Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (10 page)

In the basement of the CIA, the fish kitchen was frigid, the red tile floor was damp, and the room stank of dead seafood.

Carlos spent the next hour barking at us, calling us sloppy and inept, informing us that we would all have points deducted, that our scaling techniques were abysmal, simply abysmal. He was such an asshole that Adam and I exchanged several looks of utter, incredulous disbelief. When someone would ask a question, he was withering with his contempt for our stupidity.

It took about twenty minutes for me to figure out that Carlos was acting. That initial class, I was working the squeegee and I slipped in a puddle. Carlos rocketed over and helped me up and asked if I was okay. He seemed genuinely concerned. Then he went back to being a full-blown prick, making fun of the soaked wet spot running down my calf. When I was mopping up later, he gently told me to stop, explaining that this was the fish room, that the floor was always going to be
wet and to take it easy. Then he screamed that I’d put the mop in the wrong place. He kept making marks on his clipboard. Acting or not, a deducted point is a deducted point.

Just wait, Carlos kept saying, until Chef Viverito arrived and saw the mess we were making.

I’d spent the night before and that morning frightened and resigned. I kept watching the clock and the slow crawl of its hands toward six a.m. Viverito was like a Godot that you didn’t want to show up. Something disastrous, something that would make you drink, was going to happen.

And then it was 6:00.

Viverito walked in the door looking utterly exhausted and pissed off because of it, but I understood why so many of the female students—and presumably some of the males—had strong reactions. He was a really good-looking guy: dark-haired, young, trim, and walking like the conquering lion of the fish world.

It was the “young” that truly hit me. This guy was not older than I was. I guessed we were the exact same age, or that he might have been a year younger. A sense of dread and a small trickle of shame over my age and my circumstances began to assert themselves.

“My name is Gerard Viverito. We’ve got a really busy week ahead of us, so I don’t want to waste any time. But a couple of things. One, do not
—do not
—be late to this class. Two, have your homework ready every day. Take notes. For God’s sake, take notes. I can’t believe how often I’m up here and I look out and I don’t see anyone writing anything down. That pisses me off. Three, your knives need to be razor sharp. And when you’re carrying a knife through the kitchen, you say ‘sharp, behind you’ as you go. Even if none of your peers care, I’m going to damn well find out why you didn’t let me know.”

He went on and explained the grading criteria, the basic day-to-day schedule, a lot of minutiae.

Then he picked up a fish. “Okay. This is an Atlantic cod. It’s got three segmented dorsal fins, two segmented anal fins. It’s got a chin barb—see, right here—a white lateral line along here, and green leopard spotting along here …”

He put the fish back on the tray he’d pulled it from and got another. He went on for about forty-five minutes, explaining the physical characteristics of different fish, and then he showed us how to fillet a whole one. The technique he used was meant for hard-boned fish, like bass, a technique called “the up-and-over,” and it was, he said, the hardest technique to learn. Cut from behind the gill plate through the head. Roll the knife, cut back to free the fillet. Slice down the back to the tail. Flex the knife over the spine. Finish by flexing the knife over the ribs. Make sure the fish is “swimming” to the right. Make sure the dorsal fin is toward you. Their eyes stare at you the entire time.

You need to be using your fillet knife and rely on its flexibility and the angle at which you hold it to aid in getting the fillet cleanly from the bones. If you do it wrong, the knife will pop out of the fillet’s other side.

All of us found a space around the island of worktables running down the center of the room. It was crowded; we stood shoulder-to-shoulder. We were each given a fish. I got the sea bass. I was close to getting the first fillet off without an issue when I angled the tip of the knife too high. The tip stabbed through the fillet and cut for half an inch downward. Something similar happened with the second fillet. But I pressed the seams of the wounds together and laid the two pieces on top of each other.

Viverito walked by. He had been circling the room, eyes focused on all our hands and cutting boards, like a shark, for the past fifteen minutes. He stopped at my board and looked down. He didn’t pick the pieces up to examine them. He just said, “Nice,” and walked away, suddenly stopping a few students down to berate them for doing exactly what I had just done. There was a tray on the other side of the room where the fillets were supposed to end up. I took them over immediately, feeling like a cheat and a fraud.

