by Paula Deen
I’d had the restaurant for almost a year when one night this man walked in just as we were getting ready to close. He was tall, with gorgeous blond hair, and he had a hearty laugh and an infectious grin. Somehow, he reminded me of my daddy—his personality, and something about his nose and forehead.
Well, we had a part-time waiter at The Lady that weekend. He knew the guy; he told me he was an engineer, and that sounded respectable. I asked the waiter to introduce us. I didn’t think anything of it but, oh, I just immediately liked him. Naturally, I fed him, then sat down at the table with him as he ate, and we talked and talked, and we laughed and laughed, and it was about three in the morning when we finally got up out of that booth. It was the first intimate interaction I’d had with a man since I was divorced, and I was starved for this kind of attention. Unlike Jimmy, he listened to me. I fell head over heels in love. I didn’t mention that to the guy, of course.
That first evening, he told me he was married—unhappily. He never lied and he never hid it, I’ll say that for him. In fact, in the weeks to come, he would sometimes bring in his wife. I was always glad to see them; I didn’t think anything about it, and after I got their meals ready, I’d go out and speak to them. Mostly I’d speak to him. She didn’t seem to be interested in anything but her food. That was pretty okay with me. I don’t even remember what she looked like—that’s how much attention I paid to her.
One night, he came in late, by himself. I think it was a sign—at least I took it as a sign. The juices started flowing for both of us. Oh, honey, we couldn’t resist each other. We arranged to meet at a local park the next day.
The first time we met away from the restaurant, we sat in the park, and again just talked for hours. The Savannah sun is heady and passionate—but maybe that was my own heat speakin’. I was feeling enormous guilt because he was married, but he convinced me the marriage had long been over in everything but name. I wanted to believe him so much. I was so needy it was pathetic. Any man who didn’t call me an idiot or a bitch looked like a knight in shining armor.
It wasn’t long before our relationship turned sexual and we slept together. The second time we met away from The Lady, he rented a motel room and that made me feel adventuresome, risky, so carefree and young. I was also petrified. He’d brought wine; I got drunk and became sobby. He took what he came for, got dressed without a word, walked out, and said, “Sober up.”
It was my first clue that he was not an awfully nice guy.
I am ashamed to tell you I didn’t write him off like a bad debt, and instead went back for more, but I promised I’d tell secrets, and this is my true story. I want it down on paper, even more than I hate for anyone to know I was ever that bad off.
You just wouldn’t believe how prideless I got. Just totally prideless. I would call him and he would say he would meet me, then stand me up. I remember one night, I rented a room at the motel, and he was gonna come spend the night with me. I sat up all night in that bed, and he never showed up.
I would cook for him. I have always felt that food and cooking have a lot in common with desire. I mean the texture of certain foods, the shape of them, the way some foods melt in your mouth, or make you salivate just thinking about their texture, the fullness you feel after a good meal or good sex—well, it’s not unrelated. I would cook the dishes I loved for him and get pleasure watching him eat with pleasure. He was an electrical engineer but I never thought of him in terms of his work. I never even asked him what an electrical engineer does; I only knew what he did for me and that was to give me the identity of a woman who was hungered for. The thrill of secrecy and longing didn’t hurt either. So I cooked, and we made love, and I basked in my newfound feeling of being sexually attractive and my newfound shame of being with a married man.
As I write, I know that this does not sound like a lovely, sensual love affair, a mutually pleasing thing that I’m describing, and it wasn’t. Instead, this is Paula atoning, Paula abasing herself, Paula apologizing to herself for all those years of allowing herself to be humiliated. But I couldn’t help it. I wanted so much to be wanted.
Here’s the worst part, the most embarrassing part: it went on for ten years. I sat on the sidelines of his life for that long and waited for crumbs that he’d throw me, any crumbs at all. How could I have thought so little of myself? I didn’t feel like I deserved any better.
