Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (3 page)

I became aware again, as I looked around, of just how young so many of these people in the room were. I realized the attitude/altitude slogan was probably part of a talk geared toward people who hadn’t yet worried about paying for electricity and rent.

“Good afternoon,” Ryan began. He got a muted response.

“That was terrible,” he said. “Let me hear you: Good afternoon.”

This time he got the shouts and bellows. I felt faintly uncomfortable.

The next ten minutes were pretty much what you’d expect—he spoke about the high standards in the classrooms, the high rate of people who don’t continue because of the pressures of it all. He told us that the school only selected a very limited number of applicants. Thinking of Britney, I was a little dubious.

“There are eighty of you in this entering group,” he said. “This time, only eight of you have degrees so far. Of those eight, we have a number of career changers.” I slid down in my seat.

He went on: “What careers are they changing from? We have a law school student. We have a telephone sales rep. We have a magazine writer and a professor.” Two students across the aisle conferred with each other, slightly disbelieving, at that professor thing. It did sound a little off. He listed a few more occupational switches. And then began one of the strangest speeches I’d ever heard.

On the video monitor, the letters “CPA” appeared.

“CPA,” Ryan began. “Does anyone know what those letters mean? ‘CPA’ stands for this: carrot-peeling attitude. Does anyone know what that means? Anyone know what it means to have a carrot-peeling attitude? No? Let’s say you landed an externship at the French Laundry out in Napa Valley with Chef Thomas Keller. Everyone knows who he is, right? Now, if you get an externship there, what do you think you’re going to be doing when you start?”

This was about the sixth time I’d heard Keller mentioned that day. His name was used pretty much as a synonym for unparalleled
excellence, and it was invoked all the time as the program went on. The Muslims may have ninety-nine names for God, but at the CIA, there was pretty much just one: Keller.

“If you were an extern at the French Laundry, your first job would most likely be peeling carrots. A lot of carrots. Now, some externs would think this was beneath them. They’d think that spending weeks peeling carrots at the French Laundry was a waste of time. But, if you have a carrot-peeling attitude, this isn’t true. If you have a carrot-peeling attitude, there’s no such thing as a waste of time. If you have a carrot-peeling attitude, you’re going to make it your business to be the best carrot peeler the French Laundry has ever had. Why should you be discouraged if you’re asked to peel carrots, day after day? This is an opportunity.

“Try and see how many carrots you can peel in a day. And then the next day, try and break that record. Now, each time, you’ll want to go see whichever chef is supervising you and say, ‘Chef, I know you’re busy, but could you come and look at my carrots?’ He or she will always—always—take the time to look at your work if you show that kind of carrot-peeling attitude.”

You could hear the faint whispers of disbelief and, I thought, a little bit of scorn. People covered their mouths with their hands and spoke asides to their neighbor. They exchanged glances. Undeterred, Ryan, who had obviously given this speech before, continued.

“So now you want to keep trying to break that record. How do you track your progress? You make a chart. You have the days of the week labeled, you have the number of weeks you’re going to be there, and you fill in how many carrots you did each day. And you ask your chef, each day, to come and look at your carrots. Hang that chart above your station in the kitchen. And each time you break your record …” For one second, it seemed as if he was steeling himself. “Each time you break that record, you put a gold star for that day.”

The place erupted in audible incredulity.

“No, no—” Ryan said, holding up a hand. “Sure, you’ll get some
good-natured ribbing from your coworkers”—there were loud hoots and catcalls—“but they’ll
respect
you. They will! They’ll respect you!”

The guy next to me turned. “ ‘Good-natured ribbing’?”

I thought of some of the cooks I’d encountered in my life. “I guess either that or a good-natured shanking between the ribs,” I said.

Ryan went on. “And by the end of your externship, maybe you’ll have your entire chart covered with stars. And who knows—maybe, because you’ve shown so much dedication, maybe you’ll be invited to walk across the road from the French Laundry with Chef Keller and go to the garden they keep there. And maybe you’ll be invited to help Chef Keller pick carrots for that evening’s service. Wouldn’t that be something? Picking carrots with Thomas Keller?

