Year of the Cow (5 page)

The rest of the time, I pimp shows about famous people falling in mud.

I'm not trying to disparage those simpler shows. If people didn't watch them—or if television execs somewhere didn't think people would watch them—they wouldn't get made. Believe it or not, television is something of a meritocracy. What bothers me on this particular morning—on most mornings—is the structure of my day, such as it is.

I finally pull into the parking garage of a nondescript office building in the shadow of a major studio. Four floors up, I settle into a thirdhand office chair to make quality television for eight hours. Or ten. Or twelve. Maybe fourteen. That's part of the problem: I can never tell for sure. I've seen the sun rise in this building more than once. I work with lovely, talented people, and issues like this are by no means limited to the entertainment industry, but because of the nature of the process, my time is not my own. We stay until the project is done.

Television, for all its thrill and magic, is largely a function of meetings. And the people in those meetings got there through various ministrations of intelligence, creativity, bluster, accident, and nepotism. The people who actually make the stuff that goes on your television—the end result, really; the reason people watch—have to sluice their work through the fine mesh of those meetings so that the people who write the checks feel reassured that those checks they're writing aren't written in vain. If five MBAs signed off on a pilot script, it must be good. Right?

Those meetings are where my work lives and dies. A roomful of people who couldn't agree on lunch need to agree that an ad or a promo is “good.” If it's deemed acceptable—great. If not, if we're lucky, we'll be told why—assuming the person actually conveying that information is one of the people who actually participated in said meeting. Or, if not, assuming the person knows what the people who were in the meeting actually said. Or, barring that, assuming that person is a relatively perceptive individual, with a solid educated guess why it flopped in the room and is willing to work with us. Or, barring that, has a prophesying dead grandmother who comes to them in their sleep and lays bare to them the hearts and minds of television executives. Or, barring that, simply isn't looking to throw the agency under a bus to look good while really having no idea what's going on. If nothing else, we're convenient scapegoats.

Such is agency life. In a way, I'm like an animist priest, offering up a video sacrifice. If the gods are kind and the sacrifice is accepted, I am released. If the gods are cruel, I am handed the boulder of Sisyphus and pointed back toward the hill.

Sometime after dark, I clamber out of the Hollywood trenches and make my way back toward home. I'm not done yet; we still have a spot in play, but I can review it and give notes from home. The best thing about working late is that the traffic is less intense—everyone else has already returned to their loved ones. My shoulders hurt, but that's normal. They always hurt after a day at work because my job is tremendously stressful. I can almost tell time by what aches.

Even though it's wildly illegal, I check my phone a few times on the ride home. Something could go wrong. Something frequently does. And when it does, my team and I are the last line of defense against dead air on television. Rest assured, America, you shall not lose access to your beloved wannabe actors performing ridiculous tasks on my watch. Tonight, all is well. For now, at least.

At home, however, something is different. A scent greets me before I even make it inside the house. My wife is cooking.

Summer's commute is even longer than mine, and she's usually every bit as tired as I am when she walks through the door. As a result, my wife cooking is an event. I mean that not only in the “this is special” sense of the word, but also in the experimental physics sense. When my wife is at the helm, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is at play. From observing the current position of the culinary process, one can divine nothing of the project's velocity. The room is an explosion of flour and knives and probably something wet. I call it Schrödinger's Kitchen. The meal is both perfect and ruined, simultaneously. Only when the meal is served does the wave function collapse, and we discover the final outcome.

Tonight, Summer's making an heirloom recipe passed down from her mother and passed to her mother from some mythic figure lost in the depths of time. She is making taco pie. It is, essentially, ground beef, cheddar cheese, and sour cream on top of a crust built from premade crescent-roll dough—all topped with crushed Fritos corn chips on top. Dinner.

