A Writer's Life (59 page)

“Beautiful zucchini I have brought you, yah?” Hans said, quickly adding, “And I have also brought you beautiful romaine lettuce … and beautiful eggplant, and potatoes, and arugula, and shiitake mushrooms, and potatoes, yah?” Hans then paused, waiting for a word or nod of approval from Peguero; but the latter withheld it until he had bent down and closely examined the contents, sometimes picking up a piece of fruit or a vegetable and raising it to eye level, then staring at it, smelling it, squeezing it lightly, testing for overripeness, I assumed, or perhaps checking for the possibility that a worm was lurking within. Only after Peguero was satisfied with what he saw did he take his ballpoint pen and mark “OK” on the order sheet that was tucked in the pocket of his apron. He had phoned in the order the night before, and before dawn this morning it had been collected at the Bronx wholesale market by Hans, who had himself done the selecting at the various fruit and vegetable stalls before making his deliveries to Tucci and the other restaurants that relied upon his judgment and accepted, no doubt with a grain of salt, his tendency to describe as “beautiful” almost everything he brought.

“But these potatoes are not so good,” Peguero said finally, lifting a few of them and then dropping them back into the box. He had momentarily held on to one of them and twirled it between his fingers a few times, as if feeling for the seam on a baseball.

“So we take the potatoes back,” said Hans unhesitatingly, shoving the box aside–a box that, for all I knew, he might later be delivering to another restaurant and describing the contents as “beautiful.”

After Hans had left, having waved good-bye to Peguero and to another kitchen employee whom he knew by name, Hereford escorted me over to meet Peguero, explaining that he would serve as my mentor and companion for the rest of the morning. This pleased me, for instead of my having to begin the day discussing food preparation, about which I had learned little from my mother and about which I cared no more than she did, I could talk baseball with Miguel Peguero if he was willing—and, fortunately for me, he was. He was also quite fluent in English, more so than most of the South American baseball players whom I have interviewed, and during our morning together—while I stood watching him slicing meat, deboning fish, and making enough lasagna to feed more than a dozen customers—I learned how he had gone from being a disabled and unemployable athlete to becoming a contented team player in the kitchen of Tucci.

He told me that he had broken an ankle while running to first base four years before on a soggy field in Fort Myers, Florida, and despite his medical treatment and his rehabilitation exercises, he had been unable to recover his earlier speed on the base paths or his range as an infielder; and so his longtime dream of becoming a big leaguer had ended before his twenty-third birthday. When I asked him if, prior to his injury, he thought he had been talented enough to compete on baseball's highest level, he replied affirmatively but modestly, alluding to the fact that in the minor leagues he had played with a number of people who would be elevated to the majors, including his ex-roommate and fellow infielder, Enrique Wilson.

But speculating on what might have been was a waste of time, Peguero suggested, emphasizing that as soon as he had physically been able to move around without crutches, he traveled to New York with his Dominican bride, and, while sharing a Bronx apartment with a few of their relatives, he sought whatever opportunities were available to newcomers like himself, young men with limited options and without green cards. One of the places where he worked was in the kitchen of a Manhattan restaurant in the East Forties, starting out as a dishwasher. But as he appeared every night to scrub dishes, he was also surveying the room and closely observing the other workers as they functioned at various positions, noting in particular the skills and ingredients they used in producing the appetizers, the sauces, the main courses, the desserts, and the specialties of the day. It did not take long before Peguero believed he was
capable of performing each task on a highly professional level, and as he recounted this to me, I had visions of him as a ballplayer standing on first base after hitting a single and, while he thought about stealing second, studying the pitcher's every gesture and movement on the mound.

