Life, on the Line (54 page)

“Count backward from ten,” I heard Dr. Klock say, and I was out.

I felt some rustling of the covers over me and I started to dream that my boys were jumping on me while I was in bed. Slowly the noises became clearer and I could make out adult voices.

“Grant? Are you awake? Can you open your eyes?”

The room at first seemed black and white and full of moving shadows, but it slowly became clearer and colors began to appear. Dr. Blair's voice registered, and as my eyes flickered open I remembered where I was and why I was there. “Can you speak to me?” she asked once my eyes opened.

“How did it go?” I tried to say, but the words wouldn't form. She knew what I was asking.

She leaned over me while grasping my hand and whispered into my ear, “It's clean. It looks good, Chef.”

 

I went into the recovery room and Grant was awake. I was shocked that the skinny guy who was wheeled into surgery suddenly looked like he had gained thirty pounds. He was swollen, bloodied, and had a tube hanging out of the back of his head. But he was aware. And the ordeal was over. He headed home the next morning.

Three days later I walked into the Alinea kitchen to see Grant standing at his station with the tube still hanging out of his head. I was fairly shocked to see him, though not surprised. “Hey, Skeletor,” I said, grabbing his elbow while he worked, “you think the health department thinks it's a good idea to be working with a head drain in?”

He smiled at me as best he could. I stood at the end of the kitchen and noticed that Pikus was smiling for the first time in a month and the rest of the crew was working vigorously.

When I came back to the restaurant at 10:30 that night I knew Grant would still be there, working. I drove back just to make sure he left. I knew no one else would tell him to go get some sleep. As I walked up to him he looked up at me and raised his eyebrow. “I'm leaving in five minutes,” he garbled.

“Good. Welcome home.”

 

I didn't attend the James Beard Awards. I was emotionally spent and couldn't imagine sitting there hoping Grant would win Best Chef in America. Once he did, the usual press hit, but I was not expecting to see any more news about Grant's ordeal or subsequent honor in the local papers nearly a week later. I woke up, made coffee, and out of habit opened to the editorial section of the
Chicago Tribune.
There it was—the top editorial of the day: “The Taste of Triumph,” along with a color picture of a pleased Grant.

I read the piece, smiled, and put down the paper. It felt like closure, the whole of it. The Beard Award for Outstanding Chef was great, but now this summed it all up.

I called Grant. I knew he would still be sleeping, but this was cool. In my mind, this was the best article about Alinea or Grant ever written.

“Hey.”

“Sorry to wake you. I assume you haven't heard about the
Trib
yet?”

“No. I am, as you might imagine, sleeping.”

“Well, you're the top editorial—a wonderful piece. Can I read it to you?”

“Sure,” he said half asleep.

I put the phone on speaker and read aloud:

“That's amazing, right? And on the editorial page too. Top of the page.”

“Great.”

“Grant. This is not the food section. This is where the real news goes. That is a hugely inspirational piece.”

“Cool. Is that a big deal?”

I laughed to myself for a second and thought about it. “No. You know, Grant, relatively speaking, it's not really a big deal at all. Go back to sleep. I'll catch up to you later.”

“I'll be at Alinea by noon.”

T
he James Beard Award for Best Chef in the United States was indeed a turning point. And for a few days it sustained me. But like all such awards and recognitions, the adrenaline rush was fleeting, the ego boost decidedly temporary.

There is no doubt that the award and resulting press revitalized Alinea. Bookings went up, and the demand for me at speaking engagements soared. The news seeped out that I was alive, and better still, that I had beaten the odds. I was downright “inspirational.” I was asked to cook at private dinners around the country, and even on a Gulfstream for a major studio executive—price no object. But I didn't do any of them. Five months after being declared “cancer-free” I was still very much living with cancer and the aftereffects of having my cells killed from the inside out. I could barely swallow, still couldn't taste, and basic human functions were a daily trial.

So when the rush of the award was over, the work of running Alinea came back to the fore. The restaurant had survived, even thrived, in my absence. I learned that my team had taken to heart my leadership and entreaties. At first this was all uplifting and remarkable. But what I was not prepared for was normalcy.

A few months after I returned, it dawned on me that things were back to normal. I was declared cancer-free, and I told everyone that the treatment had worked. But I didn't believe it myself. The doctors didn't use the term “cancer-free,” because the grain of the scans only goes down to one millimeter. That's small, but it can contain plenty of cancer. If even a single cell metastasized anywhere in my body, one becomes two becomes four becomes four hundred million pretty quickly. I understood that math all too well.

