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 really cares about or wants. 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. And now she’s scratching her ass on the couch.

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 are 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 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 pressed 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 of it.

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. 

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 past the suburbs and take him for walks out in the trees. No one was ever really there. 

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, like, soft.

I had recently watched this YouTube video from Vox on truffles that Jorge showed me, 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 beginning of my shift that Wednesday, one week after my promotion. “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 went to the walk-in. I stacked several cabbages and heads of lettuce in eight-quart Cambros, and grabbed some other herbs and vegetables, with names like chervil and celeriac, names that sound like diseases. My newest station—the garde manger—made me realize I could not plate a salad if my life depended on it. That was the first time I landed in hot water with the chef, a burly woman with knuckles the size and shape of walnuts.

“Does this salad look like something you would pay twenty dollars for?” is the first thing I ever heard Chef say to me. I think she wanted me to say no, even though I don’t think I’d ever buy a salad to begin with, so I shook my head.

“Look, all these ingredients are worth cents.” She was pretty direct all the time. No pleasantries, no platitudes, no small talk. 

“This salad doesn’t cost shit to make. So you need to plate it in a way that makes it look like it costs twenty dollars. You get it?” So I did what she said. Or at least tried to.

At that point in my life, I just needed extra cash. I was about to graduate high school. My friend Ramos had roped me into washing dishes with him the summer before, which is how I ended up there in the first place. And Ramos got fired for trying to get a drink from the bar at work, barely two weeks after he started. He let it get to his head—I’m not sure what it is—but he thought he could. He wasn’t on the clock, but he was still seventeen.

So after he was fired and I was left by myself, I still scrubbed shit off of plates. The most beautiful things could turn into the most disgusting waste once it was on that plate.

So I would do that, and I would fall into a rhythm. And that rhythm carried me onto the kitchen staff doing prep, then line cook, then the garde manger. That was before I was promoted again, before I got fired, and before I got into truffling, like, full time.

God, the ceiling still leaks heavy. The drip, drip on the tile floor annoys the fuck out of me. 

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 Cheese Bread Emporium first. There are no Michelin star restaurants in Texas—at least not yet—but there are some good ones, and the chef at Cheese Bread gives me good money for first pick.

Francis is kind of round, in a doughy looking way. Not at all like Chef. 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.

She manhandles a fistful of them. “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 nineteen at the time. I’m nineteen.

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, but they didn’t have kids. I think they had a hamster. 

I started working at Marmiton full-time the summer after I graduated high school. That was when I was promoted, again. Goodbye, garde manger. Goodbye, twenty-dollar salads. Hello, grill. Hello, sweat. Hello, heat-caused infertility.

The owner would come by sometimes. He owned several restaurants and a couple of bars. He didn’t know who I was. Not even when I got promoted. Of course he didn’t. He didn’t know who I was until he found out I was doing things with his girlfriend. But before any of that happened, that summer, I was just focused on working. 

I heard this story from my friend Costello, whose girlfriend was serving at this spot not far from here. A girl died in the vents over there—she was 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.

The man insists he is French. He is not French. That man is Samoan, and huge.

In Ramsay’s autobiography, he said him and that older lady had hot sex. Apparently the owner never found out, but Ramsay left after three years because she confessed she loved him. 

There’s actually conflicting accounts about the Gordon Ramsay story. His autobiography said that the owner 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.

That aside, around that same time, I realized Jorge was particularly good at making the duck confit. 

“Yo, try this.”

At family meal, Jorge passed me a plate. Mashed potatoes and old duck. Grated on top, the pecan truffle.

It was good. Like really good. Like Ratatouille-strawberry-and-cheese-moment good.

Later that day, I dropped a giant glass bottle of truffle oil. That was the second time I landed in hot water with the chef. Shards of glass skittered across the floor. Time stopped. Everyone turned to look.

I heard the crack of Chef’s walnut knuckles from across the kitchen, beyond the door of the office.

She flung the door open.

“Do you know how much that was worth?”

She narrowed her dark eyes on me.

“Way more than the shit we put in the salads.”

She turned.

“Jorge, how much do we spend on truffles here?”

He scratched his brow with the back of his hand. Probably an unsatisfying scratch.

I needed to make amends, or my ass was on the line. That weekend, I took Spot and a bucket to the orchards. Everything he dug up, I threw into the bucket. 

After I sorted out the bottle caps and rocks, we had several ounces of bonafide truffles. Well, pecan truffles.

At the start of my next shift, I took them in for Chef.

“The fuck is this.”

I stuttered. “It’s truffles.”

“This shit is not truffles.”

“No, they are,” I protested. “Jorge said so.”

“Jorge!”

And after that whole ordeal, pecan truffles began appearing on menu items. I started bringing more to the kitchen. I didn’t think to ask for anything in return—I was just trying to save my job. And eventually, they just expected it of me. That was something I hadn’t learned yet. Don’t try to do anyone any favors or they’ll just expect you to keep doing that shit for them. And you won’t get anything for it, and you can’t stop because it looks bad, and then your ass could be on the line again.

