Yes, Chef (19 page)

The more time I spent with Casey, the more I realized how quaint my own upbringing had been. From the outside looking in, I was fascinated that these guys who lived inside the law and weren’t broke still related to the hip-hop world where everyone was on the lam and out of work. Casey’s buddies identified with that world and stuck with it the way I’ve since seen the alumni of black colleges or fraternities stick together.

We’d go to the outer boroughs to hear music but also to play basketball. I’d say, “There is basketball in Manhattan,” but they never wanted to play there. Manhattan was where they worked. They called it “money-making Manhattan,” and they didn’t know anyone who lived there, except for maybe in Harlem. When we went to parties in Harlem, I realized their whole world was completely black. Maybe there’d be some Puerto Ricans involved, but otherwise, it was all black. On the one hand, that was opposite from my own upbringing. On the other, it was just as homogenous.

Casey became my window into African American experiences, and I was so happy to be invited along; this was what I came to America for. At times, it felt like a cultural test: What would it take for me to belong? Was the color of my skin enough?

Casey had a serious side, too, and he knew more about the Black Panther movement than anybody I’ve ever met. We would have these big arguments about how to fight for racial equality—MLK or Malcolm, early Malcolm or late Malcolm, violent or non-. Casey was intrigued by Sweden, and listened to my stories as if I were telling him about living on Mars. I realized how his world, so full and rich in some ways, was also like my pal Anthony’s in that it was so completely cloistered, cut off from the rest of the world. As cosmopolitan as Casey and his homeboys seemed to me, they were also sheltered. It was 1993 and we didn’t have the Internet; they didn’t see black movers and shakers outside the classic professions of entertainment or
sports. They had very little in the way of role models aside from Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, men who, right or wrong, came across as powerful and self-made.

A
NOTHER
N
EW
Y
ORK
came to me through Aquavit, the New York of Central Park. I found it through Carlos, the Guatemalan fry guy who had fingers made of asbestos and would reach into the fryer to pull out pieces of fish and remain unscathed. Carlos turned out to be a serious soccer player. Plenty of guys in Aquavit’s kitchen came from soccer-loving cultures. They had a favorite team or strong opinions of who was or wasn’t worth shit, but not too many actually played with any regularity. Carlos was good.

“I’ll show you where you can play,” he offered, and the next day we both had off, he took the train into Manhattan from his Red Hook apartment, where he lived in close proximity to twenty or thirty people from his hometown of Guate, or Guatemala City. “We have better teams in Brooklyn, but this is easier for you.”

We met at a field in Central Park, just above the Ninety-seventh Street transverse and in the lower part of the North Meadow. It was a series of fields, actually, all of them in use and with squadrons of players waiting to take over when any match finished.

I towered over many of my Central American teammates, which was the exact and pleasant opposite of my lifelong Swedish soccer experience. Even though I had no Spanish and some of them had no English, we were all fluent in our sport. We held our own against a crew of well-practiced Brazilians, then trounced a team of American yuppies whose training was no match for those of us born to the sport.

Afterward, I was with my teammates, shooting the shit, goofing on each other’s mistakes and re-creating the great passes and goals. I got so worked up about a bad call that I started cursing in Swedish.
“Värsta
fucking
domare någonsin. Du måste vara jävla blind att ha missat det!”
Worst fucking call ever. You’d have to be fucking blind to have missed it!

I saw a group of black guys headed toward me. The smallest of the bunch, a light-skinned guy with a shaved head, looked me in the eye.

“Svenne?”
Are you Swedish?

“Yeah,” I said in English. “Are you?”

Teddy told me he was an Ethiopian raised in Sweden and Israel, and the guys with him were equally international, some part Swedish, some Somalian. The tallest one, a guy named Mesfin, was from an Ethiopian family that had moved to Stockholm. Mes was an aspiring photographer in New York, currently working at a coffee bar and schlepping backdrops at a fancy photo studio in the West Village.

