Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (6 page)

People were afraid of her. I noticed this early on.

She
had
mentioned something earlier, back in England, about an ex-boyfriend who’d supposedly “stalked” her. How Mom had had to call some “friends” to “talk to” the fellow in question. How there’d been no problems after that. Somehow I’d blown right past
that
flashing red warning light, too—along with all the others. Now, all I wanted to do was get her on a plane back to London, but it was like reasoning with a wild animal. She didn’t want to go. Wouldn’t go.

By now, middle of the night, she’d jack the volume on the TV all the way up and flick rapidly back and forth between news stations, raving about oil prices. Strangely, neither neighbors nor management ever dared complain. I went to sleep each night not knowing where we’d sleep the next, if I’d wake up in bed soaked with blood of indeterminate origin, afraid to open my eyes to find out if the girl had cut her wrists—or my throat. I tried, really tried to act as I thought one does with a genuinely crazy person: solicitous, like a gentleman—until one can get ’em safely back in the bughouse. But she’d dragoon people into helping us—strangers and distant acquaintances who seemed to like the idea of chauffeuring around a crazed heiress and giving her cocaine. She crashed parties, jumped lines, scarfed grams at will, a magnet for indulgent enablers, reptilian party-throwers.

“What does she do?” I heard one admiring bystander ask of another as my roomie bounded, gazelle-like, across the dance floor toward the bathroom—there, no doubt, to fill her nostrils.

“Nothing,” was the answer. As if this was the proudest profession of all.

Apparently familiar with her rapier wit, her way with a lasting cruel remark, those who knew her from St. Tropez, from Monaco, from Sardinia—wherever fuckwits and fameballs went that year—they cowered at her approach. No one stood up to her.

Maybe it was because they all hated each other. (It seemed the point of the whole exercise.) I soon found out that to move in this woman’s poisonous orbit was to willingly attach oneself to a sinister global network of Italian art collectors, creepy Russian oligarchs, horny Internet billionaires, the wrinkled ex-wives of Indonesian despots, princelings from kingdoms that long ago ceased to exist, mistresses of African dictators, former-hookers-turned-millionairesses, and the kind of people who like hanging around with such people—or who make their living doing so. All seemed to have come to St. Barths over the holidays in order to find subtle new ways to say “fuck you” to each other. With a smile, of course.

We spent a somewhat less than romantic New Year’s Eve at a party hosted by the Gaddafis. That should tell you something. Enrique Iglesias provided the entertainment. A detail that lingers in the memory like the birthmark on one’s torturer’s cheek.

Who had the bigger boat, wore the better outfit, got the best table seemed all that mattered. There were decade-old feuds over casual cracks long forgotten by everyone but the principals. They circled each other still—waiting to identify a weakness—looking for somewhere and some way to strike. People jockeyed for position, cut each other’s throats over the most petty, nonsensical shit imaginable. This from the people who, it gradually began to dawn on me, actually ran the world.

I was lingering over the buffet on a Dr. No–size yacht with the appropriately Bond-esque name
Octopus
: huge interior docking inside the hull, a six-man submarine, landing space for two helicopters, Francis Bacon originals in the crapper. I looked up from the sushi and got the impression that anybody there—any of the guests dancing, schmoozing, chatting politely at the party—would have watched my throat getting cut without the slightest change in expression.

By the time she lost her wallet for the third and last time, I was ready to dig a hole in the sand and drop her in it—had I thought for a second I could get away with it. But she spoke daily with “Mom.” And the option of simply walking out on her, leaving the wallet-less, fund-less, coke-crazy schizo-bitch to her just deserts, broke-ass in a hotel room from which I had every expectation she would be removed at any hour—this, too, I was uncomfortable with.

I also had a very real concern that even were I to do something as measured and sensible as simply walk out on her, what remained of my Caribbean sojourn might end with the arrival of two thick-necked fellows from Chechnya holding a tarpaulin and hacksaws.

I was a bad person in a bad place, with another bad person, surrounded by other, possibly even worse people.

