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By Root 695 0

it was undergoing massive rehabilitation; an entire neighborhood by the waterfront was being 'restored' into a sort of red-brick and cobblestone theme park.) Bars close at 1 A.M. they start flashing the lights for last call at twelve-thirty. The permanent residents speak of New York and DC with strangely wistful expressions on their faces, as if they can't understand how they ended up here, rather than a few miles north or south, where there's a real city. There's an element of the South, an almost rural quality to Baltimore, an Ozark fatalism that's amusing in John Water's films but not so much fun to live with. Worst of all, I had no idea where to score drugs.

Gino's Baltimore occupied the second floor of a large new structure on the water in Baltimore's Harborplace. The kitchen was bigger than the dining room - which I liked - but the dining room was pretty empty most times, which I didn't like so much. The crew, not uncommonly for most far-flung outposts in a restaurant empire, were already used to being the neglected bastard offspring, largely ignored by their leader. Supplies, which were supposed to arrive from New York, were sporadic. Guidance, such as it was, was erratic in the extreme. I was told immediately that another chef had just preceded me. He had set up a menu, showed the recent culinary graduate cooks how to dunk pasta, and then quit.

My first night, I slept in a vacationing waiter's apartment. It was a strange bed, with a strange cat, in a shabby, two-family Victorian. I lay awake, kicking and scratching, swatting the cat at my feet. The next day, I was brought over to the official residence of visiting dignitaries from New York: a three-story townhouse, brand-new but built to look old, in the center of the fake historical district. It was pretty swank: wall-to-wall carpeting, four bathrooms, vast dining room, living room and top-floor studio. The only problem was, there was no furniture. A bare futon lay in the middle of the floor on the third story, a pathetic black and white TV with coat-hanger antenna the only offered amusement. The spacious kitchen contained only some calcified rice cakes. The only other sign that anyone had ever lived there was a lone chef's jacket on a hanger in one of the closets - like an artifact, evidence of an ancient astronaut who'd been here before me.

It was make-work, and I knew it. The Shadow called to let me know that he wanted me to create a brunch menu and a happy-hour buffet. This was an easy enough assignment, as there were only about three bar customers who spent their evening chatting with the manager; and brunch, such as it was, consisted of about five tables of Sunday tourists who'd wandered into the empty dining room by mistake while window shopping and been too embarrassed to leave after realizing their mistake. The place had been open only a few months and already gave off the distinct odor of doom. Large-scale doom. There were twelve cooks, all new equipment, a bake shop, a pasta-making department. The Silver Shadow had spent million son this colossal monument to hubris and cocaine. And you could see, in the cooks' faces, that they knew - as sure as they knew that they lived in a second-class city - that they'd be out of work soon. The body was dying; only the brain had yet to receive the message.

I worked fast, spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth to New York to score in bombed-out shooting galleries on the Lower East Side. My pay had never been arranged properly; when I needed money, I simply asked the GM to give me a few hundred, which he seemed happy to do, as money bled quickly out of Gino's every orifice. There was no business at the restaurant, so there was soon nothing to do. When I couldn't make it back to the real city, I'd drink at the Club Charles, an atmospherically crappy dive with a vaguely punk-rock clientele, or watch TV in my lonely room with a view.

I passed the Baltimore job to Dimitri as soon as I could. Maybe it wasn't the nicest thing I ever did, but it was a chef's job, and the money was good - and hey, room and board