The Ignition Point of Paper
The first evening of war, half an hour after a fireman snatched our dinner from the oven to fling outside, my wife and I watched a map of the Middle East as if it were animated, the reporters doing voice-overs from countries certain to suffer. We listened to faraway air raid sirens. We heard sentences built around warhead, payload, andmissile range. I wondered out loud about which of those reporters might be self-consciously slow putting on a gas mask, what symptoms of poisoning might be visible. My wife said nobody would hesitate, not when they expected the alternative was paralysis or death. We started rethinking dinner, what else to eat with war because chicken-in-a sack lay charred and sprawled in our front yard.
We settled on frozen pizza. The boxes had directions that called for preheating to 425 degrees. The oven was still vaguely warm. An hour earlier, when I’d opened the oven door, the paper bag had flared. When I closed it, I could watch the cyanotic smolder of it through the glass. I said 451, remembering, from school, a novel about books burned by firemen, the classics consumed by flames 49 degrees below the heat our recipe had suggested for baking. I’d felt like a science text, like bagging my own bookish body for the torch. On television, the President stared and told us, “This is no Vietnam,” sounding like the President who told us, “We’ll nail the coonskin to the wall” the year I learned the ignition point of paper, and I left the gospels of the president to re-sack that sorry chicken, add it to our week’s curbside bags. Though by daylight something had shredded its way inside and scattered the carcass on the snow, none of it retrieved by the garbage man who refused, by contract, to accept anything not bagged and tied.
Inedia
A few years earlier, when we’d moved, we’d discovered that a nearby village had been suffering from an underground mine fire for twenty years. Centralia, by then, was being emptied because of subsidence, the threat of carbon monoxide, and what was proving to be the hopelessness of extinguishing the fire. Some expert declared there was enough coal remaining in the seams to burn for 200 years. The main highway through the town began to crack, smoke escaping through the fissures.
Near where we’d lived before was a neighborhood grown infamous for having slime bubble up through its stricken lawns. Decades earlier, Hooker Chemical had dumped 21,800 tons of hazardous waste into the abandoned Love Canal, covered it up, laid down some top soil, and sold the land to developers. By the time we lived in Western New York, families were being shuttled from the Love Canal site because of miscarriages, the threat of cancer and other possible environmentally-related diseases. Residents of both neighborhoods talked in similar ways about the hammerlock of property, the eye gouge of ownership. In one parable of industry was the blasphemy of coal barons; in the other was the heresy of the landfill. Such a sampler of sadness, I told my wife, it’s like we can press our disasters like chocolates, using our fingers to find cherries or butter creams or caramels. And when there was a sweet story of a boy in Centralia being saved by tree roots after tumbling down a hole created by the mine fire, it seemed more miraculous than the survival of the woman who, recently found, had lived two weeks without eating, the miracle explained by an expert who told us she crash-dieted before her voyage to shipwreck. She’d grown used to little food, a sort of cross-training for starvation, and I recalled the Woman of Norwich, who lived for twenty years without eating, according to Francis Bacon, who might be Shakespeare, according to someone else.
The Maggot Farmer
That summer, maggots swarmed in our garbage when the bags came time to be carried to the curb. I made lifting my son’s job, told him they were only larvae, what we could use for bait to hook barble and bream. I talked and talked about what I’d read but didn’t know. I mentioned the farmer who had once shown me the carcasses of cattle he stored behind his house. “For coarse fishermen,” he had explained while I stared and retreated. I told my son that Aristotle claimed maggots were conceived by rotten meat, how he thought he saw insects birthed by mud. How he wrote it down and landed on a list of fools in a book I showed my son, one notch below Bill Pickering, the astronomer who said, in the twentieth century, the spots on the moon are huge swarms of insects. Maybe, I said, he let his garbage grow wings instead of flushing his cans with disinfectant. Maybe NASA filmed the astronauts in Nevada like the skeptics claimed because they feared the lunar surface writhed with grubs. And though my son insisted no one grows maggots for a living, twice that summer we dropped worms into fouled creeks for sport. We examined the teeth we found while digging for bait, thinking, if we studied forensics, we might claim discoveries others would believe for as long as it takes to turn up something to disprove them.
