TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 158

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 21, 2000000000007


Dear Collection,

	My divorce support group assigned me the 
awful task of doing something nice for myself 
between meetings.  Something nice.  Anything, as 
long as it was nice.  And I was asked by our 
great leader, "What will you promise to do for 
yourself?"  I came up blank.  Honest to God, I 
couldn't think of anything nice to do for myself. 
It sounds a little absurd right now, but that's 
the way it was.  So, all week I've been looking 
for the opportunity to do something "nice" for 
myself, and I was inspired at our recent trip to 
Costco while standing at the clothing bins, 
collecting pants for Meyshe, that I could 
actually buy myself a pair of pants.  Since 
moving in with my mom, I've been alternating 
between a couple, three pairs of pants.  I 
perused the bins where ladies' pants were folded 
in disturbed piles.  I found a pair of pseudo 
cargo pants.  I require plenty of pockets, so 
that looked right.  The pockets were a little 
shallow, but I thought I could handle that.  I 
got  a couple of pairs and when I got them home, 
I tried one on.  They're these low rider things. 
The waist is around the hips.  We used to call 
these, "Hip huggers," but now they are, "Low 
riders," and they are very annoying.  There is a 
drawstring which is the only thing between me 
clothed and me with my pants around my ankles. 
So I have to tie it very tight and hope the bow 
holds.  And the pockets are very short.  My right 
pocket, where I store my money, has green leafy 
bills peeping out of it.  How do people wear 
these things?

	So here's the question:  Did I do 
something nice for myself thereby satisfying the 
requirement, or do I have to go out and do 
something else?  This nice stuff has me working 
hard.




 
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Catering

	Harry was the first male I ever met who 
could cook.  He did a good job.  He grew up in 
the '30s in San Francisco's Chinatown.  He had 
three brothers.  He said they were so poor you 
couldn't believe it.  But they ate well.  For 
fifty cents you could call and have a banquet 
delivered to your door by a boy who carried the 
whole meal on a platter on top of his head.  They 
feasted on all the delicacies of China. 
Meanwhile, poor Americans, felled by the same 
depression that laid Harry's family low, were 
miserable because they couldn't afford a steak. 
You just have to learn to love chicken feet, 
preserved eggs, tripe, smoked tea eggs, chow fun. 
You also have to suffer through Peking Duck, 
whole steamed fishies and roasted fire sausage. 
As Harry told me, everyone learned to cook, 
because everyone was working to bring in whatever 
money they could, and you never knew who would be 
available to prepare the meal.

	I'd cooked what I thought was Chinese 
food before, but Harry showed me how to cook real 
food.  He showed me how to use a cleaver, still 
my hatchet of choice even after having sliced the 
top of my left index finger nearly off.  I would 
chop up the ingredients, smack the ginger and the 
garlic.  He would address the wok with the 
implements you can get in your own Chinatown for 
very cheap.  I studied what Harry did as he 
cooked, scraping up chopped onion on the broad 
side of the cleaver, squirting sesame oil into 
the hot wok, tossing the spices into the hot oil 
until the aroma wafted up, then throwing in the 
vegetables and onions, stirring until they were 
done, emptying those out into a bowl and starting 
out again with the sesame oil and spices, heating 
it up, throwing in the ginger and garlic, then 
the meat of choice, stirring that until nearly 
done, and returning the vegetables and onions to 
the stirred protein.

	That was cooking by method.  No recipe 
needed really.  I learned how to do this, enjoyed 
it, then headed off to the bookstores for Chinese 
cook books that seemed authentic - it had to have 
the honky free dishes: offal, strange vegetables, 
preserved meats, anything that stared back at you 
from the bag or jar.

