Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (9 page)

Nelly had taken over completely the running of the house. She paid the bills. Sometimes she’d ask me to contribute, other times she just paid them.

After class, I’d go to the library and use the reference materials to
answer the homework questions in exquisite detail—way more than I needed. When I got home, Nelly would often greet me at the door in one of her insane writing outfits—severely faded red yoga pants, clogs, a pink tank top she’d had since she was twelve, hair up high in a disheveled bun—and we’d catch up on the day. Sometimes she’d read to me from her novel—“Is it violent enough?” she’d ask—or describe dogs she encountered on one of her daily walks. We’d eat dinner, I’d study and then retire to the porch to sip scotch and watch the moon rise. Almost everything out of my mouth had to do with school or food. Nelly loved hearing the stories about Sebald and the other students, and we’d pore over cookbooks together planning future dinners, but sometimes she’d have to stop, lean in, put her hands on my knees and, enunciating every syllable, tell me, “We. Really. Really. Really. Have. To. Talk. About. Bills.” I was doing the occasional freelance article and bleeding the tiny amount of savings I had, doing my best to extend it. I’d usually deflect any household discussion, begin studying, and then make the first pour. I realized that the two of us only got to interact for about ninety minutes a day.

When the fall semester started and she began commuting down to Sarah Lawrence to teach her writing courses for three days a week, we saw each other even less. As the days passed, the nights got a little chillier.

I
ACTUALLY LIKED THE
studying, though. In an environment where a person gets to—is encouraged to—fixate entirely on food and its preparation, why would you not want to read and analyze Escoffier’s recipes? Or pore over Gray Kunz’s
The Elements of Taste
? Or let McGee explain the precise chemistry behind why an onion caramelizes under the influence of slow, steady heat?

At my age the answer is obvious. If I were the age of most of the others, or a different person, it might be a lot more nebulous.

On the way out of meat class one day, I overheard this: “I’m failing everything. I failed Gastronomy. I’m failing meat. I got a D in Product
Knowledge. I need to concentrate on my studies. So as soon as I’m done with this bag, I’m going to quit smoking weed.”

And then there was the eighteen-year-old kid who only ate hamburgers. I was sitting with him in the dining hall one day.

“So,” I said, “I couldn’t help but notice you really like hamburgers.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much all I eat.”

“Do you want to try some of this?” I pushed a plate at him that had foie gras mousse piped into profiteroles. It had been up for grabs on a buffet table when you walked in the cafeteria door. I was ecstatic when I figured out what it was. I’d eaten as much as I could from the plate. He wrinkled his face.

“No, man. That’s cool. I won’t like it.”

“Really? How often are you gonna get this? Try it.” I suddenly felt like my mother.

“No. I just want the burger. I can’t wait until they teach us to cook these things.”

S
EBALD TAUGHT US TO
break down chickens. We learned how to get the loin from the ribs of a pig and, further, to separate out the tenderloin. We learned to french a rack of lamb—to trim and expose the bone—so it looked really damned elegant. For some reason, I did well at that. I didn’t do as well at other tasks. All along we were to be studying the cuts of meat to be able to identify them on sight. I did find it insane that meat class was held for just seven days; butchering should be a constant for the entire time you were at the school, I thought. How could you possibly get a handle on it in such a short time? I tried to soak up everything that I could.

The ones in class who did the best—like Adam—were those who’d been exposed to this before and were now refining their technique under Sebald’s guidance. The rest of us had been tossed into the deep end of the pool, and I was just able to tread water. I might have known the answers to all the questions, but I couldn’t perform on demand, at
least not the way I wanted. I hoped these were lessons that would be reinforced later.

On the penultimate day of meat class, during lecture and before our trip to the meat room, we were having a ten-minute break. Most of the others ran downstairs to get a cup of coffee from the dining room or smoke a cigarette. Adam, Lombardi, and I were sitting on benches outside of the classroom, killing time.

Sebald came out and sat down on the benches across from us.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “I want you to do something. I work with a CSA [community-supported agriculture] farm in New Paltz, and next week, it’s time to go to the farm and slaughter the chickens for the members to pick up. I do this several times each year and I always bring a group of students with me. I already have a number of volunteers, but I’d like you to come.”

