Author's Note

HOW NOT TO DO IT

A Memoir

Donald N. Walker

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is nonfiction. It’s drawn from my own memories, notes I took at the time, photos, employment files, and court records I’ve held on to over the years.

I’ve changed some names, places, and identifying details to protect folks who never signed up to be in a book. I use first names where it felt right and leave them out where privacy mattered. A few people aren’t named at all. This is my story to tell, not theirs, and I don’t have the right to share someone else’s mistakes.

Some of the people here are gone. Others I’ve lost touch with. One is my brother, and honestly, I have no idea where he ended up.

In a few spots I’ve tightened a timeline or folded a couple of events into one scene, but nothing in here happened that didn’t happen. The dialogue is put together as best I can remember it. It isn’t word-for-word.

Let’s be honest: memory isn’t a reliable narrator, and for long stretches mine was fogged by drinking. Where my memory and the records disagree, I say so right there on the page instead of quietly picking a side.

Prologue

Stop Digging

It was June 2020.

I found myself standing in a parking lot in Victor, Idaho, with my entire life crammed into a borrowed pickup and a rented storage unit.

Meanwhile, two cowboys were hanging out on the porch of the house I’d called home just yesterday. Six months prior, things looked totally different.

I had a six-figure salary, a title I’d been chasing since I was twenty-five, a kitchen that was truly mine, a menu I could be proud of, and even a friend living in the basement.

Now? I’m forty-eight years old. I’ve been fired, laid off, escorted out, or told to resign from more kitchens than I can count without help. On top of that, I have five DUI arrests across three states.

In a twist of irony, I once slept in a homeless shelter while working at one of the most exclusive resorts in the American West. And yet, right then, I was about to do the single best thing I would ever do: drive to a breeder in southeastern Idaho to pick up a dog. I didn’t know it at the time.

Standing there in that lot, I only knew that I had messed up again. But there’s an old piece of advice people keep repeating in recovery rooms and everywhere else: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

The problem is, I’d been holding a shovel since I was thirteen. This book tells the story of how I got that shovel, what I dug with it, and exactly what it took to finally put it down. I officially got sober on January 1st, 2022.

Everything before that is instruction on how not to do it.

I climb too high. I catch fire. And then I crash and burn. Rinse. Repeat.

PART ONE

ROOTS AND RUNNING

1972 – 1997

Let’s Talk

At some point, everyone asks me how I got my start as a chef. It pops up at parties, while leaning on a bar rail, or within the first ten minutes of a job interview.

I’ve got a polished answer for that question—one I’ve been using for thirty years. It involves a country club near Columbus, certified master chefs, and a lesson about the difference between honing and sharpening a knife that’s stuck with me since 1999.

That story is true, but it’s really just the fourth or fifth thing that led me down this path. The real reason is simpler.

My mom yelled at me for eating all the food in the house. I was fifteen, had just gotten my license, and we were living in Florida. I’d grown five inches in a single year and was eating like something let off a chain.

Dad was out of town on a railroad job, leaving Mom to watch me devour groceries she’d just brought home. She looked at me and told me to get a damn job.

So, I did.

Instead of being scared or hurt, I was excited. The job was at a tiny pizza place near our house—washing dishes and delivering pizzas. It was grease, nerves, and responsibility I wasn’t ready for, and I loved every second of it.

That’s the origin story.

There’s no grand ambition in it, except maybe getting out of the house. Look, I’m not a famous chef. I never went to culinary school. I’m just a guy who spent a lifetime in professional kitchens learning by doing.

I was good at it, though I was also asked to leave more places than I can count without a piece of paper in front of me.

Both facts are on my resume; only one ever made it onto the version I handed to anyone.

I have a killer memory for kitchens. I can tell you the layout of a basement storage room in New Albany, Ohio, in 1999, and exactly what was stacked on those metro shelves. I can describe the smell of the exhaust hood at a fried chicken buffet in Heath from half a mile away.

My memory for everything else isn’t so great. Some nights are completely blank, and there are years when the sequence of events gets hazy. Usually, that haziness means I was drinking heavily during that time.

A few folks in these pages behaved badly—some toward me—but I left most of that alone because I’m the only person in this story who agreed to be here. What I can offer you is the view from inside my addictive mind.

Anyone can see the wreckage. What I can show you is the thought process: the way a man makes a decision, completely sincerely at nine in the morning, believing this is the last time, and is back at it by noon.

How a plan to improve your life ends up financing a truck you can’t legally drive. Why a geographic solution stays attractive for thirty years despite a perfect record of failure. That mental process is more common than most think. If you have it, you’ll find your own version somewhere in here.

If you love someone who does, this is as close as I can get to the other side of a conversation you’ve probably had a hundred times and never once won. I don’t have a moral for you.

I have a sequence instead. It runs from a liquor cabinet in Licking County, Ohio, in 1986 to a laptop in a mother-in-law suite in Sweetwater, Tennessee, on the first morning of 2022.

So, let’s talk.

I’ll go first.

Let's Talk

Let’s Talk

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