Phillip
July 06, 2021
(Tiny basement restaurant, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2018; there was seating for maybe 10 people because the tables were a foot wide, the chairs tiny stools. This husband and wife team made Nepalese specialties like fried lung for workingmen; the space they are in is the entire kitchen except a 1950s refrigerator and a two-burner counter-top stove. They were very patient with my ignorance, and as you can see, they were proud of their work )
Before we started off on this wanderjahr, we had a series of dinners and gatherings with our kith and kin, to say au revoir, and one was with our neighbors. Next door is a film and TV director and writer who is famous for an important film about violence against trans people, and across the street a showrunner and director known for Black and multiracial comedies. Both of their partners are writers as well. One couple we’ve become very close with in recent years, and the other women are fairly new friends.
At one point during the evening, one said, “If a Millennial asks someone from Generation X about intersectionality, the Xer is likely to say, yes, we really fell down on intersectionality, and we have to catch up. But if they ask a Boomer, she said, the Boomer says, “What’s intersectionality?”
I mean, we were standing right there….
And to be fair, she did say, “A friend said to me recently that if a Millennial asks a Gen Xer…..”—in other words it wasn’t exactly her opinion, and in playing it back to myself, I thought, okay, she doesn’t include us in the category of oblivious Boomers, clearly—she’s quite fond of us, we are very fond of her, all four of us are fond of each other, and so without a doubt it didn’t occur to her that she was sideways insulting us. So I didn’t take it personally. No harm, no foul.
But it started me to thinking.
Don’t get me started on the whole Boomer thing. My wife and I often say it to each other—"Okay, Boomer!”—when we think the other is being particularly ridiculous, and I’m quite aware of the haze so many people my age walk around in. After all, a lot of the Trumpers are Boomers, Trump himself is a Boomer, and so is—oh, you know, there are lots of idiots out there. But Alex Jones is GenX, as is Tucker Carlson, and I don’t think either of them feel bad about not appreciating intersectionality. Our four friends were all GenXers and have nothing in common with those con men other than the arbitrary range of dates in which they were born.
The term “intersectionality” is newish, but the idea certainly is not—you can’t have a decent sociology without it, and Emile Durkheim and WEB DuBois and Talcott Parsons and E. Franklin Frazier and Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and, for that matter, Freud and Marx understood that multiple and intersecting social identities combine to empower and to oppress. The term was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 (Crenshaw, by the way, a Boomer), but you can’t understand the intellectual careers of pre-Boomer Audre Lorde, for instance, or almost-a-Boomer Angela Davis, or Boomers Mike Davis or Sonia Sotomayor, without realizing that the idea of intersectionality, without the name, was essential to their work. Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, is a Millennial, as is Lauren Boebert. And so it is not wise to generalize about generations. Because, yes, intersectionality.
All this made me think about Phillip, the man who taught me to cook, the chef at my first restaurant, soon after I had turned 19. Sometimes, it seems to me, we learn things—like the nature of intersectionality—in complex ways and in passing, in the process of figuring other things out, amidst the welter of social events that change us day by day, educate us day by day, reset our sense of the world minute by minute. We may not learn it completely, and we may not learn it fast, but we learn parts of it, we start putting pieces together.
And so I wrote this short remembrance of Phillip: chef, gentleman, and the Queen of South Norwalk. RuPaul has said that we’re born naked and everything else is drag, and these were the days when I started to learn that. In this little story, I try to stay close to my consciousness at eighteen. Ninety percent of what the story means to me is implied rather than stated, and occurred to me over the years rather than at the time. This was my thinking then. For good or ill, that’s what I decided my job was here.
Phillip
One thing about cooks: we drink.
The kitchen is hot, the kitchen is stressful, the kitchen cooks with wine and flambés with booze, the kitchen has access to the storerooms, and our food is designed to be served with drink. And all that aside, we drink.
Phillip was a tall, sharp-eyed, very dark-skinned Black man of some ancient vintage—or so it seemed to me at the time—and kind of worn out. The only drink he could handle was Scotch with milk, because anything else hit his ulcer too hard. Or so he claimed—I was never sure how much to trust what he said. He was frail and powerful, halting and willful, straightforward and withholding and unreadable, physically fragile and emotionally fierce. As a nineteen-year-old white kid, I was in no position to judge how truthful he was, since he had no reason to be particularly honest with me, and, in fact, I had no way of judging how old he really was. He might have been 50, he might have been 70. I had no yardstick, no experience, no referents. His hair was black, but maybe dyed; he always seemed slightly exhausted, but whether that was age or hard living or just a worldview, I never knew.
In the early 1970s, Phillip was the chef at the improbably named Tumbledown Dick’s, a Connecticut steakhouse that a couple of decades later would have called itself a gastropub, plummy and wood-paneled, with a very busy middle-aged bar, a kind of married businessman’s pick-up spot, with a lot of suits and ties and bluster meeting a lot of make-up and high heels. The sign out front, I only realized much later, was modeled on old English pubs. What did I know? I’d barely graduated from high school, and hadn’t paid much attention when I was there.
It was a small shop, less than twenty tables and the bar out front, the kitchen not much bigger than a home kitchen, with a small staff. Phillip was in complete charge of the back of the house, Profit was second in command, George third, me making salads, and then Dillon, the busboy/dishwasher. Profit and George were hardcore Lakers fans, hated the Celtics, and bet on the games. They were friends—I had the sense that Profit had helped George get the job. George had large thyroid eyes and Profit seemed always to squint, as if expecting an insult. Profit was keyed up and George chill; Profit ambitious, George satisfied. Dillon was much younger—my age—and much hipper. Phillip didn’t seem to like any of us.
He especially didn’t like Dillon, who used his large Afro as a storage locker, always with a big comb in the back, a cigarette on either side, and some toothpicks over his forehead on the left. He smoked whenever he had a chance and had a toothpick in his mouth the rest of the time. He walked as if he was listening to Curtis Mayfield in his head, laid back with a swagger, not a care in the world. He introduced me to menthol, and I switched from Marlboros to Kools. Phillip smoked Benson & Hedges and called menthol foolishness. Profit smoked mostly my cigarettes. George said smoking made his heart race.
George was a round guy, the only one of us who looked like he dealt with food all day. Phillip was a rail, Profit looked like an athlete, muscular, lean, and quick, and Dillon and I were boys, not fully grown into our adult shapes. Phillip would stand behind his stove and watch us all, his erect Cherokee cheekbones and his lineless forehead the only parts of his face not contorted with disgust, his eyes blazing like he was ready to smite us all in an Old Testament rage. It was normal then, the generation gap, it was everywhere. Dillon’s entire look was less than a decade old—wide Sly Stone bellbottoms and three-inch shirt collars—and I suppose mine was too. We were the counterculture incarnate, announced by his big hair and my long ponytail and beaded necklaces, and Phillip was, at heart, an aristocrat of the old regime. His lip would curl, his eyes on fire, as he watched Dillon strut into the dining room with his empty bus tray, a bounce in his stride, the comb sticking out of the back of his hair like he was saying relax, old man, I got this.
Phillip’s problem with Profit was different. Profit was 30-ish, but an old 30. When Phillip was gone, after 8:00 or so, and on his days off, Profit was very much in charge. He was smart and proud and bowed to no man. He knew what he was doing in the kitchen, was deeply competent and efficient, immune to pressure or panic—a great first cook—and the kind of man you’d want with you in a crisis. He prompted confidence. And you would not want to cross him, not want to be on the other side in a fight. Phillip, though, had been in the military for 20 years and expected people to recognize the chain of command, every minute of the day, and to appreciate the prerogatives, perquisites, and privileges of his office. Profit was none too good at that. George lacked any ambition to move up the ranks in Phillip’s army, and Dillon and I were peons not to be counted on. So Phillip forbore Profit, barely. Profit thought Phillip was, if not an Uncle Tom, too compliant, too ready to accept the fact of a racist world. Phillip though Profit was a brat who would find out how the world worked some day or other, but not at all soon enough to stay part of his kitchen. Their generation gap was even more fraught than any gap with me and Dillon. We were airheads, but Phillip and Profit both knew exactly what was what, and that was part of the problem. It was détente. I only saw them happy when the other one wasn’t there.
*
The Lakers and Celtics were in the finals, and Profit convinced me to bet $10 on one of the games, and told me the Lakers were his, so I had to take the Celtics. He lived in the caretaker’s apartment of a ridiculous estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he and his wife both worked—the restaurant was his second job. The place was modeled on Versailles, he said, which maybe it was. They lived out back in what he said was a carriage house. I had been listening to the game on the kitchen radio—Profit had the night off—had a few pulls on the cognac we had for flambéing. I closed up the kitchen and the Celtics won on the car radio as I pulled up to Profit’s place. I was jubilant! My first-ever sports bet and I had won.
I went in all hopped up to find him despondent. I didn’t quite get it until later, but he must have had some serious money on the game, because he was a wreck, and his wife was upset. He poured us double shots of whiskey, we downed them in a gulp, and he looked me in the eye, his glassy, and sighed. He poured another shot, and we downed them, and his wife shook her head. I felt wobbly. He paid me my ten bucks and I felt like a thief.
*
In the military, Phillip had been a cook, and because he was good, and because he respected the hierarchy, at least in practice, he ended his career at the top of his ladder. He was the personal chef for the man in charge, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Emerson LeMay, famous during the Vietnam War for wanting to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” LeMay had been on TV a lot, always in fights with the other Joint Chiefs about how nobody would listen to him, and how we needed to carpet bomb North Vietnam, so I knew who he was. He had overseen the massive aerial bombardment of civilians in Japan at the end of World War II, tried to lure the Soviet Union into a nuclear World War III in 1950s, urged the bombing of Havana during the Missile Crisis, and screamed for the bombing of Hanoi every chance he got until he was finally fired by LBJ. To my pot-smoking, draft-dodging, peace-nik young ass, he was the worst of the worst of the worst.
