Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen--A Book Review

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen

                                                                                                By Jason Sheehan

If you ever had a notion to find out what goes on behind those swinging doors that lead toward the kitchen in your neighborhood family restaurant, don’t. What goes on back there isn’t what you might think. Jason Sheehan however does. He is a cook and the author of Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen. Cooking Dirty is a memoir outlining Jason’s journey first as a kid growing up in Rochester, how he began a career in cooking, and how he regained a foothold on life with a girl he would marry and how she prompted him to become a writer. What is of special interest to me, he is, or was, my neighbor; his mother still is.

Cooking Dirty is hilarious and riddled with the smart-assed wit of Jason Sheehan. His escapades behind the closed doors of kitchens across the country, of how he survived, drank, screwed, lived, worked, and generally existed in an environment where five or six cooks served up three hundred to a thousand dinners a night, gives the reader a glimpse into who he is a person. He tells how he started by learning to keep a dilapidated dishwasher from flooding a local pizza shop when he was only fifteen and how he came to bartend, underage, at a local Chinese restaurant. He learned what the back alleys were used for, the drug dealers, the black market food sources, and a home to those just too tired to make it any further. Jason worked and moved up in the pecking order of kitchens the hard way; by slicing fingers along with filets, by leaving burnt skin on the handles of fry pans, by collapsing from 140 degree heat, and getting back up, falling into line, never giving up, never giving in, always for the food and the other guys in the kitchen…his friends and family. Yet he, like most cooks, the ones who didn’t commit suicide, overdose, get mugged for 9 bucks an hour, or end up in the psycho-ward, eventually burned out. His girlfriend Laura, who he married, was as ill-tempered as Jason, but wittier, showed him the way to a successful career as a food critic, a food writer, and now an author. As Jason remembered:

Laura and I are two angry, opinionated, stubborn, smart, and damaged people who have never backed down from a fight in our lives, never able to leave well enough alone, never had a scab we didn’t pick at until it scarred. And yet through it all, we’ve loved each other with a fierceness born of absolute honesty. She knows I’m never going to leave her. And when I come home at night, stinking of cheap beer and salami. It’s to a woman who knows exactly what kind of a broken, fucked-up, beaten-down, ill-tempered asshole I am and stays with me anyway.

Until you get there yourself, you have no idea how reassuring a feeling that is. I know what true love is now. True love means never having to wonder who’s going to be with you when you die.

She'll probably be standing over your corpse with a smoking pistol and a really good reason.

This particular argument led Laura to ask Jason why he didn’t just start writing about food since he couldn’t cook any longer. In a quip he explains, guys just cannot keep up with an angry female:

“No, Jay. I mean really write about it. Like somewhere that someone other than you will see it. Because really? I’m sick of hearing about it but you’re obviously not sick of talking about it. So why don’t you look for a job as a writer?”

“I…Uh…”

The argument ends with Jason wondering why she could be right and what he could do about it. Laura popped open another beer, sat on the couch with her legs folded under her and a Jason put it, “…signifying that the discussion was over.” And Jason became a writer.

Although Cooking Dirty is one of the funniest and provocative memoirs I have read, the book in paperback form is 355 pages long. In my opinion, and I’m sure Jason wouldn’t care for my opinion, since my life about mirrored his in the good-for-nothing asshole department, the text could very easily have been pared down at least 50 to 75 pages. Every chapter goes into a repeated list separated by a mountain of commas about cooks, the low-down drunks who step outside during a Friday night blast or to shoot-up, or have a smoke and a warm beer in the alleyway, and through all this cooks are dedicated to the only thing in life they are good at, cooking food. While he most generally uses rants and lists to set the reader up for a rib splitting punch-line, the constant exposition gets redundant and burdensome. One such rant comes just as the cooks at Jimmy’s Crab Shack beat the snot out of the kitchen boss, the wheel man, for pushing a waitress:

There are many ways to offend a cook and inspire him to violence. We are, as a rule, a passionate and fiery people prone to the expeditious use of fists to settle our disputes. Mostly it’s done in high spirits and good humor. I’ve been punched by more good friends than I can count and rarely held a grudge. But if there is one thing you do not want to do in front of a cook, it’s hit a waitress. For that, we’ll just fucking kill you.

As the line cooks calmly continued on with the never ending food orders, stepping over Jimmy as he lay unconscious, bleeding into the drain, Jason was promoted to the wheel man.

Our memories are fluid; what we remember, how we remember it may not be fact. What Jason Sheehan writes, considering the many times he couldn’t remember his name, where he was, or who is was sleeping with, may not be entirely fact either. He does an excellent and seamless job at alerting the reader to these possible inconsistencies. For instance, early on, he “remembers” Angie, who owned the pizza place around the corner from our street, Belcoda Drive. Later in reflection of that place: “Maybe I’m over-romanticizing my time at Ferrara’s—remembering it as better, sweeter, more moving and affecting than it really was. I don’t think so. I look back now from a distance of about two decades…” Another, “The way I remember it…” And when remembering Laura accepting his marriage proposal: “Which isn’t to say she stopped trying to dump me or anything. In fact, she threatened to divorce me the very first time she read those last couple paragraphs, claiming that it didn’t happen that way at all…something I forgot? And she said that, yeah, I fucking forgot something. I forgot that there actually were rings.” While we don’t really know what the real facts are, Jason tells us that he might not be a hundred percent accurate. It doesn’t matter; it is his story the way he remembers it.

There is something eerie and strangely possessive seeing my street named in print, to read about a neighbor, the woman I know as Cindy Sheehan, Jason’s mom, about places I know and drive past every day. A great story draws a reader in by creating visions that the reader says: “I know that place,” “I know her,” “I’ve been there,” Hey, that’s my street,” or “I know how he lived, I lived just like that.” I can say that with conviction since I do know those people, those places.

Jason Sheehan lived in some of the rattiest places in America, drunk or stoned, dead tired and beat up. He worked his ass off doing things most will not do and did it for less money than normal humans would accept. He went to work hung-over, drunk, high, beaten-up and bruised. He crawled to the edge of Hell, fell in…and climbed out. And why? Because as he bluntly exclaims, “I couldn’t remember wanting to do anything else.” And for me, I can well relate. My life would read much the same as Jason’s in Cooking Dirty. In reflection, I have to wonder how my family, friends, ex’s, and enemies would react to seeing their name in print, to remember and read about places and events from long ago and perhaps wanted to forget. How would they react by reading my side of the story, or at least how I remembered it--in fact, I wonder if would care.