Since the place where Peguero had been hired as a dishwasher had a rapid rate of employee turnover, he was soon promoted to more interesting and challenging assignments at the salad station and the grill. Three years later, in 1996, after he had worked for a while as a cook in a second restaurant, he accepted a higher salary to serve directly under Matt Hereford in Tucci's kitchen. Hereford prepared the menus, made decisions regarding the workers' schedules, and was nominally in charge of everything that occurred in the rear of the restaurant. But it seemed to me, after I had spent a few days there, that the workers saw Peguero as their leader, even though he never asserted himself, nor did he set himself apart from the others. Still, he was obviously a presence, one to whom the others came for advice and consultation, and they usually nodded in agreement with what he said to them. He was inches taller than his coworkers, being a six-footer, and had big shoulders, narrow hips, a long dark-skinned face, and brown eyes that were large and alert, and he moved around the floor and up and down the staircase with agility and grace, showing no signs of his old injury.

He and Matt Hereford both arrived for work at approximately the same time, shortly after 9:00 a.m., but it was my impression that Peguero worked harder and certainly put in longer hours. Hereford would sometimes leave the building prior to the serving of dinner. Hereford was then dating a sister of Gerald Padian's fiancée. Peguero would spend much of the morning and afternoon in the preparatory kitchen, wielding a knife delicately and precisely in separating fat from meat, and removing myriad fish bones with his tweezers, and then at approximately 6:00 p.m., he was upstairs in the main kitchen, beginning to cook dinner; he was there until nearly midnight.

Flanking him at the grill almost every night was the assistant cook, Ray Perez, who had been born in Brooklyn of Mexican parents, and Lindomar De Mouvra, a Brazilian who performed many tasks but specialized in none of them. Working at an adjacent counter, which was closer to the kitchen's swinging doors, was the pasta cook, José Rosendo, who was a native of Mexico, and the pizza maker, Andres Artigas, who had been born in Uruguay. There were one or two kitchen workers who shied away from conversing with me; perhaps they feared that I would expose them as illegal aliens, or maybe they were unable to communicate in English. There was a dishwasher, however, who spoke English quite well, and he
took the initiative in introducing himself to me shortly after I had met Miguel Peguero.

“Hello,” he said, extending his right hand after drying it off with a towel. “My name is Manuel Bonete, and I am from Ecuador.”

“Ecuador,” I repeated, “
that's
where Lorena Bobbitt is from. You know who she is, don't you?”

“Oh yes,” he said enthusiastically. “She is very famous in my country.” After I had mentioned seeing her many times in person at the trial, he told me that she had visited Ecuador during the past week and had been at the palace in Quito to attend a luncheon hosted by Ecuador's president, Abdalá Bucaram.

A few months later, I read in the
New York Times
that the Ecuadorean congress had voted to remove President Bucaram from office because of what it called his “mental incapacity.”

Inasmuch as Gerald Padian had not established a limit to the frequency of my visits to Tucci, I came and went with regularity throughout the summer of 1996 and into the winter of 1997, usually appearing when there were no customers and when the employees, who had become quite accustomed to my presence, were so preoccupied with their tasks that they more or less ignored me, allowing me to wander around at will. As I explored the vastness of the basement, which was nearly one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet wide—and which housed a wine cellar, a pantry, a glass-enclosed office, two bathrooms, a cloakroom, and the preparatory kitchen, which took up most of the space—I reminded myself that this area had once been the domain of a dozen dray horses. They had slept and been fed here when Frederick J. Schillinger operated this building as a warehouse, beginning in 1907. A freight elevator had transported the horses up to their wagons, which had been parked within what was now the main dining room of Tucci. The dining room had been renovated and repainted so many times during the last two decades as a result of the rotating restaurateurs that there were few remaining signs of the fine work done here by the celebrated Sam Lopata, who had designed this building's first restaurant, Le Premier, in 1977. Although the critic Mimi Sheraton had condemned Le Premier's cuisine and high prices, she had raved about its design, calling it an “absolute stunner … a dazzlement of Art Deco splendor at its most sensual and flattering … as romantic as a valentine.”

