I slept for three weeks. When I woke up, I was determined never again to
be a chef.
I'd cook. I had to make money. But I would never again be a leader of
men. I would never again carry a clipboard, betray an old comrade, fire
another living soul.
I left none too soon. Gino's, in the end, dragged down the entire Silver
Shadow empire, bankrupting even the family provisions business. Last I
heard of the Shadow, he was doing time in federal lock-up, for tax
evasion. I was about to enter the wilderness.
THE WILDERNESS YEARS
IT IS ONE OF the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off
heroin, things started getting really bad. High on dope, I was—prior to
Gino's—at least a chef, well paid, much liked by crew and floor and
owners alike. Stabilized on methadone, I became nearly unemployable
by polite society: a shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and
corner-cutting hack, toiling in obscurity in the culinary backwaters. I
worked mostly as a cook, moving from place to place, often working
under an alias.
I worked a seedy hotel on upper Madison, a place so slow that the one
waiter would have to come downstairs and wake me when customers
came in. I was the lone cook, my only companions the hotel super and a
gimpy dishwasher. I worked a lunch counter on Amsterdam, flipping
pancakes and doing short-order eggs for democratic politicos and their
bagmen. I worked a bizarre combination art gallery/bistro on Columbus,
just me and a coke-dealing bartender—a typically convenient and
destructive symbiotic arrangement. I was a sous-chef at a very fine two-
star place on 39th, where I dimly recall preparing a four-course meal for
Paul Bocuse; he thanked me in French, I think. My brain, at this point,
was shriveled by cocaine, and I made the mistake of telling a garde-