The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives.
The boys across the street were considered to be a championship team, the perfect example of the culinary ideals of the time. Mario's Restaurant was a hugely successful Southern Italian joint and the Mario crew were feared and respected because they did more covers, by a few hundred each night, than almost anyone else in town. It was fairly sophisticated stuff for the time: whole legs of veal were actually butchered on the premises, stocks were made from real bones (not commercial base), sauces were made from scratch with quality ingredients - and the Mario crew were the loudest, crudest, most bad-ass bunch of cookies in town. When they'd swing by the Dreadnaught for a few pops after work, they made our ragtag bunch of part-time roofers feel small. They were richer, more confident, and moved with even more swagger and style than our motley crew of oddballs and amateurs. They moved in a pack, with their own dialect - a high-pitched, ultra-femme, affected drawl, salted with terms from eighteenth-century English literature and Marine Corps drill instructor-speak - a lush, intimidating, sardonic secret language, which was much imitated.
'You, sir, are a loathsome swine. Too damn ignorant to pour piss from a boot! Your odor offends me and my shell-like ear gapeth to hear thy screams of pain. I insist you avert your face and serve me a libation before I smite your sorry ass with the tip of my boot - you sniveling little cocksucker!'
They had women's names for each other, a jarring thing to hear as they were all huge, ugly-looking and wild-eyed, with muscles and scars and door knocker-sized earrings. They looked down on outsiders, frequently communicated with only a glance or a smile, and moved through the streets and bars and back alleys of P-town like Titans. They had more coke, better weed, bigger gold, prettier women. They loved rubbing our noses in it.
'How many?' they'd ask after a busy Saturday night.
'Oh . . . one-fifty, two hundred,' Bobby would reply, fluffing the number a little.
'We did . . . what? How many was it, Dee Dee, daahlin?' the Mario chef would ask casually, 'Four-fifty? Five?'
'Six, I think,' Dimitri, the Mario pasta man, would reply - a man who would later play a major part in my career.
'Yes . . . six. Slow night, I dare say. Pathetic, don't you know. Pig-dogs must have eaten their mung elsewhere tonight. Dairy Queen, probably.'
And then there was Howard Mitcham. Howard was the sole 'name chef in town'. Fiftyish, furiously alcoholic, and stone-deaf - the result of a childhood accident with fireworks - Howard could be seen most nights after work, holding up the fishermen's bars or lurching about town, shouting incomprehensibly (he liked to sing as well). Though drunk most of the time, and difficult to understand, Howard was a revered elder statesman of Cape Cod cookery, a respected chef of a very busy restaurant, and the author of two very highly regarded cookbooks: The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook and Creole, Gumbo and All That Jazz - two volumes I still refer to, and which were hugely influential for me and my budding culinary peers of the time.
He had wild, unruly white hair, a gin-blossomed face, a boozer's gut, and he wore the short-sleeved, snap-button shirt of a dishwasher. Totally without pretension, both he and his books were fascinating depositories of recipes, recollections, history, folklore and illustrations, drawing on his abiding love for humble, working-class ethnic food of the area.
Howard loved seafood. All seafood. Unlike most of us, he knew what to do with it. He loved the less popular fishes of the day, using tuna, squid, mackerel, bluefish and salt cod to great advantage. His signature dish was haddock amandine, and people would drive for hours from Boston to sample it. He was the first chef I knew to appreciate fully the local Portugee cuisine: the spicy cumin-scented squid stews, the linguica-laden kale soups, the coupling of fish and pork sausages. And he was a strident advocate for the mystical powers of the Quahog, that humble, slightly tough local clam.
Once each summer, Howard and friends - mostly artists, local fishermen, writers and drunks - would throw a party called the John J. Gaspie Memorial Clambake, in honor of a departed fisherman friend. It was a major social event for P-town's year-round residents, and for those of us who worked the season in the restaurant business. Howard and friends would dig pits in the beach and drop shiny new trash cans into the holes, then fill them with quahogs, lobsters, codfish, vegetables, potatoes and corn, allowing them to simmer over glowing coals buried deep in the sand while everyone drank themselves silly.
To us at the Dreadnaught, Howard was a juju man, an oracle who spoke in tongues. We might not have understood Howard, but we understood his books, and while it was hard to reconcile his public behavior with the wry, musical, and lovingly informative tone of his writings, we knew enough to respect the man for what he knew and for what he could do. We saw someone who loved food, not just the life of the cook. Howard showed us how to cook for ourselves, for the pure pleasure of eating, not just for the tourist hordes.
Howard showed us that there was hope for us as cooks. That food could be a calling. That the stuff itself was something we could actually be proud of, a reason to live. And that stuck with some of us from those early frontier days. He influenced a lot of my friends. I read a Molly O'Neill column in the New York Times Magazine recently, in which she was describing the delights of Portuguese-influenced Cape Cod food like white beans, kale and chorizo, and I knew she'd eaten the old man's food, and probably read his books too. Without his name being mentioned,Howard's reach had extended across the decades to my Sunday paper - and I was glad of it.