“What was he like?” I asked Phillip.
“He was a real gentleman,” Phillip said.
“Didn’t he run for Vice President with George Wallace?”
“Yes,” he said in the long, drawn out way he had—yes took a three count—when he wanted you to shut up. He looked me in the eye. “He was a gentleman,” he repeated. “He had beautiful manners.” He took a long hit off his Benson & Hedges and looked up at the ceiling while he exhaled, and then back at me with a glare, tapping his chef’s knife on the cutting board.
Every day he showed me another trick of the trade—how to chop an onion in ten seconds, how to flip an omelet with my wrist, how to make a demi-glace. It was the first time I had acquired real skills. I felt he was giving me, a boy, my place among men, my place in the world.
*
I lived in a beat-up house in the boonies north of the parkway with a half dozen other young quasi-derelicts. We were starting a band, and my girlfriend Suzy was the singer. I was a terrible self-taught keyboard player, but both the guitarist and the drummer were better than me and could show me simple parts to play. One day Profit came up to buy some weed from one of my housemates, and we all got stoned the way people did back then when they bought weed. We drank a few beers and had a couple of shots of tequila. It was the middle of the afternoon and although I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, I was feeling a bit queasy from the hootch. Profit asked if he could take the roommate’s motorcycle for a spin. It was a little old Harley that looked much more like it was from the set of a WWII movie than from Easy Rider. My roommate was proud of it and embarrassed by it. It was small, and old, but it was a Harley and it was his.
“You know how to ride?” the roommate asked.
“Yeah, man, no problem,” Profit said, and I seconded him, since, as I say, he was worldly and resourceful. And also I was stoned and drunk.
The housemate started it up—it was fussy about starting, he said—and stepped off.
“The gear shifter,” he said, pointing to it, “is a little sticky, but just give it a push, it will work.”
“Good,” said Profit, straddling the bike.
“It’s one up and three down,” the roommate said.
“One up, three down,” Profit said, and something about the way he said it made both the housemate and me have second thoughts. He didn’t say it like it meant anything to him. He revved it and popped it into gear the wrong way, let out the clutch too fast and went shooting down the driveway like a bullet. He hit the road hard, lost control, fell off, and the bike smashed into a stone wall on the other side of the street, dangled on it for a moment like it was deciding which way to fall, and then crashed back to the road. The beat-up bike looked like a cartoonist had designed it—the front wheel bent at 90 degrees, the headlight popped open like a jack-in-the-box, the back wheel still turning until the engine sputtered dead.
Profit assured us he would pay for it.
*
Phillip and I didn’t talk much, but I suspected that he wanted to get rid of Profit and was prepping me to take over his shifts. He taught me how to poke a NY strip, a ribeye, or a filet mignon with my finger and recognize the feel of rare, medium rare and well done, how to pan-fry a trout, how to finish a lobster tail under the broiler. It wasn’t a complicated menu.
A couple weeks in he told me to get ready for my first night. It was a Friday, usually one of Profit’s shifts, so I asked if he was sick.
“No, Mr. Profit is no longer with this establishment,” he said, taking his time with each syllable of the last word. It was the last word.
I couldn’t blame Profit, after that, for never coughing up for the motorcycle repair. I never actually saw him again.
*
“You know,” Phillip said one day. “I don’t usually like white dick.”
I didn’t have a response for that.
“It always looks like a piece of pork,” he said, shuddering, theatric, with a smile, tapping his knife on the counter, “pork” sounding like it had an aw in the middle instead of an or. “But I’m gonna make an exception in your case.”
I looked over at George, who kept his eyes down, but was grinning slightly.
“He ain’t gonna help you!” Phillip said, laughing, after which George laughed, too.
“But you mark my words. I’m gonna get you. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I want you, and I always get what I want.”
He was very convincing. I spent a number of days wondering if I was gay.
*
George hadn’t arrived yet, and Phillip waited until Dillon went out to the dining room.
“I am having one of my semi-annual bulldagger balls,” he said, and I nodded as if I knew what that was. I felt honored that he was asking me. “You and—Suzy?—is that it?”—he grimaced and I nodded—“You and Suzy will be my guests. Here is the address. When you are done here Saturday, we will just be getting started.” He pushed a calling card across the cutting block, the address written on the back, and waited, tapping his knife.
“Great,” I said.
“Who taught you manners, young man?” he asked, not for the first time, his upper lip raised like he smelled something bad. “Or who didn’t? They are truly atrocious!”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That would be delightful, Mr. Phillip,” he said, modeling the manners he thought I should have. “I do so much appreciate the invitation.”
“Yes,” I started to say, “we would be delighted…” But he had already waved me off in disgust and turned back to cutting steaks—a job he didn’t trust me with yet.
*
One day, hitching into work, I got picked up by a middle-aged man, a working-class guy in a windbreaker, hair slicked down—not back like a crooner, but flat like an accountant—driving an older car, a Pontiac, big, wide and rumbling. He was smoking a cigarette and sighed when he blew out the smoke. He asked where I was going and I told him to work. He asked where I lived and I told him up Long Ridge Road. He sighed and then asked if I wanted a blow job. He asked looking straight down the road, matter-of-factly, not glancing at me, inhaling again.
“No, thanks,” I said, and then added, I’m not sure why: “I just had one.” I think I felt like it would be rude to just say no without a reason, and I suppose that so far in my life, the only time I didn’t want one was right after I’d had one.
“Just thought I’d ask,” he said. “No harm in asking.”
“No,” I said, “no harm in asking.”
We pulled up to the restaurant, and I got out, thanking him for the ride, thinking maybe I wasn’t gay. Or maybe everyone was, just not everyone gay for everyone.
*
Suzy and I had been with each other since high school and lived together, but we both had roving eyes and sometimes, I came to learn, the rest of her did a bit of roving, too. We were babies, but we did love each other. She was a preacher’s kid, a PK, and she lived up to the stereotype—our first sexual encounter had another guy involved. But that’s a different story. She was a year older than me by birth date, and at least a decade older emotionally and sexually. I was a bit timid, and so the fact that she took me in hand when I was still 16 and walked me down the road to mutually orgasmic fucking was, as her father would say, a great blessing. She was more important to me than anything in life. Still, we understood that we were on borrowed time, and by the end of that year, she would move to Vermont with Preston, and Babette would move into my room and unpack her things into what had been Suzy’s half of the dresser.
We arrived at Phillip’s ball at around 11:00, and it was large, crowded, and in flight. It didn’t seem to be Phillip’s house—it was suburban, and kind of square, except for the people. I think we were introduced to the owner, but it was too loud, and we were too jumpy, to quite follow what was being said. We were greeted by most people with big smiles, which were part welcoming, full of party-time goodwill, and part surprised curiosity. We were the only white people in the place. Almost everyone seemed to know almost everyone—we got the sense we were outsiders in a tight-knit community. Many people were in drag. We were pointed to a bar where we both got tall glasses of vodka on the rocks.
The music stopped, and I could hear a couple of people tapping their glasses with spoons, quieting the partygoers. We all turned toward the middle of the room, where two men in wigs, long ballgowns, and high heels were standing. One was Phillip. He wore a large, very wingy blonde hairpiece, more Carol Channing than Marilyn Monroe, a shiny red gown, and tall heels, making him 6’6” rather than 6’1”. He was clinking on his glass, but not with a spoon, with a very large ring capped by a Hope Diamond-sized stone. The glass was half full of Scotch-tinted milk. The other man was in a white gown, also tall and thin, with two-inch fingernails studded with little jewels and a Veronica Lake wig, down over one eye, but blazing red. Next to her was a man—or a woman, I couldn’t tell—in a three-piece grey suit, an affable, roly-poly person a foot or more shorter than Big Red.
“We are gathered together,” Phillip said, shooting a fiery look at someone who dared to talk. “To join together these two children of God.” Some noise came from a back room, and a few people turned to shush them. “Well, I must say, I don’t know—” he interrupted himself, the way he did at work when he went off on a tangent, “I really don’t—where some people get their manners.” He waited a bit until it was completely quiet again. It occurred to me that Phillip was a personage, someone with real weight, the unofficial mayor of South Norwalk, or at least the mayor of gay South Norwalk.
“We have to celebrate,” he said, taking a sip of his milk with a small grimace, “love.” A few people said yes or amen. “That’s right, I know you all think I am a hard-ass”—and as he said this he ran his hand down his gown over his own ass with a wry smile, which got a little laugh, nobody wanting to get him mad by laughing too loud—“I know you think I’m a peevish, petulant grump who doesn’t believe in love and happiness and happy-forever and all that nonsense, but I do, I do. I do believe. We need love. We deserve happiness.” He waited a moment and then began: “Alton Bigsby, do you take this Avery Johnson to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”
The couple, like the rest of us, had been drawn in and forgot it was about them. They both stood up straight.
“I do.”
“And Avery Johnson, do you take this Alton Bigsby to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”
“I do.”
“Then by the power invested in me by the State of Connecticut, I do pronounce you married. You may kiss and go on about your business.”
Everyone cheered, the couple embraced and kissed eagerly, then accepted congratulatory hugs as the music came back on and the dancing started up again.
Suzy and I walked toward Phillip—I wanted her to meet him. He watched us approach with that look of disapproval, and it froze me. I couldn’t speak.
“Thank you for having us, Mr. Phillip,”he said, and shook his head. He held his hand out to Suzy like he was royalty, and she, always quicker on the draw than me, took it and kissed it with a little curtsy. “A pleasure to meet you, dear. I don’t know how you put up with this one,” he said, looking over at me again. Maybe it was seeing me in the middle of his world, or maybe he just had had enough of me, but I could tell that whatever had given us a brief bond was broken. It was over. I had turned out to be less interesting than he thought. I was a disappointment.