	Harry had many friends who were artists. 
We'd plan a dinner and set aside a day for 
cooking, invite over maybe a party of eight.  We 
cooked in the kitchen, side by side.  We cooked 
well together.  We each knew what to do to 
support the other's efforts and the banquets we 
cooked together were spectacular, all of every 
day Chinese food, nothing fancy.  Before the 
arrival of the guests, I'd write up an official 
menu, complete with the wine selections, and 
decorate it with obligatos of art work, then tack 
it to the door.  I'd even name our restaurant. 
"Chez Menu," was one of my favourites, "Serving 
the San Francisco Bay Area for over three hours." 
We got known around the art crowd for our 
banquets.  By invitation only, they arrived and 
dragged their tongues through our offerings. 
Harry and I got up frequently during the meal to 
dash off into the kitchen and cook another dish. 
Afterwards, we'd clean up and be so exhausted it 
was an effort to peel off our clothes to climb 
into bed.

	Bed.  Bed with Harry.  No sex.  He 
claimed that when we made love, it sapped his 
precious bodily fluids, his energies to do his 
artwork.  I remember arguing with him about it. 
It never did any good.  The argument, which was 
basically me begging for intimacy, just became a 
fundamental part of our relationship.  We were 
therefore intimate in our intellectual 
discussions and in our kitchen capers.  That is 
when we worked as a unit, and the complete 
weariness after the evening, falling into bed, 
completely spent, was the after glow.

	Then, one day, when Harry had returned to 
San Diego and I was going it alone, I got a phone 
call from a strange man asking me to cook a 
banquet for his wife and three other couples in a 
big house in San Francisco.  He'd gotten my name 
from somebody who'd been to one of our dinners.

	I said, "But.  How can I cook for you?  I 
don't know you.  I don't love you."

	He said, "We'll pay you whatever you want."

	In that moment before I answered him, I 
did not consider what I was doing.  I just gave 
an internal shrug, said, "Okay," and that is how 
my career as a caterer began.  Did I do 
advertising?  No.  Did I hire any help?  No.  Did 
I know what to charge the clients?  No.  I just 
loved to cook.  Dancing around the kitchen and 
pitching food into a wok, pulling things out of 
the oven, arranging these things on platters, was 
one of my favourite things to do.  So as an 
improvisation, I cooked my first professional 
meal.  I carried boxes over to the house of the 
man who'd hired me.  They had an enormous kitchen 
with a decent stove, and an arrangement that I 
had to pace around in, in order to get used to 
it.  For the whole week, I shopped and chopped, 
prepared and marinated, soaked and set aside 
hundreds of ingredients, which I put into bowls 
and loaded in the trunk of my little white car. 
On the day of the dinner, I drove across the Bay 
Bridge, not nervous at all, though maybe I should 
have been.  I set up in the foreign kitchen and 
began to prepare in earnest.  The wife stood in 
the kitchen watching me.  There was very little 
discussion.  I had to get used to being on 
display.  So I tied my hair back, rolled up my 
sleeves and got to work.  Right away, I noticed 
what I'd failed to bring with me: an apron.  I 
borrowed one.  Enough serving platters.  I 
borrowed them.  A piece of paper on which to jot 
down my costs.  They gave me one.  I figured I'd 
charge twenty bucks a person, which was quite a 
lot in the mid seventies, then add in the cost 
for all the food I'd bought and hope they didn't 
refuse to pay it.  I worked my tail off.  I ran 
from stove to counter, carried in the platters 
and placed them on the table, announcing what the 
dish was, and in many cases, how to eat it.

	These people had a fat budget and a 
magnificent house.  Their conversation started 
out staid and polite, but loosened up as their 
stomachs stretched out and the wine flowed.  I 
had not asked the hosts to give me a budget for 
the wine or the food, or tell me what they could 
or could not eat, so when a few of them recoiled 
from the pork kidney, I had to shrug my shoulders 
and apologize sweetly.  Still, it was devoured by 
the rest of them.  The last thing I brought in 
was the whole steamed rock cod, decorated with 
scallions, strips of ginger, preserved red date, 
black mushroom slices and minced garlic.  I 
brought it in and set it down on the table right 
in the middle where I'd cleared a space for it. 
The entire party stood up at their chairs and 
applauded.  When did anyone applaud me?  I was 
used to being on my knees, davening and begging 
for sex.  Here was a crowd singing my praises.  I 
could do this again.

