Excerpt #4 from his original 1983 Smoke Signals food column
DEAD FOOD SCROLLS #1 | #2 | #3
I love sushi but you know there is a point at which you really don’t want to sink your teeth into a fish that’s still flopping, and I’m not again talking about the greens that can be technically alive. I could go out and dig under two feet of snow and find some reasonably green parsley, rip it up and stuff it in my mouth — that’s not what I mean.
I’m a little worried that I’ve changed certain brain waves by not drinking enough alcohol which I’ve cut down on vastly. Mostly because I find the less I drink, the more I get to dream and dreaming (up here in the great white north where not a lot happens) gives you something interesting to do at night. Anyway, of late I’ve been strapping weights all over my body and dancing to reggae music for an hour a day to combat winter. I’m wondering if this isn’t changing my brain in some ways because suddenly I used to eat beef and now I’m going for more pork products. I have a passion, which I’ve only been able to solve lately by going to Kentucky and eating ample quantities of pork skin and pit barbeque with a sauce so hot that every hair on my body including 7 hairs on my chest are wet. So that might be a consideration. Then again I’m not going to take this live food thing too far — if it endangers my health.
For instance, I’ve agreed to do a project with the French actress Jeanne Moreau: the project is of course top secret as is everything I do. Anyway I was thinking of lying there on the forest floor in France with a trained pig; admittedly this would cost bucks. The minute the truffle is torn from the ground I will pop it in my mouth while it is still alive like a big black, pitch black, coal black, raw apple. It isn’t that I’ve killed too much; I must say that I’ve enjoyed eating several hundred woodcock, quail, geese and venison this fall. These animals are top drawer nutrition-wise as they spend, what your humble readers in New York would think, their lives in a natural environment. There is nothing quite so natural as the big slab of deer liver fresh from the steaming cavity.
Incidentally, I sent McGuane Schweid’s now-famous book, at least it’s famous in my own mind, Hot Peppers. I think, of course, it’s superior in grace and beauty to any novels I’ve read coming out last year. There is a beautiful meal enclosed in a new book by William Least Heat Moon: the book is called Blue Highways. Look for the great meal in there.
This reggae music might just be poisoning me. I looked for Jamaica on the map to make sure I knew just where it was. But I have a tendency to jig around in odd places when I shouldn’t be jigging around, like the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, or at the Keeneland auction — the horse sale. At the horse sale which I attended the top mare went for 3.8 million: think of socking that into a wine cellar! As my cousin, Thurman, who is a block lawyer, says — a house with an empty refrigerator is like a dildo without a battery. It’s pretty catchy. In other words, if your clothes are too tight, get bigger clothes.
I fear this reggae is infecting everything I do now. Once Buffet brought me a gallon of fresh shucked oysters and we went out to have a few cold ones, put them in my studio fridge, and when we got back I put them out on my desk next to some books — my books looked so fragile compared to this great mass of fresh shucked oysters and, as if not knowing what I was doing, I thrust both hands into this gallon of oysters and began to eat greedily, because I was so dazed with grief at the time I knew this live food would help — of course they weren’t swimming because oysters don’t swim — they were moving counter clockwise at a rate which you didn’t see them directly, you just saw it out of the corner of your eye. For instance I wanted to congratulate you for quitting smoking but have you thought perhaps you quit smoking for the same reason that you started smoking, another desperate ploy of the ego? It’s like trying to explain eagerly to a starving child that you just gave up spending a couple of hundred bucks a week on cocaine; the starving child sits there with those huge eyes like a Keene painting and whispers “congrats.” I suppose with the same distance that a writer necessarily has from the world, I will always be a rather lonely detective of food, uncritical, an observer between meals … it’s a job.
Addendum
Dear Folks,
I am back to eating dead food. In Florida I put a small live frog in my mouth but I could not swallow it. The same thing happened with a minnow. Perhaps, this whole concept of live food should remain just that, a concept. My next DEAD FOOD SCROLL will be about “the food of lust and violence.”
I hope you are well Mike. I have been dancing an hour each day not with a girl but with a heavy dumbbell in each hand. I am getting to be a very strong fat guy.
- to be continued -