I am not sure I awoke the next morning as a bearded gobbler, but I was on the road back.
1990
The Panic Hole
I am on the road for reasons unshared by Jack Kerouac and Charles Kuralt, Charlie Starkweather and William Least Heat Moon. A movie, Revenge, that I had had a modest part in by writing the novella and a few drafts of the script, was on the eve of coming out, and I felt raw, exhausted, and, worst of all, vulnerable. What is thought of as success meant only that absolute strangers bothered you in restaurants or on the street in resort towns. Success tends to make you think backward, where you rehearse the steps that brought you the check, an event that caused good feelings at the time. People use cocaine to feel successful, which means there are dubious aspects to the emotion. Anyway, I was feeling put-upon, a close second to self-pity as a destructive state. On the way home from the bar, I suddenly wanted to drive a Butternut Bread truck and eat a hasty meal of fish sticks and coleslaw before going bowling.
So I got out of town. One of my favorite authors, the great Gerald Vizenor, said that “the present is a wild season, not a ruse.” As you get older, it occurs to you that “the present” is in increasingly short supply. The virtue of spending a couple of weeks stuck in a dentist's chair is less apparent than it used to be. The notion of “taking your medicine” like a sick dog poised before the phone is morose and Calvinistic when all you have to do is disappear. “Vamoose. Sayonara, motherfucker,” as we used to say in high school. Man is not an answering machine.
Vizenor developed a saving idea called a panic hole in his novel The Trickster of Liberty. Panic hole is defined as a place where you go physically or mentally or both when the life is being squeezed out of you or when you think it is, which is the same thing. A panic hole is a place where you flee to get back the present as a wild season rather than a ruse. For the time being, my panic hole is an enormous, red Toyota Land Cruiser. A mile from my home, which has a bull's-eye painted on its roof, I felt a whole lot better, the oppressiveness slipping out the window and discoloring the 185 inches of snow we had received thus far.
For reasons that are obscure, perhaps genetic, I headed even farther north than my own frozen landscape. White snow and black trees are soothing and more anguish-absorbent than the obvious tropics, where the foreign heat bubbles your skin and brain. The tropics tend to distract you rather than empty you out. In the north it can be a really big day when you see three crows. And there are times when three crows more than equal a girl in a bikini, the Gulf Stream, and conch fritters.
Curiously, my first stop was Escanaba, at the House of Ludington, where I began this column two years ago. It was then that I announced my belief that small portions are for small and inactive people and that cuisine minceur was the moral equivalent of the fox-trot. Life was too short for me to approach with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute. My idea was to eat well and not die from it—for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating.
I succeeded in not thinking about the time in between by using a few mail-order secrets on how to give up your name. After twelve hours of sleep, I took a long dawn walk far out on the ice, where I glassed three ravens feeding on a fish. What luck! I lay on the ice to make myself less obtrusive and listened to the vast nothingness of Lake Michigan. The landscape was empty except for the lump of me and three ravens watching one another across a hundred yards of blinding white.
This sort of epiphany goads the appetite savaged by sixteen months of work. Other than during bird season I had become so picky that I had lost a few pounds. At the hotel's Sunday brunch, I got a “tsk-tsk” from the waitress when 1 failed to polish off the plate of fruit and basket of breads, the platter of eggs, bacon, ham, real beef hash, and chicken livers, which was followed by an assortment of desserts, including a whipped-cream-stuffed pastry swan. My error was in reading during the meal—Bernard Heinrich's Ravens in Winter, from which I learned that in the late forties in Illinois 100,000 crows were destroyed in a single night by hand grenades. This was the American version of Cortés burning the aviaries of Montezuma, and it put me off my feed.
My spirits were revived at the Chippewa midwinter powwow that afternoon. On entering, I watched a very old man dancing in a full bearskin cape, his skull encased in the bear's head. He gracefully shook his war club at the gymnasium ceiling. A little later, fifty young girls in native costume did the crow dance so convincingly that I shivered, then, not surprisingly, wept. One day out and I was getting a long way from show business.
