All or Nothing (28 page)

One after another, the three of us just knocked the dishes out. We didn't stop for a moment—not to check out Zakarian and his crew and not even to check in with each other. I trusted my team and knew that I had to take off the training wheels and let them roll. It was crazy, nonstop fun, and I was running around like a madman, at one point running so fast that a whole grouper slid right out of my hands. But I loved every minute of it. When it was all over and the host announced my name as the winner, I couldn't believe it. I was thrilled to be able to add “
Iron Chef
winner” to my accomplishments.

Soon after filming
Iron Chef,
I flew down to Florida to meet with my dad, and as we drove around one day he said, “Something's not right. My PSA levels are up.” My dad has always been a worrier, and I blew him off. “You probably just drank too much coffee before the test or something,” I said. But my dad was right. We found out soon after that he had prostate cancer. Coming so soon on the heels of my mother's breast cancer and melanoma, I just couldn't believe it. What was next?

Things kept up at a rapid pace. I was invited to cook at the James Beard House, which is a huge honor for any chef. Foodies from around the city bought tickets to watch me cook in a kitchen that had been used by every notable chef in the world. As I began to prep the food with my team I thought about the fact that I was cooking on the same stove my mentors had used and washing my hands in the same sink as the very chefs who had helped mold my style and shape my career had done. We were cooking for a hundred people who had been invited to walk through the kitchen as we were working. It was an amazing and surreal experience. These diners had eaten food prepared by the world's best chefs, so I knew mine had to be good.

I pulled from the Recette arsenal, coming up with dishes that were salty and acidic and demonstrating a good amount of technique, but not to the point where the food was too artistic or intimidating to eat. We served a little hors d'oeuvre of beef carpaccio wrapped around burrata cheese with tomato jam, a classic flavor combination that used a nontraditional technique. Next were classic French gougères stuffed with a smooth, silky puree of wild mushrooms and Parmesan cheese. We made croquets with good Spanish ham that we folded into béchamel sauce and then breaded, fried, and topped with a salty white anchovy that made the whole thing sing. I reached into my passion for Japanese simplicity and came up with a scallop crudo using amazingly fresh Maine sea scallops. We shucked them out still pulsating, sliced them paper-thin, and served them with just a touch of lemon and olive oil. On top we put a beautiful, sweet sea urchin, one of my favorite ingredients, and a piece of heirloom tomato. I wanted to show technique with a foie gras terrine, which looked like a mosaic when we sliced it. Then we pickled chanterelle mushrooms to make them really acidic and paired them with fatty pork belly and a sweet corn pudding to hit all the flavor profiles. We took delicate, flaky halibut and served it with delicious, thick, creamy mushrooms and lots of caviar. Finally, we served pork three ways: in a fried terrine made from the pork shoulder; a slow roasted, carved loin; and a seared belly that we had braised and pressed.

My team and I set up an assembly line in the kitchen and prepared dish after dish. After we walked through the dining room and answered questions, everyone applauded us. “I couldn't do any of this without my team,” I said, and we all felt incredibly proud of pulling off this high-stakes culinary rite of passage.

Meanwhile, I kept single-mindedly pursuing the goal of opening a second restaurant. Through Art, I met another investor named Leon Wagner, whom Art called “the Governor of New York.” Indeed, he seemed to know everyone. At our first meeting we sat down to lunch, and I ordered a salad. Lindsay had been on my back about my out-of-control eating habits, and even I had to admit that I needed to lose weight.

“Why are you ordering a salad?” Leon asked me. “Are you on a diet?”

“Not exactly,” I told him. “But my wife read me the riot act a couple of weeks ago. We have a one-year-old son, and I want to be around to see him grow up.”

Leon paused for a moment. “I want to introduce you to Dr. Stephen Gullo,” he told me. “He's one the world's top diet doctors. I'll set it all up. It'll be my treat. This is how we'll christen our partnership.”

A few days later Lindsay and I went to Dr. Gullo's office on the Upper East Side feeling antsy and not knowing what to expect. This guy treated celebrities and Academy Award winners; what was he going to say to a mildly obese chef and former junkie like me? Dr. Gullo walked in, and we talked for maybe five minutes before he laid it on the line. “Jesse, you're type A,” he told me. “Moderation is not part of your vocabulary.” Lindsay and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. This was perhaps the greatest understatement we'd ever heard.

