I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands -- using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure [...]

[...] it was the last time they could say what they wanted in the workplace. The last time they could behave like savages, go home feeling proud and tired at the same time. The last time they could fuck somebody in the linen closet and have it not mean anything too serious, or stay out all night and wake up on the floor. The last time they found themselves close to people from every corner of the world, of every race, proclivity, religion and background. The restaurant business is perhaps the last meritocracy -- where what we do is all that matters. [...]

Thousands of the highly prized, relatively expensive striped bass were, in a rare feeding frenzy, suddenly there for the taking. You had literally only to throw bread on the water, bash the tasty fish on the head with a gaff and then haul them in. They were taking them by the hundreds of pounds. Every restaurant in town was loading up on them, their parking lots, like ours, suddenly a Coleman-lit staging area for scaling, gutting and wrapping operations. The Dreadnaught lot, like every other lot in town, was suddenly filled with gore-covered cooks and dishwashers, laboring under flickering gaslamps and naked bulbs to clean, wrap and freeze the valuable white meat. We worked for hours with our knives, our hair sparkling with snowflake-like fish scales, scraping, tearing, filleting. At the end of the night's work, I took home a 35-pound monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I'd ever eaten, was due to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, Could anything be better than that?

My knives set me apart right away. I had my by now well-worn high-carbon Sabatiers rolled in with the cheap school-supply junk: hard-to-sharpen Forschner stainless steel, peeler, parisienne scoop, paring knife and sheer. I was older than most of my fellow students, many of whom were away from home for the first time. Unlike them, I lived off campus, in Poughkeepsie with the remnants of my Vassar pals. I'd actually worked in the industry-and I'd had sex with a woman. These were not the cream of the crop, my fellow culinarians. It was 1975 and CIA was still getting more than their share of farm boys, bed-wetters, hicks, flunk-outs from community colleges and a few misfits for whom CIA was preferable to jailor juvenile detention. Hopeless in the kitchen, happy in their off-hours to do little more than build pyramids of beer cans, they were easy marks for a hard case like myself. I nearly supported myself during my two years in Hyde Park playing seven-card stud, Texas hold-em, no-peek and acey-deucey. I felt no shame or guilt taking their money, selling them beat drugs or cheating at cards. They were about to enter the restaurant industry; I figured they might as well learn sooner rather than later. If the Mario crew ever got hold of some of these rubes, they'd have the fillings out of their teeth.

Another class, Oriental Cookery, as I believe it was then called, was pretty funny. The instructor, a capable Chinese guy, was responsible for teaching us the fundamentals of both Chinese and Japanese cooking. The Chinese portion of the class was terrific. When it came time to fill us in on the tastes of Japan, however, our teacher was more interested in giving us an extended lecture on the Rape of Nanking. His loathing of the Japanese was consuming. In between describing the bayoneting of women, children and babies in World War II, he'd point at a poster of a sushi/sashimi presentation on the wall, and say in his broken, heavily accented English, 'That a raw a fish. You wanna eat that? Hah! Japanese shit!' Then he'd go back into his dissertation on forced labor, mass executions, enslavement, hinting darkly that Japan would pay, sooner or later, for what it had done to his country.

We met, and I must have looked like a rhesus monkey-the one in the perils-of-freebase commercial, cornered up a tree, shunned by his monkey pals, exhibiting erratic, paranoid and hostile behavior. I was rail-thin, shaky, and the first thing I did was ask my oId pal Bigfoot if he could lend me 25 bucks until payday. Without hesitation, he reached in his pocket and lent me 200-a tremendous leap of faith on his part. Bigfoot hadn't laid eyes on me in over a decade. Looking at me, and hearing the edited-for-television version of what I'd been up to in recent years, he must have had every reason to believe I'd disappear with the two bills, spend it on crack, and never show up for my first shift. And if he'd given me the 25 instead of 200, that might well have happened. But as so often happens with Bigfoot, his trust was rewarded. I was so shaken by his baseless trust in me-that such a cynical bastard as Bigfoot would make such a gesture-that I determined I'd sooner gnaw my own fingers off, gouge my eyes out with a shellfish fork, rub shit in my hair and run naked down Seventh Avenue than ever betray that trust.

