brand, he probably stole it from the restaurant) and now he's out of
money. He doesn't have enough for a cab and he's too lazy and
incoherent to hump twenty blocks down and feed the bitch.
I pondered the situation, looking first at the 250-pound blob of starter,
and then at Steven.
"I'm not doing it!" said Steven (his voice gets high and squeaky when he
gets indignant). "Tell Vinnie to go fuck himself!" (Steven calls Adam
"Vinnie". I don't know why. Maybe it's his real name.) I kept Adam
waiting.
"I'll help you feed her, man," I told Steven. "I don't want to look at the
guy, the way he sounds. You really want to see him? The condition he's
in? You know how he gets."
"All right, all right," said Steven, grumbling under his breath as he
slapped a steak on the grill. "This is the last time, though. Tell him. Tell
him that next time I'm going to let her die. I'm going to throw her in the
trash. We can buy bread."
"We'll feed her," I told Adam.
I was now committed to wrestling a back-breakingly heavy, ungainly
blob out of the plastic Lexan, heaping it in stages into the big Hobart
mixer and "feeding" it with a mix of warm water and fresh flour and
yeast. Then I'd have to scrape it back into the Lexan, haul that back up
onto its resting place, stack sheet pans and potato sacks on top of it. It
was a two-man job, one that would leave flour and goop all over my
clean kitchen, leave dough under my fingernails and clinging to my
clogs. But anything was preferable to having Adam Real-Last-Name-
Unknown in my kitchen right now. Anything.
Why did God, in all his wisdom, choose Adam to be the recipient of