“So we’d be slaughtering chickens?” I asked.

“Ja
. There are about one hundred chickens that will be slaughtered. Have you ever done it before?”

“No,” said Adam.

“No,” said Lombardi.

“Yes,” I said. And I told the story.

The night before my twelfth birthday, I overheard snatches of conversation between my mother and father. I heard the words “an hour’s drive,” “Boston,” and “tomorrow night.” I puzzled over this for some time until I came to the single, obvious conclusion: Tomorrow night, my father and I would make the trek from our home in New Hampshire to Boston, which was about an hour away. I assumed that we would be seeing the Red Sox at Fenway Park; they were scheduled to play that night and I had been making some noise about wanting to see my first baseball game.

I was on crutches at the time, as a result of a serious sprained ankle. But I was beside myself, a prepubescent package of pure enthusiasm. This would be great.

Of course, it didn’t happen. We took a right out of our driveway,
which was not the way to go south to Boston. And we kept driving. We drove farther into New Hampshire, for about an hour, to the town of New Boston. We pulled off the town’s main road and drove up to a one-story concrete building with a green corrugated-steel roof. A sign in front of the building announced that there was a chicken-slaughtering class being held inside that evening, sponsored by the local 4-H.

Each student in the class was given a chicken and a knife. There were about forty of us, not one over the age of thirteen or fourteen. There were wooden posts running the length of the interior, and each had a Clorox bottle upended and nailed to it. The top and bottom of the bottle had been cut away. We were to put the chickens in and, on command, kill them. We only did one each, but I remember that one being absolutely surreal. I wasn’t able to make a causal link between the chicken, my knife, the Clorox bottle, and everything that came afterward.

And that’s how I spent my twelfth birthday.

Sebald thought this was hilarious. He laughed really hard. Adam and Lombardi, too. And then Sebald suddenly stopped, stood up, and clapped one of those massive hands on my shoulder. “Perhaps it’s time to confront your demons then,
ja?
”

Adam, Lombardi, and I all signed up to go and kill animals the following Friday. Meat class would be over, and we’d be in the thick of fish class—Seafood ID and Fabrication. But this was something necessary. If I really asked myself some tough questions, which I did in the days going forward, I realized that the truism was right: Unless you’re a vegan or hard-core vegetarian, if you are going to consume animal flesh, then you should kill an animal. Not just watch the killing and the flow of blood, not be an observer, but touch an animal and end its life.

The next day we took the final. I scored well on the multiple choice and fill in the blanks. I missed a few on the identification test, confusing a quartet of steak cuts that I shouldn’t have.

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE
it began, Adam had been apprised of who would be teaching the fish class, and when he told us, the tone of his voice swelled with portent and black clouds.

“We’ve got Chef Viverito,” he said, getting agitated. “The guy doesn’t play. He doesn’t fuck around. We really,
really
need to be on. We’ll be hemorrhaging points.”

I felt a wave of tiny, internal palpitations too. I knew about Viverito.

I’d been paying a lot of attention to anecdotes about the chefs. Most of those anecdotes were a bit dull. The stories about the yelling were de rigueur. Everyone yelled. It was simple shock treatment, and you expected a certain level of cruelty. But after analyzing the stories, I began formulating an idea that there were two sorts of screaming, or maybe, more accurately, two different effects the screaming and cruelty could have.

There was the basic motivation and aversion component. You didn’t want to be yelled at so you worked hard to avoid it, and when you were yelled at, you wanted it to stop. Elementary cause and effect. These sorts of reprimands rolled right off your back once they were over.

Then there was the sort of yelling and cruelty that made you ashamed, that left you feeling incompetent and gutted. You were being yelled at because you were falling far short of some crucial standard,
not out of laziness per se but because there was—at that moment—something you lacked. Or maybe even not at that moment, maybe something that was inherently lacking. The yelling, the reprimands, the loud corrections—it was accusatory, and the deep worry was that you would not be able to answer the charges, not then and possibly not ever. These were the sorts of screams that exposed nerves that we spend whole lifetimes trying to keep under wraps. This yelling was not malicious. It was mere declaration of fact. But it had the potential to stick with you for years, or a life. This was the sort of yelling we were all scared of.

