The food was not bad. God knows we had enough cooks, plenty of equipment, and room to put it. Somehow, things got done, though I have no idea how; the place had its own momentum, like some rudderless ocean liner, captain and crew long gone - it just kept going, plowing through ice fields. Someone with a brain had designed the line: a sensible trough of water for pasta, with cute fitted baskets, ran the length of the range-tops, for easy dunking. Nice refrigerated bains held garnishes and mise-en-place, so that each cook had an artist's palette of easy-access ingredients at hand. Downstairs, a long bar curled around the dining room, serving a lighter menu of trattoria items, sandwiches, quick-grilled foods, cheese, shellfish. Outside, when it was warm, a long barbecue grill serviced the cafe.
I fine-tuned the menu, meeting with the Shadow for a few minutes a day, satisfying him by simply responding to his culinary whims. 'Bagna cauda? I can do that. No problem! Clams oreganata? Why not?' I had no delusions of chefly integrity or personal agenda where Italian menu items were concerned, so I was relatively responsive compared to my mysterious predecessor - and the Shadow seemed happy with me. In fact, after people started asking me, in hushed voices, what the Shadow thinks of this, and what the Shadow thinks of that, I realized that the three or four minutes a day I spent talking to him made me, in the eyes of everyone else in the organization, his closest associate - though I couldn't have told them, if asked, what shade his eyes were, or anything else. With six different things going on, the man was a blur - like Patty Hearst in those security camera photos from the bank job - perpetually in motion, always on the way out the door.
I wasn't really very good at Italian food. I relied on Dimitri for most of my recipes, though his experience at Mario's was almost entirely Southern Italian red sauce and the like. But I got by nodding at whatever high concept the Shadow had a hot nut for that week, my real value to the organization becoming apparent after I had finally had enough and cut loose the coke-dealing head of prep.
The Shadow and upper management were impressed by this. It showed frugality: the man was deadwood after all; he had been absent from work without explanation two Saturdays in a row, and truth be told, he couldn't cook at all. I'd shown balls, too, firing their coke dealer, and they kinda liked that. They couldn't have done it, as the bastard knew too much - and I'd shown real talent and diplomatic skill in the way I'd done the deed: the already financially comfortable prep chief was easily convinced that this showing up at the restaurant thing was an inconvenience, and a distraction from his real calling, and that he'd be happier reverting to his former lifestyle, scooting around New York's bars and nightclubs in expensive Italian automobiles selling drugs. When I sorted out the Rodriguez, García, Pérez problem, unloaded a couple of wise-ass slacker waitrons, and replaced some no-show cooks with loyalists from Tom's and Work Progress, the Shadow saw in me my real calling - which was hatchet man.
Not that I was happy with this mantle.
But I was off dope now . . . and comfortably sedated by methadone, I felt free to visit the service bar numerous times a night, so that I could pack my nose with cocaine. This gave me that lovably psychotic edge so useful for mood swings, erratic bursts of rage, and the serious business of canning people, thus saving my master money. Every day I'd wake up, lounge around in bed for a while, come in to work - where service was already on automatic full swing - and look around for someone to fire. I had, really, no other responsibility. Supplies were ordered by a steward. The cooks served the food, the same way they'd always done. Expediting was done by committee (although I did it now and then). I scheduled, hired and fired, and as we were greatly overstaffed, it was mostly the latter.
But I was not happy in my work.
Every day, having to look in some desperate cookie's eyes and tell him 'No mas trabajo aqui. . .' was taking a toll. Especially when they'd ask why. White boys were no problem; I could bang those goof balls out all day. They knew anyway, they'd been expecting it, amazed that they hadn't been canned earlier. But the Mexicans and Ecuadorians and Salvadorians and Latinos, who'd look at me with moist eyes as they realized that there'd be no check next week or the week after - when they asked that terrible question, 'Porque? Why, Chef? No work for me?' as if maybe they'd heard wrong - this was really grinding me down, tearing at what was left of my conscience. Every day, I'd stay in bed later and later, paralyzed with guilt and self-loathing, hoping that if I stayed in bed a little later, showed up a little later, maybe, just maybe, it would be me that got fired this time that I wouldn't have to do this anymore, that this whole terrible business would end.