Suzy wandered away, and once in a while I saw her dancing, with different partners each time. Gender was a vast and variegated spectrum at Phillip’s ball, and I danced with many people, drinking a lot out of nervousness, and I often had no idea who I was with, especially as things became a blur. It was beautiful. At one point a dance partner in a tight, brown-checked suit and silver vest stroked my hair—it was long, in the style of the day, halfway down my back—and asked me, pointing to Suzy, “That your girlfriend?”
“Yes,” I said, and tried to concentrate. My dance partner was large, and, I noticed, had very large breasts and a silver satin bowtie, and was looking at me with bemused curiosity.
“You match your haircuts,” she said, and I looked over at Suzy, realizing, for the first time, that we did, indeed, have the same haircut, long, parted in the middle, with some waves but no real style—in this crowd it occurred to me this might be seen as a deficit.
“I guess so,” I said, with a bit of a th over my s’s, a bit drunk.
“So I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye—she didn’t think it was rude—“but when you do it, who’s on top?”
“Mostly me,” I said, without thinking, and again fumbled the first word a little.
“Hm,” she said, and gave out a good-natured laugh. “Then maybe she’d like me! I’m mostly on top, too!” She looked over at Suzy again. “You’re a cute boy,” she said vaguely, turning back to me in dismissal, giving me a peck on the cheek as she wandered off. The next morning I had a vague memory of them dancing. Suzy danced like exactly who she was—a woman who knew herself sexually better than just about anyone she ran across. It was beautiful. I was drunk.
*
Sandy, the main waitress at Tumbledown Dick’s, and some shifts the only waitress, was 30-something, and so in my idiot brain she seemed like a different species than the girls I was attracted to. Besides, she told me that she loved Elvis Presley, and I thought, bad enough to love him, but to admit it? In 1972? She was a single mom and a favorite, of sorts, among the married businessmen on the make—they would all flirt with her, and she with them, all safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t what they were after, and they, maybe, weren’t what she was after, either. Dick—yes, the balding owner’s name was Dick—left her in charge of everything in the front of the house, because she was very capable, and no-nonsense, and could keep the drunks in line without them feeling insulted by it. I watched her and the other middle-aged people miming sexual attraction for each other and just couldn’t quite care.
Sandy came into the kitchen one day and introduced Babette to us as the new part-time waitress. Babette was my age, had dropped out of some fancy college after a year, was blonde and wore leotard tops without a bra, nipples erect most of the time. She had a scattered affect that made young men dream of getting her to focus. One night I finally did, and came home very late, just as Suzy was leaving Preston’s room.
*
Phillip’s party, by two or three in the morning, was a roll of low-level flirting and sexed-up dancing, a lot of thighs in the crotch and grinding, and everyone in a bit of a blur of booze and pot and speed and whatever. And then, pop, pop, I came out of the communal fog to realize a gun was being shot. A couple of people tried to grab it, but the gunner jerked it away and ran outside. Pop, pop came from outside and everyone, all of a sudden alert, seemed to come to the same conclusion. We all wanted to get the fuck out, but the shooter was on the other side of the door we came in. Like in an earthquake, when everyone stands around panicked until the shaking stops, and then runs for the door, we all put it together at the same time and took off in search of a back entrance.
In the middle of the ruckus I saw Phillip, standing tall and elegant and sequined, saw his deep sadness at the feebleness of his fellow human beings. He was profoundly dispirited by us all, and yet philosophic in his distress. He knew, it occurred to me, how to take life’s accidents and blows in stride—in other words with a disconsolate dignity. The rest of us tried to put a brave face on things, or tried to scatter and hide, or to find the best in each other, or to explain things away, or to get out when the going got tough. Phillip knew there was no getting out. “People,” he said to me once. “They’ll break your heart.”
*
When I got to work the next day, Phillip made it clear he did not want any mention of the party, and I could see—for the first time. because how could I have possibly seen it before?—that he felt, in his chef’s whites in a middling restaurant in a middling place, diminished. He stood, glaring at Dillon, tapping his knife, without makeup, without long fingernails, without his Carol Channing wig, without his long eyelashes, without his position, unsequined, unheralded, stripped of his aura. We went about our day without talking.
A new chain of steak houses was opening a restaurant just down the road, and one night, over a bottle of vodka, Babette, who had legions of admirers and somehow had been approached to work there, suggested I apply for a job, too. I did. We both quit Tumbledown Dick’s and started working at the new place, and I never went back to TD’s again. Profit was already gone, and I never saw Dillon again, or Sandy, or George, or Phillip. I knew he wouldn’t approve of the chain; they paid better, but they were crap restaurants—Phillip would never be caught dead working in one of them. He may have felt déclassé at TD’s, but the chain was way down the ladder from there. After a few weeks, because the new place had such a loser staff, I was promoted to head cook. I won’t say chef, because it makes no sense in a place like that. And I knew I was faking it, always saw, in my mind’s eye, Phillip shaking his head, a small grimace on his face, disgusted by my impersonation, and by my defection—my cowardly defection, since I never said goodbye. I was afraid to face him.
The average age of the dozens of people working at the new place hovered somewhere around 22. Even the manager was only 27. We drank beers from the walk-in cooler all day, smoked pot out by the dumpster, did lines of meth in the bathroom, and eventually we all got fired. There were plenty of other young delinquents around to take our places, and the skill level meant new staff could be trained in a day or two. I had called on at most a tenth of what Phillip had taught me. The rest I only used at home.
Every year or two, something will remind me of him, and over time I started to think that I had, in fact, understood him, at least in part, understood his pain and his hauteur, understood it even though, callow youth that I was, I had no categories to help me arrange what I knew. I loved him, in my way.
I have no idea if he ever thought of me again. I doubt it. And now, of course, he is long dead.
I still chop an onion the way he taught me. I still see my fellow humans, sometimes, through his eyes, see their struggles, and feel his deep, deep disappointment.
***
Comments
Popular posts from this blog
Setting Out
(Photo from Turkistan, Kazakhstan. 2017) Giving a talk in Hong Kong to a group of students, after And the Monkey Learned Nothing was published, I was asked a stumper: "Why," a young woman who wanted to become a travel writer asked, "did you want to put these stories in a book?" Well, it's what I do, I had to say, I write books, but I didn't really get what she was after. "I love travel writing," she said. "But I would never think to go to a book for it. All the great travel writing is online." My guess is that Bruce Chatwin and Pico Iyer might beg to differ, but it made me wonder—why am I so obsessed with publishing in book form? Is it just because I get rewarded for it as a professor? Is it so firmly embedded as the opposite of perishing that I can't think past it? I also wonder about publishing in the literary journals. Shouldn't I just get out of the way now? I'm nearing retirement, I don't need to add anything to my C
(Photo from Urumqi, China, 2007) We arrived in Paris after 11 hours in the air and one on the ground in New York. We have an Airbnb in the Marais for 10 days before renting a car and hitting the road. We took a cab from the airport, had a coffee and pastry, slept forever, then went to a superb Parisian dinner, then slept forever, and wandered down to the Bastille market and bought a few things. Looking at the beautiful Parisians, Laurie said it's interesting how when you are young, you look fabulous on the outside, and feel completely discombobulated on the inside. I just wish the converse felt a bit more accurate....
Powered by Blogger
TOM LUTZAuthor of The Kindness of Strangers, Portraits, Aimlessness, Born Slippy, and other books.
Archive
Report Abuse
Comments
Popular posts from this blog
Setting Out
(Photo from Turkistan, Kazakhstan. 2017) Giving a talk in Hong Kong to a group of students, after And the Monkey Learned Nothing was published, I was asked a stumper: "Why," a young woman who wanted to become a travel writer asked, "did you want to put these stories in a book?" Well, it's what I do, I had to say, I write books, but I didn't really get what she was after. "I love travel writing," she said. "But I would never think to go to a book for it. All the great travel writing is online." My guess is that Bruce Chatwin and Pico Iyer might beg to differ, but it made me wonder—why am I so obsessed with publishing in book form? Is it just because I get rewarded for it as a professor? Is it so firmly embedded as the opposite of perishing that I can't think past it? I also wonder about publishing in the literary journals. Shouldn't I just get out of the way now? I'm nearing retirement, I don't need to add anything to my C
(Photo from Urumqi, China, 2007) We arrived in Paris after 11 hours in the air and one on the ground in New York. We have an Airbnb in the Marais for 10 days before renting a car and hitting the road. We took a cab from the airport, had a coffee and pastry, slept forever, then went to a superb Parisian dinner, then slept forever, and wandered down to the Bastille market and bought a few things. Looking at the beautiful Parisians, Laurie said it's interesting how when you are young, you look fabulous on the outside, and feel completely discombobulated on the inside. I just wish the converse felt a bit more accurate....
Powered by Blogger
TOM LUTZAuthor of The Kindness of Strangers, Portraits, Aimlessness, Born Slippy, and other books.
Archive
Report Abuse
(Basement restaurant, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2018)
Intersectionality
Before we started off on this wanderjahr, we had a series of dinners and gatherings with our kith and kin, to say au revoir, and one was with our neighbors. Next door is a film and TV director and writer who is famous for an important film about violence against trans people, and across the street a showrunner and director known for Black and multiracial comedies. Both of their partners are writers as well. One couple we’ve become very close with in recent years, and the other women are fairly new friends.
At one point during the evening, one said, “If a Millennial asks someone from Generation X about intersectionality, the Xer is likely to say, yes, we really fell down on intersectionality, and we have to catch up. But if they ask a Boomer, the Boomer says, “What’s intersectionality?”
I mean, we were standing right there….
And to be fair, she did say, “A friend said to me recently that if a Millennial asks a Gen Xer…..”—in other words it wasn’t exactly her opinion, and in playing it back to myself, I thought, okay, she doesn’t include us in the category of oblivious Boomers, clearly—she’s quite fond of us, we are very fond of her, all four of us are fond of each other, and so without a doubt it didn’t occur to her that she was sideways insulting us. So I didn’t take it personally. No harm, no foul.