The Habits of Eating
Rabies. Bubonic Plague. AIDS. Botulism. I study a list of the deadliest illnesses, including kuru, the laughing sickness, a sure death that comes from eating the raw brains of the dead, gulping them, after battles, to absorb the prowess of the defeated warriors. Stupid, we’re likely to scoff, or absurdly vain, yet we’re often stubborn, fierce with ethnic excuses for the animals we devour: snakes, dogs, beetles, ants. Or balot, the Tagolog name for one more improbable, long-lived recipe:
First, be patient. Wait the number of days it takes to hatch a duck, and then snatch that egg, hard-boil that fetus, and eat the unborn whole — feathers, bill and bones.
Like veal, you might say, or lamb, speaking like an illustrator of books for babies who want smiles in their barnyards, ear-to-ear grins on Flopsy, Mopsy and Topsy. And probably you’ve owned a few of those living toys, and all of them have died like a series of hamsters who quiver with metabolism so rapid they flare and go out like filaments. We float and grow, transform from the curled worm common to us all: Flippers to feet, tails retracted, the brain’s circuitry connected, and, if not spoiled, set loose by those who could eat us.
Don’t Let the Moon Break Your Heart
Unable to sleep one night, I carried a bag of potato chips downstairs and watched a three a.m. B-movie, an early Sixties dubbed-in saga about Spaniards reaching the New World. The Cortez lookalike stepped ashore saying, “That’s one small step for man,” so he might, in first run, have moved Neil Armstrong to tears. Or all along, those astronauts, sworn to secrecy in Nevada, were prepped for bogus landings with lines penned for beefcake stars. David Scott. James Irwin. John Young. By then I needed an almanac to name the moonwalkers, sleeplessness enough to discover crib-sheet dialogue in an old Conquistadore film.
It wasn’t the only time. Early at work, the first year I taught English to the teenage children of fathers who worked at Valvoline, the railroad yards, and Armco, I let the night-shift guard say the moon just conquered lay fifty miles outside Las Vegas, that close, as he showed me a book that proved the earth flat, pointed out stars that clustered where heaven lay. I drank coffee and ate custard doughnuts while he explained the hierarchy of halo shapes, the maintenance for wings. Some nights, he said, you can see shipments of the saved arriving in light — The Pearly Gates, could I see their shape? And I stared, two hours before I had to say a word, mouthing to myself “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes,” singing like an armored extra in a foreign musical who’s lip-synced, later, to show his hands flew apart for balance, not joy, before he tumbled off the delicate wafer of the just-claimed land.
The Mayan Syndrome
All that summer after what’s proved to be only a prelude to an endless Mideast war, my children claimed we were the only family they knew that ate dinner together. What’s more, we were the only family that ate “real meals” while their friends ate pizza, hot dogs, tacos and instant mac ‘n cheese. The news began to warn that parts of our planet were missing. Soil presumed drowned. Ozone kidnapped and murdered. If we weren’t careful, we could expect a pandemic of environmental disasters. As if it were a supplement to those stories, a feature on the Mayan Syndrome, the mystery of that culture’s inexplicable loss, appeared in a magazine I subscribed to. Now even the ruins were being abused. The man in a photograph was sweeping his patio built from temple blocks, feeding his pigs from an artifact altar. Nothing prospers, the man claimed. Rain has moved elsewhere, the solution of sea-turtle sacrifice to the rain god Chac proved false. These swine need to eat, he said, and I could have smirked and imagined that when their trough catches the sun at exactly the proper angle, the pigs paused to think of miracles, but I had planted stones of my own, spreading them from my sliding door in the sign used for calculating square root. It might have passed for a symbol, the spread stones meant to be read from the heavens to keep evil from my doorstep, pass it along to my neighbors, their daughter disappeared and likely dead, who weren’t, in those drought months, pleading for rain when they faced their altar. She won’t be dead, not to us, they said, until her body is found. Like MIA’s. Like the charity bracelet names. Corporal Connors, I read from the one in my basement drawer, but he was still missing somewhere in a Vietnam rain forest, immortal almost, like the souls of Mayans, like ozone and soil and the woman who may be buried near our neighborhood like one of those bodies cleverly hidden in the eye-teasers printed in a book of puzzles.
