Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  “Oh, shit man—” Brian came back from his reverie. “It was pretty hard. You had to ID something like twenty or thirty fish and there was a hundred-question written part of the test. Also, do you guys have to write essays?”

  I’d forgotten: Yes, we did have to write essays to be turned in the last day. “Well,” Brian continued, “he is not an easy grader. I worked my ass off on that thing, and I did just okay.”

  Everyone looked at me; they knew where I’d come from. “Well, look—” I said. “You don’t know, I might not do so well … he might hate the way I write … ahh, screw it, I know this is where the GPA’s going to get resuscitated.”

  “Did you guys know he’s set to take the CMC test?” Brian was referring to the Certified Master Chef Exam. Only fifty-nine people had ever passed the test; a handful of them worked at the CIA. President Ryan was one of them. Most of us knew about it from reading Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef, which followed the fortunes of seven chefs aiming to achieve the CMC title. The test lasted a week and most people failed; a lot more than fifty-nine have tried. The command of techniques you needed, the grasp of tradition, of pairing flavors and textures, of plating, the breadth of knowledge required—it was staggering to contemplate. But pondering the phenomenon of Viverito … of course he was going to take the test. Of course he’d pass. None of us had ever tasted a thing he’d cooked, but you just knew.

  “That guy will pass,” Adam said. “No question—he’ll get the title.”

  I was surprised to find myself suddenly feeling terrible. This guy—an actual peer—was capable of demonstrating a real mastery of something, demonstrating an excellence you could measure. I was partly jealous of his accomplishments, partly envious of his mind. And partly, what I felt was mournful. I had spent a lot of years in a drift. How strange to be pushed into direct contact with someone who had no idea about wasted time. Or to be among people who weren’t old enough to have wasted any.

  THE RIDE TO THE farm took about half an hour, through the center of New Paltz, up along a steady slope to where the Shawangunk Ridge pitches itself straight against the sky. During the whole trip, gray banks of clouds hid the sun, spat down some rain, and retreated. The mountains are a dark blue and green; looking at them at that moment, they were so beautiful you understood why people will fight so hard to stay alive.

  The farm’s dirt driveway cut through green fields, and a few yards down from the road a sign read WELCOME CIA STUDENTS AND BROOK FARM FRIENDS. For most of the ride, the four of us in the car had talked food, Thomas Keller and the cult of celebrity, run down other students we didn’t care for, and generally avoided the topic of killing. With the farmhouse in sight the conversation swerved down a darker bend; we made jokes that weren’t all that funny and laughed too hard at them. We parked the car, gathered the knives, and took heavy steps to the backyard.

  The yard would have been big and open, normally, but this afternoon it was crowded with vehicles and equipment. As we walked toward a set of tables to put our things down, we passed a mobile chicken coop, presumably filled with the work at hand. A dozen or so feet beyond that was a fifty-five-gallon drum full of bubbling water on top of a propane burner, and next to it a cylindrical tube with finger-sized rubber pieces extruding off the interior sides and on the bottom. Nearby were a few tubs filled with water. And throwing their shadows onto the tables were six traffic cones upended and nailed to a crossbeam. I remembered the Clorox bottles from my twelfth birthday; I had a good idea what the traffic cones were for. Beneath the cones, someone had dug a trench about six inches deep. On this assembly line, no one part of the process was more than a few feet from another.

  The farm was run by a husband and wife team. They were a good-looking couple, at the upper end of their fifties, or early into their sixties. A lot of years of hard work had helped sculpt their faces. They looked a bit young to have been on the countercultural vanguard, but seemed more a product of the early ’70s; they’d probably done a post-Woodstock retreat back to the land; if they hadn’t spent time on a commune, I would have been surprised. If you’ve ever seen Robert Kramer’s genius film, Milestones, this was a pair from the cast three decades on. They radiated warmth.

  Both of them shook our hands and thanked us in advance for our help. On one of the tables were bread and butter; suddenly buckets of freshly picked corn appeared. The wife and the husband dumped the corn in the bubbling water. Given what was set to happen, the idea of food and eating seemed lunatic. But no one else appeared to hold that point of view; the bread disappeared. People took corn as fast as they could. The wife was suddenly in front of me holding out a pile of it. “Go ahead,” she said. “It was picked and shucked just a few minutes ago.” What do you say in the face of this kind of hospitality? The corn was something to exult over—someday I hope I’ll have some that good again.

