It became clear that three of us were not going to be enough in the kitchen once the workload increased and the concert season got into full swing. Management sent us some résumés, and this time I was the one doing the interviews. I told the third candidate, Emiliano, to come back the next day for a week’s trial period. He had cut his teeth in restaurants all over Turin, and his passion for writing was equaled only by his weakness for controlled substances. His speech was hurried, but what he said was well thought through and coherent. When he was high, it wasn’t his clenched jaw that gave him away, nor was it his slightly compulsive habit of sharing his alarmingly exhaustive opinions of “people,” “the world,” and “eating well.” What gave him away was his language: foulmouthed and funny at the same time. Between relentless ramblings, almost without pausing for breath, he would ask me to taste the sauce, did it need more salt? Was the garlic a touch too pungent in the salmon sauce? By that stage his taste buds were shot.
That was not the usual Emiliano, though. As a rule he was as high as a kite and much, much quieter. Sometimes it was methadone, other times he dampened the effects of coke with rohypnol, Prozac, Lendormin, or any of the other medications the doctor had prescribed for his mother, which he pilfered from her nightstand when he visited her. He didn’t shoot up heroin; he smoked it. He’d stopped doing needles after he got hepatitis. Michele appeared to be oblivious. All he did was make jokes about how crazy Emiliano was and how I only ever trusted my gut when I chose people.
As I got closer to Emiliano, I began distancing myself from Michele. My brain seems to work exceptionally well on some levels, but on others it gets tangled up in pointless conflict with itself and slides into perilous bullshit. When that happens, my only escape route is to concentrate on something practical and precise that relieves the tension and wears me out. Cooking is a wonderful medicine, far superior to the benzodiazepines Emiliano took. In that sense the paradox is that my best moments in the kitchen always coincide with the most fucked-up times in my life. I don’t know if that’s why I tend to fuck things up so often.
Emiliano was a deep thinker, maybe the deepest I have ever met. It was just that when he got tired of thinking, he smoked so much heroin that in the morning you’d find him in the kitchen looking like a wreck, his pupils the size of pinheads. Naturally, instead of sleep he was looking for a state of enhanced alertness that transcended insomnia. He never wanted to switch off. People who think heroin makes you close your eyes and fall asleep don’t have a clue. When his body told him to slow down, he stepped on the gas.
I admired his ability to live on the razor’s edge — not only did he not fall but he left everyone else for dead, including me. My snap decision to hire him had been spot-on, because with him the menu took another massive and completely unexpected leap forward into brilliance and sheer genius. And it worked, fuck me, it really worked.
We talked more and more, and more and more we snorted a line of cocaine in the restroom before service. More and more I ended up at his place sniffing heroin between smoking one joint and the next, with thoughts that were strangely lucid and had nothing to do with tingling fingers. I sensed that the game could take over my life, and knew it could happen in a heartbeat, but I was convinced that my work would save me. Together, we fucked up our lives, distanced ourselves from the others, and turned the kitchen into a wellspring of miracles.
It was me who asked to shoot up together. Everyone chooses their own path to destruction, but Emiliano’s strength and sensitivity would never be wrecked by a shot of brown, of this I was sure. Much more than he ever was. And, of course, he was right.
“Chefs reign supreme, Leo, but only in the kitchen,” he told me, while heating the glass vial containing the little dark ball swimming in saline solution with a lighter.
When you do heroin, your thoughts stack up one on top of the other but remain lucid. You get a head rush and you become incredibly rational, which is hard to reconcile with the substance you’ve just injected. You rationalize and reach conclusions that you can transfer into your everyday life, yet you dig a trench between yourself and what it takes to understand them. And, above all, you believe that you are totally in control and no one will notice. You only do it now and again, after all, you think.
First times are sometimes last times — maybe that is why they stay so clear in your memory. When they are not, you stop thinking about them altogether.