Anything That Moves Read Free Page B

said. Not long before we talked, Sietsema said, Gold had visited. “He and I went on a typical binge. We started with porchetta sandwiches, then went to David Chang’s bakery for focaccia with kimchi, then we had salty-pistachio soft-serve ice cream, cookies, and coffee milk. Then we went to a pizzeria famous for its artichoke slice, where we also had a Sicilian slice, and then we took the train to Flushing and visited a new Chinese food court and had half a dozen Chinese dishes there. Then we went to the old food court down the street, visited three more stalls, and had a bunch of things, including lamb noodles, and then Jonathan had to go to dinner somewhere. After dinner, he stopped by my apartment, and we went out to another three-course dinner.” Sietsema told me, “Jonathan once said, ‘We don’t write about food, we write about eating.’”
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    W hen Gold took the job at
Gourmet,
maître d’s around the city hastened to get a bead on his appearance. The word went out: “Biker.” Wednesday was bear night in the West Village, where he lived, and he became an object of desire. “I felt like I was walking around naked,” he says. Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman—“another hairy Californian”—and for Mario Batali, though, according to him, “I’m much better-looking than Mario.” Gold was a music journalist in the eighties and nineties. His hip-hop name, given to him by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, is Nervous Cuz. He is sly and erudite, withdrawn in person and in print exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone, who has titled many of his pieces after restaurants that Gold has introduced him to, considers him the S. J. Perelman of food.
    Gold grew up in South Central, the eldest of three boys. His mother, Judith, was the librarian at a rough public school, a witty, lively woman who had been a magician’s assistant and a minor theater actress. His father, Irwin, an aspiring academic, studied under Joyce-scholar Richard Ellmann but got polio before he could finish his dissertation. He became a probation officer; Roman Polanski was one of his cases. The filmmakers behind the documentary
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
used Irwin’s copious, finely written probation report in their research. He was passionate about classical music, literature, and comfort food (Chicago-style hot dogs, all-you-can-eat buffets, lunch-counter burgers); aiming to please him, Jonathan took up cello, reading, and eating. In spite of his efforts, he failed to win his father’s approval: Irwin claimed never to have read his columns. After his father died, Jonathan cleaned out Irwin’s car and found a complete file of his columns in the trunk and Verdi’s
Requiem
in the tape deck.
    At sixteen, Gold left the house. It was the late seventies; he stayed with friends and, he says, in the months before the Iranian Revolution, squatted in Beverly Hills houses that had been bought but not yet occupied by families from Tehran. On the strength of his cello playing, he went to UCLA, where for a time he lived in his practice room. During his freshman year, Gold took a course in cultural geography and was assigned to make an ethnic map of a block of Beverly Boulevard not far from downtown. The city’s variegated, unassimilated complexity began to dawn on him. At a laundromat, he saw Salvadorans saving dryers for Salvadorans, and overheard Mexicans who spoke not Spanish but Nahuatl. The 7-Eleven, he noticed, was owned by Koreans. Just as important, the block included Shibucho—one of the first Japanese restaurants, Gold says, to expel patrons for ordering California rolls—and he tried sushi. Later, for a class that he took with the performance artist Chris Burden, Gold made a piece that involved going to every Jewish deli in the city and buying two water bagels using only pennies; one he ate