Thorne's Yankee modesty shields innovation from pretension. He doesn't show off, and all of his energies go toward food that resonates, that is genuine and memorable. His ego is quite barren and the attributions generous—it is an oddity of the genre that most cookbooks pretend they are the only ones in existence. Thorne even writes a convincing essay on why he isn't a good cook. He admits that he loves fried-chicken-skin sandwiches—a truly nasty idea, but to admit that you would eat them is admirable. On a long, warm flight up from New Orleans, he imagined that the two pounds of boudin in his suitcase were spoiling, so he ate them all on arrival, the sort of timeless wisdom to which I can respond.
So I was rereading all of Thorne and experimenting with his recipes rather than beginning the revision of the screenplay (revision being a euphemism for doing the whole thing over without saving a word of the first draft). Simply enough, hunger had overly cleansed our doors of perception, and we had come up with a better idea. After a few days at my cabin, I found that the food reading and long hikes had restored my appetite for life the way Henry Miller used to do when I was a young bohemian.
Curiously, in both writing and cooking you're a dead duck if you don't love the process. When you short-circuit or jump start the process in either, you end up with an imitation of your own or someone else's best effects. You will get away with it a few times, but the germs of shame will be there, and inevitably you will end up serving your dinner guests or your reading public mere filigree, plywood gingerbread, M.F.A. musings, housebroken honeycomb, in short, the thief of fire as a college cheerleader.
Back to the obedience to awareness: still within the aftereffects of L.A. burnout, I nearly stepped on a nest of grouse chicks and forgot that Buddha's birthday was falling on the same day as the full moon. When will this happen again? I forgot to leach the eggplant and the parmigiana was mushy! So were the cannellini beans I cooked too hard, neglecting to add the pancètta rind! Son of a bitch, but I was delaminating!
I decided to start over as a regular guy, an ordinary fellow. For dinner I'd cook a Thorne version of fish chowder. Dad used to say that fish was brain food. Since I was busy with the screenplay, I put out an illegal setline in the river next to the cabin, already cheating on the process. I tended to ignore the writing, rechecking the setline every fifteen minutes or so, the first I had used since my youth. In fact, I became childish, imagining that the salt pork, potatoes, onion, and cream were lying in wait for the fish.
Finally, late in the afternoon, the line was headed upstream rather than downstream where I had tossed it. I began to draw it in, then discovered that though indeed I had a fish on, the fish had wrapped the line around some sunken alder branches. I scrambled back up the bank and put on my waders.
Unfortunately, when I stepped in the river, the water came a full foot above my waders, and the current swept my feet out from under me. I howled in shock—there was still some snow in the woods, and the water was very cold—and hauled myself out on a log. Now I was, frankly, pissed off. I grabbed the line and jerked mightily, launching both broken branch and fish into the air, where the fish parted from the hook. I lunged back into the river, grabbing at the stunned fish. She glanced at me a moment, recovered her senses, and sped off. For some reason I'm sure it was a female.
I changed clothes and headed to town for some beverages, remembering a line from Stephen Mitchell's fine translation of the Tao te Ching:
I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.
1989
The Tugboats of Costa Rica
Many of us like to think we own some unappreciated talent, modestly concealed and perhaps lacking the urgency to rise toward the light. Youngsters playing catch on the lawn make elaborate movements, hoping that the passing green 1949 De Soto contains a pro scout who might take notice of them, even at this early age. It is said that Henry Kravis, the fabled Wall Street predator, can pick up a coin without bending over.
While I have the gravest doubts about the durability of any of my writing, few can beat me at the graceful dance of knife, fork, and spoon across the plate or the capacity to make a pickle last as long as a sandwich. I have thought of rigging tiny lights to my eating utensils and getting myself filmed while eating in the near dark: imagine, if you will, the dancelike swirl of these points of light. Just last evening in my cabin, the performance took place over a humble, reduced-calorie Tuscan stew (very lean Muscovy duck, pancétta, white beans, copious garlic, fresh sage, and thyme). Since I was alone in the twilight, the applause rang a bit hollow.
