Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (12 page)

My turn came. I could feel the bird’s pulse under my thumb. I positioned the knife as instructed and drew it hard across the chicken’s throat. And then I was holding its head in my hand, blood on my arms and shirt, watching the body convulse. My foot slipped and slid into the trench. My work boot was glistening with blood.

The body was dunked into the same hot water that had cooked the corn. When the feathers began pulling away, it was removed from the water and put into the cylinder. The cylinder whipped the bird around and the rubber extrusions pulled away the feathers. Any feathers left were plucked by hand at a nearby table. Then we gutted the chickens, the viscera still hot. The carcass was then washed and put into a tub. We went through this for hours, until past dusk, stopping when the hundredth chicken was finished. About two hours before the end, I got stung on my neck by a bee. Sebald made me stop, put ice on it, and sit for a few minutes. “Karma, huh?” he’d said.

In the early evening, I’d watched three other students playing around. In front of the daughter, who sat without saying anything to anyone, eyes red and wet, these three made bloody handprints on one another’s shirts and took pictures. They held up a living chicken with one hand, knife in the other, with a stupid rictus of a smile splitting their faces, and took pictures. I noticed my friends and some others staring at them in disbelief. After a few minutes, I couldn’t look at them anymore.

At the end of the night, the husband and wife asked us to gather in a circle and tell them what we’d learned. One by one, we each mouthed the same platitudes about respect for food, being closer to the food source, and like that. But what I actually learned I still only feel.

For the first few minutes, the car ride back was hushed. Then we
started talking about food, the cult of celebrity, running down other students we didn’t care for.

The next night, Nelly and I roasted a chicken. When I carved it, I got every last scrap off the bones.

I
SPENT THAT WEEKEND
writing my essay for Viverito in a fever of righteousness after having killed the chickens. I also had something to prove.

My essay was titled “Farm-Raised vs. Wild: Why We’re Doomed.” Viverito had spent a lot of time sniping at American culture and distancing himself from it. “There’s no television in my house. We have a set, but that’s solely for watching movies. Yeah, I know
Top Chef
is a lot of fun, but for God’s sake—read a book.”

Or: “I don’t eat mammals. Maybe—
maybe
—I would not be opposed to eating animals that were raised naturally, cows allowed to be pasture raised rather than feed-lot raised. Chickens allowed to roam around the fields rather than being raised without beaks in little henhouses. But I’m not going to put that shit into my body otherwise.”

One day he was incredulous: “I was shopping the other day and I kept getting nearly run down by all these people on those Rascals puttering up and down the aisles. I was just freaking amazed. Get your ass out the chair and get your heart rate going, you near-diabetic, obese mother …” He trailed off, not finishing the word, glowing with indignation.

I did eat mammals. I watched TV. I’ve never ridden a Rascal. But I understood. Part of me thought that you can’t spend years listening to Fugazi, Black Flag, or the Dead and not harbor—or least empathize with—those anti-mass-cultural impulses. Part of me also thought that these positions were the logical outcome of thinking morally and ethically and not being a sociopath. I found myself mentally yelling “Amen” to a lot of his pronouncements.

I wrote: “In a blog entitled Liquid Life, the blogger described her reaction to her first taste of wild salmon: ‘Alas, my celebratory mood
was interrupted when I took the first bite. It tasted … fishy. And it was really … chewy.’ She went on to note, ‘I knew that there was no way I was going to eat the rest of this muscle-y fit fat-free wild-caught salmon. I just couldn’t. I am going back to my farm-raised salmon.’

“Well, who can blame her?” I continued writing. “And beyond questions of blame, who can even be surprised by a reaction like that? For all the lip service paid to notions of experiencing the most we can out of life, living every day to its fullest, and all those other Oprah-like platitudes, it’s in the realm of the quotidian where we, as a culture, seem to like our experiences least. Many people are willing to commit some act of hyper-insanity like sky diving or sheer rock climbing, but appreciating a new piece of food is a Herculean undertaking. Of course, it doesn’t stop at food; you could look at the arts—film, music, visual art—and see over and over the same unwillingness to submit to a new experience. That which reinforces old sensations (with increasing diminishing returns) gets rewarded, but anything on the cusp of the new is usually damned to obscurity (at least until the artist dies), or, at best, to a cult following. Steven Spielberg could buy and sell me a thousand times over; for every movie John Cassavetes made, he had to mortgage his house to fund it.”

