DAD, violently slapping a glass of whiskey out of my hand: “Knock it off, kid.”
It’s amazing the things family will do for you sometimes.
And there it was, as I stood before my father, Peter, and a few of the crew: that look. The same look of dishonor and disappointment covered in a ganache of we’ll get through this that burned to my memory from when I was ten years old. The look that told me I’d screwed up again. I was becoming weak, not unlike the addicted scumbags we dealt with and their never-ending needs for gambling and drugs and prostitutes. In our family and crew, a glass or two of wine with a meal or a pair of beers was nothing, but the third would always raise an eyebrow, and if it became a pattern, guys were dropped down—or off—the list of trust. Like Louis Salvone; one day you party a little too hard, a year later you’ve got a coke habit and prison cell and a shiv in your gut.
I surrendered the alcohol with relative ease, for it wasn’t serving the purpose it did for most alcoholics. One of the guys who supplied Sylvia with quality meats was a recovering alcoholic and very distant cousin of my father. I hardly knew him, but you could tell by looking at the guy that he was living a new rendition of his former self, that his once heavy body had been drained and thinned by alcoholism, his face left sagging, his belt hidden by a spare tire that had lost its air. He lived a sober existence, but with every delivery I could see him watch the bar through the kitchen door, where if someone was cooking with vodka or wine his movements would slow and his nostrils would flare and undulate like a frigging dog. He once told me he couldn’t walk past a bar without wanting to go in, that the smell of any booze at all would make him salivate, that he could actually taste it before the bartender had finished the pour. His story never resonated with me; I couldn’t even understand it. I never developed a flavor for alcohol as much as I used it to get rid of the bitter taste of regret I woke up with each morning. In my case, drinking had become a casual way to dilute my guilt and concern, like taking Tylenol every day to assuage the pain of a headache that lasted a year.
I needed no help screwing the cap back on the bottle; I knew there was really only one way to make my headache go away.
Once I’d sobered I looked around and realized the fusion cuisine and the trendy restaurant were a natural fit for me, a breath as fresh as that Kentucky air. For all my armchair analysis of Melody and the people around me, it took me some time to realize—or admit—that the restaurant was a way to break out. I believe contemporary flavors and unexpected elements were the terms I used to describe the food, but they might have been better used to describe me. Everyone on staff at the restaurant always called me Jonathan, and for whatever reason I never corrected them, learned to like it, helped me to live my alter ego. I was the Bovaro on the fence, perched high and looking down on the two worlds of my life, not stuck there because I could not decide which way to go, but trying to figure out how to exist in both equally. I wanted to live the fusion, too.
I started taking my health more seriously, started working out—to build muscle but mostly to release tension—and eventually got an on-again/off-again personal trainer who operated out of the gym near my apartment, a talented gal constantly distracted by my last name. Nonetheless, the training worked, and in my family gaining additional strength would never have gone unutilized.
Over that initial year of developing the restaurant, my appearance began to change, and not just from filling out my sweaters across the chest. While in my mildly drunken stupors I had started noticing that almost everything I read was getting blurry, though once free of the booze, things remained blurry. I took a trip two blocks away to an optician who’d had a storefront in Brooklyn since the 1950s and was told I was myopic. Translation: I can’t read jack from any real distance. The optometrist, so old