In the town where I grew up, everyone was always eating. Chewing was certainly allowed, and necessary, but like all things, it was looked down upon when done in excess. I heard once, in my slim and spry youth, that the priest could get a whole New York steak down in six chews. The mayor boasted he could do it in three.
The priest led the town in prayer once a month, and always ended his sermons with a doleful shout. “You are what you eat! Amen.” I imagined little pieces of pesto-mozzarella crostini in my arms, mother’s lemon-dijon chicken probably in my thighs; I imagined hot dogs exactly where you would expect them. With four bites the priest was finished with his North-Atlantic cod loin melted in leek sauce and the town chanted amen in unison.
I am not the small beauty of the forest or the soft rhythm of the sea, unless the small beauty is roasted venison backstrap in gooseberry sauce and the soft rhythm something like miso-glazed salmon or grilled tilapia. Sometimes I wish that eyes and ears were like mouths and stomachs so that I could fill myself with sunsets and sonatas like bruschetta and chicken cordon bleu, but it’s hard to imagine little pieces of those things in my fingers and belly, so every time I give up the thought.
This time, I notice that everyone has been staring at me. Of course, I was chewing. My mother, the last person to notice, threw her hands up in the air and my father shook his head. I swallowed my cod loin and almost choked on the mint julep funnel cake as the soft din of utensils went on without me.
+ + +
A hundred, a thousand hurried meals later I was on my way to graduation. To wear the white crossover collar, to throw my toque into the air in celebration, these were my ambitions, these were the things that I would think about when all of my friends were out somewhere getting wasted, crossing out their days with black sharpies and their nights with whatever burning liquid seemed to be on hand. These were the nights I was in the kitchen blackening my Coq au Vin and thinking that my whole body must be made up of longing.
I was sad most days. The professors at my school knew about me from my chewing faux pas however many years ago, and everywhere my dishes were scolded and laughed at. In Entremier class my baby artichokes were suffocated by pancetta and mint. In Boulanger, my naan caught fire in the tandoor, and I cultured my Rye with Yersinia Pestis instead of Lactobacillus. Soon after, the entire school was sick. The dean’s house was covered in vomit; the hospital was packed like finals week in winter. Fraternity row didn’t look very different. The priest came to the school chapel and prayed for the sick and spread the good word, “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me.” Communion wafers were given out with speed and swallowed. The sous-boulanger told me, coughing in between the giant rolls of fat around his mouth, that I would never be a chef.
That same night I was stripped of my puntilla and steak knives. My bread knife was confiscated forever, and the rest of them were dulled against an old mortar and given back to me, sharp enough only for butter. My pans were to be disinfected in chemical bleach and my Dutch oven was lost forever to the landfill.
That day I walked to the chapel in tears and spoke to the priest. He told me there were other ways to live. “Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. You can be a cook instead of a chef,” he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The words hung on me ears for a long time with a great heaviness. I said, “Thank you, Father” and I tried very hard to swallow the lump in my throat that did not let me say anything more.
Following my suspension I cooked in secret, and I chewed. I had to chew. There was no other way to cut my food into edible pieces, and the shame. The shame engulfed me. For days I hardly left my room. When I ate, I ran the faucet so that nobody would hear.
For a whole semester I chewed by myself, and after that I had to leave. I lost fifty pounds and was devastated. How could anybody trust a chef who did not carry his meals around with him? They would think I was ashamed of my own creations. A few times a thought would come into my mind. I could move to the fishing town, or the farming town with its outspoken priest who wore overalls and could plow a whole acre in twenty minutes. But the thoughts quickly passed; I am a slave to cooking, and a slave to passion is no slave at all.
When I dropped further down to two hundred and eighty pounds, I packed what was left of my things and my too-big shirts and too-big pants, and watched the sourdoughs rise over the convection plates in the oven, knowing full and well I would never make it here. It was the last dough rise I would ever see. I squeezed past my four-hundred-pound roommate Theodore out into the hallway. I passed the spices, the small and lovely bottles in their neat lines, and I missed advieh and harissa, the crushed wild paprika and saffron harvests in summertime. I missed them, if not for themselves, then for the way that they smelled when I pulled them out of their little glass vials before lecture.
I cooked and tried hard in my apartment, but without spices, which were expensive, my creations floundered. Often, I would take nostalgic walks past the school that I once so loved. Some days I could smell the classrooms through the open windows, the lemon rind shavings over Alaskan king crab as they were being carried through he halls, and hear the faint cracking of soufflé glazes being broken up softly by silver spoons. My colleagues were on their way to becoming chefs. I tried my best to catch up and make do with what I had. My fettuccini in tear bolognaise, my baked potato dandruff compilation, and my filet mignon braised in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue were all complete failures. I chewed them all down and was ashamed.
+ + +
My mother called once, but it was awkward, and laden with silence. She said that she didn’t raise me to chew in public. She didn’t raise me to chew at all… “Why can’t you be like your sister? She is swallowing all the time… And do you ever see her sad? I haven’t seen her sad once… You have to chew in front of the whole town and make our family look bad. I didn’t raise you like that. I don’t know where you got that from.”
I didn’t know either. While she was on the phone I sat at my kitchen table and chewed over her words. When she talked, I did not know what to say. I pushed over the saltshaker with my finger and it spilled a few little white piles of salt onto the table.
+ + +
I worked as a cook. The priest was kind enough to give me a recommendation at a fast food chicken restaurant on the east side. The mahogany ladle I traded for a spatula, the spice rack for little white packets that explode sauce when you step on them. Every night I flipped burgers and closed my eyes, and for a moment; a moment and a half every time, I saw myself in a white chef’s coat serving my meals to faint music and half-crescent mouths that closed tightly and swallowed. When I could hold them shut no longer, and the whole world would moan in mixed pain and release, my eyes would widen onto the pastel bars of window gleam that found their way through the blinds and onto the shiny red booth seats. The hostess would come by with a sixteen set disposable rainbow of crayons for the kids, and the bus boy would clean a half-eaten burger off of an empty table.
I still chewed. Often I did it absent-mindedly, and the bus boys snickered behind their largeness and jeered when they caught me. There was no epiphany moment when I began chewing regularly, no grand change and then relief. The process of coming to terms with my chewing was as demure as walking down the street and smelling rain on the asphalt, and looking at the little rainbows that the gasoline makes in the puddles, or watching the sun shine through an orange layer of pollution at six p.m. It was like eating olives and hating them, before finding something more to their taste than just bitterness.
Every once in a while the priest, that kind kind man, called to see how I was doing. The last time he called he said, “Son, I’m going to pray for you. I know you chew too much. I remember when I used to chew too much as well. You probably don’t believe me, but I used to chew over stacks of pancakes in ten, fifteen bites. But then the good Lord came to me in a vision and He told me that all I had to do was give up chewing and just believe, and I would be happy.”
While he was talking I sat down in my kitchen with the salt still pushed over on the table. I watched the faucet spew water over the dishes that I hadn’t done, and the knives.
“There is no need for you to chew it all over. Some day I’m sure you will understand.” Quietly, he added, “You are what you eat, Amen” and hung up the phone.
I tried hard to think about his words. I wondered about the things that I was. I tried to remember if I had cooked loneliness into my breakfast. Maybe I had spilled some heartache with the salt. I searched everywhere for emptiness, in the cabinets and the pantry, the refrigerator and my stomach, and my heart, and my veins. But there was no emptiness any of those places, just blood. Only blood.
