Jonah Sweet of Delancey Street

When Jonah Sweet enrolled in cooking school, he had a different vision of what he would be doing. He imagined creating artistic, colorful dishes with delicate baby asparagus and rich golden sauces. He pictured himself arranging perfect rounds of filet mignon around haricot vert salad with truffles and pine nuts. He would drizzle a rich red wine reduction sauce over a large square white plate so thin he could almost see through it. He would serve his culinary creations to well-dressed men and women who sat around tables covered with starched white linens.
He never thought he’d wind up chopping onions, boning slimy old chickens, and boiling eggs all day. Just touching raw chicken caused a pull in his stomach, and he kept forgetting to turn the hard boiled eggs off on time and wound up with cracked shells and green yolks. He’d only enrolled in cooking school because he couldn’t find a real job with his college degree: a master’s in puppetry from a well-respected university.
After a year without any luck at all in his job searches, his mom and dad suggested he should learn a trade. They thought cooking school would be something that might suit him. His mom said, “It’s either cooking school or you join the goddamn circus with those puppets.” His dad said, “We’d like to retire and move to Florida but we can’t while you’re still so needy, Jonah.”
They’d been talking about moving to Florida for the past four years. Jonah didn’t know what else to do; he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life working part time at Donutland in Queens. So he agreed to enroll in the Abernathy College of Cookery in Manhattan and stopped looking for work with puppets.
At night, when most people his age were out with friends having fun, Jonah was home in his childhood bedroom in Queens working on his puppets. They brought him to a secret wonderful place where nothing could ever harm him. They took him away from onions, raw chicken, and greasy faced cooking instructors who sneered at him no matter what he did. Some of Jonah’s secret puppets weren’t like any other puppets in the world. These puppets were all beautiful gay men with chiseled bodies and nice cocks. He named them and kept them categorized according to dominant and submissive. He designed outfits of black leather and lace, with handcuffs, masks, and boots. They had whips and chains, and shackles and clamps. He even designed a tiny little paddle so one of his favorite puppets could enjoy a good spanking every now and then.