Vampires in the Lemon Grove (19 page)

Here is a recipe we like for Team Krill Kool-Aid Punch:

You may have heard of pemmican, the Spam of Antarctica? A big favorite with the early polar explorers? Pemmican consists of a repugnant arithmetic of dried beef + beef fat. We don’t eat that dog food on my ship.

Dehydrated foods, nonperishables—these are Antarctic tailgating staples. Apocalypse food is appropriate for the Antarctic tailgate, the sort of stuff you’d find in a Cold War bunker: jerky, canned tuna, powdered milk, soups in envelopes. If you’re a health nut, don’t tailgate in the Antarctic. You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it’s a salad.

The tailgaters for Team Whale employ a wicked stratagem of culinary intimidation: they feast on krill cocktail, on krill risotto, on a humongous red velvet cake shaped to look like a krill with chocolate eyestalks. It’s a macabre business. You are aware it’s just icing, but still: the cake
looks
like a krill. Those Team Whale pricks have a five-star French-Guyanese chef on board.

Of course, those bastards are probably also pouring liquid gold onto their organic arugula leaves or something. Well, fuck them. Potato flakes and ham-in-a-can and army MREs from mid-century wars are plenty fine for Team Krill.

When Team Krill defeats Team Whale, you’ll want to have the provisions for a true Antarctic feast. I’ve been tailgating around the Frozen Continent with these items in my Victory Cooler since Ronald Reagan was in office: Arm & Hammer baking soda, Crisco, Nestlé Quik (powdered), a sack of sugar, dried corn, dried prunes, Hormel corned beef, astronaut candy, air horn. On the day that our team finally wins, it will be a bacchanalia. That said, rookie tailgaters, take note! You can get caught up in the moment in those ice caves and then—boom!—botulism.

In the katabatic winds, a “balmy” game day is 0.5°F. You are going to want to cover your extremities. Put your Team Krill outer shell over your Team Krill neck gaiter. Buy a pair of badass goggles.

Science hasn’t proven the efficacy of tailgating in costume (yet) but we believe that the visible support we provide to Team Krill by dressing up and moving our antennae and plastic krill thoraxes in the characteristic undulant motion of a school of krill is
vital
to their eventual victory against Team Whale. Through
mists of ice, we tailgaters lean over the gunwales of our boats and shake our pinky-beige swimmerets, tracing moody shapes onto the dark surface. What does this do for Team Krill? Skeptics, marine biologists, and my ex-wife, Maureen, will tell you: nothing. Can the krill hear us cheering for them? Probably not. Do they understand what they are seeing with their shrimpy compound eyes? Yes. Definitely. After seventeen seasons I am sure of this. I’ve seen the magic of cheering, in costume, for the almost invisible, indefatigable krill. I’ve seen krill accelerate toward the maw of Team Whale, streaming bubbles, a mute shrimp battle cry. It’s a beautiful sight, and beautiful to feel you were a part of it. That our screaming and our gyrations on the surface reach down to them, to the tiny, tumbling bodies deep below the ice: our team.

In fact, sometimes the little guys wave their plentiful legs back at us, as if they are cheering on our cheering.

If you’re really serious about tailgating, like my cousins and me, you’ll want to sequester yourself in your bedroom for two to three months prevoyage with old National Geographic footage and practice swishing. Most people lead with their hips, but for me it’s all in the ribs.

Denny Fitzpatrick, who is like the commissioner of our tailgates down there—this red-nosed Irishman who looks a little like a krill himself, whiskery and furious, and who started tailgating around the South Pole when I was still in diapers—Denny can do this one waggly thing, with his elbow. It really seems to get them going.

I mean, you really should try to look as much like a krill as you can.

Rule Five-A: If your wife leaves you for a millionaire motel-chain-owning douchebag fan of Team Whale, make sure you get your beloved mock-bioluminescent Team Krill eyestalks out of the trunk of her Civic before she takes off

I’m assuming that you rented a boat crewed by Russians. They control a lot of the Antarctic tailgating industry, so treat them well. We usually tip 5 percent of the charter cost of the ex-polar navigator. If and when you make it to the ice caves, you’ll be family.

Team Whale tailgaters fly into Ushuaia, Argentina. Typically, they roll into the harbor of the ice caves on the day of the game, their fleet puttering through the blue archways as lazily as a series of yawns, all those hundreds of Team Whale fans looking so smugly upholstered in their Disney-manufactured whale suits. I hear those cushioned baleens are as comfortable as pajamas. Just the fin portion costs three thousand dollars. Good for you, Team Whale tailgaters! It must be nice for you, to have that kind of money. It must be
real tough
, you cetaceous fucks, to support the best team in the league.

Excuse me.

Your average Team Krill tailgater can’t afford that kind of luxury. He wouldn’t want to. We like to travel in our own style. For example, my cousins and I have converted a Russian schooner into
The Krill Cruiser
, whose only purpose is to visually and audibly support Team Krill. Cousin Larry is an electrician and he did just an incredible job on the cabin. Strobe lights, a birch bar for beers and “hot” peanuts. The Russians love that little flourish, though theirs is not a culture of tailgaters. I sometimes get the sense the Russians think us a little silly.

You might also want to bring a little gift for the mailman at Port Lockroy. They had some British guy installed there last time we sailed through. Young guy. He gets so lonely. Some magazines, some chocolate mints. It’s really just the thought.

Quick and easy cooking is a must for the Antarctic tailgater. Here is a family recipe that will give your Antarctic tailgate some “regional flavor”:

Salt to taste and all that.

