Just Before Dark Page 3
I didn't feel the couch liberal's guilt over not having saved the orange for him, just plain old Midwestern Christian guilt. In my deranged state I thought that maybe the guy was Jesus, and I had denied him the orange! Then 1 lapsed into memories of things I had eaten when I was actually hungry, such as the fried trout I used to eat at streamside with bread and salt. I remembered, during my wandering-starving-artist years in the late 1950s, spending subway fare for a thirty-five-cent Italian-sausage sandwich and walking seventy blocks to work the next morning, eating free leftovers given to me by Babe and Louis at the Kettle of Fish bar, buying twenty-five-cent onion sandwiches on rye bread at McSorley's. I had wonderful meals while working as a poetic busboy at the Prince Brothers Spaghetti House in Boston; I often devoured two fried eggs at a diner after Storyville, the best jazz club ever, closed at dawn. In the San Francisco area there were two-for-a-nickel oranges, the oddly delicious macaroni salad at the Coexistence Bagel Shop for a quarter, the splurge of an enormous fifty-cent bowl of pork and noodles in Chinatown. And let's not forget the desperation of eating ten-cent cafeteria bread and catsup in Salt Lake City or the grapefruit given me by an old woman in the roadside dust near Fallon, Nevada.
When I arrived home from one of these trips, mostly brown skin and bones, my father said, “If you had stayed away longer, you wouldn't weigh nothing at all. It's plain to see it will be some time, if ever, before you know what you are doing, James.” Then he fired up the grill, and we went into his enormous garden and picked all manner of fresh vegetables. He broiled some chickens with lemon, garlic, and butter. That's what I remembered on the way down the mountain.
1989
Then and Now
I have a good memory, though good is somewhat questionable, since there is a tendency to over-remember life rather than to look for new life to be lived. “Late in the Great Depression, on the first day of spring in 1938, in fact, I gazed from the cradle as my parents ate smoked pork chops and the last of the home-cured sauerkraut, which was particularly redolent from six months in the crock, whose stone surface I often licked for salt while crawling around the floor, looking up at the underside of the world, the small strawberry birthmark on the back of my lovely aunt's thigh just below the apparent bird's nest wrapped in white cotton. I rejected baby food with sobs and howls, preferring whole venison hearts, herring, pike, perch eggs, the souse that Grandmother boiled down from an enormous pig's head on the wood stove.”
That sort of thing. “I still remember the mosquito-bite scab on the dirty left knee of the little girl who put out my eye with a broken bottle on a cinder heap at the edge of the woods in 1945. We were playing doctor. The Tigers were in third place, and Hal Newhouser was going to pitch that day. On the way to the doctor, our car smelled because I had left a bluegill in the trunk behind the tire but was afraid to admit it. When I was in the hospital, my parents brought me herring, the odor of which repelled the nurse. I thought I'd look like the little pig that lost its eye to a rusty nail protruding from a pen board. The second board from the bottom on the north side. For several painful months, the blind eye shone like a red sun in my head.”
Again, that sort of thing. Luckily, we eat in the present tense, else we might travel further into madness. That goes for fishing, too. When you combine fishing, eating, and a little drinking, you are riding the cusp of sanity as you did, quite happily, the schoolyard swing or that rope at the swimming hole that arced you out over a deep hole of cold, clear water, where you dropped down on startled brown trout whose fingerlings were speared by the kingfisher perched on the elm's bald branch. Jerry Round jumped from the bridge top and died, driving his head into his body. Naturally, I thought of turtles which Vince Towne purged in a washtub before he ate them. He told us that fried turtle would make our peckers grow big, a comment about which we had mixed feelings.
Fishing and eating, not without a few drinks at day's end. Hundreds of years ago, a roshi admonished his students not to prate about Zen to fishermen, farmers, and woodchoppers, since they probably already knew the story. Because I live up in Michigan and don't much like ice fishing, I've been going to the lower Florida Keys for a little winter fishing since 1968. With ice fishing, you dress up bulky like an astronaut and stare through a round black hole you've spudded in the ice. The “spud” is the tip-off that you're in the wrong place—it is an enormous forty-pound chisel. The sandwiches we brought along used to freeze in our pockets, and one day the wine froze at twenty below zero.