Sometimes he’d go months without calling. I called him. I debased myself deeply. Sometimes in order to get him to answer his pager, I’d have to go to a phone whose number he wouldn’t recognize; he wouldn’t call me back if I called him from my number. He was an accomplished torturer; I was a willing slave. Boy, he had it good. He had two women, but the wife always won out on the holidays. I spent many Christmases alone.
Thinking about it now, I understand that it wasn’t the Paula I’ve become who lived out this humiliation. Should I write down about the money I gave him? Do I have to go into details?
Okay. I’ll tell you one thing.
One night, he was waiting for me at my apartment. I’d been working particularly hard that night at the restaurant, so I ran my bathwater almost as soon as I got home and stepped into the tub. In about five minutes the door opened, he looked in, said something, and stepped out. It felt peculiar. Later that evening, I checked my wallet. Four hundred dollars was missing. I can’t be sure, but I think he opened that bathroom door for one reason only—to see if I’d started my bath so he could rifle through my purse. I thought this when it happened, but I didn’t say anything. Over the years, in one way or another, I gave him—or he took—thousands of dollars.
Don’t judge. It could have been you. It could be you. Why not? Don’t you cook like me, eat like me, talk like me (even if you’re not from Savannah), think like me, love your family passionately like me? It could have been you.
Why am I telling you all this? I’m telling you because I promised you the truth. I don’t want y’all to make the same mistakes. Don’t ever, ever, ever get intimately involved with a married person.
I’m too embarrassed now to write more about this.
It was time to think about moving The Lady. The nonrenewable contract at the Best Western was up anyway, and I was just staying on with a month-to-month deal. The space was now too tiny for us to grow, and I had so much glorious cookin’ still to do.
I had very little money but I had a huge, huge dream. I was pretty good at dreamin’.
Sexy Oxtails
What I did for love? Oh, far too much. But one thing I never did was make his-favorite-in-all-the-world dish for the man I thought I loved. I cooked my favorites—not his. That should have been my first clue that something was wrong: you definitely want to cook his own sensual preferences for the man you really love, and if it never came up, true love wasn’t inspirin’ me.
That’s why it wasn’t long after I met Michael (and you’ll hear all about that on page 137) that I made a point of asking what his most special dish was. Oxtails, he said. They’re real sexy.
Sexy oxtails? You bet. Michael’s favorite dish in the whole world is my oxtails, because they’re so damn good, juicy, and sexy to boot. If I tell Michael I can fix him any recipe in America, he will choose oxtails every time. He calls them swingin’ sirloins. You pick them up with your hands, you gnaw the bones, lick ’em, and suck out the marrow. I got so good at gettin’ that marrow out, I could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. It is a loving dish; a hearty, lip-smacking dish; and those tails are better than a passionate kiss. Boy, you are ready for some serious lovemakin’ when you’re finished. All over the world people eat oxtails, but few realize it is a dish to feed a lover.
Now you can buy packages of presliced oxtails at most markets, but I carefully pick the particular grocer that carries the best fresh ones. In Savannah, there’s a shop down on Martin Luther King Boulevard that carries the whole tails, and I’ll have the butcher slice them on a meat slicer with a sharp blade, for me, special. I have them cut about 1½ to 2 inches th
ick, and the reason I like to get the whole tail is because up close to the rump, the tail is big and round before it narrows. My favorite part of the oxtail is that narrow piece. I just love the texture, which is like a very soft gristle. Love to gnaw it apart.
I trim as much of the fat off the tails as I can, season them with House Seasoning (see page 96), and lay them out in a big casserole dish. Then I sprinkle them with soy sauce—not drown them, just toss them. I cover them with sliced onions and bay leaves and just a cup of water, cover the dish with foil, and put them in a 325°F oven for about 3 hours. The hardest part is waiting the 3 hours.
When it’s ready, the aroma of that wonderful, rich stock fills the house and we pile the whole dish of oxtails on top of buttered rice.