The next morning before I left, I called the Swedish Pantry to check out its soups. “We always have the same soups,” I was told, the phone voice informed with what passes for mystery among the Swedes. It was, however, the best pea soup I had ever eaten, and, accompanied by limpa bread and a side of herring, it was a fine load of fuel for the drive to Appleton, Wisconsin, where I visited my daughter at her college. That evening a peculiar thing happened at a restaurant with the equally peculiar name of Hobnobbin’. The gizmo used to clamp an escargot backfired and shot the snail directly into my chest, spraying its freight of garlic-laden butter all over my expensive suede sport coat. For some reason, I thought this was very funny. I had a fine chat with my daughter and went on to eat an enormous slab of heart-smart rare roast beef, something that I rarely order but found utterly delicious in this restaurant.
There were moments of backsliding in the Midway Motor Lodge in La Crosse, Wisconsin, quarters I shared with a group called the Young Farmers and another named the Tri-County Breeders (presumably of cattle). A phone call, naturally, told me that the fish-wrap technocrats of the movie arts didn't care for Revenge. Sad that they'll never realize their fond dreams of being slammed in the butt by Don Johnson's speedboat, I thought, and went for a long walk during which I saw three bald eagles feeding on dead shad on the partially frozen Mississippi River. This was not a “sign” of anything except that three bald eagles were hungry.
That evening I dined on pork and beef ribs at Piggy's in downtown La Crosse on the river, a restaurant that had recently won the National Pork Producers Restaurant of the Year Award, no mean feat. The ribs were well cooked and the locally brewed Heileman's Export was delicious, though I am not a beer drinker. Piggy's should add a hot sauce as an alternative to its regular offering. My dinner was disturbed by the gradual evolution of an idea, the pinpointing of a grave threat to America. I slept on the idea, deeming it not yet ready for the man on the street.
The next morning, at the beginning of my long drive to Lincoln, Nebraska, I could not contain myself and delivered a speech through the wind-shield to the subzero landscape: “Who are these WASP eco-yuppies? They are afraid of blacks and ignore them. They think Native Americans are hopelessly messy. They scorn all cowboys, hate ranchers, loathe hunters, fishermen, and trappers (I agree on this one), won't eat beef or pork or drink hard liquor. These folks are thinking about their life-styles and missing the point: the bitterest of struggles against business, industry, and government, which are using the environment, as always, as a cheap toilet. The struggle is against a nation that will always spit in its grandchildren's faces for immediate profit. As Vizenor would say, ‘Their Mother Earth is a blond.’ “
In Lincoln I checked into the Cornhusker Hotel, another of my panic holes. They know what they're doing at the Cornhusker, and they mean to be normal, with food and service nearly the equivalent of those in a deluxe hotel in New York for less than one-third the price. But then one of the main reasons I like Lincoln is that it is not Manhattan. On your first visit you will sense a haunting boredom that, on following trips, you will recognize as Life herself without rabid hype. In Lincoln I eat relentlessly at the Bistro, where there is a surcharge of thirty-five cents if you want a Caesar salad rather than a tossed salad. At lunch I have red beans and rice the equal of any of the dozen versions I've had in New Orleans. At dinner I enjoy the spinach gnocchi and Italian sausage. One night for dinner, John Carter, a folklorist and historian, took me to t
he Steakhouse, where we had a delicate appetizer of several pounds of fried chicken gizzards followed by wonderful porterhouses and Geyser Peak Cabernet. During the day I looked at nineteenth-century photographs at the Nebraska State Historical Society.
After four days at the Cornhusker, I've become prelapsarian Adam and am ready for a slow drive home by the identical route. I want to see the same landscape from the opposite direction. And at dawn I do the same thing I've done for years, a not-so-banal trick 1 learned from the Navajo. You bow deeply to the six directions. That way you know where you are on earth—at least for the time being. Much earlier in this century, an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news, you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home for dinner—and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.
