On February 5,
1983, I prepared my first meal as the main cook of the Soup Kitchen sponsored
by the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, the oldest standing Roman
Catholic church building in Manhattan. I was 34 years old and had just graduated from Columbia Law
School. I was also terrified.
I grew up in a
large Mormon family. If I count all my half-, step-, and full
brothers and sisters in chronological order, I am number 9 of 14. Six sisters
and two brothers preceded me, but I was the first child in my family to conclude
that my stepmother was lost in the kitchen. My initial reaction was to eat at MacDonald’s whenever I
could (I worked after school as a sales clerk at Montgomery Wards in Las Vegas,
Nevada, and could afford a 19-cent cheeseburger). My second reaction was to buy The Joy of Cooking and, at the ripe age of 16, assume
responsibility for major family meals, which I did without a hitch. But cook for 150 people, with only 3
hours to prepare? That I had never
done before.
I was not the
first Soup Kitchen cook at St. Joseph’s—that honor belongs to Patricia Dempsey,
who convinced the church’s Social Action Committee to sponsor the Kitchen in
1982—but I began within a few months of its opening and remain its longest-serving
chef. Over the years I have watched
the demographics change and the number of meals we serve fluctuate in relation
to hard economic times for the poor.
In 1983, we served more women and families with children. Now our clientele is almost exclusively
adult males. By the end of the
Regan era, the number of meals we served on a given Saturday had climbed from
150 to as many as 700. During Clinton’s
last year we sometimes saw our numbers drop back to as low as 150. For the past several years, though, our
numbers have hovered around 400, but no matter how many meals we serve, I no
longer panic. I regularly toss off
Soup Kitchen entrées in less than 3 hours, and the food’s not bad, either. I would eat it. The Social Action Committee, in
conjunction with the City of New York, provides canned goods and many fresh
vegetables for us to work with, but it has insufficient funds to purchase fresh
meat. (Canned meatballs and canned
chicken are sometimes available.)
I therefore always pay for the kielbasa or other meat products I use out
of my own pocket and am happy to do so.
I try to accommodate all. On
the weeks I cook, the Soup Kitchen turns out three versions of the main course: one that includes beef or pork; one that
has only turkey or chicken; and one that’s vegetarian.
My first two
years at the Soup Kitchen I cooked every Saturday. (Our original idea was to take up the slack from the soup
kitchen at St. Vincent’s Hospital, which served no meals on Saturdays. St. Vincent’s has since closed.) When I found I had no time to do
laundry before I returned to work each Monday (I was a Wall Street lawyer at
the time), I simply purchased more underwear and socks and kept right on
cooking. By my third year, however,
I knew something had to give. My talent
for churning out hearty meals in large quantities had been put to good use, but
I had so little free time I worried about burnout—not as a lawyer, as a cook. That’s when I hit on the sensible idea
of claiming the second Saturday of every month as my own, a schedule I’ve adhered
to ever since. I celebrated my 30th
Anniversary as a cook at St. Joseph’s on February 9th of this year.
No one has to
prove he or she is homeless in order to eat at St. Joseph’s, although it’s safe
to assume that most people who dine with us either are or are surviving on little.
People often think that being poor
is such an intractable problem there’s not much one person can do to help
besides donating money, but my Soup Kitchen experience shows otherwise. I, with the aid of a few volunteers who
chop cilantro, celery, and onions each week (not to mention kielbasa), have
served over 150,000 meals to the poor.
And I’m one person.
Cooking,
though, is not my only obsession.
I have another.
I was six years
old when the first thing happened in life that seriously made me think about what
is true or false and how honesty works in the world, or doesn’t. Our car got wrecked. My mother, who had been in the house
when it happened, ran outside to find me and my little brother both in the
driver’s seat and a gaping hole in the side of our garage. I explained I was there only because I
had seen what my brother was doing and had tried to stop him. My mother didn’t believe me. Nobody did.
My punishment
was swift and harsh, and from my point of view, completely unfair. To me, it wasn’t the car that got
wrecked. Truth did. My parents’ version of what had
happened, which I knew to be false, prevailed over my own, which I knew to be
true. That confused me. It made me question not only those who
had authority over me, but everything I had been taught, both at home and at
church, about truth and honesty since I was an infant.
I was eleven years
old before I figured out, in terms that made sense to me, exactly what had
happened that day, and why. I decided
right then and there, much as I would later decide to teach myself to cook in
order to have decent food, that when I was old enough to do the topic justice,
I would write a book about truth.
And I have. Three times.
The first time
was in the mid-’70s. We had no Master
of Fine Arts program at my undergraduate school (then Eastern Washington State
College, now EW University), so I convinced my advisor to let me write a novel
that would be my “thesis” for a Master’s Degree in English. The Committee that reviewed my work liked
it and approved of what I wrote, but I considered it a failure. It fell far short of what I had hoped
to say.
I tried again
in the mid-’90s. I quit my job as
head of half the litigation department at MetLife and stayed home to write fulltime.
After two years of solid work, I
sat down at Henry’s, a bar in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New
York City, and read the final product.
It almost made me sick. My Master’s
thesis had been better.
Fortunately, I still remembered the telephone number of my former boss,
and when I called, he answered. In
the affirmative.
Then 9/11
happened. I thought, because George
W. Bush, our President, was a professed Christian, that our country was about
to set a stunning example. I believed
he would help us show the world that a country could follow a course higher
than the animalistic drive for revenge.
He would prove we could turn the other cheek because “an eye for an eye
leaves the whole world blind,” and although I am a nonbeliever, I accept the
New Testament’s idea that the only effective way to neutralize an enemy is to love
him. President Bush and a majority
of the country disagreed. And
where are we now? In need of eye
patches.
