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French Fries
Just as most people don’t wake up and become a murderer, most don’t wake up and become a food critic, but I did. Embracing this particular skill set felt like slipping into a bespoke garment, something cut to flatter my exact, idiosyncratic body. And yet, however much I feel put on this planet to instruct people on how, what, and why they should eat, I am compelled to admit that my vocation as food critic wouldn’t have been possible without men. I owe them so much.
In 1990, you had to squint to glimpse the Internet looming. In today’s time of newspapers and magazines gurgling a nonstop deathrattle, it’s hard to recall that, just a quarter century ago, print was basking in a halcyon moment. In ‘90s New York, it felt as if a new four-color magazine hatched everyday. It was a dizzying time of weighty glossies with oddly specific names like Egg, Paper, George, Spy, Blurt, and Spin. (These magazines, I believe, foretold the days of single-word restaurant names: Plum, Parm, Sauce, Supper, Den, Carnivore, and Home.) Ideas, print, writers, and money mushroomed with sweet yeastiness. One begat another, which begat another, which begat another, and before you knew it, you had a giant amorphous mass of words and people, pages and layouts, advertisers and editorials, subscriptions and readers, all demanding constant feeding.
During these Twin Peaks, Pretty Woman, “Ice Ice Baby” days and cocaine-fueled nights, ideas grew with fungal fecundity, and relationships were traded like currency. It was all about whom you knew, whom you blew, and whom you’d yet to screw. You just had to
be at the right cocktail party, at the right gallery opening, at the right restaurant, in the right club’s bathroom doing the right drug, on the right coast, in the right tight black skirt, thighs pressed to the right person, in order to find your name on a masthead of some slick publication.
And that was how I became the food critic for Noir.
I remember the exact night that birthed my career. It was at Beignet, where I found myself wedged on the restaurant’s beige nubuck banquette next to Manhattan playboy Andrew Gotien. Over the thudding bass of C + C Music Factory and a sea of upended vodka shots, I shouted that the braised Malpeque in lemongrass crème tasted like a fifteen-year-old boy’s fantasy of cunnilingus. I remember Andrew heard me and laughed as he slid his hand up my thigh. I remember going home with him. I vaguely remember some assertively athletic sex that ended in a misfire. I remember waking the next morning in Andrew’s Tribeca loft, and I remember, as Andrew’s sperm dried on my belly like donut glaze, he propped himself on one elbow, looking at me appraisingly.
“I want you to be the food critic for my new magazine,” he said.
Noir, he said, would take a dark sideways look at culture, fashion, politics, art, and pretense. I’d be perfect for it.
“Of course,” I said, drawing an idle doodle with his spunk. “You’ll pay me $4,000 a column.”
We sealed the deal with a sloppy kiss and a squelchy fuck.
I say I woke up and found myself a food critic, but it’s equally true that my life’s sinuous lines led me to my career. Looking back on it now, as I often do—prison really facilitates introspection—I feel as if I was raised to write about food. Just as dairy cows are raised to give milk, Nebbiolo vines are cultivated to make wine, or civet cats were created to defecate the world’s best coffee, I was raised to give voice to food’s consumption.
In retrospect, it seems fated to be, and, much to my distaste, it begins with my mother. You see, unlike most Americans born in the early’ 60s, I was reared on hand-crafted food. Like Daniel Boulud, I never ate store-bought bread unless I was at a restaurant—in fact, I never ate store-bought anything. My mother made her own bread,
kneading it with measured sensuality, dough perpetually drying in the crescents under her fingernails. She grew her own tomatoes, then she canned them, and then she used those jarred tomatoes to make fragrant cassoulet, salty steam rising as from a bagnio. She drove to the dairy and carted home great pails of unpasteurized milk from which she then made her own butter, yogurt, and crème fraîche— creamy, blond cups of it. She’d pour it, unctuous and fragrant and drizzled with honey, over bursting berries, sun-warmed and brambly.
My mother grew the berries and kept the bees, too.
