My Year of Meats (7 page)

“Exotic? Well, botanically speaking, yes, but not what you’d expect. I’m more of a hybrid or a mutant.... I’m tall. Very tall, pole thin....

“Green eyes, shaped like my Japanese mother’s with her epicanthic fold. My dad’s eyes were blue. The green’s not traceable, but Ma thinks it’s the
oni
and I’m the devil’s spawn....

“Brown hair. Usually. Sometimes I dye it when I’m not working. Short, but respectable. No, like
really
short. Like boy short. Yeah, with a couple of AWOL parts that stick out in front....

“Breasts? Upstanding, small. Never discouraged, never lethargic ... Yes, quite sensitive ... Hmm, yes, some pain is good....

“Now? At a truck stop. Lying on the bed looking up at the drop ceiling ... An old army-green sleeveless undershirt and brand-new boxer shorts from Wal-Mart ... Haven’t been near a laundromat in weeks. Yes, men’s shorts ... More room to move around in ...

“The room? Lurid. Weeping walls and peeling ceilings, and it reeks of Tiparillos. The wallpaper’s flocked, harvest gold with a floral pattern. The walls are riddled with pockmarks, looks like from an air gun, and the mirror has a large crack in it. Mattress like a sponge. The carpet is golden, too, and sticky, so I’m wearing my combat boots ... unlaced, no socks.... No. You know what it’s like? A 1960s porn set: exotic Eurasian of ambiguous gender, dressed in men’s underwear and combat boots, lying on her back having phone sex on the damp polyester bedspread—sort of post-Vietnam nostalgia-porn thing. A quick little R and R fantasy in Tokyo or Seoul. I should call the boys in to film it. There must be a market for this....”

We finally met in Nebraska. I got back to the motel after a day of shooting a Mrs. Beedles and her Busy-B-Brisket, to find Sloan sipping a martini at the motel bar. He had no trouble recognizing us, of course, being as we were the only Japanese television crew in the 77,355 square miles of high plains that is Nebraska. He strolled over to us and extended his hand.

“Jane Takagi-Little? Sloan Rankin, Nebraska Film Commissioner. It’s my distinct pleasure to welcome you and your distinguished crew to the Cornhusker State.”

I tripped over the tripod I was carrying. Suzuki and Oh and the director were right behind me, so I introduced them all, and that’s when I noticed something peculiar about the Japanese crew—they would not look an American in the face. The director, a shy, sweet man this time, approached the ersatz Commissioner with desperation and gusto. In a valiant simulation of a hearty American greeting, he pumped Sloan’s hand, but he was unable to raise his eyes from the floor. When Oh’s turn came, his body just seemed to rotate like a magnet driven away by an opposing charge. Suzuki was the most successful ; he fixed his gaze in the region of Sloan’s solar plexus and haltingly greeted the string tie Sloan had purchased as part of his Commissioner disguise. Along with the cowboy hat. Or so he told me later.

“Will you be visiting our national forest during your stay?” Sloan drawled with unctuous aplomb. “It truly is one of Nebraska’s more notable attractions, being as it’s the only man-made forest in the United States of America.”

The crew stood quietly, heads bowed, and withstood this onslaught of English like schoolboys being singled out for unfair punishment, so I excused them and they escaped to their rooms with the equipment. Later I gave them petty cash and asked them to fend for themselves; I had to eat with the Commissioner. He’d been such a valuable asset during preproduction, I explained, and had introduced us to Mrs. Beedles and her Brisket and all the nice folks of Nebraska ... but Suzuki and Oh and the director were already deep into communion with Jack Daniel’s, cackling convulsively about something esoteric pertaining to their choice of video entertainment for the evening.

I left them in the motel room, cabling up the Betacam to the motel TV. In our equipment case was a small but well-curated collection of prerecorded tape stock with titles like “Texas T-Bone Does the Hoosier Hooters.” These were little-known regional delights that the crew had acquired during our travels, and needless to say, the climax was always about meat.

It was a cinematic night. A seedy motel room. A tall, dark stranger in cowboy boots, who followed me through the door, shut it firmly behind, then locked it. The unfamiliar hand, resting heavily on my shoulder, letting me know that I wouldn’t get away. In the cool night, beyond the venetian blinds, the nervous light of the neon flickered red and hot. Sloan was unapologetic as he pushed me down onto the flimsy bed and lowered himself on top. As the Commissioner, he was relentless.