The question at hand is, “Are the Keys the same or as good as in the old days?” This is an especially stupid question that I have been asked countless times by dozens of people. My answer, “yes and no,” is usually unsatisfactory except to the timid, so I add a little gingerbread, to wit, isn't the past the silliest of tautologies? Have you forgotten Mircea Eliade's blessed “concrete plane of immediate reality"? Didn't René Char tell us not to live on regret like a wounded finch?
Where have any of us ever been that some nitwit doesn't tell us that we should have been there before? They are only pissing on a fireplug to establish territory in the face of recent arrivals. In Aspen, at the Hotel Jerome, you will always meet a stockbroker with an overbite much envied in London who is eager to establish that he was there first. I've developed a good tactic: wherever you are, say that you were born and raised there, but infinitely prefer living in Detroit.
The fishing in the Keys is about the same, but the food is better. There are more fishing guides, but the water is scarcely cluttered. I wouldn't return again in March, when college students on spring break flood the town of Key West. They invariably march around in groups, puking drunk, reminding me of the Nazi youth that cursed the world. They are all apparently the soul children of Ronald Reagan and should be packed off to Daytona Beach before they further destroy the community. If you like this sort of thing, you can save a lot of money by hanging out in a college community after a football game.
Far from this caveat is the notion that much of the food used to be quite awful except for what was served at Rene's, down on Duval, or in the better Cuban restaurants such as El Cacique. Now you can eat better in Key West than in any town I can think of in America fifteen or twenty times its size. Of course, there was a period in the early seventies when you might fly-fish for tarpon on three hits of windowpane acid backed up by a megaphone bomber of Colombian buds that required nine papers and an hour to roll. You weren't exactly ready for fine food when you got off the boat. What you had in mind has still not been determined.
There is something in the character of flats-fishing in the tropics that diminishes the appetite: a mixture of sun, heat, fatigue. You are fly-fishing in the shallow water of a river that is fifty miles wide, and casting only to visible fish. The energy expended in the relentless staring into water is exhausting. You are utterly immersed in the act and dare not let a single extraneous thought enter your mind or you'll miss the fish. It was upsetting this year to find that I have become much better at fly-fishing now that my drinking has vastly moderated. A hangover, simply enough, internalizes the quality of attentiveness, and you're looking inside at your myriad fuck-ups rather than outside at fish.
Not that I couldn't eat adequately, only that I'm usually a multiple-entrée type of guy, and I came to know the certain sadness of watching my wife, two daughters, and son-in-law eat more than I did. The tradition of piggery carries on, I thought. Chef Norman Van Aken's Mira is a grand place, with a first-rate wine list devised by Proal Perry. You should buy Van Aken's book, Feast of Sunlight, published by Ballantine. For day-to-day excellence we chose Antonia's, eating rather elaborate meals there three times in two weeks, though you can order simply from the appetizers and list of pastas (including stone-crab claws and mussels in a cream sauce on homemade linguine). Frankly, I find no fault with Antonia's. In a dozen visits I've never met the chef, Phillip Smith, nor the owner, and not a single visit was an expense-account item. There were no disappointments, and the serving staff is deft and unobtr
usive.
We also frequented Louie's Backyard, whose upstairs café is informal and beautifully decorated. One day, chef Bill Prahl will become as inventive as Van Aken. The menu could be called “nouvelle Cuban,” and Prahl's squid rings with citrus aioli are exquisite, as are the Havana pork roast and the shellfish zarzuela. Downstairs the atmosphere is more formal but the food, prepared by Doug Shook under the direction of co-owner Phil Tenney, fine indeed. I prefer this area for lunch when the fried-chicken salad is available, along with onion rings made from marinated Spanish red onions. One day a shellfish gumbo beat senseless anything Louisiana ever offered me. A short drive up the Keys to Cudjoe to Rick Lutz's Cousin Joe's will give you a taste of what the area used to be like, only the food is much better.
