How Comrade Snarky died was probably a heart attack. Mrs. Clark says it's from a shortage of thiamine, what we call vitamin B1. Or it could've been a shortage of potassium in her bloodstream, causing muscle weakness and, again, a heart attack. That was how Karen Carpenter died in 1983, after years of anorexia nervosa. Fainted dead on the floor like this. Mrs. Clark says it was no doubt a heart attack.
Nobody really dies of starvation, Mrs. Clark says. They die of pneumonia brought on by malnutrition. They die of kidney failure brought on by low potassium. They die of shock caused by bones broken by osteoporosis. They die of seizures caused by lack of salt.
However she died, Mrs. Clark says, that's how most of us will. Unless we eat.
At last, our devil commands us. We're so proud of her.
“Easy as skinning a chicken breast,” Chef Assassin says, and he drops another lump of meat on the dripping paper plate. He says, “Christ Almighty, I do love these knives . . .”
Plan B
A Poem About Chef Assassin
“To become a household word,” says Chef Assassin, “all you need is a rifle.”
This he learned early, watching the news. Reading the paper.
Chef Assassin standing onstage, he wears those black-and-white-checkered pants
that only professional cooks get to wear.
Billowing big, but still stretched tight to cover his ass.
His hands, his fingers, a patchwork of scabs and scars. Shiny old burns.
His white shirtsleeves rolled up,
and all the hair singed off the muscle of his forearms.
His thick arms and legs that don't bend
so much as they fold at the knee and elbow.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment flickers:
where two close-up hands, the fingernails clean and the palms perfect
as a pair of pink gloves,
they skin a chicken breast.
His face, a round screen, lost under a layer of fat, his mouth lost under the pastry brush
of a little mustache,
Chef Assassin says, “That's my backup plan.”
The Chef says, “If my garage band never gets a record contract—”
if his book never finds a publisher—
if his screenplay never gets a green light—
if no network picks up his pilot episode—
The Chef, his face worms and twitches with those perfect hands:
skinning and boning,
pounding and seasoning,
breading and frying and garnishing,
until that piece of dead flesh looks too pretty to eat.
A gun. A scope. Good aim and a motorcade.
What he learned as a kid, watching the news on television, every night.
“So I'm not forgotten,” the Chef says.
So his life isn't wasted.
He says, “That's my Plan B.”
Product Placement
A Story by Chef Assassin
To Mr. Kenneth MacArthur
Manager of Corporate Communications
Kutting-Blok Knife Products, Inc.
Dear Mr. MacArthur,
Just so you know, you make a great knife. An excellent knife.
It's tough enough doing professional kitchen work without tolerating a bad knife. You go to do a perfect potato allumette, that's thinner than a pencil. Your perfect cheveu cut, that's about as big around as a wire—that's half as thick as a potato chip. You make your living cutting carrots brunoisette with hot sauté pans already waiting with butter, people yelling for those potatoes cut minunette, and you learn quick the difference between a bad knife and a Kutting-Blok.
The stories I could tell you. Time and time again, how your knives have pulled my ass out of the fire. You chiffonade Belgian endive for eight hours, and you might get some idea what my life is like.
Still, it never fails, you can tourné baby carrots all day, carving each one into a perfect orange football, and the one you screw up, that carrot lands on the plate of some failed cook, some nobody with a community-college degree in hospitality services, just a piece of paper, who now thinks he's a restaurant critic. Some prick who hardly knows how to chew and swallow, and he's writing in next week's paper how the chef at Chez Restaurant is lousy at tourné-ing carrots.
Some bitch no caterer would even hire to flute mushrooms, she's putting in print how my bâtonnet parsnips are too thick.
These sellouts. No, it's always easier to nitpick than actually to cook the meal.
Every time somebody orders the dauphinoise potatoes or the beef Carpaccio, please know that someone in our kitchen says a little prayer of thanks for Kutting-Blok knives. The perfect balance of them. The riveted handle.
Sure, knock wood, we would all like to make more money for less work. But selling out, turning critic, setting yourself up as a know-it-all, and taking cheap shots at the people still trying to make their living peeling calf tongue . . . paring away kidney fat . . . pulling off liver membrane . . . while those critics sit in their nice clean offices and type their gripes with nice clean fingers—that's just not right.
Of course, this is just their opinion. But there it is, showcased next to real news—famines and serial killers and earthquakes—there it's given the same-sized type. Somebody's gripe that their pasta wasn't quite al dente. As if their opinion is an Act of God.
A negative guarantee. The opposite of an advertisement.
To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can't, gripe.
Not journalism. Not objective. Not reporting, but judging.
These critics, they couldn't cook a great meal if their life depended on it.
It's with this in mind I started my project.
No matter how good you are, working in a kitchen is a slow death by a million tiny knife cuts. Ten thousand little burns. Scalds. Standing on concrete all night, or walking across greasy or wet floors. Carpal tunnel, nerve damage from stirring and chopping and spooning. Deveining an ocean of shrimp under ice water. Knee pain and varicose veins. Wrist and shoulder repetitive-motion injuries. A career of perfect calamares rellenos is a lifelong martyrdom. A lifetime spent turning out the ideal ossobuco alla milanese is a long, slow death by torture.
Still, no matter how thick-skinned you are, getting picked apart in public by some newspaper or Internet writer does not help.
Those online critics, they're a dime a dozen. Everybody with a mouth and a computer.
That's what all my targets have in common. It's a blessing the police don't work a little closer together. They might notice a freelance writer in Seattle, a student reviewer in Miami, a Midwestern tourist posting his opinion on some travel Web site . . . There is a pattern to my sixteen targets, so far. Yes, and there's my years of motivation.
There's not much difference between boning a rabbit and a snarky Web-site blogger who said your costatine al finocchio needed more Marsala.
And thanks to Kutting-Blok knives. Your forged tourné knives do both jobs beautifully, without the hand and wrist fatigue you might get using a less expensive, stamped paring knife.
Likewise, cleaning a skirt steak and skinning the little weasel who posted an article about how your beef Wellington was ruined with too much foie gras, both jobs go fast and effortless thanks to the flexible blade of your eight-inch filleting knife.
Easy to sharpen and easy to clean. Your knives are a blessing.
It's the targets that always turn out to be such a disappointment. No matter how little you expect when you meet these people in person.