“You know,” he announced loudly to the ceiling, “it sounds as if most of you need to take your knives to the stone. How the hell do you expect to cut these things if you couldn’t slice a stick of butter with those knives?”

Later: “Anytime any of you want to come in after class and spend a
few hours cutting fish, you’re more than welcome. And, my God, some of you better take advantage.”

After we were done with the up-and-over we moved on to filleting salmon, which required a much more straightforward technique than the up-and-over. You needed to use your fillet knife for the initial cuts, then the solid, inflexible chef’s knife to remove the skin.

I started on the salmon and for some reason, started doing the up-and-over. Viverito appeared besides me.

“Oh, hi,” he said, with a superlative mockery in his voice. “Just for my own information: Why are you using the up-and-over on this salmon?”

I didn’t answer. I actually couldn’t think of what to say. After I kept silent for a while longer, he said, “When you remember how to talk and figure the answer out, why don’t you let me know. In the meantime, try doing it the way you’re supposed to.”

After the filleting, we were to remove the skin. When you remove the skin, the knife should be held perfectly flat. Viverito was walking around and then stopped at a vantage point where he could see us all. “Keep your knives flat,” he said quietly.

Then, a little louder: “Keep your knives flat.”

Another moment passed. He picked up a chef’s knife the size of a scimitar, raised it up, and started pounding the side of the knife on the steel tabletop. “Keep! Your! Knives! Flat! Keep! Your! Knives! Flat!” he screamed. “Keep! Your! Knives! Flat! Keep! Your! Knives! Flat!”

The sound of steel on steel with that much force is deafening. We were thrown entirely off balance. We stood shocked and staring.

“So please keep those knives flat.” He left the room.

W
HEN WE WERE DONE
fabricating our fish, we cleaned up and moved into an adjacent room for three hours of lectures: further points of identification; the history of cod and the routes of exploration the fish inspired; the pros and cons of farm-raised fish. Each day we’d have a tasting of different varieties of the same species: cod, salmon, clams, and on the last lecture day, we’d taste different caviars.

We all took notes, of course. And I found myself filling page after page after page, in an almost incomprehensible scrawl, trying to keep up with what Viverito was saying. I was in awe; the guy seemed to know everything. He could go off on long, long tangents about the history of fish farming in Hawaii, countless ways of preparing catfish or crab, the disgusting conditions of shrimp beds in Vietnamese rivers.

There was also a daily game of
Jeopardy!
He’d move alphabetically through the roster and we’d pick a question in a given category from the overhead slide projected on the screen behind Viverito’s desk. If you got it wrong, he went to the next name. You lost your daily quiz points. There were three slides’ worth of this stuff and it could be endless if people kept missing the answers. He’d go on until he proved his point or got bored. He sounded bored pretty frequently. Not with the subject matter. But bored with us as a group and the flubbed answers and the hacked-up fish. His eyes were always red, but if he fixed them on you, you knew you had done something particularly stupid.

The first two days were dense with spoken and silent recriminations. But fragments of the guy’s personality began to leak out. One of the class members, Dylan, didn’t show up after the first day. Viverito asked where he was.

Alyssa spoke up. “Dylan really wants to be here, but he isn’t the most ambitious student. He just … he needs to be more motivated.”

“So
why
exactly isn’t he here?”

Alyssa was a pretty seventeen-year-old, with a soft face. She looked distinctly uncomfortable right now. “It’s too early for him. He said he needed to switch into a later class.”

His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head side to side almost imperceptibly. He didn’t say anything for a minute until he began that day’s
Jeopardy!

Everyone was fucking the answers up—me, Adam, Brookshire, Lombardi, all the kids.

Finally, Viverito just couldn’t contain himself. “I have students that are really proud that they’ve never been into the library. They say it has nothing to do with cooking. My advice to you, and not just to succeed
in this class, is this: figure out where that library is. It isn’t just the building you went to on your orientation. If one day you think that you haven’t really learned anything that day, pick up a cookbook and teach yourself something. Otherwise it’s been a waste of twenty-four hours.