She made it, she made it all, and she made it well. She stood with arms akimbo in her Connecticut garden; she strode her kitchen as a colossus. In our small world, she was the great, ever-giving Mother, maker of mysterious soups, magical stews, peerless fluffy loaves of bread, shiny fruit tarts glowing like family jewels, crispy- juicy brown hunks of roasted meat, vegetables cooked so crunchy- tender that your teeth wept, pottages of cream, sauces of jus, mysterious dishes of rice and herbs, salads that slayed you, all from produce grown in my mother’s own meticulously kept garden, or from ingredients sourced with an alchemist’s care. My mother was a witch in the kitchen and a Demeter in the garden. We hated her for it.
My father worked all day, churning out advertising copy with an electric mind that crackled and popped syntactic snaps. His kinetic brain prickled with quick, thick witticisms that sold stuff well and reliably. He worked long, late hours (time that, as it turned out, was punctuated with a series of mistresses, women whose identities blurred furry into a string of pronouns and epithets—her, she, that one, that bitch, your whore. I’d hear my parents argue in raw hushed tones, my mother making a show because propriety demanded it. In truth, she expected more integrity from the jars of preserves in her pantry). For a man given to 60-to-80-hour work weeks, my father’s home was less his castle and more his weekend office.
My mother, who ruled our home with a floured fist, was nominally, philosophically, and aesthetically French. Her Francophilia inflected her speech, her cooking, and her red lipstick, which she wore even when tending her organic garden, her hair tied up in a careful bun, giant gloves on her hands, faded cotton jacket on her back, and Wellies on her feet. Her faux Frenchness enabled her to roast a
chicken to succulence, then take that chicken and, with a shaman’s magic, turn it into an evolving kaleidoscope of meals: roasted chicken became chicken in aspic, chicken sandwiches, chicken stock, chicken with dumplings. My mother made a roast chicken stretch forever, an unblinking eternity of chicken.
Taking her work as head nurturer seriously, my mother lived to feed her three children—my two younger siblings, one son and another daughter, and me—from her garden, her pantry, and her larder, places defined by my mother’s necromantic abilities, Protestant determination, and single-minded snobbery. (Protestant, after all, because my mother was fake French. She was, like a gilded Louis XIV chair in a despot’s palace, a knockoff.) In contrast to my ever-present stay-at-home mom, my father was a presence in equal parts ephemeral and unchanging. He smelled like tobacco and brown liquor; his voice sounded like an emery board; he carried his slender body with a slight, resigned defeat, even as he made the kind of money and owned the kind of property and gave his Gen-X children the kind of education that defines privilege. My father was always precisely dressed—Brooks Brothers during the week, L.L. Bean on the weekends, and Ralph Lauren for special occasions—he complemented the wood-beam and cotton- duck farmhouse like he’d been purchased to match. Limited as my father’s home life was, you could set your watch by his presence, even if that presence felt as solid, and as visually perfect, as a cinematic projection. Together, my parents constructed a Potemkin village for our nuclear family; it looked good from the outside.
But every family has secrets, and my family’s was me.
Here’s an interesting thing about privation—it causes hallucinations.
For example, sleep deprivation often brings psychosis. The human brain can go only so long without deep REM rest, a break from our walking, talking, acting cognitive selves, before our brains do it for us, taking a deep dip into the waking dream state. Enough time awake, our skin begins to crawl with insects, centipedes and butterflies alighting, itching, fluttering, inching. Our ears ring with the voices of the dead or the detested. Our eyes see apparitional flashes of ghosties and beasties, exploding shafts of light and shifting
landscapes; we can’t trust our hands to hold that shuddering doorjamb. Our adrenaline spikes and our hearts beat a tachycardia tattoo. Our brains wrap nightmares around our sleepless flesh.
Food privation similarly sheathes you in a cocoon of yearning. I’m not saying that Bedford Hills starves its female populace—it doesn’t.
We eat. We eat puce goop and ecru glop and flat brown patties of unknown origin. We get peas tepid from the can, swimming in an oleaginous, salty bath. We get gluey, chewy bread spread with near- rancid margarine. Swallowing meals of government-issued apathy, we eat, three times a day. Sometimes, to slake our phantom appetites, we cobble together dishes from vending machines and commissary goods.
