Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [18]
The ensuing ceremony was thus spared the prospect of decomposing aspics depicting Moses parting the Red Sea, or melting wedding cakes. A few days later, I had my diploma. I was now a graduate of the best cooking school in the country - a valuable commodity on the open market - I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind.
I was a danger to myself and others.
THE RETURN OF MAL CARNE
MY TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO Provincetown - halfway through the program at CIA - came the following summer. Newly invigorated with obscure cooking terms, The Professional Chef and the Larousse Gastronomique under my arm, and my head filled with half-baked ideas and a few techniques I'd seen and maybe even tried a few times, I rejoined my old comrades at the Dreadnaught, to much curiosity and amusement. A little knowledge can be dangerous and annoying . . . but I had actually learned some useful things. I'd been working in the city weekends while at school, I could work a station without embarrassing myself, and I was enthusiastic about my new, if modest, skills. I was determined to outwork, outlast and in every way impress my old tormentors at Mario's.
Dimitri, the pasta man, was years older than I was. Then in his early thirties, running to fat, with chunky-framed glasses and a well-tended handlebar moustache, he was markedly different from his fellow cooks at Mario's. Born in the USA of a Russian father and a German mother, he was the only other cook in P-town who'd been to cooking school - in his case, a hotel school in Switzerland. Though he claimed to have been expelled for demonstrating the Twist in that institution's dining hall, I always doubted this version of events. He became the second great influence in my career.
A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle - to which he was hopelessly addicted.
It was from Dimitri's fertile mind that much of what I'd come to know as Mario speak had originated. Brainy, paranoid, famously prone to sulking, he both amused and appalled his co-workers with his many misadventures, his affected mannerisms and his tendency to encounter tragicomic disaster. Fond of hyperbole and dramatic over-statement, Dimitri had distinguished himself after a particularly unpleasant breakup with a girlfriend by shaving his head completely bald. This would have been, in itself, a rather bold statement of self-loathing and grief, but Dimitri pushed matters to the extreme; the story went that he had no sooner revealed his snow-white skull to the world than he went to the beach, got drunk and sat there, roasting his never-before-exposed-to-the-sun scalp to the July ultraviolets. When he returned to work the next day, not only was he jarringly bald, but his head was a bright strawberry-red, blistered and oozing skullcap of misery. No one talked to him until his hair grew back.
Dimitri saw himself, I think, as a Hemingwayesque, hard-boozing raconteur Renaissance man, but he was completely under the thumb of his mother, a severe, equally brilliant gynecologist, whose daily calls to the Mario kitchen were much imitated.
'Alloo? Is Dih-mee-tree zere?'
We'd met before, of course, the previous year, when he'd known me, no doubt, as 'Mel'. But I was a broiler man now, a CIA student, a curiosity. It was permissible for Dimitri to talk to me. It was like Hunt and Liddy meeting; the world would probably have been a better place had it never happened, but a lot of fun was had by all.
Dimitri was scared of the outside