	And I did.

	My reputation got  around.  All word of 
mouth.  Soon, friends of this first couple were 
calling me, asking me to cater a banquet for 
them.  I accepted everyone who called.  I carried 
my equipment to dozens of strange kitchens in the 
houses of rich folk who didn't care what I 
charged them, and happily forked over what I 
thought were astonishing amounts of cash.  Did I 
keep track of any of this?  No, I didn't.  Did I 
finally hire an assistant?  No, I did not.  This 
was in the days before Cuisinarts.  I did all the 
pulverizing by hand.  You just keep chopping 
after it's minced.

	I arrived to interview one kitchen and found an electric stove.

	"I can't do this on an electric stove," I told them.

	"What kind of stove do you need?" they asked.

	"A gas stove with six burners is best."

	They got one for me.

	Each meal took me a week's preparation. 
I'd have dreams of sloshing through oceans of 
chopped meat and vegetables, my shoe laces tied 
together, afraid to fall and drown in it all. 
I'd wake up reciting lists of items to purchase 
in Chinatown, go to bed at night arranging the 
bowls of prepared food for cooking, in my head. 
I minced garlic and ginger in my mind while I was 
practicing the cello.

	The clients got further and further from 
the couple who had originally recommended me. 
These were now total strangers who recited to me 
the likes and dislikes of their crowd.

	"Three of us are vegetarians.  Two on a 
low salt diet.  One is allergic to ginger.  And 
Myra keeps kosher.  Don't do anything spicy. 
Leave out the soy sauce.  No bones in the fish. 
We're afraid of oysters."  I'd think, "Call out 
for pizza," and I'd try to please them.  There 
were also the last minute changes.

	"Four more people are coming, but make 
the same amount of food, so don't charge us more."

	"Three people cancelled, so subtract the charges for their meals."

	"But I already bought all the food, and 
I've spent three days preparing it."

	"Maybe we should just cancel."

	I never asked for a deposit.

	I was an incredibly bad business woman. 
But, see, I'd never gone into this thinking I was 
going into business.  I was in it for the love of 
it.  And I found out that was wrong.  Did I then 
learn the ways of business?  No, I didn't.  I 
kept insisting it was for love of the process. 
But, increasingly I felt I'd earned my money, and 
needed more of it to reward me sufficiently for 
my labours.  I started to find it distasteful 
when  a new client would call and ask for a meal. 
I grew weary of hopping between strange kitchens, 
slinging my woks and cleavers, steamers and bags 
of ingredients to the trunk of my car, then from 
my car to the strange kitchen in question, from 
the strange kitchen back to the car, and from the 
car into the house.

	There were sixteen people at the banquet 
table.  I brought in the last dish, bowed 
politely to the nice people, and went back into 
the kitchen to start cleaning up.  After they'd 
all lingered over their plates for a while and 
were sloppy, relaxed into inebriated conversation 
and satiety, I cleared the dishes and started to 
scrub.  The host came back into the kitchen and 
told me that he'd heard I analyzed handwriting. 
Would I do that for the crowd?  They'd really 
love it.

	"Oh, I don't know.  I usually charge for that."

	"We'll pay you"

	I took off my apron, put on my rings and 
went back in to do my job.  When I finally left, 
knowing way more about all of them than I really 
wanted to know, I had a monstrous check in my 
hands.  I was tired and sore and my mind and 
heart were aching.  I got into the car and 
examined the check.  Including handwriting 
analyses, I'd been paid over eight hundred bucks. 
And I said to myself, "It isn't worth it.  I'm 
starting to hate cooking."

	And I quit.  Right then, I quit.  Did I 
think twice about it?  I didn't.  Did I regret 
it.  Nope.  The next time someone called asking 
for a banquet, I told her, "No".  She asked why. 
I told her I'd burned out, crashed and couldn't 
do it any more.

	"Just one more?" she pleaded.

	I mustered all my strength and I 
repeated, "No".  There was no love in it any more.

	It was a long time before I began to like 
cooking again.  And then they invented the 
Cuisinart.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net