The Autonomic Curse
Mac Norton, the Human Aquarium, claimed to possess the multiple stomachs of a cow, swallowing six goldfish, twelve frogs, and delivering all eighteen, one at a time, between his lips. Never lost a prop, he said, resurrecting them in minutes, but there were frogs, once, in Australia, who laid eggs and ate them, waiting out hatching and the transformational nursery weeks until, one by one, fully formed, those children spit themselves out like one more evolution wonder. Nothing like my friend’s cyanotic son, his head huge and hopeless in the pictures he handed me, once, like a deck of cards. Another week, maybe two, he quoted his doctor, though I didn’t see even that chance in any of the photos from the thirty-six hours of breathing. And those odd Australian frogs? They are extinct.
Remedies
Before school began I needed to drive my daughter ninety miles to a television studio to be interviewed for what proved to be thirty seconds of air time. The day before, in court, a convicted killer had claimed he was a holy assassin because God had asked him to murder. I am a remedy, he said like a junta, and on the way home, while we were stuck in a flagman’s traffic beside a mile-long graveyard for cars, I decided to get off at the next exit and search for the murder site. My daughter guessed half a million rusted bodies were taking the cure, enough, maybe, to be Guiness World Records famous, and I answered by wheezing like an ad opener for the inhalant I was determined not to use. The road crew slouched on shovels while I remembered the list-book lines on Salisbury, the man who became a food when he convinced people to eat, well done, ground beef three times a day. “With hot water,” he added, menu for the end of asthma, “with reasonable habits.”
Lately I’d been unreasonable, weaning myself from a thousand milligrams per day of Theolair and waking inside the mathematics of strangling. So far, I’d survived, walking breath back into myself, researching holistic remedies for health. In Ethiopia, for instance, one emperor ate the Bible to restore himself — Psalms for discomfort, Exodus for disease. He sent Zachariah, not hamburger, to his bronchi; he swallowed Genesis instead of apricot pits or brain waves, choosing from his personal list of lubberwort,one word I’d taught Shannon, explaining her diet, the valueless foods that make us stupid, her soda and puffed cheese and cookies. She’d just been sick enough to require prescription tubes; she’d recovered and returned tolubberwort, and when we finally escaped construction, we entered the killer’s neighborhood, the six hundred block of mayhem where we parked and half recalled the shape of the death-house tree behind the TV newsman. My daughter stood in front of four likely trunks until I caught the curve of a branch, the black fork jutting exactly the way God’s gunman must have seen it before slipping inside, and she posed there, fist to her mouth like a microphone, ready to speak to the air.
The Air of Delicate Pastry
Francis Battalia, years ago, ate stones by the spoonful, chased them with beer and shook the sack of his stomach for evidence. After his feats became popular, stone eaters flourished. The thinnest drank water to flush their gravel, fueled one cult of reduced calories, early converts to the slow furnace of zoologists who extend the lives of test mice, these days, by diminishing their charted dinners. In our country of sad diets, we choose the stones of low sugar, low sodium, the rocks of low fat and cholesterol. We suck and roll them back our tongues to gulp doses for the fears that keep us cautious. Which bite brings the AIDS of the arteries or the stiff botulism of the heart? Though he made them, my father wouldn’t eat the fat ladylocks and thick whoopee pies, refusing their sweet, white sculptures of crème. Lard and sugar, he told me. A little water. Fool’s food, he said, like the corn starch of bargain pies, the refined sweeteners of icing he tasted, judged, and spit out while he slathered it for millworkers, baking from midnight till morning, stopping with doughnuts turning gold in the deep-fat fryer. He ate wheat bread, the rich custard of eclairs. He explained fiber and eggs and the legitimate sugars of fruit. He praised the natural holes in bread, none of them like the homogenized air of Wonder loaves, their dough a miracle of emulsifiers, whipped and balanced like flavored scoops of soft ice cream, perfect squares of processed cheese. And then he described the air of delicate pastry, how it lightens the richness of butter, how he folded and sheeted, folded and sheeted until that sweet dough spread so fine and light it released the breeze of desire, the breath of gratitude, what works to support us, the air from which we never grow estranged.