“Nebraska,” he breathed into my ear. “Population: one million, five hundred eighty-four thousand, six hundred seventeen. Birth rate: seventeen per thousand. Death rate: nine point two per thousand. Population density: twenty point seven persons per square mile. Thirty-seventh state in the Union.”

He kissed me for a long time, then turned me over onto my stomach. “Major agricultural products,” he continued, “—corn, soybeans, hay, wheat, sorghum, dry edible beans”—he gnawed on the back of my neck—“sugar beets”—he doubled me over—“cattle, pigs, sheep ...”

He ran his hands around me, up under my T-shirt and down into my boxer shorts. With a quick yank, he pulled them down, then pressed against me. “Nebraska state motto: Equality Before the Law.”

There was to be no discussion.

Sloan played the sax. He had a remarkable embouchure and a memory for facts. All the things I’d told him on the phone over the previous months he remembered and now put to use, in an ebb and flow that lasted until morning. It was odd. Since I knew him so intimately from the phone, I felt emboldened to do or say anything—but at the same time, since I’d never met the physical man before, I was rocked by the heart-pounding terror of fucking a total stranger. He felt the strangeness too. During a rest, I opened my eyes and caught him staring.

“Is it what you’d imagined?” I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask.

“More or less. You’re younger looking. Like a prepubescent boy after a growth spurt.”

“Do you feel like a pedophile?”

“A bit. But I like it. What about you?”

“I knew you. Your descriptions were good. Gaunt, cadaverous.”

“Do you feel like a necrophile?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t mind looking like a corpse, but you shouldn’t think I fuck like one. I’d be upset.”

He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. His face was rough and his eyes were deep-set, curtained by a forelock of dark-brown hair, which diffused their intensity. He was tall. Taller than me, and lanky, but still somehow elegant. He had the most remarkable fingers, long and dexterous, and a habit of pressing his fingertips against his lips, as though to seal them shut. He could do wonderful things with his fingers.

In the morning, when it was still dark, I dragged myself out of bed, showered, and dressed. I left Sloan asleep, sprawled across the bed; he was an exquisite corpse. The crew was in the parking lot, silently loading the equipment into the van. We drove through the deep-blue, shadowy dawn to shoot the sun rising over the Nebraska dunes. Throughout the long day I thought about Sloan incessantly. He had insinuated himself under my skin. Whenever I could, I would disengage from the scene at hand, and my mind would retract like an oyster to its shell, to worry this newfound nacreous pebble. When we got back to the motel later that day, he was gone. He had chartered a flight from the municipal airport and disappeared as abruptly as he’d come. The room had been cleaned, sheets changed, bed made. I thought perhaps he might have left a note on the night table, or perhaps in my suitcase, or on the bathroom mirror. Perhaps a message at the front desk. But he hadn’t. I went to bed. Lay there and waited. By the time he called, I was dead asleep.

“You’re not here,” I told him groggily.

“No. That’s right. I’m here.” His voice was low, a rough whisper. Suddenly I was wide awake.

“Oh, Weren’t you just here?” A deep, sleep-induced indifference was the effect I was after, but my heart was in my throat and pounding.

“Yes. I was there last night.”

“Oh.” I yawned. “I don’t believe you.”

“No?” I could hear him smile.

“No. Because I don’t think you exist. Good night.”

“That’s too bad. It’s sad that I leave such a transient impression. I will try to fix that. Let’s see, Bloom on Saturday, isn’t it? Just south of Dodge City?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Called your office. Told them I was the Kansas Film Commissioner, calling to complain that you hadn’t submitted your location permits. They faxed me your itinerary for the rest of the month.”

I liked him. He produced records in New York, scored films in L.A., and his band, based in Chicago, played a dark, demented brand of postmodern jazz that was popular in Tokyo and Berlin. He was always flying across the country, so it was relatively easy for him to touch down for a night or two.

I worried about the crew at first. The ex—flight attendant knew right from the start, but I bought him off by approving his phone sex. He smirked a lot, but he kept quiet. The directors from Japan changed from week to week, so they would never catch on. Suzuki and Oh were the problem, but somehow they never seemed to notice that the film commissioners from Kansas and Utah looked the same as the one from Nebraska, and Sloan changed his shirt and the shape of his tie on a state-by-state basis. I kept waiting for the boys to raise their eyes, to recognize his face, but they never did. Maybe they were just too drunk, or Sloan was too tall, or maybe it was that all Americans looked the same, so why bother? More likely, they just didn’t care.