I knew about Gerard Viverito, and from everything I’d heard, he was a commandant of the second camp. Not that he wasn’t an expert in the first camp, though.

Sometimes the two genres overlapped for devastating effect.

There was a story that circulated and had, in fact, been verified. When he first started teaching at the CIA, Viverito, like every instructor, was assigned Skills I, the most basic of the cooking classes. Every kitchen has three garbage bins: gray, for trash; yellow, for recyclables; and blue, for food garbage.

Viverito was a maniac about waste and would not tolerate it. During class, he would periodically inspect the blue bin to make sure nothing was being unnecessarily tossed. One day, he made a discovery: Someone had jettisoned several fully intact bell peppers and several whole tomatoes. It’s unclear whether he, at this point, called the class over to watch or simply went ahead with what came next.

While people were concentrating on fabricating their vegetables, the blue bin got upended in the middle of the kitchen floor. The volume of his voice was reportedly deafening; it was allegedly heard many, many yards down the hallway. The students were forced to pick through the detritus and pull out anything that was still usable. Viverito performed an on-the-spot cost analysis and determined that there was at least $20 worth of perfectly good produce. It was washed off and put on trays. Everyone had to get on hands and knees and address the mess on the floor. Then they were given a demo on fabricating peppers and tomatoes, and a long lesson on how the scraps could be utilized.

This had happened four or five years before I arrived at school, and I had heard the story at least half a dozen times. There were always some variations: people sobbing, the number of curse words screamed at the students, like that.

People were terrified of him. I hadn’t even met him, and I was. Once I learned he’d be the fish instructor and I opened my ears to the talk around me, I discovered that no other chef was the subject of as much discussion as Viverito. Other chefs were incredibly popular: Shirley Cheng, the Asia instructor, was elevated to the status of saint; Gerard Coyac was similarly revered, as was another fish instructor, Corky Clark. There were chefs who were despised and derided, talked about in obscene terms. But Viverito was unique.

He inspired strange reactions in students.

At lunch one time after meat class, we were sitting together and another student, much further along in the program, was sitting at the same table, but at a remove. Viverito’s name came up and when he heard it, that student looked over at us. “Holy shit!” he said, scrambling out of his chair, putting one foot on the seat and leaning toward us. “That guy is one tough motherfucker, a
tough
motherfucker! That guy is scary. But he is the shit. For real: Viverito is the shit!”

I spoke to a female student who told me this: “One day in class, he was demonstrating how to fillet a halibut and he used my knife. He started cutting, then he stopped and said, ‘Whose knife is this?’ I told him it was mine and he told me that I had done a great job sharpening it. I felt so good. I was really scared of him. I felt great.”

“Do you not get a ton of compliments or something?” I asked.

“You don’t understand—that was probably the best day I’ve had at this school.”

Others were of a different bent, but no less passionate on the subject.

“I fucking hate that guy,” someone told us at another lunch. “Fucking unbelievable dick. Total asshole.”

“How’d you do in his class?” I asked.

“He failed me.”

The first fish class was the eighth day, beginning with meat, that I
had gotten up not too long after midnight. I’d driven morning after morning from Saugerties with a head full of cement, semidelirious, my heart clutching, and coughing from too much caffeine. I’d drink the coffee outside, on the porch, under a spray of stars, listening to the whistle of the freight trains. I’d move pawns and rooks through the upcoming year, through the program’s end point, trying to figure out what I’d do when it was over.

And on this morning, I was laid low with dread.

We were there at 4:30 a.m. to start in on the daily tasks, of which we were provided a list. The fish refrigerator’s bins would need to be cleaned each morning and the ice on which the fish rested be changed out. The floors would get messy during this step and need to be squeegeed. There would be orders placed by different kitchens and each requested fish would need to be pulled from the fridge and scaled. Fish that were part of that day’s lesson plan would need to be gathered up and placed on trays so that when Viverito arrived, at 6:00, he could get right into pointing out the identifying features of the species and type. Until Viverito showed up, we were to be supervised by Carlos, a short, thick CIA graduate now employed as a teaching assistant.