Re: Person I Knew
How Steve Silberman made me believe in cookbooks.
The first boyfriend I ever had died last week—Steve Silberman, 66, of San Francisco: science writer, beloved author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, David Crosby acolyte, Deadhead.
Using boyfriend to describe Steve is pathetic, I know, but in ten years together, we never really knew what to call each other. Partners wasn’t used like that in the 1980s, not in the San Francisco we knew. Lovers was icky. So boyfriends it was, with all the ambivalence that word carries; the sense of provisional infatuation—for us a stubborn, ultimately joyous, fatally curdled one.
We met in 1981.
I was two months under the weight of a Berkeley English degree that felt both useless and poorly earned. I kept the books I’d been assigned for my classwork—Proust, Virginia Woolf, Ulysses, a thick anthology of Augustine poetry—as if they were participation trophies in a contest I couldn’t see my way through. It’s true that the truth of my secret—a queerness that was proving less and less containable, despite my strict efforts—had thrown an inconvenient shadow across my college years. I was stuck at the threshold where the world split between acceptable and despised, unsure about which to enter.
Books, though—I needed books.
Of course, the only thing worse than being lonely and scared is being horny-lonely-scared. I didn’t know how to find gay bars (it was before the rainbow became a storefront marker) and anyway I’d have been paralyzed to enter had I found one. Desperate, I looked up GAY in the Alameda County phone book. As I recall it there was one listing, in Berkeley: the Pacific Center, an LGBT counseling hub in an old house near campus. I cinched myself up in every strand of bravery I could find and dropped in on the regular Tuesday night discussion session.
Steve led the talk that night.
He was gorgeous: black curls and cheek dimples, a month-old Provincetown tan that didn’t seem to have faded, dark eyes jealous for every drop of light in the room. Still wearing the department store outfits his mom probably bought him for college that he couldn’t afford to move on from: the button-down in frayed pink piqué; cords bare at the knees from sitting cross-legged on co-op floors at Oberlin debating dyke separatism and radical faggot politics into a hundred dawns.
After the discussion circle, as guys stood chatting around a coffee urn and a sleeve of cookies, Steve and I connected.
Blahblahblah, regretfully I hooked up with someone else that night, months went by, Steve came back to me, we spent a night together and I spent a week never really leaving his apartment except to go to work. He departed for Europe: a long-planned solo trip. I stayed in his room, smoking his pot and listening to the Go-Go’s, lifting the needle again and again to “Our Lips Are Sealed.”
He wrote to me about the lemon tarts at the snack bar in a gay bathhouse in Paris. I imagined those tarts dozens of times: tried to taste the butter in the pastry, wondered at the particular balance of tangy and sweet. I tried not to think about the random bathhouse sex part, and what it meant for us. Steve had said from the beginning, after the first weeks, when I basically lived in the apartment he shared with his roommate David, on the thin mattress on his floor, that we should have an open relationship. That monogamy was a relic of the patriarchy, a mechanism of bourgeois control.
He made it sound convincing. I mean, we were only boyfriends.
We moved in together a month after he was back from Europe, into a street-level apartment on the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park: 1920s grand, echoey with traffic. It had arabesque moldings and a crystal chandelier, a kitchen like an alcove and a scarred view of fencing. It still felt empty after we moved in. Besides clothes my only possessions were books and the scratched cook pans and kitchen tools my mom had cast off. On the sidewalk we found a drop-leaf table and chairs someone had painted flu medicine green. I arranged the books along the baseboards as if they were library shelves. Steve’s mattress floated on the sea of hardwood, not quite anchored.
At night Steve waited tables in a trendy brass-plated bar and grill down by the Opera House. By day he wrote poems in an ecstatic voice learned from Blake, Whitman, and Ginsberg, about whales and stars and evil men unleashing nuclear catastrophe. He’d get home late after his shift. His breath when we kissed had the sweetness of vanilla and seared sugar from a leftover crème brûlée he swallowed while counting tips, mixed with tannins from the ends of a customer’s unfinished Cabernet, or the ashtray pungency of the pipe he’d hit, as if I could read his body through my senses. I became addicted to the smell of his chest fur, like some humid convergence of yeast and violets. Our limbs sprawled off the mattress and onto the cold floor under the switched-off ceiling light when we thrashed, grunts echoing around the bareness. I’d never been so happy.
I came home one day to a chunky book on the green table. The jacket drawing looked across a terrace to a yellow spit of beach separating turquoise sea from turquoise sky. To John, he’d written inside. Gentle summer. Always, Steve. It was Elizabeth David Classics: the U.S. edition of the English food writer’s first three books from the early ‘50s, Mediterranean and rustic French and British seaside holiday recipes.