Taco pie is the sort of dish that's tremendously common in the particular corner of the Midwest where I grew up. Like green bean casserole made from cream of mushroom soup, canned green beans, and canned fried onions. Or Rice Krispies treats. It's food made from other processed foods. It's much faster than making each of the component ingredients separately, and it doesn't taste half-bad. It isn't haute cuisine, but when you're too tired to cook, it's an easy one-dish meal.

By the time I arrive, Summer has already fed Declan a sliver of the pie, which he's nibbled on and picked at, birdlike. I sit down across from him to talk about his day for a few minutes. He made a lot of art at day care today. He loves art. After showing me a couple of watercolor paintings, it's time for bed. I wish I had more time with him in the evenings, but these few scant minutes are all that remain between my return and his bedtime. I tuck him in, sing him a song originally warbled by sock puppets, and ten minutes later he's out cold.

Finally, Summer and I sit for our own meal. Exhausted. “Thanks for making dinner,” I say. “We haven't had taco pie in a while.”

Summer nods. “I know. We have the world's largest stockpile of ground beef, now.… I figured Dec might like it. It's so hard to get him to eat protein.”

“What's not to like? Pie. Corn chips. Cheese. It's like the toddler trifecta.”

She chuckles and picks at her plate.

“Good day?” I ask.

“Long day,” she replies. “There was a wreck on the 405.” Translation: longer commute. “I almost didn't make it home to get D. in time.” Our day care closes at 6:00 p.m. We arrive at 5:59 on the best of days. If we were late, I don't
think
they'd keep our child overnight to prove a point, but it's probably best not to press the issue.

“Did they seem mad about it?” I ask.

“No. But he was the last one to be picked up, again. I don't like doing that to him.”

“I know,” I mumble, idly fingering my phone. No new e-mails.

“Do you have to do that?” she asks.

“Do what?”

“You're checking your e-mail.”

“We're finishing a piece tonight. I'm expecting a link to proof the final version.”

“Do you have to check while we're eating?”

“The guys are still working. They're waiting on me to look. If I don't check, they have to stick around the office staring off into middle distance while they wait for stupid me to say nice things.”

“I'm waiting for you to say nice things. And I'm your wife. Talking about our son.” Then, a beat later, she adds, “And don't call yourself stupid.”

I demur, thumbing the lock button on my phone to blank the screen.

I take another bite of this pie that my wife made for us to share together. It's crunchy from the corn chip topping. There, munching on my Fritos-covered grass-fed beef, I pause. I feel guilty. I know what high-quality beef this is. I know how much hard work went into raising the animal humanely, harvesting it quickly and painlessly, and getting it into my backyard. It does not deserve to be covered in Fritos dust. Suddenly, I am not hungry.

But I don't want to be rude. Quietly, I lay down my fork and turn back to Summer. “So he was the last one?”

“The very last.” She pokes at her food, silent. Finally, “I feel like I'm missing his childhood.”

“You aren't missing his childhood.”

She counts on her fingers. “I don't see him in the morning at all. I leave before he gets up. You take him to day care, and I pick him up at six. Drive home, hang out for an hour, then it's time to get ready for bed. I see him for a little over an hour a day.”

“It's hard, I know.”

“Hard? It's not hard. I'm just missing out.”

I sigh heavily, not really sure what to say. “What if—”

Klaxons sound from my phone—a special “Oh, shit!” ringtone I've assigned to the office. I glance from the phone to my wife. “I need to get this.”

She shrugs, dismissing me. I thumb the talk button and listen for a few moments. The Machine is down. Something's broken and something's lost and it all has to be fixed tonight. I turn back to Summer.

“I have to go.”

She knows. She always knows.

*   *   *

A few days later, I'm standing in Declan's room in the dark. Early morning dark, with the sky just starting to nudge toward purple and indigo before really getting to the business of rising. Summer and I watch over Dec as he sleeps for the first time tonight.

He's sick. But not sick like adults get: [
cough cough
]
I don't feel so good
. He's sick like very small children get. The world-shattering,
my life is pain,
cataclysmic horror show of an illness. The kind of sick kids get that when the coughing starts you don't know which orifice some bodily substance is going to erupt from or what it'll be. And it's been going all night.

