Dear Mike,
“Whither food?” you asked in a recent letter. That question set me to thinking. Food, you see, is something that is so obviously dead and that we have in large, large quantities. We don’t, of course, bother bearing this deadness in mind because quite naturally you eat it, everybody eats it—dogs, cats, everything on earth. Everything that lives eats it. Certain things worry me though, certain thoughts—tonight I am in a white heat and all around me is snow, and I sit awake with my sleeping animals who always keep a weather eye half open in case I go to the refrigerator. I’m angry enough to turn over a car myself, something I did on a bet with a Model-A way back when my back was in good shape. Yes, I tipped over a Model-A by myself. What I’m trying to say tonight is there’s nothing to eat, in fact my bank account is low, which is another source of anger. Mike, to be frank, I feel myself on the verge of a change. Perhaps a great leap backward into a smaller size. All too frequently I find that women, when they say to me you’re too big, they’re not referring to my primal fundament but my overall body size! When I ask friends do you think I’m too big they say no, and use polite euphemisms such as burly, pulpy—not insulting words, just a shade short of grotesque. But certainly you, Mike, who live in New York, which is rife with such schemes, know there is nothing so boring as somebody else’s self-improvement plan. The oddity here is that I am not trying to improve on anything. What I’m thinking is much more positive than the cheapness, the drabness of self-improvement plans. What I am thinking is what if a man just said to himself in the privacy of his haunted nights, I swear on Mom, the Lord, and everything holy, I’m only going to eat live food. Enough of this dead food that has been taxing my system and taxing my popularity with the opposite gender. I don’t mean those sorts of decadent experiments of the Middle Ages when the French were given to eating a swan while it was still alive. They would cook a swan while it was still alive and start eating at it while it was still squawking. I don’t mean torture, neither do I mean that I’m going to become one of those bliss-ninny grazers they call vegetarians. Mike, you probably think I’m setting you up for something here; I’m not, I am perfectly serious. Of course I know that a woman, Ms. Distaff as it were, is alive, and a woman’s you-know-what is very much alive, but checking with my local optometrist, the only real medical man in the area (he’s also gay), a woman’s you-know-what is totally without nutritional value, unless you catch her right after she’s spilled the bowl of soup in her lap.
Luckily for me the inception, the beginning of this experiment— and as the experiment unwinds I’ll let you know—is that I’m going south to do a little hunting, after an onerous, secret project that I’m not at liberty to divulge to anyone of course. I’m going to Louisiana to hunt the fabled woodcock and I’m going to do some quail hunting in north Florida so I will be close to the Cedar Key oyster and the Bon Secours oyster. I will be interested to hear from any of your readers of any other live food that I can have. I love sushi but you know there is a point at which you really don’t want to sink your teeth into a fish that’s still flopping, and I’m not again talking about the greens that can be technically alive. I could go out and dig under two feet of snow and find some reasonably green parsley, rip it up, and stuff it in my mouth—that’s not what I mean.
I’m a little worried that I’ve changed certain brain waves by not drinking enough alcohol which I’ve cut down on vastly. Mostly because I find the less I drink, the more I get to dream and dreaming (up here in the great white north where not a lot happens) gives you something interesting to do at night. Anyway, of late I’ve been strapping weights all over my body and dancing to reggae music for an hour a day to combat winter. I’m wondering if this isn’t changing my brain in some ways because I used to eat beef and now I’m suddenly going for more pork products. I have a passion, which I’ve only been able to solve lately by going to Kentucky and eating ample quantities of pork skin and pit barbecue with a sauce so hot that every hair on my body including seven hairs on my chest is wet. So that might be a consideration. Then again I’m not going to take this live food thing too far if it endangers my health. For instance, I’ve agreed to do a project with the French actress Jeanne Moreau: the project is of course top secret as is everything I do. Anyway I was thinking of lying there on the forest floor in France with a trained pig; admittedly this would cost bucks. The minute the truffle is torn from the ground I will pop it in my mouth while it is still alive like a big black, pitch black, coal black, raw apple. It isn’t that I’ve killed too much; I must say that I’ve enjoyed eating several hundred woodcock, quail, geese, and venison this fall. These animals are top-drawer nutrition-wise as they spend their lives in what your humble readers in New York would think a natural environment. There is nothing quite so natural as the big slab of deer liver fresh from the steaming cavity.
Incidentally, I sent McGuane Schweid’s now famous book, at least it’s famous in my own mind, Hot Peppers. I think, of course, it’s superior in grace and beauty to any novels I’ve read coming out last year. There is a beautiful meal enclosed in a new book by William Least Heat-Moon: the book is called Blue Highways. Look for the great meal in there.
This reggae music might just be poisoning me. I looked for Jamaica on the map to make sure I knew just where it was. But I have a tendency to jig around in odd places when I shouldn’t be jigging around, like the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, or at the Keeneland auction—the horse sale. At the horse sale which I attended the top mare went for $3.8 million: think of socking that into a wine cellar! As my cousin, Thurman, who is a block layer, says—a house with an empty refrigerator is like a dildo without a battery. It’s pretty catchy. In other words, if your clothes are too tight, get bigger clothes.
I fear this reggae is infecting everything I do now. Once Buffett brought me a gallon of fresh shucked oysters and we went out to have a few cold ones, put them in my studio fridge, and when we got back I put them out on my desk next to some books—my books looked so fragile compared to this great mass of fresh shucked oysters and, as if not knowing what I was doing, I thrust both hands into this gallon of oysters and began to eat greedily, because I was so dazed with grief at the time I knew this live food would help—of course they weren’t swimming because oysters don’t swim—they were moving counterclockwise at a rate which you didn’t see them directly, you just saw it out of the corner of your eye. I wanted to congratulate you for quitting smoking but have you thought perhaps you quit smoking for the same reason that you started smoking, another desperate ploy of the ego? It’s like trying to explain eagerly to a starving child that you just gave up spending a couple of hundred bucks a week on cocaine; the starving child sits there with those huge eyes like a Keane painting and whispers, “Congrats.” I suppose with the same distance that a writer necessarily has from the world, I will always be a rather lonely detective of food, uncritical, an observer between meals . . . it’s a job.
Addendum
Dear Folks,
I am back to eating dead food. In Florida I put a small live frog in my mouth but I could not swallow it. The same thing happened with a minnow. Perhaps, this whole concept of live food should remain just that, a concept. My next Dead Food Scroll will be about “the food of lust and violence.”
I hope you are well, Mike. I have been dancing an hour each day not with a girl but with a heavy dumbbell in each hand. I am getting to be a very strong fat guy.
A Letter to the Editor
Dear Mike:
Hang on to Jim Harrison. Don’t let that big fish off the hook. He’s the best food editor in the US of A. He makes James Beard look sick. In fact any robust male makes James Beard looks sick. Keep Harrison at all costs. Spare no expense. Send him cases of Echezeaux, Romanée-Conti, Montrachet, Roederer Cristal. Spoil him. Pamper him. Give that glutton anything he wants. And watch your distribution soar. Before you know it Smoke Signals will be right up there with Family Circle and Good Housekeeping. He will make you golden, Mike.
Faithfully yours,
Sam Lawrence
Boston, Mass.