But it started me to thinking.
Don’t get me started on the whole Boomer thing. My wife and I often say it to each other—"Okay, Boomer!”—when we think the other is being particularly ridiculous, and I’m quite aware of the haze so many people my age walk around in. After all, a lot of the Trumpers are Boomers, Trump himself is a Boomer, and so is—oh, you know, there are lots of idiots out there. But Alex Jones is GenX, as is Tucker Carlson, and I don’t think either of them feel bad about not appreciating intersectionality. Our four friends were all GenXers and have nothing in common with them other than the arbitrary range of dates in which they were born.
The term “intersectionality” is newish, but the idea certainly is not—you can’t have a decent sociology without it, and Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons and E. Franklin Frazier and Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and, for that matter, Freud and Marx understood that multiple and intersecting social identities combine to empower and to oppress. The term was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 (Crenshaw, by the way, a Boomer), but you can’t understand the intellectual careers of pre-Boomer Audre Lorde, for instance, or almost-a-Boomer Angela Davis, or Boomers Mike Davis or Sonia Sotomayor, without realizing that the idea of intersectionality, without the name, was essential to their work. Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, is a Millennial.
All this made me think about Phillip, the man who taught me to cook, the chef at my first restaurant, soon after I had turned 19. Sometimes, it seems to me, we learn things—like the nature of intersectionality—in complex ways and in passing, in the process of figuring things out, amidst the welter of social events that change us day by day, educate us day by day, reset our sense of the world minute by minute.
And so I wrote this short remembrance of Phillip: chef, gentleman, and the Queen of South Norwalk.
Phillip
One thing about cooks: we drink.
The kitchen is hot, the kitchen is stressful, the kitchen cooks with wine and flambés with booze, the kitchen has access to the storerooms, and our food is designed to be served with drink. And all that aside, we drink.
Phillip was a tall, sharp-eyed, very dark-skinned Black man of some ancient vintage, it seemed to me at the time, and kind of worn out. The only drink he could handle was Scotch with milk, because anything else hit his ulcer too hard. Or so he claimed—I was never sure how much to trust what he said. He was frail and powerful, halting and willful, straightforward and unreadable, physically fragile and emotionally fierce. As a nineteen-year-old white kid, I was in no position to judge how truthful he was, since he had no reason to be particularly honest with me, and, in fact, I had no way of judging how old he really was. He might have been 50, he might have been 70. I had no yardstick, no experience, no referents. His hair was black, but maybe dyed; he always seemed slightly exhausted, but whether that was age or hard living or just a worldview, I never knew.
In the early 1970s, Phillip was the chef at the improbably named Tumbledown Dick’s, a Connecticut steakhouse that a couple decades later would have called itself a gastropub, plummy and wood-paneled, with a very busy middle-aged bar, a kind of married businessman’s pick-up spot, with a lot of suits and ties and bluster meeting a lot of make-up and high heels. The sign out front, I only realized much later, was modeled on old English pubs. What did I know? I’d barely graduated from high school, and hadn’t paid much attention when I was there.
It was a small shop, less than twenty tables and the bar out front, the kitchen not much bigger than a home kitchen, with a small staff. Phillip was in complete charge of the back of the house, Profit was second in command, George third, me making salads, and then Dillon, the busboy/dishwasher. Profit and George were hardcore Lakers fans, hated the Celtics, and bet on the games. They were friends—I had the sense that Profit had helped George get the job. George had large thyroid eyes and Profit seemed always to squint, as if expecting an insult. Profit was keyed up and George chill; Profit ambitious, George satisfied. Dillon was much younger—my age—and much hipper. Phillip didn’t seem to like any of us.
He especially didn’t like Dillon, who used his large Afro as a storage locker, always with a big comb in the back, a cigarette on either side, and some toothpicks over his forehead on the left. He smoked whenever he had a chance and had a toothpick in his mouth the rest of the time. He walked as if he was listening to Curtis Mayfield in his head, laid back and strutting, not a care in the world. He introduced me to menthol, and I switched from Marlboros to Kools. Phillip smoked Benson & Hedges and called menthol foolishness. Profit smoked mostly my cigarettes. George said smoking made his heart race.
George was a round guy, the only one of us who looked like he dealt with food all day. Phillip was a rail, Profit looked like an athlete, muscular, lean, and quick, and Dillon and I were boys, not fully grown into our adult shapes. Phillip would stand behind his stove and watch us all, his erect Cherokee cheekbones and his lineless forehead the only parts of his face not contorted with disgust, his eyes blazing like he was ready to smite us all in an Old Testament rage. It was normal then, the generation gap, it was everywhere. Everything about Dillon’s look was less than a decade old—wide Sly Stone bellbottoms and three-inch shirt collars. We were the counterculture incarnate, announced by his big hair and my long ponytail, and Phillip was, at heart, an aristocrat of the old regime. His lip would curl, his eyes on fire, as he watched Dillon strut into the dining room with his empty bus tray, a bounce in his stride, the comb sticking out of the back of his hair like he was saying relax, old man, I got this.
Phillip’s problem with Profit was different. Profit was 30-ish, but an old 30. When Phillip was gone, after 8:00 or so, and on his days off, Profit was very much in charge. He was smart and proud and bowed to no man. He knew what he was doing in the kitchen, was deeply competent and efficient, immune to pressure or panic—a great first cook. He was the kind of man you’d want with you in a crisis. He prompted confidence. And you would not want to cross him, not want to be on the other side in a fight. Phillip had been in the military for 20 years and expected people to recognize, every minute of the day, the chain of command, to appreciate the prerogatives, perquisites, and privileges of his office, and Profit was none too good at that. George lacked any ambition to move up the ranks in Phillip’s army, and Dillon and I were peons not to be counted on. So Phillip forbore Profit, barely. Profit thought Phillip was, if not an Uncle Tom, too compliant, too ready to accept the fact of a racist world. Phillip though Profit was a brat who would find out how the world worked some day or other, but not at all soon enough to stay part of his kitchen. Their generation gap was even more fraught than the one with me and Dillon. We were airheads, but Phillip and Profit both knew exactly what was what, and that was part of the problem. It was détente. I only saw them happy when the other one wasn’t there.
*
The Lakers and Celtics were in the finals, and Profit convinced me to bet $10 on one of the games, and told me the Lakers were his, so I had to take the Celtics. He lived in the caretaker’s apartment of a ridiculous estate in Greenwich, where he and his wife both worked—the restaurant was his second job. The place was modeled on Versailles, he said, which maybe it was. They lived out back in what he said was a carriage house. I listened to the game on the kitchen radio, had a few pulls on the cognac we had for flambéing, and the Celtics won on the car radio as I pulled up to Profit’s place. I was jubilant! My first-ever sports bet and I had won.
I went in all hopped up to find him despondent. I didn’t quite get it until later, but he must have had some serious money on the game, because he was a wreck, and his wife was upset. He poured us double shots of whiskey, we downed them in a gulp, and he looked me in the eye, his glassy, and sighed. He poured another shot, and we downed them, and his wife shook her head. I felt wobbly. He paid me my ten bucks and I felt like a thief.
*
In the military, Phillip had been a cook, and because he was good, and because he respected the hierarchy, at least in practice, he ended his career at the top of his ladder. He was the personal chef for the man in charge, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Emerson LeMay, famous during the Vietnam War for wanting to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” LeMay had been on TV a lot, always in fights with the other Joint Chiefs about how nobody would listen to him, and how we needed to carpet bomb North Vietnam, so I knew who he was. He had overseen the massive aerial bombardment of civilians in Japan at the end of World War II, tried to lure the Soviet Union into a nuclear World War III in 1950s, urged the bombing of Havana during the Missile Crisis, and screamed for the bombing of Hanoi every chance he got until he was finally fired by LBJ. To my pot-smoking, draft-dodging, peace-nik young ass, he was the worst of the worst of the worst.
“What was he like?” I asked Phillip.
“He was a real gentleman,” Phillip said.
“Didn’t he run for Vice President with George Wallace?”
“Yes,” he said in the long, drawn out way he had—yes took a three count—when he wanted you to shut up. He looked me in the eye. “He was a gentleman,” he repeated. “He had beautiful manners.” He took a long hit off his Benson & Hedges and looked up at the ceiling while he exhaled, tapping his chef’s knife on the cutting board.
Every day he showed me another trick of the trade—how to chop an onion in ten seconds, how to flip an omelet with my wrist, how to make a demi-glace. It was the first time I had acquired real skills. I felt he was giving me, a boy, my place among men, my place in the world.
*
I lived in a beat-up house in the boonies north of the parkway with a half dozen other young quasi-derelicts. We were starting a band, and my girlfriend Suzy was the singer. I was a terrible self-taught keyboard player, but both the guitarist and the drummer were better than me and could show me simple parts to play. One day Profit came up to buy some weed from one of my housemates, and we all got stoned the way people did back then when they bought weed. We drank a few beers and had a couple of shots of tequila. It was the middle of the afternoon and although I wouldn’t have admitted I to anyone, I was feeling a bit queasy from the hootch. Profit asked if he could take the roommate’s motorcycle for a spin. It was a little old Harley that looked much more like it was from the set of a WWII movie than from Easy Rider. My roommate was proud of it and embarrassed by it. It was small, and old, but it was a Harley and it was his.
“You know how to ride?” the roommate asked.
“Yeah, man, no problem,” Profit said, and I seconded him, since, as I say, he was worldly and resourceful. And also I was stoned and drunk.
The housemate started it up—it was fussy about starting, he said—and stepped off.
“The gear shifter,” he said, pointing to it, “is a little sticky, but just give it a push, it will work.”
“Good,” said Profit, straddling the bike.
“It’s one up and three down,” the roommate said.
