I saw myself becoming like him, and I didn't like it. Okay, I wasn't
cadging drinks for a living, listening to a bunch of drunks in return for
the occasional freebie, or throwing rent parties. I did have a job, and an
apartment and a girlfriend who still, it appeared, loved me. But there was
little good happening in my life. I was living paycheck to paycheck. My
apartment was a dark, dusty cavern with paint peeling off the ceilings.
Though I was no longer getting high at work, my off-hours were still
revolving around the acquiring and doing of controlled substances—even
if they weren't heroin. I was barely a cook. My culinary education, my
early food epiphanies, the tastes and textures and experiences of my
childhood in France and my rather privileged high school and college
years were of little use to me behind a shellfish bar.
Something had to change. I had to get it together. I'd been the culinary
equivalent of the Flying Dutchman too long, living a half-life with no
future in mind, just oozing from sensation to sensation. I was a disgrace,
a disappointment to friends and family and myself—and the drugs and
the booze no longer chased that disappointment away. I could no longer
bear even to pick up the phone; I'd just listen to the answering machine,
afraid or unwilling to pick up, the plaintive entreaties of the caller an
annoyance. If they had good news, it would simply make me envious and
unhappy; if they had bad news, I was the last guy in the world who could
help. Whatever I had to say to anybody would have been inappropriate. I
was in hiding, in a deep, dark hole, and it was dawning on me—as I
cracked my oysters, and opened clams, and spooned cocktail sauce into
ramekins—that it was time, really time, to try to climb out.
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT MEAT
AN EPISODE FROM THE Wilderness Years.
Things were not going well. It was August, and my tree from the
previous year's Christmas still lay in a heap of brown, dead pine needles
in my dark, unused dining room. I was ashamed to take it out to the