My Year of Meats (11 page)

The majority of housewives say they would prefer to buy meat from vending machines, where they would not be called upon to make conversation about the weather or answer questions like “How are you today?”

“The modern Japanese housewife, living a hermetic existence, increasingly cut off from contact with the world, is literally losing her voice. Is it any wonder she prefers to interact with a machine?” asks Dr. Yoko Horii, of Tokyo University. Dr. Horii studies eating disorders, depression, substance abuse, suicide, and other dysfunctional behaviors among Japanese housewives.

These new findings may be a cause of concern to sociologists
like Dr. Horii, but the challenge for meat marketers is
clearly how to “de-humanize” meat.

—
Asahi Gazetteer
(English translation)

 

I read this article in a Tokyo newspaper and found the market trend toward dehumanized meat quite interesting. After my year, I have my own thoughts on the matter.

A sixteen-year-old high school exchange student from Japan named Yoshihiro Hattori was shot to death in Louisiana. Rodney Dwayne Peairs, the man who shot him, worked at a Winn Dixie supermarket as a meat packer. Hattori had rung Peairs’s bell to ask for directions, and Peairs shot the boy in the chest with his .44 magnum. He had yelled “Freeze” before he fired. The case went to court, and Peairs was acquitted by the jury of manslaughter, on the grounds that he had acted in a reasonable way to defend his home.

Japan was shocked at the verdict. It was murder, or at the very least it was an act of wanton and reckless manslaughter, and the Japanese media went into overdrive, trying to explain what was so clearly a miscarriage of justice. On TV talk shows, professors from Tokyo University who were experts on U.S. culture discussed the profound feelings Americans have for their guns. Japanese news crews brought cameras into gas stations and 7-Elevens to show viewers the vast array of magazines on guns, ammo, and hunting for sale. They filmed bars with firearms displayed in glass cases like works of art, next to the stuffed heads of the animals they had killed. One crew even visited Wal-Mart to show how easy it is to buy a gun over the counter. A newspaper article attempted to analyze the profound feeling Americans have for guns by comparing it to the Japanese attachment to rice, and a TV show offered lessons in idiomatic English, explaining that
freeze
was not just something that was done to meat.

“Do all Americans carry guns?” was a question my Japanese friends used to ask me. “What kind do you have? Where do you carry it?” I became a documentarian partly in order to correct cultural misunderstandings like this one, and it made me crazy to see them so effectively reinforced.

Hattori was killed because Peairs had a gun, and because Hattori looked different. Peairs had a gun because here in America we fancy that ours is still a frontier culture, where our homes must be defended by deadly force from people who look different. And while I’m not saying that Peairs pulled the trigger because he was a butcher, his occupation didn’t surprise me. Guns, race, meat, and Manifest Destiny all collided in a single explosion of violent, dehumanized activity. In the subsequent civil trial, evidence that had been suppressed during the criminal trial was introduced, including Peairs’s affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. The civil court found him guilty.

I started collecting local stories and would test them on the boys as we drove around in the van. If they liked a story or found it surprising, I would use it in the show. I was a full-fledged director now, and I’d promised Ueno I would do my best to satisfy the “unique sensibilities” of the Japanese television audience; since I wasn’t Japanese, I used the boys as my barometer. Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has
become
the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.

In Green River, Wyoming, a bartender told us a story about a rancher who was traveling into town, when he spotted a campfire. As it was growing late, he rode closer, glad of the company and the promise of a good meal. Sitting there were two scruffy-looking men, stirring a large pot full of delicious-smelling stew. The rancher asked if he could have some, and reluctantly they agreed. He sat down and ate a bowl, then, finding it quite tasty, he asked what it was. “Pigeon stew,” they answered somewhat curtly. They were not very sociable, so rather than linger, he rode on into Green River, where he stopped at the bar for a drink. The bar was crowded. Seated to one side, he overheard some townspeople discussing a doctor back East who was looking to purchase clean human skulls. On the other side, a couple of cowhands were talking about the mysterious disappearance of a local rancher named Lloyd Pigeon.

“Sooo
da ne ...
,” said Suzuki, considering. “Cannibalism is interesting to Americans.”

“We Japanese eat mostly fish,” explained Oh.

 

 

Sloan used to love this stuff. He was an entirely modern, urban musician and had never been exposed to the macabre underbelly of small-town America. The crew and I would come back from a day on the sagebrush steppes, clambering about the buttes, scrabbling down riverbeds, jumping barbed wire, hopping tracks, searching for the perfect shot of the lowering skies, and I’d find Sloan lounging in a local bar like the one in Green River, buying drinks for laid-off trona miners and railroad men. It was great, like having a researcher in the field. He’d cull stories, then feed them to me later in bed.

Bed with Sloan. He was a masterful storyteller, but that was only a small part of it. First I have to explain. I had hit my adult height by the time I was fourteen and spent most of my adolescence freakishly taller than my classmates. My first sexual experiences felt like geographical surveys; I was a continent, a landmass beset by small, brave pioneers. Like Gulliver. It was amusing, in a distant sort of way. Later I learned about pleasure, but procuring it always felt masturbatory, like my partner was a tool, something I could hold in my hands and manipulate.

Few men could make me feel diminutive. Sex became sleek and narcissistic, but I never experienced that queasy, uneasy paradox of boldness and fear. I never felt submissive and certainly I never lost control.

Until Sloan. He overwhelmed me. Is it regressive of me to talk this way? The word “masterful” comes to mind, but he could be that. In the motel room in Nebraska, with the neon spitting red and blue and turning the air electric, Sloan took charge. In life, I am the most competent person I know. It can get in the way. But Sloan was such a master of sex that my competence in life was irrelevant. He relieved me of choice. And self-consciousness.

