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I don't know, you see, how a normal person acts. I don't know how to behave outside my kitchen. I don't know the rules. I'm aware of them, sure, but I don't care to observe them anymore because I haven't had to for so many years.

Okay, I can put on a jacket, go out for dinner and a movie, and I can eat with a knife and fork without embarrassing my hosts. But can I really behave? I don't know.

I have responsibilities, I tell myself and my wife. I've got things on my mind. I'm in charge of people's lives . . . and it can weigh heavily on me.

In my world, you see, my friend is a killer.

No, he's not, you say. How could he have predicted what this drug-addled maniac was going to do? How can what some cokehead cook has done to himself and to his family be laid at his door?

Because it can. Because when you look somebody in the eyes and can them, there's no telling what terrible result might ensue. He might come at you with a meat cleaver or a boning knife. He might, like Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown, drag you into court, on whatever specious yet embarrassing grounds. He might turn tail and simply leave the business, move to Arizona and sell insurance - as one talented cook of my acquaintance did. On the other hand, he could simply suck it up, move on to the next kitchen and make a smashing success of himself; ten years in the future, you might find yourself standing next to him at the James Beard Awards dinner, where he's just picked up his award for Best New Chef, and resplendent in his tux he turns and pees smilingly on your pants leg. These are all considerations when peering down the line at some troubled and troubling employee and pondering his fate.

Survival has its costs.

I took a fateful cab ride many years ago. Rolling back from the Lower East Side with a bunch of close friends, all of us fresh from scoring dope, I jokingly remarked on an article I'd seen, detailing the statistical likelihood of successfully detoxing.

'Only one in four has a chance at making it. Ha, ha, ha,' I said, my words ringing immediately painful and hollow as soon as I'd said them. I counted our number in the back of that rattling Checker Marathon. Four. And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me. I wasn't going to let these guys drag me down. I didn't care what it took, how long I'd known them, what we'd been through together or how close we'd been. I was going to live. I was the guy.

I made it. They didn't.

I don't feel guilty about that.

'We're in a lifeboat . . .' begins one of my standard inspirationals to new sous-chefs. 'We're four days out to sea, with no rescue in sight. There are two Snickers bars and a tiny hunk of salt pork left in our stores, and that fat bastard by the stern is getting crazier with every hour, becoming more and more irrational and demanding, giving that Snickers bar long, lingering looks - even though he's too weak to help with the rowing or the bailing any more. He presents a clear and present danger to the rest of us, what with his leering at the food and his recently acquired conviction that we're plotting against him. What do we do?'

We kick fat boy over the side, I say. Maybe we even carve a nice chunk of rumpsteak off his thigh before letting him go. Is that wrong?

Yah, yah, yah, tough guy. Sure you'd do that. To which I'd say, 'You don't know me very well.' Insurrection? A direct challenge to my authority? Treasonous dereliction of duty? The time will come, my friend, when it's gonna be you going over the side. I will - and I tell my cooks this ahead of time contrive, conspire, manipulate, maneuver and betray in order to get you out of my kitchen, whatever the outcome to you personally. If an unexpected period of unemployment inspires you to leap off a bridge, hang yourself from a tree or chug-a-lug a quart of drain cleaner, that's too bad.

The absolutes first attracted me to this business (along with that food thing). The black and white of it. The knowledge