Although, typically, I don’t bother with salt. I don’t really bother with forks and such, either. I like to pluck the meat from the burning coals and bare my teeth and let out a piercing, unearthly howl at the Team Whale tailgaters moored across the ice floes, personally. Just to razz them a little.

You want to have a sportsmanlike attitude while tailgating in the Antarctic, even when it is difficult (e.g., snow-blind/mourning a loss/drunk on Crown Royal). Show those Team Whale fans that even though their players weigh ten tons to our players’ .038 grams, we krill supporters are the bigger people. Some of the tailgaters for the minke whales are homicidally devoted to their team. Rich psychopaths. You’re likely to find the rowdiest bands of them near the Grytviken whaling station, drinking cabernet and hissing across the calved icebergs at us.

Pull your rubberized Krill earflaps down—that’s what I do. Be civil. Tragedies happen in the lower latitudes, particularly when some of the younger guys get their blood up. Fights seem to spike about a month or two before the Big Game, when you hit that traffic in the Bismarck Strait.

One sad example, from a coupla seasons ago: This teenager called the minke whale fans “dickriders.” A poor freckled kid from Decatur City, Iowa. God, we all liked him. He wasn’t the brightest bulb but somehow he’d memorized every Krill statistic going back to the Cretaceous Food Chain Games—he just loved the franchise. It was his first tailgate, he told us—his first time below the equator. Sweet kid. We all liked him but we kept forgetting his name.

Anyway, the dawn after the whole “dickriders” altercation? Our Krill boats were all still at anchor but the Team Whale tailgaters were long gone. We found the kid’s body floating amid blocks of ice, already meat, three blue skua jawing on it. An orca sailed by him like a sunken moon, its wake engulfing the kid in black ripples. His feet were bare, I remember that. Those monsters took his Krill feet and his Krill Scamper-socks. Can you imagine that level of evil—sock robbers? We could see the boats of his murderers like a line of ants in the distance, entering the hole of the midnight sun.

You can lose at tailgating, too, just as devastatingly as Team Krill keeps losing to Team Whale.

Rule Nine: Should you have to bury your dead, do so in the proper receptacles

Nobody likes a litterbug. You can’t get much lower class than a boat of tailgaters who just leave their dead around.

The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don’t want to come all that way and miss the game.

Some (like my ex) will tell you that it’s a special sort of masochist who supports Team Krill, since all evidence suggests that they have been consistently losing the Food Chain Games for eons. Paleobiologists’ molecular-dating methods reveal that the krill have never won a game. Team Krill loses to Team Blue Whale, Team Humpback Whale, Team Fin Whale, Team Sei Whale, Team Skua, and Team Albatross.

To this, I say: sure, it takes a special kind of fan to love the league underdog. Something Maureen would know very little about. Listen. The krill are in a rebuilding year. The krill are always in a rebuilding year. Every year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 krill gets eaten. Team Whale sucks Team Krill into the primordial combs of its baleen plates at twenty-eight knots. We’ve got a decent offense but we’ve got a pretty dismal record on defense.

But this is going to be our season. With all your might, try to believe that.

The greatest feeling in the world is getting there. Rowing over to the ice caves on game night, after all that travel. Krill will surge along either side of your boat in a rosy pregame warm-up. Lots of excitement in the frozen air. Inside the ice caves, you can glimpse the minke whales grouping into pods.

“Surge, krill!” Denny Fitzpatrick always screams at this juncture; you can bet that he’s been drunk since April. “Surge, you godless bastards!”

Antarctic tailgating is such a nice way of socializing on a balmy evening, when the sun goes down in flames behind the caves, while you share the end of your two-year supply of liquor and chips (how did it last only eight months?) with the Russians. We wear our costumes on the stern of the boat, our Krill eyestalks ogling the polar stars, huddled, shivering, convulsing with victory dreams. We munch and munch in the most extraordinary silence.

When Beverly enters the room, the first thing she notices is her new patient’s tattoo. A cape of ink stretches from the nape of the man’s neck to his hip bones. His entire back is covered with blues and greens, patches of pale brown. But—what the hell is it a tattoo
of
, anyways? Light hops the fence of its design. So many colors go waterfalling down the man’s spine that, at first glance, she can’t make any sense of the picture.

Compared to this tattoo, the rest of the man’s skin—the backs of his legs and his arms, his neck—looks almost too blank. He’s so tall that his large feet dangle off the massage table, his bony heels pointing up at her. Everything else is lean and rippling, sculpted by pressures she can only guess at. Beverly scans the patient’s intake form: male, a smoker, 622″, 195 lbs., eye color: brown, hair color: black, age: 25. Sgt. Derek Zeiger, U.S. Army, Company B, 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In the billing section, he’s scribbled:
This is free for me, I hope and pray …? I’m one of the veterans
.

And it is free—once she fills out and faxes in an intimidating
stack of new forms. Ten sessions, 100 percent covered by military insurance. Sergeant Zeiger is her first referral under the program created by Representative Eule Wolly’s H.R. 1722 bill, his latest triumph for his constituency: Direct Access for U.S. Veterans to Massage Therapist Services.

At the Dedos Mágicos massage clinic, they’d all been excited by the new law; they’d watched a TV interview with the blue-eyed congressman in the office break room. Representative Wolly enumerated the many benefits of massage therapy for soldiers returning home from “the most stressful environments imaginable.” Massage will ease their transition back to civilian life. “Well, he’s sure preaching to our choir!” joked Dmitri, one of the oldest therapists on staff. But Beverly had been surprised to discover her own cellular, flower-to-sun hunger for exactly this sort of preaching—in the course of a day, it was easy to lose faith in the idea that your two hands could change anything.