Summer and I back out of his room with as much grace as we can muster, terrified of knocking over or kicking or looking sideways at anything that could wake Declan from his hard-fought slumber.

Safe in the living room, I collapse onto a couch while Summer slumps in a chair.

“You or me?” she asks.

“You or me what?”

“Do you want to stay home or should I?”

I take a long, deep breath as I rub my eyes. “I don't know. Whaddaya got?”

“I can't really afford to be out. I'm the only one in the office, and we're finishing credits on a film this week.”

“If you stayed home you could get some sleep.”

“I can't take calls and take care of Declan at the same time.”

“Right.” She has a point. At times like this, I wish we lived near family. We're two thousand miles from the nearest person either of us shares a chromosome with. Besides Declan, that is.

“You guys busy?”

“Sure. Three projects and a sales tape. Trying to knock them out before the trip.”

“Can anyone cover?”

“Not really.” I crack my neck. It's gonna be me, and I know it. “I can handle it from here, though. I have mostly scripts and e-mail today.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I'm sure. It'll be alright.” I am in fact sure of no such thing. But it's our only option. “Let's get some sleep while we can.”

*   *   *

Dec is intermittently awake throughout the morning. After firing a quick e-mail to the office, I split my time between petting his back and doing what I can to put things in order around the house. Basil needs to eat. There are dishes to do. Sheets to be changed, washed, sterilized—and maybe burned, depending.

The day is calming, in a way. Despite the situation, there is a serenity in these domestic tasks and in putting the house in order. Sometime after noon, with Dec finally down for something like a nap, I turn my attention to dinner that night. If not for Declan, then at least for Summer and me.

Braising is the order of the day. I'm tired, Dec's exhausted, and I'm sure that Summer will be wiped out when she gets home. We need something homey and satisfying, and braises are food for the soul. There's something about meat cooked low and forever that offers fortitude for the journey, whatever that journey may be.

Braising is the act of cooking a piece of meat in a liquid at low temperature for a very long time. If this project is about making the most out of every cut, braising a pot roast is a reasonable first step. I've done a pot roast before—simple fire-and-forgets in a crock pot with whatever vegetables I had at the time—but today, with nothing but time on my hands, I'm going to do it right. I pour a big cup of coffee and set to work.

The cut in question is a chuck roast. A cut off the shoulder of the cow, it has a lot of beefy flavor but also a lot of connective tissue that has to be dealt with in some way. In this case, braising will melt the connective tissue and thicken the braising liquid into a sauce. If cooked too hot or too fast, that tissue will remain intact and will not be delicious. The road to Nasty is paved with messed-up braises.

My chuck roast is a little over two pounds. It's a rich, vibrant pink oblong, streaked with white fat and a few crevasses across the surface of the meat. I lay it on a cutting board and pat it as dry as I can with paper towels.

First things first: I put a couple of cups of all-purpose flour in a pie pan, along with a couple of heavy pinches of salt and some solid grinds of black pepper. I nestle the roast in the pan, turning it to coat the meat. I go heavy on the seasonings because most will fall off anyway. When coated, it looks like a fluffy white pillow.

I set a casserole dish on my stove's biggest burner, pour in some canola oil, and gun the heat. When the oil dances like a Rockette, I gently lay the roast in the dish, turning the meat to sear all sides into golden-brown loveliness.

Suitably seared, I move the meat to a plate and add a quick mirepoix (diced onion, celery, and carrot in a 2:1:1 ratio) back into the casserole dish, along with some whole garlic cloves and an entire bottle of Shiraz. I also knock the heat back down to medium and preheat the oven. When the wine reaches the barest of simmers, I gently nestle the meat back into the pot. About three-quarters of the meat is covered by the deep-maroon liquid, like a meaty iceberg in a nighttime sea. I turn off the burner, cover the pot, and slide it into the oven.