business, how we’d be bringing in more than vegetables and meats through the back door.
It’s amazing the things you will do for your family sometimes.
Even at the time, while working through long nights of spackling and painting and nailing down hardwood, I knew the reconstruction of the restaurant served as a massive distraction, a means for occupying my mind and keeping it off of Melody. I worked myself to exhaustion every day, so that those moments before I fell asleep, even as I slumbered on a discarded couch in the unfinished kitchen, I’d not have a chance to think of her, be one step closer to forgetting her.
But just before Sylvia opened its large wooden doors to the public, around the time the head chef and I started experimenting in the kitchen and assembling the menu, Melody returned to my head because of the distance of time I forced between us. The first few months after finding her in Kentucky weren’t so bad; I’d just seen her, and though her existence seemed uncomfortable and unsafe, it was fresh. But as the same season approached one year later, those warm early summer days, the thoughts of her became nearly impossible to push away, and the memories of my experience with her became vivid again, even the slightest reminders—the smell of cut grass or greasy, stale convenience store hot dogs—would send me into a tailspin. And as those memories rose in my mind, so did my concern for Melody, my wonder of what had happened over the last year, whether she had dived into promiscuity in a search for temporary connection, or if she had retreated into herself, destined to hide from the rest of the world, watch life pass from behind a family room window.
My memory of her no longer made sense; she was changing, and I began to once again ascend the fixation of finding out how.
There are two hidden benefits to running your own restaurant: abundant food and easy access to booze. Of course, the greatest downsides to running your own restaurant are all that abundant food and easy access to booze. On the food side, the kitchen crew had to come to terms with various guys from the Bovaro crew hanging out in the kitchen, feasting for free, most commonly my youngest brother, Jimmy, who by twenty-one was piling on the weight with monthly regularity, began to take the shape of a tackle, with all the violence and dexterity built right in. That first year, though, I began to pack on the pounds as well, gained ten before the restaurant had paid its third round of bills.
But what really got me was the alcohol.
It became harder and harder to get to sleep. The control and influence from Pop played a part, my having taken a restaurant I had designed and renovated with my own hands and whoring it out to my family’s money laundering, allowing it to be pimped by my older brothers. The resentment began to age me. But the real stress was something else entirely. The more successful Sylvia became, the more the guilt kicked in; it seemed unfair that I could have the life I was given while having cast Melody into the darkness, then leaving her there. The worry returned, could only be quieted by a small glass of Glenfiddich at the close of the day. The problem is, as any alcoholic will tell you, liquor is a pretty effective way to get rid of that leak in your ceiling; cover it in a thin layer of paint after each storm. Soon, you may as well start a little earlier so by the time bed is in view, you’re already there. And if it serves you well at night, why not dilute the guilt and shame and worry anytime you feel their burden? Works equally at lunch as it does at dinner.
Took about three months for me to get to the point where it became noticeable—“Anybody seen Johnny?” “Check in the bar”—and one more for it to have become an official part of my day. The pressure of running a restaurant is immense—like putting on a high-profile stage production day after day—but the alcohol wasn’t diluting my stress, in fact made that part of my life worse, slowed my ability to multitask. Its only purpose was to cloud, to erase. It did that well in a temporary capacity, so I kept it flowing.
My father eventually took me aside and performed a well-planned intervention, went