“You’ll be the best carrot peeler they’ve ever had. You’ll peel carrots better than anyone else. The journey is the destination, people, the journey is the destination. And you’ll be able to use that attitude no matter what job you have in the kitchen. And if you do have that attitude, you can become the best at anything you want to do.”

The guy was, admittedly, a really good speaker. But the idea of anyone over the age of twelve being so meek and submissive as to ask a supervisor whether it was okay to put a gold star on a chart made me squirm. I got the point. I think everyone did. But you’d really have to be a special kind of sniveling bootlick to plumb that depth of obsequiousness.

That acronym, CPA, still showed on the monitor. And then we were dismissed.

Done for the day, I went back to Roth Hall and began walking down the hallways. I needed to see what was going on in the kitchens. I wanted to look at the students while they worked. I wanted to look closely at their faces and see if I could recognize something reflected back to me, a portent or omen that might indicate I wouldn’t fuck this up.

The hallways were dim like tunnels, the colors of the floors and walls both dark, and the ceiling was high above, almost in shadow.
Along the hallways were the kitchens, bright portals visible through glass windows in the doors, humming with motion, but quiet inside, nearly silent. I stopped at one. In the dimness, it almost had the force of a revelation, light and movement from another world. It was another world. It would, I found myself understanding, be my world too.

The kitchen walls were all yellow tiles; the floors, red tiles. There were workstations arranged strategically throughout the room, and a number of ranges, ovens, and sinks. The instructor was walking among the students as they worked. He’d stop and hover, dig among their chopped vegetables, hold pieces between his fingers, and shake his hand for emphasis, dropping them back onto the cutting boards. Some students were at the ranges, attending pots and sauté pans. The instructor walked to a pair of them and spoke. The students stopped what they were doing. The fire burned unsupervised under the pans; steam rose up from whatever was inside. They nodded at him and he kept talking. The steam was coming up thicker. I saw the students—one young male and one young female, brown hair coming out from under the back of her toque—eyeing the pan. The instructor walked away, and they scrambled to take the pan from the heat. The instructor took a few steps backward, keeping his front to the students, and said loudly to the group that they had thirty minutes left. He pivoted and was facing me. He was tall and thin, with a heavy mustache streaked with gray. I saw him see my name tag and he smiled and made a nod with his head and then swooped away to stand behind someone else at their station.

I fixated on one student who was chopping what looked like parsley; his knife came up and down, up and down, with violence and speed, and the metal caught the light in the room and the knife seemed to glimmer. He worked with complete purpose, and I felt something that was like a cousin to admiration and envy both. I watched him, feeling that sensation for another minute or so, until it was time to get to the parking lot, start the truck, and drive home.

I
DROPPED OUT OF
kindergarten, and I had no friends until I was six. I knew how to talk to adults, but not to others my own age. I was a tiny kid—bait for bullies. And the world was just about at an end.

We’d moved from some remote burg in the White Mountains of New Hampshire down to a small town bordering Massachusetts. We lived next door to my grandparents. This was during the autumn when I was five, and, because of the move, why I never finished kindergarten. I was reading already, so I was set to start first grade the following September. There were no other kids around; my sister was a toddler and therefore useless. I spent the year with books and playing by myself in my own fantastical hazes. I counted Charlie Bucket, heir to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, as a good friend. I took a seat around the Cratchit family’s Christmas table. Laura Ingalls was my first girlfriend.

Right before we moved, I’d undergone one of the great rites of passage. My parents took me to the drive-in and we saw
Bambi
. After Bambi’s mother was shot, our car was one of many queuing up at the exit with a weeping, hysterical little kid in the backseat. Around that time my mother had been supposed to die. She was bitten by an infected mosquito and contracted viral encephalitis, which cooks the brain and leaves you dead or comatose. I was called into her hospital room to say good-bye but I didn’t quite get it; I kept asking for soda. I
thought we’d be back the next day—which we were; my mother pulled through. It messed her up for the next decade, but she lived.