Anyway, like I was saying, I was fooling around with the owner’s wife-not-wife.

And then, boom. I was fired. Taken off the schedule. Not on the spot, not in a flaming way. In an underhanded way. Days would pass, and I wouldn’t be on there. I’d ask Chef why.

“You’ll be on the schedule next week. It’s slow season is all.”

And the next week, I still wasn’t on there.

I had not applied to college. I was living at home. 

And something else happened. I felt guilty. The guilt that settled on me was like that thick spray foam that comes out of firetrucks when they’re trying to quell a fire.

And when that feeling grew stronger, I stopped asking.

I would bum around the back door sometimes. I didn’t really know where else to go. Jorge would still ask for truffles, so I would fetch them and bring them to him. I started bumming it at other restaurants’ back doors, too—and eventually, I started selling truffles across town.

That is, until Spot started experiencing seizures.

I knew he was old. But the first time he seized up on me, at the orchards, was the first time I realized he was actually going to die, eventually. And it happened sooner than I thought.

I woke up in the middle of the night, in dead silence. There was no snorting coming from the foot of my bed, no struggle for air.

We buried him in the backyard, with a money tree as a grave marker. 

Speaking of, all the cash I had been saving up—that summer, working on the grill—had to go to something. I had no job. All I had, at the moment, or thought I had, was truffles. So after the grief subsided, I decided to invest in an actual, bonafide, Italian-grade truffle hunting dog. I bought Riesling.

I bought Riesling, I started making 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 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 “cholesterol heavy” or whatever.

“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.” Francis is blabbering on. I can see the sweat stains permanently pressed into the creases of her chef’s coat.

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, out of desperation.

The weekend, and Mondays and Tuesdays, are reserved for finding them. To be honest, I sort of give myself the weekend off, something I could never do while working in food service. 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, so I can sell those at a premium. And that way I don’t have to worry about Tuesday if I find enough on Saturday—I can stretch out my search 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. We don’t kill each other’s dogs over truffles, either.

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

Riesling sniffs the ground and gets distracted. 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. 

At night, I park on a side street and walk to the apartment, down a descending flight of rather steep cement steps.

 I settle into the couch. The latest season of MasterChef is on its third episode. You know, the version since Ramsay restarted it because I don’t know why, maybe he needed money. Oh my god, it’s the blind girl again. Everyone talks about the blind girl winning season three, and trust me, that’s amazing. Few people talk about the runner up who committed suicide after that season ended. 

I don’t fuck around in the kitchen much on my own. It’s all Taco Bell, baby. I live más every fucking day of the week. And I watch MasterChef as I’m eating as a sort of simulation, you know, as if it was the future and I was in a simulation pod eating my glop as images of real-world food were projected before me. Real food, like the stuff the old guy ate in Soylent Green. 

The next day, it’s the same.

That’s how I felt at Marmiton, too. It was cyclical. Servers made more money. Chefs made more money. The panhandler out front made more money. His name was Sugar. I was just the one struggling for change.

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.

There’s a knock at the door. Judging from the rhythmic nature of it, it must be my girlfriend.

“Is it open?” She lets herself in. That reminds me that I really need to start locking my door; not because of her, but just because.

She looks around the room.

“Where’s Riesling?”

It’s at this point that I realize Riesling isn’t where she usually is—not on the couch across the room. Of course she would notice before I did.

I look around.

“Shit, I don’t know.” I get up and look under the few sparse pieces of furniture around the room, as if she could’ve flattened her sausage body into a shape flat enough to squeeze under anything. “Where is she?”

My girlfriend sighs. 

In the next few minutes, we’re outside, walking rapidly to cover ground. She goes into people’s yards, peers into backyards, rings some doorbells. Eventually, she starts crying. 

The next day, she prints out posters. I help, of course. We make posts on Nextdoor, Facebook. Call the pound. The advice they give us is pretty useless. They say she should’ve showed up by now, or maybe she was stolen. I do remember I left the door unlocked.

Have you seen that movie with Nicolas Cage? No, not Dream Scenario. The one with the truffle pig? His prized truffle pig gets stolen. 

It’s at this point the realization that she’s not just a dog—she’s a moneymaker—sets in. 

I sell what I can that Thursday night. There’s no real problem yet. That is, until Friday. I need to get more truffles. I have some leftovers that I was planning on giving to Marmiton, but I hold onto them, in case I can sell them the next Wednesday. 

I go and stare at the fields. I consider raking, but out of respect for the ground I don’t. Not only do you disrupt the growing pattern of the truffles, damaging them, but you root up unripe truffles as well as ripe ones. It’s mostly a lose-lose situation. 

I dig up some with my hands, the ones just peeping out of the soil that I can see with my naked eyes. I’m on my hands and knees digging around for hours longer than I otherwise would be out there.

The soil smells good, but the sun is kind of hot on my back.

At home, the empty couch looks like a painting. 

Saturday, the depression and stress keeps me locked on the bed. Why is that? When I should be doing something, I just can’t muster up the energy?

