Just Before Dark Page 2

  The next evening, we floured and fried the rabbit, serving it with a sauce of the marinade, stock, and the copious brown bits from the skillet. I like the dish best with simple mashed potatoes and succotash made from frozen tiny limas and corn from the garden. The rabbit gave me a thickish feeling, so the next day I broiled two small red snappers with a biting Thai hot-and-sour sauce, which left me refreshingly hungry by midnight. My wife had preserved some lemon, so I went to the cellar for a capon as she planned a Paula Wolfert North African dish. Wolfert and Villas are food people whom you tend to “believe” rather than simply admire. In this same noble lineage is the recent Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray (Harper & Row), a fabulous cookbook. Gray's a wandering Bruce Chatwin of food.

  Naturally, I had been floundering through the deep snow an hour or two a day with my bird dogs in order to deserve such meals. But enough was enough. I hadn't exactly been saving up for the big one. A cautionary note here, something Jack Nicholson said to me more than a decade ago after I had overfed a group in his home: “Only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism.” Still, I find it important to go on with eating, not forgetting the great Lermontov's dictum: eat or die.

  So I eye the brook trout again and consider my options. It is almost the fall bird season, when the true outer limits of my compulsion are tested. Perhaps when winter comes I will resume running at night, all night long across frozen lakes, trying to avoid the holes left by the ice fishermen.

  1988

  Meals of Peace and Restoration

  I believe it was the late John Wayne who said, “It pushes a man to the wall if he stands there in the buff and looks straight down and can't even see his own weenie.” I think it was John Wayne who said that. However, I'm a poet and a novelist, not a John Wayne authority, and so what if I'm a tad burly? In my childhood we prayed every evening for the starving children in Europe, causing a primitive fear of hunger. There are also the scars from my youthful New York City art wars, when I thought I was Arthur Rimbaud and the average dumpster ate better than I did. And then there is the notion of the French surrealist poet Alfred Jarry: “I eat, or someone will eat in my place.” In any case, I have decided it is time to escape the sodden mysteries of personality and try to help other folks. Not that I really wish to become the Baba Ram Jim of food advice, but something calls me to offer a handful of garlic along the way.

  Times have changed. We have seen the passing of the blackjack and the accordion. Few of us sing alone on our porches on summer evenings, watching the sexual dance of fireflies in the burdocks beside the barn. The buzz of the airport metal detector is more familiar than the sound of the whippoorwill or coyote. The world gets to you with its big, heavy, sharp-toed boot. We are either “getting ready” or “getting over.” Our essential and hereditary wildness slips, crippled, into the past. The jackhammer poised daily at our temples is not fictive, nor is the fact that all the ceilings have lowered, and the cold ozone that leaks under the door is merely a signal that the old life is over. There is a Native American prophecy that the end is near when trees die from their tops down (acid rain).

  To be frank, this is not the time for the “less is more” school when it comes to eating. The world as we know it has always been ending, every day of our lives. Good food and good cooking are a struggle for the appropriate and, as such, a response to the total environment. Anyone who has spent an afternoon in New York has seen the sullen and distraught faces of those who have eaten julienned jicama with raspberry vinaigrette and a glass of European water for lunch.

  But let's not dwell on the negative, the wine of illusion. You begin with simple truths in food: for instance, peeling sweetbreads is not really exercise. When you're trimming a two-pound porterhouse, don't make those false, hyperkinetic motions favored by countermen in delicatessens. Either trim it or skip trimming. Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor. Chances are you will come up with something Latin—I mean food that is quite different from our own in areas of fruit growth, food from a place where garlic and flowers abound, where there are blue water and hot sun. At the bottom of dampish arroyos are giant butterflies and moths, extravagantly plumed birds that feed on the remains of lightning and sunbeams, the unique maggots that feed only on the spleens of road kill. Farther up the cliffs, where the cacti are sparser, rattlers sun themselves. At first you are uncomfortable, then disarmed by the way the snakes contract over hot coals. They are particularly good with the salsa that goes by the brand name Pace.