It didn't. Things only got worse. Pleased by my cost-cutting, the Shadow and his minions urged me on to even greater efforts. When I finally had to start messing around with some loyalists' schedules, giving them split shifts for no additional money, and I saw the terrible look of betrayal in their eyes - guys who'd come up with me, some Egyptian cooks I'd trained from dishwasher -I could take no more. One day I simply turned to the GM and said, 'I quit,' and it was over.
I slept for three weeks. When I woke up, I was determined never again to be a chef.
I'd cook. I had to make money. But I would never again be a leader of men. I would never again carry a clipboard, betray an old comrade, fire another living soul.
I left none too soon. Gino's, in the end, dragged down the entire Silver Shadow empire, bankrupting even the family provisions business. Last I heard of the Shadow, he was doing time in federal lock-up, for tax evasion.
I was about to enter the wilderness.
THE WILDERNESS YEARS
IT is ONE OF the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off heroin, things started getting really bad. High on dope, I was - prior to Gino's - at least a chef, well paid, much liked by crew and floor and owners alike. Stabilized on methadone, I became nearly unemployable by polite society: a shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and corner-cutting hack, toiling in obscurity in the culinary backwaters. I worked mostly as a cook, moving from place to place, often working under an alias.
I worked a seedy hotel on upper Madison, a place so slow that the one waiter would have to come downstairs and wake me when customers came in. I was the lone cook, my only companions the hotel super and a gimpy dishwasher. I worked a lunch counter on Amsterdam, flipping pancakes and doing short-order eggs for democratic politicos and their bagmen. I worked a bizarre combination art gallery/bistro on Columbus, just me and a coke-dealing bartender - a typically convenient and destructive symbiotic arrangement. I was a sous-chef at a very fine two-star place on 39th, where I dimly recall preparing a four-course meal for Paul Bocuse; he thanked me in French, I think. My brain, at this point, was shriveled by cocaine, and I made the mistake of telling a garde-manger man that if he didn't hurry up with an order I'd tear his eyes out and skull-fuck him, which did not endear me to the fussy owner manager. I worked a deserted crab house on Second Avenue, steaming blue crabs and frying crab cakes. I cooked brunches in SoHo, I slopped out steam-table chow at a bar on 8th Street to a bunch of drunks.
For a time, I took another chef's job - of sorts - at a moment of need at Billy's, a combo sit-down/take-out upscale chicken joint on Bleecker Street. It was an operation that was to be the flagship of another planned empire, a chain of chicken joints that would stretch across the globe.
At this low point in my career, I didn't care if the place succeeded or not. I needed the money.
My boss was an older Jewish guy, fresh out of prison, who'd named the place after his youngest son, Billy, a feckless ne'er-do-well. He had been, in an earlier life, the head of the counting room at a Las Vegas casino, and after being caught skimming off millions for the 'boys back in New York and Cincinnati', had been offered a friendly deal should he cooperate with the prosecutors. He had, admirably, declined, and as a result spent the last five years eating prison chow. When he got out, a near-broken man, his old buddies in New York, being Men of Honor, set him up with this restaurant - with promises of more to come -
as a sign of gratitude for services rendered.
Unfortunately, while in prison, the old man had completely lost his mind. He may have been a stand-up guy, but he was absolutely barking mad.
This was not a classic bust-out operation, where the mob deliberately runs a place into the ground, using a front man/ straw owner to run up bills, then pillage the place for merchandise and credit. I think that the wise guys, who from the early days of start-up were always around, really wanted the poor slob to make money and be a success. They made earnest efforts to help at every turn, enduring much nonsense from their visibly deranged partner.
It was, in retrospect, a useful experience for me, one I relied on for later works of fiction. I'd seen mobsters around before, of course, but I'd never worked in a place that was out-and-out mobbed up, where I came to know on a personal basis real wise guys, whose names I recognized from the papers. Everyone was astonishingly up front about their connections. My boss was fond of yelling into the phone when discussing prices with a purveyor: 'You know who I am? You know who I'm with?!'
We did things differently at Billy's.
