The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (7 page)

“Where?”

“Just go get dressed,” he answered.

A minute later we were traipsing across the backyard—
our
backyard. I’d never personally owned a backyard. The closest I’d ever gotten was an apartment with a doublewide fire escape. Brent was heading toward the barn—
our
barn. The morning was chilly, but not as cold as the previous night had been. The grass beneath our feet was trampled and brown, having borne the weight of the region’s legendarily deep snowfall for the last seven months. The ground itself was solid, still deeply frozen, but when we came upon the part of the yard that had been reached by the morning sun, I could smell it.

Mud.

Dirt + Water. I’m not sure I’d smelled true springtime mud in over a decade. We didn’t have real mud in New York City. We had close approximations like Filth + Water. And Grime + Pee.

So this is spring, I thought. I’d nearly forgotten what it felt like. It felt good. The direct sunlight felt warm on the skin, unlike the sunlight reflected off skyscrapers and diffused by thick air. The ground beneath my feet reminded me that the earth’s naked surface was porous, not sloped toward the nearest sewer grate. Hearing a robin chirp as it hopped along the driveway reminded me that birds make noises, not just piles of poo on top of window air-conditioning units.

While I stood soaking in the spring all around me, Brent walked ahead and opened the side door on the barn—
our
barn.

“C’mon,” he called to me. “Check this out.”

By the time I reached the doorway, he was deeper inside. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I listened to the sounds around me. Cooing. And clucking. And then, suddenly:
HERE COMES THE BRIDE!

I jumped back toward the door.

“Look!” Brent yelled, startling me even more. In the dim light of the barn, through the swirling haze of floating hay particles, I spotted him. He stood just inside what looked to be a makeshift terrorist holding cell framed into the corner of the barn. He was holding up a small gray ball.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“An egg!” he answered. “For breakfast!”

“That’s an egg?” I questioned dubiously. “Lemme see that.”

“I just figured that where there were roosters, there’d be eggs,” he continued. He was so excited that I decided not to point out the obvious flaw in his knowledge of poultry reproduction. He proudly and gently handed over his find. It was more spherical than ovoid. And the surface seemed to give a little in my grasp. Rather than a shell, it appeared to have more of a thick skin. Up close I realized that I’d originally thought it was gray in color not because of the dim light, but because it was semitranslucent.

“Are you sure this is a chicken egg?” I asked.

“Of course it is,” Brent answered. “It’s in the chicken coop.”

It was hard to fault his logic.

Much to the agitation of the chickens and roosters, Brent dug around in the straw-filled cubbyholes mounted to the wall. The longer we stood in the coop, the braver the poultry grew. Within thirty seconds I had four birds pecking at my shins.

“C’mon. Let’s get out of here,” I said nervously. “Once they get the taste of human blood there’s no stopping them.”

“There are dozens of eggs,” Brent said, continuing to root around in the nests.

“Just grab three,” I said. “That’s all we need for breakfast. We’ll get the rest later.”

As we crossed back over the muddy earth toward the house, I turned the eggs over and over in my palms. Our first meal. Entirely provided from our very own farm. This was what it’s all about, I thought. Even though I hadn’t so much as tossed a handful of grain at these chickens, I had an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. I was feeding myself. I was convinced that soon I’d be creating feasts that were entirely grown and raised on our land—feasts that would be the envy of the greatest New York restaurateurs.

Back in our kitchen, I took down one of the old saucepans, filled it with water, and placed it on the stove. There was no butter or oil, so I decided to poach the eggs. We stood around the saucepan waiting for the water to boil.

“What will we eat the eggs on?” Brent asked. “There are no plates.”

“We’ll just use our fingers. Like in the olden days.”

“They had forks in the olden days.” Brent sighed.

As soon as the water began bubbling, I cracked one of the eggs against the side of the pot. Well, crack might be too strong a word for it. With its leathery skin, I just sort of pressed it down against the lip of the pot until it began to tear. The first egg slipped easily into the water. It swirled around perfectly, clinging together as if it were giving itself a hug.

