Medium Raw

11 I’m Dancing

I’m dancing.

The twist, actually—or something very much like it. And though I am mortified by the very thought of dancing in front of witnesses, I am not alone in this room. Around me, nine or ten Filipina nannies and their charges are also swiveling their hips and moving to the music in their stocking feet. My dance partner is a two-year-old girl in pink tights and a tutu. The red stuff beneath my fingernails is, I suspect, vestigial Play-Doh.

This, I am fully aware, is not cool. This is as far away from cool as a man can get. But I am in no way troubled by such thoughts. I crossed that line a long time ago. If anything, I’m feeling pretty good about myself—in the smug, Upper East Side, Bugaboo-owning, sidewalk-hogging, self-righteous kind of a way indigenous to my new tribe. I am, after all, the only parent here on this fine Tuesday afternoon, alone among the gyrating nannies, the little Sophias, Vanessas, Julias, Emmas, and Isabellas. My daughter, grinning maniacally as she jumps and twists about three feet below me, is very pleased that I am here. “That’s right, I do love you more than the mothers of all these other children love them. That’s why Daddy’s here—and they’re not. They’re getting their fucking nails done, having affairs, going to Pilates class, or whatever bad parents do…I’m here for you, Boo…twistin’ my heart out—something I would never ever have done for any other person in my whole life. Only for you. I’m a good daddy. Goooood Daddy!”

Later, if she’s good, there will be ice cream. I will seat her prominently next to me, facing the street in her Petit Bateau jumper, secretly hoping that passersby will notice how beautiful she is, how cute we are together, what a great dad I am. Holding her little hand, or carrying her on my shoulders, I will float home on a cloud of self-congratulation.

I’m through being cool. Or, more accurately, I’m through entertaining the notion that anybody could even consider the possibility of coolness emanating from or residing anywhere near me. As any conscientious father knows in his bones, any remaining trace elements of coolness go right out the window from the second you lay eyes on your firstborn. The second you lean in for the action, see your baby’s head make that first quarter-corkscrew turn toward you, well…you know you can and should throw your cherished black leather motorcycle jacket right in the nearest trash bin. Clock’s ticking on the earring, too. It’s somehow…undignified now.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a “decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.”

I encouraged the psychopath in myself for most of my life. In fact, that’s a rather elegant description of whatever it was I was doing. But I figure I put in my time.

The essence of cool, after all, is not giving a fuck.

And let’s face it: I most definitely give a fuck now. I give a huge fuck. The hugest. Everything else—everything—pales. To pretend otherwise, by word or deed, would be a monstrous lie. There will be no more Dead Boys T-shirts. Whom would I be kidding? Their charmingly nihilistic worldview in no way mirrors my own. If Stiv Bators were still alive and put his filthy hands anywhere near my baby, I’d snap his neck—then thoroughly cleanse the area with baby wipes.

There is no hope of hipness.

As my friend A. A. Gill points out, after your daughter reaches a certain age—like five—the most excruciating and embarrassing thing she could possibly imagine is seeing her dad in any way threatening to rock. Your record collection may indeed be cooler than your daughter’s will ever be, but this is a meaningless distinction now. She doesn’t care. And nobody else will. If you’re lucky, long after you’re gone, a grandchild will rediscover your old copy of Fun House. But it will be way too late for you to bask in the glory of past coolness.

There is nothing cool about “used to be cool.”

All of this, I think, is only right and appropriate. Too much respect for your elders is, historically, almost always a bad thing. I want my daughter to love me. I don’t necessarily want her to share my taste for Irish ale or Hawaiian bud.

When you see the children of the perennially cool—on shows like Behind the Music—they look sheepish and slightly doomed, talking about their still-working rock-’n’-roller dads, as if they are the reluctant warders of some strange breed of extravagantly wrinkly and badly behaved children. Kids may not be old enough to know what cool is, but they are unerring in their ability to sense what isn’t.

No kid really wants a cool parent. “Cool” parents, when I was a kid, meant parents who let you smoke weed in the house—or allowed boyfriends to sleep over with their daughters. That would make Sarah Palin “cool.” But, as I remember, we thought those parents were kind of creepy. They were useful, sure, but what was wrong with them that they found us so entertaining? Didn’t they have their own friends? Secretly, we hated them.