There was another inspiring moment: a rough, choppy, moonlit night on the water, and the Dreadnaught's manager looked out the window suddenly to spy thousands of tiny baitfish breaking the surface, rushing frantically toward shore. He knew what that meant, as did everyone else in town with a boat, a gaff and a loaf of Wonder bread to use as bait: the stripers were running!
Thousands of the highly prized, relatively expensive striped bass were, in a rare feeding frenzy, suddenly there for the taking. You had literally only to throw bread on the water, bash the tasty fish on the head with a gaff and then haul them in. They were taking them by the hundreds of pounds. Every restaurant in town was loading up on them, their parking lots, like ours, suddenly a Coleman-lit staging area for scaling, gutting and wrapping operations. The Dreadnaught lot, like every other lot in town, was suddenly filled with gore-covered cooks and dishwashers, laboring under flickering gaslamps and naked bulbs to clean, wrap and freeze the valuable white meat. We worked for hours with our knives, our hair sparkling with snowflake-like fish scales, scraping, tearing, filleting. At the end of the night's work, I took home a 35-pound monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I'd ever eaten, and I don't know if it was due to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning to take on, but it hit me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better about things, made me better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow . . . It was a protein rush to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, eaten with the hands. Could anything be better than that?
As the season came to an end, the regular crew
began to fade away, off to work ski resorts in Colorado, charter boats in the Caribbean, restaurants and crab-shacks in Key West. After Labor Day, I got my chance to move up for the last few weeks before the Dreadnaught closed for the year. I worked the fry station, dunking breaded clams and shrimp into hot oil for a while, racked up a serious body count of lobsters on the double-decker steamer, and finally was moved up yet again to do a few shifts on the mighty broiler. I cannot describe to you the sheer pleasure, the power of commanding that monstrous, fire-breathingiron and steel furnace, bumping the grill under the flames with my hip the way I'd seen Bobby and Jimmy do it. It was tremendous. I couldn't have felt happier - or more powerful in the cockpit of an F-16. I ruled the world for a few short weeks, and I was determined to make that station my own the following season.
Sadly, things didn't turn out as planned. The next summer, Mario bought our faltering restaurant. Mario was kind enough to allow those of us who'd worked there the previous year to audition for our old jobs with a few shifts in his kitchen. I was thrilled by the opportunity, and headed up to P-town that April filled with hope and confidence, certain I'd make the cut, land that top-tier broiler job, the big money, the gig that would surely make me one of the pirate elite, an ass-kicking, throat-slitting stud who could lord it over the salad men and fry cooks and prep drones at less successful restaurants.
I pulled into town, I remember, wearing - God help me - a spanking-new light blue Pierre Cardin seersucker suit. The shoes, too, were blue. Here I was, hitchhiking into a town that for all intents and purposes was a downscale, informal Portuguese fishing village and artists' colony, a town where people dressed unpretentiously in work clothes - denims, army surplus, old khakis - and in some deranged, early '70s bout of disco-inspired hubris, I chose to make my entrance in gull-wing shouldered Robert Palmer-wear, just itching to show the local yokels how we did it in New York City.
They were pounding veal in the kitchen when I arrived; the whole crew, on every available horizontal surface, banging on veal cutlets for scallopine with heavy steel mallets. The testosterone level was high, very high. These guys were the A-Team, and they knew it. Everybody knew it. The floor staff, the managers, even Mario seemed to walk on eggs around them, as if one of them would suddenly lunge through the bars of their cage and take a jagged bite. I alone was too stupid to see how over my head I was among these magnificent cooking machines. I'd served a few hundred meals, at a relaxed pace, in a not very busy joint, in the off-season. These guys drilled out four, five, six hundred fast-paced, high-end meals a night!
It was Friday, an hour before service, when I was introduced to Tyrone the broiler man, whom I'd be trailing. Looking back, I can't remember Tyrone as being anything less than 8 feet tall, 400 pounds of carved obsidian, with a shaved head, a prominent silver-capped front tooth, and the ubiquitous fist-sized gold hoop earring. While his true dimensions were probably considerably more modest, you get the picture: he was big, black, hugely muscled, his size 56 chefs coat stretched across his back like a drumhead. He was a gargantua, a black Viking, Conan the Barbarian, John Wayne and the Golem all rolled into one. But unintimidated as only the ignorant can be, I started shooting my stupid mouth off right away, regaling my new chums with highly exaggerated versions of my adventures at the old Dreadnaught - what bad boys we had been. I blathered on about New York, trying to portray myself as some street-smart, experienced, even slightly dangerous professionalgun-for-hire of the cooking biz.
They were, to be charitable to myself, not impressed. Not that this deterred me in the slightest from yapping on and on. I ignored all the signs. All of them: the rolling eyes, the tight smiles. I plunged on, oblivious to what was happening in the kitchen right around me; the monstrous amounts of food being loaded into low-boys and reach-ins for mise-en-place. I missed the determined sharpening of knives, the careful arranging and folding of side towels in kitty-cornered stacks, the stockpiling of favorite pans, ice, extra pots of boiling water, back-up supplies of everything. They were like Marines digging in for the siege at Khe Sanh, and I registered nothing.