The Hot Wings Wager
Once, during the time we lived near Love Canal, I took the dare of a local bar that promised gift certificates for downing a double order of “Diablo wings” in fifteen minutes. They triggered tears, revved the wheeze and cough of reflex with jalapeno and japones, guero and tepin, and the chiles unnamed and mythical as holy mushrooms. I was ready to spend my winnings on beer and shrimp, authentic blues in an uptown bar. “Hot cherry,” I said. Cayenne.” I recited my picante vita, claiming fifteen minutes of pain so tiny I’d laugh, later, at apprehension. And I thought of my father, who believed in the green pepper and the green pepper only. Who swore food on the table showed a man for who he is, one reason he sometimes wished for the selfish to choke, the rich to aspirate, hurrying themselves to hell. Like this, I thought, swallowing fire like a flame eater, bolting eight, frantic to finish and recognizing, more clearly than ever, the scald of stupid choice. Ten. Twelve. Halfway to paradise, the cook explained — something like sex, like the multiplications of filth. Sixteen and stalled. Eighteen and the betrayal of the esophagus and stomach, the giveback of foolishness to the visible word. Though even after vomit, after the violence of the body’s refusal, I was regretting its checks and balances, how we’re limited by the sober sonata of involuntary sense.
Now You Know
One Saturday morning when I was twelve, my father offered me a choice between a calf’s brain and kidney that he’d bought fresh for frying. A brain was impossible and refusing was an option guaranteeing ridicule, so I asked what a kidney tasted like. “Better than you think,” he said. “You’ll know it’s ready when the stink goes away.” Slathered with salt, the kidney was so rich with fat I loved it. “See there,” my father said, “now you know.” The grease pooled around my scrambled eggs and the rich rye bread I used to sop it up, bread he’d baked hours before, on his feet all night, anticipating those meals of organs, teaching the body.
China, May, 2001
After our children left home, after my wife and I had stopped eating red meat at home, followed by her abandoning chicken as well, I visited China with students and other faculty from the university where I work. The third day we rode a bus north from Beijing through neighborhoods that seemed closer to the year 1001 than 2001. Shortly before our trip, a group I’d never heard of were on the news for destroying ancient Buddhist and Hindu artifacts. Riding the bus to one of our first destinations, I asked a colleague who teaches political science to explain who the Taliban were. Awful, she said, far worse than the Communists for the people of Afghanistan. Everything seen as sacred by anyone other than them represents a false god, she added, accounting for why the world’s tallest standing Buddha had been destroyed a few weeks earlier.
That evening, when the students we accompanied whined about eating nothing but local cuisine everywhere we traveled, I vowed to try everything that was served. The next day, at our northernmost location near the Gobi Desert, the students were even pickier, skipping half the choices. I worked fatty boiled meat around in my mouth and swallowed; I tried something yellow that was cooked but had the consistency of wood. Finally, I stuffed something into my mouth I couldn’t swallow. I chewed and chewed as the students prattled on about how primitive everything was, the bathrooms in particular. I chewed some more and surrendered, spitting the congealed mess into a napkin. My Chinese colleague, who was leading the tour, laughed and said, “Duck’s feet, very difficult.”
After The Daily Show
Two years later, one of my students traveled to Centralia to research an essay. She interviewed the mayor, a man recently the object of a mocking, false interview on The Daily Show. He was in his 80s and had twelve constituents left to govern. “His wife served me lemonade and cookies,” she said. “They were the nicest people.” Her descriptions drew me to drive there again, walking where hundreds of houses once stood before hiking to where the trees were still green to stand among them a few feet from where the forest was skeletal. “It made me angry,” she said, “to see all the tourists taking photographs.”
Love Canal, by then, had been declared clean and taken off the Superfund list. What’s more, though one group of houses had been razed, 260 others had been refurbished and sold to families at 20% below value to repopulate the area. Occidental Petroleum had purchased the land and contained the pollution. They’d renamed the housing development Black Creek Village and welcomed the new homeowners. “This is a victory,” a spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency declared.
At my university, students had placed tiny flags in front of the campus center, one for every soldier killed in the Middle East. Each week they added new flags, the display growing like an enormous, spreading rash.