“Take a calendar and block off class time. Then block off studying time. Then go to a vineyard and learn how a grape grows, learn how it’s picked, learn how it’s crushed. How it ferments, how it’s bottled. Go on all kinds of mini field trips. And relate them to what you learn. When I went to culinary school, I always said ‘God, I wish I knew more about
this.
’

“Go learn so you have a basis of knowledge. We’re in the Hudson Valley—we’re at a great advantage. It breaks my heart when I hear a student say, ‘I’m so bored. This place is boring. There’s nothing to do here.’ It breaks my heart.”

Obviously, I knew exactly where the library was, but I stayed there later that afternoon and going forward. My homework answers were exceptionally detailed and elaborate. I spent even more time studying. It wasn’t for Viverito’s benefit, however, and not because I was scared of him. The more hours I spent around the guy, I found it harder and harder to stomach the idea of being the person who took the shortcut.

I
WATCHED MY BLOOD
trickle bright and red under the heavy fluorescence of the CIA fish room. The gills of a fish—a sea bass, in this case—are heavy, crude syringes, livid with bacteria. There’s nothing on them you want introduced under the skin. I’d been scaling the fish; I’d been careless—it was 6:15 and my alarm had gone off at 2:36 a.m.—and the spikes punctured deep into my thumb. I dropped the scaler to the red tile floor, stepped away from the sink, and barked an obscenity. In five minutes my hand would feel like it had been drenched in acid. Minute by minute the pain graded up. Before long, it was exquisite, total. My eyes watered. A little drum of nausea beat in my stomach.

Adam walked up to me, pulled my hand in front of his face, whistled, and said, “Prepare yourself—that’s going to hurt like a bitch.”

Since the cutting part of the class had started, most of my fillets had been looking like roadkill. I was at that second trying the up-and-over on an undeserving fish.

And then Viverito took a moment from his rounds to stand at my shoulder and ask, “What the hell are you doing?”

I squirmed, just a little bit. What the hell was I doing? I had a cold fish under my fingers, and scales stuck to my forearm. I had a knife in my injured hand. I’d just started cutting away the flesh from the bones. I was also so tired I couldn’t recall my middle name. I was angry, because I was so tired. I was full of ire at being made to feel uncomfortable, and, with this man at my elbow, beginning to feel frayed. My mind had gone tabula rasa; there was nothing there. What the hell was I doing? I went for honesty. “I don’t know.”

He stared me down. He was about six inches from me; I could feel either heat or hostility radiating off him. He kept staring. I noticed that his eyes were seriously bloodshot. I forgot completely about my hand. His lips pursed, and he looked like he might spit bile. His breathing picked up speed. He said, “Yeah—no kidding you don’t know.”

When this guy cuts a fish, the flesh seems to just swim away from its body. The bones and ribs are bare, and you can hear a chorus of mermaids and sirens singing through the mists. But I was the one cutting, and now he was glowering at me and all I could hear was the sound of everyone else’s knives. I shot a look around; I had never seen my peers as focused on anything as they were right then on their fish.

He began speaking a mantra: “Fish to the right. Fish to the right. Fish to the right. Fish to the right.” Every syllable was a drill right into whatever confidence I owned before class started. “Where’s your right hand?” he asked. I had no idea. My head buzzed with static. I moved a hand. He pushed it away. “No, not that right hand. Your other right hand. Come on. Oh, for God’s sake, come on. I said, ‘to the right.’ ”

I felt different emotive sparks start to flicker all through my head. I wanted to turn and grind the fish in his face. I wanted to drop under the table and crawl away. I wanted to fall to my knees, kiss his hand, and beg him to leave me alone. I wanted to cut the freaking fish
correctly. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to remember where my right hand was. All these things in turn, in reverse, simultaneous.

I started flopping the fish around. At some point, I must have gotten it right, because he walked away. My hearing came back. I heard him yell at someone: “If I ever see you pick up a fish by its tail again, I swear I’ll stab you.” And then to someone else: “This is a really easy technique if you know what you’re doing. Which you obviously don’t.”

My hand had reverted to a high alarm of pain.