In October of 2021 I completed a novel entitled Confetti. Written in a fever within three and a half months, the idea originally germinated from thinking long and hard about the former restaurant, Vespertine. It was supposed to be a long short story or novelette but ended up being full length, an 83,000 word (332 pages) crazy romp following the observations and outrageous adventures of a twisted Michelin inspector with many problems, including a foot fetish. A book Jo called “Disgusting and gruesome with a gross, appalling, offensive character at the center.”

Anyway, I think the guy is great, he’s lewd, yes, and incredibly damaged, but fun. I’ve been thinking of the book quite often as of late and how the hell it all came together. It just streamed out of me and when I look back at how it all happened I have no idea how I generated the energy to withstand such an outlandish human being inside my head. Maybe that’s why it had to be done quickly. Since starting on The Seasonal Bar back in November, and now this blog in January, I’ve had the desire to continue writing fiction but no time to do so. I’ve got about two hours or ninety minutes each morning and a lot of that time is spent coming up with trying to think about what the hell to write. An exercise in perseverance itself. There’s also many distractions throughout the morning as I no longer go to Bluey’s to write. For instance, my son is learning to pee in his squatty potty so he wants me to see how he can piss in it and every couple of minutes I stand up and go to the bathroom to praise him. Trying to regain focus after many diversions is easier to do when writing a blog than writing fiction as fiction requires intense focus.

I’m trying to think what the back of the book would look like and how it would describe this whole, extremely bizarre thing. The blurb so to speak. I’ll work on it. I think this book has merit, but then again, what do I know?

The book contains 14 chapters. An amuse bouche and 12 courses with an intermission, a nice walk, dead center. Yeah, it needs editing as it’s a first draft and veers between tenses pretty wildly but the basic jist is there. Anyway, I’m tentatively putting the first chapter out there. So here you go, everybody. Yikes.

Confetti

By Justin Dicken

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.” 

-George Orwell 

Amuse Bouche

The meal at Panorama Rustica was superb, top notch, worthy of a single star, but I feel the environment, the impressive interior showcasing brilliant modern architecture, distracted and derailed my overall experience. A sleight of hand. The food must speak for itself of course, always, but a fidgety glee overcame me the moment I walked in as my anticipation, along with my appetite, swelled with the majesty of truly spectacular restaurant design, the minute details at every corner bowling me over with joy. At one point I caught myself in a rare moment of giddiness, clasping and wringing my hands together like a poverty stricken child awaiting a rare slice of cake. Yes.

Behind a slightly askew walnut podium at the spacious entryway stood not one but two brunette hostesses. One brown eyed, the other blue, both flashing perfect gleaming teeth, splendid in their tight black dresses, radiating the power and false innocence of their youth at me, displaying magnificent collarbones and slight but muscular shoulders with unblemished, lustrous, tanned, unfreckled skin, their long necks stopping at soft earlobes from which dangled silver chained, sparkling, spherical baubles, miniature handholds guiding my eyes upward to find purchase on their deliberate, curled sidelocks and completing the ascent to glossy, conditioned hair piled high atop their heads geisha style. Ensorcelled by this display from the get go I consciously allowed for it to wash over me, change my attitude, and silently thank whoever had the foresight to hire them. The awful, cliched truth of first impressions is you get one chance at them and beauty never hinders. Both enchantresses addressed me by name and I followed the blue eyed doll’s lead as she strutted ahead of me, perfect calves flashing, her defined, trim ankles brilliant, heels clacking on the hardwood floor, me close behind, daydreaming of slipping the shoes off myself and imagining how her size seven feet and pronounced veins under the smooth skin would feel once safe in the palms of my hands. 

A small tattoo blemished the back of her downy neck. A graphic bird, all hard black lines and bright colors. A phoenix. Flames and feathers. Although I’m one to always appreciate a nod toward myth and fantasy, my opinion of the entire production wilted in the presence of this distasteful splotch, spoiled as I thought of how mottled and faded the ink would look in ten years and further into her forties and beyond. The tattoo revolution, aka the great identity crisis, began in the late nineties and lost no steam in the modern age. I understand it to be a way for people to mark themselves as unique in this cruel, pale world, but for me, it has become a sort of warning to stay away, as it does in nature’s more poisonous, lethal creations. What makes us unique are our faces, billions of them somehow distinct, our tastes and distastes stemming from events in our lives, our genetic code imprinted into the very substance of every cell in our body along with our unavoidable dark fates. We know not how we will go but each of us carry the dread in our particular way and this fact haunts us whether we care to admit it or not, tattoo or no.

