Piggies Come to Market

Betimes, when I awake at dawn or a few hours thereafter, I must remind myself that I am not a coal miner or even the farm laborer I was in my youth. I no longer work twelve hours a day to take home fifteen bucks. What happened to my battered tin lunch bucket, where I stored my dreams of New York City and the beautiful girls who looked as if they changed their underwear every single day? What does it mean that this year I will make forty times what my dad did his best year? He doesn't mind up in heaven, but for some reason I do.

In such somber moods I glance in the mirror and don't see Mother Teresa. In such moods I am infected by the disease of social conscience brought about by my youthful forays into civil rights and the reading of Eugene Debs, Thorstein Veblen, Frantz Fanon, and others. Nowadays a social conscience is a disease you can purportedly cure by sending off a check for the rain forest.

Don't for an instant believe that I'm going to chug along on this banal train of thought, certainly a nexus of regret many of us are familiar with, particularly those who never expected to be successful in financial terms. There is also a specific danger in manufacturing, like William Buckley, a social and philosophical system to justify your prosperity. Life gets used up damned fast by the exhaustion of peripheries. Besides, I have proved repeatedly that I have no gifts for rational discourse, no gifts outside the immediate confines of the imagination. A number of years ago, at a rancorous public meeting, I said, “In the wrong hands even a container of yogurt can be a fatal weapon.” Perhaps it was an acid flashback.

It was only last evening, while I was working on a screenplay with, of all things, the Academy Awards on the tube in the background, that I identified the malaise. It was the painful rejuvenescence of March, the brutality of a northern spring, when the songbird that was celebrating sixty degrees one day flops in its death throes at ten below under a cedar tree the next morning. This year a group of mallards had their feet frozen to a pond's surface, and now a bald eagle busies himself swooping in and tearing off their heads. Rages and pleasures mix themselves in this spring stew. Last week, a dear friend in a tequila rage shot himself in the parking lot of a bar. My beloved and saintly glutton of a Labrador must have her ulcerated left eye removed. Now we will be blind on the same side. Perhaps while we are hunting next fall, if she makes it, we will run into the same tree in the woods. When I was a boy, my left side was always bruised.

Of course, an older fool should be able to counter the emotional clay-mores brought about by the change of seasons and the pummeling of fortune's spiky wheel. The first move is to question whether certain of my grand assumptions about life have turned cheesy. Perhaps it is time to take down the motto from Deshimaru that is pinned to the wall above my desk: “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.” Perhaps this coda I so devoutly try to follow is allowing insufficient oxygen? This Oriental ruthlessness may be inappropriate unless you work for Sony, which in fact I do, via Columbia Pictures, come to think of it.

Naturally, this foment has had a negative effect on my cooking. A few weeks ago, passing through my grocer's, I bought a packet of dehydrated French's pork gravy. The label noted that this gravy was award-winning. Since I have never won an award, who am I to question this gravy? Tom Wolfe probably won an award for Campfire of the Vanities, so he doesn't have to try this gravy. I can't recommend it, even with the addition of garlic. My wife, Linda, watched quizzically from the far side of the kitchen.

No lessons were learned. Two days later, I felt another rage for normalcy and bought two cans of Hormel chili (one with beans, one pure “meat") and a copy of People magazine. After this luncheon mud bath I actually burst into tears, then walked exactly eleven miles to purge the whole experience. That evening, after a classic French-roasted capon, I trashed my notes (seriously) for a somewhat scholarly essay I had intended to write, to be called “Brain Vomiters: The Twilight of the American Novel.”

Things were plainly getting out of hand. One warm morning, before it snowed again, I yelled at the birds in the barnyard because they were too noisy. I stopped cooking altogether. Linda tempted me with fine new dishes made according to the recently published Monet's Table. They were splendid, but I could not eat the accustomed quantity, and I began to shed ounces. Then pounds dropped off. Contrary to most folks, I have to eat real big to stay big. The most destructive force in my life tends to be the unwritten poem, but despite my best efforts I was stropheless, except for my first epitaph: All Piggies Must, Finally, Come to Market.

