The Omnivorous Fish

You know, I’ve really been wanting to post this week, but I’ve been busy, so there aren’t articles to write, I don’t have a kitchen, so no recipes, and for the last three days I haven’t really been able to eat anything that didn’t almost immediately vacate my body in one way or the other.

Lots o’ fun.

Funny story about the expression “you know.” When I first was in France, I would end every sentence with “you know”- in English. So I’d say something like: Il y a besoin de puisance pour audio, you know?

They let me do this for weeks before pointing out that it makes perfect sense to say it in French… in French.

Last night I had several nice vegetable and seafood dishes in a little place in Astoria called Fatty’s, on Ditmars. I stand corrected.

Listening: John Mayer. Strange time.

Meals are telling in our lives, in one way or another. Depending on what they consist of or what the surroundings are, we know the occasion. A turkey surrounded by sweet potatoes and cranberries tell us something specific. Lilies and silver trays say “occasion.” Sitting in the middle of a construction site I paid $300K for, eating Indian food out of a paper carton on Friday night says that times are changing. I’ve been staying here for the last week, since the Agent told me we should spend the week apart to see how we feel. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what to do or think or say. I still don’t.

I’m famous for hating to eat alone. I regularly ensare more or less total strangers to have lunch with me at work, since I never pack and often eat at the wholly unsustainable but democratically priced diner near the theaters.

That said, I still eat alone all the time. I’m spending a few nights in my “investment property” in Washington Heights, where there aren’t a ton of resaturants to begin with, and a sizable portion of them are patently abysmal. Tonight, I wandered into a place that I’ve been to for lunch in the past with acceptable reuslts. Sometimes, it’s better to eat at the bar when you’re alone, but not when the restaurant doubles as the one-tier-from-dive-bar of the neighborhood. At dinner, like many places for which I see no discernible reason, they like to turn the lights down really low. And, while there may be heart shaped mirrors along one wall, it’s not exactly a romantic spot. Interestingly, the lights were low, but readable until I unfurled my dinner companion (the new New Yorker). At that instant, the lights went down even further, probably for the benefit of the ONE other inhabited table.

I can’t make coffee worth a damn. It’s a good thing I have mostly dated people that make excellent coffee, because the coffee I make by and large sucks. I used to make great coffee, and I honestly don’t know what happened. I used to make bitchin’ espresso and decent drip coffee, I made turkish coffee all the time, and I wanted to buy a percolater, though I never did.

Then one day, something changed.

Maybe the coffee elves lost my address. Maybe it was the water in Queens, I don’t know, but now I am starting from zero. Less than zero, really, since the search for good coffee is complicated by my new intolerance to caffeine.

I spent some time in Northern California many years ago. I stayed in Walnut Creek and went to San Francisco a lot. I also did a bit of camping and experienced some of the natural wonder the area has to offer. Total, maybe I spent two weeks there. I stayed in Sacramento for a couple of months after that, and went to Berkeley and had a job interview in Emeryville. The job didn’t pan out. I closed my business and went on the road the following fall.

Naturally, I am now convinced that Northern California is heaven on earth and everything wrong in my life would be better if I lived there. I fantasize about farmers’ markets and chilly foggy evenings in late spring, wearing cable-knit sweaters and growing my hair longer.

The food is gone, mostly. The dishes are half done. The crowd is gone. The stragglers have stayed and gossipped and drank the dregs and left. The leftovers were sent home. The agent has already passed out.

I’m alone with my thoughts, about this party and the people who were here and the people who weren’t. This was my party for many years; now it’s ours. I’m ok with that, just getting used to the idea. I still hear the din and the glasses clinking and chirping and the faint whisper of christmas music in the background. The phantom party lives on in my mind.

Many people who were here will read this, and I want to thank you. Just like my work is nothing without an audience, so is my hobby. If you weren’t here, especially Nick, you were missed. When the show you work at changes, your surroundings change, the people in your life change. The moments that were really good live on in my memory and in this christmas party. Often, it’s the only time of the year I see the people who made those times special. They’re doing other shows, I’m doing other shows, that’s how it is. But tonight, I can offer a slice of ham and a glass of wine to damn near everyone I’ve ever met, and I love it. I eat a slice or two myself, and when I do, I think about some of the people who simply aren’t here anymore. Like the shows I did with them, they are gone from the stage, but not from memory.