My mind was a fugue of outrage. I kept writing: “Tangential stuff? Sure, because I’m supposed to be fixating on the notion of farm-raised fish vs. wild, but it really isn’t such a stretch to see the preference of the Liquid Life blogger as symptomatic of an American intellectual laziness. Of course, laziness implies that there’s a goal to reach, or something to be done or accomplished that is being ignored. We’ve lost sight of any goals. We’re on the way to being rendered incapable of even recognizing goals. At a nexus of profit, habit, convenience, and torpor, we’ve achieved a great failure. And for an example of the essence of this failure we don’t need to look much farther than the end of the fork.”

I went on. And on. And on. And then wound down: “Farmed fish and factory-farmed produce and meat aren’t going anywhere. Of course they have their uses; if you can save lives and prevent malnutrition, then a life-giving but inferior product will certainly do in a pinch.
Plus, they earn untold sums of money. But neither are the problems they engender going anywhere. And just as red meat was once villainized, then redeemed in favor of the demonization of carbohydrates, so America’s current infatuation with ‘being green’ and eating organic will probably wane when a new trend is established—or as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Only a relatively small minority work to make a positive impact anyway. Everyone else continues thickening their precious bodily fluids with high-fructose corn syrup.”

I was done with the essay. I called Nelly up to read parts of it to her. I spent hours afterward on the front porch studying the characteristics of all of the fish we’d seen in class; I looked over every note I took; I had a two-inch-thick pile of index cards with key terms on one side and the definitions on the other. I went to bed at 9:00 and got up five and a half hours later.

Soon after I got to school, we assembled in the fish room to take the identification part of the final. We were all standing shoulder-to-shoulder as Viverito held out the fish toward us. I guess we all have our blind spots. I had had a hard time spotting immediate differences between rainbow trout and brook trout. Viverito showed us an example of each, and I couldn’t make the distinction.

Adam was immediately to my left. He was a lot taller than I was, and he held his test paper at my eye level. My eye saw that Adam did not have trouble making the distinction. I weighed the ethics for a moment; I didn’t mean to see, but I did. If I didn’t do well in the class—and I was convinced, given the condition of almost every fillet I cut, that I wouldn’t—it could mean some finance pain down the line. I didn’t mean to see it, but I did. I filled in the blanks. The test went on, and I didn’t miss any others. When it was over, Viverito asked that the tests be passed to him. This did not feel good.

I just couldn’t do it. I erased both of the trout answers and handed the test in. Adam watched me doing it. “Those were the right answers you had,” he said to me.

“Well, actually, they were your right answers. You were holding your test right in front of my face, but I couldn’t bring myself …”

“I’m kind of impressed.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

We went into the lecture room and took the written part of the test. I knew every answer but one. I was the first person finished. I turned in the test and my essay and left the room. It was 9:00 a.m.

A few minutes later Adam was finished and we wound up walking the campus and talking—about Obama’s candidacy, about race in the America, about our parents, about the school experience so far. Lunchtime conversations were usually either about other students, class, or a litany of dick and fart jokes. This was the first time I’d really
talked
with another peer at the CIA. Adam was smart and perceptive. The guy would be going places.

At one point, Adam asked me, “Did you like the fish class?”

I said, “Well, I told you, I used to teach. So I’ve been on the other side of the desk. I’ve gotta say, that is one of the best educators I’ve ever encountered. Hands down. It isn’t that you’re going to remember every single thing he said or be an expert at cutting up fish after seven days. But come on, didn’t you find yourself studying really hard?”

“Shit, yeah.”

“Okay, that’s the mark—that guy made you and me want to be like him. Not
be
him, but be
like
him—know as much you can, to be really good. We wanted to measure up. That’s being a really good teacher.”