I spent the summer in and out of fog, immersed in my Elizabeth David. Steve and I roamed Golden Gate Park, my omnibus volume, dust jacket left behind so it wouldn’t fray, with Steve’s army surplus rucksack on shoulder. Tall cypresses lining the west-facing meadows, the bark gray-black and with twisting folds, the branches splayed with starkly scribed colonies of leaf-spikes. The skies over the western half of the city cleared by noon most days, leaving three to five hours of sun on green lawns, the cool air saturated with the Pacific. I imagined myself moving through David’s Italian landscapes, among stone pines or the cypresses of Capri. I was in a fog of a different kind.
In 1983, unhappy with our apartment, Steve found a new one for us across the Panhandle in the Haight-Ashbury proper: 160 Belvedere, on a ridge running perpendicular to Haight Street and three blocks north, facing west to the ocean. It was cavelike, scarred, yellowed, and enormous, with two small, totally inadequate gas heaters at either end of the flat.
The kitchen had a long, skinny pantry with wooden shelves along the wall and at the back. We filled them with the Italian plates and pasta bowls he’d salvaged from Greens, his first restaurant job in SF. We mounted Steve’s vise-mount crank grater from Oberlin, with the attachment that made perfect shreds of carrot for salads and Parm for pastas; his thick stainless food service spoons nicked from his co-op. The shower proper dribbled water; the usable one was in the kitchen, in a converted closet where you had to shower with the curtain open if you wanted light to see what you were doing.
We turned the back porch off the kitchen into a tiny dining room: drafty as hell, sloping floor, and the noise of Wally, the shy, sweet junky in the attic apartment upstairs, shambling up and down the back stairs. We nailed a couple of salvaged redwood slabs in the corner to make an el-shaped shelf for my growing collection of cookbooks.
We figured it must have been a rooming house once, before the hippies invaded the neighborhood—you could see where the hasps of lock-latches had been screwed into the door frames. That speculation only added to my sense of emotional transience: the feeling that whatever happiness was here would not last, even if we went on sharing a living space.
We both wanted different things from being together—for most of the 10 years we were together, neither of us got exactly what he wanted or could fight the strong inertia that connected us. I wasn’t into the Grateful Dead. He pushed me to explore the world in ways that maybe I didn’t always feel comfortable with. He urged me to go to a bathhouse by myself, to experience a gay rite of passage he believed was essential, but when I went I felt abandoned, navigating without a map, vulnerable before tweaked-out creeps, lacking any confidence to say what I did and did not want.
But food: restaurants, cooking—cookbooks. That was us at our best. He helped me get my first cook’s job. And his many cookbook gifts to me did the work, if not of loving me, at least showing me what was possible in a world that could not give what I needed.
New ones and old, Steve gave them to me: The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (the week in 1982 it came out); Madhur Jaffrey, Marcella Hazan, Jane Grigson, Richard Olney—The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1960 paperback edition, with the restored hashish fudge recipe of course), each with an inscription, done in the same fine-point pen he scribbled poems with. Christmas, 1982, his inscription in the Toklas book: Take care of the intelligent gentle soul that dwells in these pages. Maybe besides Alice he meant me, or him.
Life with Steve was immersive, frequently exhausting. People were always in and out: hardcore Deadheads; poets; boys in the Allen Ginsberg fan universe; young guys who’d take the bus in from Marin or Walnut Creek, for whom Steve was a guru of sorts. I cooked for some of them. It was my role.
At the table, he’d sometimes do a kind of free verse improvised reading of what I’d cooked. The weak acidity in a too-sweet blueberry tart danced along the dark side of perception. A root vegetable stew tasted of intentionality. Beans with pancetta wasn’t just comforting, it pushed back on Saṃsāra. It was glorious bullshit. He could make me believe that what I cooked was part of a bigger story crackling through the universe. A vaguely Buddhist interest in awareness, steeped in pot resin, synchronous with the rhythms of Beat poets and Jerry Garcia jams.
He brought a Deadhead’s sense of wonder to his cookbook giving. None could be just a collection of recipes, it had to reveal truth; a poetic vision. The author had to be a prophet, a Blakeian visionary, seeing, tasting, and feeling things others could not. Turning Blake’s line “Energy is an eternal delight” into a guiding principle for cooking: That the cook’s efforts, inspired via the peyote tea of a truth-baring cookbook, could keep the world firing and cooling, broadcasting its chemical syntaxes, sending crucial information through vast cortical circuits. Cookbooks that showed inspiration, real cookbooks, were an intensification of experience.
It was messy, it fucked me up by playing on some of my worst, self-loathing impulses—and it taught me, by contrast, what a healthy relationship could feel like. But being Steve’s boyfriend taught me to train a scholar’s attention onto anything ecstatic, anything joyful. In a weird way I miss him, almost the way I did when we were together. And though I cut out a few of the inscription pages, I still have the cookbooks. I still diligently tend to the souls within them.
God damn it you're good, John.
This was so beautiful.