  Last March I was hiking out of the Seri Indian country, south of Caborca along the Sea of Cortés, with Douglas Peacock, the fabled grizzly-bear expert. We were both out of sorts: he, because he can't seem to make a living; I, because my sinus pain was so extreme that I had to bash my head against the car door and specific boulders we passed. Luckily, we were able to dig a full bushel of clams at a secret estuary and make a hearty chowder with a pound of chilies and garlic, which started me on the road to recovery. Broiled tripe from an unborn calf helped, as did giant Guaymas shrimp. After this infusion of health I was able to dance five hours with a maiden who resembled a beige bowling ball. She was, in fact, shaped rather like me. In the morning my clothes were crisp from exertion; my head, bell clear. The world seemed new again—like a warm rain after a movie.

  One late-November night, on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, I was camping out with two old men who I was reasonably sure were witches, although kind witches. I was researching a film on the life of Edward Curtis and that morning had received word that the studio had fired me again. But that night there was a big moon through the intermittent snow, and above the fire a posole was cooking, with its dark freight of several different chiles, a head of garlic, sun-dried hominy, and the neck, ribs, and shanks of a young goat. After eating the posole, we hiked in the moonlight, and one of the old men showed me his raven and coyote imitations, jumping in bounds the length of which would have shamed Carl Lewis.

  Posole is a generic dish, and I've eaten dozens of versions and made an equal number of my own. The best are to be found in Mexico. Menudo is a similar dish and a fabulous restorative, the main ingredient being tripe. I would offer specific recipes, but you should immediately buy Authentic Mexican by Rick and Deann Bayless, published by William Morrow. And if you are in Chicago, you can literally eat your way through the book at their splendid restaurant, Frontera Grill. I've made a good start on the project.

  Curiously, though, menudo has specific effects around which you can design a day. Picture yourself waking on Sunday morning with a terminal hangover and perhaps a nosebleed, though the latter has fallen from favor. You have a late-afternoon assignation with a fashion model you don't want to disappoint with shakes and vomiting rather than love. Just eat a couple of bowls of menudo sprinkled with chopped cilantro and scallions, wild Sonoran chiltepines, and a squeeze of lemon. The results are guaranteed by the tripe cartel, which has not yet been a victim of arbitrage.

  Last fall I felt intense sympathy for a friend, Guy de la Valdène, who was arriving in Michigan for bird season after a circuitous road trip through Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. If you've ever passed through them, you doubtless know that these are not food states. On the phone I could tell that Valdène's spirit was utterly broken, so three days before his arrival I began making Paula Wolfert's salmis de cuisses de canard, from her Cooking of South-West France. Since there were to be two of us, I increased the recipe, using nineteen duck legs and thighs, a couple of heads of garlic, two pounds of lean salt pork (homemade by my butcher), a half-cup of Armagnac, a bottle of Echêzeaux, and so on. (Wolfert's new effort, World of Food, can also be read as an edible novel.) During the three days of preparation, it occurred to me how Ronald Reagan was outsmarted by François Mitterrand a few years
back. Reagan purportedly concentrates on a diet of lean fish, turkey breast, raw zucchini, and jelly beans, while Mitterrand snacks on caviar, truffles, foie gras, and jellied calves’ feet and drinks fine bordeaux and burgundy (rather than Reagan's habitual Riunite on the rocks with seltzer). At least George Bush eats pork rinds—a step in the right direction. Anyway, I helped my friend directly to the table, and within twenty-four hours we had finished the dish, his health completely restored.

  Not to belabor the peasant motif, a week later Valdène ordered two pounds of beluga malassol from Caviarteria in New York, which we ate in a single sitting with my wife and daughter. I reminded myself not to do this too often, since the next morning my goutish left big toe tingled, making bird hunting awkward.