Back to the restaurant. The hostess, now forever tainted in my mind by her poor choices, gestured to my seat at a high top in the bar lounge, a magnificent creation where long shafted, lethargic overhead fans descended from crisscrossed steel beams, and floor to ceiling windows providing glimpses of the city lights at night. A false, upside down version of the galaxy. She seated me outward toward the door and the fragile, chiseled rear shoulders of the blue eyed hostesses. I realized for the entire meal I would face the podium and focus on the tattoo, however, and switched seats. She handed a menu over, smiled, and strode away. The tall stool had a comfortable, high back, and the seat itself, where I placed my ponderous ass, was grooved for prolonged satisfaction. I’m a monstrous six six but felt no awkward geometry in my legs as my feet sought purchase to rest upon the crossbar of the stool. 

A triad of ambiance exists in proper restaurants in order to put the guest at ease right away. Music, lighting, and temperature. All three were dialed in. I would hesitate to include a fourth as the image of the staff but we’re no longer allowed to comment on the slovenliness of people’s appearance and disgusting life choices. Here, at least, they were well scrubbed and polished and the tattoo soon faded to the rear of my mind as I basked in the perfection of a perfect seventy one degrees, soft warm light, and vibrant, post classical music laced in the form of violin and piano sprinkled with modern electronica. 

A scent in the air lurked amidst my well trained nostrils. I had a hard time figuring it out. Close to cinnamon (my favorite spice) but not quite so obvious. A lingering vanilla laced with perhaps anise or burnished leather, like a finished, empty whiskey barrel left to dry in the Kentucky sun. Quite pleasant this. 

A brand new table. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Refurbished wood from a barn coated with some sort of lacquer. Bonus points for no wobble. They must have read my review of the restaurant Hoity Toity where I mentioned I felt like I had eaten on a table in a ship at sea. I had denied them a star for this oversight. The beauty of new furniture is that it contains an air of unused appeal. When I sit at a place my thoughts always drift to the grit and fungus of how many other people’s elbows must have ground into the microscopic pores of the surfaces. Much like how I toss and turn on hotel beds, thinking of just how much dried semen lingers in the fibers of the mattress. 

Now the waiter. The management team had chosen dark blue jeans and periwinkle blue Oxfords, untucked, along with long, dark brown aprons as uniforms. Yawn. A good looking dullard in his late twenties approached with the typical nervous fake smile, a prime example of the slow leaching of the soul as one heads into their thirties as a restaurant server. An ambitious face clinging to the last vestiges of boyish charm as a future of alcoholism, receding hair, and depression awaited him. Clean nails. Decent cuticles. The left pinky recently chewed. Saggy belly and recently acquired love handles which he sucked in and subconsciously projected an aura of low self esteem. A silent golf clap for ramrod posture. The black leather shoes a bit down and out. Scuffed tips. Something, a spilled sauce, tomato, had dried to the laces of the right foot. Imperceptible to any but my own watchdog eye. He took the appropriate amount of time to let me settle in, (one minute and twenty seconds) took my order for a bottle of sparkling water, and asked if I needed anything at that moment, to which I replied with my customary politeness, “No thank you.” He then disappeared for an exact ninety seconds to allow me to gaze over the drink menu and select a cocktail.  