The Long Line for Brains
Three more years pass. In a town I visit, the longest line at any of the booths at its annual fair lead to brain sandwiches. “Pigs’ brains this year,” my guide says, “because mad cow scares off the customers.” She is twenty-one, showing me and my wife an hour of southern Indiana before I am supposed to read and discuss my poems and stories about Pittsburgh, where I’d eaten liver and hearts, stomach and kidneys. “It’s a week’s worth of cholesterol on a bun,” she says, as if that is more frightening than the remoteness of mad cow disease. And yet there is a whole-wheat option and a short list of condiments, including onions. “They’re the best,” she says, laughing. That afternoon, loitering among a hundred Hoosiers swallowing something like a heart attack, I think of my father’s heart at nearly ninety despite dozens of Saturday breakfasts, not only of brains, but also of chicken livers and gizzards and hearts, all of them fried crisp in grease.
How to Enjoy High Meat
High meat is raw and fermented, the blood becoming like alcohol. For beginners, marble-sized bites are recommended, bolting them down without chewing and quickly, too, as insurance against the stink. Supposedly, there’s extra energy you will gain, so much of it you should avoid eating at night for fear of sleeplessness.
One dieter says he began with buffalo liver, eight pounds of it he nibbled for a week. And once, a month-old deer brain because he loved organ meat. As for any diet, there are some issues. Fish turns peppery and acrid. Scallops and sea bass have limits of four or five bites a day. Beef pancreas so quickly turns gooey and flavorless, it’s nearly impossible to tolerate at all.
Subsidence
One night, after we’d driven fifteen miles in order to eat at a restaurant for which he had a coupon that said, “Buy one meal and get one of equal or lesser value for free,” my father had me drive through the new housing plan less than a mile from his house. Two streets featured strings of sawhorses with flashing lights. “Subsidence,” he said. “They built over the old mines even though everybody knew.” One of those streets was closed to traffic. “Three houses here are abandoned,” he said. “More will surely go.”
Eating the Brains
When he sees calves brain on the appetizer menu, my son, forty years old now, insists we order a plate. He’s heard my brain stories more than once; he’s testing me. When they arrive, they’re soft, nearly mushy, a consistency that somehow surprises. The flavor isn’t as distinctive as I expect. It is closer to bland than any other organ meat I’ve tried. When we finish, both of us are triumphant but disappointed that finishing the brain didn’t announce itself as some sort of rare achievement. Veterans of organ food, we ask ourselves “What’s left?” and imagine intestines, lungs, and, at last, testicles.
Artifacts
Now there are fewer than ten people left living in Centralia. The government waits them out. When everyone is dead, the site will be deserted except for tourists who come to marvel at the ground’s heat, the dead forest, and the emptiness.
Now there are reports that the new residents of Love Canal are falling ill and having miscarriages. Lawsuits have been filed; a thousand more have been threatened. Denials proliferate.
Now when I see photographs of 3000-year-old Assyrian artifacts being destroyed in Syria by ISIS, I think of walking across campus to the office of the political science professor, but the destruction feels so familiar I don’t know what else I could ask her. Instead I open a breakfast bar and watch a video of men with their faces covered pounding on the downed statues with sledge hammers until they seem little more than gravel.
This Week
For my son’s birthday, we go to a restaurant that specializes in chicken wings. His son, lately turned teenager, is with us. There are dozens of sauces to choose from, an elaborate chart that is scaled to the peppers’ heat, but one at a time, we all order the standard “medium.” My wings and my grandson’s are boneless, so we eat them with a knife and fork. My son gives up before he finishes, saying his are too spicy. I help my grandson finish his. On the television news, there is a mention of a single local casualty in the Middle East, someone killed on his third tour. “That war,” I say to my grandson, “is as old as you are,” but he is distracted because every other large screen is tuned to baseball, basketball, softball, soccer, and hockey. My son wants to talk about the memoir I’ve published, the terrible food I was forced to eat and the odd behavior of my parents, mixing those items as if they’re connected by some strange cause and effect. Though I have included specific details about their reliance on recipes and prejudices passed down from their parents like faulty chromosomes, I begin to defend them, starting with “Despite all that …”