I should have seen this well-practiced ritual for what it was, understood the level of performance here in Marioland, appreciated the experience, the time served together which allowed these hulking giants to dance wordlessly around each other in the cramped, heavily manned space behind the line without ever colliding or wasting a movement. They turned from cutting board to stove-top with breathtaking economy of movement, they hefted 300-pound stockpots onto ranges, tossed legs of veal around like pullets, blanced hundreds of pounds of pasta, all the while indulgently enduring without comment my endless self-aggrandizing line of witless chatter. I should have understood this femme/convict patois, this business with the women's names, the arcane expressions, seen it for what it was: the end result of years working together in a confined space under extreme pressure. I should have understood. But I didn't.
An hour later the board was filled with more dinner orders than I'd ever seen in my life.
Ticket after ticket kept coming in, one on top of the other, waiters screaming, tables of ten, tables of six, four-tops, more and more of them coming, no ebb and flow, just a relentless, incoming, nerve-shattering gang-rush of orders. And the orders were all in Italian! I couldn't even understand most of the dupes, or what these waiters were screaming at me. The seasoned Mario cooks had an equally impenetrable collection of code names for each dish, making it even more difficult to make sense of it all. There were cries of 'Ordering!' and 'Pick up!' every few seconds, and 'Fire!', more food going out, more orders coming in, the squawk of an intercom as an upstairs bartender called down for food. Flames 3 feet high leaped out of pans, the broiler was crammed with a slowly moving train of steaks, veal chops, fish fillets, lobsters. Pasta was blanched and shocked and transferred in huge batches into steaming colanders, falling everywhere, the floor soon ankle-deep in spaghetti alia chitarra, linguine, garganelli, taglierini, fusilli. The heat was horrific. Sweat flowed into my eyes, blinding me as I spun in place.
I struggled and sweated and hurried to keep up the best I could, Tyrone slinging sizzle-platters under the broiler, and me, ostensibly helping out, getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with every order. On the rare occasions when I could look up at the board, the dupes now looked like cuneiform or Sanskrit indecipherable.
I was losing it. Tyrone, finally, had to help the helper.
Then, grabbing a saute pan, I burned myself.
I yelped out loud, dropped the pan, an order of osso bucco milanese hitting the floor, and as a small red blister raised itself on my palm, I foolishly - oh, so foolishly - asked the beleaguered Tyrone if he had some burn cream and maybe a Band-Aid.
This was quite enough for Tyrone. It went suddenly very quiet in the Mario kitchen, all eyes on the big broiler man and his hopelessly inept assistant. Orders, as if by some terrible and poetically just magic, stopped coming in for a long, horrible moment. Tyrone turned slowly to me, looked down through bloodshot eyes, the sweat dripping off his nose, and said, 'Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid?'
Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real close so I could see them properly: the hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new. I watched, transfixed, as Tyrone - his eyes never leaving mine - reached slowly under the broiler and, with one naked hand, picked up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter, moved it over to the cutting board, and set it down in front of me.
He never flinched.
The other cooks cheered, hooted and roared at my utter humiliation. Orders began to come in again and everyone went back to work, giggling occasionally. But I knew. I was not going to be the Dreadnaught's broiler man this year - that was for damn sure. (They ended up kicking me back down to prep, one step above dishwasher
on the food chain.) I had been shown up for the loudmouthed, useless little punk that I was. I was, I learned later, a mal came, meaning 'bad meat' in Italian, referred to as 'Mel' for weeks after. I had been identified as a pretender, and an obnoxious one at that.
I slunk home that night in my blue Pierre Cardin suit as if it was sackcloth and ashes. I had not yet found a summer rental, so I was sleeping over the walk-in in the back room at Spiritus Pizza. My torment, my disgrace was complete.
After a few days of sulking and self-pity, I slowly, and with growing determination, began to formulate a plan, a way to get back at my tormentors. I would go to school, at the Culinary Institute of America - they were the best in the country and certainly none of these P-town guys had been there. I would apprentice in France. I would endure anything: evil drunk chefs, crackpot owners, low pay, terrible working conditions; I would let sadistic, bucket-headed French sous-chefs work me like a Sherpa . . . but I would be back. I would do whatever was necessary to become as good as, or better than, this Mario crew. I would have hands like Tyrone's and I would break loudmouth punks like myself over the wheel like they'd broken me.
I'd show them.
INSIDE THE CIA
BURNING WITH A DESIRE for vengeance and vindication, I applied myself to gaining entry to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. My Vassar friends - those who remained on speaking terms with me after two years of truly disgusting behavior on my part - thought I was out of my mind, but then they thought that anyway. I'm sure that there was a collective sigh of relief on Vassar's rolling, green, well-tended campus that I would no longer be around to cadge free drinks, steal drugs, make pointedly cruel remarks and generally lower the level of discourse. My idols of that time had been, all too predictably, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and Bruce Lee; I had had, for some time, a romantic if inaccurate view of myself as some kind of hyper violent, junkie Byron. My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword - that should tell you all you need to know. The most romantic thing I had done in two years was to chop down about an acre of Vassar's lilacs one night with my sword, so that I could fill my girlfriend's room with the blossoms.