The French, who administered this playground of evil, who serviced its visitors, knew their customers well and catered to them, accommodated them, gouged them, and fucked them over in all the traditional ways—and a few new ones. Sit down for a burger at a beach bar and suddenly the music starts thump-thumping and here come the models with swimwear for sale—or jewelry. It was a bottle-service world—meaning, you pay for the table, not what’s on it. Unless, of course, you’re like my companion, who had a way of looking confused at the suggestion that
anyone
would pay for
anything
—much less her. Fiftyish men with potbellies hanging out over their Speedos danced with pneumatic-breasted Ukrainian whores—during brunch. Over-groomed little dogs in diamond chokers snapped and barked at one’s heels. Waiters looked at everyone with practiced expressions of bemused contempt.

There was, however, one glimmer of light—or inspiration—in all this darkness:

One man on the island understood better than anyone the world my companion moved in. An artist, a genius—a man who stood alone in his ability, the sheer relish with which he fucked the rich. Let’s call him, for the purposes of this discussion, Robèrt, the man who took what might be described as the “Cipriani business model” to its most extreme yet logical extension. And a man whose example gave me, in some ways, the strength to endure.

The Ciprianis, along with a few other operators and imitators, made, a long while back, a remarkable discovery: that rich international fucktards like to hang out with each other and eat marginally decent Italian food—and are willing to pay outrageous amounts of money for the privilege. Better yet, all the people who want to
look
like they, too, are rich international fucktards will want to get in on the action as well. That’s the customer base that dreams are made of. If you go to Harry’s Bar in Venice, you get a pretty good plate of food—and the Bellinis are just fine. They just cost a fuck of a lot. But they do treat you courteously and it
is
Venice out the window—and everything’s expensive anyway. I’m guessing the Ciprianis figured out that if this model worked in Venice, it would work in New York. That maybe twenty-nine bucks for a bowl of spaghetti with red sauce is perfectly reasonable.

In New York, it is a cruel irony of Italian food that the more ingredients in your spaghetti with red sauce, and the more time and steps spent preparing it—the more it costs to prepare—the less likely it is to be good. (It will also usually be cheaper on the menu.)

Consider, though, a basic, authentic, “just like in Italy” spaghetti
al pomodoro
: a few ounces of good quality dry-cut pasta, a few drops of olive oil, garlic, some tomato, and a basil leaf. This will cost you twenty-nine bucks. And the drink that precedes it will cost at least seventeen.

Essentially, you’re paying extra for someone to
not
fuck up your food.

Many who gazed admiringly at the Ciprianis took things a little further, realizing that decent food was in no way necessary. Rich international douchebags and those who love them will happily pay those kinds of prices simply to be jammed into tiny, dollhouse-size banquettes, cheek by Botoxed jowl at Nello—or to poke at faux Chinese food in graveyards of the über-rich, like Mr. Chow and Philippe.

Add to the mix some curiously available Eastern European women who find low-riding ball-sacks distinctly fascinating? You’ve got yourself a recipe for success.

But Robèrt on St. Barths? He had it
all
figured out. He took the model where it should have been all along, cut things right to their very core nubbin of ugliness: you don’t have to have decent food. On the contrary, you can explicitly and with great care and determination, he discovered, serve shit. You don’t need a nice room, fancy tablecloths, flowers, or even Russian hookers. You need only a nice location (in this case, a wood-planked beachfront patio deck) and an attitude. Specifically, you need a reputation as an ornery fuck who doesn’t give a shit about anything or anybody. Then, like Robèrt, you can not only fuck the rich, you can fuck each and every one of them personally—one at a time, just bend them over a sawhorse in order, and roger them up the poop chute while they thank you repeatedly.

At his restaurant, for twenty-five euros (about thirty-five bucks then), one gets a few grams of cold, unseasoned, boiled lentils on a very large plate. Lentils. That’s it. About two tablespoons of them—with not so much as a carrot chunk or limp dice of onion to distinguish them from what some street kid with a skateboard and a Hacky Sack is eating right now in a parking lot in Portland. Probable food cost to Robèrt? Maybe two cents. Feel free to season with oil and vinegar, though. Provided complimentary.

