A few weeks ago my shrink told me that she figures that I have the brain of a recovering meth addict.
Note the use of the present tense. Turns out it's not such an easy trip out of the woods.
Methamphetamine, pharmacologically speaking, causes the brain to produce vast quantities of dopamine. I'm talking crazy huge amounts here, several orders of magnitude beyond anything that occurs in the normal course of life. Imagine a 110 appliance plugged into a 208 line by accident and you pretty much get the picture.
Dopamine makes us feel good. It is the substance that courses through us when we feel intense love for another person, or when we throw a bike into the apex just a lttle too hot and feel the rear wheel hop out ever so slightly on the exit. Dopamine floods our brain at the moment of orgasm, the instant that our hand latches onto the bomber hold just past the crux on a sketchy climb, the first time our newborn child muckles on to our finger with his impossibly tiny fist. Dopamine celebrates accomplishment, release, triumph, raw sensual pleasure. It is adrenaline's hot, slutty cousin – desirable and available, but fleeting. We can't help but come back looking for more.
The problem with meth is that once you have lit your dopamine receptors up like God's own Christmas tree, they lose their sensitivity like taste buds with a bad case of pizza burn. Hence the addict's dilemma: You want to recapture the feeling, but it takes more every time. After meth, nothing else feels remotely pleasurable. Love? Forget about it. Sex? You probably aren't even interested, unless it's going to help you score another hit. Art, music, illegal street racing… whatever it was that used to give you that rush, it's gone. And when you go into rehab and lay off the crank, your life descends into a swirling wash of greys and browns without a speck of color to pique your interest. It takes months, or years, for the brain to exercise its remarkable self-healing powers and relearn the pleasure principle.
I never did meth with any regularity, but I might as well have.
For half a decade, I had a job that kept me at a point of near-permanent emotional and mental redline. The demands of trying to manage an operation like that demanded every bit of focus I could muster, and forced me to endure psychological punishment beyond anything I had previously thought possible. On my days off I waited in a cold sweat for the phone to ring, and on my putative vacations I spent most off my time searching for a decent WiFi connection so I could check email. There was never enough time in the day, never enough resources at my disposal, never enough effort or energy or discipline to get my arms around it. When things went wrong, they went colossally wrong; mistakes were measured in vast sums of money, or the unquantifiable yet infinitely more serious measure of damage to reputation and integrity. A single oversight could send a sixty-thousand dollar wedding spiraling irrecoverably into the abyss or leave the entire kitchen suicidally understaffed for a holiday weekend breakfast rush. When it was bad, which was most of the time, it was really bad.
On the fleeting occasions when it was good, however, it was fucking phenomenal. Dopamine bonanza. When the kitchen was firing on all cylinders, when my sous-chefs all had their game on and the food looked tight and and I was driving the whole fire-breathing machine full tilt like a GP bike down the back straight at Catalunya, I had the feeling of absolute invincibility. I was coordinating the efforts of twenty different people executing simultaneous banquets while the restaurants were going off the hook and I had it all in hand, every detail accounted for, every contingency covered, an army of people who jumped at my word and carried out their tasks like a well-oiled SWAT team in the belly of the beast… at those moments it all came together in a comingled rush of exhuberance both tempered and elevated by the certain knowledge that all hell could break loose without warning.
I miss that.
I miss expediting service for the holiday brunches when we cranked three hundred covers through the dining room in the space of four hours at a hundred bucks a head, the tickets stacked so deep that I used a line of doubled-up duct tape to create another slide for incoming orders. I miss buying Iranian Osetra by the half-kilo tin and stirring it into beurre blanc with a plastic picnic spoon. I miss the sight of thirty-five perfect cylinders of foie gras hung in neat rows from the shelves of a walk-in cooler, swaying gently like tree fruit in a breeze. I miss butchering tenderloin steaks by the hundred and seeing them racked up, seared, and buttered prior to service. I miss the slow buildup to a big night, the days of prep and planning, the rehearsal, and then the final mad crescendo of dishup followed by the delirious release when it was all over. I miss the cigarettes on the loading dock with my boss when we reviewed the game tapes, celebrating the wins and dissecting the missteps.
I miss sliding a finished plate into the window and for a brief moment pausing to consider just how gorgeous it is. I miss the food that my cooks would make for each other late into service when there was a lull, and I miss the sounds. The steel-on-steel ring of sautee pans hitting a stovetop, the hiss of rendering fat, the crash and sizzle of an entire sheetpan of product upended with an expert flip onto a red-hot broiler. I miss the raised voices, the cursing, the locker-room posturing and above all the knowledge that any one of these people would go to the wall for me before they gave up.
Why do guys like Jordan and Lance keep trying to come back? Think about it. Once you have performed at that level, been the undisputed best in your chosen line of endeavour – what's left? Can you really be happy selling insurance or calling games, or even coaching? Unless you're a freak like Bill Bradley and you go on to the US senate, you spend the rest of your life remembering what the rush felt like and forgetting how frightened you were of losing it. Which goes a long way to explain why Brett Favre is currently in talks with the Vikings.
And me? I'm home for dinner every night and I take the weekends off. My phone doesn't ring between Friday night and Monday morning, and when it does it's usually my boss calling to let me know that there's a sale at the Nike outlet. I make it to every cub scout meeting and little league practice and most nights I sleep like a baby.
And when every once in a while I go for a few drinks with my old crew and we start talking shop, I can physically feel the itch like bugs underneath my skin and I start getting that old familiar churning in my guts like it's gametime. And even though I haven't smoked in almost a year, I find myself thinking about those post-mortem cigarettes on the loading dock. Damn, they tasted good.