“One up, three down,” Profit said, and something about the way he said it made both the housemate and me have second thoughts. He didn’t say it like it meant anything to him. He revved it and popped it into gear the wrong way, let out the clutch too fast and went shooting down the driveway like a bullet. He hit the road hard, lost control, fell off, and the bike crashed into a stone wall on the other side of the street, dangled on it for a moment like it was deciding which way to fall, and then crashed back to the road. The beat-up bike looked like a cartoonist had designed it—the front wheel bent at 90 degrees, the headlight popped open like a jack-in-the-box, the back wheel still turning until the engine sputtered dead.
Profit assured us he would pay for it.
*
Phillip and I didn’t talk much, but I suspected that he wanted to get rid of Profit and was prepping me to take over his shifts. He taught me how to poke a NY strip, a ribeye, or a filet mignon with my finger and recognize the feel of rare, medium rare and well done, how to pan-fry a trout, how to finish a lobster tail under the broiler. It wasn’t a complicated menu.
A couple weeks in he told me to get ready for my first night. It was a Friday, usually one of Profit’s shifts, so I asked if he was sick.
“No, Mr. Profit is no longer with this establishment,” he said, taking his time with each syllable of the last word. It was the last word.
I couldn’t blame Profit, after that, for never coughing up for the motorcycle repair. I never actually saw him again.
“You know,” Phillip said one day. “I don’t usually like white dick.”
I didn’t have a response for that.
“It always looks like a piece of pork,” he said, shuddering, theatric, with a smile, tapping his knife on the counter, “pork” sounding more like it had an aw in the middle than an or. “But I’m gonna make an exception in your case.”
I looked over at George, who kept his eyes down, but was grinning slightly.
“He ain’t gonna help you!” Phillip said, laughing, after which George laughed, too. “But you mark my words. I’m gonna get you. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I want you, and I always get what I want.”
He was very convincing. I spent a number of days wondering if I was gay.
*
George hadn’t arrived yet, and Phillip waited until Dillon went out to the dining room.
“I am having one of my semi-annual bulldagger balls,” he said, and I nodded as if I knew what that was. I felt honored that he was asking me and not the others. “You and—Suzy?—is that it?”—he grimaced and I nodded—“You and Suzy will be my guests. Here is the address. When you are done here Saturday, we will just be getting started.” He pushed a calling card across the cutting block, the address written on the back, and waited, tapping his knife.
“Great,” I said.
“Who taught you manners, young man?” he asked, not for the first time, his upper lip raised like he smelled something bad. “Or who didn’t? They are truly atrocious!”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That would be delightful, Mr. Phillip,” he said, modeling the manners he thought I should have. “I do so much appreciate the invitation.”
“Yes,” I started to say, “we would be delighted…” But he had already waved me off in disgust and turned back to cutting steaks—a job he didn’t trust me with yet.
*
One day, hitching into work, I got picked up by a middle-aged man, a working-class guy in a windbreaker, hair slicked down—not back like a crooner, but flat like an accountant—driving an older car, a Pontiac, big, wide and rumbling. He was smoking a cigarette and sighed when he blew out the smoke. He asked where I was going and I told him to work. He asked where I lived and I told him up Long Ridge Road. He sighed and then asked if I wanted a blow job. He asked looking straight down the road, matter-of-factly, not glancing at me, inhaling again.
“No, thanks,” I said, and then added, I’m not sure why: “I just had one.” I think I felt like it would be rude to just say no without a reason, and I suppose that so far in my life, the only time I didn’t want one was right after I’d had one.
“Just thought I’d ask,” he said. “No harm in asking.”
“No,” I said, “no harm in asking.”
We pulled up to the restaurant, and I got out, thanking him for the ride, thinking maybe I wasn’t gay. Or maybe everyone was.
*
Suzy and I had been with each other since high school and lived together, but we both had roving eyes and sometimes, I came to learn, the rest of her did a bit of roving, too. We were babies, but we did love each other. She was a preacher’s kid, a PK, and she lived up to the stereotype—our first sexual encounter had another guy involved. But that’s a different story. She was a year older than me by birth date, and at least a decade older emotionally and sexually. I was a bit timid, and so the fact that she took me in hand when I was still 16 and walked me down the road to mutually orgasmic fucking was, as her father would say, a great blessing. She was more important to me than anything in life. Still, we understood that we were on borrowed time, and by the end of that year, she would move to Vermont with Preston, and Babette would move into my room and unpack her things into what had been Suzy’s half of the dresser.
We arrived at Phillip’s ball at around 11:00, and it was large, crowded, and in flight. It didn’t seem to be Phillip’s house—it was suburban, and kind of square, except for the people. I think we were introduced to the owner, but it was too loud, and we were too jumpy, to quite follow what was being said. We were greeted by most people with big smiles, which were part welcoming, full of party-time good will, and part surprised curiosity. We were the only white people in the place. Almost everyone seemed to know almost everyone—we got the sense we were outsiders in a tight-knit community. Many people were in drag. We were pointed to a bar where we both got tall glasses of vodka on the rocks.
The music stopped, and I could hear a couple of people tapping their glasses with spoons, quieting the partygoers. We all turned toward the middle of the room, where two men in wigs, long ballgowns, and high heels were standing. One was Phillip. He wore a large, very wingy blonde hairpiece, more Carol Channing than Marilyn Monroe, a shiny red gown, and tall heels, making him 6’6” rather than 6’1”. He was clinking on his glass, but not with a spoon, with a very large ring capped by a Hope Diamond-sized stone. The glass was half full of Scotch-tinted milk. The other man was in a white gown, also tall and thin, with two-inch fingernails studded with little jewels and a Veronica Lake wig, down over one eye, but blazing red. Next to her was a man—or a woman, I couldn’t tell—in a three-piece grey suit, an affable, roly-poly person a foot or more shorter than Big Red.
“We are gathered together,” Phillip said, shooting a fiery look at someone who dared to talk. “To join together these two children of God.” Some noise came from a back room, and a few people turned to shush them. “Well, I must say, I don’t know—” he interrupted himself, the way he did at work when he went off on a tangent, “I really don’t—where some people get their manners.” He waited a bit until it was completely quiet again. It occurred to me that Phillip was a personage, someone with real weight, the unofficial mayor of South Norwalk, or at least the mayor of gay South Norwalk. “We have to celebrate,” he said, taking a sip of his milk with a small grimace, “love.” A few people said yes or amen. “That’s right, I know you all think I am a hard-ass”—and as he said this he ran his hand down his gown over his own ass with a wry smile, which got a little laugh, nobody wanting to get him mad by laughing too loud—“I know you think I’m a peevish, petulant grump who doesn’t believe in love and happiness and happy-forever and all that nonsense, but I do, I do. I do believe. We need love. We deserve happiness.” He waited a moment and then began: “Alton Bigsby, do you take this Avery Johnson to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”
The couple, like the rest of us, had been drawn in and forgot it was about them. They both stood up straight.
“I do.”
“And Avery Johnson, do you take this Alton Bigsby to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”
“I do.”
“Then by the power invested in me by the State of Connecticut, I do pronounce you married. You may kiss and go on about your business.”
Everyone cheered, the couple embraced and kissed eagerly, then accepted congratulatory hugs as the music came back on and the dancing started up again.
Suzy and I walked toward Phillip—I wanted her to meet him. He watched us approach with that look of disapproval, and it froze me. I couldn’t speak.
“Thank you for having us, Mr. Phillip,”he said, and shook his head. He held his hand out to Suzy like he was royalty, and she, always quicker on the draw than me, took it and kissed it with a little curtsy. “A pleasure to meet you, dear. I don’t know how you put up with this one,” he said, looking over at me again. Maybe it was seeing me in the middle of his world, or maybe he just had had enough of me, but I could tell that whatever had given us a brief bond was broken. It was over. I had turned out to be less interesting than he thought. I was a disappointment.
Suzy wandered away, and once in a while I saw her dancing, different partners each time. Gender was a vast and variegated spectrum at Phillip’s ball, and I danced with many people, drinking a lot out of nervousness, and I often had no idea who I was with, especially as things became a blur. It was beautiful. At one point a dance partner in a tight, brown-checked suit and silver vest stroked my hair—it was long, in the style of the day, halfway down my back—and asked me, pointing to Suzy, “That your girlfriend?”
“Yes,” I said, and tried to concentrate. My dance partner was large, and, I noticed, had very large breasts and a silver satin bowtie, and was looking at me with bemused curiosity.
“You match your haircuts,” she said, and I looked over at Suzy, realizing, for the first time, that we did, indeed, have the same haircut, long, parted in the middle, with some waves but no real style—in this crowd it occurred to me this might be seen as a deficit.
“I guess so,” I said, with a bit of a th over my s’s, a bit drunk.
“So I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye—she didn’t think it was rude—“but when you do it, who’s on top?”
“Mostly me,” I said, without thinking, and again fumbled the first word a little.
“Hm,” she said, and gave out a good-natured laugh. “Then maybe she’d like me! I’m mostly on top, too!” She looked over at Suzy again. “You’re a cute boy,” she said vaguely, turning back to me in dismissal, a peck on the cheek as she wandered off. The next morning I had a vague memory of them dancing. Suzy danced like exactly who she was—a woman who knew herself sexually better than just about anyone she ran across. It was beautiful. I was drunk.
*
Sandy, the main waitress at Tumbledown Dick’s, and some shifts the only waitress, was 30-something, and so in my idiot brain she seemed like a different species than the girls I was attracted to. Besides, she told me that she loved Elvis Presley, and I thought, bad enough to love him, but to admit it? In 1972? She was a single mom and a favorite, of sorts, among the married businessmen on the make—they would all flirt with her, and she with them, all safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t what they were after, and they, maybe, weren’t what she was after, either. Dick—yes, the balding owner’s name was Dick—left her in charge of everything in the front of the house, because she was very capable, and no-nonsense, and could keep the drunks in line without them feeling insulted by it. I watched her and the other middle-aged people miming sexual attraction for each other and just couldn’t quite care.
