his Presidential Guard was at that moment downstairs tackling the
difficult problem of repairing a city-owned sewage pipe. The problem
had occurred directly below our walk-in. In typical fashion, Bigfoot had
induced his Mexican disciples to hammer straight down through 2 feet of
concrete, then, like Colditz escapees, tunnel 25 feet through waste-
sodden earth beneath the walk-in, and make a hard-left turn to the site of
the break. The big hands gently squeezing my shoulders were trying to
determine whether I was thin enough to wriggle around the tight corner
—through mud and shit—to help the porters, apparently too well fed to
fit.
I couldn't hold it against him for trying. "That's not my job" was not in
the Bigfoot phrase book. Toilet overflows while the chef is at hand? He's
going right in with a plunger, and fast. No waiting for the toilet guy—he
is the toilet guy now. In Bigfoot's army, you fight for the cause,
anywhere you are needed. If it's slow in the kitchen, you pick an old
sauté pan and scrub the carbon off the bottom. Genteel sensibilities are
unwelcome. Lead, follow . . . or get out of the way.
I worked for Bigfoot part-time while I attended CIA, and years later—
over ten years later—I washed up on his shores again. It was a low point
in my career. I was burnt out from my five-year run in the restaurant
netherworld as a not very good chef—in rehab for heroin, still doing
cocaine, broke—and reduced to working brunches at a ridiculous mom
and pop restaurant in SoHo where they served lion, tiger, hippopotamus
braciole and other dead zoo animals. I was determined never to be a chef
again, sickened by my last gargantuan operation: a three-kitchen Italian
place in the South Street Seaport, where I seemed to have spent most of
my time as a convenient hatchet man, waking up every morning with the
certain knowledge that today I'd be firing someone again . . . I was spent,
desperate, unhappy, with a negligible-to-bad rep, in general a Person Not
To Be Hired Or Trusted, when Bigfoot called looking for someone to
cook lunches at his new saloon/bistro on 10th Street.