Monster's Chef (7 page)

It was all very clear to me now: Don't address Monster's wife; don't talk to the children.

Mind your own damn business.

She held a white rose to her nose and sniffed and sneezed.

I laughed, and she looked at me with narrowed eyes.

“Sorry,” I said with a shrug.

Frowning, she turned toward the mansion and waddled away.

My stomach sank. I imagined her using sign language to convey just what a pig I had been.

Thug would return with Security and have me hauled off to the dungeon. No, they'd just fire me and I'd be back on a plane, flying to New Jersey to return to the halfway house.

I was so lost in thought that I pretty much denuded a rosemary shrub and didn't see Monster's wife return with paper and pen.

She flung open the wrought iron gate separating the staff from the inner courtyard. She made her way to me, scribbling ferociously.

I waited, wondering what she had written, what kind of trouble she was about to inflict on me. She thrust the paper into my hands.

She had written in a flowing hand,
You were laughing at me!

“No,” I said.

She shook her head and pointed to the paper and handed me the pen.

I wrote quickly.

I wasn't laughing at you. I just thought you looked beautiful. Mothers-to-be are beautiful.

She seemed to hiccup, but then I realized it was a giggle.

I scribbled,
When are you due?

She took the paper from me.

Three weeks.

You must be very excited.

She took the paper from me and wrote,
Yes!

Do you like my food?

It's much better than the last cook's.

Who was the chef?

I looked at her fingers as she passed the paper back to me. They were long and strong, and her nails were the same color as the rosemary blooms.

An Italian guy. He didn't last long. He drank. Then we had a Japanese woman, who was very good, but she just disappeared.

That's bad luck. Sometimes that happens in the restaurant business, a run of bad luck and you just about have to shut your doors.
I wrote in response.

She wrote something and passed it to me.

Do you know how to sign? I'll teach you.

Took me a minute trying to think of the best way to explain it.

It's my contract; I can't fraternize with family or friends.

She shook her head, then signed her name and repeated it a couple of times in sign language until I caught on and signed
Rita
to her delight.

She scribbled another note.
I don't want to talk about rules and how things are done. I will teach you every day in the morning.

My first lesson had ended, and she patted my hand, took the pen and paper from me, and waddled off into the inner courtyard. I glanced up and saw Security looking at me from a second-story alcove equipped with a camera and telephoto lens, studiously recording signs of my disloyalty.

Manny was right. When Monster was done with the world tour, business junket, pleasure cruise, whatever he was doing, he came back like the president landing on a carrier, sock stuffed deep into crotch. A helicopter circled the Lair a few times and settled on the great lawn in front of the manor house.

Security appeared and gestured for the staff to come out to greet the return of the conquering Monster.

He sprang from the helicopter like all the cameras in the world were focused on him, waving and beaming, wearing the biggest pair of aviator sunglasses I had ever seen and a bomber jacket that looked big enough for two of him.

He stood there giving us a stadium wave, and we waved back even though the helicopter blades kicked up a wall of stinging dust.

Security surrounded him, a circle of men in gray jumpsuits, and escorted him into the enveloping privacy of the Lair, his sanctum sanctorum.

Now that Monster had been back for a few weeks, the pressure of the job was no longer busywork, my need to appear useful even if it was a demonstration for nobody but myself.

Monster discovered my number and kept me on my toes by being demanding in this odd, jellyfish-like way. He didn't complain, didn't fire me, nothing obvious, but I felt myself being weighed down by the oddness of his needs.

For some reason he took an interest in the time the garlic was picked. Before dawn was the best, but he'd accept the hour after dusk. He needed to see my logs for substantiation. It was that important to him. That was only the beginning. Soon I was keeping extensive notes on all the herbs and vegetables I picked in the various gardens. I didn't need to know why, really. It was all about keeping everything right for Monster.

But I knew it had to do with some new age mysticism, homeopathy.

Then I realized that food to him was more like the Eucharist was for me as a child, mysterious and symbolic. Monster wanted food to transform him into something better. He needed me to be the high priest of his stomach. But then he changed up on me, wanting more variety. I guess all that juice gave him the runs.

I had to be inventive with my menus. Every now and then another note from Monster would mysteriously appear, taped onto the refrigerator by hidden kitchen operatives. That's how I received the directive to expand the Living Food menu, and for it to taste better, throwing down an impossible challenge, like imagining a five-sided square. He also pointed out how important it was for me to keep Rita from backsliding. Since she was carrying their baby, he wanted her to benefit fully from his eating regimen. Rita had spent a few days showing me the various ways to sign how much she hated the stuff. She passionately conveyed in writing how she refused to eat uncooked spaghetti squash. I agreed, and rededicated myself to making it easier on her, to break new ground with semiliving cuisine. I wanted to get to the point that she'd feel good about swallowing it, but I doubted that she would if she wanted much more than salads and cold soups. Monster liked the idea of sunbaked breads and rices for philosophical reasons.
It's so unadulterated!
he wrote in his last note.

I purchased a solar-powered glass oven that worked very well on sunny days, but on overcast days I'd just toss everything into the brick oven.

I prepared lunches for the staff too, but other than Thug's fresh steak, nothing that bled was allowed anywhere near the kitchen. I grilled on a little hibachi on a worktable near the toolshed, where I kept a small refrigerator stocked with my meats. I ate a lot of bacon, probably too much, and steak. Maybe I wanted the stink of it to annoy Monster's True Believer employees, who were happy to sustain themselves on carrot juice, ground chickpeas, and heaping teaspoons of sawdust. They wanted to be as much like Monster as possible.

I worried about Rita.