Over the next two hours I told Dr. Gullo everything—when, where, what, and how much I ate, along with the details of my background and history of addiction. He was the only person who knew all this other than my immediate friends and family. Even my closest coworkers, my pastry chef and sous chef didn't know about my past. They knew I didn't drink and probably assumed that I had issues with addiction, but they didn't ask and I didn't tell. Once I was done, Dr. Gullo said, “The sugar in simple carbohydrates can trigger a response in the brain similar to that of cocaine,” and I knew in that moment that this guy had me pegged.

I eagerly listened as Dr. Gullo laid out a plan for me. “There are certain things about you that we're not going to change,” he said. “You're a chef. You're going to eat late. You have an appetite for life.” Instead of changing me or even my habits, Dr. Gullo changed which foods I ate. “Think substitution, not deprivation,” he said, writing up a schedule for the week. “If you follow this plan to the letter, I guarantee you'll be down nine pounds in a week.”

A week later I was down nine pounds, just as he predicted. Once I saw the results, I put the blinders on and barreled forward, diving into weight loss with my typical determination. This type of singular focus on pursuing a goal is celebrated in our culture, and it certainly helped me achieve my goals, but it also served as a distraction from the issues that lay dormant underneath. The same obsessiveness that drove me to use drugs, to work around the clock, and even to gain weight in the first place now pushed me to lose sixty pounds in mere months. The weight loss was great for my physical health and my appearance, but as the weight came off so did my buffer. My fat had protected me just as drugs and later meetings and spirituality had, and without my weight or my armor, I was left naked and vulnerable. I needed another safe harbor, and I'd soon find it.

A few months before Eddie turned two, Lindsay and I
took him up to New Paltz for my cousin Jack's bar mitzvah. My New Paltz family had grown by leaps and bounds—my cousins now had kids of their own, and I loved being back in the fold of that open, loving, chaotic family. At the bar mitzvah they played a video of Jack with his two older siblings, and I caught Lindsay looking at me with those green eyes. I knew what that meant. She wanted another baby, and I had to admit that I did too.

At that bar mitzvah I saw the generations passing before my eyes. The tradition is for the oldest male in the family to say a prayer over the challah, and since Grandpa Laz and Uncle Bruce were both gone, this honor fell to my dad. He was horrified and kept asking me, “Can you believe I've got to cut the fucking challah?” Things were moving too quickly for all of us.

Before long Lindsay and I were expecting our second child. I had no idea how we'd fit another baby into our daily lives, but I didn't stop to think about that. I feared that if I paused for one second to think about anything, it would all tumble around me. The only answer was to keep going, pushing, and striving forward. Nothing would get in the way of me opening a second restaurant and continuing to grow my business and my family.

A couple of months later Lindsay, Eddie, Joee, and I were on our way back to New York from Florida. It was a quiet, uneventful flight, and I sat reading an article in a medical magazine that had been left in the seat pocket in front of me about deep vein thrombosis. Suddenly a surge of energy ran through my entire body, like a wave that went from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I started fidgeting with my fingers and tapping my feet like I always did as a kid. I couldn't sit still and kept shifting in my seat. My heart was racing, and beads of perspiration formed on my brow.

Deep vein thrombosis. I couldn't get those words out of my head. By the time we got from the airport to our apartment in the West Village, I was dialed in. I immediately sat down at the computer and scoured the Internet for anything I could find on the blood clots that form in a vein deep in the body, nervously reading about how they can travel through the bloodstream and cause a pulmonary embolism. In my rational mind, I knew that I didn't have deep vein thrombosis. I didn't have a single risk factor and probably had a better chance of being struck by lightning than developing DVT, but that didn't matter. After putting Eddie to bed that night, I locked myself in the bathroom and examined my calves. Were they warm, red, and swollen? I searched for hard, wormlike veins, a telltale sign of DVT, and then I made a checklist and ran through every symptom. Lindsay walked in to find me checking the pulse in my left foot. She must've thought I was out of my mind.