Sam Lopata, who was thirty-four at the time, had been born in Paris during the Nazi occupation. His father, a milliner, had been arrested during a roundup of Jews and would not survive Auschwitz. In 1971, after studying architecture at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris,
Lopata moved to New York, where he eventually befriended his fellow Frenchman, the restaurateur Robert Pascal, who had commissioned him to create the ambience at Le Premier. Lopata then moved on to design several other restaurants in New York and elsewhere. In 1986, he was named “Restaurant Designer of the Year” by
Time
magazine. Ten years later, he died of cancer in New York at the age of fifty-four. In the
Times
obituary, the onetime owner of the restaurant Lutèce, André Soltner—who had once hired Lopata to provide Lutèce with a face-lift—described Lopata as “an indefatigable perfectionist who approaches walls and floors, tables and chairs, as an artist approaches a canvas.” But the only reminder of Lopata's decorative style within 206 East 63rd Street in 1997 was the five-tiered coffered ceiling of the auxiliary dining room on the second floor of Tucci.

The dining room staff at Tucci consisted of five waiters, three waitresses, a bartender, and two “runners,” the latter being young men who carried trays laden with food from the kitchen to the seated customers. The dining room crew were entirely fluent in English, although only two of them were native-born Americans. One was the bartender, an attractive and vivacious red-haired woman named Elizabeth Edwards, whose possessive boyfriend had been a nightly visitor to the bar until the management had ordered him to stay away. The other was a dark-haired, stocky waiter in his late thirties named Andy Globus, whose grandfather had been a neurosurgeon and his father an advertising executive. After Andy had dropped out of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the early 1970s, he had drifted into restaurant service and had worked in several places before coming to Tucci in 1996. Andy Globus's associates at Tucci were at least ten years his junior, and they included a waiter from Romania named Givan Stevans, a waiter from Sardinia named Vittorio Scarpa, a runner from Bangladesh named Mohammed Matin, and a waitress from Poland, Monica Kosciolowiez, who had come to the United States on a student visa and divided her time between waiting tables at night and attending classes during the day at nearby Hunter College.

Andy Globus shared his nearby flat on First Avenue with a Tucci waiter from Russia, Konstantin Avramov, a tall and prematurely balding man of twenty-seven with an oval face, brown eyes, a courteous manner (his father and grandfather had both been Soviet diplomats, serving, respectively, in Czechoslovakia and Austria), and a well-defined muscular body that he maintained by working out in a gym for two hours every afternoon. Konstantin Avramov had been born in Moscow in 1970, and at seventeen was called into the army, serving for two years and considering himself lucky not to have been sent to Afghanistan, which he viewed
as comparable to America's involvement in Vietnam. After being discharged as a sergeant in 1990, following the completion of Russia's withdrawal from Afghanistan a year earlier, Konstantin returned to Moscow filled with a sense of malaise and estrangement. He had no idea what he wanted to do. As a teenager, he had grown up feeling quite comfortable with the political system, and, while it did not encourage individual ambition unless it served the system's interests, he believed that the government's intent was to satisfy the basic needs of the people, offering job security and pensions and at least a modicum of identity with the awesome power and status of the state.

He had been raised in relatively privileged circumstances, he told me one afternoon at Tucci, recalling his comfortable and happy family and the fact that his parents and grandparents had often hosted dinner parties for their many friends and acquaintances employed within the government. His family and their guests took turns entertaining one another in their homes, never in restaurants, and he described his mother as a superb cook who planned the menu several days in advance of a party. He had always been impressed with her social energy and culinary creativity, her way of preparing traditional Russian food heavily flavored with Asian and European spices, which he thought had prompted within him a curiosity about people living in faraway places.

Konstantin's first job after leaving the army was as a trainee in a Moscow hotel owned by a Canadian corporation, and it was then that he began to sense that his country was beginning to decline as a superpower. Many of his fellow veterans and ex-schoolmates, lacking his family's connections, were unable to find jobs. “Nobody is offering us anything” was the phrase that he often heard, and there were also complaints about the high cost of things that had formerly been affordable and available. The grocery store patronized by his mother now had many empty shelves, and the dinner parties were quickly discontinued. A friend of Konstantin's began traveling regularly to Belgium to obtain luxury cars to drive back and sell to members of the newly emerging enterpreneureal class that was prospering in the wake of the national crisis. After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Konstantin quit his job at the hotel and left for Belgium to join his friend in the car-selling enterprise.