i’m left-handed so all my scars are on my right hand, my stupid hand. The eight stitches on my little finger I got slicing a cantaloupe one August in Paris during a rushed lunch service. The dark spray marks on my forearm were made by hot oil at New York's '21. They will never go away. The two clean scars on my index finger were made by the same blade on a meat slicer. The first time I was cutting frozen bacon and it slipped. The second time I'd replaced the blade and stored it under the desk in the office. One day I was feeling around for the phone jack and forgot that the blade was there and it bit me again. That was in L.A. My scars are like a stamped passport. But the worst cuts are the ones at the tips of your fingers, small nicks made by sharp knives. You keep getting salt in them during the service. Band-aids fall because of the heat. On busy nights, when the orders are coming in fast and hard, the blood would have to be flowing for you to leave your station. If you left for even two minutes you could back up the whole service. You get one of the dishwashers to go to the first aid kit and bring "tiritas y condoncitos," band-aids and finger cots. He rushes back. You hold out your cut hand while spreading pans around the open flames with the other. The little guy from Jalisco is working at your hands like a cut-man between rounds. Two, three, four hundred people are sitting outside eating or waiting for their food. This is the high of cooking —that it's only for the tough. Services don't stop, they dwindle out like coals. After the first rush there's the second and maybe a third. Cooks drive each other. "Is that all?" you ask casually when a food runner fires 10 tables at once. "Balls out!" someone shouts at a student trembling in the pantry because the printer on the order machine is starting to sound like a machine gun nest. And then there's the straggle of the tables, and when you've put away your mise en place and cleared out your station and think you're getting out, there's always one more table. "They've been waiting at the bar for an hour," the manager half apologizes, "I couldn't say no." I have been in this profession all my adult life. I am not about to choke because one table has been seated late. I am not about to be unprofessional. It's necessary to remember that to the clients this is a good time. They are oblivious to us, though singled out like this we are not oblivious to them. "So take the order," I say. "Maybe they'll even have three courses," someone in the back chips in. It's gallows humor. After four hours on the line, our aprons may look like banners from a siege, but no one will really complain that there's still more to do. Later, when you're standing around pounding beers with men and women with oven-scars up and down their arms, finger tips wrapped in compacted bandages like the bound hands of prizefighters, you have to know that you're tougher than anything they can throw at you. Because tomorrow is more of the same. Most cooks, whether beginners or media stars, are working at various levels of burnout. Still, every night they have to pull it out of the hat. What cooks have always to remember is that though they might put out hundreds of copies of a particular dish, for each client it is the only one that they'll eat. When you're buried at your station it is hard to remember this. Professional pride helps. So does having a mentor. At a moment of panic, if you feel someone's eyes on you, they may not necessarily be the eyes of your immediate superior but of someone in another restaurant, at another time. Someone who taught you the ropes. Someone who wouldn't let you send out crap. You do it for them. I used to know a chef in Paris, the very first chef who ever gave me a job when I was 18. He was in his late 30s, about five-foot-three, a stocky, rosy-checked Breton. I worked with him in the garde manger, from where he used to run the kitchen. I knew hardly any French and still I became his assistant. He taught me how to cook great trays of mackerel with white wine, to chop consomme jelly for the foie gras garnish, to make roses out of tomato skins and much more. All the delivery men in the morning got to have a cup of white wine with him. A few times he slipped me a cup and slapped me on the back and told me that I was all right. He looked like a schoolboy: mischievous, tousle-haired, and always exhausted from screaming and carrying on. We used to serve half the French government in that bistro, because it was the closest restaurant to Parliament and I'm sure no one knew who he was. He'd been cooking since he was a teenager and he had basically no secondary education. He didn't have a recipe book either. Everything he knew had been beaten into him. I still can't reach with my hand for anything in a plastic or metal container without hearing him shout, "Les microbes, les microbes!" He couldn't bear my lazy impulse to grab, when I knew that the germs on my hands would shorten the life of food that had taken time to prepare: the artichoke hearts, the cooked pig's ear, the poached pears. To this day I'll go back and get a metal spoon. I understand now what he did for me. He gave me a place to go to every day and he gave me responsibility. I'd been in restaurant kitchens before, but always as my mother's assistant. In Dublin, after my parents divorced and we came back from Spain, she worked as a restaurant cook. It was a restaurant of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and they ate things like kidneys and pheasant. I used to help her blanche and press the sweetbreads and then I cleaned them until they were little morsels that could be eaten. Summers she worked on the coast in Kingale and we lived in a trailer in the garden behind the restaurant. I can still see her coming back from work with a pint of Jameson and a six-pack of Harp. Before I could even cook, I knew it took alcohol to get certain services out of your head. A girl who smoked French cigarettes made me leave Ireland. We met at a mime workshop, where we both pretended to be seagulls. Afterwards, in the snug of Toner's Pub, I watched her blow perfect rings of Gauloise smoke from between her perfect lips. She'd just come home from two years in Paris and wasn't settling back into Dublin very easily. I had visions of the two of us in France. In our second mime class I was the wind and she was the grass. Afterwards, we shared a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in my student bed-sit. I wore a beret. She laughed. It was raining. "Let's go to France," I said. "No," she said. "I'm back. Paris is hard." I arrived in Paris the perfect way: with a broken heart. NEXT: When you're already "away," how do you "leave"?