Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (11 page)

I began thinking more about acting. I know everyone has a role to play. His was to be the Idi Amin of this chilly, fishy Uganda-in-a-basement. He wore scales instead of medals. My role was to be cowed and terrified, and to grope around my guts for some kind of grace under pressure. Strike the last one. I got the first two down, though. I knew he wasn’t like this outside of the room. Probably. But for me and everyone else: what I was in the classroom is what I’m like outside it, only distilled. Ever done anything you’re ashamed of? Something rotten you surprised yourself with? You wonder how you could have sunk to doing it. It’s not so dissimilar to the feeling of seeing your masks dismantled and getting a good glimpse of the sun-deprived skin underneath.

I had a neighbor in New Hampshire, an older guy, whose lawn I used to mow when I was a kid. Once, he said this to me: “Jonathan, never try to teach a pig to sing. It frustrates you and annoys the pig.”

I was wondering if there was any point being in this class, any point being in school. Exposure to knowledge, to technique, did not mean you were going to pick it up, be able to put it to any use. There might be no point in trying to teach me to sing. But I still stayed after class was over, in the library, looking up the answers to the study questions and writing them down in minute detail. It was hard to write; my hand was killing me.

The next day, we took a break during lecture and everyone left the room except me, Alyssa, and Viverito. She asked him: “What do you do when you aren’t teaching?”

He looked irritated, then, all of a sudden, he didn’t. “I don’t know … I try and teach myself something every day. I work in my garden. If I
have nothing to do, I’ll spin a globe and stop it with my finger, and if I don’t know anything about the culture and what they eat where my finger’s pointing, I’ll look it up. Sometimes, I go and see music.”

People started coming back into the room. “What sort of music do you like?” Alyssa asked.

“I used to follow the Grateful Dead around, but, obviously, I can’t do that anymore. But I went and saw RatDog a few nights ago.”

RatDog: Bob Weir’s solo project. I couldn’t help myself. “You saw RatDog? Were they good? Do they do original stuff, or is it all Dead material?”

“All Dead stuff. And Dylan. You a Dead fan?”

“Yeah. I never followed them around, but I’m pretty fanatical. I always loved the Dead, and they were great when I saw them. But I came of age listening mostly to punk stuff.”

“Really? I grew up in DC, and I went to a lot of punk shows. I used to listen to the Bad Brains, Black Flag.…”

“So did I … I still do.”

“I saw the Rollins Band, Fugazi—”

“Me too …”

“Jane’s Addiction in a tiny club. Back in the late ’80s. They were amazing.”

“I saw them in a tiny club also. And they
were
amazing.”

He looked at me for a second.

“Yeah—I’m old,” I blurted out. He kept looking, then shook his head, as if he was trying not to laugh.

“Okay,” he said to everyone. “Let’s get back to shellfish depuration.”

And there he was at my shoulder again, just as a fillet came free from the side of a haddock. I put the knife down. He picked the fillet up. Then he picked the bones of the haddock up and ran his finger over the big scraps of meat I’d left clinging.

“Poor thing,” he muttered as he put the fillet back down. He made a scratch on his clipboard.

During lecture, Viverito stopped what he was doing and asked us, “Who’s going on Chef Sebald’s chicken slaughter this afternoon?”

About five of us raised our hands.

“You should all be going,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that chicken doesn’t originate wrapped in plastic. If you’re going to eat it, which I assume most of you do, you need to see what it’s really like to take those chickens down.

“Man, I have to tell you—chickens are dirty, filthy, disgusting animals. Those of you who are going will find out. But you’ll definitely learn something. And Chef Sebald—he might look like an old man, but when you see that guy maneuvering half a steer carcass, you know he’s no joke.”

A
FTER CLASS, WE ATE
lunch and scattered for an hour or so. We were to be in the parking lot at 1:00, at which point we’d meet Sebald and carpool into New Paltz.

I had changed out of my uniform into the grimiest, most ripped jeans I owned and a T-shirt I’d used all summer to paint in. I’d brought an extra, just in case I got sprayed with blood. I’d spent a long time the night before sharpening my boning knife on my water stone.