Allow me a moment to reflect on the ridiculousness of the cocktail craze. There’s really only four or five actual cocktails in the pantheon, the gin and tonic, the Manhattan, the Negroni, Margarita, Daiquiri, etc. Everything else is just an endless wave of variations. Sure, you can shake up some rum and lime with strawberry syrup, slap a foolish moniker on it, but it’s still just a goddam daiquiri. I find this trend incredibly banal, and at Panorama Rustica, they adhered to more of the same nonsense, staying in the comfort zone instead of remaining traditional or just going full explosion in the opposite direction. Anyway, the names are always cutesy, Right Decision (spicy mezcal margarita variation, hibiscus, mango), Fizzy Bubbly (spritz), Ecto Cooler (gimlet bolstered by fresh cucumber juice and a salted rim), and so on and so forth. I get it, cocktails are cool now but we forget they always have been. It’s booze. Its power to dissolve social barriers will never get old. The whole renaissance plays more to the ignorance of the populace than anything else. I mean, to put whiskey and sweet vermouth a glass in a two to one ratio, dash some bitters and stir it to make a Manhattan, cherry or no, is so easy as to be deceptive. There’s no magic in this, just like cooking, but I think the average moron has too much going on in their life to think about any of it. Hey, I get it. We’re all lazy in some way. The same revelation as when I figured out how to make pasta. Boiling water, dried spaghetti, ten minutes or so, and a light bulb going off above my ten year old simpleton head. All this so called cocktail renaissance poppycock rings a similar bell. Once you figure it all out, like anything in life, the magic disappears and maybe that’s why we secretly choose not to learn certain things and keep the mysteries intact instead of digging them up. The experts all around us are the people who want to unveil these intricacies of life and expose them. I’m wishy washy about it, I both wish to learn and then am distraught when I do. Again, a feeling that goes back to childhood and loss of innocence. I used to be terrified of horror movies until I saw a piece about how they were made, the makeup applied, the fake blood. Never frightened again while simultaneously missing the feeling. But anyway, let’s veer back to the damn restaurant. 

I started off with a cocktail from the menu to steady my nerves. Nothing stood out except for a simple white Negroni. Boring and beautiful, like a young woman, but delicious and satisfying, like her well taken care of mother. Bitter and sweet like life itself (please allow me a few of these cliches from time to time). When the beverage touched down I swooned from the first sip almost immediately. I sucked in a great draught of air and took it all in, the restaurant and its whole deliberate environment and knew exactly how the whole meal would turn out before placing one morsel of food in my mouth. It would be a delicious snooze fest. The steak would be cooked to my specifications and served with a vegetable in season, maybe a tasty sauce in proximity to chimmichurri or variation thereof. There were no surprises in the culinary world anymore. Word had gotten out, every technique in every cookbook had been shared, hacked, thoroughly examined. It was nearly impossible to go anywhere without running into a good restaurant. You had to try to eat shitty food nowadays. The youngins do it out of pure irony, like frequenting dive bars. No more culinary deserts existed unless you were landlocked in some truly podunk town in the middle of Nowhere, USA. A decent meal in this era is always perched within reach, ready to be plucked, and even some of the most strange, foreign, backward places have good food. Bad meals no longer have power in the world, but I would like to argue that sometimes we need those to remind of us the good ones. The bland and the tasteless only make the great meals sing but in the modern world of information sharing it had all become so good that quality had become mainstream. We sometimes forget the benefits of mediocrity and failure, and their power to elevate our palates and our spirits. The only way to appreciate anything is to be given a glimpse into the cold abyss of flaccid pasta, under seasoned vegetables, overcooked meats, and wilted salads. 

At any rate, I’ll forgo any further dialogue about the food, the meal was fantastic but snooze inducing. Like a rockstar who has become anesthetized to sex from the sheer weight of groupie pussy, I too had grown bored of all the luxurious sipping, sucking, quaffing, slurping, and chewing of extravagant food. It’s altogether possible I needed to go eat at some of my favorite deplorable fast food joints for a month to reset my palate and remind myself of just where the bottom existed, but I decided to go a full one hundred and eighty from this stomach churning, gaseous idea. In the pipe lurked an experience I had only heard whispers of. Yes, an experience unlike any other. An unadvertised, word of mouth joint whose previous patrons were sworn to secrecy under punishment of blackmail and whispers of a tortuous death, which brought up the question as to how it was supposed to do any business at all if no one knew about it. Ah, but word of mouth is the most powerful advertising and mystery, great, sweet mystery is equally alluring. In an age when women dress outlandishly and show off every curve, even the lips of their pussies, leaving nothing to the imagination, there are still men, like myself, who appreciate a well turned ankle while practicing the age old art of voyeurism. 

I had found out through a contact of mine in the industry, a fellow gourmand. A despicable, ultra wealthy, fat son of a bitch who had gone great lengths to obtain the information. One of my remaining true friends, Leonardo Alfonso. He had been and told me nothing about it except how only a single method existed to make a reservation. He had obtained the information from a dead man who had been buried with a sloppy, hand written card. A cryptic, yellowed artifact. A golden ticket that I now had in my pocket and as I ate this last, normal meal and thought of how I would write my review of Panorama Rustica before my trip, it burned away inside me, this curiosity which in its faded chicken scratch read:

Confetti

Fine food catering to the specific needs of the individual. 