There was the possibility that I had been sucker-punched by a dangerous fad last year. In an effort to shape up for bird season, I had begun to eat a nasty, fibrous cereal for breakfast. It was something to be endured, like a theater line. Not that I wanted bacon and eggs, another nasty fad that had its inception in the dizzy thinking that followed shortly after World War I. But in my heart I knew I'd rather eat the cow than the oats the cow eats.

This notion prompted a rage at the nitwits on the National Beef Council and their sniveling ads. Why don't they say you can have your beef if you give up all that fat-laden junk food, tasteless domestic cheeses, and ersatz French desserts? A T-bone has to be better for you than the $28 sea-urchin custard that is all the current rage in Gotham. Mind you, I have eaten versions of this dish in Paris and its alter ego, Los Angeles, and wouldn't feed it to Donald Trump, Tom Wolfe, or Hitler's daughter, Gretchen, who may also work for Sony.

Naturally, I rushed out and bought a largish Delmonico for brunch, but a watery pink fluid came out at first cut. What the fuck! I ate it anyway and dreamed of the fine steaks I used to eat in New York at Bruno's, Pen & Pencil, the Palm, and Gallagher's, or the sirloin at Elaine's before which you eat mussels and then spinach as a side to the meat. Florentine wines are better with steak than those of Bordeaux or Burgundy.

Beef is pleasure food, and we deserve pleasure because we live nasty, brutish lives. In ten days, I'll be in Valentine, Nebraska, where I'll eat a thirty-two-ounce aged porterhouse with two bottles of cabernet because there's no Barolo in Valentine. The following morning I will take a four-hour walk in the unfathomably beautiful Sandhills and count meadowlarks. I predict that my cholesterol count will not rise above its current 147, the same number of meadowlarks I'll see.

My disease of consciousness was somewhat alleviated by a week's trip with my wife and youngest daughter to Boca Grande, on the west coast of Florida. Boca Grande is lovely, safe, and sedate, and no one there is likely to slip you a manuscript or borrow money. I went sailing and bird-watching with my old friend Tom McGuane, who is a part-time resident (so much for our shared reputation as rounders).

Oddly, we saw only three birds on the wilderness island of Cayo Costa. How could this be, we wondered, the unused binoculars flapping on our chests. Then we noticed there were a lot of birds walking around on the ground just like us. We presumed they were feeding. On close inspection some of the birds were brown, and so were others. They were clearly, we decided, critic birds.

On the way home there was another pratfall after a pleasantly lavish night in Chicago at a hotel called 21 East, recently changed to Le Meridien. The dining room is among the three or four great restaurants in that city. Unfortunately, the next morning, after riding to O'Hare in one of the hotel's fleet of 750 BMWs, I watched a family of six poor folk there to pick up Grandma (I was listening). I was eating an expensive breakfast hot dog, which they decided against for financial reasons. I computed that hot dogs and soft drinks for this family of six would come to just over twenty-seven bucks. Anytime a hot dog approaches an hour at minimum-wage work, the state is in peril. My scalp prickled in shame for my sad country, its veins swollen with the pus of greed and dark scorn for the poor.

I also wondered about the eight hundred bucks I had spent in the last twenty-four hours. I could barely finish my hot dog but did, because I was thinking how in the past nine years the Republicans, with the dithering cooperation of the shamelessly class-conscious media, had isolated the bottom one-third of our population as social mutants. Frankly, this is unchristian, and these assholes better pay for it in hell, since they are doing quite comfortably on earth.

Back to the Academy Awards and the shrill evidence of an extreme black phobia in Beverly Hills. Spike Lee and Ed Zwick don't drive Miss Daisy. Afterward, I watched an intriguing video, rented at a convenience store, called Cheerleader Camp, starring Lucinda Dickey. These gals looked real good until they started killing one another. Blood is antierotic except in a steak. I was reminded of Eric von Stroheim's description of his life as “a symphony of disappointments.” I was also reminded of hot dogs and the question, How can a modestly prosperous writer cast his spiritual lot with the social mutants?

In a few days I am beginning an irrational ten-thousand-mile car trip. I am going to look at a secret half-man and half-wolf petroglyph in Utah. After all, Thoreau said it is in “wildness” (not wilderness) that we find our preservation.

1990