The bucket I keep under the ceiling drip looks like it’s filling up faster than before. There’s probably mold in that ceiling. The back of my neck is sunburnt. I pick the skin off and roll it between my fingers.

Sunday I’m desperate. I need to pay my rent. I try Cheese Bread first.

“So, are you hiring for any, like, prep? Or just line cooks?”

Francis looks like she’s about to spit at me. I feel ashamed.

“You?”

I nod.

“Forget it. Go ask for forgiveness at Marmiton.”

I don’t cook for myself, but I know how. And I need money. Not Marmiton. Never Marmiton.

You know most truffle oils don’t have truffles in them? They have petroleum. It’s a scam. There’s no way Trader Joe’s is gonna sell truffle oil at 14 dollars. You think about that? It’s oil. It’s all big oil. In disguise.

I get home, I crash on the couch.

It feels odd being alone. I remember one time I was on molly and I was just feeling Riesling’s fur and it was the softest thing ever. Just like, buttery. And it was just the best feeling.

The toilet is clogged again. The dirty water reaches the rim of the bowl frequently.

I have terrible bowel movements. I think I might be one of those young people that gets colorectal cancer at a really young age. I wonder. Colon cancer is on the rise among young people. I wonder if I should get a colonoscopy.

The next night I go out there, I dig my hands in the soil. There’s a bacterium in the soil. I forget what it’s called, but it alleviates depression and it’s good for your brain. Shit I did on accident I now go do on purpose. So I walk around and stick my hands in the soil, looking like a freak.

Unfortunately, the truffles from the previous week already have a much less pungent aroma. The smell cuts in half after a few days. I try to sell them, but it’s work. This business takes a degree of self-motivation and discipline that I don’t really possess. Even when I had a dog.

I sell or end up throwing away everything by the time Thursday rolls around again. The mushy nubs fall into my trash bin with a dull musical cadence.

Early morning, picking truffles. There’s no structure anymore. More hanging around at back doors. I tried farmer’s markets once; sold a bunch then. Not going to do it again, though. 

Across from me, the couch is empty. That side of the wall looks like a painting from over here. Old orange couch, cement wall. Sad lighting.

Me and my girlfriend go to Trader Joe’s. She’s looking at all the things. Yeah, the truffle oil’s there. Bastard.

You shouldn’t go back to an ex, should you? Even though you want to? That’s what it is. Think about Gordon, he must’ve wanted to go back there so bad. Anyway, I can’t, and he can’t, because the only way to go is forward. 

But I need money. 

I pull up the old Townie to Odessa.

Jorge is in the kitchen. He’s bumping Three Six Mafia and tweezing cilantro.

He’s quick to figure it out.

“You want to work here? Chef is gonna bust your fucking nuts.”

He throws an apron at me anyway.

I take my place behind the line. Right away, I’m hit with the familiar heat. The heat that’s supposed to make you infertile by boiling your balls till all the sperm die.

Shit pay once again. My station, my knife. And I have a lot of time to think. 

Out of habit, I still go to the orchards. I just kind of stare at them now. I could rake around, check the spots I used to. But nothing really compels me to do so. I keep my head down, do my work.

It’s rote work.

And the cherry on top of it all is that the owner let Gordon Ramsay live in an apartment above the restaurant. He got money, a job, and a place to live, whew. That’s true bonkery. To fuck his wife when the guy is housing you? Ok, that man is truly a dog.

Grueling weeks of this shit. 

My girlfriend complains that I smell weird. It’s true, I do. That reminds me of that book where the guy has to wash blood clots out of the dead carcasses of pigs. I forget the name. It was something about the Vietnam War; I read it in school.

I think about those Syrian refugees. The “things are worse elsewhere” narrative actually helps me a lot. Like I know I should feel bad for them, and also a bit guilty for having such a cushy life by comparison (and I do), but I also just feel like, I don’t know. 

Goddamn these chefs. Ever since they announced that Michelin stars would now be expanding to Texas, they can’t just stop running around and doing things.

So grueling.

I go to the walk-in. There’s a giant pig head staring at me. Eyes wide open. Clear and almost conscious, not milky and dumb like I want them to be. I hate that.

The owner puts his hand on my shoulder. 

“So you’re back, huh?”

I go home. Riesling is wagging her tail in the yard when I get there. 

Really. I can’t make these things up.

At work, I make a dish. It’s veal and some other shit. I garnish it. It looks cute.

At least I’m not in Syria.

We still go on walks, of course. Sometimes she’ll dig up a rock, or a bottlecap. I pat her head and tell her she’s a good dog.

The next day at work, there’s a new menu. For the meat, there’s quite a few cuts of steak, a pork schnitzel, pan-seared salmon. There’s no truffle listed anywhere.

We start getting tickets in, and I start lining up the cuts of meat on the grill.

I flip a steak. I look up. I think about myself, stuck in those vents, getting smoked to death, my body a large slab of pork. The scent of smoked meat wafting through the stale, hot air. My body stuck above me. Folded in there, arms in front of me, sweat slicking me, but not enough. Losing air. 

Then I look back at the grill, and I flip the next slab of meat.