My cooks, for one: every one of them came from the Fortune Society, guys who spent their off-hours in halfway houses, allowed out only to work. I was used to working with a fairly rough bunch, a lot of whom, at one time or another, had had problems with the law - but at Billy's, every single one of my cooks was still basically a convict. I can't say that it was an unhappy arrangement, either; for once I knew my cooks were going to show up at work every day, if they didn't, they went back to prison.
And credit was easily obtained. I knew, from previous experience, how difficult it is to set up terms for a new restaurant; even getting a week's credit with some of these companies was usually a lengthy process, involving credit applications, a long wait, initial periods of cash on delivery. At Billy's, no sooner was I off the phone than stuff was arriving, often on sixty-day terms. Produce and dry-goods people who'd been loath to offer even two weeks at other places I'd worked were suddenly all too happy to give me all the time I wanted.
My boss spent a lot of time on the phone, investigating the serious business of horses and their bloodlines, and how well they ran in mud or on grass. Billy himself, at eighteen, was happy to drive his sports car around and chase girls. So my day-to-day was spent mostly with some genial gentlemen from an Italian Fraternal Organization. They helpfully told me where to buy my meat and poultry and how to meet the folks who would be supplying my linen, bread, paper goods and so on. I had a lot of meetings in cars.
'The bread guy is here,' I'd be told, and a late-model Buick would pull up out front. An old guy in a mashed-down golf cap would beckon me from the driver's seat and then get out of the car. The older guy in the passenger seat would slide over, indicating he wanted me to get in, sit next to him and talk. We'd sit there in the idling car, talking cryptically about bread, before he brought me around to the trunk to examine some product. It was a strange business.
Yet some things were off-limits. Trash removal, I found, was a mysteriously pre-arranged division of labor. When I called around for price quotes, told them who I was calling for, I was repeatedly quoted prices far exceeding the national debt until I called the company I'd obviously been intended to do business with. 'Oh yeah, Billy's!' said the voice on the phone, 'I was waiting for youse to call!' and quoted me a very reasonable price. I rang up a meat company, inquiring if they'd care to sell me tens of thousands of dollars of burger patties a year, and they gave me a flat 'No!' They wouldn't even quote me prices. I was confused by this until years later, when I read a Paul Castellano biography called Boss of Bosses, and recognized the name of the meat company as a business operated by another family.
And there was the Chicken Guy, who also met me in a car, and showed me samples in a trunk. When I introduced him to my boss, the old man bitched about the price, telling the Chicken Guy, in his blood-smeared white butcher's coat, that the price was too high, that he could 'just fly to fucking Virginia, buy the stuff direct,' and 'Do you know who I'm with anyway?!'
The Chicken Guy was not impressed. He spat on the floor, looked my boss in the eye and said, 'Fuck you, asshole! You know who I'm with?! You can fly to fuckin' Virginia and buy direct all you want - you still gonna pay me! Frank Fuckin' Perdue pays me, asshole! And you're gonna pay me too!
My boss was suitably chastened - for a time.
But he got wackier and wackier. When we finally opened, we were packed from the first minute. Orders flooded in over the phone and at the counter and at the tables. We were unprepared and understaffed, so the Italian contingent - including various visiting dignitaries, all with oddly anglicized names ('This is Mr Dee, Tony, and meet a friend, Mr Brown . . . This is Mr Lang'), all of them overweight, cigar-chomping middle-aged guys with bodyguards and 10,000-dollar watches - pitched in to help out with deliveries and at the counter. Guys I'd read about later in the papers as running construction in the outer boroughs, purported killers, made men, who lived in concrete piles on Staten Island and Long Beach and security-fenced estates in Jersey, carried brown paper bags of chicken sandwiches up three flights of stairs to Greenwich Village walk-up apartments to make deliveries; they slathered mayo and avocado slices on pita bread behind the counter, and bussed tables in the dining room. I have to say I liked them for that.
