Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain Read Free Book Online

the old resort (flying heedlessly over the speed bumps), I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs’ edges approaching the French side. Here, I’d really step on the gas, and it was at precisely this point that I’d hand over control to my unknown DJ. For a second or two each night, for a distance of a few feet, I’d let my life hang in the balance, because, depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I’d decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward—or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.
    In this way, my life could easily have ended with a badly timed playing of Loggins and Messina. On one memorable occasion, as I waited in the brief millisecond of silence between songs, foot on the gas, the cliff edge coming up at me fast, I was saved by the Chambers Brothers. I recognized the “tic-toc” metronome of “Time Has Come Today” and, at the last second, turned away from empty air, laughing and crying at the wonderfulness and absurdity of it all, diverted from what I very much felt to be my just desserts, making (momentarily) some strange and profound sense. Saving my life.
    So. That’s how I was feeling that year. And that’s the kind of smart, savvy, well-considered decision-making process that was the norm for me.
    Back in New York, I was living in a small, fairly grim Hell’s Kitchen walk-up apartment that smelled of garlic and red sauce from the Italian hero joint downstairs. As I’d pretty much burned down my previous life, I didn’t own much. Some clothes. A few books. A lot of Southeast Asian bric-a-brac. I was seldom there, so it didn’t seem to matter. My favorite dive bar, where I was on permanent “scholarship,” was right down the street.
    I was not seeing anybody regular. I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t even looking for sex. I wasn’t in a frame of mind to take the initiative with anybody. Yet, if you brushed up against me in those days, I’d probably go home with you if you asked.
    Business took me to England now and again, and one night, surely drunk again, sitting at the bar of a particularly disreputable “club,” waiting to meet someone from my publishers, I noticed a very beautiful woman staring at me in the mirror over my shoulder. While this was of moderate interest, it did not cause me to get off my bar stool, wink, nod, wave, or stare back. I had a pretty good sense by now of my unsuitability when it came to normal human interactions. I felt as if I’d had my thermostat removed—was without a regulator. I couldn’t be trusted to behave correctly, to react appropriately, or to even discern what normal was. Sitting there, hunched over my drink, I knew this—or sensed it—and was trying to avoid any contact with the world not based on business. But an intermediary—the woman’s friend—took matters into her own hands, suddenly at my shoulder insistent on making introductions.
    The woman and I got to know each other a little—and from time to time, over the next few months, we’d see each other in England and in New York. After a while, I came to understand that she was from a very wealthy family—that she kept an apartment in New York. That she spent her days mostly traveling to runway shows and buying things with her mother. That she was of British, French, and Eastern European background, spoke four languages beautifully, was smart, viciously funny, and (at least) a little crazy—a quality I usually liked in women.
    Okay. She had a problem with cocaine—something I’d moved past. And her T-shirts cost more than the monthly salaries of everybody I ever knew. But I flattered myself that I was the one guy she’d ever met who really and truly didn’t give a shit about her money or her bloodline or what kind of muddleheaded upper-class twits she moved with. With the righteousness of the clueless, I saw all that as a liability