Liquor

  Though he’d never admit it to Rickey, G-man had actually liked their stint at Reilly’s, the stodgy old hotel restaurant, better than their apocalyptic years at the Peychaud Grill. Rickey loved the Peychaud because that was where he had truly become a hardcore cook. He’d always wanted to be hardcore, but he hadn’t really known how until Chef Paco took his methods apart and said No, this is how you cook. It was the best kitchen they’d ever worked in, but after-hours life at the Peychaud was exhausting almost beyond endurance, even for a couple of healthy young men who’d learned how to drink and smoke pot before they knew how to drive a car. G-man often found himself thinking nostalgically of Reilly’s, where the work was hard but predictable, where the crew was amiable but not close. They’d gone home when their shifts were done; there had been time to talk, have sex, or just lie around together, things hard to come by when they still lived with their parents. At the Peychaud Grill these activities became catch-as-catch-can, all but lost in a haze of bourbon, beer, bud, and blow. G-man was almost glad when the place imploded. Rickey wasn’t glad, but G-man could see that he wasn’t surprised either; the Peychaud had always had the feel of a juggernaut gathering steam for its own destruction.

  Since then, life had been good. Sometimes they were broke, sometimes they were tired, but they had a nice time together. G-man supposed “nice” would never be good enough for Rickey. He had that restless spirit that had lured him off to New York, made him love the Peychaud Grill, and now convinced him he could open his own restaurant on the strength of one crazy-genius idea. Well, hell, maybe he could. If he did, then G-man would be his sous chef. Maybe Rickey wasn’t always fair to him, but Rickey made him happy. He wanted Rickey to be happy too, and Rickey would never be happy as long as he was bored. G-man got up, pulled on a pair of pants, and went to the kitchen.

  From the looks of it, Rickey intended to make enough cheese straws to supply every wedding reception, confirmation, and bar mitzvah in New Orleans for the next month. He had two sheet pans in the oven and a big plastic-wrapped wad of dough chilling in the fridge, and he was kneading handfuls of grated Cheddar into another batch of dough as G-man came in.

  “You really think Anthony’s stupid?” said G-man, parking himself at the table.

  At first he didn’t think Rickey was going to answer. Then Rickey shrugged and said grudgingly, “I don’t think he’s the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

  “Maybe that’s why he’s letting us take over his kitchen.”

  Rickey laughed. G-man could tell he was trying not to, but they had never been able to stay mad at each other for very long. “I shouldn’t have said that shit to you,” Rickey admitted. “About working for other people. I don’t really believe it. I’m just freaked out.”

  “I know you are. It’s OK.”

  Rickey set a plate of hot, golden cheese straws on the table. They sat there munching, not saying anything for a while, glad that things were comfortable between them again.

  “These are really good,” said G-man. “Did you do something different?”

  “That’s why I made so many. I put a couple tablespoons of cognac in this batch. The ones in the fridge have bourbon, and for the next batch I was gonna try rum.”

  “Rum?” said G-man doubtfully.

  “Sure, why not? I figure it’ll make ’em kinda sweet. If they suck, hey, we got plenty more.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I didn’t mean to make so many, but I don’t know if I can sleep. I can’t stop thinking about Lenny and Mike and Anthony B and all these fuckers …”

  “Hang on. I got a surprise for you.” G-man went into the bedroom, removed a choupique caviar tin from the top dresser drawer, and returned to the kitchen. He opened the tin to reveal a wooden dugout pipe and a single fragrant bud of sinsemilla.

  “Sweetheart! You been holding out on me. Where’d you get that?”

  “Laura gave it to me on Saturday night. I decided to save it for a time of need.”

  “This is a time of need, all right. Let’s fire it up.”

  “Sure you wouldn’t rather make a few more cheese straws?”

  “Blow me.”

  “Later.”

  G-man crumbled part of the bud into the bowl, and they sat at the table passing it back and forth, taking deep lungfuls of the sweet, relaxing smoke. Rickey rested an elbow on the table, propped his head on his hand, and closed his eyes, smiling. G-man thought he might be asleep until he said, “You really think we ought to take money from Lenny?”

  “I think we ought to consider it.”

  “You don’t think he wants to rip us off?”

  “I don’t think we have to let him.”

