Cooking as Fast as I Can (35 page)

The driver of the second car got out and came over to my window. He was a well-dressed Indian guy in a pressed shirt and nice slacks. Even with a few beers under my belt I clearly saw his expression shift from irritation to wicked delight. He'd come to collect my insurance information, but then he recognized me. He pulled out his phone and started videotaping.

All right, I thought. This comes with the territory. By then his girlfriend had appeared at his side to take in the show. Cat Cora, caught in the wild! I was polite. I'm a southern girl, even three sheets to the wind. “I'm being videotaped by two nerds,” I said with a smile. Okay, a drunken smile. “Who doesn't just want to go have dinner together. Could do something exciting with their lives. Really.”

The couple called the police and sold their twenty-seven-second recording to TMZ.

I was arrested with a blood-alcohol limit twice the legal limit in California, and pled no contest. I was sentenced to three years' probation and paid $2,386 in fines.

Not my finest hour.

You're probably wondering about my phone. Jennifer had marched home, hopped into the other car, and sped back to retrieve it.

twenty-two

G
etting that DUI was easily the most shameful moment of my life, but I've come to view it as a gift. It was a wake-up call. I'd needed to face my postpartum depression problems, tease out how much was hormones, how much was basic disposition. I went to a doctor.

They say you start going to meetings either because you made the decision to stop on your own or because you received a nudge from the judge. According to the state of California, and the terms of my probation, I was required to attend at least eight meetings within a certain time frame. I'd been to meetings before, so walking in and taking a seat wasn't hard, but afterward I was required to present my court card to the leader, and every time I felt myself flush with shame and guilt.

I felt like a total loser. I couldn't shake it. I continued going to meetings for four months after the DUI, and then our family took a trip to Italy and I started up with my few glasses of wine with dinner.

The conventional wisdom is that step one is the most difficult step, admitting that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable, and I know it has been difficult for me. Until you are able to stand up and say “I am an alcoholic,” you can't get well.

If only because it would make a neater, simpler story, I
wish I could tell you that I have stood up and shared, and surrendered completely to the process of recovery, but I'd be lying. I've thought long and hard about my relationship with alcohol, have remembered those long-ago days at Hinds Community College where I would get fall-down drunk most nights of the week, and also the days during the beginning of my career, when I would “cleanse” before a shoot, then guzzle martinis afterward, and also, recently, when I tried to soothe my troubled heart and ease the pain of a marriage in crisis by self-medicating with some nice Chardonnay, but I am not ready to surrender. Not yet. Right or wrong, the trauma of my early sexual abuse, the PTSD that resulted from having endured it, my ongoing anxiety that I'm trying to manage without medication, and the ever-present stress of providing for my wife and kids in a complex profession, has led to a habit of using alcohol to help relieve my stress.

The day is coming when this will no longer serve me. Drinking has become like screwing a porcupine—the pain exceeds the pleasure. I'm engaged in an internal struggle, one that is familiar to millions of others: Do I quit alcohol for good because I know I will be free and happy? Do I try just to drink less (and is that even a possibility?), or do I just pray that one day I'll be blessed with an epiphany and stop drinking altogether? As of this writing I'm going to meetings again, working the twelve steps with my sponsor. And, not surprisingly, I am happier.

Whether I continue on my current path, my drinking and driving days are absolutely over. If I could hop into the Wayback Machine, knowing what I know now, I have not a shred of doubt that rather than try to drive after Jennifer got out of the car that day, I would have pulled over and called a cab. The other night I had a nightmare that I was tooling around behind the
wheel with a cocktail in my hand, and I woke up in a terrified sweat. I never got behind the wheel with a single drop of alcohol in me after June 17, 2012, and I never will again.

I've also focused on getting my crazy schedule under control. Over the years I've said yes to everything, always aware that I was responsible for providing for six people, and fearful that if I said no, another opportunity would not come along. I've said yes, even as it took a toll on my family and myself. Now, after a lifetime of working to distance myself from the confused little girl degraded by abuse, working fiercely to show the world that I wasn't trash, but how accomplished I could be, how perfect, how iron, I've learned to let it go a little. “Being you is enough,” has become my daily mantra, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. I started taking time to evaluate each and every opportunity that came my way, no longer automatically saying Hell yes! to everything.

In terms of my marriage, I'm reminded of my response to Donna's tantrum over the broken vinaigrette all those years ago. That it was always going to break overnight. That was the nature of vinaigrette. It broke, and in the morning you reseasoned it, remixed it, and fixed it. That's just what my wife and I are doing, day by day.

We have made it to a place where we can laugh, just a little, about the dramatic events of the past few years. As they say, tragedy plus time equals comedy. I told her she was allowed one head shaving in our marriage, and she said I was allowed one DUI. Recently, I got a tattoo to honor the power of forgiveness and the hope I hold for our love. It's from Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.

We're having some friends over to dinner tonight. All the boys are underfoot, and Jennifer is at yoga, but will be home soon. She has finally earned that yoga teaching certificate, not in hot yoga but in a Vinyasa-based style called CorePower, which is more laid-back, in keeping with her essential nature. I'm proud of her and her accomplishments, as both a mom and a yogi.

Zoran, now ten, is helping me make the salad—Greek, of course, with off-the-vine tomatoes, feta, and glossy kalamatas. Caje is arranging crackers on a plate to serve with my roasted eggplant tapenade. Nash and Thatcher are irritating him by eating them as soon as they are perfect.

In teaching my kids about food, I've adopted the ways of my mom. They have to try everything once. I offer them options —“What do you think tonight? Are we going to have chicken or are we going to have salmon?”—and once we've decided, that's what's for dinner. Like any children, they'd live on pizza and burritos if you'd let them, but they also love artichokes, asparagus, and pork tenderloin. I'm proud of them, too. I think, no matter what else I've done in this lifetime, what mistakes I've made, what times I've let the devil on my shoulder lead me, even what good things I've achieved, these kids are the very best I've done. I got them completely right.

What's on the menu? Oh, I think you know. My
kapama
, still and always my favorite dish. I pat the chicken dry with paper towels, mix the cinnamon, salt, and pepper in a bowl, and rub the chicken with it on all sides. Mince some garlic. Heat up the olive oil. I put my head down and as the Greeks say,
siga, siga
, slowly, slowly, I begin to cook.

Acknowledgments