  Here were all these people gathered together, eating, but there was nothing celebratory to the moment. The ambience was muted, stilled, with the tenor of a commemoration. A stereo in my head grabbed on to the line from Bukka White’s antique blues song “Fixin’ to Die Blues”: “Just as sure as we live, sure we’re born to die.” Over and over in my skull, as I tried to suck stuck corn from between two teeth. The wife said a few words about how the chickens had lived well, been treated well, and she read a poem she’d written from the bird’s point of view, absolving the killing because it was natural to die, and saying how the chicken’s short life had been a good one.

  And then it was four in the afternoon, and the light was thick. Things began dying. By the coop there were two wooden cages. The husband took a few of us to the coop, crawled inside, and handed out chickens two at a time. Six chickens were put into each cage. The cages were carried back to the crossbeams; we reached in and each picked up a chicken by its feet and held it upside down—if held that way long enough, chickens go into a trance; they’ll fight you, though, when you first try to turn them feet up. Once they were sedated, we drew them headfirst through one of the cones. Sebald spoke his softly accented instructions: Hold the head with your thumb under the chicken’s beak. Put the bottom end of the knife blade against the bird’s throat. Draw the blade across, applying firm, even pressure. The head should pop right off. All of us stood thronged together, knives in hand, waiting. The first bird went into the cone.

  It was really coming onto fall now. I’d noticed a few of the leaves beginning to tint with color. My parents were getting a little bit older. We’d all see another winter, but only so many. We have a finite number of times to watch a full moon wax, to see it turn the topography around you a dusky silver.

  The chickens had been brought to the farm as newly hatched spheres of down and had grown ineluctably toward this point in time. The farmers’ daughter, a girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen, had appeared. She wore ratty jeans and a green T-shirt. She still had her adolescence all over her; someday, when that awkwardness dropped away, she’d be very beautiful. She was keeping to herself, sitting off at a distance. The first chicken went into the cone. The daughter just broke. She streamed tears but wouldn’t look away. She sat with her arms crossed, weeping with more intensity. She’d helped raise them. She’d witness the entirety of their transition.

  That first bird: a young woman from school was the first to kill, and it didn’t go as well as it could have. The knife seemed to stick; the bird freaked out; she responded in kind but got the knife through the neck. She had blood running down her cheeks and held the head in her hand. She was blameless; it’s hard for your hands to know what to do. In the cluster of students around her, I saw one of the teaching assistants from school, her eyes also shining with tears.

  Most of us were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. I held my knife with a tight grip. Other students were reaching into the cages and pulling out the chickens. I watched people lifting the birds up, watched their wings flap frantically, heard them squawking, saw them being killed.

  I love my parents and I want to live fo
rever. I love my girlfriend. And I felt a wild surge of resentment move like electricity through me, angry that everything has to end. People I’d known or admired or were influenced by, pets I’d kept, family I’d loved. Jerry Garcia was dead. William Burroughs was dead. My dogs, Nigel and Cedric, were both dead. My grandmother, gone twenty-two years and still walking into my dreams, was dead. My uncle, too.

  My turn came. I could feel the bird’s pulse under my thumb. I positioned the knife as instructed and drew it hard across the chicken’s throat. And then I was holding its head in my hand, blood on my arms and shirt, watching the body convulse. My foot slipped and slid into the trench. My work boot was glistening with blood.

  The body was dunked into the same hot water that had cooked the corn. When the feathers began pulling away, it was removed from the water and put into the cylinder. The cylinder whipped the bird around and the rubber extrusions pulled away the feathers. Any feathers left were plucked by hand at a nearby table. Then we gutted the chickens, the viscera still hot. The carcass was then washed and put into a tub. We went through this for hours, until past dusk, stopping when the hundredth chicken was finished. About two hours before the end, I got stung on my neck by a bee. Sebald made me stop, put ice on it, and sit for a few minutes. “Karma, huh?” he’d said.

  In the early evening, I’d watched three other students playing around. In front of the daughter, who sat without saying anything to anyone, eyes red and wet, these three made bloody handprints on one another’s shirts and took pictures. They held up a living chicken with one hand, knife in the other, with a stupid rictus of a smile splitting their faces, and took pictures. I noticed my friends and some others staring at them in disbelief. After a few minutes, I couldn’t look at them anymore.

  At the end of the night, the husband and wife asked us to gather in a circle and tell them what we’d learned. One by one, we each mouthed the same platitudes about respect for food, being closer to the food source, and like that. But what I actually learned I still only feel.