Sandy came into the kitchen one day and introduced Babette to us as the new part-time waitress. Babette was my age, had dropped out of some fancy college after a year, was blonde and wore leotard tops without a bra, nipples erect most of the time. She had a scattered affect that made young men dream of getting her to focus. One night I finally did, and came home very late, just as Suzy was leaving Preston’s room.
*
Phillip’s party, by two or three in the morning, was a roll of low-level flirting and sexed-up dancing, a lot of thighs in the crotch and grinding, and everyone in a bit of a blur of booze and pot and speed and whatever. And then, pop, pop, I came out of the communal fog to realize a gun was being shot. A couple of people tried to grab it, but the gunner jerked it away and ran outside. Pop, pop came from outside and everyone, all of a sudden alert, seemed to come to the same conclusion. We all wanted to get the fuck out, but the shooter was on the other side of the door we came in. Like in an earthquake, when everyone stands around panicked until the shaking stops, and then runs for the door, we all put it together at the same time and took off in search of a back entrance.
In the middle of the ruckus I saw Phillip, standing tall and elegant and sequined, saw his deep sadness at the feebleness of his fellow human beings. He was profoundly dispirited by us all, and yet philosophic in his distress. He knew, it occurred to me, how to take life’s accidents and blows in stride—in other words with a disconsolate dignity. The rest of us tried to put a brave face on things, or tried to scatter and hide, or to find the best in each other, or to explain things away, or to get out when the going got tough. Phillip knew there was no getting out. “People,” he said to me once. “They’ll break your heart.”
*
When I got to work the next day, Phillip made it clear he did not want any mention of the party, and I could see—for the first time. because how could I have possibly seen it before?—that he felt, in his chef’s whites in a middling restaurant in a middling place, diminished. He stood, glaring at Dillon, tapping his knife, without makeup, without long fingernails, without his Carol Channing wig, without his long eyelashes, without his position, unsequined, unheralded, stripped of his aura. We went about our day without talking.
A new chain of steak houses was opening a restaurant just down the road, and one night, over a bottle of vodka, Babette, who had legions of admirers and somehow had been approached to work there, suggested I apply for a job, too. I did. We both quit Tumbledown Dick’s and started working at the new place, and I never went back to TD’s again. Profit was already gone, and I never saw Dillon again, or Sandy, or George, or Phillip. I knew he wouldn’t approve. The chain paid better, but they were crap restaurants—Phillip would never be caught dead working in one of them. He may have felt déclassé at TD’s, but the chain was way down the ladder from there. After a few weeks, because the new place had such a loser staff, I was promoted to head cook. I won’t say chef, because it makes no sense in a place like that. And I knew I was faking it, always saw, in my mind’s eye, Phillip shaking his head, a small grimace on his face, disgusted by my impersonation, and by my defection—my cowardly defection, since I never said goodbye. I was afraid to face him.
The average age of the dozens of people working at the new place hovered somewhere around 22. Even the manager was only 27. We drank beers from the walk-in cooler all day, smoked pot out by the dumpster, did lines of meth in the bathroom, and eventually we all got fired. There were plenty of other young delinquents around to take our places, and the skill level meant new staff could be trained in a day or two. I had called on at most a tenth of what Phillip had taught me. The rest I only used at home.
Every year or two, something will remind me of him, and over time I started to think that I had, in fact, understood him, at least in part, understood his pain and his hauteur, understood it even though, callow youth that I was, I had no categories to help me arrange what I knew. I loved him, in my way.
I have no idea if he ever thought of me again. I doubt it. And now, of course, he is long dead. I still chop an onion the way he taught me. I still see my fellow humans, sometimes, through his eyes, see their struggles, and feel his deep, deep disappointment.
***
Comments
Popular posts from this blog
Setting Out
(Photo from Turkistan, Kazakhstan. 2017) Giving a talk in Hong Kong to a group of students, after And the Monkey Learned Nothing was published, I was asked a stumper: "Why," a young woman who wanted to become a travel writer asked, "did you want to put these stories in a book?" Well, it's what I do, I had to say, I write books, but I didn't really get what she was after. "I love travel writing," she said. "But I would never think to go to a book for it. All the great travel writing is online." My guess is that Bruce Chatwin and Pico Iyer might beg to differ, but it made me wonder—why am I so obsessed with publishing in book form? Is it just because I get rewarded for it as a professor? Is it so firmly embedded as the opposite of perishing that I can't think past it? I also wonder about publishing in the literary journals. Shouldn't I just get out of the way now? I'm nearing retirement, I don't need to add anything to my C
(Photo from Urumqi, China, 2007) We arrived in Paris after 11 hours in the air and one on the ground in New York. We have an Airbnb in the Marais for 10 days before renting a car and hitting the road. We took a cab from the airport, had a coffee and pastry, slept forever, then went to a superb Parisian dinner, then slept forever, and wandered down to the Bastille market and bought a few things. Looking at the beautiful Parisians, Laurie said it's interesting how when you are young, you look fabulous on the outside, and feel completely discombobulated on the inside. I just wish the converse felt a bit more accurate....
Powered by Blogger
TOM LUTZAuthor of The Kindness of Strangers, Portraits, Aimlessness, Born Slippy, and other books.
Archive
Report Abuse
(Basement restaurant, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2018)
Intersectionality
Before we started off on this wanderjahr, we had a series of dinners and gatherings with our kith and kin, to say au revoir, and one was with our neighbors. Next door is a film and TV director and writer who is famous for an important film about violence against trans people, and across the street a showrunner and director known for Black and multiracial comedies. Both of their partners are writers as well. One couple we’ve become very close with in recent years, and the other women are fairly new friends.
At one point during the evening, one said, “If a Millennial asks someone from Generation X about intersectionality, the Xer is likely to say, yes, we really fell down on intersectionality, and we have to catch up. But if they ask a Boomer, the Boomer says, “What’s intersectionality?”
I mean, we were standing right there….
And to be fair, she did say, “A friend said to me recently that if a Millennial asks a Gen Xer…..”—in other words it wasn’t exactly her opinion, and in playing it back to myself, I thought, okay, she doesn’t include us in the category of oblivious Boomers, clearly—she’s quite fond of us, we are very fond of her, all four of us are fond of each other, and so without a doubt it didn’t occur to her that she was sideways insulting us. So I didn’t take it personally. No harm, no foul.
But it started me to thinking.
Don’t get me started on the whole Boomer thing. My wife and I often say it to each other—"Okay, Boomer!”—when we think the other is being particularly ridiculous, and I’m quite aware of the haze so many people my age walk around in. After all, a lot of the Trumpers are Boomers, Trump himself is a Boomer, and so is—oh, you know, there are lots of idiots out there. But Alex Jones is GenX, as is Tucker Carlson, and I don’t think either of them feel bad about not appreciating intersectionality. Our four friends were all GenXers and have nothing in common with them other than the arbitrary range of dates in which they were born.
The term “intersectionality” is newish, but the idea certainly is not—you can’t have a decent sociology without it, and Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons and E. Franklin Frazier and Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and, for that matter, Freud and Marx understood that multiple and intersecting social identities combine to empower and to oppress. The term was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 (Crenshaw, by the way, a Boomer), but you can’t understand the intellectual careers of pre-Boomer Audre Lorde, for instance, or almost-a-Boomer Angela Davis, or Boomers Mike Davis or Sonia Sotomayor, without realizing that the idea of intersectionality, without the name, was essential to their work. Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, is a Millennial.
All this made me think about Phillip, the man who taught me to cook, the chef at my first restaurant, soon after I had turned 19. Sometimes, it seems to me, we learn things—like the nature of intersectionality—in complex ways and in passing, in the process of figuring things out, amidst the welter of social events that change us day by day, educate us day by day, reset our sense of the world minute by minute.
And so I wrote this short remembrance of Phillip: chef, gentleman, and the Queen of South Norwalk.
Phillip
One thing about cooks: we drink.
The kitchen is hot, the kitchen is stressful, the kitchen cooks with wine and flambés with booze, the kitchen has access to the storerooms, and our food is designed to be served with drink. And all that aside, we drink.
Phillip was a tall, sharp-eyed, very dark-skinned Black man of some ancient vintage, it seemed to me at the time, and kind of worn out. The only drink he could handle was Scotch with milk, because anything else hit his ulcer too hard. Or so he claimed—I was never sure how much to trust what he said. He was frail and powerful, halting and willful, straightforward and unreadable, physically fragile and emotionally fierce. As a nineteen-year-old white kid, I was in no position to judge how truthful he was, since he had no reason to be particularly honest with me, and, in fact, I had no way of judging how old he really was. He might have been 50, he might have been 70. I had no yardstick, no experience, no referents. His hair was black, but maybe dyed; he always seemed slightly exhausted, but whether that was age or hard living or just a worldview, I never knew.
In the early 1970s, Phillip was the chef at the improbably named Tumbledown Dick’s, a Connecticut steakhouse that a couple decades later would have called itself a gastropub, plummy and wood-paneled, with a very busy middle-aged bar, a kind of married businessman’s pick-up spot, with a lot of suits and ties and bluster meeting a lot of make-up and high heels. The sign out front, I only realized much later, was modeled on old English pubs. What did I know? I’d barely graduated from high school, and hadn’t paid much attention when I was there.
It was a small shop, less than twenty tables and the bar out front, the kitchen not much bigger than a home kitchen, with a small staff. Phillip was in complete charge of the back of the house, Profit was second in command, George third, me making salads, and then Dillon, the busboy/dishwasher. Profit and George were hardcore Lakers fans, hated the Celtics, and bet on the games. They were friends—I had the sense that Profit had helped George get the job. George had large thyroid eyes and Profit seemed always to squint, as if expecting an insult. Profit was keyed up and George chill; Profit ambitious, George satisfied. Dillon was much younger—my age—and much hipper. Phillip didn’t seem to like any of us.
