Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [67]
Something had to change. I had to get it together. I'd been the culinary equivalent of the Flying Dutchman too long, living a half-life with no future in mind, just oozing from sensation to sensation. I was a disgrace, a disappointment to friends and family and myself - and the drugs and the booze no longer chased that disappointment away. I could no longer bear even to pick up the phone; I'd just listen to the answering machine, afraid or unwilling to pick up, the plaintive entreaties of the caller an annoyance. If they had good news, it would simply make me envious and unhappy; if they had bad news, I was the last guy in the world who could help. Whatever I had to say to anybody would have been inappropriate. I was in hiding, in a deep, dark hole, and it was dawning on me - as I cracked my oysters, and opened clams, and spooned cocktail sauce into ramekins - that it was time, really time, to try to climb out.
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT MEAT
AN EPISODE FROM THE Wilderness Years.
Things were not going well. It was August, and my tree from the previous year's Christmas still lay in a heap of brown, dead pine needles in my dark, unused dining room. I was ashamed to take it out to the trash, not wanting my neighbors to see how far I'd fallen, how utterly paralyzed I'd become by my years of excess. Eventually, my wife and I would make a heroic effort to dispose of the incriminating object - chopping it up like a dead body and stuffing it in plastic bags before lugging it in the dead of night a few floors down and leaving it near a known coke dealer's doorway. Let him take the rap, we figured.
My unemployment was running out, and the responses to the resumes I'd sent out inevitably invited me to meet with such a transparently doomed bunch of chuckle heads that even I, the seasoned carrion feeder, couldn't stomach the prospect of working for them. There was a guy planning a Maria Maples restaurant; Maria would sing in the upstairs cocktail lounge, he confided, ensuring hordes of high-spending gourmets. The feng shui advisor was riding a cosmic groove around the half-completed restaurant when I arrived for the interview, boding poorly for the man's prospects. I deliberately tanked the interview.
Another well-known New York restaurateur summoned me to a series of highly secret meetings to discuss the changeover of his current operation - an unbelievably loud, grotesque, television-themed monstrosity - into a fine French bistro. I took the job, sight unseen, on the strength of his reputation, a generous money offer and the prospect of serving fine French food, which he knew quite a bit about. But one night in that place was more than I could take. Squealing children shoved up against the expeditor as they lined up to buy lunch-boxes, gummy bears, T-shirts and bomber jackets from the merchandising concession. Waiters with microphones urged customers to Name That TV Show as the theme music from Green Acres and Petticoat Junction blared over Volkswagen-sized speakers. The food was what you might expect to find on Air Uganda tourist class: boil-in-the-bag veggie burgers, pre-cooked bacon slices, greasy meat patties which were pre-seared and left to marinate in grease in the steam cabinet. It was soul destroying, and at the end of the night, I scrawled a quick note to the owner, something along the lines of: 'I could never last even another ten minutes in this shithole. I don't care if you're turning the joint into Lutece - it's too horrible NOW.'
A couple of '70s survivors wanted me for a new seafood