We fought all the time, Sam, Dimitri and I. Waving our cookbooks at
each other, we'd squabble endlessly over the "correct" way to prepare
certain dishes. We teased, poked, prodded, sulked, conspired and
competed. We wanted to be the best, we wanted to be different, but at the
same time, correct. We yearned to bring honor to our clan, and in that
vein, we came up with the looniest, most ambitious menu our super-
heated, endorphin-overloaded brains could agree on, a sort of Greatest
Hits of Our Checkered Careers So Far collection. French classics sat
side-by-side with Portuguese squid stew, my Tante Jeanne's humble
salade de tomates, dishes we'd lifted out of cookbooks, stolen from other
chefs, remembered seeing on TV. There were Wellfleet oysters on the
halfshell, oysters Mitcham (in honor of Howard), there was a pasta dish
from Mario's—a sort of taglierini with trail-mix and anchovies as I
recall—scallops in sorrel sauce (from Bocuse maybe?), calves' liver with
raspberry vinegar sauce, swordfish with black beans and white rice,
pompano en papillotte, my mom's crème renversée . . .
We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every
opportunity to "conceptualize". Hardly a decision was made without
drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in
honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and,
increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to
Alphabet City to get. We worked long hours and took considerable pride
in our efforts—the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end-
product. That was what the whole life we were in was about, we
believed: to work through the drugs, the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the
pain, to show no visible effects. We might be tripping out on blotter
acid, sleepless for three days and halfway through a bottle of Stoli, but
we were professionals, goddammit! We didn't let it affect our line work.
And we were happy, truly happy, like Henry V's lucky few, a band of
brothers, ragged, slightly debauched warriors, who anticipated nothing
less than total victory—an Agincourt of the mind and stomach.
We were pretty busy initially, and along with the young protégés who