She needed a diet that wouldn't starve the baby. I read that the first thing that's affected by malnourishment is brain size. Seemed to me that any child of Monster's would need all of its faculties to have a shot at a normal life. Luckily, Santa Ynez had more kinds of goat cheese than anywhere else in California. Cheese-filled dumplings, cheese breads, and rice cheese soufflé, I made it all for her because Rita needed those calories that Monster shunned.

I THOUGHT MY RELATIONSHIP
with Monster would remain the same. He'd be somewhere in the Lair, producing new music or writing, but whatever he did, I imagined that his time was so valuable he wouldn't have a moment to spare, so I was surprised when, one particularly overcast afternoon, Monster appeared in the kitchen with two blank-faced assistants whom I took to be Security without the gray jumpsuits. This was the first time I saw him close-up and in decent light. I tried not to stare at him, but it was hard; his skin glowed oddly, almost as if it were internally illuminated, and his eyes were large and beautiful, like the eyes of a girl in Japanese animation. His lank-limbed body resembled a boy's more than that of a man.

“Good morning, Mr. Stiles,” I said, but Monster and his attendants watched me silently, without response. I stood with my hands dangling at my sides until it became uncomfortable and I began to feel ridiculous. I turned and picked up a handful of radishes from a green ceramic bowl and sliced them on the chopping block.

“Call me Monster,” I heard from behind me, so I turned to see Monster dismiss his assistants and lean against the sink, as though he was prepared to stay a while in the kitchen.

“I want to watch you cook,” he said with a smile.

I shrugged, feeling naked to his eyes. The kitchen, my kitchen, was a refuge, but with him standing there, an unwanted guest, I had to accept the fact that I was paid help, that I didn't own anything in that kitchen other than the knives I had brought with me to the Lair.

“I've been meaning to tell you I hate radishes,” he said, as though it pained him.

“Sorry, I didn't know.”

Monster shrugged. “Rita likes them in her salad.”

“Good,” I said, wondering if he had anything else he wanted to mention about my cooking.

“Don't mind me, I'm just watching you,” he said, with the words hanging in the air.

“You're interested in cooking?” I asked, but Monster didn't reply; after a moment or two I glanced up to see him still watching me like a freakish hawk. I began dicing onions and mincing herbs and started a vegetable stock, anything to keep busy.

“You know, I miss those breakfasts of toast and jam, but Mr. Chow, my herbalist, refuses to allow me to eat that anymore.”

I didn't know what to say to that.

“If you don't find Living Food satisfying, you can find an alternative.”

Monster shook his head.

“I've already caused so much damage to my body and spirit. Mr. Chow insists that this is my last chance to help myself achieve unity.”

“Well, sometimes you need to live. If you deny yourself all the pleasures in life, it's no good, you're just torturing yourself for no reason. No one can live like that,” I said, with all the earnestness of a reformed drug addict looking back at the good old days of excess.

Monster thought about it for a second, then disappeared down the hall. He returned after a few minutes and gestured for me to follow him down a grand hallway to the main entrance. There a Rolls-Royce sat idling in the long driveway.

“Let's go,” he said.

Soon as the car started to move, Monster called to the driver, “Play Prince.”

“You're a Prince fan?”

Monster snorted as the bass line of “Head” reverberated in the cavernous backseat. “I like
Dirty Mind
, and some of his older work. I'm not a fan of his new stuff. I just don't get it. People talk about how innovative he is, but I think I'm the one who kept up with where music is going.”

I didn't want to get into a debate with Monster on that subject, but I did want to know where
we
were going since we were in such a rush, going over a hundred, blowing by traffic, racing somewhere.

When we reached the 101 and started north, I began to worry as I sat across from Monster in the seat that faces backward. I tried not to glance in Monster's direction, knowing if I did I'd be snared by him and unable to look away from the horrifically beautiful car accident that was his face.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“I've been working in Manhattan for the last ten years,” I said, looking at my hands like I was surprised to have them.

“No, where were you born?”

“I was born in Germany. My dad was in the army.”

“Oh,” Monster said, disappointment echoing in his voice; I guess my answer wasn't what he wanted to hear. “Did you like Germany?”

“We moved a lot, I don't remember much about the country other than it was very cold.”

“Have you visited since?”

“Yes, a few times.”

“How do they treat black people?”

My mind ground to a halt.

“What?”

“How do the Germans treat black people?”

“I couldn't say I noticed anything particularly racist.”

“Some places don't treat black people very well. That makes me uncomfortable because some of the cats in my band, they don't get respect and that makes me angry. Russia, for instance, isn't a place I'll play again because I'd have to leave all my black personnel home, and I can't see doing that.”

He paused but looked as though he was on the verge of saying something else.

I assumed he thought I was black, black man to black man, explaining the difficulty that black folks have in the world. Then for a moment I got the impression he didn't think of himself as black, and that I, with my light-skinned ass, had become the single black man in the back of the Rolls.

“My whole life I've tried to be a bridge between groups of people because I see all sides. I've evolved. I've become something different; I'm not bound by what holds people back. You see what I'm saying?”

I didn't, but I nodded anyway.

“When I was black, I couldn't see it, the big picture; then when I changed, it became clear to me and I've never looked back.”

“You changed?” I asked.

“It just happened. I became something different. It happened at first internally, then the changes radiated outward. Mr. Chow said it was inevitable, that I evolved at such a fundamental level that my appearance would also reflect it.”

“Well, what started it, this change?”

I realized where we were going, and at Pismo Beach we pulled off at the Arroyo Grande exit and headed for the ridiculously long line at the In-N-Out Burger.

I thought, as the Rolls idled in line, that Monster had forgotten my question, but I was wrong.

“I changed when I made my first hundred million. I wasn't black anymore, nothing was going to hold me back from finding my destiny.”