"Have some shrimp on the Barbie," he says, gesturing to a plastic doll perched on a plate, incongruously surrounded by prawns. "Be sure to try the cilantro sauce," he adds, and I daintily dip into a dish between her legs. "I'm the journalist traveling with you," I mumble, extending a slightly greasy hand for him to shake. "Glad to have you on board; we leave in five minutes," he says, turning his high-wattage smile on a trembling housewife clutching his latest cookbook. I shove food down my gullet until Mary Burnham, the toaster-mobile's sous chef, an efficient-looking woman with a blond ponytail, politely asks me to step aside, saying, "I've got to get these groceries unpacked in three minutes." Already I sense this operation runs like a well-oiled Cuisinart, and fearing that my presence will slow down the whirling blades, I pitch in. Ninety seconds later, we've stashed the ingredients for the evening's dinner. "Everybody in! Let's go!" Suzi Q. Varin, the diminutive but formidable tour manager, herds everyone into the rumbling Winnebago that pulls the toaster-mobile, and slams the door.
As we pull out with a roar, she peers intently through her cat-eyed glasses at several maps spread on her lap. "Bob, we might be late," she states cheerfully. Slipping out of his chef's jacket embroidered with the tour sponsors and into a worn gray T-shirt, Bob sighs deeply and folds his lanky frame in next to me. "This morning we were stopped at the Canadian border because Chip had a 17-year-old misdemeanor charge for a barroom brawl, and they wouldn't let him into the country." Behind the enormous wheel, the driver, Chip Bont, wearing a deep tan and a baseball hat, smirks without a trace of remorse. Bob reaches for a jug of organic orange juice and pours it into a plastic tumbler. "I drove to the dinner party and I've never driven a Winnebago before in my life. But we like to turn adversity into a party." With practiced dexterity, he dumps a liberal amount of Absolut vodka into the glass as it slides along the tabletop. "Would you like a screwdriver?" he asks.
"What is that thing?" Suzi squeals while we are trapped in traffic, snapping away at the Tacoma Dome with one of the four cameras constantly dangling from her neck. Bob, who illustrates his books with witty and surreal paintings, ignores her rhetorical question, pouring me yet another drink while sipping on one of his own. "I guess my biggest artistic influences are Magritte and Ralph Steadman. I always assumed a journalist would come onboard with us, gonzo style, but you're the only one who asked." Nodding drunkenly, I keep mum about the fact that I could locate a free meal if I were stranded on the surface of Mars.
Suddenly, Mary lurches up from the bed in the back. "Bob, tell me that you've taken the bones out of the salmon." He blinks, his handsome face tellingly blank. "Oh, Bob," she sighs, digging frantically through the drawers of the tiny kitchen. "When we stop, I'll grab the fillets out of the fridge and we'll de-bone them. We need tweezers. Damn it, where are they?" "Uh, pluck-your-eyebrows tweezers?" I ask, holding up a pair I brought in my constant vigilance against stray facial hair. "Perfect!" she says as we pull into a Chevron in Olympia. "Now we just need one more pair."
Chip, ignoring all known wisdom concerning gasoline and open flames, leans insouciantly against the pump, lighting a Marlboro Red as he fuels the RV. "You like this tour?" I ask. "I've been on better," he drawls. "Lot of back-seat drivers, ya know? My next one out is AARP, and I expect that to be an improvement." Suzi, who has been photographing the gas station, and Mary, who has been unsuccessfully trying to locate another pair of tweezers, come jogging back. As we are about to pull out, a Chevron mechanic waves a pair of needle-nose pliers in the air. "Will these work?" he asks shyly. "Us entrepreneurs gotta stick together." Bob leaps out and signs a cookbook for him, flashing that blinding smile. "I promise, you'll never see these again," he says gratefully.
"Bob, Good Day L.A. wants you to do 'Shrimp on the Jillian Barberie.' That's the host's name. And they want you to spell out the show title in melon," Suzi says brightly, pressing the hands-free attachment on the cell phone ever deeper into her ear canal. "I'll do it if they give me a half hour," Bob replies, calmly pulling bones out of salmon fillets that have been marinating in Ziploc baggies full of maple syrup. "Five minutes," she says, shaking her head ruefully. "Tell 'em to fuck off," he responds without a trace of rancor, turning back to me. "I've always excelled at living beyond my means. So, nine years ago I put out a cookbook." The book, The Surreal Gourmet: Real Food for Pretend Chefs, became a New York Times Book Review favorite, and launched his career with the sudden heat of a grease fire. "I've never cooked professionally," he admits. "But cooking shouldn't be a complicated thing. Want another beer?" This from an author who unashamedly includes a cocktail with every meal in his second book, The Surreal Gourmet Entertains: High-Fun, Low-Stress Dinner Parties for 6 to 12. Of course, any man who outlines steps to cooking "six-cylinder trout with fresh sage" on the engine block of a moving car would enthusiastically embrace inebriation. "How did Hunter S. Thompson ever type in this condition?" I muse as he hands me yet another cold microbrew. "At home I've got a good knife, a sauté pan, and a butcher's block. The rest of the stuff I rarely use. See, with my recipes, the ingredients do the work for you." He scoops a small pile of bones into the palm of his hand. "Suzi, how are we for time?"