For the main course, there is the option of chicken or fish. Chicken is one leg, which Robèrt himself (that’s him, the scowling, shirtless, and unshaven fellow over there, wearing an apron, shorts, and flip-flops) will personally burn into unrecognizability for you. Nothing less than carbonized will satisfy his exacting standards. Robèrt will take the extra step to ruin your chicken each and every time. People who’ve had the temerity to step over to the grill preemptively and suggest that, perhaps, this order could be a little less cooked find themselves quickly in the street—next to Madonna.

The fish option is a small, barely cleaned, whole red snapper, prepared with similar attention to detail—which is to say, burned to shit.

Price for these delights of land and sea? Fifty euros (about seventy-five bucks) each.

Add a chilled bottle of the cheapest rosé on the list to stave off the summer’s heat, and ameliorate, perhaps, the taste of campfire in your mouth, and you’re talking five hundred dollars for lunch. Merci—and fuck you very much.

And yet they line up, they beg, they try and bribe, they conspire, they whisper loudly into their cell phones, to friends in St. Tropez or Punta del Este or Rome, trying to reach someone with influence over the situation—so that they may visibly swan past less favored mortals and sit, triumphant, on the Patio of the Gods.

If, as the man says, “behind every great fortune there is a crime,” then, surely, many of these customers have sanctioned every variety of cold-blooded behavior in the interests of a few dollars here and there: relocating African villages, flooding valleys, gouging the infirm, dumping toxins down wells, and knocking off the inconvenient when circumstances require. But for Robèrt, they cheerfully grab their ankles.

And they don’t even ask for a reach-around.

It kind of begs the question:
why?

It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with since early in my career, when I was charged with the care and refilling of the trays and hotel pans at the Rockefeller Center Luncheon Club, where the Masters of the Financial Universe ate every daytime meal at our sorry-ass buffet of the damned. I wondered what might have compelled these people, who singlehandedly decided the fate of nations, the captains of industry, the fabulously wealthy wives of potentates, scions of old European families who didn’t even remember where their money came from, why would these people cower in the dreary confines of the lunch club—or fight tooth and nail, clawing over the bodies of their friends to eat truly awful, insultingly priced food on a shabby pool deck, abused by a man of no standing or station, whom, under ordinary circumstances, they would have set the hounds on without a second’s thought?

Why, for that matter, tolerate the absurd pretense and prices of Mr. Chow—or Philippe, or Nello, or Cipriani—when there are a hundred better restaurants within a few moments’ drive? What my horrible week on St. Barths taught me was that this traveling strata of mega-rich people, all of whom know each other, crave nothing more than the comfort, the assurance, that they’re going to the same crummy place as everybody else. Perhaps this explains why they all go to the same lousy beaches—usually narrow, pebbly, and unimpressive stretches of oft-reeking sand that would be unacceptable to any half-seasoned backpacker—and to restaurants that any food nerd with a Web site and a few bucks would walk sneeringly by.

Try arguing the virtues of Nello on chowhound.com, or a similar online meeting ground for knowledgeable food nerds, and prepare to get pilloried. So, why would people who can afford to eat anywhere obligingly allow themselves to be charged outrageous amounts of money for food that’s, on its very best day, mediocre?

A clue came to me on St. Barths as I lay on a chaise lounge, half drunk in the moonlight, various Gaddafis and their guests frolicking in the background. Perhaps it’s that they’re so ugly, these “beautiful” people. They wear the same ugly clothes, designed by the same misogynistic old queens—who must privately piss themselves with laughter seeing their older, richer clientele squeezing into these outfits…leading one to the observation that the style-makers themselves, the people who decide what the world will wear next year, who’s pretty, what’s “hot” and what’s “not,” are uniformly hideous beyond the lurid imaginings of Cub Scouts round a campfire. Just look at the guest judges on
Project Runway
or
America’s Next Top Model
—or at the front row of any fashion show—and you’ll get the idea: a dumpier, less attractive, more badly dressed bunch of customers would be hard to find outside a suburban Dress Barn. Rick James—in the ’70s—could never have gotten away with what Karl Lagerfeld wears every day. He’d have been hooted off the stage. If Donatella Versace showed up at your door selling Amway products, you’d slam it and double-lock it—before calling the neighbors to warn them.