As we battled through party season at the Supper Club, Steven and I did a lot of after-work drinking together, sitting around reviewing the events of the evening, planning our moves for the next day, pondering the mysteries of This Life We Live. I came to rely on him more and more, to find out what was going on, to fix things, to help me in the crushing, relentless routine of serving hundreds and hundreds of meals, different menus every day, hors d'oeuvres, a la carte meals, managing a staff of cooks that would swell into double digits for big events then shrink back to a core group of about eight for regular service.
Buying 10,000 dollars-worth of meat a day gave me a strange and terrible thrill, like riding a roller-coaster, and the simple act of moving ceiling-high piles of perishable fish and produce through my kitchen every day was a puzzle, a challenge I enjoyed. I liked being a general again: deploying forces where needed, sending out flying squads of cooks to put out brush fires on the buffet stations, arranging reconnaissance, forward ob servers, communicating by walkie-talkie with the various cornersof the club:
'More filet on buffet six,' would come the call. 'More salmon on buffet four!' 'This is security at the door. I got a body count of three hundred and climbing! They're really coming in!' Amusingly, we shared a radio band with a nearby undercover unit from the street crimes division of the NYPD. They were always trying to get us to change frequency, which we couldn't, as we used them all: one for managers, one for kitchen, and a security band. After threats and shouts didn't work, the cops got clever; they listened, got to know our lingo and our locations and would play games with us, calling for 'More roast beef on buffet one!' when none was needed, or creating notional emergencies that would cause security to gang-rush the 'mezz bathroom' to break up a non-existent fight. It was a wild-style life. It wasn't unusual to see naked women hosing ice cream off their bodies in the kitchen pot sink (the Howard Stern event); sinister Moroccan food tasters packing heat (Royal Air Maroc party); Ted Kennedy in a kitchen walk-through eerily reminiscent of RFK's last moments; our drunken crew, in a hostile mood, bullying a lost Mike Myers into 'doing that Wayne's World Ex-cel-lent thing'; Rosie Pérez hanging on the saute end, fitting right in as if she worked with us, sitting on a cutting board, 'What's good to eat in here, boys?'; a clit-piercing on stage (Stern again); Madonna fans trying to sneak through the kitchen from the hotel (she brings her own eggs for Caesar salad); concerts, swimsuit models, hard-core hip-hoppers, go-go boys. One day there would be a wedding for 100 people where the customer spent 1,000 bucks per person for lobster and truffle ravioli, individual bottles of vodka frozen in blocks of ice, baby wedding cakes for every table, and the next, the whole club would be tented over, filled with dervishes and dancers from North Africa, serving couscous and pigeon pie for a thousand.
Thanks to the Bigfoot Program, I never ran out of food, was always prepared, was never late, and Steven helped enormously. What finally made him a serious character in my eyes was the night he ran a knife through his hand while trying to hack frozen demi-glace out of a bucket. Squirting blood all over the place, he wrapped his hand in an apron and listened to my instructions: 'Get your sorry ass down to Saint Vincent's, they've got a fast emergency room. Get yourself stitched up and get yourself back here in two fucking hours! We're gonna be busy as hell tonight and I need you on the line!' He returned ninety minutes later and managed to work, one-handed, on the saute station, very capably cranking out 150 or so a la carte dinners. I was pleased with this demonstration of loyalty. Working through pain and injury counts for a lot with me.
I don't really know what happened to the Supper Club. The general manager, with whom I had a good working relationship, was suddenly gone. Nightclub operations were shut down, possibly in response to neighborhood complaints about noise, unmanageable crowds in the streets, change in ownership. The new management team was an oily duo of ex-waiters from the Waldorf, a Spaniard and an 'I dunno' who liked to pretend they were French. I answered an ad in the paper for a chef and was quickly in the wind.
I took Steven along.
One look at One Five, and I knew the place was doomed. Jerry Kretchmer, with the hugely talented Alfred Portale in tow, had just failed in the same location. The new owners were two very nice matronly middle-aged ladies with little to no restaurant experience. But I fell in love with the kitchen. It was huge, well equipped and loaded with history. I'd even worked there for a day while at CIA, as part of a 'Day in New York' field trip. The dining room was appointed with the salvage from the ocean liner Normandie, which had sunk mysteriously in New York harbor. It was an irresistible impulse. My predecessor, a jumped-up megalomaniac boob, had already plowed through most of the partners' dough, insisting on a kitchen staff of thirteen people to serve sixty or so dinners a night, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to make a difference and do some honest toil for these nice ladies, save them a few bucks.