"We're only an hour late," she says happily. Plotting food placement with pens as asparagus and his cell phone as the salmon, he confides, "I'm developing TV shows with two producers in L.A., and they're both flying in for tonight's dinner. I'll just have to seat them at opposite ends of the table. I like this one," he says, gesturing to the incongruous arrangement of objects on the table. "If we follow the curve of the plate, we get this dynamic thing happening."
As we draw closer to the site of the evening's festivities in Portland, Bob calls out from the cramped bathroom, "Suzi, can I have a five-minute warning?" "Five minutes," she responds, as Bob re-emerges, resplendent in a slightly cleaner chef's coat. "When we're done with this tour, we're auctioning the toaster-mobile off on eBay," he says absentmindedly, running his fingers through his vertical locks. Twenty guests linger under a clear, Magritte-blue sky outside of the restaurant Assaggio. Out of my peripheral vision, I notice three guests watching the proceedings with a hawk-like gaze. "Aha, the producers!" I think. "We're F.O.B.--friends of Bob," the black-clad woman with a drawn face laughs. Her companions, a man with bonded teeth who introduces himself as an "entertainment executive" and a red-faced man dressed oddly in a too-tight tweed blazer, nod mysteriously. Then I spot two emaciated women dressed nearly identically in skin-tight pants, open-toed stilettos, and itsy-bitsy, dark denim jackets. Their high-pitched squeals as they hug Bob give them away. "The second set of producers," I chuckle. "I adore dinner-theater drama!"
Inside the toaster-mobile, Bob and Mary have transformed themselves into efficient knife-wielding dervishes, dancing to the sweet strains of Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." "Can you help serve?" Bob asks suddenly. Stumbling into the restaurant with two plates held carefully aloft, as if they held delicious nitroglycerin, I am plagued with visions of the meal exploding onto one of the producers' laps. "Remember, ladies first!" Bob shouts after me. I manage to serve the entire table without incident. It's only when I sit down to eat that I realize my shirt is inside out.
After the simple but delicious dinner and countless bottles of wine, Suzi murmurs in my ear, "It took me five rolls of film to figure out not to take photos until they've drunk a couple bottles." I nod in agreement, pouring my 14th glass of the evening. "Dessert!" Bob announces, appearing with a gigantic mousetrap on which he has placed an array of gourmet cheeses, some of which taste like having a delicious sock in your mouth. "So, you had something to do with that movie My Side of the Mountain?" I overhear one of the scrawny women ask the red-faced man in the tweed coat. Apparently I've missed a fascinating chunk of the conversation. I vaguely remember that Disney-esque film from the '70s, and lean in hungrily to hear more. "He was only the STAR!" the black-clad woman hisses in response. I cough into my linen napkin.
When the evening winds down, I have the presence of mind to order aspirin and an IV drip of fluids from room service, since the morning's first appointment is brutally scheduled for 7:30 a.m. We snap to consciousness as the host of AM Northwest stomps into the toaster-mobile wearing a crisp button-down and an expression of disdain. "What the fuck is this?" he snarls, glancing around contemptuously. "Some cookbook thing?" Bob has prepared sea bass with papaya salsa in a brown paper lunch bag, but the host remains unimpressed. Bob shakes his head as he stomps off. "They shouldn't treat a nice Canadian boy like that. That guy was seriously lacking a pulse." He glances down at his microphone and flinches. "Shit, the mic's still on! They just caught the whole post-mortem!" No time for regrets, with only minutes to make the next radio appearance--On Your Side. Unfortunately, this host is also wearing the telltale costume of the self-righteous boor--a starched white shirt. Bob graciously fields moronic questions while he simultaneously sautés, but when we push the pudgy host out the door and tear off, he sighs. "Who the fuck would listen to that show? I mean, I was bored, and I was the one being interviewed."
Just as I am drafting a vow to never, ever go on a promotional tour, we pull up to the next radio station. The host of Profiles leads us into the booth, where a big yellow dog gnaws on a rawhide bone. "She's a guide dog, but you'd never know it, she's so darn spoiled," he says with a gentle smile. Picking up Bob's book, he holds it about an inch from his left eye. "I'm a big fan, you know. This book is very clever and the illustrations are just great." My Christ, this man is legally BLIND, and he's read Bob's book! What possible excuse could the other hosts have for being so unpleasant and ill-prepared? In the flickering fluorescence, Bob looks worn out, rubbing his stubbled cheeks with his big hands. But when the segment ends, he seems refreshed from the relatively pleasant experience and ready to take on the next starched shirt in his irreverent battle to make life (and the food we eat while we're living it) a little less serious. "What's waiting for you at home that you're the most excited about?" I ask, hoisting my bags into a taxi as the RV idles impatiently. "The Hollywood Farmer's Market and sleeping in my own bed," he says. "No, wait--make that sleeping in my girlfriend's bed." As the toaster-mobile pulls away, he flashes me that crazy quarter-million-dollar smile, leaving me with only my memories, a hangover, and a cookbook that recommends I make salmon in the dishwasher.
