rob a bank, blow your brains out or just go and sell used cars like so many other ex-cooks do, but whatever it is, get out. Drop the knife, push back from the board, take one last fond look around, and then head for the door. Because if you’re not where you want to be by thirty in this industry, you’re probably not going to get there. Being on the line is a young man’s game that tends to kill the middle-aged either slowly or viciously fast.

  And yeah, I know there are exceptions. Of course there are. But trust me: out-by-thirty is a good rule of thumb. I think that for most cooks, kitchens are what we have instead of plans, instead of goals. Kitchens are what we have instead of a real life.

  So I collapsed. Because I could, because I needed to, because I knew that even though I hadn’t yet hit that magic mark, I’d already spent too long in the galley to let it go easy. Enough time in that kind of environment and everything else becomes a disappointment. You become one of those poor, dim fuckers who show up at the kitchen door on their nights off because, free for a few precious hours, they can’t think of anything else to do with themselves and their hands no longer know any action that isn’t weird without a knife or pan attached. It’s understandable. I mean, when you’ve really, truly loved it, what in a normal life can compare? You watch cooking shows. Maybe you read the magazines. You keep to the strange little rituals and superstitions that you knew when you were still in The Life (an AC/DC song on the radio would always mean something bad was about to happen, leaving a cigarette burning on the fuse box would mean that nothing bad could possibly happen, and both the chef and the sous-chef stepping out for a cigarette at the same time would bring down the rush like rain). You try to have conversations with people about things that have nothing to do with kitchens and fail somewhere in the middle when you realize that you have absolutely nothing to say about anything that isn’t about kitchens. You listen to the music you listened to when on the line and it all seems flat, like it’s missing something, like it’s wrong somehow. And that drives you crazy for a few days until you realize that the thing that’s missing is the clack clack clack of the ticket printer sounding off. It’s the sound you’ve been waiting for all along.

  I started writing around this time to fill some of the dull hours. I’d written before. A little bit. Here and there. When I was a kid, I’d write stories in class rather than paying attention; read them sometimes to friends while walking home. Later, on days or weeks when I’d decided that maybe I was drinking a little too much, celebrating a little too much, I’d cool it out by going to the all-night diner after work instead of the bar, and feeling weird about sitting there alone, I’d bring a notebook with me, a pen. When I’d been sick and broke and bored at my folks’ house in Rochester, I’d borrow a few bucks from my dad now and then and hitchhike or walk into the city to sit drinking coffee and scribbling away for a few hours.

  But this was the first time I’d laid into it with any kind of seriousness or regularity. I was twenty-eight years old. I wrote kitchen stories, food stories, terrible-night stories and best-night-of-my-life stories. I wrote about other stuff, too, but, like my thoughts, the words kept circling back to food, to kitchens. And there was nothing wrong with that. Writing about kitchens was as good as writing about anything else. The best kitchen stories, like the best war stories, aren’t really anything more than stories about people anyway.

  BESIDES, since no kitchen opportunities were forthcoming (or at least no opportunities walking into our housing project, trudging up the stairs and knocking on our door while I was awake), I didn’t know what else to do. Not until the night Laura hit on a suggestion: Why didn’t I try being a writer?

  Now, mind you, I don’t think she meant this as a reasonable alternative to actually working for a living. And her suggestion wasn’t delivered quite so politely or with quite so much chipper optimism as you might think. It was more like a challenge. Or a threat. An option of last resort.

  We were arguing (of course) on the night it came up. About what no longer mattered because the fights had all started just blending together: a Whitman’s Sampler of guilt and blame and humiliation and neglect. I was a slob, she was crazy. I hadn’t done the dishes in a year, she was mean. I was a lazy, inconsiderate, miserable, short-tempered prick who’d never really loved her and was just clinging to her now out of desperation for someone to take care of me because I was worthless and stupid and no one had ever demanded anything more from me than my ability to make a nice cassoulet. She . . . couldn’t parallel park.

 
; I’ve known people out there who claim to have happy, supportive, mutually satisfying relationships. I’ve listened to them talk about the calm and serenity that their significant other brings to them—the joy of their union, the strength of their union. You know what I think when I hear this kind of thing?