Sloan regarded these trips as opportunities for sex and sociological surveys. So did I, but that was my job. The sociology part, I mean. It’s not easy to find My American Wife and you have to initiate a broad base of inquiry. First we’d look for an area with distinctive geographical features and scenic appeal and then we’d undertake a survey : chambers of commerce, churches, PTAs,agricultural extension offices. The researchers would sit in the New York office, phoning these bastions of small-town culture; what I learned is that there’s precious little culture left, and what’s managed to survive is mostly of the “Ye Olde” variety.

Main Street is dead, which is no news to the families whose families ran family businesses on Main Street. When I returned from Japan and visited Quam, I found that all the local businesses from my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart. If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist
³
boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death. Don’t get me wrong. I love Wal-Mart. There is nothing I like more than to consign a mindless afternoon to those aisles, suspending thought, judgment. It’s like television. But to a documentarian of American culture, Wal-Mart is a nightmare. When it comes to towns, Hope, Alabama, becomes the same as Hope, Wyoming, or, for that matter, Hope, Alaska, and in the end, all that remains of our pioneering aspirations are the confused and self-conscious simulacra of relic culture: Ye Olde Curiosities ‘n’ Copie Shoppe, Deadeye Dick’s Saloon and Karaoke Bar—ingenious hybrids and strange global grafts that are the local businessperson’s only chance of survival in economies of scale.

Anyway, once we’d found a town, we’d start homing in on its married women. Using Tokyo’s list of Desirable Things, we’d extract the names of plausible candidates from our initial contacts—local clergymen and newspaper reporters made the richest sources—then we’d start phoning the wives. It was easy to get information from them about their families, hobbies, and favorite cuts of meats. Even wholesomeness could be ascertained over the phone. The challenge was to find out what they looked like. But there were ways. You could phone up the local Nu U Unisex Salon or Chez-Moi Hair Styling and Life Insurance and appeal to the owner as a colleague:

“‘So, Cindy, you’ve known Mrs. Crumph for five years, you said? Great. Now, just between you and me ... you’re a beauty
professional,
and what I really want to ask you for is your professional assessment of her appearance.... I mean, this is television, and we need someone who looks attractive—not necessarily glamorous, but you know, not horribly overweight, or with a walleye or goiter or anything.’ ”

“You really ask them that?” asked Sloan, bemused.

“Of course. We need to know these things.”

“You can’t shoot a wife with a goiter?”

“No. The BEEF-EX people are very strict. They don’t want their meat to have a synergistic association with deformities. Like race. Or poverty. Or clubfeet. But at the same time, the Network is always complaining that the shows aren’t ‘authentic’ enough. Well, I’ve been saying if only they’d let me direct, I’d show them some real Americans. So this is it, Sloan. This is my big chance....”

Sloan was entertained. I lay on the bed at the Outlaw Inn as he applied Wet ’N Wild nail polish to the reddened clusters of chiggers that were breeding all over my legs and thighs. They burrow under your skin and the only way to get rid of them is to cut off their oxygen supply.

I got the chiggers in Texas, in a field outside Lubbock, but it was worth it. We’d been standing there for a good part of an afternoon, shooting a very small child playing with his piglet. In the background was a white farmhouse. The boy, whose name was Bobby, lived there with his parents, Alberto and Catalina Martinez. Alberto, or Bert, as he now preferred to be called, was a farmworker. He’d lost his left hand to a hay baler in Abilene seven years earlier, a few months after he and Catalina (Cathy) had emigrated from Mexico, just in time for Bobby to be born an American citizen. That had been Cathy’s dream, to have an American son, and Bert had paid for her dream with his hand. Since then he had worked hard in the fields to support the family, and Cathy had worked too, in factory jobs, and finally their efforts had paid off. They had scraped up the money to buy the little white farmhouse and a few acres of surrounding land, and the way I figured it, Alberto, Catalina, and little Bobby were on their way to becoming a real American success story. The problem was getting the chance to tell it. After four months, the BEEF-EX injunction on the demographics of our wives was still in effect, and we continued to shoot primarily middle-class white American women with two or three children. The Martinez family would obviously break this mold.