He especially didn’t like Dillon, who used his large Afro as a storage locker, always with a big comb in the back, a cigarette on either side, and some toothpicks over his forehead on the left. He smoked whenever he had a chance and had a toothpick in his mouth the rest of the time. He walked as if he was listening to Curtis Mayfield in his head, laid back and strutting, not a care in the world. He introduced me to menthol, and I switched from Marlboros to Kools. Phillip smoked Benson & Hedges and called menthol foolishness. Profit smoked mostly my cigarettes. George said smoking made his heart race.
George was a round guy, the only one of us who looked like he dealt with food all day. Phillip was a rail, Profit looked like an athlete, muscular, lean, and quick, and Dillon and I were boys, not fully grown into our adult shapes. Phillip would stand behind his stove and watch us all, his erect Cherokee cheekbones and his lineless forehead the only parts of his face not contorted with disgust, his eyes blazing like he was ready to smite us all in an Old Testament rage. It was normal then, the generation gap, it was everywhere. Everything about Dillon’s look was less than a decade old—wide Sly Stone bellbottoms and three-inch shirt collars. We were the counterculture incarnate, announced by his big hair and my long ponytail, and Phillip was, at heart, an aristocrat of the old regime. His lip would curl, his eyes on fire, as he watched Dillon strut into the dining room with his empty bus tray, a bounce in his stride, the comb sticking out of the back of his hair like he was saying relax, old man, I got this.
Phillip’s problem with Profit was different. Profit was 30-ish, but an old 30. When Phillip was gone, after 8:00 or so, and on his days off, Profit was very much in charge. He was smart and proud and bowed to no man. He knew what he was doing in the kitchen, was deeply competent and efficient, immune to pressure or panic—a great first cook. He was the kind of man you’d want with you in a crisis. He prompted confidence. And you would not want to cross him, not want to be on the other side in a fight. Phillip had been in the military for 20 years and expected people to recognize, every minute of the day, the chain of command, to appreciate the prerogatives, perquisites, and privileges of his office, and Profit was none too good at that. George lacked any ambition to move up the ranks in Phillip’s army, and Dillon and I were peons not to be counted on. So Phillip forbore Profit, barely. Profit thought Phillip was, if not an Uncle Tom, too compliant, too ready to accept the fact of a racist world. Phillip though Profit was a brat who would find out how the world worked some day or other, but not at all soon enough to stay part of his kitchen. Their generation gap was even more fraught than the one with me and Dillon. We were airheads, but Phillip and Profit both knew exactly what was what, and that was part of the problem. It was détente. I only saw them happy when the other one wasn’t there.
*
The Lakers and Celtics were in the finals, and Profit convinced me to bet $10 on one of the games, and told me the Lakers were his, so I had to take the Celtics. He lived in the caretaker’s apartment of a ridiculous estate in Greenwich, where he and his wife both worked—the restaurant was his second job. The place was modeled on Versailles, he said, which maybe it was. They lived out back in what he said was a carriage house. I listened to the game on the kitchen radio, had a few pulls on the cognac we had for flambéing, and the Celtics won on the car radio as I pulled up to Profit’s place. I was jubilant! My first-ever sports bet and I had won.
I went in all hopped up to find him despondent. I didn’t quite get it until later, but he must have had some serious money on the game, because he was a wreck, and his wife was upset. He poured us double shots of whiskey, we downed them in a gulp, and he looked me in the eye, his glassy, and sighed. He poured another shot, and we downed them, and his wife shook her head. I felt wobbly. He paid me my ten bucks and I felt like a thief.
*
In the military, Phillip had been a cook, and because he was good, and because he respected the hierarchy, at least in practice, he ended his career at the top of his ladder. He was the personal chef for the man in charge, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Emerson LeMay, famous during the Vietnam War for wanting to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” LeMay had been on TV a lot, always in fights with the other Joint Chiefs about how nobody would listen to him, and how we needed to carpet bomb North Vietnam, so I knew who he was. He had overseen the massive aerial bombardment of civilians in Japan at the end of World War II, tried to lure the Soviet Union into a nuclear World War III in 1950s, urged the bombing of Havana during the Missile Crisis, and screamed for the bombing of Hanoi every chance he got until he was finally fired by LBJ. To my pot-smoking, draft-dodging, peace-nik young ass, he was the worst of the worst of the worst.
“What was he like?” I asked Phillip.
“He was a real gentleman,” Phillip said.
“Didn’t he run for Vice President with George Wallace?”
“Yes,” he said in the long, drawn out way he had—yes took a three count—when he wanted you to shut up. He looked me in the eye. “He was a gentleman,” he repeated. “He had beautiful manners.” He took a long hit off his Benson & Hedges and looked up at the ceiling while he exhaled, tapping his chef’s knife on the cutting board.
Every day he showed me another trick of the trade—how to chop an onion in ten seconds, how to flip an omelet with my wrist, how to make a demi-glace. It was the first time I had acquired real skills. I felt he was giving me, a boy, my place among men, my place in the world.
*
I lived in a beat-up house in the boonies north of the parkway with a half dozen other young quasi-derelicts. We were starting a band, and my girlfriend Suzy was the singer. I was a terrible self-taught keyboard player, but both the guitarist and the drummer were better than me and could show me simple parts to play. One day Profit came up to buy some weed from one of my housemates, and we all got stoned the way people did back then when they bought weed. We drank a few beers and had a couple of shots of tequila. It was the middle of the afternoon and although I wouldn’t have admitted I to anyone, I was feeling a bit queasy from the hootch. Profit asked if he could take the roommate’s motorcycle for a spin. It was a little old Harley that looked much more like it was from the set of a WWII movie than from Easy Rider. My roommate was proud of it and embarrassed by it. It was small, and old, but it was a Harley and it was his.
“You know how to ride?” the roommate asked.
“Yeah, man, no problem,” Profit said, and I seconded him, since, as I say, he was worldly and resourceful. And also I was stoned and drunk.
The housemate started it up—it was fussy about starting, he said—and stepped off.
“The gear shifter,” he said, pointing to it, “is a little sticky, but just give it a push, it will work.”
“Good,” said Profit, straddling the bike.
“It’s one up and three down,” the roommate said.
“One up, three down,” Profit said, and something about the way he said it made both the housemate and me have second thoughts. He didn’t say it like it meant anything to him. He revved it and popped it into gear the wrong way, let out the clutch too fast and went shooting down the driveway like a bullet. He hit the road hard, lost control, fell off, and the bike crashed into a stone wall on the other side of the street, dangled on it for a moment like it was deciding which way to fall, and then crashed back to the road. The beat-up bike looked like a cartoonist had designed it—the front wheel bent at 90 degrees, the headlight popped open like a jack-in-the-box, the back wheel still turning until the engine sputtered dead.
Profit assured us he would pay for it.
*
Phillip and I didn’t talk much, but I suspected that he wanted to get rid of Profit and was prepping me to take over his shifts. He taught me how to poke a NY strip, a ribeye, or a filet mignon with my finger and recognize the feel of rare, medium rare and well done, how to pan-fry a trout, how to finish a lobster tail under the broiler. It wasn’t a complicated menu.
A couple weeks in he told me to get ready for my first night. It was a Friday, usually one of Profit’s shifts, so I asked if he was sick.
“No, Mr. Profit is no longer with this establishment,” he said, taking his time with each syllable of the last word. It was the last word.
I couldn’t blame Profit, after that, for never coughing up for the motorcycle repair. I never actually saw him again.
“You know,” Phillip said one day. “I don’t usually like white dick.”
I didn’t have a response for that.
“It always looks like a piece of pork,” he said, shuddering, theatric, with a smile, tapping his knife on the counter, “pork” sounding more like it had an aw in the middle than an or. “But I’m gonna make an exception in your case.”
I looked over at George, who kept his eyes down, but was grinning slightly.
“He ain’t gonna help you!” Phillip said, laughing, after which George laughed, too. “But you mark my words. I’m gonna get you. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I want you, and I always get what I want.”
He was very convincing. I spent a number of days wondering if I was gay.
*
George hadn’t arrived yet, and Phillip waited until Dillon went out to the dining room.
“I am having one of my semi-annual bulldagger balls,” he said, and I nodded as if I knew what that was. I felt honored that he was asking me and not the others. “You and—Suzy?—is that it?”—he grimaced and I nodded—“You and Suzy will be my guests. Here is the address. When you are done here Saturday, we will just be getting started.” He pushed a calling card across the cutting block, the address written on the back, and waited, tapping his knife.
“Great,” I said.
“Who taught you manners, young man?” he asked, not for the first time, his upper lip raised like he smelled something bad. “Or who didn’t? They are truly atrocious!”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“That would be delightful, Mr. Phillip,” he said, modeling the manners he thought I should have. “I do so much appreciate the invitation.”
“Yes,” I started to say, “we would be delighted…” But he had already waved me off in disgust and turned back to cutting steaks—a job he didn’t trust me with yet.
*
One day, hitching into work, I got picked up by a middle-aged man, a working-class guy in a windbreaker, hair slicked down—not back like a crooner, but flat like an accountant—driving an older car, a Pontiac, big, wide and rumbling. He was smoking a cigarette and sighed when he blew out the smoke. He asked where I was going and I told him to work. He asked where I lived and I told him up Long Ridge Road. He sighed and then asked if I wanted a blow job. He asked looking straight down the road, matter-of-factly, not glancing at me, inhaling again.
“No, thanks,” I said, and then added, I’m not sure why: “I just had one.” I think I felt like it would be rude to just say no without a reason, and I suppose that so far in my life, the only time I didn’t want one was right after I’d had one.
“Just thought I’d ask,” he said. “No harm in asking.”
“No,” I said, “no harm in asking.”
We pulled up to the restaurant, and I got out, thanking him for the ride, thinking maybe I wasn’t gay. Or maybe everyone was.