But the end of time was hovering over us. My parents are people of faith, and their faith is in a branch of conservative Christianity. They believe in the Bible, and they try to live it. They also believe that the end of things is soon, sooner than anyone thinks, a coming cataclysm. I lived haunted by the idea that time was short, that the mountains would melt, the dirt of the earth would burn, the sea would boil. There would be fire and blood and dying in the night, with wars raging and sicknesses eating alive the wicked of the world. Vivid sunsets sometimes scared me because they made the sky look molten. There were battles being fought in Cambodia, then Afghanistan and later in Beirut, in Latin America. I was sure that the momentum of the fighting would someday swing right into my backyard.

The town next to us, Nashua, New Hampshire, was home to the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Center for the Northeast. I was told that across the world, nuclear missiles were poised and aimed right at it. I assumed if it happened, if a missile was launched, we’d never know what hit us.

My mother loved my sister and me with everything she was. I knew this even as a kid and sensed that no one could ever love me like that again. And when the cataclysms and disasters split the skies into splinters, there would be no one to love me at all.

My parents are devout, but they aren’t Bible thumpers; they never spoke in tongues, and they were compassionate. They were interesting. They were interested.

My mother studied archaeology, and my father is an artist. He has a vested interest in human expression and every Saturday morning, he would take a few albums from his collection and give them to me: the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Hendrix,
The White Album
. I never got tired of hearing his story of seeing Hendrix perform in a gymnasium on Long Island.

When I was a boy, I remember an afternoon alone in the house, when I crouched in front of the stereo speakers in the living room,
playing “Gimme Shelter” over and over and over. It was the sound of the beginning of the end of the world. I was trying to prepare myself.

Almost every great memory I have of my childhood is set at one dinner table or another.

Discounting religion, we were as Anglo-Saxon as families get. My favorite days were Sunday afternoons at my grandparents’. We’d eat big dinners of roasted meats and potatoes and gravies and vegetables. My mother made beautiful Yorkshire puddings. My father made the gravy and we’d all sit—my parents, my sister, my grandparents, and usually one of my mother’s sisters—for hours at the table, from late afternoon until past dark. Everyone laughed a lot. Outside, leaves blew in the wind; wood sparked and flamed in the fireplace. Right then nothing was ending. Everything was as it should be.

As I got older, I still spent most of my time by myself. But I also started spending a lot of time with my mother in the kitchen, watching and absorbing. She explained some of the basics: how to cut butter into flour to make biscuits; how to cream butter and sugar to make cookies; how to fry an egg. I applied myself and learned quickly. We always had a steady supply of cookies on hand, or biscuits, and we ate a lot of my fried eggs.

My mother let me move on to roasting chickens and pieces of beef. She gave me her Yorkshire pudding recipe, and my father showed me how he made his gravy, pouring boiling water over the drippings in the bottom of a pan, making a paste of flour and cold water, stirring it into the liquid, simmering it and skimming.

I was in love with every moment spent in that kitchen, over the old electric stove, its glowing metal coils bent and listing. I loved every inch of the white countertop and its divots and burns.

When I wasn’t cooking, I was reading, and this fueled my cooking even more. I wanted to taste what my book friends tasted. Bilbo Baggins and company roasted a leg of mutton on a spit over an open flame; I made do with a leg of lamb in the oven. Mrs. Ingalls made corncakes with molasses for her family so I tried that, too (the corncakes were okay; with the molasses, they tasted awful). I read and
reread
A Christmas Carol
and, one Christmas way before my voice changed, I roasted a goose. Before the age of thirteen, I did at least half the family dinners every week. My parents bought me a cloth toque that I proudly wore every time I worked in the kitchen. I must have looked ridiculous.

W
HEN
I
WAS A
teenager, a girl I was in love with played me all sorts of underground music. The first few cacophonous Sonic Youth records, Black Flag, the Bad Brains, Einstürzende Neubauten. I fell for this stuff in all its extremes—music for a personal apocalypse. I became obsessed with the Grateful Dead. I had no idea what anyone was talking about when they described the Dead as full of warmth and peace. I had never heard music that dark, dazed, and knowing. It was on a nice continuum to everything else I listened to—a more measured chaos.