Kitchen Ghosts

I'm never alone

I’m a machine made of cactus leaves and rice and I come to do no harm. I’m a son cooking a birthday dinner for his mother and his family and his friends and there’s a goddamn lake on the floor from the stupid dish drainer. How many times have I tried to get a new one? And here’s Nery standing next to her dish drainer smiling. Her little house. Her little dogs. Our little year. I smile back and put her in my pocket, and I think I even threw this drainer out once but had to get it and bring it back in after the new Amazon one was such a disappointment. We’re stuck with each other. I fly past the sink and grab a towel and then another towel and then another and throw them on the floor in a big show of tragedy and triumph. I clean up the puddle with my feet, pushing the towels around like ice skates. And then into the washer they go as I pull a fresh towel out of the dryer.

“You should just keep them in the dryer,” that’s what Stephanie says, all Jewish girl smart and witty. “Don’t even bother with putting them in the drawer.” She’s here in the kitchen and then 30 years gone, sitting like a trickster curled in the corner of the ridiculously convoluted sectional couch in our little Hollywood apartment. “Larchmont Adjacent” she called it. She liked to say we lived in a “tony” neighborhood.

God, I love kitchen towels. And paper towels. Such a luxury. I’d clean the whole house with paper towels if I remembered to buy them more often. Doubled up even. Thicker. Richer. I can just hear the indignation now. The whimpering and the recrimination of my selfish, wasteful, maximum-carbon existence pulls in Laurie Cooper with her ugly shoes and her always spoken last name. Ugliest shoes we’d ever seen. Birth control shoes I called them and she’d laugh and laugh and, as was the edict of her tribe, she’d perfunctorily try to shame me for all the paper towels and all the Styrofoam and all the plastic water bottles, not that I’d ever tote around a water bottle like some parched troglodyte as I can’t remember the last time I was more than fifteen feet away from a faucet of some sort. I’d tell her “green is for breeders!” I’d tell her “Having a child is like having a pile of tires burning in your backyard for sixty years and I have none so I’ll let the parents do all the recycling thank you very much” as I open the oven and check the lamb which looks beautiful, all encrusted in panko and confit garlic and pine nuts but well it’s the insides that count and isn’t that always the case?

I think Laurie liked Nick Cave. Did she? Beth sure did. Beth hangs around for a split second but Nick pulls me all the way back to college while I stand there looking at the stove and for the thousandth time try to get the schedule right in my head. The Philistines have no idea of the stress. Making sure everything is ready at exactly the same moment. “They aren’t all Philistines” a lonely little pipsqueak voice in me says always trying to see the good, the beautiful, the hope. I wonder if Nick Cave knows about timing a dinner. I wonder if he’s ever cooked for his mother’s birthday. Does he even cook? Does he eat? The first time I saw him, we all went. Leslie and Marion and Fred, and Darren. 9:30 club in DC. 1984. Everyone but Leslie was horrified by it. Way too much for them. Of course it was, they were all stuck dumb with REM and The Police, entry level stuff like that. Leslie liked it well enough, but I swore then and there to never take another bit of dead weight to a Nick Cave show and for 41 years I’ve kept my vow. Somehow this leads to Paris and Paris means fresh thyme and that’s it. I just think of a vase of thyme in Paris.

Anyway, it’s Saturday so one more day left before Monday. That used to mean something extra although not so good. I always hated Sundays. It always rains on Sundays and they wouldn’t let us play baseball in the rain. Sunday was the inevitable slow end of the good times.

I should start the risotto. I should dress the salad. I should smoke. I’m a 1958 short order cook in San Francisco with a cigarette in my mouth and an apron around my waist while Trish waits for me in bed. In San Francisco, every day is Sunday, and Trish chose to move there. She’s the only one who’s completely disappeared. I only see her now and then in my kitchen. And only when I’m stupefied by the fire.

The chicken stock I made yesterday for my mom’s risotto is gorgeous and dark and simmering in a copper pot not three feet from my eyes and I wonder, did Leslie smoke? Did I even smoke back then? I think I rolled my own. Leslie smoked opium once, she told me. In college. Didn’t like it. I asked her if it was just no good, like was it fake? She said “no, I just didn’t like how it felt.” Imagine that. I loved her anyway. Where do they all come from? Where did they all go? Every little movement and morsel and smell and touch brings someone charging back into the room just at the front of my head. It’s the Green Room for the cast all tangled up in the lamb and the towels and the confit and God I hope this isn’t the last Birthday dinner I cook for my mom.