A few weeks ago, while preparing roast quail stuffed with leeks and sweetbreads (served on a polenta pancake with a heavily truffled woodcock sauce), I realized that it was far too late for me to cooperate politically or artistically with a modern sensibility that so apparently demands the cutest forms of science fiction for its soul food. After dinner, I floundered in the drifts, looking at the full moon up through the blizzard. The moon had somehow ignored the destruction of the middle class, the most recent fall of Europe, the Trump split, and the release of dozens of movies and books. It was the same moon I had rowed toward in a wooden boat as a child, my dog and a pet crow in the backseat. This winter moon was a cold but splendid comfort.
1990
Piggies Come to Market
Betimes, when I awake at dawn or a few hours thereafter, I must remind myself that I am not a coal miner or even the farm laborer I was in my youth. I no longer work twelve hours a day to take home fifteen bucks. What happened to my battered tin lunch bucket, where I stored my dreams of New York City and the beautiful girls who looked as if they changed their underwear every single day? What does it mean that this year I will make forty times what my dad did his best year? He doesn't mind up in heaven, but for some reason I do.
In such somber moods I glance in the mirror and don't see Mother Teresa. In such moods I am infected by the disease of social conscience brought about by my youthful forays into civil rights and the reading of Eugene Debs, Thorstein Veblen, Frantz Fanon, and others. Nowadays a social conscience is a disease you can purportedly cure by sending off a check for the rain forest.
Don't for an instant believe that I'm going to chug along on this banal train of thought, certainly a nexus of regret many of us are familiar with, particularly those who never expected to be successful in financial terms. There is also a specific danger in manufacturing, like William Buckley, a social and philosophical system to justify your prosperity. Life gets used up damned fast by the exhaustion of peripheries. Besides, I have proved repeatedly that I have no gifts for rational discourse, no gifts outside the immediate confines of the imagination. A number of years ago, at a rancorous public meeting, I said, “In the wrong hands even a container of yogurt can be a fatal weapon.” Perhaps it was an acid flashback.
It was only last evening, while I was working on a screenplay with, of all things, the Academy Awards on the tube in the background, that I identified the malaise. It was the painful rejuvenescence of March, the brutality of a northern spring, when the songbird that was celebrating sixty degrees one day flops in its death throes at ten below under a cedar tree the next morning. This year a group of mallards had their feet frozen to a pond's surface, and now a bald eagle busies himself swooping in and tearing off their heads. Rages and pleasures mix themselves in this spring stew. Last week, a dear friend in a tequila rage shot himself in the parking lot of a bar. My beloved and saintly glutton of a Labrador must have her ulcerated left eye removed. Now we will be blind on the same side. Perhaps while we are hunting next fall, if she makes it, we will run into the same tree in the woods. When I was a boy, my left side was always bruised.
Of course, an older fool should be able to counter the emotional clay-mores brought about by the change of seasons and the pummeling of fortune's spiky wheel. The first move is to question whether certain of my grand assumptions about life have turned cheesy. Perhaps it is time to take down the motto from Deshimaru that is pinned to the wall above my desk: “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.” Perhaps this coda I so devoutly try to follow is allowing insufficient oxygen? This Oriental ruthlessness may be inappropriate unless you work for Sony, which in fact I do, via Columbia Pictures, come to think of it.
Naturally, this foment has had a negative effect on my cooking. A few weeks ago, passing through my grocer's, I bought a packet of dehydrated French's pork gravy. The label noted that this gravy was award-winning. Since I have never won an award, who am I to question this gravy? Tom Wolfe probably won an award for Campfire of the Vanities, so he doesn't have to try this gravy. I can't recommend it, even with the addition of garlic. My wife, Linda, watched quizzically from the far side of the kitchen.
No lessons were learned. Two days later, I felt another rage for normalcy and bought two cans of Hormel chili (one with beans, one pure “meat") and a copy of People magazine. After this luncheon mud bath I actually burst into tears, then walked exactly eleven miles to purge the whole experience. That evening, after a classic French-roasted capon, I trashed my notes (seriously) for a somewhat scholarly essay I had intended to write, to be called “Brain Vomiters: The Twilight of the American Novel.”