Teddy, Mes, and I started hanging out right away. They were more like me in terms of experience and culture than anyone I’d ever met, and they also knew how to navigate the city. Mes had a coworker at the coffee bar, a handsome Somali Swede named Sam. Sam and Mes roomed together in a quirky arrangement they had with a model friend. The model let them stay in her apartment for free when she was doing the seasons in Paris and London, and it was several steps up from anything they could have afforded on their own: a doorman one-bedroom on Twenty-fifth and Park. At that point, I’d left Peter and Magnus’s to stay in a series of word-of-mouth apartments with roommates I didn’t know and where my stuff, what little of it there was, constantly went missing. When Mes suggested I join him and Sam in their one-bedroom, I packed my bags and went.

We rotated sleeping arrangements; one person got the couch and two shared the bed. At first we were suspicious of the doorman, assuming he knew we were not legitimate tenants, but he didn’t seem to care and opened the door for us just as promptly as he did for the little old ladies with their little old dogs. That apartment was my first home in New York, a place where my Swedish-English patois was the common language.

My new roommates brought me into their world, which was every bit as exotic as my adventures into Queens. This was the era of the supermodel, and Mes’s studio would regularly bring in Christy Turlington
or Naomi Campbell for shoots. Eddie Murphy would be in one day, TLC the next. Often, the shoot day would end with a party, and under the guise of being staff, I’d join them behind the bar, pouring coffee and beers. If we didn’t have a posh party to crash, we’d go to the one-dollar beer place in the Village where we could play pool and the jukebox gave you seven songs for a buck. We loved going high and low, and between the three of us, we had enough charm to get in almost anywhere. In Manhattan at the time, there was an ongoing underground party called Soul Kitchen that played soul music and switched locations every Thursday or Tuesday. One of us always figured out where that party was going to be. We’d go to Nell’s on Fourteenth Street, a club that had live bands upstairs and hip-hop on the floor below, and where you got in not by wearing a suit, like so many clubs these days, but by wearing an attitude.

None of us talked about it—we were guys, after all—but we all felt freer in New York than we had at home; we were no longer such oddballs. We all had other black friends and other people of color as friends and everybody did his thing. Everything we moved to New York for was happening for us: diversity, music, excitement, creativity.

Not everything went my way in New York, of course, and some of those disappointments were greater than others. On the lighter side of failure, my attempts at love, American style, flopped. I had this idea, when I arrived, that I wanted to date a typical American girl. (Whatever that was.) I wasn’t more specific than that in my desire; I was just ready to change up from the Swedish au pairs I’d met through
Svenne
buddies at work. Casey hooked me up, of course—I’d have had no other way into that world.

The deck was stacked against me from the start, since I knew almost nothing about dating, much less American dating. In Sweden, we hung out in groups, and whoever ended up as couples still traveled as part of the group. Whoever had money paid; there were no expectations, and no one kept track. Once I got to America, my Garden City buddy Anthony filled me in on the high school prom rituals of the boy asking the girl, the corsage, the limo, the bow tie having to match the dress.

“For a high school
dance
?” I kept asking him.

When I met up with my first proper American date, an African American woman a couple of years younger than me, she seemed ready for adventure.

“Let’s go places,” she said. Cool, I thought, and headed for the nearest subway.

“No, I can’t,” she said, looking down at her high heels. “Not in these.”

So we cabbed down to the Village to have a drink and some food at a skanky place on Bleecker Street. Then she wanted to go uptown to the Shark Bar, so we cabbed up to the Upper West Side and had another drink. Then she wanted to go back downtown to listen to late-night music, and when we stepped out onto Seventh Avenue, I counted out the fare for our third taxi of the night and I realized I had only eight dollars left. I panicked, then I got mad. Screw this, I thought.

“This has been nice,” I lied. “But I have to get up early tomorrow.”

It’s not in my nature to give up easily. I met another girl and came up with what I figured was a surefire plan. One of Aquavit’s Brazilian waiters had gone back to Rio for vacation, and I was apartment-sitting for him. He had a nice place, so I figured, OK, rather than go on a date to some bad restaurant, I should invite the girl over so I can cook for her. I get to show off what I’m good at, and we’d eat better and cheaper than any restaurant I could afford. I called and proposed the dinner.