Maitre D’ Holland Bollingsworth

11702 Zenniciler Street, Suite 303

Instanbul, Turkey

I arrived on a Tuesday, leaving the solace of the airport’s air conditioned bubble, into the sweltering heat with all eyes on me. The cab and driver enveloping me in a tangy melange of body odor and spices, a pheromonal soup, so to speak, rich, pungent, disgusting, soaked right into the very fibers of the greasy cloth seat I sat upon. Rich tobacco, cardamom, spoiled onion, expired vanilla extract, past its prime hard cheese, a small bottle of anisette spilled after an unforeseen pothole, tamarind. I refused, however, to shelter myself from the experience and breathed deeply of this peculiar aroma. I wanted all of it. The sheen of his yellow, canned wax bean skin. The dusty, heavy air outside the window. This strange city which viewed me as a complete and total foreigner as I sat in the uncomfortable, itch inducing scent of a well worn cab and driver. A fact transcending all worlds, all cultures. If any constant remained as a reminder to our similarities as a species it was this. The humble, necessary cabbie. Bad back and all. Tobacco stained fingers on the worn, naugahyde wheel. Beaded seat polished with baked in farts. The stories contained within the man and the cab as one. Two imperfect machines but without flaw in the eyes of their creators. 

He dropped me off in front of a nondescript building. A simple office front. Bland. Sand colored. Concrete with one large glass window. Sand polished sidewalk. Traffic noise. People walking by. Men with incredible varieties of facial hair. Women shod with a kaleidoscope of shoes. I could have been anywhere. The wave of heat hit me when I stepped out and I half expected my foot to sink into the pavement like a fly buzzing pile of lukewarm dogshit. A steam bath. I sucked in a lungful of dust and swelter and summoned an insane amount of strength to one legged squat my torpid bulk out of the vehicle. 

I imagined myself as some sort of modern day Lewis and Clark in this foreign world where no Michelin Stars were yet to be awarded. Yes, there had to be food worthy of attention here but our offices published no guide to this mad place as if it existed on the fringes of imagination only. Most of the major cities were given lavish attention, Tokyo, New York, Moscow, Dubai, but not Istanbul. It was ignored, not on purpose, not out of its sheer alien environment, but because no one really cared to give it any consideration yet. My goal, my hope, was Confetti would be the new discovery, my discovery, and would put this glorious, ancient place on the map. Much like how chef Adrian Ferrara gave new life to the cuisine of Spain in his heyday. I would find a chef here, someone devoted to their craft who had stayed many decades out of the spotlight in order to fine tune their food, to hone, to slave, to attempt perfection, and it was my task, my goal, to find them, bring them out of their shell and into the spotlight, award the star or stars, inform the world of this new genius. 

Inside, the office stank of the artificial, chemical linger of freon from the air conditioner which chugged away like a rented mule on a grist mill. A small room, a desk. No bathroom. Light from the lonely front window illuminating the dust swirls in the air. Nothing on the cracked eggshell walls. A thin, stern woman seated. All business. Her energetic, snake nest macrame of curly, black hair off-putting and turgid, but its impenetrable event horizon impossible to deny. She addressed me by name. I tried not to let it rattle me and instead, reminded myself this was the pinnacle, the ultimate, these were professionals. I had made no reservation save the one for my flight. But then I thought of Leonardo Alfonso, the dratted villain. He must have alerted them to my curiosity. She sized me up and I sat my substantial buttocks down in a slippery, shabby plastic chair without invitation. I could tell she hated me right away. She had the means to know everything about me. The ancient Egyptians knew that real power over a person came by simply knowing their name. I felt a bit naked. She cut right to the chase. 

“The fee is one million dollars, Mr. Leavenston. Twelve courses over several weeks.”

“Gratuity included?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. No emotion. 

“Do you take checks?”

“No. We are prepared to accept a wire directly from your bank account which we have already examined. Otherwise you would not have been allowed here at all.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“All I need from you is an ok and we can proceed.”

“Do I sign anything?”

“No.”

“No receipt?”

“No. You must trust us and us, you.”

“I don’t need to be sworn to secrecy?”

“There is no need, sir. No secrets here, only your word to go forward.”

“Ok,” I said. “Let’s proceed.”