Dear Mike,*
I am so confused and distraught that this will have to serve as my food letter for the upcoming issue. Let’s face it, the twin specters of food and politics loom large these days. On a recent trip to Central America, to cover for my own curiosity the multifaceted revolutions in that area, I frankly ate very well. One particular lunch for instance I had squid stewed in their own ink, braised quail on toast, a soup made entirely of miniature crustaceans, plus a skewer of several lobsters and two bottles of wine. This was extraordinarily cheap because of our advantage in the exchange rate. The cooking was prodigiously adept compared to my recent ten-day trip to New York City where food, lodging, and pharmaceuticals ran about $8,000. I want you to be the first to know that when my next novel is published I’m heading straight to Costa Rica.
You said you were curious about my meals with Orson Welles, who of course, is a bit of a trencherman. The most memorable was at Ma Maison (the restaurant with the unlisted phone number out there in Glitzville). The two of us were accompanied by a beautiful Hungarian countess who left in either boredom or disgust halfway through the meal. You see, Mike, she was slender and could not comprehend our great, sad hearts choked as they are with fatty deposits. Orson began by clearing his palate with a half dozen bull shots in quick succession. As we were hungry the first course was a half pound of fresh caviar with an iced bottle of Stolichnaya. (Politics again! In Palm Beach two years ago a liquor store clerk refused to supply me Stolichnaya because of what the Russians were doing in Afghanistan. I explained to him that the residents of that sorry country of Afghanistan are Muslims and don’t drink vodka. My account was such that I got my vodka.) The next course was a wonderful ragù of sweetbreads in pastry covered by a half quart of black truffle sauce, accompanied by a rare old Burgundy the name of which would mean nothing to the impoverished hippies who read your magazine. Then without a moment’s rest arrived a whole poached Atlantic salmon in a sorrel sauce and a white Bordeaux. At this point the countess wrapped herself in her cape and spun into the night. Her departure enabled me to ask Orson how he managed to snag Rita Hayworth at the top of her form. He said he was in Rio at the time her picture appeared on the cover of Life magazine; he took the next plane to L.A. and literally browbeat her into the marriage bed within ten days. It seems, though, that romantically the great man’s true weakness was for hatcheck girls.
To tell you the truth, I was beginning to lose some of my appetite at this point, my life at the time being submerged in a number of business and romantic failures. My spirits arose however when the next course arrived: an immense platter of slices of rare duck breasts in green peppercorn sauce accompanied by beautifully braised and sculpted root vegetables. With this, quite naturally, we had a very rare Romanée-Conti. I was astounded that Mr. Welles had remembered from the day before over an ample lunch that this was my favorite item, perfected by the great Paul Bocuse before he submerged himself in the cuisine minceur, a method even more fraudulent than psychiatry. This last course nearly put me under and I looked down happily at the record of the meal left on my shirtfront. I rejected the platter of desserts and rushed to the bathroom. A certain unnamed actress had given me a vial of white powder, which she told me I should use to keep awake. I know you can vouch for the fact that I don’t use drugs but this seemed an exceptional occasion. I poured the whole gram on my palm and snorted heavily so that anyone coming in the bathroom might think I was washing my face. I have no memory really about what we talked about other than food and sex.
But back to food and politics. I won’t drink Polish vodka because of the long record of anti-Semitism in that country. I generally avoid German restaurants for the same reason. So I am not without my politics, am I? I avoid the cooking of my motherland, Sweden, because it is a land without garlic, a land without sunshine. I avoid Jewish cooking because it is basically lousy. A certain tribe mentioned in Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind eats bear shit for constipation not political reasons. Perhaps when no one is looking Nancy Reagan licks her new china. I do know that of all Mother Westwind’s children, the mammalian group, man alone cooks. Man alone is capable of looking over a girl’s shoulder while he fucks her at the coffee table laden with fifteen appetizers. He stares into the blank eyes of the Dungeness crab that will be transformed from a delicate sea creature into a mere turd.
How can I answer any of the questions on your questionnaire? All of my dooms are small dooms, the ones, to quote myself, “that seem to lurk behind each fence post.” Yet your questionnaire is not contemptible nor is my refusal Audenesque; all that fake liberalism warring against the state when it’s still the same fake liberal paying his taxes and marching right along with the other civil servants. I barely ever think of the government anymore even though a few years ago I paid taxes equaling the salaries of four senators. Why they took this money that could have been spent on food, wine, and floozies—exotic travel—beats me. As an instance of the banality of it all I read in this morning’s paper that when confronted with this $100 billion deficit, Reagan told a cute joke about some Negro buying a bottle of vodka with food stamps. This, I think, indicates a constitutional hopelessness in leadership. Another instance I reflected on when I was in Central America: I wondered if there was a single legislator who was familiar in any deeper sense with the history of Latin America. I thought then—probably nope. But enough of this sententiousness. Don’t you find it strange that the true symbol for God, the Buddhist circle, is also the exact shape of a dinner plate. Has this ever occurred to you? The all-knowing father-mother has made us machines of devouring and he has given us heads to figure out what we are going to eat next. Let’s not be ignorant, in terms of mythography, that the sacrament of the Eucharist makes us all vampires. Yes, vampires by proxy. Mike, you should remember that within the unyielding anguish of the writer, it’s always night and you’re always flying solo, and then usually over the Mato Grosso.
Yes, Golden, I went without protein for four days . . . without any form of protein, eating rice and fruit like a Jain. Golden, even that name. Do you realize that if you could get $350 an ounce for your body you would be worth what Barry Manilow makes in one night at a concert? Anyway, I went without any protein for four days, I fell into a depressing trance, I could barely move, my head ached, I was depressed, of course, this the average third world experience. I dreamed of ham, western ham, northern ham, southern ham, not eastern ham. Redeye gravy, the sweet vinegar clove gravy, mashed potatoes, more ham, slabs of ham, juicy ham, dry ham, ham sandwiches, ham croquettes, ham on rye, hamburgers—anything. I wanted it, I wanted it with a desperation akin only to sexual desire. I wanted it like a fifteen-year-old farmboy in 1952 wanted Ava Gardner. All those big words of yours and your questionnaire are meaningless to me. Such polysyllabic words such as God and world are too much for me to handle at this late date. Do you not on your logo express the strange wisdom of the ages, both the Orient and the Occident, not to speak of the other regions by saying, “Zen bones, Zen bones, Zen hambones”?
* Mike Golden, editor of Smoke Signals