  It's interesting to see, in the manner of a pharmacist, how particularized the food nostrum can be: for clinical depression you must go to Rio to a churrascaria and eat a roast sliced from the hump of a zebu bull; also try the feijoada—a stew of black beans with a dozen different smoked meats, including ears, tails, and snouts. For late-night misty boredom, go to an Italian restaurant and demand the violent pasta dish known as puttanesca, favored by the whores of Rome. After voting, eat collard greens to purge yourself of free-floating disgust. And when trapped by a March blizzard, make venison carbonnade, using a stock of shin bones and the last of the doves. If it is May and I wish to feel light and spiritual, I make a simple sauté of nuggets of sweetbreads, fresh morels, and wild leeks, the only dish, so far as I know, that I have created.

  I recently went to Chicago to see the Gauguin retrospective at the Art Institute. The show was so overwhelming that I actually wept, jolted into the notion that art does a better job for the soul than food for the body. I remembered reading, though, that Gauguin himself, when a little low and cranky, liked to have a goblet of rum followed by breadfruit, a fresh steamed fish with ginger, and perhaps a roast piglet. No mention was made of dessert. During my art-dazed walk back to the hotel, I slipped into the Convito Italiano for a bite—a simple carpaccio and a hit of grappa. Finally, after a long nap with South Seas dreams, I went up to Café Provençal for a grand feast. So it goes.

  1989

  Hunger, Real and Unreal

  Did you ever notice how we never allow ourselves to be actually hungry?” said Russell Chatham, a burly painter of some note. We were eating a prehunt breakfast, parked beside Oleson's buffalo paddock outside Traverse City, Michigan. All of the little boy buffalo, ignorant of gender, were chasing one another around, hell-bent on sex, their red wangers bobbing in the air. “Those guys are a tad confused,” Chatham added, eyeing the corked bottle of wine, at which we both coughed, thinking that ten in the morning isn't too early for a sip of red wine with a sandwich. Way up here in the northland there's a fine Italian delicatessen, Folgarelli's, and Chatham was having a hot Italian sausage with marinara sauce and melted mozzarella, while my choice was a simple prosciutto, mortadella, Genoa salami, and provolone on an Italian roll.

  Throughout the day we mulled over the not-exactly-metaphysical question of why we never, for more than a moment, allowed ourselves to be hungry. Could this possibly be why we were both seriously overweight? But only a fool jumps to negative conclusions about food, especially before dinner. Cuisine minceur notwithstanding, the quality of food diminishes sharply in proportion to negative thinking about ingredients and, simply put, the amount to be prepared. There is no substitute for Badia A Coltibuono olive oil. Period. Or the use of salt pork in the cooking of southwest France. Three ounces of chablis are far less interesting and beneficial than a magnum of bordeaux. I have mentioned before that we are in the middle of yet another of the recurrent sweeps across our nation of the “less is more” bullies. When any of these people arrive in my yard, I toss a head of iceberg lettuce and some dog biscuits off the porch.

  Despite these apparent truths, almost biblical in veracity, and bearing some of the grandeur of our Constitution, I recently learned that hunger is the actual sensation of the body burning its own fat. This is not a very appetizing idea but is, nonetheless, a positive experience when the body wears too much fat. I learned this when I spent two weeks at the Rancho La Puerta health spa in Tecate, Mexico, in order to quit smoking.

  Almost incidentally I lost seventeen pounds. This appears impossible, but some of it was “easy” weight from a feast (the usual wonderful squid, chicken, tuna, carpaccio, lamb, etc.) at Rondo's in Los Angeles the evening before my incarceration. I also worked out six to eight hours a day: I took a solo four-hour mountain hike each morning to look for birds and follow the tracks of coyote, bobcat, and puma, and I did up to three hours of exercise in the gym.