But most of all, we want. I want so hard and so viscerally that my brain wills food into being and floods my head with a tsunami of perfect ceviche from Playa del Carmen in Mexico, shrimp and tilapia basking in the spiky tang of sun-warmed limes, shivery slivers of papaya and guanabana cuddling with serrano and jalapeño. I’ll reach to shelve a book, and I’ll be slammed with olive oil cake, rough and crumbly, salty-sweet and scented with the fat bellies of green olives, chased with a mouthful of bittersweet espresso. I sit on my bed and pomegranates crush my lips, rack of lamb curls in my nostrils, hot black bread slathered with cultured butter fills my throat, and it chokes me. Ghost food wafting in crystalline recollection—a perfect besotted Manhattan, a half shell oyster shucked and glimmering with seawater, a bowl of minestrone curling with evergreen pesto, the first salty bite into a warm chocolate chip cookie—my mouth wets as my cunt once did. My jaws close on emptiness. Privation serves up these beggar’s purses of imagination, and I could die with want.
At home with my family, I ate my mother’s organic meals that gave meaning to her life. Out with my friends, though, I gorged on junk food. Kick-lines of fries, umber and indefatigably crisp; volcanic apple pie nestled in crust bubbled like deep-fried bubonic plague; milkshakes tinged with an inescapable plastic sheen—junk food was my rebellion. I never smoked, to give you a point of reference. Both of my parents smoked. They wouldn’t have cared if I balanced one of their Marlboros or Gitanes between my index and middle fingers,
struck a match, and inhaled deeply after a dinner of trout almondine and haricots verts. In fact, they expected it. Junk food was my adolescent insurrection. It was my teenage dissent, my Che Guevara’s beret, my black-gloved fist in the air, my vicious mohawk, snarling lip, and ripped leather jacket.
Too sweet, too salty, too plastic, and too glorious, junk food is a debt I owe my teenage girlfriends—but were they my friends? I don’t know. They were the people I modeled myself after because fitting in was easier than sticking out. I wore what they wore. I watched what they watched. I listened to the music they liked, and I screamed at musicians’ names because these girls screamed first. I swept my eyelashes with blue mascara because they painted theirs indigo. I peppered my speech with “like” and “went,” using the former as a filler and the latter as a synonym for “said.” Most excitingly, I ate what these girls ate because at home I never got to eat Whoppers or Whoopie Pies.
Friends or not, these girls let me explore the new appetites—junk food, junk sex, real power—that I couldn’t access in the eternal childhood of my parents’ home. But were they my friends. I don’t know whether I am able to have friends; friends, for me, are usually people I like well enough to act as if our relationship isn’t wholly transactional. I suppose Emma is my only real friend, though the jury is still out—the metaphorical jury, of course. The actual one handed down their decision on November 13, 2014, just a few days after Emma testified against me, but I digress.
I have reasons to feel forever grateful to my fake teenage girlfriends, for aside from teaching me about junk food, they taught me how to be feminine. Snuggled in their blossoming Love’s Baby Soft-scented bosoms, I learned to approximate a female—how to talk, how to walk, how to dance, how to flip your hair. How to part your lips as for a kiss but not for a bite of food. How to end your declarative sentences in a question. How to twitch your hips as you left a room. Why you laugh when you feel like screaming. Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.
I remember after-school hours speeding around Connecticut corners in cars, singing “Cold as Ice” and drawing out the last “I know” with our perfect mouths rounded like Playboy bunnies. We were just being girls as we squeezed around plastic tables to pick at our plastic food, batted our cerulean eyelashes at boys in the booth across the way, and pulled our lip gloss out of our collective purses and swiped them as one, a Lucite sheen sticky on our collective lips.
We were girls being girls at the keg parties and house parties, eating frozen pizza, holding red plastic cups of bad beer or worse wine, convening for late-night McDonald’s, and meeting for gropings in the dark with interchangeable boys-will-be-boys boys. Spending time with these scented, luscious girls, I felt I was stealing something precious. All these years later, a couple of bars of “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and I’m instantaneously holding a plastic cup of tepid PBR, looking to make out with the nearest, stupidest lacrosse player.
Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk. Adolescence immersed me in an ouroboros of desires, and it was ecstasy. What choice did I have but to lose my virginity to a fry- cook.