  You poor bastards.

  Because not for nothing, fellas, but you just don’t know where you stand with a woman until you’ve stood there, taken both dialectic barrels in the chest, then come back for more. Forget the stinky-feet/little-dick/never-put-the-toilet-seat-down sniping. That’s kid’s stuff. Until you see the veins in her neck, until her eyes roll back like a shark’s eyes, you ain’t seen nothing. It’s like what Tyler Durden says in Fight Club: How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?

  Try falling asleep next to an angry woman who, just a couple hours prior, threatened to stab you with a barbecue fork. That’s like taking a nap in the polar-bear cage. While nine times out of ten you might be okay—the bears might just totally ignore you—that tenth time you’re going to wake up, open your eyes, and see her there, hovering over you, nose close to your nose, and she’s going to say something like, “Do you have any idea how easy it would’ve been for me to kill you just now?”

  Laura and I are two angry, opinionated, stubborn, smart and damaged people who have never backed down from a fight in our lives, never been able to leave well enough alone, never had a scab we didn’t pick at until it scarred. And yet through it all, we’ve loved each other with a fierceness born of absolute honesty. She knows I’m never going to leave her. And when I come home at night, stinking of cheap beer and salami, it’s to a woman who knows exactly what kind of a broken, fucked-up, beaten-down, ill-tempered asshole I am and stays with me anyway.

  Until you get there yourself, you have no idea how reassuring a feeling that is. I know what true love is now. True love means never having to wonder who’s going to be with you when you die.

  Probably standing over your corpse with a smoking pistol and a really good reason.

  ANYWAY, at some point during our argument I’d gone off on this self-pitying rant about how I’d dedicated my entire life to food and blah blah blah. I said something about how nobody on the outside—no civilian—understood what it was really like and how the whole business was screwed up with people who only wanted C-school graduates or guys who looked like the chefs on the Food Network, how no one gets it anymore, you know?

  And yeah, it was pretty pathetic. But really, it was just a dodge. I was just attempting to drum up a little sympathy, get out from under the whole lazy/desperate/unemployed loser offensive Laura had working—a boxer going into a desperation clinch and just trying to hang on until the bell. But suddenly, mid-scoff, she stopped and looked at me.

  “So why don’t you explain it to them?”

  “And another thing, it’s not like people . . . Wait a minute, what?”

  “Why don’t you tell them about it?”

  “Who?”

  She waved her hand. “These ‘people’ you keep referring to.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “About food and cooking and the business. Write about it.”

  I shook my head. “No . . . I’ve been writing about it.”

  “No, Jay. I mean really write about it. Like somewhere that someone other than you will see it. Because really? I’m sick of hearing about it but you’re obviously not sick of talking about it. So why don’t you look for a job as a writer?”

  “I . . . Uh . . .”

  She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head and opened her eyes real wide—this thing she does when she knows she’s right or when she knows she’s confused me to the point where I have no fight left in me.

  “Look, Jay. I love you, okay? I’ll always love you. But this isn’t about love right now. I’m about ready to kill you. If you don’t get off your ass and do something soon, I’m going to lose all respect for you and punch you, understand? So if you say you can’t cook anymore, why not do the other thing you’re good at?”

  “You mean mast—”

  “No. Not masturbating, you idiot. I’m being serious here. Why not try writing? You do it anyway. Why not get paid for it? Seriously, what’ve you got to lose?”

  So I thought about it for a minute, then for ten minutes. Then I pretended to think about it for another half hour or so just because while I appeared to be thinking, Laura appeared willing to not yell at me and the quiet was nice—like the Christmas truce on the Western Front with everyone’s gun close at hand but, for the moment, silent.

  She was the one with the journalism degree. After a while, I mentioned this to her and she shrugged it off, waving her hand dismissively.

  “That’ll only be ironic if you actually make something of yourself. Worry about finding a job first.”

  Then she pulled her knees up to her chest, popped open another beer and stared straight ahead at the TV, signaling that the discussion on this matter had come to a close.