That was the charm of it. I was a director now, in control of my crews and my shoots. Yet in hotels and motor lodges across the country, in seedy rooms or from time to time in penthouse suites, the moment the door closed behind us, the parameters of my reality would shift—violently, like the list of a ship, or, on a plane, the way your stomach pitches during a problematic descent through turbulence—that is how he would tip me.

In the quiet corridor on the way to the room, he walked behind me and his focus made me cower. The hairs on my neck would prickle and rise, and there was this moment of fear.... I’d seen nature documentaries about the sexual behavior of large felines in the wild. I’ve
made
nature documentaries about the sexual behavior of large felines in the wild. I’d just never felt like one before.

I just assumed that, like any dominant male, he had a harem. Okay. There was this one thing Sloan did that was antithetical to nature, at least the documented animal kind: He always wore not one but two condoms, the heavy-duty kind that seemed to be made out of synthesized latex and Kevlar, which he would secure in place before anything resembling a penetration took place. Not a nudge, not a bump or a brushing up, was allowed to happen unprotected. I assumed that his precautions reflected the peculiar exigencies of his profession: Musicians of course would have multiple partners. Still, while I was a firm believer in safe sex, and while I was grateful to him for initiating such durable care, there was something disturbingly neurotic about that second condom.

Lying in bed in Fly, Oregon, I asked him about it. He was stunned at my assumptions regarding his promiscuity. On the contrary, he protested, he was protecting himself from me. Standard precaution. And thus we arrived at a juncture of sorts.

“Takagi, where I grew up, people are careless. All the guys I went to high school with got their girlfriends pregnant and are stuck working shitty factory jobs in Akron, trying to pay child support....”

“I’m not your girlfriend, Sloan. And I don’t get pregnant.”

“And then with AIDS and all ... I’m a musician; a lot of my friends have died. And you’re in the
film
business, for Christ’s sake. For all I know, you’ve got a Commissioner in every port.”

“Sloan, that’s the most insane ... How could I? Getting you in and out of these backwater towns is hard enough.”

“Yes, but once you figure out the logistics for one Commissioner, it’s simple to bring in a second or third....”

“I don’t have the time—”

“Or you could just hire locally....”

“Never mind the energy—”

“Or you could get a travel model, something compact and portable, like your flight attendant? I always thought that he ...”

“That’s disgusting. Anyway, it was never my intention to be monogamous with you, believe me. I never even intended to
like
you, but that’s just the way it’s turned out.”

From the parking lot outside the motel window, the air brakes of an enormous semi squealed and decompressed. The motel was in a strip mall by the interstate.

“Is that comment significant?” Sloan asked.

The truckdriver checked into the unit next to ours. He slammed the door and went straight into the bathroom. I listened to him urinate.

“I don’t know, Sloan ... Do you want it to be? And if it is, can we go to the next level of intimacy—you know, use just one condom?”

“We could get tested.”

“I have. Repeatedly. Well, twice since you ...
I’m
fine.”

The truckdriver flushed. I listened to him reenter the bedroom and turn on the television, flipping through the channels. Looking for porn.

Sloan rolled over onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow. “Me too.”

The driver turned off the television and turned on the radio. Surprisingly, the sounds of Mahler filtered through the hollow Sheetrock. I looked over at Sloan.

“It’s Mahler’s Sixth,” he said, “his most completely
personal
symphony, according to his wife. Listen, it’s his old orchestra too—the Boston Philharmonic—but it’s Tilson Thomas conducting.” He was watching me. “So, that means we’re safe,” he concluded tentatively. “At least from the disease standpoint, right? I haven’t slept with anyone else since you, either.”

“So ... ?” I didn’t know what he was getting at. He had this wicked grin on his face as he rolled on top of me.

“Takagi, do you mind if I ... I mean, could we ... Here, just for a moment ... I won’t come inside you, I promise.”

“Sloan, what are you ... ?”

He had lowered himself, half laughing, and was whispering relentlessly in my ear. “It’s perfect, Jane, please.... Come on, it’s such a
personal
moment....”

“Sloan, you’re crazy.”

“Jane, I trust you completely.”

“Yeah, well, I trust you too....”

Which was a lie. I mean, I trusted him about testing negative because I knew him to be scrupulous in areas of empirical truths and health care. But emotionally he was an enigma. I didn’t understand him, so how could I trust him?

And maybe that’s why I went along with it. I was curious. Suddenly I needed to know things: Why did he want this? What did it mean? I needed to know if, unprotected, he would be different, if he would lose his control, if he would suddenly fall in love with me, and if he did, would I fall in love with him? And just as suddenly, the need for answers turned physical, and I found myself craving the heightened contact of total nakedness and the thrill of the truth or dare. Suddenly it seemed so personal.

We fucked without a condom, which sounds banal, but fueled by the urgency of all those ifs, it was as if the sex opened up and swallowed us. And I let him come inside me because I knew I was safe, and when it was over and the shuddering had slowed but the trembling was still raw and sporadic, Sloan raised his damp head from my sweaty breast and thanked me politely. In the desultory conversation that followed, I discovered that in the two decades he’d spent developing his sexual connoisseurship, he had never once fucked without a condom. He’d been curious—and so, of course, had I. But afterward, curiosity sated, I was only terribly aware of the sounds that filled the room: the distant whine of cars on the interstate; the soft exhalations of Sloan sleeping; the muted movements of the truckdriver next door, padding back and forth across the stained carpet, popping the flip top of a can of Budweiser, opening and closing drawers, all the while listening to Mahler’s most completely personal symphony on NPR, which was a reminder to me that maybe I didn’t know so much about musicians or truckdrivers after all.

A light, reassuring tone was what the editor wanted, but Akiko found this difficult to achieve. It was, after all, an article on complications.