My dog is worth more to me than most things. Not in the I-love-my-dog-so-much way, but in the I-make-most-of-my-money-because-of-this-dog-and-would-probably-be-broke-without- her-and-living-in-my-parents’-basement way. I still live in a basement. It just happens to be a basement apartment, which I pay for. Riesling, my dog, is scratching her dog ass on the corner of the couch I got from the sous chef at Marmiton after I moved out. 

I named her Riesling after the wine, which is named after the grape that it’s made from, because like the wine and the grape, she’s uppity Old World shit that nobody except a small select portion of the population should really care about or need. She’s a Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian breed, but I got her from a breeder in Oklahoma that I found on Instagram, that goes by the name xgaryspetsx. xgaryspetsx charged me like 3K for the smallest runt of the litter that I specifically chose because it looked like I could fetch a discount for her on account of how malnourished she looked. Not the case.

“She’s as good a dog as the rest,” xgaryspetsx told me, reversing his baseball cap on his head. “She’ll fill out. Just a bit small right now.”

Which was a coded way of telling me that I would need to buy more dog food for her than if I had gotten one of her siblings. Nevermind the drive there and back, and the vet appointments, and all the hours I put into training her to sniff mushrooms. I spent the whole summer last year searing my elbows and hands and forearms and one time the side of my face (after it was pressed there by one of the sous chefs because I charred an unbelievably large cut of pork) on the grill at Marmiton to afford the three grand it took to get her.

I’m on the bed, which is against the wall across from the couch, under the only window, which happens to be next to the only outlet, which is hooked up to two separate refrigerators—one for my shit, mostly leftovers. And the other exclusively for storing pecan truffles.

I open up the fridge. The truffle one. Goddamn, it reeks. Not in a bad way though. Two open bins sit on the middle shelf. At first glance, you might think the bins are filled with tiny potatoes. Look closer, and you’ll see that the potato-looking things actually kind of nubby, more deformed. Cut one in half, and it looks like the cross-section of a brain. Eat it, and you’ll taste an earthy nuttiness but with a seductive, almost irresistible quality. Kind of like the allure a handful of soil had if you really liked eating dirt as a child.

I ate a lot of dirt as a child. Just loads of it, I don’t really know why. I would dig fistfuls of dirt out of the garden with our family dog, Spot, and just scarf it down. I think I might’ve been nutrient deficient, considering my mom would pretty much just feed me peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of tap water. 

Spot would eat dirt, too. And other things—cat poop and whatever fell on the floor and the nibs of pens. He was part French Bulldog, I think, I really couldn’t tell. He was definitely a mutt, but his face was so screwed up and smushed that it looked like someone took an iron pan and just smushed his face into it as a puppy, kind of like clay, and it just stayed that way. I could hear him breathe at night at the end of my bed, just snorting and gasping for air but never really getting enough.

I think maybe the chronic lack of oxygen to his brain made him weird in other ways, too. Like he couldn’t really bark, and he definitely couldn’t fetch even if he tried to on account of his pan face, but he never really tried. He was good for one thing, though.

Eventually, I stopped eating dirt. Spot didn’t. Once I got my first car, a beat-up Lincoln Town Car I hotwired at a Walmart after I noticed it sitting in the parking lot, untouched, for several months, I would drive to this pecan orchard and take him for walks out in the trees. No one was ever really there. One time, I saw someone picking pecans up off the ground, but that was really it. 

Anyway, I noticed him digging up these weird potato things that he really seemed to like to eat. 

At first I thought they were rocks—because they looked like rocks, and it was Spot. But after I tried to wrestle one out of his mouth—there’s no way I was paying for another vet bill after he just ate all eight Monopoly pieces last week—I noticed he was chewing on it, and these rocks were surprisingly soft.

Normally I don’t really pay attention to what he eats, but I had recently seen this YouTube video from Vox on truffles and figured I would take them to Jorge. Jorge was the sous at Marmiton (the one who gave me the couch, not the one who smashed my face onto the grill). For a meathead like Jorge, he sure knew a lot about vegetable stuff.

“That’s a fucking truffle, motherfucker,” is what he told me when I showed him at the end of my shift that Wednesday, third week of my job. “You could get good money for this. This one’s mine though. Thanks, bitch. You’re a pretty one.”

After he finished emasculating me, I hopped back into the Town Car. I went to go find some more. Eventually, Chef started giving me good money for them.

“You’re doing good,” she told me, without any emotion in her voice. I think she’s still mad at me for quitting.

God, the ceiling still leaks heavy. The drip, drip on the tile floor annoys the fuck out of me. Anyway, that’s how I got into truffle selling, or collecting, or dealing, or whatever you want to call it.

Spot died a year and a half ago, so I decided to invest in an actual, bonafide, Italian-grade truffle hunting dog, which is why I got Riesling. 

I take handfuls of the truffles and move them to a cooler, emptying out one of the bins—which I’ll load into my Lincoln Town Car and take to Cheese Bread Emporium, then Restaurant Odessa, then Richard’s Brewing and Buns, then when everything’s picked through, I’ll go to Marmiton, because they don’t pay me shit for them anyway.

Here’s the math on the whole process. While a pound of black truffles from Italy can make you around 2K per pound, there’s import fees, and taxes, and the cost of transportation, and they could go bad, and all these other variables that could really only turn you a small profit, wasting you a lot of time. Pecan truffles are native to North America, and they only go for, at most, 200 dollars a pound. But, because I find them myself, or I guess, Riesling finds them, and I store them myself, and deliver them myself, I turn kind of a good profit, as long as I can sell. And as long as I can find them.

The stupid car won’t start. Goddamn it. Oh wait, ok. 

I pull up to the Cheese Bread Emprium first. There are no Michelin star restaurants in Texas, but there are some good ones, and the chef at Cheese Bread gives me good money for first pick.