Then Michael and I are in hog heaven. We start eating them with a fork and a knife like most civilized people do, but we wind up just dipping into them, pickin’ them up and chompin’ into them with our teeth.
Sexiest dish in the world.
By the way, you can substitute beef short ribs for the oxtails. But I wouldn’t.
Chapter 9
THE LADY & SONS
Build it and they will come.
—ADAPTED FROM THE MOVIE FIELD OF DREAMS
I knew I had to move on because I’d never get to be a woman of substance in that teeny, tiny Best Western space.
I had my secret heart set on a larger restaurant in downtown Savannah. Originally a port city born from the coastal wilderness in 1733, there’s a story sayin’ General Sherman gave Savannah to President Lincoln as a Christmas present in 1864. True or not, the city was growing, and the area I loved best to wander was the historic downtown. Even though it was still pretty much undeveloped, the architectural splendor of the fine old buildings, the magnificent parklike squares, and my own sense of “I’m home” always made me feel serene and strong at the same time.
I knew this wonderful woman, Miss Wilkes, and she owned a great boardinghouse right there downtown on Jones Street, which she opened in the early 1940s. The boardinghouse and its tiny restaurant had prospered enough to take care of four generations. She was the same age as my grandmother, and although they never knew each other, they both made their marks in the food business when it wasn’t fashionable for women to work outside the home. I just admired Miss Wilkes so much and wanted to be the next Miss Wilkes of downtown Savannah.
There was only one tiny problem: money. I had a little saved but not nearly enough to fix up a place to my satisfaction. Still, I kept my fingers crossed: money, or the lack of it, hadn’t yet stopped me. Something would turn up; it always did.
Because I have a big mouth, I’d always told customers about things going on in my life and I’d become friends with many of those customers. I gabbed about my downtown fantasy, and over and over I heard that I’d better not go to the downtown area—a single woman could be stomped on, held up by robbers—anything could happen. Still, I knew I belonged in a restaurant among the historic buildings of what had become my beloved city.
In 1991, when I started The Lady in the Best Western, there was a new movie in the theaters that everyone just adored. It was called Field of Dreams and it starred Kevin Costner as an Iowa corn farmer in love with the memory of a long-dead baseball team and his hero, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson; the farmer was searching for his dreams—and one day his dream came looking for him. He heard an otherworldly voice that told him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfields and Joe and the dear departed Chicago Black Sox team would come back to play.
“Build it and he will come,” said the voice, and they did.
Well, build it and they will come was my theory also, in my case, it being a fabulous restaurant, and they being a million hungry tourists.
One day, my dream came looking for me—just like in the movie—and he walked into my restaurant.
Mike Brown was a building developer. He hadn’t been in town very long, but he used to come into The Lady and we always enjoyed a good gossip as I fed him. He strongly believed that downtown Savannah, then pretty run-down, was a potential gold mine. It was in part from our talks that I started yearning to be there in a business of my own. Mike had started to buy up properties in the area, and he’d recently rented a building at 311 West Congress Street. That afternoon, Mike had his lunch and told me to meet him downtown the next morning at the corner of Congress and Montgomery streets. When I arrived, I found him leaning on the building on the corner. He crossed his arms and just nodded toward the building across the street.
“I’ll take it,” I said, and consummated the deal with a handshake.
Now, you have to know that all my life a lot of people have worried about me because they say I make rash decisions. Fact is, I rely on my intuition and my gut feelings, and I’ve rarely been wrong. But this one even I knew was a stretch.
The empty building he indicated had been Barnett’s Educational Supply House, built in 1910, and it was located between two of Savannah’s best restaurants, which were well established in the area. Well, Barnett’s had closed down and I immediately saw that it was only purely logical that Mike’s leased building should house another of Savannah’s marvelous restaurants. It took me less than a minute to visualize a new Restaurant Row. I was certainly aware that many local people still didn’t want to venture downtown to dine: those empty streets were pretty desolate, and besides the two restaurants, there wasn’t much else. But three restaurants? That could change the equation. The place looked perfect—just big enough for me—but it sure was in desperate need of TLC, and maybe the most expensive tender loving care the area had ever seen. I walked around it, checking out the area and the building. It needed serious work: appliances, furniture, everything.
