Everything I need to know, I learned in a kitchen: e.g., how to give your boss a snow job; not to give another kind of job to a co-worker.

Tachi, the sexy Cuban dishwasher, leaned back against the slop sink and stared at me. I stood by the oven and stared back, unable to say anything. His amusement at my discomfort didn’t help. He was like a cuter, younger version of Fidel Castro, whom I’d never thought sexy before. He was a problem: a new bout of infatuenza I needed to squelch but that he knew instinctively how to inflame. As I cooked, I could often feel him looking at me from behind. I gazed at a sauté pan and, instead of burning mushrooms, saw his long-lashed, liquid opal eyes, thick glossy hair brushed back from the smooth forehead, his sensual, somewhat insolent, purple lips.

“What are you going to do?” Tachi asked.

“Do?”

“With all that feeling?” he teased.

Before I could answer, Noberto, the Argentinean waiter/busboy, rescued me. He glanced at us, smirked and pinned an order in the window. Table of five: one half chicken with apricots, brown rice and steamed vegetables; two filet of sole; one vegetable lasagna; and one sautéed “vegetable medley” over kasha. Determined to master the art of short order cooking, and prove to Charles the owner, that he was smart to hire me, I turned back to the stove. I scanned the dishes, broke them into components, started what took longest, and then went in descending order. I needed to ignore distractions like Tachi. Half-roasted chickens saved me. They needed more time in the oven. I needed to redo the mushrooms, and pressure cook another batch of brown rice. The béchamel was running low and Noberto swung by with three new orders.

When I took the job—more accurately, when to my astonishment Charles hired me after the most bizarre interview I’ve had to date, forty years later—my only problem was a lack of experience, which Charles, sweet generous Charles, allowed me to gain. He had no reason to.

Down on the Farm owed its popularity not just to the excellent food, but to the welcoming atmosphere created by Charles and his Argentine lover and co-owner, Roberto. They served a cross between Roberto’s Argentinian home cooking and Charles’ recent updates to his former macrobiotic regimen—he now allowed himself and his customers poultry and fish. Charles and Roberto liked to mingle with their customers. They sat at various tables when there was a free chair or crouched for a brief chat, and treated their two small rooms as their home. Noberto the combination waiter/busboy kept things moving. The clientele included many artists and theater people, some of whom lived in nearby Westbeth, and Noberto knew how to seat them to greatest effect. There was a framed letter from Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder and star Charles Ludlum hanging just inside the front door. Richie and I ate there frequently.

One night, Charles told my roommate Richie that their short order cook had just given notice and they needed someone to start in week. To my surprise, and without asking first, Richie announced: “Steve is an excellent cook and baker, hire him.” This wasn’t pure altruism. Much as Richie liked to meddle in his friends’ lives, he had what Sydney used to call “an inferior motive.” I had money troubles again. The modeling jobs were coming less often and clearly would soon stop altogether, while the need to pay my share of the rent would not. If I didn’t get a job, Richie’s planned winter trip to Peru with one of our roommates, Joan, might be cancelled. I knew a few things, but I would never have called myself a skilled cook, still less a chef. My only question was could I do it?

Charles didn’t seem to need more convincing; I met with him the next day and he took me into the small kitchen—except for the professional oven and range, it was not much bigger than ours on West 104th. The sink was behind me; the stove sat to the left of the butcher-block counter, where I could chop vegetables.  A pressure cooker rattled as we talked and Charles said they served so much rice it had to be going all the time. I’d never used a pressure cooker and it scared me.

One by one he went over the dishes on the menu. I’d never cooked most of them. I saw the job disappearing if I admitted my ignorance.

“Charles, I’ve eaten here several times now. You have a regular clientele; they expect their favorite dishes to taste the same each time. Why don’t you show me how you prepare each one and I’ll make sure that there’s continuity before introducing any variations of my own.”

I know Charles wasn’t stupid.  He dealt shrewdly with the more outlandish pronouncements of his favorite customers—this was the 70s, people were claiming spiritual enlightenment at a rate that would have made the Buddha proud. Charles ended all such speculative discussion with the catch phrase “But who knows what the reality is?” I admired his ontological agnosticism, but didn’t doubt his ability to tell the difference between vegetable stew and the big pot of bullshit I’d just handed to him. Maybe he admired my shameless attempt to manipulate him. Whatever his reasons, he did as I asked and all but cooked each dish for me, miming the action when he couldn’t use the results later, as he could when he put several half-chickens in to pre-roast and whipped up a gallon of the sauce I would soon be spooning over side orders of brown rice, kasha and pearl barley. I’d never made a Béchamel which he clearly guessed upon seeing the blank look on my face when he told me “We serve Béchamel sauce on just about everything; we just alter the flavor if it’s going over grains or on fish or chicken.

I said nothing.

“Béchamel. A white sauce?”

“Yes, Charles, I know what it is, but I want to make sure I make it with the exact thickness your customers are used to.”

