Here I Stand for a
Few Minutes

My words are only hot pads for an unacceptable reality. Many intelligent people, Canadians among them, have recently noted that the world is apparently committing suicide. This fact is having severe effects on our mental and physical health. The question is, How can we personally counterattack the horrors of the world around us without using excessive amounts of alcohol, drugs, and television watching, the latter being the curse the Indian chief Seattle put upon us? The answer, of course, is to achieve the ultimate in physical and mental health. We have to become like those virtual superheroes in comics and movies so beloved by children and politicians.

To show you what’s possible, in the bad old days when I abused alcohol and drugs I would regularly need nine cups of coffee and nine cigarettes to get started in the morning and now I’m down to five of each. I did it all with willpower, a much-neglected secret ability within all of us albeit in minimal amounts.

We are taught that knowledge is power but then we are unsure of what power is. If I go to the doctor tomorrow to find out if fifty years of heavy smoking has damaged my lungs, what kind of power will this knowledge give me? During the many years I made a partial living by screenwriting, producers would ask me to create characters who become empowered but I never really got a fix on this concept, thus my Hollywood career was doomed. I met many people out there who said that they felt empowered but I couldn’t determine by their behavior what this might mean except for their giddy aggressiveness while snorting cocaine. Another hot issue at the time (more than ten years ago) was the mind-body connection. Millions were spent trying to make this concept visual. I inappropriately said in a meeting, “Yeah, I get it. On a hot day a dog wakes up and thinks, I’m thirsty, so he walks across the porch and drinks water from a bowl.” The important producer said, “We’re not making a dog picture.” I segued to a more pungent aspect of this high concept. “You’re watching Penélope Cruz in Jamón, Jamón. Your mind watches her and your body springs a woody, you know, a boner.” The producer took a few calls before he said, “Penélope isn’t bankable. Give me something where she’s teamed with Michelle Pfeiffer.” My fertile mind kicked in and I said, “Perhaps Penélope and Michelle are partners in a low-rent feminist detective agency in Encino. They’re framed by a Republican senator and put in a women’s prison. There’s the obligatory riot and twenty-three naked women are shot by guards with AK-47s in a huge stark-white shower room.” I got the assignment and wrote the screenplay in ten days aided by a case of vodka, thus continuing to support my vice of writing books of poems and novels.

But I have digressed. Obviously our livelihoods can be discouraging. An old fishing friend attached bumpers at an Oldsmobile factory for twenty years before he moved up to windshields. His brother taught a seminar on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene at a prominent university for thirty years. Once when we were camped out trout fishing, the brothers agreed that their jobs were remarkably similar. Everyone involved knows that the arts are a cruel mistress and few of us indeed earn room and board from our strophes and etchings, and if you make a buck or two there is the additional worry that your work is primarily a soiled toy for the elitist children who can afford twenty-five dollars for a novel or a book of poems.

I couldn’t help noticing that even in show business good food is the true source of power and health especially at the highest level. I was lucky enough to take meals with Orson Welles, John Huston, and Federico Fellini, and these big boys were not quick to push back from their plates or wineglasses. A legion of the dweebs and snivelers that make up our population of body-Nazis were startled indeed when Huston and Welles achieved their biblical three score and ten, given their reputations as tosspots and trenchermen. One of my few regrets after a dinner conversation with Fellini is that he said, “We must cook together,” and I never made it to Rome to do so.

Of late I’ve been concentrating on wild food. In November in a twenty-four-hour period I ate an antelope liver and heart and the resulting sense of well-being was astonishing except for the goutish big toe of my right foot, which was a signal not to do this every day. Shortly thereafter I set about making some English game pies. I’m not particularly a fan of English food except for the gorgeous cookbook of Fergus Henderson called The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. I realize the signs are now good over there but their grand traditions ceased after the First World War when citizens tired of being servants or cooks and it took nearly a century for these ruddy clowns to learn to cook for themselves and begin to rediscover the grandeur of their food past.

The game pies were labor-intensive because first of all you have to shoot the game, which requires a fair amount of walking in rough country. I used a couple of mallard ducks, a half dozen Hungarian partridge, which abound in Montana, also a chunk of venison from a hindquarter of mule deer. To help bind the contents I used a half dozen pounds of osso buco with their delightful marrow. I am savagely incompetent as a baker so my wife, Linda, made the necessary lard pie crust. Our long marriage would not have survived without our cooking together.

Everyone who shared in these game pies became light of foot and full of wild laughter but you don’t necessarily have to hunt in order to eat food that is powerful. The words wild and vivid are mostly states of mind. When Mario Batali visited in October he made a marvelous paella using rabbit, lobster, and shrimp. He also brought along some four-inch-thick porterhouses from beef especially fed and raised for his restaurants, and our pasta courses every day included white truffles, a delightfully wild flavor as the literary princelings of Toronto well know.