  “You think—”

  “I think we ought to get some sleep and talk about it tomorrow,” said G-man, and they did.

  Lenny Duveteaux shrugged off a white bathrobe as thick and soft as Chantilly cream, turned on the whirlpool jets, and stepped into his sunken tub. His springy, abundant body hair formed dark whorls on his skin as he lowered himself into the water. He reached for his glass of Chateau d’Yquem—a 1985, not the best year he’d ever had but pretty damn good—and rolled the complex golden wine around in his mouth as he thought about all the money he and these kids were going to make off each other.

  They didn’t have a clue, not yet. They knew they’d be lucky just to get a restaurant off the ground; even Rickey didn’t understand the full potential of his idea. When Lenny first came to New Orleans, he’d been shocked by how much people drank. Three-martini lunches had gone out with the eighties elsewhere. Here, no one raised an eyebrow if you had four. The absorption of large amounts of alcohol was as much a part of the culture as the splashy Catholicism, the three seasons of sweltering heat, the after-school streets alive with young black boys blowing sour notes on rented trumpets. People here loved to drink, and they loved to have fun when they drank; they filled the bars and toasted each other across the tables and nattered about the Saints, politics, what they had eaten for lunch, what they were going to eat for dinner. They were absolutely primed for a restaurant like the one Rickey wanted to start.

  When Anthony B first told him about the idea, Lenny was doubtful. He’d dragged Anthony to the Gold Club one night, and while Anthony stared nervously at the acres of tanned, spangled, naked flesh swirling about the place, Lenny sipped cognac and bitched about the moribund state of the New Orleans restaurant scene. He didn’t even mean it; he was just pissed because no one had ordered the gorgeous Kumamoto oysters he’d had on special at Crescent that night. “Nobody wants to try anything new,” he complained. “You people are perfectly happy eating the same shit you ate in 1840.”

  “Aw, I’m not so sure of that,” Anthony had said. “I know a couple kids who got a real good idea—but no money to do anything about it.”

  Lenny listened to the idea and immediately recognized its genius. “They’re good cooks?” he said. “They’re not a couple of shoemakers?”

  “What’s a shoemaker?” asked the stunning young woman who sat close beside Lenny in the leatherette booth, absently tracing designs on his knee with one gold-lacquered, talonlike nail.

  “A bad cook,” Lenny told her. “A cook who doesn’t give a shit about the food.”

  “Really? Why they call it that?”

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  “I do,” Anthony surprised him by saying. “You ever heard of Willie Shoemaker?” The stripper—who was all of twenty-two—looked blank, but Lenny nodded. “He was a great jockey, but he made one granddaddy of a mistake in his career. He was on Gallant Man in the ′57 Derby, and somehow or other he mistook the sixteenth pole for the finish line. Stood up in the stirrups and threw the race—Iron Liege won by a nose.”

  “What’s that got to do with bad cooks?” asked Lenny, fascinated.

  “Well, the way I heard it, this chef had bet his paycheck on Gallant Man. Lost it all and never forgave the jock. From then on, every time one of his cooks screwed something up, the chef w
ould yell ‘Shoemaker!’ I guess it just spread. Anyway, no, Rickey and G ain’t shoemakers—they’re real good cooks.”

  Lenny had no idea if the Willie Shoemaker tale was true, but it was the kind of story New Orleanians loved to tell in bars. He made a mental note of the young cooks’ names and tracked Rickey down at Escargot’s.

  Though he knew they were suspicious of his motives, Lenny had been impressed with them, and particularly with Rickey. There was a young man who wasn’t going to let much of anything turn him aside from his goal. G-man lacked that intensity, but it was obvious that he would do whatever Rickey wanted him to, and Lenny suspected he was a stabilizing influence on Rickey. Also, for a couple of nobody line cooks, they had charisma. People sneered at the idea that a chefs personality should factor into a restaurant’s success or failure, but Lenny knew it was important.