*
Suzy and I had been with each other since high school and lived together, but we both had roving eyes and sometimes, I came to learn, the rest of her did a bit of roving, too. We were babies, but we did love each other. She was a preacher’s kid, a PK, and she lived up to the stereotype—our first sexual encounter had another guy involved. But that’s a different story. She was a year older than me by birth date, and at least a decade older emotionally and sexually. I was a bit timid, and so the fact that she took me in hand when I was still 16 and walked me down the road to mutually orgasmic fucking was, as her father would say, a great blessing. She was more important to me than anything in life. Still, we understood that we were on borrowed time, and by the end of that year, she would move to Vermont with Preston, and Babette would move into my room and unpack her things into what had been Suzy’s half of the dresser.
We arrived at Phillip’s ball at around 11:00, and it was large, crowded, and in flight. It didn’t seem to be Phillip’s house—it was suburban, and kind of square, except for the people. I think we were introduced to the owner, but it was too loud, and we were too jumpy, to quite follow what was being said. We were greeted by most people with big smiles, which were part welcoming, full of party-time good will, and part surprised curiosity. We were the only white people in the place. Almost everyone seemed to know almost everyone—we got the sense we were outsiders in a tight-knit community. Many people were in drag. We were pointed to a bar where we both got tall glasses of vodka on the rocks.
The music stopped, and I could hear a couple of people tapping their glasses with spoons, quieting the partygoers. We all turned toward the middle of the room, where two men in wigs, long ballgowns, and high heels were standing. One was Phillip. He wore a large, very wingy blonde hairpiece, more Carol Channing than Marilyn Monroe, a shiny red gown, and tall heels, making him 6’6” rather than 6’1”. He was clinking on his glass, but not with a spoon, with a very large ring capped by a Hope Diamond-sized stone. The glass was half full of Scotch-tinted milk. The other man was in a white gown, also tall and thin, with two-inch fingernails studded with little jewels and a Veronica Lake wig, down over one eye, but blazing red. Next to her was a man—or a woman, I couldn’t tell—in a three-piece grey suit, an affable, roly-poly person a foot or more shorter than Big Red.
“We are gathered together,” Phillip said, shooting a fiery look at someone who dared to talk. “To join together these two children of God.” Some noise came from a back room, and a few people turned to shush them. “Well, I must say, I don’t know—” he interrupted himself, the way he did at work when he went off on a tangent, “I really don’t—where some people get their manners.” He waited a bit until it was completely quiet again. It occurred to me that Phillip was a personage, someone with real weight, the unofficial mayor of South Norwalk, or at least the mayor of gay South Norwalk. “We have to celebrate,” he said, taking a sip of his milk with a small grimace, “love.” A few people said yes or amen. “That’s right, I know you all think I am a hard-ass”—and as he said this he ran his hand down his gown over his own ass with a wry smile, which got a little laugh, nobody wanting to get him mad by laughing too loud—“I know you think I’m a peevish, petulant grump who doesn’t believe in love and happiness and happy-forever and all that nonsense, but I do, I do. I do believe. We need love. We deserve happiness.” He waited a moment and then began: “Alton Bigsby, do you take this Avery Johnson to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”
The couple, like the rest of us, had been drawn in and forgot it was about them. They both stood up straight.
“I do.”
“And Avery Johnson, do you take this Alton Bigsby to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”
“I do.”
“Then by the power invested in me by the State of Connecticut, I do pronounce you married. You may kiss and go on about your business.”
Everyone cheered, the couple embraced and kissed eagerly, then accepted congratulatory hugs as the music came back on and the dancing started up again.
Suzy and I walked toward Phillip—I wanted her to meet him. He watched us approach with that look of disapproval, and it froze me. I couldn’t speak.
“Thank you for having us, Mr. Phillip,”he said, and shook his head. He held his hand out to Suzy like he was royalty, and she, always quicker on the draw than me, took it and kissed it with a little curtsy. “A pleasure to meet you, dear. I don’t know how you put up with this one,” he said, looking over at me again. Maybe it was seeing me in the middle of his world, or maybe he just had had enough of me, but I could tell that whatever had given us a brief bond was broken. It was over. I had turned out to be less interesting than he thought. I was a disappointment.
Suzy wandered away, and once in a while I saw her dancing, different partners each time. Gender was a vast and variegated spectrum at Phillip’s ball, and I danced with many people, drinking a lot out of nervousness, and I often had no idea who I was with, especially as things became a blur. It was beautiful. At one point a dance partner in a tight, brown-checked suit and silver vest stroked my hair—it was long, in the style of the day, halfway down my back—and asked me, pointing to Suzy, “That your girlfriend?”
“Yes,” I said, and tried to concentrate. My dance partner was large, and, I noticed, had very large breasts and a silver satin bowtie, and was looking at me with bemused curiosity.
“You match your haircuts,” she said, and I looked over at Suzy, realizing, for the first time, that we did, indeed, have the same haircut, long, parted in the middle, with some waves but no real style—in this crowd it occurred to me this might be seen as a deficit.
“I guess so,” I said, with a bit of a th over my s’s, a bit drunk.
“So I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye—she didn’t think it was rude—“but when you do it, who’s on top?”
“Mostly me,” I said, without thinking, and again fumbled the first word a little.
“Hm,” she said, and gave out a good-natured laugh. “Then maybe she’d like me! I’m mostly on top, too!” She looked over at Suzy again. “You’re a cute boy,” she said vaguely, turning back to me in dismissal, a peck on the cheek as she wandered off. The next morning I had a vague memory of them dancing. Suzy danced like exactly who she was—a woman who knew herself sexually better than just about anyone she ran across. It was beautiful. I was drunk.
*
Sandy, the main waitress at Tumbledown Dick’s, and some shifts the only waitress, was 30-something, and so in my idiot brain she seemed like a different species than the girls I was attracted to. Besides, she told me that she loved Elvis Presley, and I thought, bad enough to love him, but to admit it? In 1972? She was a single mom and a favorite, of sorts, among the married businessmen on the make—they would all flirt with her, and she with them, all safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t what they were after, and they, maybe, weren’t what she was after, either. Dick—yes, the balding owner’s name was Dick—left her in charge of everything in the front of the house, because she was very capable, and no-nonsense, and could keep the drunks in line without them feeling insulted by it. I watched her and the other middle-aged people miming sexual attraction for each other and just couldn’t quite care.
Sandy came into the kitchen one day and introduced Babette to us as the new part-time waitress. Babette was my age, had dropped out of some fancy college after a year, was blonde and wore leotard tops without a bra, nipples erect most of the time. She had a scattered affect that made young men dream of getting her to focus. One night I finally did, and came home very late, just as Suzy was leaving Preston’s room.
*
Phillip’s party, by two or three in the morning, was a roll of low-level flirting and sexed-up dancing, a lot of thighs in the crotch and grinding, and everyone in a bit of a blur of booze and pot and speed and whatever. And then, pop, pop, I came out of the communal fog to realize a gun was being shot. A couple of people tried to grab it, but the gunner jerked it away and ran outside. Pop, pop came from outside and everyone, all of a sudden alert, seemed to come to the same conclusion. We all wanted to get the fuck out, but the shooter was on the other side of the door we came in. Like in an earthquake, when everyone stands around panicked until the shaking stops, and then runs for the door, we all put it together at the same time and took off in search of a back entrance.
In the middle of the ruckus I saw Phillip, standing tall and elegant and sequined, saw his deep sadness at the feebleness of his fellow human beings. He was profoundly dispirited by us all, and yet philosophic in his distress. He knew, it occurred to me, how to take life’s accidents and blows in stride—in other words with a disconsolate dignity. The rest of us tried to put a brave face on things, or tried to scatter and hide, or to find the best in each other, or to explain things away, or to get out when the going got tough. Phillip knew there was no getting out. “People,” he said to me once. “They’ll break your heart.”
*
When I got to work the next day, Phillip made it clear he did not want any mention of the party, and I could see—for the first time. because how could I have possibly seen it before?—that he felt, in his chef’s whites in a middling restaurant in a middling place, diminished. He stood, glaring at Dillon, tapping his knife, without makeup, without long fingernails, without his Carol Channing wig, without his long eyelashes, without his position, unsequined, unheralded, stripped of his aura. We went about our day without talking.
A new chain of steak houses was opening a restaurant just down the road, and one night, over a bottle of vodka, Babette, who had legions of admirers and somehow had been approached to work there, suggested I apply for a job, too. I did. We both quit Tumbledown Dick’s and started working at the new place, and I never went back to TD’s again. Profit was already gone, and I never saw Dillon again, or Sandy, or George, or Phillip. I knew he wouldn’t approve. The chain paid better, but they were crap restaurants—Phillip would never be caught dead working in one of them. He may have felt déclassé at TD’s, but the chain was way down the ladder from there. After a few weeks, because the new place had such a loser staff, I was promoted to head cook. I won’t say chef, because it makes no sense in a place like that. And I knew I was faking it, always saw, in my mind’s eye, Phillip shaking his head, a small grimace on his face, disgusted by my impersonation, and by my defection—my cowardly defection, since I never said goodbye. I was afraid to face him.
The average age of the dozens of people working at the new place hovered somewhere around 22. Even the manager was only 27. We drank beers from the walk-in cooler all day, smoked pot out by the dumpster, did lines of meth in the bathroom, and eventually we all got fired. There were plenty of other young delinquents around to take our places, and the skill level meant new staff could be trained in a day or two. I had called on at most a tenth of what Phillip had taught me. The rest I only used at home.
Every year or two, something will remind me of him, and over time I started to think that I had, in fact, understood him, at least in part, understood his pain and his hauteur, understood it even though, callow youth that I was, I had no categories to help me arrange what I knew. I loved him, in my way.
I have no idea if he ever thought of me again. I doubt it. And now, of course, he is long dead. I still chop an onion the way he taught me. I still see my fellow humans, sometimes, through his eyes, see their struggles, and feel his deep, deep disappointment.
***