I sat on a bench at the edge of the parking lot with about fifteen minutes to kill. I saw my friend Brian walking up to me. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the end of academics. He was wearing jeans, distressed sneakers, and his white chef’s coat.

“What’s up with the coat?” I asked. “That’s going to get ruined.”

“I just realized I’d forgotten my T-shirt.”

“Are you naked under the coat?”

“Yeah. I’ve got no choice.”

I gave him my extra T-shirt. He offered to launder it before he returned it, but I thought of the shirt being covered with chicken viscera and told him it was a gift.

Adam and Lombardi appeared.

Brian was explaining that while we had started this block of classes with Sebald and meat, he was in a group of students that had started with fish, then switched to meat, and that Viverito had
been his instructor. “That guy’s the shit,” Brian said. He was full of admiration.

Adam got right to the heart of the matter: “What was the final like?”

“Oh, shit man—” Brian came back from his reverie. “It was pretty hard. You had to ID something like twenty or thirty fish and there was a hundred-question written part of the test. Also, do you guys have to write essays?”

I’d forgotten: Yes, we did have to write essays to be turned in the last day. “Well,” Brian continued, “he is not an easy grader. I worked my ass off on that thing, and I did just okay.”

Everyone looked at me; they knew where I’d come from. “Well, look—” I said. “You don’t know, I might not do so well … he might hate the way I write … ahh, screw it, I know this is where the GPA’s going to get resuscitated.”

“Did you guys know he’s set to take the CMC test?” Brian was referring to the Certified Master Chef Exam. Only fifty-nine people had ever passed the test; a handful of them worked at the CIA. President Ryan was one of them. Most of us knew about it from reading Michael Ruhlman’s book
The Soul of a Chef
, which followed the fortunes of seven chefs aiming to achieve the CMC title. The test lasted a week and most people failed; a lot more than fifty-nine have tried. The command of techniques you needed, the grasp of tradition, of pairing flavors and textures, of plating, the breadth of knowledge required—it was staggering to contemplate. But pondering the phenomenon of Viverito … of course he was going to take the test. Of course he’d pass. None of us had ever tasted a thing he’d cooked, but you just knew.

“That guy will pass,” Adam said. “No question—he’ll get the title.”

I was surprised to find myself suddenly feeling terrible. This guy—an actual peer—was capable of demonstrating a real mastery of something, demonstrating an excellence you could measure. I was partly jealous of his accomplishments, partly envious of his mind. And partly, what I felt was mournful. I had spent a lot of years in a drift. How strange to be pushed into direct contact with someone who had no
idea about wasted time. Or to be among people who weren’t old enough to have wasted any.

T
HE RIDE TO THE
farm took about half an hour, through the center of New Paltz, up along a steady slope to where the Shawangunk Ridge pitches itself straight against the sky. During the whole trip, gray banks of clouds hid the sun, spat down some rain, and retreated. The mountains are a dark blue and green; looking at them at that moment, they were so beautiful you understood why people will fight so hard to stay alive.

The farm’s dirt driveway cut through green fields, and a few yards down from the road a sign read
WELCOME CIA STUDENTS AND BROOK FARM FRIENDS
. For most of the ride, the four of us in the car had talked food, Thomas Keller and the cult of celebrity, run down other students we didn’t care for, and generally avoided the topic of killing. With the farmhouse in sight the conversation swerved down a darker bend; we made jokes that weren’t all that funny and laughed too hard at them. We parked the car, gathered the knives, and took heavy steps to the backyard.

The yard would have been big and open, normally, but this afternoon it was crowded with vehicles and equipment. As we walked toward a set of tables to put our things down, we passed a mobile chicken coop, presumably filled with the work at hand. A dozen or so feet beyond that was a fifty-five-gallon drum full of bubbling water on top of a propane burner, and next to it a cylindrical tube with finger-sized rubber pieces extruding off the interior sides and on the bottom. Nearby were a few tubs filled with water. And throwing their shadows onto the tables were six traffic cones upended and nailed to a crossbeam. I remembered the Clorox bottles from my twelfth birthday; I had a good idea what the traffic cones were for. Beneath the cones, someone had dug a trench about six inches deep. On this assembly line, no one part of the process was more than a few feet from another.