  Now this was an unconscionable and pathetic amount of exertion, but necessary to avoid cigarettes. I plummeted into a depression in which the first of my ideals to fly away into the mountains was literature. The Rancho's menu was vegetarian with fish twice a week. Chef Ramon Flores took this limited cuisine as far as it can be taken, but not quite far enough for the grief of a man who had temporarily lost his calling. One late morning after an exhausting hike, I began to tremble uncontrollably, a state I recognized as protein starvation. A tumbler of Herradura tequila was a temporary measure until I gathered the strength to call a cab and head into town for a slab of swordfish with garlic sauce and a full order of carne asada.

  Quite naturally, as Americans we all loathe decadence, though our notions of decadence change from time to time. Around the turn of the century, a man's girth was a fair estimate of his prosperity and moral worth, and the thin, sallow look, so much the rage at present, was considered fair evidence of low birth and probable criminal intent. (Curiously enough, of the countless times I've been swindled in Hollywood, the guilty parties have always been thin.) Men nowadays will not settle for a Paul Newman washboard stomach but want an entire washboard body, even though none of them remembers an actual washboard in his past.

  Let's all stop a moment in our busy day and return to some eternal verities. It's quite a mystery, albeit largely unacknowledged, to be alive, and, quite simply, in order to remain alive you must keep eating. My notion, scarcely original, is that if you eat badly you are very probably living badly. You tend to eat badly when you become inattentive to all but the immediate economic necessities, real or imagined, and food becomes an abstraction; you merely “fill up” in the manner that you fill a car with gasoline, no matter that some fey grease slinger has put raspberry puree on your pen-raised venison. You are still a nitwit bent over a trough.

  At the Rancho one day at lunch I told some plumpish but kindly ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a château up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch. The land doubled as a horse farm, and a vicious brood mare had tried to bite me, an act I rewarded with a stone sharply thrown against her ass. Two old men I hadn't seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half-dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs from a jug of red wine. When we finished eating, and since this was Normandy, we had a sip or two of calvados from a flask. A simple snack but indescribably delicious.

  I waited only a moment for the ladies’ reaction. Cheese, two of them hissed, cheese, as if I had puked on their sprouts, and wine! The upshot was that cheese is loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar. I allowed myself to fog over as one does while reading bad reviews of one's own work.

  That evening, Gael Greene, also a Rancho guest, spoke of the travails of being a food critic, making me ache for the usual foie gras and truffles. Later I told her that I used to carry a notebook and dictaph
one into restaurants, assuring myself of a good meal as a bogus food critic. I never actually said I was a critic, only that I couldn't talk about it. I reflected, too, on the idea of food snobbism: my friends in Paris are cynical about the idea of a good meal in New York, and in New York the idea of eating in Chicago is somewhat laughable, and so on through Los Angeles and San Francisco in every direction. I enjoy telling them that in recent years my best meal was at the Ali-Oli in San Juan, Puerto Rico. True.

  At dawn the next morning I decided to spend the day in the mountains. I figured that Aldous Huxley, one of my boyhood heroes, who used to hang out at the Rancho, would have done the same thing. I took my binoculars, an orange, a hard-boiled egg, and a one-ounce bottle of Tabasco for the egg.

  Four hours into the mountains I ate the egg and the orange. I was seated downwind from a bobcat cave, hoping for a sighting but knowing it was doubtful until just before dark. The cave had a dank, overpowering feline odor similar, I imagined, to that of the basement of a thousand-year-old Chinese whorehouse (the visionary propensities of hunger!).

  Then out of the chaparral appeared a tough, ragged-looking Mexican who asked me if I had anything to eat. I said no, wishing I had saved the orange. He smiled, bowed, and continued scampering up Mt. Cuchama, presumably toward the United States and the pursuit of happiness, including something to eat. He had chosen the most difficult route imaginable, and I followed his progress with the binoculars, deciding that not one of the Rancho's fitness buffs, including the instructors, could have managed the mountain at that speed.