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And if twenty-eight years in the restaurant business had taught me anything at all, it was that if things look good today, they will most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.
His success had become an organic, ever-expanding thing, growing naturally larger, as it had to, for to shrink—or even stay the same—would be to die.
I’d wanted to become a junkie, after all, since I was twelve years old. Call it a character flaw—of which drugs were simply a manifestation, a petulant “fuck you” to my bourgeois parents, who’d committed the unpardonable sin of loving me.
Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you. Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.
I was holed up in the Caribbean about midway through a really bad time. My first marriage had just ended and I was, to say the least, at loose ends. By “loose ends” I mean aimless and regularly suicidal.
Consider, though, a basic, authentic, “just like in Italy” spaghetti al pomodoro: a few ounces of good quality dry-cut pasta, a few drops of olive oil, garlic, some tomato, and a basil leaf. This will cost you twenty-nine bucks. And the drink that precedes it will cost at least seventeen. Essentially, you’re paying extra for someone to not fuck up your food.
What they want on St. Barths—as elsewhere, I’m guessing—is to feel secure among others of their ilk. Secure that they’ve chosen the right place—the place everybody else in their set will choose.
luck is not a business model.
But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning.
Everyone should be able to roast a chicken. And they should be able to do it well.
The best ingredients cost a LOT of money.
People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit.
I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.
