The New Yorker Presents (2015) s01e05 Episode Script

1 There's the A lot of the people in the neighborhood can't afford it now, so a lot of them are moving out.
Most of the houses is going co-op or going condos.
They changed the neighborhood.
It wasn't like that before.
I've been in Harlem 50 years, 20 years in this restaurant.
All the kids you see on that corner, I watched them grow up from 2 years old.
You got to figure I do about 1.
500 pieces of chicken a day.
That's, like, Monday and Tuesday.
And then on the weekend, I do, like, 3.
000, maybe.
I grew up in North Carolina, and I have a large family of 12 brothers and eight sisters.
We grew our own chickens, our own vegetables and everything.
I never went to no school to learn how to cook.
I learned it all from my mother.
The seasonings? I can't tell you that.
I can't give you that secret.
My mother, she told me if I ever opened up a restaurant, do not use deep fryer.
Always pan fry your chicken.
And so I came back down south to get my big frying pan.
I can fry at least 25 pieces of chicken in it.
Deep fry is easy, but pan fry is not easy.
You put more love into a a pan Pan fried chicken because you got to stay there with it.
You know, you got to continue to turn it and cook it and make it come out right.
There's not a lot of what we call soul food places left in Harlem.
And there's a lot of people looking for soul food.
- How are you today? - Real good.
What would you like? Hey, Cookie.
- Hey, Charles.
- What's your favorite? Everything.
Especially the fried chicken, the barbecued chicken, the turkey wings, the collard greens, the string beans, and, can I say, the yams.
If you have not been to Charlie's, you just really haven't had any chicken.
- Take care.
- All right, baby.
Macaroni and cheese, candied yams, collard greens.
Whoo! Makes you smack your mama.
If you're a couple of cents short, Charlie makes sure you eat.
Yeah.
He's a good guy.
Been in the neighborhood for years.
We can go anyplace, and a lot of people know him.
"There's Charles!" He cooks just like my mother.
All the big restaurants is coming to Harlem now.
They might close at 9:00.
I close at 4 or 5:00 in the morning.
Five years ago I retired.
But I don't feel like I retired.
I work, like, 18 hours a day.
I grew up working hard.
I love it.
If the customers are happy, that make me happy.
Does 6:30 not even mean 6:30 anymore? Does it mean 7, 7:30? - No.
- Do you need anything? Saffron.
It's a cab we picked up in Santa Barbara.
You ever make it up there? I parked two blocks away.
Is that okay? I couldn't understand the street signs.
They do that deliberately.
That's how the city makes money.
She's coming from the West Side - Susan.
- I got it.
Hi.
We're late.
Paul insisted on going to his wine shop to prove that it was still open.
Surprise.
It was not.
It would have been if she hadn't taken ten minutes to find her purse.
- This neighborhood is really cool.
- Yeah, you can walk to get coffee.
- I know.
It's fantastic.
- So authentic, so diverse.
That woman who got shot in the head, that was just a block away, right? It was, like It was, like, two or three blocks.
- It's delicious.
- I love the marinade.
- Never seen anything like it.
- Oh, no, it's super-simple.
It's just parsley and vinegar, oregano, thyme, allspice, garlic olive oil, lime juice, lime zest, lemon rind, and, uh, ginger.
Yeah.
I feel like we should save some for Susan.
We love Europe in the summer.
We spent a month in Majorca.
We have friends in Ibiza.
We spent our summer volunteering with animals - Uh, for animals.
- We spend most of ours on the water.
Yeah, just sailing and parasailing.
Monogamy was historically another way for men to exert their control over women.
Fact.
Uh, it also deludes us into thinking that we're meant to fuck just one person.
Thank you for that, Paul.
That was very adult.
- Not exactly my point.
- It's my point.
Look at Ruth.
She's a beautiful woman, very attractive, great body.
She's not like us.
She doesn't want to be owned.
She doesn't need marriage.
She doesn't subscribe to hetero normative convention.
Yay.
Bravo, Paul, bravo.
Did you know that Paul got his Masters in bullshit? Susan's sorry.
She can't come.
We meet in a parking lot.
She invites me over.
She doesn't offer me a drink.
Her hand is up my skirt right away, and there's a dog, a very old dog.
Was it a girl dog or a boy dog? I don't know.
It was one of those kind that has, like, a hard time breathing, - you know, like - A pug.
Or a French bulldog? - Or shar pei.
- Shar pei.
Yeah.
Sure.
His breath was shallow, and his back legs had given out.
He shit the carpet in the bedroom.
I mean, there's vomit all over the kitchen, so we rush him to the nearest ER, and the vet comes out to my car to put him down, which is completely illegal in the state of California.
She's sobbing, and then she's like, "My husband is en route.
" Ha ha ha.
It happens in a lot of neighborhoods.
I mean, just look at New York City.
Yeah, so homogenous now.
So, so - white.
- White.
You can be a gentrifier and not be white.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of gentrification.
Well, yeah.
There is such a thing as a poor white family being gentrified out by a rich black family.
I mean, plenty of rich blacks, you know, move to underdeveloped areas where, you know, it's predominately non-black.