To be sure, our limitations strangle us, letting us know who we are. On a semireligious level, normally we have a secret animal we favor, but this is dangerous territory. Never tell a government official your secret animal, since it will one day be used against you. On a more mundane plateau, if you were a boat, what kind of boat would you be? You must be honest, since I can't interrogate you, what with each of us being alone. No dream boats, grand sloops, ghostly galleons, if you please. As for me, and I'm doing the writing here, I have long confessed to being a tugboat: slow, rather stubby, persistent, functional, an estuarine creature that avoids open water.
This is all prefatory to my irritation on being asked if I was a good fly-fisherman. I had just returned from a trip to Costa Rica with the painter Russell Chatham and the sportsman Guy de la Valdène, where we were fly-fishing for billfish up in Guanacaste Province on the Pacific. A little of my testiness might have been caused by garden-variety dysentery and a skin rash that turned my entire torso into a pizza. The consolation is that dysentery is a grand leap forward on a brand-new diet, though Chatham noted that the connection between his dysentery and diet was like pitching a shufleboard puck off a cruise ship. I shall never forget his pathetic yelp in the night as he pooped his bed during a feverish dream. My skin rash, incidentally, left doctors helpless, but I cured it myself with a slush devised out of baking soda and Epsom salts, patent pending. Chatham and I questioned why de la Valdène remained disease-free, but then it occurred to us that he no longer eats his way through a menu merely out of curiosity. We wished him an attractive middle age at La Cascada, outside San José, a fabulous place with good wine and a boggling array of fresh seafood and beef. For some reason, Costa Rican beef is exquisitely flavorful, though very lean. It tastes like the best beef of your childhood, before the advent of short-cut packing, feed lots, chemicals, and no aging.
But to address my irritation about whether I'm good at fly-fishing: why bother if you haven't taken the time to learn to make the throw? Beyond that point, any spirit of competition in hunting or fishing dishonors the prey. It means that you are either unaware of, or have no feeling toward, your fellow creatures. Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls, say, neatly bound bluebirds. Competition also engenders anger, and there's little point in being out in the forest, in a river, or on the ocean if you're going to be pissed off.
It just occurs to me that I shouldn't tell you where we went fishing in Costa Rica. There's no travel writer's obligation here. Find your own place. The location isn't lacking in business, and I'd hate to return and find the place mobbed. Anyhow, there are certain disadvantages: the charter plane from San José had no working gauges, and the land beneath the plane, a lovely green hell, lacked landing strips. Just hills and gorges. There were scorpions on the path from the marina and restaurant to the hotel, shaking their malevolent asses at sea-weary drunks. We did miss the bandied-about march of tarantulas. Our presiding captain had a softball-size, pitch-black sore on his arm from a “little spider” he rolled over on in his sleep. Our wonderful captain of the last day, a surgeon who took early retirement from the frenzy of the States, said that the occasional missing arms and feet in surrounding villages were from the fer-de-lance, an aggressive viper. To me this added to the fabulous beauty of the place, the green mountains meeting the blue sea, the deserted beaches, the hundred-acre schools of spotted dolphin, the 353 green
parrots sitting in a shoreline tree above an immense green marine iguana sunning on a rock. The location is doubtless safer than crossing Lexington on Seventy-second or turning left on Laurel Canyon off Sunset Boulevard.
Modest dangers make you attentive, while extreme danger can explode your equilibrium, sometimes permanently, as we see in certain Vietnam veterans. When your engines quit far out at sea, you become a great deal more conscious of the immensity of the ocean. But then you have a ship-to-shore radio, though this is scarcely foolproof. One afternoon we monitored a Mayday from another charter boat. It had broken a shaft, lost a propeller, and couldn't offer a navigational fix for rescue craft! Moreover, the current was drifting the boat toward Nicaraguan waters. Our Spanish captain assured us that the latter wasn't significant, since the two countries aren't hostile. Looking north across the expanse of water, I found it difficult to feel the threat of this country, which, as William Greider pointed out, owns only two workable elevators. Perhaps the Russian atomic subs cruising the Jersey waters are more important. Perhaps the Nicaraguan threat was a red herring to cover up the massive savings-and-loan swindle, the HUD pillaging, the Pentagon procurement scandal, the eight solid years of ignoring the environment.