Francis is kind of buff, but in a doughy looking way. She still scares me.

“What you got this week? What, did the pecan trees all die or something? This is shit.”

I can just smell whatever’s on her breath. It smells like old person and some type of specialty cheese. Like gorgonzola. Or havarti.

“I could’ve found these myself.”

The truffles aren’t always good, or even passable. They grow year-round, but that doesn’t mean they’re always growing, you know, qualitatively.

“You should just go back to Marmiton. At least you’ll be worth something when you’re on that grill.”

I am not going back to Marmiton. You know Gordon Ramsay? He used to run the kitchen at this spot in London called the Wickham Arms. He worked there for a while, but he got fired for sleeping with the owner’s wife. He was 19. I’m 19. Unfortunately, I’m not Gordon Ramsay. 

It wasn’t the owner’s wife, but it was close enough—they weren’t married, per se. At least I don’t think so. It struck me as a more staying-together-for-the-kids type relationship.

My friend Costello’s girlfriend worked at this spot not far from here. A girl died in the vents over there—she was also sleeping with the head chef or something. Anyway, she tried to crawl through the vents to eavesdrop on the conversation he and his wife were having in the office, and got stuck there. She got stuck there, on a Sunday, and no one found her until the restaurant started smelling like smoked meat. Like, more than usual. That’s where she got stuck—the exhaust vent. They used an inside smoker to smoke their meat, like we did at Marmiton.

Anyway, I can’t go back. As far as I know, that guy is still the owner, and I’m not about to get my ass handed to me.

In Ramsay’s autobiography, he said him and that older lady had hot sex. Apparently he never found out, but Ramsay left after three years because she confessed she loved him. I unfortunately did not receive the same affection put upon me, and I was found out. Well, by that time, I had enough money for Riesling, and I used this as an escape route. I quit before he could fire me. 

There’s actually conflicting accounts about the Gordon Ramsay story. His autobiography said that the chef only found out until afterward, but another account, from the owner himself, says otherwise. I can’t actually tell who’s trying to save face.

She came onto me, though.

Anyway, once the falling out occurred, I got my last check and ran out of there. That money that I saved up was supposed to go to, I don’t know, a college fund. Instead, I bought Riesling.

I bought Riesling, I made some money flipping truffles, and I moved out of my parent’s above-ground room for me and my mother’s lovingly homemade breakfast (eggs) and moved into my lovingly dingy basement, where I eat eggs but only made without love. They’re hardboiled in large batches and I keep them in a separate bin in my other fridge. I’ll eat like six of them at a time—yes, with the yolks, nobody can convince me they’re “cholsterol heavy” or whatever.

Since then, I flip truffles. I only ever interact with the souse, and I mostly pass off the truffles as a peace offering, or to pay my respects.

“You know you’re good at it. You should just try to go back. I’d hire you here, but honestly, you’re not that good. At least not for Cheese Bread.”

Now, my dad was a chef. My mom married him for his cooking, and left him for his temper. So no more dad at home. Which is why I ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches. I also just had a weird palate, which must be why I ate soil. It also helped in the kitchen, for some reason. And I also got some of the genetic food-cooking talent.

After making the rest of my rounds, I head home. Tomorrow, I’ll do basically the same thing.

Wednesdays and Thursdays, I usually drive around and drop off truffles. Sometimes I’ll try a new spot, and slink around at back doors until I can get someone’s attention. Those are good days. Nearly every spot is guaranteed to be open but not so busy that they’ll throw something at me. I made that mistake a couple of times.

The weekend, and Mondays and Tuesdays, are reserved for finding them. If I find enough on Saturday, I’m pretty much good for the week. Maybe I’ll gather some more the next few days, but usually I’ll skip until Tuesday—Tuesday is usually freshest. And that way I don’t have to worry for Tuesday if I find enough on Saturday—I can stretch out my searching over the next few days.

In Texas, you can’t pick pecans unless they’re already on the ground. There’s no rule for truffles, as far as I know. Maybe in Italy, but not here.

I take Riesling to the orchard and we sit in the Town Car. I light a bowl.

Riesling sniffs the ground and gets distracted. It’s an odd Saturday morning. She doesn’t have an affinity for truffles, but I trained her with treats. Either way, she might have been bred for this, but she’s definitely not built for this. 

In Syria, it’s not an easy job. You could easily be killed for truffle hunting. In the middle of Texas, it’s about as leisurely as watching TV about Syrian refugees. Like, sure, maybe there’s a small fear in the back of your head that you’ll get caught but it’s not actually real and you’re safe. But anyway, in Syria. And they’re only selling them for 25 dollars a kilo! And getting shot for it. My basement apartment is actually ok.

At night, I eat a sandwich and pull into my house.

It’s late. I watch some Master Chef and then some reruns. Tomorrow, I’ll take Riesling out and we’ll do the whole thing over again. I found some, but not enough.

The next day, it’s the same.

That’s how I felt at Marmiton. I was a kid, still am a kid, just a little older. And I was cooking burgers. Servers made more money. Chefs made more money. The panhandler out front made more money. I was just the one struggling for change.

Cash in hand, I do this every week. Not a lot of places use truffles, but once it’s on the menu, it stays there. The love of the little truffle thing. I once heard someone describe it as sexy, but it’s not. It’s pretty routine. Truffles grow in the same place every year—it’s just a cycle of which orchard I go to, where I collect. Not a lot of people collect pecan truffles. Pecan farmers used to just throw them away, if you could believe it. Assigned value to food is an interesting subject. Like lobster, which I’m sure you’ve heard about, or even a slice of pizza. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that value isn’t inherent or even earned, it’s given, by people better than you, usually indiscriminately and at random.