“What are you talking about?” she said, as if I were crazy. For me that wasn’t a weird thing, just to invite someone over and cook a big meal. She finally agreed to come—as long as she could bring a girlfriend/bodyguard.

“No problem,” I said.

I did a four-course meal, with appetizer and soup and a potato-wrapped salmon.

The girls oohed and aahed at every course. I figured I’d put the girl I liked at ease, but as soon as dinner ended, and I asked if she
wanted to hang out, she and her friend announced they had to go. I guess they’d figured they’d eat with me and then go hang out with the guys who were serious prospects, guys with enough loot to wine and dine them.

That wasn’t me. My salary wasn’t going to increase anytime soon, so I had to figure out how to have fun on the cheap, and find girls who would go along with that. By the end of my nine-month stint, I’d tracked down the best hot dog stand in the city, and that’s where I’d take my dates. Afterward, if a girl hadn’t given up on me yet, I’d invite her to take a walk with me through Central Park. You’d be surprised how many New Yorkers have never really
been
to Central Park—or if they have, haven’t visited it in years.

I love Central Park like only an immigrant could. It’s an American masterpiece. I explored every corner of it: I’d skate up to 100th and Fifth to sit in the rose garden or hang out at the east-side plaza where roller skaters of every shape and size danced all day long. People were making out, picnicking, jogging. There was every color and ethnicity. Back then, you’d see lots of Vietnam vets, too, guys who’d checked out of society and made their home there. On the soccer field, I’d play one day against some of the best soccer players I’ve ever competed against in my life, and the next day, I’d be playing against some bum who would drop out to go smoke weed and then come back in. No one cared. No one was there to judge.

Being broke and living in a city like New York was no problem, once I realized you could still find plenty of stuff to do if you knew where to look. If I was going out and had fifty dollars to spend, I’d grab the
Village Voice
events calendar, scoping out whatever was cheap or free—concerts in the park, clubs with no cover, off-off-Broadway shows that needed butts in the seats. I got it down to an art form: how to have a good time for forty-nine dollars or less.

The best place to start was Chinatown, which was busy and energetic, with a sidewalk scene that provided plenty of visuals and smells and a totally exotic soundtrack. I found spots where my date and I could get a tasting menu for five dollars each, if you ordered right,
and since I was the cook, I always ordered. We would share noodles, dumplings, steamed buns, barbecue ribs, hot and sour soup, and one noodle dish for the grand sum of ten dollars. Add in some really bad plum wine and a tip: sixteen dollars and you were good to go. For me, the best dish of all was the sweet pork buns, which were such a new combination of textures and flavors. The big white buns were light and airy with a slightly toothy skin caused by the steaming process. I watched as the cooks loaded up bamboo steamer baskets with buns, put on their lids, and then set them over heats much higher than we ever used at Aquavit. At the center of the bun was a filling of roasted pork and a sweet sauce.

It came with a side dish of soy sauce, and into this I’d mix every condiment on the table: mustard, chili sauce, and a bit of chili vinegar. We’d dip the buns in the sauce and get through the obligatory first bite—all dough—to get to the mind-blowing second bite, which combined dough and filling. It’s still one of my favorite dishes to eat. I always wondered who created this dish, how it came about.

The whole experience of the Chinese restaurant was so intriguing to me that I never minded being treated rudely or made to wait. And yes, the lighting was usually operating room fluorescent and the floor was linoleum and the service would have gotten you kicked out of restaurant school, but if you were lucky enough to be able to see into the kitchen, even glimpses through swinging doors, you saw a fury of activity, cooks working at top speed putting out tremendous volume and quality. That work ethic, along with a price I could afford, kept me coming back.

Chinatown was just one of a hundred food destinations I’d discovered, and almost day by day, my desire to stay in New York grew stronger. I was intrigued by what I was seeing in the American approach to food. It clearly started with the traditions of Europe but was not bound by them. Europeans I’d worked with scoffed at American cuisine, claiming it was nothing more than burgers. I knew that was bullshit. I was having one unbelievable food adventure after another, and I didn’t want that to stop.