In all of the ten years or so that I spent as a member of the criminal underground in Buenos Aires, I never saw anything so callous as the present Bush junta’s looting of democracy. What began as merely obnoxious has become sinister. As the current chairman of the Christian Environmentalists, I also talk to God, but not on the cellular. At least I go outside and sit on a stump or rock. The Gospels teach us there’s a difference between talking to God and playing God. Bush’s theocratic junta is busy demonizing Islam and is as daffy as our ancestors who launched the original Crusades. I’m tempted to refer to Bush et al. as the spawn of Satan, but I don’t want to fall into their malicious pit of discourse with its foghorn drone of murder.
That said, I’d like to confront more important subjects: to wit, food, sex, and death, which have all been desperately trivialized by our culture. In moments, perhaps hours, of despondency, I wonder if I have any clarity to offer. Yup, as we say in the northern Midwest. Having kept myself remote from suffocating or drowning in the holding tank, the septic tank of our culture, I can say my heart and words are pure, or relatively so, at least for a member of the tribe of writers, that peculiar race of junkies, alkies, cads, whiners, amateur gynecologists, and desolation angels. They’ll do anything to get your attention, like starting a story with “I can never forgive her for killing our beloved dog with a butcher knife.”
Occasionally, my self-righteousness makes me a tad nervous. Maybe I’m a victim of a genetic glitch in my family? Maybe I suffer a number of mental and bodily diseases for which there are no apparent symptoms? I can’t forget my great-uncle Floyd, who was the most unsuccessful knife thrower in the history of the American circus. An émigré from Sweden near the Arctic Circle, Floyd had an uncommon flash and sense of showmanship but ended up wounding a total of eleven women, none fatally, before the Barnum and Bailey authorities convinced him to retire. Curiously, despite his public record, Floyd had no problem finding women to stand there and take their chances. A cousin told me that when Floyd died at age eighty-eight in Wisconsin on May 18, 1957, he said on his deathbed, “I could have been a famous knife thrower, but I just couldn’t throw knives.”
I also admit that I reached full sexual maturity at age seven, about the same time that many began to caution me about my gluttony. One afternoon, I caught and ate ten nice trout and felt a bit ill—but not too ill to climb a dozen trees that evening to peek in the windows at the members of the high school cheerleading squad whose high-kicking antics drove me into a batty sexual froth. More than once, I was caught by a puzzled father.
“Jimmy, why are you up in that tree?”
“I’m picking walnuts for my mom.”
“But that’s a pine tree.”
“Nobody told me.”
That sort of thing. I want to make my own record clear, as so many in America are doing this election year, when we all feel a little like toilet seats with so many big political asses aimed at us. It’s certainly time to head to the woods or mountains with a load of groceries and French wine. In our own case, we are in the mountains near the Mexican border, purposely without a television so we don’t have to actually watch those zoo monkeys throwing shit at each other.
Recently, due to the deaths of my brother in December and one of our dearest friends only three weeks before him, I’ve been trying to pitch my vaunted negative capability out of this moving window and come to some conclusions. For instance, I’ve noted that a large number of otherwise intelligent Americans believe that a particular combination of food and vitamins will produce miracles. Is living until eighty-one instead of seventy-eight a miracle? I have at odd times tried tofu and think of it as a gustatory self-laceration, well below boiled pig liver on my list of preferences.
Many of my male friends have, of late, been on strange diets so that younger women won’t regard them as biological outcasts. If they are successful, younger women will think of them as thin old men. Of course, it is natural to wonder how you got so old, but then you’re ignoring the obvious answer that it happened behind your back in moment-by-moment increments. I’ve never been the man I used to be. If we keep descending into reality, we discover that we are as likely to be attractive again as our boyhood dog is to arrive at the back door with that softball he couldn’t find fifty years ago. I suspect that time, our singular most fatal disease, has to keep itself largely behind our backs because that’s where the culture wishes it to be.
It is wonderful how early in life we begin tinkering and toying with our genitals—and then move on to the genitals of others. This is the lovely way that species further themselves. In the outer reaches of the universe, even stars continue to calve. How disturbed should we be that everywhere we look, banality has metastasized and sexuality is a trillion-dollar industry? Not much.