He couldn’t have been fooled. God love him, he gave me the job. It was on this job that I made up what has become my life motto: Dive in; don’t drown. What I hadn’t anticipated was that I’d be learning how to negotiate some of the rougher waters of physical, but not emotional and spiritual attraction with someone I saw six days a week. Cooking was easy compared to this.

Down on the Farm had less than twenty tables. Most seated two or four, but a few sat six and there were times when eight were jammed together at the biggest, round table. Larger parties required two or more tables shoved against each other. No matter how large the group, they all expected their food to arrive at the same time.

During three or four seatings in six hours, I sometimes put out a hundred covers of the eight entrees on the menu. For the most part, I prepared them entirely myself, but Charles sometimes took a break from clomping around the dining room in wooden clogs and helping Noberto to bus tables to make sure that we had enough of our biggest staples: Béchamel sauce that we mixed by the gallon or the beans, chick peas and especially the brown rice that we cooked in twelve minutes—less than half the usual time—in the pressure cooker sitting on the back burner. On the busiest nights we filled the 1970s, i.e., pre-Cuisinart, pressure cooker four or five times. The two-gallon, hissing, rattling, damned near dancing, always threatening to explode, scare-the-hell-out-of-me monster, made it possible to serve fluffy rice with our broiled filet of sole or roasted half-chicken with apricots. Gummy rice, the hallmark of bad “health food” cooking, was not on the menu.

And fortunately, I discovered there is a kind of Zen secret to short order cooking. In less than a week at Down on the Farm, I felt like the centipede who couldn’t walk if he stopped to examine how he did it. The rhythm of the evening helped. Orders came into the kitchen at an accelerating pace. The quieter hours between six and eight allowed me to build up to the two-hour rush that followed. When the dinner shift ended, or was just coming to a close—when Noberto locked the front door and no more orders would be posted—I sang from the sheer relief of having gotten through another night. I was still far from being a skilled cook, but each successful night diminished the fear that Charles would regret hiring me in the first place. My relief, however, was tempered by the intensity of my feelings for Tachi.

Three weeks in, by which time my confidence had increased so much I relaxed enough to sing while I cooked, I was halfway through a rendition of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, when Tachi asked me for a date.

“We’re closed on Sunday. I’m having a small dinner party, would you like to come?”

“Who else will be there?”

“It will be very intimate. Just you and me.”

I said Yes, and asked, like the well-brought up boy that I was, if I could bring anything.

“Just your own sexy self.”

Dinner did not go as Tachi had planned. As soon as I arrived at his Greenwich Street apartment, just a few blocks from the restaurant, he began plying me with a new, and very sweet drink he had invented for the occasion and that he called “La Principessa”— heavy on the dark rum, heavier on the gin, and made somewhat palatable by the sugar, orange and pineapple juice. Getting me drunk was easy, getting me into bed not so much. Especially after my first trip to the bathroom, halfway through the main course (chicken with black beans and rice—Tachi was a good cook), where I saw the note written on the mirror. I stared at it as I washed my hands:

“Steve = love.”

Oh dear. Even in my drunken state I knew, instantly, that what I felt for Tachi wasn’t love. It was an irrational mix of lust, curiosity, and need—need for the attention he gave me at work, an attention that lessened my insecurity, however awkward it made me feel, but also a need for simple physical contact, as I still had not had a relationship that lasted longer than two months. I wouldn’t fall in love—unmistakable, insane, suddenly in a new universe that still somehow looks familiar, life changing love—for another four years, when I was twenty-six. Looking at Tachi’s note I felt dishonest and cheap and a little bit mean. How much had I led him on? I didn’t know. I did know that I’d done it before.

At the Nelly Deli, I also used to sing when I worked. One night a waiter came into the kitchen just as I was beginning a lovely Judy Collins song, Since You’ve Asked. It was quiet in the dining room so he stopped to listen and I sang it right at him. The next night he told me how much he had loved the song. I thanked him casually, and went back to washing the dishes. He looked deflated and was brusque with me for several days. When I’d had enough, I asked why he’d suddenly turned on me: “We used to get along so well.”

“Why did you sing that song to me if you didn’t mean it? I thought you were singing it to me.”

Yes, I was that stupid and blind and self-absorbed. And as far as relationships went, I was twenty-two going on twelve. I’d had three “love affairs”—all with older men. In descending order, two months with a forty-nine year old poet whom I saw during the two-year interregnum of his now fifty plus-year relationship with a novelist; three or four dates with a thirty-four year old bisexual novelist who published his first book, about an affair with an older woman and then married one shortly thereafter; and two months with a twenty-eight year old gay activist. I remained friends with all but the novelist. I was not marriage material. I was not even boyfriend material. But I was willing to learn and I was now learning that there are some things you just don’t do where you eat. So I left Tachi’s house still on my feet, more than a little drunk, but pleased that I had put a stop to something before it got really ugly. Work was, as it had been at the Nelly Deli, a little tense for a while, but the awkwardness passed. It always does.

I’ve had several refreshers since. My realization that I had allowed this to develop was powerful enough to keep me in check for many years. It taught me not to play with people’s affections and to at least try to see the effect I had on other people. At twenty-two, it was still news to me that I had any.