Now in December down here in our tiny casita on the Mexican border I have been shooting a fair amount of doves lately. They roast up beautifully on a wood fire. Yesterday we ate tamales made with elk meat for lunch, then doves and pork ribs for dinner. Everyone should be careful not to buy pork raised on factory farms, which has been denatured of its vivid flavors. A free-range pig is a delightful creature and this characteristic makes its flesh toothsome. Of course feral pigs that you have to trap or shoot are even better. When I cook ribs I usually go two different ways to avoid the monochromatic. I’ll go half with a piquant Chinese sauce and the other with a baste I call “the sauce of lust and violence,” which is full of various chiles and hot sauces and prevents sinusitis, impotence, and any number of biological infections. I have about a gallon of Tabasco in my pantry in preparation for a possible outbreak of avian flu. On airlines, which are a hotbed, a greenhouse for vermin, I spray all my food with Tabasco, even the brown wilted salads and the puddings writhing with invisible maggots.

Ultimately, of course, fruit, nuts, fish, rice, and beans might be better for our bodies than vivid food on a strict health basis but we would quickly become as frail and limp as albino sea worms and totally without personal power. We all recall how our media in Iraq became embedded in the military’s collective ass like ingrown hairs. It is the intent of our consumer culture, which in fact has become our total culture, to trap us anaerobically in its intestinal tract where we are meant only to cooperate in our own devouring.

Of course death is a black door without hinges and opens in only one direction. Death is our ultimate safety net but until that moment our only option is “resist much.” A secret brotherhood insists that there is no God but reality, but I have doubts about this when I read that a single teaspoon of a neutron star weighs a billion tons. Who wants to become yet another conscript in someone else’s world of limited ideas? This Sunni–Shiite quarrel has been going on since 632 A.D. and the Catholic–Protestant silliness has been behind centuries of bloodshed including ignoring the first signs of the Aryan binge. The Hitler–Stalin Pact was mere pro forma and earlier the more than three hundred thousand who died in ten days at Verdun had no real idea of the bottomless hole they had marched into. The pathetically undereducated members of the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress now say re: Iraq, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In any of the dozens of countries I visit, people indicate to me the sense that they are being led by low-rent chiselers.

Oh well, what can I offer you but a few personal clues, mindful of my mom’s stern admonition, “What if everyone were like you?” I am scarcely what you call a role model and there might be a tiny germ of truth in Mom’s attitude. All I do is write novels and poems, hunt, fish, smoke, cook, drink, and treat women, children, and dogs kindly. When I voted in November I had the feeling I was peeing in the ocean but then I won, springing the slightly lesser of two evils onto our world. I may now ignore Paracelsus’s warning about “the dark and turbid entrails of lustful women” because I am a geezer that women have tossed into the biological dumpster. It’s been more than a decade since a ballerina has said to me, “I want to have your baby.” I have discovered that my smoking tends to enliven strangers around me. Since it’s no longer fashionable to publicly abuse gays, blacks, Jews, Indians, and left-wingers, the culture has aimed its instinctive vitriol against smokers. I have abandoned my intelligence and no longer use words like iconic or semiotics. I rarely bray out “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in public. I take two one-hour naps a day, which reduces possible mischief. I walk two hours a day in remote areas where I can do no harm to my fellow bipeds. Last summer I destroyed a cell phone by pouring coffee on it, my only recent violent act. I have tried to help others but my abilities in this area are indeed limited.

Just recently I conceived of a helpful project for the four months before May when I’ll return to southwest France to further search for the lost poems of Antonio Machado, certainly a more valid obsession than O. J. Simpson looking for his wife’s killer on the golf courses of Las Vegas. The mountains around Collioure are jagged country and such pilgrimages must be made barefoot, especially painful when your knapsack is full of Domaine La Tour Vieille, my favorite local wine. At the end of the day you run down the mountain and hurl yourself into the Mediterranean, buoyed up by the empty wine bottles.

Back to the singular figure of Penélope Cruz, who has expressed dismay that viewers are distracted from her acting abilities by her attractiveness. This is certainly not true for me as I’ve long considered her among my top three favorite actresses in our solar system and at the moment I am reviewing twenty of her films through Netflix for my project. In short, I want to secure a double suite at the Hotel Canal Grande in Modena, Italy, near which there is one of the best markets in Europe. I am a Christian gentleman so the door between the suites will be operable only on her side. I will have a simple kitchen installed in my portion of the rooms and in a mere thirty days I guarantee I can put thirty pounds on her delicate frame thus making her safe from the loutish misunderstanding of movie viewers. I am already a Quasimodo in a world without bells and these thirty days of hard cooking would help fulfill my calling as an artist. Doubtless Penélope Cruz will read this piece and either pick up the gauntlet or ignore it. She would emerge from the hotel plump but not dumpy. Maybe we would go to Cannes where I refused to be a judge last year and wear his-and-hers skimpy bathing suits and be amused by the way people would avert their eyes. Penélope would startle the press by only saying, “There is no more grotesque misunderstanding of life than to murder people in the name of ideas.”