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When management finally got wind of the fact that Jimmy was getting paid for not working at the Supper Club, I was made the chef. Unfortunately, Steven had already carved out his own invisible empire within my own.

It made things difficult.

The boy could cook, though.

The Club, particularly during the winter party season, when we regularly did banquets and sit-downs for hundreds and hundreds of people, required strength, skill and endurance, and an ability to improvise fast of its cooks. The bulletin board on my office wall was clogged with party sheets; sit-down meals for 300 would lead directly into four buffets and a cocktail reception for 700 - often on the same day. The logistics involved in buying the food, preparing it and moving it around for so many people were staggering - the invasion of Normandy every day of the week. Having an enterprising and capable little bastard like Steven around was a powerful asset. Here was a guy who could stay up all night snorting coke and drinking Long Island ice teas, getting into trouble of the most lurid kind, and still show up the next morning and knock out a thousand meals. I may have spent way too much time investigating the criminal activities of the Steven and Adam crime family, always calling one or the other into my office for a tune-up or an interrogation (I must have fired them both at least three times), but they, particularly Steven, always found a way to weasel their way back into my good graces and make themselves invaluable.

Steven, for a while, it seemed, saw the light (to whatever extent that's possible with Steven). One night, Nancy and I bumped into him at a bar in Westhampton. He'd been moonlighting (typical of Steven) for Sears, and when I saw him, he was slurring his words, his jaw twitching from cocaine, his eyes scrambling around in his sockets like caged spider monkeys, and he slapped an arm around my shoulders and announced that he was going to start showing up to work on time, that he was going to start behaving responsibly, that he was going to turn over a new leaf.

I remember Nancy looking at me as if to say, 'Yeah, riiight . . .'

He was, of course, promising much more than he could ever deliver. Life with Steven over the last five or six years has been notable for one hideous outrage after another. But he did begin showing up at work on time. He stopped disappearing on two-and three-day benders. He tried, as best he could, to refrain from bringing shame and disgrace upon my house and kitchen.

Most important, Steven, suddenly and inexplicably, became the sort of person who, when he says he's going to do a thing, does it. This, more than anything else, is the essence of sous-chefdom. With Steven around, I no longer had to come in in the morning and say, 'Did you take care of that thing?' The thing was always taken care of.

I like that. I made him my sous-chef.

Let's revisit, reconstructing from an untrustworthy and incomplete record, the checkered career of Steven Tempel: he grew up on Long Island, attended Johnson and Wales culinary school where, unsurprisingly, he ran into trouble (something about an assault) and was nearly expelled. He worked in a diner in Providence while he was at J and W (Steven, for all his faults, likes money and was never afraid to work), did time at Big Barry's out on the Island, bounced around a progression of knucklehead jobs and eventually migrated to Northern California, ending up at a joint called La Casa Nostra, where he encountered the uncontrollable idiot-savant and baking genius Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown (nobody knows - as far as the Government is concerned, he doesn't even exist). Like Hunt and Liddy, these are two guys who should never have been allowed in a room together. When they're together, a sort of supernova of stupidity occurs, a critical mass of bad behavior. They like to reminisce about this California idyll period of their lives: snorting coke through uncooked penne, projectile vomiting in the parking lots of strip clubs, driving their owner into