The purpose of my trip, however, was to fly-fish for billfish, which might be called stunt fishing. I had done it a decade before in Ecuador, where the current run of striped marlin had proved unmanageable. In Costa Rica we hooked some Pacific sailfish, and for an hour I fought one that was over 150 pounds. The excitement is intense when fish are rising to the baits, which are large rubber squid. You tease the fish with the squid, and when the fish are properly turned on you stop the boat and fly cast. It sounds quite ordinary, but several times the fish in question were blue and black marlin weighing in excess of five hundred pounds, bigger around than an oil barrel and over ten feet long. The blue marlin in particular seems perpetually angry. I watched from the flying bridge as an enormous blue slashed at the baits, half out of the water, then took de la Valdène's streamer fly, thrashing his head and breaking the line. Marlin flash iridescent blue and green when they attack a bait, startlingly beautiful against the darker water. Our surgeon-captain told me he had seen spotted dolphin bump marlin away from baited hooks.
Curiously, our most pathetic meal on the coast was also our best. Hubert and Agnes, the proprietors of the Amberes Restaurant, had made a stew out of the fresh local catch and shellfish. It was pathetic because Agnes was doctoring Chatham's dysentery and allowed him only plain rice with a ginger ale on the side. He glowered, beet red from the sun and fever and in pain from boating a fish while aching with a bad back, fighting the sailfish, hunched over like a nautical Quasimodo. I expressed my sympathy by losing a lot of money at the casino.
1989
Midrange Road Kill
For a reason that must be specific, albeit untraceable, no phrase causes me more mental discomfort than “sudden weight loss.” This condition, of course, presages dozens of fatal diseases that can pluck us off the earth as if there had never been any gravity, or gravy, for that matter. A psychoanalyst has helped me locate the nexus of this terror but not the particularities of the childhood trauma hidden in the mists of stateside World War II. The central images, doubtless from LIFE magazine, are of the great vegetarians, Hitler and Tojo, who wished to chop off our country's head. From Buchenwald to Bataan, these two managed to make millions of souls permanently thin and to rape the consciousness of a round, brown, country child. When I close my eyes, my mind can still reel off the photos of the carnage of starvation, as if my brain were a slide show manned by a speed freak. In those years we were advised daily at dinner to finish our plates because the children in Europe had nothing to eat—a warp of logic typical in parent-child control.
The child is father to the man, as Wordsworth would have it, so the time and energy I've spent avoiding sudden weight loss come as no surprise. At no time is this effort more energetic and heroic than when my system is verging on a depression. Now, I've had five identifiable whoppers in my life (none in eight years), and once you get past the early stages you should literally turn yourself in for whatever professional help you can find or afford, because you can't truncate the process by yourself, and simply living through it makes you vulnerable to suicide. (The most elegant and intense record of an encounter with the disease was written by William Styron and appeared in the December 1989 Vanity Fair.) Beyond the early phase, the pathology of the disease establishes itself as icy, sodden, and remote; Inertia herself becomes queen of the endless days and nights. The anguish is so palpable that an actual fractured skull would be a sweet relief, and there is a relentless temptation to kiss the Back Wall.
However, resourcefulness and attention to early warning signs can put you in what fighter pilots call an “avoidance posture,” though sometimes the causes of depression are so connected to the roots of life that any precaution resembles the psychobabble of self-improvement schemes.
When entering a depression, you become a consensus human, a herd creature going through the motions that the wolves, the interior predators, can spot a mile away. You go through the motions of consensus: eating food from consensus cookbooks and restaurants; imbibing consensus perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge from consensus newspapers and magazines, feeling consensus feelings offered by consensus television, music, and drama, and reading poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from consensus publishers. You have become the perfect midrange road kill. You are suffocating in lint. The nervous laughter that greeted Divine's eating dog shit in Pink Flamingos was caused by the shock of recognition.