He was nobody to me, just a guy bent over a grill, artfully flipping burgers, and that made him perfect. He caught me with his slick spatula dance, a quick wrist snap and a hip shimmy. To him it was a nothing move, something he’d done again and again, burger after anonymous burger, one dead cow piled upon another in a line of prefab patties. Cunt-struck, I watched him. His striped smock hitched above his hips, skinny and serpentine. I saw that snap-shimmy and imagined the furrow of his spine, the downy trail of hairs snaking below the waistband of his 501s. I imagined the feel of his sharp hips under my palms, I envisioned the weight of his body. I wanted to lose myself in his skin’s dead-meat-grease stink.
He turned toward me, his back to the grill. His hair feathered around his paper cap, like a little boat riding atop a sea of waves, his face narrow with full lips the Disney red of Snow White’s poisoned apple. I imagined his lips, a little chapped, and his tongue, a little thick. I imagined the slubbed silk of his skin and the pang as his dick pierced my inviolate pussy. I imagined the relief after my hymen broke, the sense that with this one tiny moment, a seismic thing had
shifted, an act I could never take back. I could see myself as if it had already happened, born anew, driving away in my car, bleeding ejaculate into my panties, and tasting his salt on my hands. I ate my cheeseburger while listening to my friend chatter on about how, like, she went to DJ? And he was all, like, What’s up? And she went, You know, nothing? And he went, Yeah, me too?
I listened and responded, my eyes on that feather-haired Fryolator boy. The girl across from me prattled on, and I watched the fry-cook. I willed him to look at me. To see me sitting in that blood- red plastic booth, naked and potent in my blooming desire. I knew if we made eye contact, he would fall into my hands like a ripe plum. I could already feel his hair gummy-slick under my fingers, I could already feel the clash of his teeth, the rough strawberry of his tongue. I imagined his car had a bench front seat wide enough to ranch cattle. I wanted to sprawl across that late-model Crown Vic, spread my legs, grab his narrow flanks in my hands, and swallow him whole.
I watched his nylon-clad back, his paper-boat hat clinging to his hair. With every nerve of my body, I commanded him to turn around and see me, turn around and see me, TURN AROUND AND SEE ME. And he did. Our eyes met. I smiled and put a french fry in my mouth. Chewing it, I stared at him. The moment hung. A machine buzzed, and he turned around. But I knew. I knew. He was mine.
Whoever he was.
My girlfriend and I finished our food, and left together. Walking to the car, I listened to her yammer on about DJ and the way he, like, looks at her? And, like, the party that weekend? Did I think, like, her and DJ would totally make out? Yes, I said, I did. I was sure of it. I was positively expansive with possibility.
Two hours later I returned alone, parked my car in the back parking lot, and pushed play on Talking Heads: 77, whisper-singing the lyrics as I watched the back door. “Who Is It?” segued into “No Compassion,” which segued into “The Book I Read.” The door opened and my Fryolator boy walked out with a big bag of trash in either hand. He crossed in front of me as he stumped to the dumpster. I clicked on the interior light. Our eyes met across the
black of the parking lot, our gaze suspended like an aerialist midflight. I clicked off the light.
When he came out again, I was waiting in the March chill, my fake-fur jacket lamb-like and approachable, my tight Calvin Klein jeans ending in four-inch Candie’s, my body leaning against my sports car, one foot tucked up. He wore this lame leather jacket that was trying too hard. I bet his car had an eight-track. I hoped it did.
“Hi,” I said.
He stopped, smiled. His grin was lopsided, but his teeth were pretty and white. From six feet away I could catch that burger scent,
the finest that Jersey labs can craft.
“Hi.” He said.
I walked up to him, looked in his eyes, took his hand, and, like an alien, told him to take me to his car. Joy of joys, it was an Impala. In its wide smoke-scented front seat, we grappled like raw students in a dojo. I inhaled his smell, drowning myself in it. I stripped off my clothes and urged him, hard and lean, into me.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m on the Pill.”
He stuck me. I yowled, then I luxuriated in the unfamiliar pain, a sensation that thrilled and frightened me. A miasma of beef tallow, dirty corn oil, and unwashed man surrounded us. To this day, I can’t look at a Burger King cheeseburger wrapper without feeling my clit twitch. Such is the power of that particular madeleine.
I wish I knew that guy’s name. I’d like to look him up.