  Lenny didn’t kid himself about his basic abilities. He could cook, but there were better chefs in New Orleans, and most of them weren’t doing half the business he did. Lots of potential customers were intimidated by their own ideas of fine dining. They thought the menu would be in French, they wouldn’t know which fork to use, they’d be scorned by highfalutin maître d’s. If they saw the chef on TV acting like a regular guy, even poking a little fun at his own reputation, they were more likely to come. He didn’t plan to put Rickey and G-man on TV just yet, but he thought people would like them. They were personable, good-looking, even reasonably well-spoken for a couple of kids who’d grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward. They said “dis” and “dat” and “ax a question” and “t’row out da gawbage,” but that was OK in the restaurant world; people still saw chefs as essentially blue-collar, though tinged with a glamour they hadn’t had when Lenny was coming up.

  People tended to assume Lenny was a culinary school graduate, as if anyone who’d gotten so far in the competitive restaurant world must have a degree. He didn’t. Like Rickey and G-man, he’d begun cooking in his teens. The summer after high school, he got a pantry job at the Schooner, a busy seafood joint in Portland. At first he just made salads and did prep work, deveining shrimp, separating curly parsley into sprigs to garnish plates, slicing thousands and thousands of lemons. The chef-owner, Jerome McElroy, understood the necessity of catering to tourists but had a secret yen for the exotic. In the off-season, he’d make things like lobster terrine and Provençal fish stew. Lenny was so interested in these flights of fancy that Chef Jerome took a liking to him. The chef moved him to the hot line and occasionally let him make a dinner special. Lenny began to get his chops.

  He stayed at the Schooner for four years, eventually becoming one of Chef Jerome’s three sous chefs. The others were a waste case named Seth and a twenty-year-old girl named Diane. Lenny was the best of the three; Chef Jerome always scheduled him for the busiest nights and gave him more creative control than the other two. At the beginning of Lenny’s fifth year there, Chef Jerome started talking about making him a partner in the restaurant. For a thousand dollars, Chef said, Lenny could have a ten percent share. It wasn’t much money, but Chef was in his late forties, single and childless, and hoping to retire by the time he hit fifty-five. He was looking for someone he trusted to take over someday.

  Lenny got some of the money from his parents and scraped together the rest. Chef Jerome promised him they’d draw up the legal papers soon. Lenny kept working the line, secure in the belief that he’d soon be part owner of a restaurant. He really thought he had it made.

  One day the crew showed up for work to find the doors locked. Calls went unanswered. Everybody was owed at least a week’s pay, and of course Chef Jerome had Lenny’s thousand dollars. Diane, the sous chef, was gone too. It transpired that Chef had been sleeping with her for several months, she was pregnant, and they’d last been seen boarding a lobster boat rumored to do a brisk business running bales of marijuana to and from Canada. The Schooner turned out to be heavily mortgaged. There was even a lien on the property that Lenny hadn’t known about.

  No one ever got paid, and Lenny never heard from Chef Jerome again. One night he and Seth the waste case went out drinking, did a bunch of coke, wrote “THIEVING SCUM” on a sweet potato with Magic Marker, and hurled the makeshift missile through one of the Schooner’s big plate-glass windows. It was a pointless act of vandalism that Lenny never regretted, since it got most of the anger out of his system. He understood that the chef had been completely unhinged by sex with a twenty-year-old, and that the twenty-year-old would leave him broke, alone, and in Canada. Lenny couldn’t even stay angry at Diane: he’d seen what women cooks had to put up with working in kitchens dominated by men who didn’t appreciate female encroachment on their turf.

  He didn’t hate Chef Jerome or Diane. Lenny liked to think he was incapable of such an unproductive emotion as hate. What bothered him, and soon came to obsess him, was the fact that he had fallen for it. He couldn’t stand the thought that someone had tricked him and gotten away with it. Since he’d stupidly let the chef slide by without signing the papers that would give him part ownership of the Schooner, there was no proof that Lenny had ever had any rights at all. He was tormented by the memory of certain phone conversations in which he and Chef Jerome had discussed the deal. If only he had a record of those conversations, he would have proof. The fact that there was nothing left worth proving seemed beside the point. The ideal thing would be to have one’s entire life on tape. When someone tried to lie to you or fuck you over, you could just rewind to the relevant part and prove them wrong.

  All these years later, Lenny thought of Chef Jerome with something resembling fondness. After all, the guy had taught him almost everything he knew about cooking. Lenny went into the Schooner a scared pantry bitch and came out a roller. He’d found that most cooks had a similar figure in their past, someone who’d given them permission to be serious about food. Rickey’s had been Paco Valdeon of the Peychaud Grill; it was obvious when Rickey talked about the guy.