Back in Key West I can also recommend Café des Artistes (unbelievable desserts), Dim Sum, the Crêperie, and Kyushu. For a relief from the pricey and somewhat formal, we returned frequently to the Full Moon Saloon for the hottest chicken wings imaginable, grouper and conch sandwiches, conch chowder, and conch fritters, as well as more elaborate meals, all turned out by chef Tom Sawyer. (I keep mentioning chefs for the same reason you tell folks who wrote the book.) I eat breakfast at Dennis Pharmacy on Simonton because it doesn't limit you to the nutritional vacuum of bacon and eggs, offering a number of Spanish soups, including red bean, and pigs’ feet. For sandwiches for the boat, go to Uncle Garlin's Food Store out on Flagler, where the meatloaf is better than Mom's.
Curiously, I didn't gain an ounce in two weeks. At least I don't think I did. I defy the mechanistic world of scales, banks, lawyers, dentists, and I wouldn't balance a checking account at gunpoint. My aide-de-camp handles all of this except the dentist. A scale is meaningless when some days you feel light and some days you feel heavy. I have chosen the weight of 135 pounds as appropriate and have stuck to it. You might ask the local farmers who see me running in the dawn mists well ahead of my panting bird dogs. Once, at the Denver airport, a bald girl in an orange dress told me that I could be what I wanted, so it's 135, period.
Back to the old days, the late sixties and early seventies. I don't miss all of the stuff that made me feel bad, and gentrification, wherever it takes place, tends to wipe out all but a charade of the indigenous culture. It can still be there, but you have to look for it.
I miss the fighting roosters crowing at dawn, but not the cocaine jag that enabled me to hear them. I miss feeling the thrill of the possible future so adumbrated by despair and empty pockets, the night thick with the scent of garbage and flowers, the fecund, low-tide odor of our beginning.
Now I go there just for the fishing and, secondarily, the eating. My family likes it, and it's doubtful I'd chance a trip without them. There are the ghosts of those I cared for who did not survive the behavior the rest of us survived. But it is the water, the life we can only visit and barely comprehend, the thousand life forms of the flats, imperceptible unless you care to learn, a saline mysterium. This year there were two beached, rotting sperm whales on the flats facing Snipe Key, their skins too tough for the seabirds to feed on. I wondered where those whales were born, where they traveled on this bloody journey, what they felt when they died together far from their natural home, all of it quite beyond the range of my speculation or imaginings, the vast, brownish, sun-blasted hulks resting on the lovely flats. Some locals had cut out their valuable teeth with chain saws, but this fact seemed singularly puny, however coarse, compared with the inviolable beauty of the seascape, the whales resting not in peace but, as all of us will, in inevitable resignation.
1989
Consciousness Dining
An artist (a generic term covering poet, composer, painter, sculptor, perhaps novelist) consciously or unconsciously takes a vow of obedience to awareness. In order not to be lost in the whirl of time, either past or present, the artist must look at all things with the energy and clarity of a hyperthyroid Buddha.
Frankly, this awareness is not always fun, a fact that explains certain consciousness-reducing vices. In some locales it is even less fun than in others. Just recently I drove south from my wilderness cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to my farm, where I packed for a trip to Los Angeles. We all know that air travel is currently a big step down from what Greyhound travel was in the days of yore. And in the past year or so, the food has further degenerated in the first-class cabin of my favorite airline, American. Now a bottle of Tabasco lasts only three trips, whereas in the old days it lasted a dozen. I have filed an application to be towed by future planes in a gunnysack full of fish guts, which will improve the trip.
I am mindful that what initially takes a novelist to L.A. is greed and, often enough to be worth mentioning, a fascination with movies. My arrival is always buffered by my getting naked into bed in a darkened hotel room, no matter what time of day, and listening to Mexican music on the radio. This is a little trick you all might try. I stay either at the Westwood Marquis, because you can walk in the UCLA Botanical Gardens and also because it is a fine hotel, or at the Shangri-La out in Santa Monica which offers, right out the window, the nonclaustrophobic feature of the Pacific Ocean, or the “Big P,” as it is known locally.