Turning thirty came as a cruel surprise for me. I hadn’t really planned on making it that far. I’d taken seriously the maxims of my time—“Never trust anyone over thirty” and “Live fast, die young”—and been frankly shocked when I found that I’d lived that long. I’d done everything I could think of to ensure the opposite result, but there I was—and without a Plan B. The restaurant business provided a degree of stability in that there were usually people who expected me to get up in the morning and go somewhere—and heroin, if nothing else, was useful in giving me a sense of purpose in my daily movements. I knew what I had to do every day for most of my early thirties: get heroin.

Of my first marriage, I’ll say only that watching Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy—particularly the relationship between Matt Dillon’s Bob and Kelly Lynch’s Dianne—inspires feelings of great softness and sentiment in me. It’s a reminder that even the worst times can be happy ones—until they aren’t.

By my late thirties, I found that I was still lingering, and I admit to a sense of disappointment, confusion—even defeat. “What do I do now?” I remember thinking. Detoxed from heroin and methadone, and having finally—finally—ended a lifelong love affair with cocaine. Where was my reward for all this self-denial? Shouldn’t I have been feeling good? If anything, all that relative sobriety pointed up a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I’d managed to fill with various chemicals for the better part of twenty-five years.

At forty-four, shortly after writing Kitchen Confidential, I found myself suddenly with a whole new life. One minute, I was standing next to a deep fryer, pan-searing pepper steaks—and the next, I was sitting on top of a dune, watching the sun set over the Sahara. I was running road blocks in Battambang; tiny feet were walking on my back in Siem Reap; I was eating at El Bulli.

Shortly before the breakup of my first marriage, I embarked on the equivalent of a massive public works project in my apartment: new shelves, furniture, carpets, appliances—all the trappings, I thought, of a “normal” and “happy” life—the kind of things I’d never really had or lived around since childhood. I wrote a crime novel around that time, in which the characters’ yearnings for a white-picket-fence kind of a life reflect my own far more truthfully than any nonfiction I’ve ever written. Shortly after that, I cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety.

There was a period of…readjustment.

I recall the precise second when I decided that I wanted to—that I was going to be—a father.

Wanting a child is easy enough. I’d always—even in the bad old days—thought fondly of the times my father would carry me aloft on his shoulders into the waves off the Jersey Shore, saying, “Here comes a big one!” I’d remembered my own five-year-old squeals of terror and delight and thought I’d like to do that with a child someday, see that look on my own child’s face. But I knew well that I was the sort of person who shouldn’t and couldn’t be a daddy. Kids liked me fine—my niece and nephew, for instance—but it’s easy to make kids like you, especially when you’re the indulgent “evil uncle.”

I’d never lived in an environment where a child would have been a healthy fit—and I’d never felt like I was a suitably healthy person. I’d think of fatherhood from time to time, look at myself in the mirror, and think, “That guy may want a child; he’s simply not up to the job.” And, well, for most of my life I’d been way too far up my own ass to be of any use to anyone—something that only got worse after Kitchen Confidential.

I don’t know exactly when the possibility of that changing presented itself—but sometime, I guess, after having made every mistake, having already fucked up in every way a man can fuck up, having realized that I’d had enough cocaine, that no amount in the world was going to make me any happier. That a naked, oiled supermodel was not going to make everything better in my life—nor any sports car known to man. It was sometime after that.

The precise moment of realization came in my tiny fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Ninth Avenue. Above Manganaro’s Heroboy restaurant—next building over from Esposito Pork Shop. I was lying in bed with my then-girlfriend—I guess you could diplomatically call it “spooning”—and I caught myself thinking, “I could make a baby with this woman. I’d like to make a baby with this woman. Fuck, I’d not only be happy to make a baby with this woman, I think…I’m pretty sure…I’d actually be good at it.”

We discussed this. And Ottavia—that was (is) her name—also thought this was a fine idea, though of my prospects for a quick insemination she was less optimistic.

“Baby,” she said (insert a very charming Italian accent—with the tone and delivery of a busy restaurant manager), “you’re old. Your sperm. Eez—a dead.”

Assuming a long campaign, we planned to get at it as soon as I returned from shooting my next show. In Beirut.

Of that episode I’ve written elsewhere. Long and short of it: my camera crew and I were caught in a war. For about a week, we holed up in a hotel, watching and listening to the bombs, feeling their impact rolling through the floors. After some drama, we were evacuated from a beach onto Landing Craft Units by American Navy and Marine personnel and taken first to a cargo vessel in the Med and then on to Cyprus.

