Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [66]
I was reaching rock-bottom, both personally and professionally. I got canned from the Mexican place, for which particular reason I don't know; there were plenty of good ones - alcoholism, drug abuse, pilferage, laziness - I don't know which of these unlovely traits actually did me in. But I didn't mind; the rats were really bugging me, especially when I was high on coke, which was most of the time.
I worked in an all-Chinese kitchen for a time, squatting on the floor with my fellow cooks, sharing their simple staff meals of rice gruel, pork broth and fish bones each day, shoveling in my food with chop sticks and betting on how many plum tomatoes would be in a case in the day's delivery. I cracked oysters at a shellfish bar, watching as drunken customers gobbled jumbo shrimps without bothering to remove the shells - so pickled from booze they were beyond caring. I came to know actors, loan sharks, enforcers, car thieves, guys who sold false ID, phone scammers, porno stars, and a dope-fiend hostess who attended mortician school during the day. She came up to me one night at the shellfish bar, a blissed-out look on her face, and said, 'We did a baby today in school . . . and it . . . like . . . aspirated in my arms, man. You could hear it sigh when I picked it up!' She looked happy about this. She had a fetish for Con Ed workers something about the uniforms, I guess. And whenever they were doing electrical work or repairing a gas line in her neighborhood,she'd come in the next day singing the praises of the fine folks who kept our utilities running.
I got to know a steely-eyed Irish hood in his fifties who worked 'with' the pressmen's union, sometimes. When he had a big tune-up scheduled, he'd recruit other regulars from the bar to go down to some warehouse or printing plant and smack some heads together. One night he came in with his right hand busted up terribly, the knuckles pushed back nearly to his wrist, and a bone jutting horribly through the skin.
'Dude!' I said, 'You should go to the hospital for that!'
He just smiled and ordered a round for the house, then a dozen oysters and some shrimp with that - and ended up drinking and dancing and partying until closing time, waving his bloody hand around like a merit badge. His pal James, who'd worn the same fatigue jacket he'd worn in Vietnam fifteen years earlier, liked to hang out by my shellfish bar, telling stories. James was a West Village celebrity, never, to anyone's knowledge, having paid for a drink. He lived off the generosity of others, throwing a well-attended rent party once a month so he could pay for the curtained-off illegal cellar cubicle he called home. James carried a mysterious stainless-steel attache case with him wherever he went, hinting that it contained the Great American Novel, the Nuclear Codes, Unlimited Firepower. I suspected it was a few tattered copies of Penthouse and maybe a change of socks - but smelling James, I was less sure about the socks. He was a bright, sweet, apparently educated guy from a military family. He'd been 86'd from half the bars in the Village, but the place I worked put up with him as long as the customers were willing to endure him. I admired his survival skills, his longevity, his staying power. He certainly didn't get by on his looks. He'd just learned how to hustle, instinctively - he didn't do it in a calculating way - he just did what was necessary to stay alive.
I saw myself becoming like him, and I didn't like it. Okay, I wasn't cadging drinks for a living, listening to a bunch of drunks in return for the occasional freebie, or throwing rent parties. I did have a job, and an apartment and a girlfriend who still, it appeared, loved me. But there was little