That's definitely not how that goes.
I was playing devil's advocate.
I read James Baldwin.
- Hey, uh - Yeah.
- It was amazing.
- Aw.
Amazing.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you.
- Yeah.
- Great meeting you guys.
- Yeah.
We got to double-date, right? - Oh, yeah.
A little less crazy.
- Yeah, right.
- It was so great.
- Let's go.
- So great.
- Come on.
- Come on.
- Okay.
- What? Yeah.
No, I know.
- Are you sure we can't do anything? - No, we're good.
- Good night.
Thank you.
Guys, it was so much fun.
I had the best time.
Thank you so much for having me.
And, uh, yeah, let's do it again soon.
Yeah, soon.
Hey.
Susan sends her love.
Uh, thanks so much.
Yeah.
Take care.
That was great, really delicious.
Thank you.
- All right.
- All right.
Good night.
Good night.
15 years ago, I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn't fully there yet.
I just had ideas like creating a restaurant that was heaven- and hell-based.
People would come in, and they would choose which side they wanted to go on.
It was such a cheesy idea, but I was more interested in what the psychology of the person walking in would be.
At the time, I would probably have chose hell because I was still in hell in a way.
This was taken when my mom and my dad were together.
My dad wrote this on the back.
I think the move to Arizona was the shift in, you know, the kind of downward spiral of my life.
I haven't driven through this in years.
Wow.
I'm just like looking around.
I'm, like, seeing, like, spots from, like Holy shit, that's I grew up across the river from Laughlin, Nevada.
You have a lot of escapism.
At a really early age, that's what you learn.
You're in this perpetual cycle of these really just extreme up-and-down moments One day you hit a jackpot, and then you mix that with alcohol, drugs, and things that never close, with access to hotel rooms.
It's a perfect storm of fucked-up.
The street that I grew up on Bullhead City was just a drug trafficking street.
They make drugs, sell drugs, or they sell food stamps.
And then they buy drugs with that cash that they get.
When my mom met Emmett, he'd just came out of the penitentiary, and he was really hardcore into drugs and then pulled her in.
I remember his tattoos.
It was, like, a skeleton face on, like, a woman's body with flaming swastikas in her eyes.
My spot's right here.
They actually put little nice little house on it.
If only they knew it was, like, just some running meth lab before.
There was a trailer boarded up, like its own little Twilight Zone.
There was one little slat in the window so you could see if the cops were going to come.
Stuffings and pâtés, and in any Food is not a priority when you're high.
Look at that leprechaun! He's got Lucky Charms! They're not hungry.
They're hungry on their come-down.
When they're coming down is like when it's the most hellish.
And Emmett would lock the door from the outside so I couldn't get out of the house.
If I had wanted to go to school, you have to get out.
I would just be up roaming the streets at 4:00 in the morning.
I've had a gun held to my head over drugs in my house.
You see people OD.
I'd just drag them out.
Emmett would try to spray me with gasoline and then chase me around with a match, like "Oh, I'm gonna light you on fire," like it's a fucking joke.
That area got wiped out.
Our trailer wasn't on fire.
It was the one behind us.
The one's making meth, the other's making meth.
Later, Emmett had alluded to, like, just, "Oh, yeah, I flicked a little cigarette over there.
" Heaven Want to drive down this street real quick? Most of my family didn't even really know the extent of the physical, verbal, emotional abuse.
My grandma used to live here, so we all used to come over here and hang out.
So you're going to culinary school? Yeah, I'm going to be going to the Cordon Bleu schools - in Scottsdale, Arizona.
- Oh, nice.
As soon as I can get, you know, some money saved up.
That's awesome.
Well, and then right now Are you cooking right now? Well, I'm a cook at Carl's Jr.
right now.
- Okay.
- It's not like That doesn't matter, though.
You have to start somewhere.
The fact of the matter is is you're trying to, you know, do something, which is awesome.
I grew up in a drug house.
I'm not sure of your background growing up, but definately you know, coming When I was growing up, I had my uncle and my aunt, and, like, they're all all in it, like my mom and everything, they were all, like, in the house together, and they had, like, a little shed in back.
What do you think they were doing in there? I came here, like, seventh grade because my mother died in 2005, so my grandpa took me.
I started out watching You know Great Chefs Of the World? It's, like, an old PBS show.
I mean, it's like This is old, old stuff.
This is the '90s.
My grandma would do Sunday suppers.
My cousins would go over, and we would all just get together and cook.
My grandma would sit over me and explain how to season something.
She just instilled into us an old-world sensibility, a respect for people You're courteous, you have manners.
She helped me to understand what is good in our lives.
I just sucked it up like a sponge.
And she told me, "You have to leave.
" You have to get out of here.
" Me and my dad had talked about going to California.
He was saying, "I'll just come out there.
I'll just pick you up, and we'll just leave.
" The last time my dad tried to come, Emmett wouldn't let me out of the house.
I remember my dad just saying "Little Craig", "come outside," but I couldn't because the doors were all locked.
And after that, my grandma called and said, "Hey, Little Craig, your dad's gone.