Hiring crew, post-Supper Club, with Steven as my underboss, was always fun. I felt like Lee Marvin, with Steven as Ernest Borgnine, in The Dirty Dozen when they recruit a fighting unit from the dregs of the stockade. Steven and I would meet, and I'd say, 'Who's available?' We'd discuss who was still talking to himself, suffering from paranoid delusions ('But can he still work the line?'), who could be lured away from another job ('Is he happy? How happy? What's he getting paid?'), who was still loyal from the collection of part-timers and freelancers we'd used for party work at the Supper Club, who had evenings free after knocking off at Le Bernardin, who could keep it together, show up on time, keep their mouth shut, and do the right thing - even if he woke up every morning naked and covered with puke on a cold bathroom floor. Steven would scour the lunatic fringe, other chefs' kitchens, flipping through the amazing mental Rolodex he kept in his head, the two of us embarking, again, on a clandestine head-hunt that often stripped rival kitchens bare. I loved those first interviews, laying eyes on old friends, new recruits, a motley collection of psychopathic grill men, alcoholic garde-manger men, trash-talking chick sauciers, Ecuadorian pasta cooks, deranged pâtissiers, cooks who thought that Sylvester Stallone was keeping them under constant surveillance ('Sly knows I wrote Cliffhanger - and he knows I know too much,' said one cook who'd apparently been communicating telepathically with Stallone while flipping burgers at Planet Hollywood). 'I needa two Heineken, seven o' clock!' said my old friend Chinese Davey, from Bigfoot days, his hand scraped raw from extracting bottles of beer from a chained cooler night after night. 'Every night! Seven o clock! Two Heineken!! No Budwasser! Heineken!' He got the job. 'I am there, Chef!' said Manuel, the pasta stud, on the phone from a very busy midtown kitchen. 'I am with you!' He dropped his apron in the middle of pre-theater rush, told the chef to fuck himself, and rushed right over. Always liked that guy. He needed Sundays off, to go to church, he said. No problem. And God help me, I even hired Adam . . . now and again.
'I'm never going to slink home again, knowing I fucked up,' I'd tell Steven in one of our many post-game analysis sessions. 'Things go sour here? It won't be for lack of trying on my part. I ain't never gonna dog it, I'm never going home at the end of the shift feeling ashamed. I don't care if the crackpots we work for deserve it or not, I . . . we are gonna give a hundred percent. We're gonna fight Dien Bien Phu over and over again every night. I don't care if we lose the war - we're professionals, man. We're the motherfuckin' A-Team, the pros from Dover, cool breeze . . . and ain't nobody ever gonna say we dropped the ball, let the side down, let things slide . . .'
One Five tanked. The 'entertainment' didn't help. We featured musical attractions so pathetic it would have made Joe Franklin blush: one-armed piano players, octogenarian cabaret singers, aspiring Broadway ingenues whose nasal-inflected warbling could shatter glass, haplessly incompetent yodelers . . . customers would wander through our magnificent revolving doors, clap eyes on one of these creatures belting out 'New York, New York' with a Yugoslavian accent, and turn on their heels and run. Like a lot of restaurants in trouble, we got shaken down by every sleaze bag publ
icist ('I got Joey Buttafuoco to come in tonight; make sure to comp him!') and corrupt gossip columnist ('My husband is at loose ends tonight; can you take care of him?'). The press we got from such largesse usually amounted to something like: 'Seen canoodling at One Five, John Wayne Bobbit and Joey Buttafuoco' - not a mention likely to inspire a gang-rush of dining public.
But Steven and I were happy. We had the cooks we wanted. We were making nice food.
When I was hired by Pino Luongo to open up Coco Pazzo Teatro, my brief Tuscan interlude, I took Steven along. And after that, Sullivan's. We were a traveling roadshow, and when we moved to another kitchen, we peeled the best of the cooks we'd left behind with us. Steven, as I said, is my kind of sous-chef. He loves cooking, and he loves cooks. He doesn't yearn for a better, different life than the one he has - because he knows he's got a home in this one. He gets along with just about anyone at any time, total strangers tending to forgive him his most egregious excesses, whatever he says or does. He's an ingratiating bastard - totally without pretense, and you cannot embarrass, shame or insult him. He knows how bad he is. The Mexican line cooks at Les Halles love him, and his tortured, completely useless command of kitchen Spanish amuses the hell out of them - as do his habits of singing Elton John and Madonna tunes in a high-pitched, atonal voice, prancing shamelessly around the kitchen like some spastic breakdancer, taping over his sensitive nipples with Band-Aids (to avoid chafe, he insists), powdering his balls on the line with cornstarch, and showing anyone who's interested his latest cold sore, the boil on his ass, an incipient zit. He truly loves the technical aspects of cooking, works fast, clean, and makes pretty plates. He likes to step into other stations when other cooks get in the weeds, chiding them in his horrible Spanish. He loves dish washing when not busy on his station, finds no task too low or too demeaning to take an interest and help. He's a remarkably thoughtful guy - mention you like gummy bears and Steven will show up the next day with a bag. If he stops off at a burger stand for a mayo and mustard and ketchup-slathered grease-burger for breakfast, he'll bring a couple extra so everyone can have some. Alone among cooks I've met, he actually enjoys cooking for the floor staff, insisting on making them food that's actually edible. He jokes around with the waiters, managers, flirts with any woman, no matter her age, rank, background, and amazingly, they seem to like it. Mexican cooks I worked with for a year without hearing them peep a single word in English or Spanish were chattering happily away with Steven after only a few hours of meeting him. 'Chuletita loca', they call him, 'crazy little pork chop'.
