Netherland. Joseph O’Neill
in the great restaurants, or educating the public about vintage wines or – his obsession – single malt whiskies. ‘I used to hate whisky,’ he told me. ‘My dad and his friends drank it all the time. But then I found out they weren’t drinking real whisky. They were drinking Indian whisky – look-like whisky. McDowell’s, Peter Scot, stuff that almost tastes like rum. When I got into Scotch – that’s when I began to understand what this drink is really about.’ Vinay found it distasteful to deal with the owners and cooks at the cheap places, immigrants who generally spoke little English and saw no particular reason to spend time talking to him. Also, the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothered him. ‘One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?’ Yet when he wrote, Vinay exuded bright certainty and expertise. As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Similar misgivings, I should say, had begun to infect my own efforts at work. These efforts required me, sitting at my desk on the twenty-second floor of a glassy tower, to express reliable opinions about the current and future valuation of certain oil and gas stocks. If an important new insight came to me, I would transmit it to the sales force at the morning shout, just before the markets opened at eight. I stood at a microphone at the edge of the trading floor and delivered a godless minute-long homily to doubting congregants distributed amongst the computer screens. After the shout, I spent a half-hour on the trading floor going over the particulars.
‘Hans, this Gabon joint venture watertight?’
‘Maybe.’
Grins all round at this joke. ‘Who’s the CEO over there? Johnson?’
‘Johnson’s with Apache now. Frank Tomlinson is the new guy. Used to be with Total. But the FD is still the same guy, Sanchez.’
‘Huh. What kind of development costs we talking about?’
‘Five dollars a barrel, max.’
‘How they going to do that?’
‘The tax structure’s good. Plus they’re only paying a two-buck royalty.’
‘Yeah, well, I need a better story.’
‘You might want to try Fidelity. I was over there Monday. Tell them something about innovative horizontal drilling technology. That’s another story in itself, by the way – Delta Geoservices. Karen’s got the details.’
Somebody else: ‘I’ll take details on horizontal drilling from Karen all day, every day.’
‘So what’re you saying, Dutch or Double Dutch?’
I smiled. ‘I’m saying Double Dutch.’ To my disproportionate credit, this informal catchphrase of mine – ‘Dutch’ described an ordinary recommendation, ‘Double Dutch’ a strong recommendation – had entered the language of the bank and, from there, of certain parts of the industry.
I liked and respected my colleagues: the mere sight of them – the men close-shaven and prosperously thick about the waist, where ID badges and communication gadgets clustered, the women in subdued suits, all of them shouldering their burdens as best they could – was capable of filling me with joy. But by the fall of 2002, even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I’d placed under my life’s leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery. It forcefully struck me as a masquerade, this endless business of churning out research papers, of blast voicemailing clients overnight with my latest thoughts on ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips, of listening to oil executives glossing corporate performance in tired jargon, of flying before dawn to meet investors in shitty towns in the middle of America, of the squabbles about the analyst rankings, of the stress of constantly tending to my popularity and perceived competence. I felt like Vinay, cooking up myths from scraps and peels of fact. When, in October, my II ranking remained unchanged at number four, my private reaction was almost one of bitterness.
One Friday of that month, I found Vinay in a bad mood. He had, he told me, been asked to write a story about the eating places of taxicab drivers. The theory, apparently, was that here you had a class of men familiar with alien foods who exercised their choices from a vast selection of establishments and had no stake in the bourgeois dining enterprise: men supposedly driven by unfeigned primitive cravings, men hungering for a true taste of homeland and mother’s cooking, men who would, in short, lead one to the so-called real thing. Of course, I could not help thinking it simple, this theory of reality. Vinay had objections of a narrower kind. ‘Cab drivers?’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit? I told my editor, Dude, I’m from fucking India. You think in India we take our fucking dining cues from cab drivers? And then I’m like’ – Vinay laughed furiously – ‘Yo, Mark, the name’s not Vinnie, OK? It’s Vinay.’ Vinay buckled, as one must, and we found a taxi driven by a man from Dhaka who was prepared to take us to a place he liked. This exercise was repeated with several cab drivers. We’d look at a menu, eat a mouthful of food, and head out again in search of another lurching ride. Before long the night had assumed the character of an evil black soup, sampled somewhere along the line, whose bitty, fatty constituents rose sickeningly to the surface before sinking back again into a spoon-deep dark. Just before midnight, a taxi driver took us to Lexington and 20-something and wordlessly pulled up at yet another accumulation of double-parked yellow cars.
‘This is the last one, Vinay,’ I warned him.
We entered the restaurant. There was a buffet counter, a wilfully haphazard arrangement of chairs and tables and refrigerators, and framed, violently colourful photographs attached to the walls: schoolchildren, sitting under a tree, receiving instruction from a teacher pointing at a blackboard; an idyll in which a long-haired maiden perched on a swing; a city in Pakistan at night. At the rear was a further dining area where men, eating in silence, stared intently at a television screen. Almost all the patrons were South Asian. ‘Look at what they’re having,’ Vinay said despairingly. ‘Naan with vegetables. These guys are on a three-dollar budget.’ While Vinay examined the menu, I wandered off to look at the television. To my amazement – I’d never seen this before in America – they were showing a cricket match: Pakistan versus New Zealand, broadcast live from Lahore. Shoaib Akhtar, a.k.a. the Rawalpindi Express, was bowling at top speed to the New Zealand captain, Stephen Fleming. I settled ecstatically into a seat.
Moments later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It took a second or two to recognise Chuck Ramkissoon.
‘Hey there, friend,’ he said. ‘Come join us.’ He was showing me a table occupied by a black man wearing a super’s shirt embroidered with the address of his building and his name, Roy McGarrell. I accepted Chuck’s invitation, and we were joined by Vinay, who arrived carrying a tray of gajrala and chicken karahi.
I urged Chuck and Roy to eat the food. ‘Vinay here’s paid to eat this stuff. You’d be doing him a favour.’
It turned out that Roy, like Chuck, was from Trinidad. ‘Callaloo,’ Vinay remarked absently, and Roy and Chuck started chortling with delight. ‘You know callaloo?’ Roy said. Addressing me, he said, ‘Callaloo is the leaves of the dasheen bush. You can’t get dasheen easy here.’
‘What about that market on Flatbush and Church?’ Chuck said. ‘You find it there.’
‘Well, maybe,’ Roy conceded. ‘But if you can’t get the real thing, you make it with spinach. You put in coconut milk: you grate the flesh of the coconut fine and you squeeze it and the moisture come out. You also put in a whole green pepper – it don’t be hot unless you burst it – thyme, chive, garlic, onion. Normally you put in blue crab; others put in pickled pigtails. You cook it and you bring out a swizzle stick and you swizzle it until the bush melt down into a thick sauce like a tomato