On September 7,
2001, which was the second Saturday of that month, I cooked at the St. Joseph’s
Soup Kitchen. On September 10,
2001, a Monday, I started a new job as a financial planner at a branch office
of MetLife, located in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. To downplay its connection to MetLife (and
emphasize its proximity to the Main Street of American capitalism), the branch had
been named Wall Street Planning. Its
manager and I had met earlier, in August.
We had agreed to leverage my public speaking skills by providing
investment seminars to wealthy clients in our well-appointed conference room
that overlooked the Statue of Liberty from the 89th floor. Both of us hoped to make lots of money.
The next day, 9/11,
I was on a flight to Phoenix, Arizona, refining the speech I intended to give that
afternoon to incite the company’s top salespeople with entrepreneurial fervor,
when we stopped in Memphis, Tennessee, for a scheduled ground transfer. I boarded my connecting flight, we pulled
back from the loading dock, and we sat.
And sat. Then, after a short,
cryptic announcement that our flight had been “grounded due to possible
terrorist attack,” we pulled back to the dock and disembarked. Minutes later, as I stood with a crowd
of others glued to a TV screen that hung above the nearest airport bar, I
watched the South Tower crash to the ground behind a newscaster interviewing dust-covered
people who had just fled the site.
They looked as surprised by the deafening roar behind them as I was. About a half hour later, I watched the North
Tower fall, too. My imagined
future went up in smoke before my very eyes. The jihadists had struck a blow against a pre-eminent symbol
of capitalism, and what was the result?
A truth wreck. Neither side
was blind, but both sides saw only their own view of the world as correct.
MetLife came up
with a swift relocation plan. We
were given an empty floor at its home office, then on the corner of Madison
Avenue and 23rd Street.
Most people straggled back to work over the next few days, but everyone from
Wall Street Planning looked shell-shocked. Nobody spoke. I
worked on commission and therefore tried to meet with my manager to explore how
we could launch our seminars now that we no longer had an 89th floor
conference room from which to gape.
He kept cancelling our meetings.
Repeatedly, during those days, I would escape to a top floor of the
clock tower on the corner of Madison and 24th Street, where my
office as a MetLife executive had once been. From there I could see the wisp of smoke that curled up from
the pit where the Trade Towers had stood.
My mournful sadness in the aftermath of the greatest truth wreck I had
ever witnessed curled up with it.
The last
weekend of September 2001, I was at home cleaning my bedroom closet when a purple
binder fell from an overhead shelf and struck my head. At first I couldn’t remember what was
in the binder, but once I opened the cover, I did—my last attempt at writing a
novel.
No, David, don’t, I told myself. You’ve been down this road twice before,
and where did it get you?
Nowhere. And where was I
then? In post-9/11 limbo.
I made myself a
deal. I gave my manager two
months. If he spoke to me in the
interim, I would do my best to help him launch a plan for reinvigorating our
office. If he did not, then on
November 12th I would whip out my laptop and go back to work on my
personal albatross: a novel about
truth.
November 11th
came and went. My manager’s only
communications with me beforehand consisted of more excuses for us not meeting. On November 12th, I pulled out
my laptop and upheld the other end of my bargain, but writing a novel, unlike
learning to cook, didn’t come off without a hitch. The first sentence I put to paper that day is not even in the
book now. I saw, over time, much
more than the demographics of my characters change and experienced huge swings in
the number of words I produced each day, from tens of thousands to none. I watched the novel take on three or four
completely different shapes, as though a Greek god were attempting to seduce me
with one form or another. Many
times along the way I thought I had finished. I would wrap up my newest final version, enlist a fresh
batch of readers, listen to their views, reflect on them, and pull out my
laptop again. And again. My oldest friends (and earliest
readers), hearing last year that I was on my fifty-seventh revision, stopped accepting
the word “rewrite” and replaced it with “excuse for not finding a job.” Finally, on February 24, 2013, exactly eleven
years, three months, and twelve days from the day I started, I finished The Book of Thompson: A Mormon Tragedy. This time, when I read the final
product at Henry’s, I understood that I had done precisely as I’d intended—I had
captured a truth wreck on paper.
I now have a greater appreciation for why my manager kept cancelling our
meetings after 9/11. He wasn’t
there yet. Neither was I. Until February 24, 2013.
Was it worth it? Was it worth spending every dime I had
and every dollar’s-worth of credit (as well as every ounce of energy) to achieve
a goal I came up with at the age of eleven? I know what I think, but I want to hear your views.
In 1983, when I
started as a Soup Kitchen cook, David J. Larkin, Jr. was a fledgling attorney
on Wall Street. Today I am an unknown
author who has fed 150,000 meals to the homeless and can’t afford my next
month’s rent. That, too, is its
own kind of truth wreck, but maybe, if someone agrees to buy the kielbasa next
time I cook at St. Joseph’s, I’ll survive.
The Book of Thompson: A
Mormon Tragedy is available on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle e-book,
in both a “full version” (495 pp.) and a “short version” (367 pp.). Both versions tell the same story. The “full version” describes in greater
detail the main character’s magical thinking and contains reflections on his father’s
earlier life that have been omitted from the “short version.” Here are links to what’s available:
PAPERBACK:
Full
Version ($18.99): http://amzn.to/XCkGgY
Short Version
($14.99): http://amzn.to/155ZHpL
KINDLE:
Full
Version ($7.99): http://amzn.to/13jN1ge
Short Version ($5.99): http://amzn.to/XhTzqp
