from our regular kitchen chores and all the overtime we needed. We
threw ourselves into the task with near-fanatical once-in-a-lifetime zeal
and prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.
As a fly-fisherman, Dimitri made his own lures; this obsessive eye for
detail carried over to his food. For Mario's garden party, we spent days
together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing
near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides
of roast and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have
looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers and bar
straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night.
Covered with gelée, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we
lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux
mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself
about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanita muscara or
psilocybin mushroom, while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg
white for "authenticity". He buried all sorts of horticultural in-jokes in
his work—already insanely detailed Gardens of Eden made of leek
strips, chives, scallions, paper-thin slices of carrots and peppers. He
created jungle tableaux on the sides of hams that he considered,
"reminiscent of Rousseau's better efforts" or "Gauguin-like". When I
jokingly suggested Moses parting the Red Sea on the side of a striped
bass, Dimitri got a faraway look on his face and immediately suggested a
plan.
"The Israelites, in the foreground . . . we can use straws to cut the olives
and egg whites for their eyes. But the Egyptians pursuing in the
background . . . we can cut their eyes with bar straws, you know, the zip-
stix! So they're smaller, you see! For perspective?" I had to physically
restrain him from attempting this tableau.
We had been under refrigeration for three days straight when we finally
collapsed in the Dreadnaught's cocktail lounge at 4 A.M., unshaven, dirty
and crazed. We woke up a few hours later, covered with flies attracted by