Off the Menu (10 page)

“Okay, I’ll meet with him.”

And I did. And much to my relief there was not the slightest flicker of recognition on his face. Or at least, he made sure there was not the slightest flicker of recognition on his face. If he had twinkled the tiniest bit, smiled in the wrong way, said anything the tiniest bit double entendre, I would have walked right out. But he either genuinely did not remember our night together, which I hoped and prayed, or at the very minimum, he was working very hard to make it appear that
he didn’t remember, and, frankly, either was fine by me. He explained the job, the duties, said he would match my current level of salary, and if I passed the tryout, would meet my current benefits package. If I wanted the job, it was mine to try to hopefully keep.

I went into the job with Patrick thinking I knew what I was getting into. Excited by the challenge. Assuming I would do it for a year or two until I could find the right person to get me back into the personal chef business. Assuming that he would chew me up and spit me out like so many before me. When he promoted me to executive culinary assistant, I made him put in a severance clause that some Fortune 500 CEOs would have envied. Or rather, I asked for something ridiculous, presuming he would have the lawyers bring it down to something rational that would make me feel like I had the smallest bit of security. But he didn’t balk. He just laughed. “You must love me an awful lot to make it so expensive for me to get rid of you.” And signed the papers.

The thing is, as much as he makes me crazy and I hate the way he treats 99 percent of the population, as much as I get creeped out by his pursuit of fame, and his treatment of women, I do, I suppose, love him in a way. Some days I would prefer to love him from afar, but at the end of the day, he has been good to me. In an overly demanding, obliterating-boundaries, twenty-four-hours-a-day sort of way.

But if I’m honest, I also have to admit that I’ve never suggested any other way.

It’s a slippery slope, being needed and depended upon, especially when the person who depends on you is notorious for never letting anyone get close, never trusting someone else. And Patrick has earned his independent nature. His dad left when he was a baby, and his mom resented him fairly
openly for what she perceived as his driving away her husband. When Patrick graduated from high school she effectively threw him out—he was eighteen and had a diploma; her work was done. He had a job flipping burgers, and jockeyed the couch at a friend’s place for a few months, living on pilfered food from the restaurant, saving every dime he could get his hands on, knowing that all he really wanted to do was cook. At nineteen, he got a cheap ticket to London, where a friend from high school was doing a semester abroad. He befriended a bartender at a classic chef’s after-service dive hangout, and eventually met Marco Pierre White, who took a shine to him and hired him as a dishwasher. Within six months Patrick was working garde-manger and absorbing everything he could from his cantankerous mentor. After eighteen months with Marco, they had a falling-out and even though they both apologized, it was agreed that Patrick should move on. He used Marco’s connections to do some stages in Paris, and then he moved to San Francisco, working in several restaurants, always moving up the line, until eventually he landed a stage at the French Laundry. He stayed eight months, and then, with Thomas Keller’s blessing, he moved to Chicago to take over a failing old warhorse of a restaurant, his first gig as executive chef. A year later, the restaurant flush with good reviews and a renewed clientele, he landed investors to help him open Conlon, and has never looked back.

There is obviously more, as most people have seen from the
Chefography
documentary on him, or, will see in his new memoir
(Not) Saint Patrick
, which is due out next fall. The short version is fairly typical. Pretty much everyone he has ever relied upon has left him. His mother died before they ever really got close, and well before he opened his first place. His dad, unsurprisingly, reappeared shortly after he began
doing
Feast
, and it was not a warm reunion, resulting in some nasty tabloid headlines, one restraining order, and a hush-hush settlement, after which his fair-weather father disappeared again never to return. After the one brief marriage to Sharlene, which lasted less than two years and little of it happy, he became an unrepentant playboy. Legs last anywhere from one weekend to a maximum of six months, and I have never ever heard him refer to one of them as a “girlfriend.”

Bob has been directing the shows since the beginning; Gloria has been running the test kitchen. I’m third in seniority, Patrick-wise, and everyone else he works with has been in a reasonable state of perpetual motion. Even Andrea, his current personal assistant, is the fourth person to hold that position in the six years I have been working with him. She’s lasted just shy of two years so far, and we have high hopes that she might just stick around.

But I am the only one whose lines have gone past blurred into nonexistent. He and Bob might go to a ball game now and then or grab a beer after a shoot, and Gloria does any on-air support when he does shows like
Chopped Masters
, or when he beat Bobby Flay on
Iron Chef America
, so they have had the after-work travel adventures that come with that territory. But neither of them get the late-night drop-ins, the invasion of family gatherings, or the complete lack of separation between church and state.

“I think you like it more than you claim,” Bennie said one night when I was complaining about how Patrick had shown up the previous night wanting to hang out and not taking no for an answer, requiring that I surreptitiously cancel a long-anticipated romp with Bruce. “Or you wouldn’t let it continue,” she pointed out.

“I feel bad for him. And yes, I do appreciate that he does trust me so genuinely considering that he doesn’t really trust anyone. But that doesn’t mean I wanted him to come over and twat block me, and make me listen to him whine about not getting the Beard Award for best chef
again
.”

“Methinks you doth protest too much,” she said.

“Because, what? I
wanted
to spend the night babysitting him and not getting laid?”

“Because I think if getting laid were more important to you than being Patrick’s go-to girl, you would have faked a case of explosive diarrhea, or told him that Barry was having a crisis that needed attending, or you would have just put on your big-girl panties and told him that it wasn’t a good night for you and that you would be happy to deal with it tomorrow.”

“That’s not fair. You know I’m a terrible liar. And he would have either stayed to take care of me, or wanted to accompany me to Barry’s, or put on his sad, needy face and convinced me to stay anyway.”

“Full. Of. Shit. You are so full of shit I can smell you from HERE. Why is it so hard to admit that you LIKE when he just needs his special Alana time? It feeds something in you.”

“I am not full of shit, I just, it, um … I dunno.”

And truthfully, I didn’t.

And don’t. And I prefer not to think too deeply about it.

S
o this is how it starts.