At 10:45, we walked back to the fish room to see if there was any progress on the tests; Viverito had promised to start grading as soon as they were handed in. One of the others, a guy named John Howze, was seated on a bench outside the room. When Adam and I walked over to him, John looked at me, chagrined, and said, “You are a total asshole.”

“For what? What did I do?”

“He picked up your essay as soon as you left the room and read it. He was laughing out loud. I think you’ve ruined it for the rest of us.”

Two more people came out, and the room was empty except for Viverito. The three of us walked in and Viverito held my paper out to me. He’d written “Excellent” across the top.

“What was the paper about?” Adam asked.

“It was a total denunciation of American culture,” I said.

Viverito said, “Hey, man—I love preaching to the choir.”

On the Saturday after the last fish class, Nelly and I were in the supermarket and I felt an urge to grill beef for dinner. I stalked the meat aisle, looking for hanger steaks. I found one. It was not all natural, it was not organic, it was not grass fed, it was not local. I put it in the cart. Nelly and I did the rest of our shopping. We slogged through the checkout, paid our money, went home, had cocktails. At 6:00, I fired up the grill and cooked our meat. Nelly made salad. At 6:30, we ate. Nelly had a small portion of meat, and I ate the balance.

After dinner, I was playing with the cat, Cash Money. Cash Money is an obligate carnivore; he requires meat. I do not. He liked playing with the plastic rings from the top of Gatorade bottles, and I stood in the kitchen tossing a ring and watching him attack it. This went on for a while. I poured a scotch and went to the porch to sip it. Through the window, I watched the cat keep on attacking the ring. Dinner didn’t taste right anymore. I don’t know what the connection was, between the cat and dinner; I just knew that one existed.

I had in my mind an image of a steer, and I pictured that steer hobbled and ruined. I pictured a perfect piece of meat, beautifully marbled, exquisitely cut. I pictured a syringe full of hormone, another full of antibiotic, another full of weird chemistry. I pictured all of them being injected into the meat, then cooking it, then eating it. I envisioned chewing, I saw the additives blending with saliva, I saw myself swallowing.

I felt a definite disgust whenever I saw an ad for some triple burger at a fast-food joint, or an all-you-can-eat buffet at the mall down the road in Kingston, but I’d bought, cooked, and eaten that hanger steak.

Nelly, as if by prompt, said to me the next day that she felt it would be worth it to spend the extra money on clean meat, if we were going to eat it at all.

We made a pact.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of Skills class, we marched into the kitchen like a bunch of invading Pattons. We were ridiculously early. We were ridiculously excited. This was the start of the real thing: real vegetable cuts, real sauces, real stocks, real heat under real pans with real food.

Everyone had cut vegetables before, and made sauces, and cooked things, but not all of us had done so under the guidance of a genuine, classically trained chef.

We’d all read enough, or seen enough television, or just been sufficiently indoctrinated by the CIA to understand that classical, traditional techniques—which meant French methodology—would be the mainstays of our arsenals for the rest of our cooking careers. Know this stuff and you could build off it without limit. After all, was there really anything in Saint Keller’s Bible that wasn’t practiced by Escoffier, too?

Skills I would run for three weeks and be followed, logically enough, by Skills II, a seamless slide from one right into the other. Both would be taught by the same instructor, Chef Bobby Perillo, a new guy. Perillo’s biography had been posted on the CIA website. A CIA grad from the class of 1986, he had been a sous-chef at Balthazar, restaurateur Keith McNally’s famous Manhattan bistro. He’d been the opening chef at McNally’s Schiller’s Liquor Bar, had worked as a tournant—a sort of kitchen jack-of-all-trades—at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole. Most recently he’d been an instructor at the French Culinary Institute in New York
City, a school that was widely derided at the CIA—like every other cooking school—mainly because it wasn’t the CIA. Maybe he hadn’t trained under Bocuse, but it was still an impressive résumé.

Adam had met with him and told us Perillo seemed “cool.”

The group of us who’d been together in meat and fish had been split up again. Brookshire was in the new group, Lombardi was there. Seventeen-year-old Carlos, presumably still doing it clean, was with us. There were some other people I’d seen around who walked into Skills, and many I’d never seen before.