But when my boss, inexplicably, showed up one day and told me to fire everyone with a tattoo on my staff, I was faced with a dilemma. Every one of my cooks was festooned with prison tats: screaming skulls, Jesus on hypodermic crosses, bound in barbed wire, gang tats, flaming dice, swastikas, SS flashes, Born to Lose, Born Dead, Born to Raise Hell, Love Hate, Mom, portraits of the Madonna, wives, girlfriends, Ozzy Osbourne. I tried to put him off, explaining that we couldn't do without these guys, that the hardest-working, most indispensable guy we had - the guy who right now was loading trash cans with hundreds of marinating chicken parts in the cramped, stifling unrefrigerated cellar on his twenty-second consecutive double shift - he was a goddamn Sistine Chapel of skin art. And where am I going to find a convict without a tattoo? The Watergate burglars weren't, to my knowledge, available.
Things only got worse. He came in the next day, obsessing about gold chains and jewelry. My grill man had the usual ghetto adornments of the day. 'Where do you think that eggplantgot all that gold?!' he raved, spraying food and saliva as he talked. 'Selling drugs. That shit is poison! Mugging old ladies! I don't want that in my restaurant! Get him out!'
This was clearly impossible, and I sought counsel with one of the silent partners who, as my boss had become increasingly distracted and unpredictable, had grown noticeably less silent. He and his associates had started to attend management meetings.'You hear what he wants me to do?' I asked. The man just nodded and rolled his eyes, sympathetically, I thought.
'Do nothing', he said, and then, with truly dangerous intonation,added, 'Aspeta,' meaning 'Wait' in Italian.
I didn't like the sound of that at all. He smiled at me, and I couldn't help picturing my boss, slumped over a dashboard after one of those meetings in a car they were all so fond of. When things came to a head a few days later, my boss openly screaming in the middle of a crowded dining room that he wanted all the tattooed guys and gold chain-wearers 'Out! Now!' I told him to pay me what he owed - I was leaving for good. He refused. The silent partner came over, peeled off my pay and an extra hundred from a fat roll in his suit pocket, and gave me a warm smile as he bade me goodbye.
I don't know what happened to Billy's. It certainly never developed into a worldwide chain as my crazed boss had envisioned - or even a second store. The next time I was in the neighborhood, a picture framer occupied the space where the restaurant had been. What happened to the old man and his dreams of a poultry empire for his son? I can only guess.
I worked at a Mexican restaurant on upper Second Avenue for a while, one of those places on the frat-boy strip with the obligatory margarita snocone machine grinding away all night and vomit
running ankle-deep in the gutters outside. The place was owned by a very aggressive rat population, fattened up and emboldened by the easily obtained stacks of avocados left to ripen outside the walk-in each night. They ran over our feet in the kitchen, hopped out of the garbage when you approached and, worst of all, stashed their leavings in the walls and ceilings. Every once in a while, the soggy, acoustic tile ceilings would crumble, and moist avalanches of avocado pits, chewed chicken bones and half-eaten potatoes would come tumbling out on our heads.
I was reaching rock-bottom, both personally and professionally. I got canned from the Mexican place, for which particular reason I don't know; there were plenty of good ones - alcoholism, drug abuse, pilferage, laziness - I don't know which of these unlovely traits actually did me in. But I didn't mind; the rats were really bugging me, especially when I was high on coke, which was most of the time.
I worked in an all-Chinese kitchen for a time, squatting on the floor with my fellow cooks, sharing their simple staff meals of rice gruel, pork broth and fish bones each day, shoveling in my food with chop sticks and betting on how many plum tomatoes would be in a case in the day's delivery. I cracked oysters at a shellfish bar, watching as drunken customers gobbled jumbo shrimps without bothering to remove the shells - so pickled from booze they were beyond caring. I came to know actors, loan sharks, enforcers, car thieves, guys who sold false ID, phone scammers, porno stars, and a dope-fiend hostess who attended mortician school during the day. She came up to me one night at the shellfish bar, a blissed-out look on her face, and said, 'We did a baby today in school . . . and it . . . like . . . aspirated in my arms, man. You could hear it sigh when I picked it up!' She looked happy about this. She had a fetish for Con Ed workers something about the uniforms, I guess. And whenever they were doing electrical work or repairing a gas line in her neighborhood,she'd come in the next day singing the praises of the fine folks who kept our utilities running.