  Lenny knew Rickey didn’t trust him, and there was no reason Rickey should, not yet. Lenny wouldn’t have been as impressed with someone who trusted him right away. That would come in time, though, and they’d all make a lot of money, and the balance of righteousness would come that much closer to being restored.

  He drained his wineglass, reached over to the faucets, and turned on the water as hot as it would go. He put his hand under the gushing stream and held it there, kitchen-callused palm taking the heat but not feeling the pain. Lenny knew people called him the Nixon of the New Orleans restaurant world, but he believed he had far more in common with G. Gordon Liddy.

  chapter 6

  Asubtle, musky perfume filled the kitchen of the Apostle Bar. Rickey stood looking at a ramekin full of uncooked white rice in which three knobbly grayish-black objects were half buried. One was the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the other two slightly smaller. He’d found the ramekin sitting on the counter when he and G-man arrived for their shift a few minutes ago. Rickey poked at the rice with his forefinger, and the fragrance intensified, making his mouth water.

  G-man came in from the storage room buttoning his white jacket. “What’s that?”

  “Black truffles.”

  “You’re kidding. Dried?”

  “No, fresh.”

  G-man let out a low whistle. “That’s like two hundred dollars’ worth of truffles, maybe a little less if Anthony got a deal. Lenny must have warned him about our meeting.”

  “He’s gonna have to do more than buy me truffles if he wants me to stop being pissed at him.” Rickey leaned over the ramekin and stirred the rice again, inhaling deeply. “Damn, they’re nice, though.”

  “So what you want to make?”

  “Don’t know. A potato cake Périgord, maybe, or some kind of bruschetta …”

  They had stashed some of their cookbooks in the Apostle Bar’s kitchen and were flipping through these when Anthony came in. “Hey, guys.”

  “Where y’at, Anthony,” said G-man. Rickey muttered something and buried
his nose in Richard Olney’s The French Menu Cookbook.

  “Rickey, how you like them truffles?”

  “They’re real nice.” Rickey didn’t look up.

  “I thought you’d like to have ’em for your first night. They’re flown in fresh from Italy.”

  “Gee, Anthony, I never would have known that. Thanks a lot for telling me.”

  “I guess you’re pretty upset about Lenny, huh?”

  “I’m not upset about Lenny.”

  Anthony looked relieved. “You ain’t? That’s good.”

  “No. I’m upset about your big fat fucking mouth!”

  “Aw, jeez, Rickey, I’m sorry. I knew you’d be mad. I didn’t even mean to say nothing to him—we were just out drinking one night and—”

  Rickey picked up his cookbook and left the kitchen.

  “He’s really mad, huh?” Anthony said sadly.

  “He’ll get over it.”

  Once Anthony was busy in the stockroom, Rickey came back with his recipe picked out. “Richard Olney has these sausages with cognac. He says it’s traditional to serve them with oysters on the half shell.” He unclamped the small meat grinder from the countertop and put it in the reach-in to chill, which would improve the texture of the forcemeat.

  “Cool. I think I’m gonna do risotto balls with lemon vodka. We can serve them with some kinda dipping sauce.”

  “Can you prep up while I go get some hog casings for my sausages?”

  “Sure, I got it under control.”

  “Anthony!” yelled Rickey. “Let me use your car … Where the fuck is he?”

  “He always leaves the keys by the register.”

  “You want anything at Zanca’s?”

  “Yeah, pick me up some nice black olives. I’ll do a tapenade.”

  “You got it.”

  Rickey left, and G-man set up their mise-en-place, the arrangement of ingredients and supplies that would take them through the night. Then he picked up his clipboard and examined a copy of the prep list. To someone who had never worked in a kitchen, this would appear to be—and was, really—written in a strange code. The various items could be checked, circled, double-circled, question-marked, exclamation-pointed, or crossed off altogether, depending on what needed to be done that day. Also on the clipboard were a photocopied order sheet, a list of purveyors’ names and phone numbers, a sheaf of blank paper for notes, and a copy of the Apostle Bar menu that would make its debut tonight.