“Look at how orange that yoke is,” Brent observed as I tore apart the “shell” of the next egg with my fingernails.

“It’s orange because the chickens get to eat in the yard,” I explained. I remember my mother teaching me this when we used to buy our eggs from our Wisconsin neighbor—an ancient woman who also happened to be the town dogcatcher. When we’d drop by the woman’s house, my mother would push me out of the passenger-side car door and watch me hopscotch over a checkerboard of dog droppings that dotted the patchy front lawn leading to her kitchen door, and then hopscotch back. I think I developed my talent for dancing in seven-inch heels without spilling my drink by hopscotching over those dog piles while carrying two dozen eggs.

The two eggs swirled lazily in the bubbly water, their whites turning slowly opaque. I reached for the third and final egg. This egg was the smallest of the three, and probably the least likely to win an egg beauty pageant. Its shell was on the soft side like the others, but it was also sort of pockmarked. It seemed less like an egg and more like what a Hollywood special effects department might have crafted to portray an alien egg sac.

The skin was a little tougher than the others. I repeatedly poked at it with my thumbnails.

“Go get a pen out of my bag,” I said. “Let me see if I can get a hole started…” The egg sac tore suddenly and the contents plopped into the pot.

Brent, who had been peering down into the pot just beneath me, reared up quickly, knocking me in the chin with the back of his head.

“What is that?!”
he yelled.

Before we could react to the sight of the viscous moss-green blob that had dropped into the pot, the stench hit us. It was completely overwhelming. I retched and backed away from the stove.

Brent, with a stomach trained by years as a doctor, was the first to peer back into the pot, where a swirl of gray-green goo was enveloping the other two perfect eggs.

“What is it?!”
I echoed.

“I think it’s spoiled,” Brent answered, poking at the bits that floated to the surface with his finger.

“Don’t touch it,”
I said, horrified.

It hadn’t occurred to us that simply because it was
our
first day at the farm, it may not have been that particular egg’s first morning. Or second morning. It could just as likely have been its fortieth morning. I wasn’t poaching eggs; I was performing a partial birth abortion.

“Scoop it out of there,” I said, still not quite able to look.

“With what? There are no spoons. Besides, it’s all spread out now.”

“Are the other eggs done?” I asked.

“I think so, but they’re coated in the green stuff.”

“We’ll just wash the good ones off,” I said.

“No way. There’s no way I’m eating those other eggs.”

I did see his point. As far as contaminants go, that third egg was toxic enough to shut down a Chinese baby formula factory. But that was part of country life, I thought: unpredictable. Food wasn’t sorted, and radiated, and sterilized into conformity as it was in the supermarket food chains. These were our very own eggs, and by God, we were going to eat them.

I moved the pot to the sink and used my fingers to pull out the largest bits of green goo. After a quick rinse under the faucet, the two good eggs floated to the top, with their glistening orange yokes. I gently put one in the palm of my hand and offered it to Brent.

“Uh uh,” he said. “You first.”

I tipped my head back and dropped the blob into my mouth. I rolled it around a bit with my tongue before I bit down on the orange yolk. In an instant my mouth filled with the most vibrant flavors. It was richer and smoother and thicker than any egg I’d ever tasted. It tasted exactly like a newly mowed lawn smelled, and coated my tongue like slowly melting Swiss chocolate.

Brent stared at my face, looking for any signs of a toxic reaction. I smiled and held out the pot with the remaining egg.

“These eggs,” I mumbled through the liquid gold in my mouth, “are worth a jumbo mortgage.”

Chapter Six

The rest of our first weekend in our new country house was spent exploring the sixty acres surrounding the Beekman, greeting neighbors who stopped by to tell us their stories of the mansion, and sweeping up dead flies. It seemed that the minute we swept a room clean, flies began dropping to the floor again like, well, flies. It was impossible to tell where they were coming from. They just appeared at the windows, carpeting the sills and floor with their slow-motion death throes. We had yet to see a fly that was actually flying. They just kept coming and coming, like a buzzing
Night of the Living Dead
.