I was reading Shuna’s blog today, and if you don’t follow it, you should. She’s a baker, patissiere, cook, writer, food and all around genius. Anyway, following links, I found this post that talks about the humanity of being an intelligent, sensitive person in a less than supportive environment. One of the things that keeps me going back to Eggbeater over and over again is her plainspoken narration of working in an environment where you’re often surrounded by overeducated people who are unable to come to grips with the fact that they have a blue collar job.

I understand this phenomenon well. I apprenticed to a chef briefly and worked in restaurants. I am now a stagehand, which is just as bad. I work alongside people, in an hourly paid, per-diem job that have master’s degrees from Yale. I’m not exaggerating. There is a multitude of them. They think they work in the arts, but in reality they pick up dirty cable and lighting instruments and pack them in and out of boxes and push said boxes on and off of trucks. I went to college for about an hour, and I tell them what to do.

Anyway, with any job where you’re part of a team, it’s largely the personalities that make it interesting. Restaurants and theaters have a lot in common: they are shit jobs that usually don’t pay very well where you do backbreaking work for minimal appreciation during hours that most people spend at home. For whatever reason, this environment draws more characters than say, the avergae CPA’s office. And, as unpleasant as it can be, it does leave one with a plethora of interesting memories, some awful, some hysterical. Very often, they go hand in hand. Case in point, Shuna’s negative experience reverberated in my memory with a bakery of Christmas Past, where I basically grew up. That memory, however, sent my head to another, much more funny memory that I’ll share.

The bakery was air-conditioned, so we had what’s called a proof box, which is basically an anti-refrigerator. It is a closed room that is heated with steam; thus we had a boiler. One day, one of the steam lines sprung a leak, and whenever the system’s pressure went up, a jet of visible steam shot out at ankle level from the boiler (right next to the bench where we worked- very safe) and drifted upwards. The red light from the exit sign beyond was vaguely visible, and almost shot through the steam, like a stage light. So, the next time the steam hit, I trudged directly into it, air guitaring and singing “Jumpin Jack Flash” to raise hell.

In retrospect, it’s not really all that funny (despite the fact that we all nearly pissed ourselves at the time), but at 4AM when you got up for school at 6 the previous day and have been at the bakery since 11, what’s funny can be relative.

I went to elementary school with a girl named Jamie Moran. I can’t remember what year it is or anyone’s birthday, but I remember her vividly, because she was absolutely convinced- and endeavored to convince me- that eggs were made of milk. This was not an attempt at irony, or some confusion with a Cadbury product, she believed, and may still, that eggs are made of milk.

For real.

Thinking back on it now, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. Americans have no idea where the food they eat comes from. I’m not talking about farm kids here; I’m talking about the majority of people in this country who live in the suburbs and are walking type-two-diabetes-time-bombs. This is not by accident, agribusiness has added this element of opacity to food production for a reason. I’m quite certain that they don’t believe people want their animals treated inhumanely, want their meat stuffed full of rBGH and antibiotics, want their food supply endangered by biologically modified plants or want every independent farmer in America driven off of their land. There is a chance that some of these things might bother people.

I can’t help but wonder if this distance from something so elemental to us as humans hasn’t contributed to the distance that’s between us and one another. Stay with me here. I don’t think people respect cooking as a social institution anymore. I’m not talking about going out to dinner in a restaurant, that’s not- by definition- cooking. That’s not making something for the people in your life. I once said to a friend that I was only capable of two emotions: rage and cooking. Perhaps that’s slightly overstated, but in a sense, cooking is, or at least was, a mode of affection. I can understand why people may have lost interest in cooking. As our attention to celebrity chefs and food porn has grown, the ingredients this mania espouses have become more expensive and largely lowered in quality. Maybe you can find heirloom tomatoes on supermarket shelves, but if they’re hard as rocks and it’s February, who cares? Moreover, if all you do is watch or read about David Burke making foie-gras-beluga-truffle-platinum dumplings, you may rightly wonder why anyone would want to come to your house for spaghetti.

I’m sure this is the beginning of a lifelong rant, but I will leave it here for now. Food for thought.