Hollywood is not a kind and gentle place, but it's where my work takes me. On the first day of a recent meeting, we worked fourteen hours, a reminder that the place doesn't necessarily dollar up on the side of frivolity. This schedule continued for several days, until 1 felt like one of the well-known, three peeled throats of Cerberus, exhausted, fluttery, my imagination a mud puddle rather than a mighty river. To put it simply, I wasn't getting enough to eat. My partners (Harrison Ford and Douglas Wick) own the sharpish features of the underfed, features that any phrenologist will tell you reflect an interest in money and power rather than in the fruits of the imagination.
Anyway, in the middle of a serious point, I slipped into an out-of-body experience and was swept away to New York City, tracking myself as I left the therapist's office where I am treated for the usual obsessive-compulsive disorders. My first stop was the Ideal Lunch & Bar on Eighty-sixth Street, for a quick boiled pig hock, then on to the Papaya King hotdog stand on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Third for a quick frank with sauerkraut and mustard, down Third to Ray's for a slice of pizza with eggplant, then over to JG Melon for a simple rare burger and a double V.O. When I came to, I discovered that I had been talking with incisive brilliance and the meeting was over, which proves that even ghost food is better than none. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the notes.
The point is that there's no snack food in L.A. on the order of New York's. I ate very good dinners at Dan Tana's and at Osteria Orsini, where my table was presided over by the best waiter on the West Coast, the fabled Igor. The last night I agreed hesitantly to Chaya's, doubtful that a restaurant that “hot” could also be good. The meal was splendid, again highlighting the fact that I have never had an accurate intuition (raw-tuna salad, a pasta with peerless squid and slivered jalapeños, a small grilled chicken with a side of garlic the equal of any I've ever had, pommes frites, and a whole bottle of Château Montelena just for me).
Despite this grand send-off, I arrived home in a palsied state—tremors of exhaustion, near tears, that sort of thing. My wife noted a burnt-rubber scent coming out of my ears, firm evidence of my brain's drag racing with itself in film country. To set the brakes 1 wandered for hours in the woods, looking for morels, but it had been a dry, bitterly cold spring, and the mushrooms were scarce. At one point I walked three hours to find four morels. I did, however, gather enough to cook our annual spring rite, a simple sauté of the mushrooms, wild leeks, and sweetbreads. Regardless of this tonic for the body, I fired off inconsolably angry letters to no one in particular and lightly spanked the bird dogs for minor infractions, until I gave up on domestic life and packed north to the cabin, with three cartons of books on Native Americans and John Thorne's Simple Cooking. Native Americans are an obsession of mine, totally unshared by New York and Los Angeles for the average reason of moral va
cuum. Native Americans are like good poetry, and it is particularly banal that we are dying from the lack of what both tell us.
A number of years ago, I had the notion that I wished to write a poem as immediately fascinating as a recipe or a dirty picture. Fat chance. Art is in no position to duke it out with our baser appetites, appetites that are the cornerstones of our individual pyramids; art is only the pointed, three-cornered capstone, signaling finally what we had in mind. Meanwhile, down at the bottom, it is clear that instincts toward sex and food must be aesthetically satisfied, or the pyramid is the usual garbage heap. It is also dear, in a historical perspective, that our current, most active generation—those between twenty and forty—is placing a giant fiber-laden, aerobic turd of greed on the history of the republic.
John Thorne is not to be confused with Nicholas Thorne, the dark genius of contemporary classical music. John Thorne's unqualified genius is for food, and I suspect that he will justly inherit the mantle from M.F.K. Fisher as our best food writer. Others, Paula Wolfert, for instance, have a much more startling flair, and I suspect that since I am an outright pig I'd choose her table over Thorne's. But for day-in, day-out innovative brilliance and lucid prose, Thorne is my favorite. For nine years he has been writing a newsletter called Simple Cooking (available from the author at Box 58, Castine, Maine 04421), and this year he published with Penguin a cookbook of the same name. Perhaps living at the northeasternmost tip of America keeps Thorne unencumbered with the faddish, those tiny points of dullish light that signal some new craze like homemade tomato soup. In both the newsletter and the book, he writes of food as varied as red beans and rice, versions of corn bread, roasted red pepper and mushroom tian, bread and olives, focàccia, varieties of chowder, olive oils, nun's farts (pet it nonne—a type of fritter), boeuf à la ficelle, collards, pork, and apple pie.