the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt two)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

JAMES GRAHAM: I put a lot of faith in mentors like Tony and Sam, who were really not qualified for mentorship. But [at Nikki & Kelly] Tony gave me license to run a kitchen staff of fifteen, and he couldn’t be happier, because that meant he didn’t have to cook.

He didn’t mind if I fucked things up; he was so elastic. If things went bad, he would just patch that over right away with a smile and charm.

One day, everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. Tony had disappeared to go tanning. That was a thing; his nickname at the time was Zonker, after the character from the Doonesbury cartoon strip, Zonker Harris, who was a professional tanner. He would tan, I think, largely to hide the pallor of heroin. He would play hooky, to go to the beach with Lenny, and tan aggressively. He looked like a Versace bag.

the last book I ever read (Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, excerpt one)

from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever:

SAM GOLDMAN: Everything that Tony said about what he learned as a dishwasher was true. He was a show-up guy. He wasn’t a genius cook. Like myself, he was a proficient mechanical cook. He knew the drill. It didn’t matter if we were fucked up on acid. I remember after this one weekend at WPA, we woke up Monday morning like, “What happened the last few days?” It turns out that we had been really busy and we’d done a good job. That was being a chef in those days, with that flavor of recreational drugs: as long as you showed up and did the job, nobody fucking cared.

I remember driving around with Tony in the East Village, in this little red Rabbit I had, before we were doing heroin, trying to find it. It was what the cool kids were doing, and Johnny Thunders was doing it, and we all kind of idolized Lou Reed’s life, and you know Lou Reed has done it. It was a natural progression of drug addiction. We did a lot of junk together.

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt fourteen)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

Because of her poor health, Altagracia has death on her mind and is thinking about going back to Mexico. “There was a raid on a 7-Eleven near my house just last week. And the other day on the bus, a white woman went on a racist rant against me while I was just standing there. All of the racism here makes me want to go back to my country when I die. I’m not wanted here, and I do not want to live in eternity in a place where I’m not wanted.” In the meantime, she says, her plan for aging involves her two children. She tells me a story about a woman she sometimes sees when she goes out to collect recycling for cash. The woman is seventy years old and collects recycling for a living. She was widowed when she was very young and never remarried, never had children. Now, Altagracia says, the woman is all alone and left to die in a foreign country without anyone to take care of her. She says the lesson is that it is important to have children who can take care of us when we grow old.

“You can’t guarantee how your kids are going to turn out. There are good children and there are bad children, so in my opinion, people should have two kids. One of them ought to turn out well. I have two kids, and after my surgery, there was always one of them around to take care of me when the other one was busy.” An heir and a spare. I ask her if the pressure of that might be hard on the children.

“Perhaps,” she says. “But that’s the tradition.”

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt thirteen)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

So I got into a fight with Leonel’s lawyer. I was working on a newspaper story on Leonel and he had been telling me for a long time that his lawyer had been treating him—communicating with him or not, mostly not—in ways I understood to be negligent and so I called him up and asked him a list of Bob Woodwardy questions that any discerning person would have understood meant I was asking around the issue of negligence, and he asked me to meet him at the church the following night at eight o’clock on the dot, like a playground bully, and yelled at me in front of Leonel and Sofía, told them they could not trust me, because he did not trust me, and they looked down at the floor because what could they say?—their lives were in his hands. So I was quiet for their sake, and also I am not a confrontational person—I am shy and I cry easily—and I went home and I cried and cried. But after a few weeks later I sent him an expensive bottle of scotch to appease him because I needed to still have access to him, because access to him meant I could help Leonel. Our meeting forced him to go to the church for the first time in god knows how long, which is what Latinos Fighting for Justice had been trying to get him to do, and while he was there, they talked to him about a new strategy, which he agreed to pursue. One of the organizers called me that night to ask if I was okay and to say that never mind all that, the strategy had worked (oh yes, the strategy!). On Thanksgiving Day, out of nowhere, Leonel was released. He was out! He called me and I tried not to cry, because it wasn’t about me, a known pussy, and our conversation was awkward. Are you stretching your legs, Leonel? Soon after, on Facebook, I saw a picture of him stepping outside the church for the first time while Sofía cried by his side and I am lucky I was already married and will not have kids so I do not have to lie about what the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is.

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt twelve)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The migraine thing is new. I’ll visit Leonel on a Monday, then wake up with a headache on a Tuesday and have to lie in the dark for the next two days, sometimes going to Urgent Care for a migraine cocktail through an IV. My arm starts looking like I use. Then I visit him again. The migraines will not stop. I will just have to start taking daily medication to prevent them and emergency medication at their onset. They will become a part of me, and Leonel will become a part of me, and the sanctuary movement will speak to me and my traumas in the way nothing ever has before.

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt eleven)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

A couple of months later, I travel to Willard, Ohio to meet them. Willard is the most rural place I have ever been to, and on the long drive there I pass through vast stretches of farmland where my cheap cell phone loses service completely. Willard is known for its rich, fertile soil—people call it “the muck”—and its agricultural industry is booming, which means that temporary workers from Mexico come in seasonally to help plant, weed, and harvest. Before I visited Willard, there was a huge battle over a welcome-home party that the chamber of commerce was throwing the migrant workers. A Vietnam War vet threw a tantrum in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, writing, “Myself and a lot of other Vietnam veterans and also Korean veterans are still waiting on our welcome-home party. Where does the Willard City Chamber of Commerce think that it is right to give the migrant workers a welcome back party?” At a city meeting dedicated to planning the party, a woman stormed out of the room with her husband, saying, “I’m a compassionate person. I believe people who come here have to come here the right way. It makes me angry when I hear people talking about harboring illegals.” The city has a population of approximately six thousand people, 94 percent of whom are white. This is where the boys live.

I come armed with the cutest pictures of my dog back when he was a puppy because I assume all children like puppies. When I arrive, I find out three of the four children are scared of dogs. (There are three boys and an even smaller child, a girl.) And clowns. I could not have arrived at a better time. They want to discuss their fear of clowns.

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt ten)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The whitest thing I’ve done in my life was trying to save Flint youth while I was visiting there. At various points when I was in Flint, I did a cowardly thing, which was to try to suggest a trip in which some of the kids would come to New York with me, because I wanted to open a Pandora’s box for them, the view of the city at night. The skyline! The fucking skyline! I asked the teens if they’d seen New York (they hadn’t), and then asked them if they’d like to see New York (they didn’t know), and holy fuck I hadn’t anticipated that. In my mind, the kids would want to get out. They’d had big Broadway dreams. They’d have questions, they’d want answers, we’d talk gypsy cabs and SAT scores and Plan B in both life and in birth control. But what happened instead is that the teens conscientiously ignored me the entire time I was there—they had no intention of talking to me—so I’d eavesdrop on their conversations, and I’d overhear them talking about how they wanted to be waitresses at some local bar because they heard you could earn mad tips that way, and I fucking DIED, because I grew up on my dad’s tips and knew what kind of life that gave you, and I wanted to save them from that. I’d drunk the social mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people when I was in high school and didn’t know how to reconcile all that with what I was seeing in Flint. I had created for myself a world in which I could only feel reprieve from panic if my parents were either dead or at peace, preferably both, and if they were to be just at peace, that would be expensive, and I had to work toward that, and I knew to the gram just how much blood they had shed for me over the past thirty years and I had to repay it in gold. And I didn’t understand these kids who didn’t think the same way. I felt like it was out one fucking job—they were alien to me. I didn’t know how to talk to them. So I didn’t.