In these times of personal mental duress, I found myself making soup, a far reach from November, when I sat down in France with a dozen others to a thirty-seven-course lunch. The lunch was basically scholarly in nature—in short, we were searching for truth of the kind that university professors are said to look for, though I know only a few of these rascals feeding at the public trough.
I suspect that, in making soups, I was looking for bedrock. Of course, none is to be found, but it is consoling to reduce confusion by making a primitive soup of shinbones and short ribs, turnips, rutabaga, cabbage, a head of garlic, and some fresh sage. One can ignore the fetish of chicken soup and simply make a good one. I also cooked a posole, a Mexican slaked hominy stew, with an antelope neck a friend had kindly sent—along with venison and elk—from Montana. The renowned Andrei Codrescu had told me that big peasant women in Romania and Albania will, in the middle of winter, hack meat off a frozen carcass with an ax and stuff it down in their capacious undies for a day or so, the better to brown it for the soup. I wanted this simplicity, having fantasized as a boy that I might run into a group of half-naked savage women deep in the forest who would welcome me to join in the feast of a whole deer they were roasting. This precious meat would naturally give me energy for the sexual bacchanalia to follow. This spectacular event hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it’s more likely in Canada.
Part of this simplifying process was to watch thirty or so foreign films in the evenings, mostly Mexican, Spanish, and Italian. I was early on put off by a French film where an otherwise attractive woman said, “I feel like a piece of lost luggage.” It was one of those French films where the only story solution is collective suicide.
I realized during this despondent period that, in terms of food and sex, people will do about anything to get excited and stay excited. There are food magazines published now that are frankly the equivalent of Penthouse or Hustler, full of froufrou recipes by young chefs who couldn’t roast a proper chicken at gunpoint. Doubtless, this food is eaten at wife-swapping parties starring the most daring young Republicans. They eat rare turkey breast sausage with jicama salsa.
Further along on the path to the primitive and restorative, I’ve been cooking with guanciale, treated pork cheeks sent by my friend Mario Batali along with a fine chunk of lardo, the neck fat of a pig fed a special diet of cream and fruit in the last month of its life. Lardo is brined, then seasoned for six months in salt, garlic, and herbs. You slice it thin and let it melt into warm bread or spread it lavishly on plain pizza. All the great cardiologists admire this dish. One told me that, though the Buddha died after eating bad pork, he probably would have died sooner if he had left pork out of his diet.
By this point, many of you are probably wondering at the subtlety with which I’ve woven food, sex, and death together with the dense beauty of a Berber rug. The other evening, two lovely women walked into the dining room attached to the grocery store in my mountain retreat, also used by Vladimir Nabokov, who thrived on sticking pins in local butterflies. One of the women ignored me while I struggled with a tough pork chop, but the other’s eyes flickered at a point above my hairline. I scented her plume of pheromones and would have dropped my fork for a peek up her skirt, but she was, sadly, wearing hiking trousers. I loitered, pretending to read Merrill Gilfillan’s fabulous Rivers and Birds, but didn’t get past a single pork-stained page, which happened to be sixty-six, my age. When her order of fried chicken arrived, she first ate all of the skin with a fair amount of salt. What did this mean? Doubtless something perverse, I thought as she cleansed her lips with a vaguely oversize tongue, a tongue that didn’t jibe with her Botticelli face. Perhaps it was the rough tongue of a lioness that can easily lick the skin off a human body. I’d love to take the chance.
I fear that, in my despair, I’m losing weight too precipitously. Whole ounces of flesh are floating off into the void, which, among other things, is a fat trap for all of the world’s silly diets and famines. Does this mean that my novels and poems will become thin and sallow? Can the death of my brother and our dear friend possibly mean I’m going to die someday? Will I be able to smoke cigarettes and drink wine in the afterlife? I conclude with a recent poem, which you must paste on your bathroom mirror.
Time
Nothing quite so wrenches
the universe like time.
It clings obnoxiously
to every atom, not to speak
of the moon, which it weighs
down with invisible wet dust.
I used to think the problem
was space, the million miles
between me and the pretty waitress
across the diner counter stretching
to fill the coffee machine with water,
but now I know it’s time
which withers me moment by moment
with her own galactic smile.