  I got my first writing job the next afternoon at a small weekly newspaper called Crosswinds, with a mostly deserted office across town from our apartment. It wasn’t a good job, but it was something—easy to get, I think, only because I didn’t know it was supposed to be hard, and offered to me, I’ve always believed, only because I’d brought my own pen. And could actually spell. And knew what a semicolon was, more or less.

  In any event, I was (rather ridiculously) given the title “investigative reporter” and offered a freelancer’s rate of ten cents a word. I had no idea if this was good or bad but figured that it had to be a step in the right direction since I’d already written some words in my life and no one had ever offered me a dime apiece for them before. The only serious complication was that after being dismissed from the editor’s office, I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I poked around the bull pen a little, went out in the parking lot and smoked a cigarette. When it became apparent that no one was actually expecting me to do anything at all, I went out and got drunk at the dim sum restaurant with Laura.

  As far as first days of work go, it was nice.

  THE DAY I SAW MY FIRST BYLINE IN A NEWSPAPER, I had to walk to the gas station on the corner to see it because our car was broken in nine different ways and I didn’t have the money to fix even one. Backpack Jack was there, panhandling for change and cigarettes. He was a big man, loud and powerful, charming in his way provided one didn’t stand too close. I showed him the paper and he clapped me on the back so hard I thought he would break my spine.

  “So now you’re famous!” he barked. “You gonna forget about all us now?”49

  I WROTE ABOUT DRUG-DIVERSION PROGRAMS for homeless people because I knew a little about Albuquerque’s homeless population and called some of its bums my friends. I wrote about organic-food labeling because I knew about food, and I wrote about the city’s preparations for the Route 66 festival because it was a big deal there and because I was personally offended by efforts to sweep all the drug dealers and prostitutes and night creatures off the street. I mean, this was the Mother Road, America’s main line. In my opinion, the street-level weed dealers, pubescent Vietnamese hookers and screaming-drunk homeless vets belonged there more than some bunch of fat, pasty, car-cult tourists from Boise did. Shit, you want to see where the American Dream of westward expansion led? You check out Central Avenue at midnight on a hot summer Friday when the tuners are out and the moon is up and the wind has been blowing a steady breeze of crazy up from the desert all day.

  For this, I earned a column called “The Curmudgeon.” Because I was only twenty-eight, I took the title as an insult. I wasn’t curmudgeonly. I was pissed off. And there’s a difference. About a month later (and just two weeks before our families were supposed to be flying out to Vegas to witness Laura and me getting hitched), 9/11 happened. Laura and I watched it on TV for three days straight while eating nothing but cheesecakes. We discussed postponing our nuptials, then decided to go through with it anyway
, knowing full well that if we put it off once, we’d just keep putting it off forever.

  Obviously, 9/11 was the biggest news story of the year, of the decade. I just sat there in my underwear, slack-jawed, staring at the television, watching that same thirty-second loop of tape over and over along with everyone else in the world. I never even thought to call my editor. To take notes. To get out on the street in those first few crazy hours when it seemed as though the entire world might be coming to an end. Once the dust settled, it occurred to me that perhaps I wasn’t cut out for traditional journalism.

  Which was okay because I’d recently picked up a second job, writing about food for a small regional food-and-travel magazine called La Cocinita and was angling for a third: restaurant critic at the Weekly Alibi in Albuquerque. The only reason I hadn’t yet quit the other paper outright was because I was owed several hundred dollars and knew that if I just up and left, I would never see it.50

  Getting the job at La Cocinita had been equal parts luck, bluff and excellent timing. Again, not knowing any better, I’d simply walked into the offices one afternoon and asked to see the chief. I had no résumé, no experience (beyond my work for Crosswinds, which I was loathe to admit to at the time), no clue how one was supposed to properly go about securing actual paying work as a writer for a respectable organization. I didn’t know about clippings, had no references, hadn’t even bothered calling first. I treated newspaper work the same as I’d treated finding kitchen work: you showed up, asked for the boss and hoped for the best.

  The one prescient guess I’d made was that, somewhere along the line, someone would probably want to see a sample of my writing before offering me a job. As with the restaurant business, where, even today, a guy has to have cooked at least one edible meal before he gets to be called chef, I assumed that eventually I would have to produce proof that I did, in fact, know the English language and could put an actual sentence together without hurting anyone.