Everyone around me was relieved. We plugged away at finishing up the Alinea book, the restaurant was full, patrons mentioned the cancer and my struggle but it was a victory, not a funeral. While I knew that everyone wished me well, their positive attitude was grating. I felt like shit physically and mentally. Didn't they know how sick I still was? Didn't they know that most of the time these types of cancers reoccur and patients die quickly thereafter? Didn't they know that while I cooked their meal I slathered lidocaine solution in my mouth and forced down a small bowl of soup and a vanilla milkshake with protein powder, nearly choking every time I had to swallow? Not to mention that I still couldn't taste.

During the treatment it was easy for me to stay engaged, play the part of the positive thinker, the can-do guy. Six months later I was pissed off, tired, and withdrawn. And it began to affect my personal relationships.

In the kitchen I was unusually quiet. I usually keep to myself and try to lead by example, but now I just put my head down and tried to get through the days. I could feel the staff fracturing. They had put so much into running the restaurant while I was dying that they had a hard time dealing with me now that I was alive. The cooks were tentative around me, unsure how to act. That just pissed me off more.

I would go a week or more without speaking to Nick. We would do shoots for the Alinea book, compile recipes, and he would look at the results and comment or make edits in an e-mail chain, but he wouldn't call me. I knew he came by Alinea because checks were signed and spreadsheets were sent to me, but he studiously avoided me, or simply walked through the kitchen and said, “Hi, Chef” as though he were greeting an intern. What the hell was his problem? Why was he tired and disengaged?

Then, one day after repeatedly reworking a course under my direction, chef Pikus simply told me, “I can't do this anymore.” I picked my head up only for a second, just long enough to look him in the eye and muster a matter-of-fact “okay.” He slammed his hands into the back door, sending it flying, and walked out. I put my head back down and started working on the dish as he had left it so it would be ready for service that night.

Jeff held this place together while I was on my back, and now a relatively straightforward dish prep sent him off. His always intense, introspective psyche had had enough. Did he crack or did I? Fuck him. He just walked out. I wouldn't do that; I wouldn't burn that bridge, I thought to myself. Instead of chasing after him, discussing things, figuring out what went wrong, I just blamed him. As far as I was concerned at that moment, Jeff no longer existed.

While I hit points during the radiation that were spectacularly low, I rarely if ever felt sorry for myself. But months later I did. I questioned whether or not I could be a chef. Can I do this? Can I keep making food if I can't taste? What if my taste doesn't come back? Then I'm a charlatan, a faker. Alinea has won enough awards, enough stars. I am beat.

For the first time in my life I wanted to quit.

I wanted desperately to leave and see what else was out there. Alinea was my home, and now it felt like a trap. Could I really do this for another ten years, another twenty? I could take those high-end private cooking gigs and make more money working fifteen days a year than I do working three hundred.

Oprah
called. Nick was right. The cancer thing, if you live through it, is perfect fodder for
Oprah
. We got the irony and had a laugh when the call came in. Still, I felt a profound sense of responsibility to go on there and tell my story, to tell other people who suffer from this insidious disease that there are alternatives to hacking apart your tongue and neck. That they shouldn't take no for an answer. But when I actually filmed the show, sitting in the greenroom with Heather and Nick, I didn't feel the rush anymore. A year earlier I would have killed to be on
Oprah,
to talk about my food, to make the case for my cuisine and restaurant in front of her huge audience. Instead I just sat there and poured a half pint of cream into my coffee to cool it down and fatten myself up.

Slowly, though, I began to realize that I hadn't died.

I kept waking up and the same people were there supporting me, working beside me, pushing me along. I spoke with my dad more frequently. Heather didn't go anywhere. She stayed beside me, and that meant a ton. Martin and Lara pulled all-nighters for weeks to complete the Alinea book, even traveling to China to oversee the printing personally. In the end, it was better than we could have hoped for at the beginning. I'm not sure any of us felt vindicated by our decision to create it in-house. We just felt relieved that it got finished.

Nick started talking about what to do next. That's his role. He doesn't work shifts at Alinea, but he tries to see around the corners. And so we started fielding requests for restaurants in New York and Las Vegas. And I got the urge to go bigger, to prove I was alive. And that began to consume me.

We headed to New York to look at sites and did the same thing there that we did in Chicago. The difference this time around was that we were a known entity and Keith was in New York and had prescouted a number of locations. The third place we looked at was just perfect.

All of the super high-end restaurants in New York are uptown. This was in SoHo, a great contrast. It was a beautiful vintage building with vaulted ceilings and, amazingly enough, an entire back area that was almost a conservatory. The kitchen, if placed in the back, would have glass on three sides, one of them being the ceiling. This was unheard of in Manhattan. The owners were two older gentlemen who were well aware of Alinea and wanted nothing more than to see us put a four-star restaurant in there. I was ecstatic. After the long search and awful negotiations for Alinea, this seemed too good to be true. Keith was beaming. “I told you guys. This is fantastic, right?”