Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Read Online Free PDF Page A

it?
    Well…I guess, me —until recently.
    But wait. The second I sat down for an interview, or went out on the book tour to promote Kitchen Confidential …surely that was kind of selling out, right? I didn’t know Matt Lauer or Bryant Gumbel or any of these people. Why was I suddenly being nice to them? In what way was I different than a common whore, spending minutes, hours, eventually weeks of my rapidly waning life making nice to people I didn’t even know? You fuck somebody for money, it’s cash on the barrel. You pick up the money, you go home, you take a shower, and it’s gone—presumably having used as much emotional investment as a morning dump. But what about week after week of smiling, nodding your head, pretending to laugh, telling the same stories, giving the same answers as if they’d just—only now—occurred to you for the first time?
    Who’s the ho now? Me. That’s who.
    Jesus—I would have given Oprah a back rub and a bikini wax, had she asked me when her people called. Fifty-five thousand copies a minute—every minute Oprah’s talking about your book (according to industry legend)? I know few authors who wouldn’t. So I guess I knew—even back then—what my price was.
    There’s that old joke, I’ve referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she’d fuck him for a million dollars—and she thinks about it and finally replies, “Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah…” At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. “Fuck you!” she says, declining angrily. “You think I’d fuck you for a dollar ? What do you think I am?” To which the guy says, “Well…we’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
    It’s a crude, hateful, sexist wheezer of a joke—but it’s as applicable to men as to women. To chefs as to any other craftsmen, artists, or laborers.
    What was my problem with my peers—no, my betters —grabbing the endorsement dollars left and right: the branded pots and pans, kitchen utensils, ghostwritten cookbooks, commercials for boil-in-a-bag dinners, toaster ovens, California raisins? I’d turned them all down.
    I’d deluded myself for the longest time that there was…“integrity” involved…or something like that. But as soon as I became a daddy, I knew better.
    I’d just been haggling over the price.
    There’d never been any question of integrity—or ethics—or anything like that…For fuck’s sake, I’d stolen money from old ladies, sold my possessions on a blanket on the street for crack, hustled bad coke and bad pills, and done far worse in my life.
    I started asking people about this. I needed guidance from people who’d been navigating these murky waters for years.
    Among the more illuminating and poignant explanations, one came from—of all people—Emeril. We were guest hosts/roasters at a charity roast of a mutual friend, Mario Batali. In a quiet moment between dick jokes, we talked, as we sometimes do, me asking with genuine curiosity why he continued to do it. He was, at the time, being treated very shabbily by the Food Network—I could see that he’d been hurt by it—and I asked him why he gave a fuck. “You’ve got a large, well-respected restaurant empire…the cookbooks…the cookware line”—which is actually pretty high-quality stuff—“presumably you’ve got plenty of loot. Why go on? Why even care about television anymore—that silly show, the hooting audience of no-necked strangers? If I was you,” I went on, “it would take people two weeks to reach me on the phone…I’d be so far off the fucking grid, you’d never see me in shoes again…I’d live in a sarong somewhere where nobody would ever find me—all this? It would be a distant memory.”
    He didn’t elaborate. He smiled tolerantly, then began listing the number of children, ex-wives, employees (in the hundreds) working for Emeril Inc., establishing for me in quick,