Doug, Garth, and Michelle seemed to have prepared the town for our arrival. Nearly everyone who came by to visit already knew that Brent worked for Martha Stewart, and that I had written a couple of books, though no one seemed particularly interested in my literary career. Everyone, however, wanted to talk to Brent about Martha.

I was used to listening to the same old questions and answers about Martha. Ever since Brent began working at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, all of our friends and family wanted to know what Martha was
really
like. It was understandable. I remembered how excited I was the first time I’d met her. Brent had been invited to her East Hampton home to discuss some business details regarding a new geriatric center they were creating together at Mount Sinai Hospital. Since it was the Fourth of July weekend, I was invited along to share lunch on her patio.

Martha was only a few months out of prison at the time and was still under house arrest. She was allowed to travel short distances for business reasons, and somehow this weekend luncheon at her beach house qualified. Under her capri pants, her ankle monitoring device, which looked something like a buckled seat belt, was clearly visible. It looked uncomfortable and hot, but she neither drew attention to it nor tried to hide it.

I’d met Martha in her kitchen, which I’d recognized from dozens of photos and television specials. She was making our meal. When we’d been invited to her house for lunch, I hadn’t expected her to actually be making it herself. But there she was, making freshly ground tuna and wasabi patties with her bare hands, just like my mother. (If my mother made freshly ground tuna and wasabi patties.)

Given Martha’s reputation as a stern taskmaster, I was a little nervous about standing around doing nothing while she cooked.

“Can I help with anything?” I asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Martha replied in her adopted Connecticut clipped enunciation. “Would you cut up that celery for the salad?”

I stared at the stalks of celery lying perfectly and crisply prone on the counter before me. I was frozen with fear as the questions started a pileup in my mind.

How big? Diced? Chopped? Do I string it first? Didn’t I see her string celery on a Thanksgiving special once? Do I cut straight across? On an angle? Which angle?! Forty-five degrees? Twenty degrees? A slight but decorative slant? Isn’t this a paring knife? Don’t I need a chef’s knife? Can celery be pared? Is this a cutting board or a platter? What if this is the meat cutting board (which must be washed with a light bleach solution
—Martha Stewart Living,
January 1992) and not the vegetable one (which should be rubbed with a cut lemon to deodorize a lingering onion smell—November 1996)? Is the proper way to slit one’s wrist across the veins or along the veins? Can I die without getting any bloodstains on Martha’s spotless kitchen floor?

I closed my eyes and went for broke.

Chop.

I looked up. Martha hadn’t exploded in a rage. So I continued.

“So, Josh, tell me,” Martha said, as she began washing freshly shelled peas in a Martha Stewart green strainer. “What do you do?”

“Well, I work in advertising,” I answered, “and I write.”

“Oh. Interesting. What do you write?”

“Um. I, ah, wrote a memoir,” I answered, pronouncing “memoir” with an overly pretentious French accent in an attempt to make a joke out of the fact that I—at only thirty-six years old—had already written the story of my life. “Mem-MWAAHHE.” The joke fell flat. Apparently French accents aren’t all that pretentiously out of place in East Hampton.

“A memoir?” Martha continued. “What did you have to write a memoir about?”

I looked over at Brent. He furrowed his brow in warning. But what could I do? She asked me.

“Weeeellll, um, I, uh…I was a drag queen for many years and I worked in nightclubs, but I had a, well, little drinking problem that put me in, ah, rather sordid situations, and then I met a boyfriend whom I thought was going to help me clean myself up, but he turned out to be a, um, male escort specializing in, ah, sadomasochism who I also eventually found out had a massive crack cocaine addiction, which didn’t help my drinking issues. But it’s not all that sad; it’s more of a tragicomedy, if you know what I mean, because, well, I did a lot of funny things and all my costumes had live goldfish swimming around in my fake tits—er—breasts, which was really quite creative, Martha. You would have really appreciated it. Because it was creative. It was like Halloween all year round. A lot of crafting went into my costumes. Really, it was quite creative. And crafty. Really. Crafts…”

For some reason, I thought that if I could successfully reframe my checkered past as one big craft project, Martha could relate to it better. She couldn’t.