He has a tattoo of a cartoon cat wearing a chef's toque on his crotch, and he's all too ready to drop his pants should you express interest in seeing it. In hot months, he works in sandals, no socks, the cuffs of his checks rolled up like clam-diggers (a daring fashion statement in a kitchen, where a dropped knife or spilled duck fat can be a career ender). He wears, with defiantly prole-pride, a dishwasher's snap-front short-sleeve shirt, shunning the traditional chef's jacket. He refuses to wear an apron. He eats his meals smashed together in bite-sized chunks - meat, starch and vegetable mixed into an ugly but apparently edible slurry - and he's always trying out new flavor combinations. Middle of the rush, Steven is holding down his end brilliantly and, somehow, making little potato crisp and caviar snackies for the other cooks to try. There's always enough to go around.
Bartenders, waiters, managers, cooks, dishwashers, porters tell him everything. Somehow he induces, without even trying, total strangers to tell him their most shameful and intimate secrets. They'll do anything for him, putting up cheerfully with his practical joking, his groping, his annoying practice of trying to throw petits pois into their ears, his horribly frank anecdotes about the previous evening's sexual adventures.
I learned never to try to compete with Steven in the practical joke department. He'll make a life's work out of getting you back. Leave a potato in his shoes and he'll freeze your street clothes. Put a sticker on his back, he'll take your locker door off the hinges and stack it full of porno magazines.
On his birthday, I once arranged for him to receive a free trial pair of adult diapers. The next day, all the cooks were waiting for his reaction. He thanked me sincerely. 'You know? Those things are pretty cool! I sat around the couch, eating nachos and watching TV in my diaper, and it was great. I didn't even have to get up to go to the bathroom! It was great! And you know, it feels kinda neat!'
Our clean-living, deeply religious Ecuadorian pasta man at Sullivan's, Manuel, would receive 4A.M. phone calls every night for weeks - Steven mid-coitus with his girlfriend: 'Manuel . . . grunt . . . plorp . . . it's Steven . . . grunt . . . guess what I'm doing?'
And, like everyone in Steven's life, Manuel played along. 'Oh, Chef . . . Chef . . .' he'd say, shaking his head, the next day. 'Chuletita call me again lass night!' and then he'd burst into giggles.
I don't get it. Still.
If I did half the things that Steven does regularly - and I'm not even talking about the felonies, just the brutish misbehavior, the bad taste, the remarks, the exhibitionism, the conniving - I'd end up in court defending myself against a host of sexual harassment lawsuits. And yet, I can't think of anyone, except the owner of Sullivan's (but that's another story) who doesn't like Steven, who doesn't find him adorable, who doesn't confide in him, go to him when they're confused or in trouble . . . an amazing accomplishment for a guy who shows up to work with sperm on his shoes ('Stopped at a peep booth to toss off,' he explains casually. 'Hey! I was horny!), who behaves like an utter pig at times, freely discusses his every digestive, dermatological and sexual manifestation with anyone within hearing.
And this . . . this, dear reader, is my closest and most trusted friend and associate.
THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE
THERE WAS A LULL in service the other night, one of those all-too-brief periods of about ten minutes when the floor staff is busy trying to turn tables, and even though the bar is packed three deep with waiting customers and there's a line out the door, the kitchen is quiet. While busboys stripped and reset tables outside the kitchen door, the cooks, runners and sous-chef swilled bottled water, wiped down their stations and bullshitted.
I stood in the doorway to the cellar prep kitchen and smoked a cigarette nervously. We were in that eerie, eye-of-the-hurricane calm. In ten minutes, when the next wave of hungry public had been seated and breaded and watered, there'd be a punishing rush - the slide filling up with orders all at once, the action swinging from station to station, boiling up the line like a Drano enema. First, the salad guy would get hit, then the saute station and finally the grill, until everything came down at once - the whole bunch of us in the cramped kitchen struggling and sweating and cursing to move orders out without falling in the weeds. We had only a few moments of peace to go, and I smoked and fidgeted and half-listened to what my crew was talking about.
The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so - and I realized that, my God. . . I've been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years!
Who's the bigger homo? Who takes it in the ass? Who, exactly, at this particular moment, is a pédé, a maricón, a fanocchio, a puta a pato? It's all about dick, you see. It's chupa mis huevos time, time for mama la ping, take it in your culo time, motherfucker, you pinche baboso, crying little woman. And your vierga? It looks like a fucking half-order of merguez - muy, muy, muy chica . . . like an insecto.
This is the real international language of cuisine, I realized, watching my French sous-chef, American pâtissier, Mexican grill, salad and fry guy exchange playful insults with the Bengali runner and the Dominican dishwasher. It's been, for twenty-five years, one long, never-ending game of the dozens, played out in four or five languages.
As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate. All comments must, out of histo
rical necessity, concern involuntary rectal penetration, penis size, physical flaws or annoying mannerisms or defects.