" I thought that was her calling to tell me that he's coming to pick me up for me to go back to California.
No, he's gone died.
I just sat there for, like, two hours with the phone just beeping.
That was, like, an extreme sudden because he was he got hit by a car.
And then my grandma died the following year.
When my grandma died, I just came and stayed here, just, like, by myself, like, in this house.
My mom had no idea that, you know, her mom had died, and I didn't want to go back over there.
The power had already been shut off, but I just stayed there.
My half-sister was taken away for bringing a spoon to school that was burned and heroin residue on it.
She went into the foster system.
One of my cousins told me, "Emmett's dead, and your mom is in a crazy house.
" On the toxicology report, he didn't have enough meth in him to kill him.
He died of blunt force trauma to the head.
He got hit in the side of the head with a blunt object.
One of the cops, when he first arrived onto the scene, my mom approached him and asked if she had killed him.
I just detached myself from it.
That was the only thing that I could do to stay sane.
My mom chose the drugs, and that was her choice.
I left Arizona with pretty much the clothes on my back and my bike.
Some people don't realize that they have the control to change the world.
All you have to do is just say yes or no.
On a Friday night, I walked into a busy restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
The chef's name was Thomas McLaughlin.
I said, "Hey, I want to come in and do dishes" to learn.
I don't care.
I'll do dishes for free.
" The first words out of his mouth was "Are you a fucking idiot?" "Okay, if you want to do this, be here at 6:00 tomorrow morning.
" Passion is not enough to do what it is that you want to do.
People think it is.
It's not.
My grandma would say it all the time: just do it.
Just do the thing that you have to do.
If it's a lot of work, it's a lot of work.
But there are worse things.
Because I was also working in a restaurant at the time while I was going to school, I was just "Okay, I'm just going to stay in school because I want to get a degree just to prove to myself that I did it.
" You know, I said I was going to do it, so I did it.
You're learning old-school French technique, French mother sauce with the French Brigade system.
Once I decided, "Okay, I'm not going to screw around replicating stuff that I saw at previous restaurants.
I'm going to go through, and I'm going to just think about what I like about flavors, textures, temperatures, colors.
" That dish, Wolves In the Snow, that I was thinking conceptually about beauty and violence, and the dish had these earthy flavors and these feminine flavors, but it looked really aggressive.
It looked like a kill scene.
When we first did it, we'd serve them pine-soaped steamed towels.
You'd eat it with your hands, and it got people's attention.
When I was younger, doing parties of 16 people, doing 25 courses with just one dishwasher and me, my greatest lesson was learning to trust people.
When I started Wolvesmouth, my whole goal was to not do a restaurant.
Wolvesmouth is a communal dinner party, kind of like the old-world salon.
We just happen to be making restaurant grade food.
It was just having that attitude of, you know, we're just going to do this.
When you come here, people don't know where the space is.
They don't know what the menu's going to be.
You're signing up on a mailing list.
We're not letting every single person that wants to come eat come eat because we have to maintain the standard.
It's about everybody coming in at once, and they're all having this experience together, going down the rabbit hole.
The deeper part of all this comes from wanting to create the things that I did with my grandma.
We could easily charge insane amounts of money, but it eliminates a lot of people who would love to be able to come hang out and have the experience.
So at the end of it, it's donation-based.
I quit doing the splatters.
Right now I'm, like, blanketing things.
I like wet food.
I like things where they look like they're moving together, more abstract and less like food.
Being able just to build these worlds and these other alternative realities, that for me is the next evolution of what Wolvesmouth is.
Some people don't understand it yet, but I want to build more elaborate, larger worlds.
They will still be food-based as far as people eating in them.
I far more admire freedom than I admire money.
I think freedom is the ultimate form of wealth.
And whether that's me doing my Wolvesmouth stuff, whether it's building art installations, those are all me building out my own reality because I was forced into another reality.
It's funny because a lot of the stuff that I do now is building fake worlds.
That's So it's like I've kind of come around full circle to the idea of escapism, I think, just in a very different way.
A lot of us have a lot more of the ability to do what we want to do than we realize.
Just do the thing you want to do.
It doesn't have to be cooking.
Go do whatever it is that is inspiring to you and make it actually happen.
Just make the right choices.
Who would believe in reincarnation if she thought she would return as an oyster? Eagles and wolves are popular.
Even domesticated cats have their appeal.
It's not terribly distressing to imagine being Missy nibbling kibble and lounging on the window sill.
But I doubt the toothsome oyster has even been the totem of any shaman, fanning the motherpiece Tarot, or smudging with sage.
Yet perhaps we could do worse than aspire to be a plump bivalve.
Humbly, the oyster persists in filtering sea water and fashioning the daily irritations into luster.
Dash a dot of Tabasco, pair it with a dry Martini.
Not only will this tender button inspire an erotic fire in tuxedoed men and women whose shoulders gleam in candlelight.
This hermit praying in its rocky cave, this anchorite of iron, calcium, and protein is practically a Molluskan saint.
Revered and sacrificed, body and salty liquor of the soul, the oyster is devoured, surrendering all again and again for love.