The farm was run by a husband and wife team. They were a good-looking couple, at the upper end of their fifties, or early into their
sixties. A lot of years of hard work had helped sculpt their faces. They looked a bit young to have been on the countercultural vanguard, but seemed more a product of the early ’70s; they’d probably done a post-Woodstock retreat back to the land; if they hadn’t spent time on a commune, I would have been surprised. If you’ve ever seen Robert Kramer’s genius film,
Milestones
, this was a pair from the cast three decades on. They radiated warmth.

Both of them shook our hands and thanked us in advance for our help. On one of the tables were bread and butter; suddenly buckets of freshly picked corn appeared. The wife and the husband dumped the corn in the bubbling water. Given what was set to happen, the idea of food and eating seemed lunatic. But no one else appeared to hold that point of view; the bread disappeared. People took corn as fast as they could. The wife was suddenly in front of me holding out a pile of it. “Go ahead,” she said. “It was picked and shucked just a few minutes ago.” What do you say in the face of this kind of hospitality? The corn was something to exult over—someday I hope I’ll have some that good again.

Here were all these people gathered together, eating, but there was nothing celebratory to the moment. The ambience was muted, stilled, with the tenor of a commemoration. A stereo in my head grabbed on to the line from Bukka White’s antique blues song “Fixin’ to Die Blues”: “Just as sure as we live, sure we’re born to die.” Over and over in my skull, as I tried to suck stuck corn from between two teeth. The wife said a few words about how the chickens had lived well, been treated well, and she read a poem she’d written from the bird’s point of view, absolving the killing because it was natural to die, and saying how the chicken’s short life had been a good one.

And then it was four in the afternoon, and the light was thick. Things began dying. By the coop there were two wooden cages. The husband took a few of us to the coop, crawled inside, and handed out chickens two at a time. Six chickens were put into each cage. The cages were carried back to the crossbeams; we reached in and each picked up a chicken by its feet and held it upside down—if held that way long enough, chickens go into a trance; they’ll fight you, though,
when you first try to turn them feet up. Once they were sedated, we drew them headfirst through one of the cones. Sebald spoke his softly accented instructions: Hold the head with your thumb under the chicken’s beak. Put the bottom end of the knife blade against the bird’s throat. Draw the blade across, applying firm, even pressure. The head should pop right off. All of us stood thronged together, knives in hand, waiting. The first bird went into the cone.

It was really coming onto fall now. I’d noticed a few of the leaves beginning to tint with color. My parents were getting a little bit older. We’d all see another winter, but only so many. We have a finite number of times to watch a full moon wax, to see it turn the topography around you a dusky silver.

The chickens had been brought to the farm as newly hatched spheres of down and had grown ineluctably toward this point in time. The farmers’ daughter, a girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen, had appeared. She wore ratty jeans and a green T-shirt. She still had her adolescence all over her; someday, when that awkwardness dropped away, she’d be very beautiful. She was keeping to herself, sitting off at a distance. The first chicken went into the cone. The daughter just broke. She streamed tears but wouldn’t look away. She sat with her arms crossed, weeping with more intensity. She’d helped raise them. She’d witness the entirety of their transition.

That first bird: a young woman from school was the first to kill, and it didn’t go as well as it could have. The knife seemed to stick; the bird freaked out; she responded in kind but got the knife through the neck. She had blood running down her cheeks and held the head in her hand. She was blameless; it’s hard for your hands to know what to do. In the cluster of students around her, I saw one of the teaching assistants from school, her eyes also shining with tears.

Most of us were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. I held my knife with a tight grip. Other students were reaching into the cages and pulling out the chickens. I watched people lifting the birds up, watched their wings flap frantically, heard them squawking, saw them being killed.

I love my parents and I want to live forever. I love my girlfriend. And I felt a wild surge of resentment move like electricity through me, angry that everything has to end. People I’d known or admired or were influenced by, pets I’d kept, family I’d loved. Jerry Garcia was dead. William Burroughs was dead. My dogs, Nigel and Cedric, were both dead. My grandmother, gone twenty-two years and still walking into my dreams, was dead. My uncle, too.