My obsession with DVT lasted for days—through meetings with staff, catering events, business meetings, and time with my family. After a week of nonstop ruminating, I moved on to another condition. Quickly it got so bad that Lindsay started keeping a log of my many imagined illnesses. My testicular discomfort had to be cancer. I stayed up all night reading about it and came up with a plan to harvest my sperm in case we wanted to have more kids. One night I went to a colleague's restaurant and scratched my throat on a chicken bone. The next day I was convinced the scratch was esophageal cancer. I even went to an ear, nose, and throat doctor and insisted that he perform a laryngoscopy, which revealed, of course, that I was fine.

The downward spiral was fast and hard. The bulging veins in my temple were the result of blood clots. A mole that had been on my back since I was a kid became metastatic melanoma. The connective tissue around my groin turned into swollen glands. Mild headaches were brewing aneurysms. Blurred vision in my right eye, which turned out to be nothing more than a smudge of dirt on my glasses, was the result of a massive brain tumor. In one terrifying three-week span I believed I had contracted gastritis, colon cancer, colitis, and even necrotizing fasciitis, a fucking flesh-eating bacteria.

I morphed into a madman, visiting urgent care so many times that I thought I was going to be issued a lifetime ban. Every test showed that I was fine. But no level of medical evaluation or reassurance helped. I became obsessed with every one of my bodily functions, habitually misinterpreting normal physical sensations. Just reading about a disease or hearing about a sick friend sent me off the deep end of worry and despair. At the same time I became perversely fascinated with medical information, staying up all night reading medical books the same way I once devoured cookbooks.

For years I'd lived with the scourge of addiction. I hid in bushes, slept on cardboard boxes, OD'd, and dodged bullets, and I survived it all. Now I was plagued with a raw, carnal fear of illness. My body and mind had healed from the savagery of my first twenty-one years, but the scars underneath had caused me to recoil. On the streets and in jail my physical body felt taut enough to withstand the hardest blows, but all along I was a paper tiger. Bruce Lee said, “The stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.” I'd grown so rigid in my lack of acceptance that I couldn't unfurl my fingers long enough to hold my child and embrace my wife. I felt broken, snapped in half like an old tree.

In the back of my head, always, was the knowledge that getting high would cure these feelings. Every day I lived on the edge, knowing that I was one pill away from losing everything I had achieved. Finally my internist told me that I didn't need another medical test. “I'm going to recommend that you speak to a psychologist,” he told me. “And I'm going to write you a prescription for Celexa.” In less than ten years I'd gone from a homeless junkie to a successful workaholic. But nothing had changed. I had just substituted one drug for another.

Whether or not to take the Celexa was a big decision. Since getting clean, I hadn't taken one sip of beer or any pill stronger than Tylenol. I worried that the Celexa would lead to a stronger pill, and then a stronger one, and then an even stronger one after that. But I was even more afraid of continuing on the path I was already on. I started taking the Celexa, and it helped take the edge off, giving me room to breathe. Slowly the anxiety lessened, and I was able to do the work I needed to do to become whole again.

Thank God Lindsay stepped in too. “You lost your center,” she told me. “You need another anchor.” With her support, I went back to AA, first one meeting a week, then two, three, and sometimes more. I began intensive weekly phone sessions with Larry Kreisberg, the therapist I'd first seen as a teenager, and I started seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist once a week to help work on my hypochondriasis.

After one meeting I approached an older man who had spoken. “I'm coming up on nine years of sobriety,” I told him, shaking slightly as I held my coffee cup, “and I've lost my way.” He agreed to be my sponsor, and I renewed my commitment to working the steps, connecting to other addicts, and being of service. I began to chair a meeting every other week and found time in the midst of the chaos for reflection.

In meetings and in therapy with Larry I realized that I had first started to go off course when I moved to New York and took my will back. In treatment I had found a way to live in a middle-ground, temperate zone, but as I got excited about the food at Ramsay and then about starting my own business, I was gradually pulled away from that middle. And then it became far too easy for me to lose myself in the extremes of work, eating, success, and anxiety.