You shouldn't read another word if you think you're going to get some free advice. Over the years my advice has been a contributing factor in at least a half-dozen suicides. Seriously. Now I am limiting my wisdom to food and, occasionally, the connection between food, sex, and depression, in hopes of saving millions of lives.
There is a poignant anecdote here under the category of the wisdom of the weird. In the late seventies I visited a friend on a movie set in a canyon near Trancas, in western Malibu. The movie being shot was a soft-core porn/nature feature called The Legend of the Mynah Bird which eventually did well in Ireland and western Australia. My friend the director was coked up and kept sending the naked starlet up a steep arroyo at a dead run, through eleven takes, until a break was called because she had developed exertion blotches. Her boyfriend had been on a rice rampage, his eyes crusty in the corners from vitamin-A deprivation. He was selling Humboldt County weed and a homemade Kama Sutra lotion that smelled like fish oil and badly burned onions. He pointed at his girlfriend, whose blotches I was watching disappear, and said, “For every top there is a bottom. She must eat. She must make love.” It occurred to me later that he was also hustling the lady, but the wide blue Pacific to the west beckoned. In short, I had to get out of there, and I filed the information under the wisdom of California.
Despite our cultural snobbism, we are all not unlike our lady of the disappearing blotches, though she was far more attractive than most of us. Eat and love, to be sure, but you'd better eat first. And if you are verging on depression and you wish your loins to stir mightily, be careful about what you eat. Don't, for instance, head into a big platter of choucroute garnie, a heap of wurst, bacon, pig hocks, and sauerkraut, since this meal will make you feel blimpy and murderous. You are suited only for a fistfight or a Big Ten pep rally, or maybe for driving your car into a fire hydrant or an abortion center, but not for a lifting of spirits and the sacred act of love. I'm not talking about the garden-variety smut machinations pushed on us by the media, but the collision of Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors, Zhivago and Lara in the frozen attic, or even Ava Gardner and a bullfighter.
The initial suggestions are obvious: tripe in any form, oysters raw or roasted with shallots, butter, and cayenne, sweetbreads in any form, the New Iberian rendition of “dirty rice” with an adequate amount of gizzard, squid in any form except the Japanese which is too self-conscious and can
cause performance difficulties. An ample mixed grill is a mistake unless you are Sean Connery or Winston Churchill, though grilled kidneys or rognons it veau à la moutarde are fine.
Far be it from me to say that women are the more glandular sex, but for some reason the cookbooks written by women are a better direction for those in this condition: Paula Wolfert, Diana Kennedy, Patience Gray, Mireille Johnston, Elizabeth David, Alice Waters, and Marcella Hazan come to mind. For instance, Hazan’s bollito misto with picante sauce will enrage your privates, while the fabled feijoada of Brazil ‘will put you to sleep unless you dance until dawn. Don't roast a whole lamb punctured with a hundred cloves of garlic, rubbed with olive oil and stuffed with a thatch of fresh thyme over a wood fire, because it is too dramatic. A simple marinated rabbit grilled over the same fire with veal sausage, however, will destroy sexual torpor. The fat lady in the rum ads will stir your weenie after this meal.
Less than a decade ago, in the middle of January, I was in bad shape. Professional help had been rejected, but my wife had alerted a country friend. When he arrived, I was standing out in our pasture; a white hat of snow had gathered on my head. He waved an enormous bird in front of my face, and, though I had tunnel vision, it was clearly recognizable as a wild turkey, the finest table bird on earth. We walked gravely toward the house, plucking the bird as we made our way through the snowdrifts. He said he had hit the bird accidentally with his car, but when we finished plucking, I saw the neat dark hole of a .22 bullet. He had broken the law for his friend! (These birds are ineffably better in the north, where they feed on acorns.) We roasted the beauty, and by the time it was done, I could see the entire kitchen and my beloved family and friends. We drank my last two magnums of Margaux, remnants of the vile but prosperous times that had sent me into the pasture.