trash, not wanting my neighbors to see how far I'd fallen, how utterly
paralyzed I'd become by my years of excess. Eventually, my wife and I
would make a heroic effort to dispose of the incriminating object—
chopping it up like a dead body and stuffing it in plastic bags before
lugging it in the dead of night a few floors down and leaving it near a
known coke dealer's doorway. Let him take the rap, we figured.
My unemployment was running out, and the responses to the résumés I'd
sent out inevitably invited me to meet with such a transparently doomed
bunch of chuckleheads that even I, the seasoned carrion feeder, couldn't
stomach the prospect of working for them. There was a guy planning a
Marla Maples restaurant; Marla would sing in the upstairs cocktail
lounge, he confided, ensuring hordes of high-spending gourmets. The
feng shui advisor was riding a cosmic groove around the half-completed
restaurant when I arrived for the interview, boding poorly for the man's
prospects. I deliberately tanked the interview.
Another well-known New York restaurateur summoned me to a series of
highly secret meetings to discuss the changeover of his current operation
—an unbelievably loud, grotesque, television-themed monstrosity—into
a fine French bistro. I took the job, sight unseen, on the strength of his
reputation, a generous money offer and the prospect of serving fine
French food, which he knew quite a bit about. But one night in that place
was more than I could take. Squealing children shoved up against the
expeditor as they lined up to buy lunch-boxes, gummy bears, T-shirts
and bomber jackets from the merchandising concession. Waiters with
microphones urged customers to Name That TV Show as the theme
music from Green Acres and Petticoat Junction blared over
Volkswagen-sized speakers. The food was what you might expect to find
on Air Uganda tourist class: boil-in-the-bag veggie burgers, pre-cooked
bacon slices, greasy meat patties which were pre-seared and left to
marinate in grease in the steam cabinet. It was soul destroying, and at the
end of the night, I scrawled a quick note to the owner, something along
the lines of: "I could never last even another ten minutes in this shithole.