Things were plainly getting out of hand. One warm morning, before it snowed again, I yelled at the birds in the barnyard because they were too noisy. I stopped cooking altogether. Linda tempted me with fine new dishes made according to the recently published Monet's Table. They were splendid, but I could not eat the accustomed quantity, and I began to shed ounces. Then pounds dropped off. Contrary to most folks, I have to eat real big to stay big. The most destructive force in my life tends to be the unwritten poem, but despite my best efforts I was stropheless, except for my first epitaph: All Piggies Must, Finally, Come to Market.
There was the possibility that I had been sucker-punched by a dangerous fad last year. In an effort to shape up for bird season, I had begun to eat a nasty, fibrous cereal for breakfast. It was something to be endured, like a theater line. Not that I wanted bacon and eggs, another nasty fad that had its inception in the dizzy thinking that followed shortly after World War I. But in my heart I knew I'd rather eat the cow than the oats the cow eats.
This notion prompted a rage at the nitwits on the National Beef Council and their sniveling ads. Why don't they say you can have your beef if you give up all that fat-laden junk food, tasteless domestic cheeses, and ersatz French desserts? A T-bone has to be better for you than the $28 sea-urchin custard that is all the current rage in Gotham. Mind you, I have eaten versions of this dish in Paris and its alter ego, Los Angeles, and wouldn't feed it to Donald Trump, Tom Wolfe, or Hitler's daughter, Gretchen, who may also work for Sony.
Naturally, I rushed out and bought a largish Delmonico for brunch, but a watery pink fluid came out at first cut. What the fuck! I ate it anyway and dreamed of the fine steaks I used to eat in New York at Bruno's, Pen & Pencil, the Palm, and Gallagher's, or the sirloin at Elaine's before which you eat mussels and then spinach as a side to the meat. Florentine wines are better with steak than those of Bordeaux or Burgundy.
Beef is pleasure food, and we deserve pleasure because we live nasty, brutish lives. In ten days, I'll be in Valentine, Nebraska, where I'll eat a thirty-two-ounce aged porterhouse with two bottles of cabernet because there's no Barolo in Valentine. The following morning I will take a four-hour walk in the unfathomably beautiful Sandhills and count meadowlarks. I predict that my cholesterol count will not rise above its current 147, the same number of meadowlarks I'll see.
My disease of consciousness was somewhat all
eviated by a week's trip with my wife and youngest daughter to Boca Grande, on the west coast of Florida. Boca Grande is lovely, safe, and sedate, and no one there is likely to slip you a manuscript or borrow money. I went sailing and bird-watching with my old friend Tom McGuane, who is a part-time resident (so much for our shared reputation as rounders).
Oddly, we saw only three birds on the wilderness island of Cayo Costa. How could this be, we wondered, the unused binoculars flapping on our chests. Then we noticed there were a lot of birds walking around on the ground just like us. We presumed they were feeding. On close inspection some of the birds were brown, and so were others. They were clearly, we decided, critic birds.
On the way home there was another pratfall after a pleasantly lavish night in Chicago at a hotel called 21 East, recently changed to Le Meridien. The dining room is among the three or four great restaurants in that city. Unfortunately, the next morning, after riding to O'Hare in one of the hotel's fleet of 750 BMWs, I watched a family of six poor folk there to pick up Grandma (I was listening). I was eating an expensive breakfast hot dog, which they decided against for financial reasons. I computed that hot dogs and soft drinks for this family of six would come to just over twenty-seven bucks. Anytime a hot dog approaches an hour at minimum-wage work, the state is in peril. My scalp prickled in shame for my sad country, its veins swollen with the pus of greed and dark scorn for the poor.
I also wondered about the eight hundred bucks I had spent in the last twenty-four hours. I could barely finish my hot dog but did, because I was thinking how in the past nine years the Republicans, with the dithering cooperation of the shamelessly class-conscious media, had isolated the bottom one-third of our population as social mutants. Frankly, this is unchristian, and these assholes better pay for it in hell, since they are doing quite comfortably on earth.