Bigfoot understood -- as I came to understand -- that character is far more important than skills or employment history. And he recognized character -- good and bad -- brilliantly. He understood, and taught me, that a guy who shows up every day on time, never calls in sick, and does what he said he was going to do, is less likely to fuck you in the end than a guy who has an incredible resume but is less than reliable about arrival time. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have. Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do-and everyone else. He'd lift ex-junkie sleazeballs out of the gutter and turn them into trusted managers, guys who'd kill themselves rather than misuse one thin dime of Bigfoot receipts. He'd get Mexicans right off the boat, turn them into solid citizens with immigration lawyers, nice incomes and steady employment. But if Bigfoot calls them at four in the morning, wanting them to put in a rooftop patio, they'd better be prepared to rollout of bed and get busy quarrying limestone. Purveyors hated his guts. They'd peel the labels off the cartons they delivered, out of fear that Bigfoot would simply cut out the middleman and order directly from the source. He was an expert in equipment. I recall him getting a leasing company to guarantee a certain number of cubic feet of ice production from a machine he was contracting for. Two minutes after signing, he had his Presidential Guard measuring and weighing ice. When it turned out that the machine fell short by a few pounds or cubic feet, Bigfoot found himself with two new ice machines for the price of one. He loved playing purveyors against each other, driving the price down. Every once in a while, if a meat company, say, promised him the lowest price they could give, he'd have someone call them up, pretending to be their largest account-a 300-seat steakhouse, for instance-and ask for a copy of their last invoice, as theirs had gone missing; could they please fax another one? God help the poor meat guys if Peter Luger was paying two cents less a pound than Bigfoot was.

I was tired, I explained, and in love, I added, hoping to appeal to that romantic Mediterranean nature I'd read and heard about. 'My girlfriend,' I said,

'I don't see her anymore. . and I miss her. . I have,' I added, 'a life . outside of this place.' I went on to describe going home each night to a sleeping girl, rolling exhausted into the sheets, still stinking from work, and how I arose at six with the girl still asleep, never exchanging so much as a word before leaving for work again, for yet another double. This was no good for a relationship, I said.

'Look at me,' said my boss, as if the nice suit and the haircut and the desk explained everything. 'I am married ten years to my wife.' He smiled. 'I work all the time. I never see her. . she never sees me.' He paused now to show me some teeth, his eyes growing more penetrating and a little scary. 'We are very happy. '

What my boss meant by this little glimpse into his soul, I have no idea. But he impressed me. I worked the double, figuring maybe this was what was required: total dedication. Forget the loved ones. Forget the outside world. There is no life other than this life. I didn't spend much time trying to figure it out. The man scared me. Years later, I got another perspective on things. I opened the Post to see a photo of my oId boss's wife, draped over the awning of a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East Side. She'd apparently performed a double-gainer from the window of her high-rise apartment and not quite made it to the pavement. So I guess she wasn't that happy after all.

You'd think the union would be happy about this development, or at least curious, with an energetic young organizer in their midst. I scheduled a meeting with the union president, looking forward to commiserating about the Imperialist Jackboot on the Necks of the Workers, and the Struggle Against the Controllers of the Means of Production. When finally I sat down with the president of Local 6 (yet another Italian with a thick accent), he was oddly unenthusiastic. He looked up sleepily at me from behind the desk of his dark office, as if I were a delivery boy bringing him a sandwich. When I asked him if I could, as shop steward, familiarize myself with The Contract, so that I might better serve our members, the president fiddled with his cufflinks and said, 'I seem to have . temporarily. . misplaced it.' It was clear from his inflection and posture that he didn't give a fuck whether I believed him or not. After a few more minutes of near total silence and zero enthusiasm on the president's part, I got the hint and skulked back to work empty-handed.

We were pretty busy initially, and along with the young proteges who held us in something like awe, Sam, Dimitri and I would work all day and late into the night. When the restaurant closed, we'd take over the bar, drinking Cristal --which we'd buy at cost -- and running fat rails of coke from one end of the bar to the other, then crawling along on all-fours to snort them. The cuter and more degenerate members of the floor staff would hang with us, so there was a lot of humping in the dry-goods area and on the banquettes, 50-pound flour sacks being popular staging areas for after-work copulation. We'd bribed the doormen and security people of all the local nightclubs and rock and roll venues with steak sandwiches and free snacks, so that after we'd finished with our pleasures at the Work Progress bar, we'd bounce around from club to club without waiting on line or paying admission. A squadron of punk rocker junkie guitar heroes ate for free at Work Progress-so we got free tickets and backstage passes to the Mudd Club, CBGB, Tier Three, Hurrah, Club 57 and so on. And when the clubs closed it was off to after-hours where we'd drink and do more drugs until, weather permitting, we'd hit the seven o'clock train to Long Beach. We'd finish the last of our smack on the train, then pass out on the beach. Whichever one of us woke from the nod would roll the others over to avoid an uneven burn. When we finally arrived back at work, sand in our hair, we looked tanned, rested and ready.