Mike again stressed that he didn’t own the building; he just leased it and was looking for a twelve-year sublease. Any alterations or improvements I would make to the space had to be on my dime.
Twelve years! Could I afford it? Of course not.
I signed the contract.
God, was I naïve! I had no idea how I’d get the cash. I knew my expenses for rent would increase substantially, and Mike figured that the building would cost a lot of money in renovations before we could open as a restaurant. How much exactly, he didn’t know, but a lot, he thought. A lot was an understatement.
Paula, I said to myself, you’re an insane optimist. Where the hell do you think you’re going to get that kind of money? Well, I’d saved about $20,000. It took me five years. I would have had more if I hadn’t given money to that crumb bun man I mentioned awhile back. What I did for what I thought was love … but never mind about that.
First stop, the bank, where I was informed that $20,000 was definitely, positively, not enough even to put down as collateral for the rest I’d have to borrow. Nothing had been done to the building in about a hundred years; it was in horrible condition. During the next week, I sent out for some professional renovation estimates and finally they came in: $150,000 was the most conservative guess. That was about a zillion dollars to me. Had to think, had to think.
Then I did about the stupidest thing you can imagine. I went ahead and told my landlord at the Best Western that I’d found another place and I would be moving in a few months.
“Wrong, Paula,” he said. “You’re moving now. And you owe me for the rest of last month, plus this month.” He kicked me out that minute. Couldn’t do a thing; I was on a month-to-month lease.
I was a mess. All I could do was pack up my things and move them all back to the East Sixtieth Street house. I’d try catering again like I did when I was just The Bag Lady.
“You can’t do this,” Bobby told me. “You’re paying rent at the Best Western and also rent for the new building now. We’re in way over our heads. Try to get out of the new lease; maybe Mike will be kind.”
Tell me I can’t do something, and I can usually juggle chain saws, but this one was stumping me. Still, I had a stubbornness rooted in anger—anger that I was poor and alone with two kids
, anger that it was all up to me. I simply had to figure out where I could get the money to fix up the new building so I could have a restaurant. In the meantime, I was back to where The Bag Lady had started.
When I first started at the Best Western, a wonderful woman named Dora Charles had fallen into my life. I was doing so much catering out the back door then, and was literally about to drop. Dora came in and interviewed for a job as a cook, and I remember asking her the very first question, “How long have you lived where you are?” And when she said, “All my life,” I said, “You’re hired.” I knew that the woman had character and she had roots. Anybody who had lived in the same house all that time was not a quitter. I was right. So during this awful time when I was catering jobs after I’d left the Best Western and while I was waiting to hear if any bank would lend me the money for the new restaurant, Dora would come over and help me. If I lost Dora, I would have been devastated. If I had a big catering job that I couldn’t handle alone, Dora came in and I’d pay her so she could keep a little money in her pockets till opening day of the restaurant.
I remember I had a catering job for a Christmas party at a private club. It gave me the opportunity to make things pretty—not just good-tasting—and I was so glad to be able to get creative. I had made all these wonderful hors d’oeuvres—like little new potatoes, hollowed out and stuffed with a salmon cream cheese. The best thing was that I’d bought a Styrofoam Christmas tree and had just so carefully wrapped it in lettuces and all these vegetables that I’d cut just perfectly in little Christmasy shapes. When it came time to deliver the food, I put this precious tree right up in the front seat of my car. My soul sister, Dora, was following in her car because we had so much food and it all didn’t fit in my car. Dora always took such pride in what she did and I remember we were running late, and I said, “Dora, we gotta go! We gotta go!”