My network had very generously provided a private jet to take me and the crew back home. None of my crew had ever been on a private jet before, and we slept and played cards and ate omelets prepared by the flight attendant, finally landing on a rainy, gray morning in Teterboro, New Jersey. We walked across the tarmac to a small private terminal, where Pat Younge—the president of the network—and Ottavia, as well as the crew’s wives and family, were there to meet us. It was, to say the least, an emotional homecoming with much hugging and crying.

I took Ottavia back to my crummy apartment and we made a baby. Nothing like eight days of fear and desperation to concentrate the mind, I guess. A few weeks later, we were in a car on the way from LAX into Los Angeles, where I was about to appear as judge on Top Chef, when we got the news from Ottavia’s doctor over the phone. There are photos of me, sitting on a bed in the Chateau Marmont, holding five different brands of drugstore pregnancy tests—all of them positive—a giddily idiotic grin on my face. Strangely, perhaps, I had no fear. At no time then—or since—did I have second thoughts. “What am I getting into?” never flashed across my brain.

I was the star pupil at Lamaze class. If your water ever breaks at the supermarket and I’m nearby? I’m your boy. I know just what to do.

I look back on my less well-behaved days with few regrets. True, the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood demand certain behavioral adjustments. But my timing couldn’t have been better. I find myself morphing—however awkwardly—into respectability just as things are getting really hot on the streets for any of my peers who are even semi-recognizable. The iniquitousness of Twitter and food-and chef-related Web sites and blogs has totally changed the game for anyone with a television show—even me. You don’t have to be very famous at all these days to end up with a blurry photograph on DumbAssCelebrities.com. You don’t want your daughter’s little schoolmates reading about her daddy, stuttering drunk, two o’clock in the morning, at a chef-friendly bar, doing belly shots from a chunky and underdressed cocktail waitress—something that could well have happened a few years ago. In a day when a passing cell-phone user can easily get a surreptitious photo of you, slinking out of the porn shop with copies of Anal Rampage 2 and MILFBusters under your arm, and post it in real time, maybe that’s a particularly good time to trade in the leather jacket for some cotton Dockers.

I love the saying “Nobody likes a dirty old man or a clean little boy.” I was, unfortunately, overly clean as a child—the fruit of a fastidious household. I shall try and make up for those years by doing my best to avoid becoming the former. Like I said, my timing—even without the daddyhood thing—was good.

It’s all about the little girl. Because I am acutely aware of both her littleness (how could I be otherwise) and the fact that she’s a blank page, her brain a soft surface waiting for the irreversible impressions of every raised voice, every gaffe and unguarded moment. The fact that she’s a girl requires, I believe, extra effort. Dada may have, at various times in his life, been a pig, but Dada surely does not want to ever look like a pig again. This can’t possibly be overstated. As the first of two boys, I can’t even imagine what it must be like for a little girl to see her dad leering at another of her sex. This creature will soon grow up to be a young woman and that’s something I consider every day.

I figure, I’m going to spoil the shit out of this kid for a while, then pack her off to tae kwon do as soon as she’s four years old. Her first day of second grade and Little Timmy at the desk behind her tries to pull her hair? He’s getting an elbow to the thorax. My little girl may grow up with lots of problems: spoiled; with unrealistic expectations of the world; cultural identification confusion, perhaps (a product of much traveling in her early years); considering the food she’s exposed to, she shall surely have a jaded palate; and an aged and possibly infirm dad by the time she’s sixteen. But she ain’t gonna have any problems with self-esteem.

Whatever else, she’s never going to look for validation from some predatory asshole. She can—and surely will—hang out with tons of assholes. Dads, I’m assured, can never hope to control that. All I can hope for is that she hangs out with assholes for her own reasons—that she is genuinely amused by assholes rather than needing them to make her feel better about herself.

I wish.

John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying—guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”

Something I wish I’d never read. I can only hope she’s happy—even weird and happy will suit me just fine. She will feel loved. She’ll have food. And shelter. A large Italian and Sardinian family—and a smaller American one. She’ll have seen, by the time she’s six years old, much of the world, and she’ll have seen, as well, that not everybody on this planet lives—or can live—anything like the way she lives. She will, hopefully, have spent time playing and running barefoot with the children of fishermen and farmers in rural Vietnam. She will have swum in every ocean. She will know how to use chopsticks—and what real cheese is. She already speaks more Italian than I do.

Beyond this, I don’t know what else I can do.