  For the first few minutes, the car ride back was hushed. Then we started talking about food, the cult of celebrity, running down other students we didn’t care for.

  The next night, Nelly and I roasted a chicken. When I carved it, I got every last scrap off the bones.

  I SPENT THAT WEEKEND writing my essay for Viverito in a fever of righteousness after having killed the chickens. I also had something to prove.

  My essay was titled “Farm-Raised vs. Wild: Why We’re Doomed.” Viverito had spent a lot of time sniping at American culture and distancing himself from it. “There’s no television in my house. We have a set, but that’s solely for watching movies. Yeah, I know Top Chef is a lot of fun, but for God’s sake—read a book.”

  Or: “I don’t eat mammals. Maybe—maybe—I would not be opposed to eating animals that were raised naturally, cows allowed to be pasture raised rather than feed-lot raised. Chickens allowed to roam around the fields rather than being raised without beaks in little henhouses. But I’m not going to put that shit into my body otherwise.”

  One day he was incredulous: “I was shopping the other day and I kept getting nearly run down by all these people on those Rascals puttering up and down the aisles. I was just freaking amazed. Get your ass out the chair and get your heart rate going, you near-diabetic, obese mother …” He trailed off, not finishing the word, glowing with indignation.

  I did eat mammals. I watched TV. I’ve never ridden a Rascal. But I understood. Part of me thought that you can’t spend years listening to Fugazi, Black Flag, or the Dead and not harbor—or least empathize with—those anti-mass-cultural impulses. Part of me also thought that these positions were the logical outcome of thinking morally and ethically and not being a sociopath. I found myself mentally yelling “Amen” to a lot of his pronouncements.

  I wrote: “In a blog entitled Liquid Life, the blogger described her reaction to her first taste of wild salmon: ‘Alas, my celebratory mood was interrupted when I took the first bite. It tasted … fishy. And it was really … chewy.’ She went on to note, ‘I knew that there was no way I was going to eat the rest of this muscle-y fit fat-free wild-caught salmon. I just couldn’t. I am going back to my farm-raised salmon.’

  “Well, who can blame her?” I continued writing. “And beyond questions of blame, who can even be surprised by a reaction like that? For all the lip service paid to notions of experiencing the most we can out of life, living every day to its fullest, and all those other Oprah-like platitudes, it’s in the realm of the quotidian where we, as a culture, seem to like our experiences least. Many people are willing to commit some act of hyper-insanity like sky diving or sheer rock climbing, but appreciating a new piece of food is a Herculean undertaking. Of course, it doesn’t stop at food; you could look at the arts—film, music, visual art—and see over and over the same unwillingness to submit to a new experience. That which reinforces old sensations (with increasing diminishing returns) gets rewarded, but anything on the cusp of the new is usually damned to obscurity (at least until the artist dies), or, at best, to a cult following. Steven Spielberg could buy and sell me a thousand times over; for every movie John Cassavetes made, he had to mortgage his house to fund it.”

  My mind was a fugue of outrage. I kept writing: “Tangential stuff? Sure, because I’m supposed to be fixating on the notion of farm-raised fish vs. wild, but it really isn’t such a stretch to see the preference of the Liquid Life blogger as symptomatic of an American intellectual laziness. Of course, laziness implies that there’s a goal to reach, or something to be done or accomplished that is being ignored. We’ve lost sight of any goals. We’re on the way to being rendered incapable of even recognizing goals. At a nexus of profit, habit, convenience, and torpor, we’ve achieved a great failure. And for an example of the essence of this failure we don’t need to look much farther than the end of the fork.”

  I went on. And on. And on. And then wound down: “Farmed fish and factory-farmed produce and meat aren’t going anywhere. Of course they have their uses; if you can save lives and prevent malnutrition, then a life-giving but inferior product will certainly do in a pinch. Plus, they earn untold sums of money. But neither are the problems they engender going anywhere. And just as red meat was once villainized, then redeemed in favor of the demonization of carbohydrates, so America’s current infatuation with ‘being green’ and eating organic will probably wane when a new trend is established—or as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Only a relatively small minority work to make a positive impact anyway. Everyone else continues thickening their precious bodily fluids with high-fructose corn syrup.”

  I was done with the essay. I called Nelly up to read parts of it to her. I spent hours afterward on the front porch studying the characteristics of all of the fish we’d seen in class; I looked over every note I took; I had a two-inch-thick pile of index cards with key terms on one side and the definitions on the other. I went to bed at 9:00 and got up five and a half hours later.

  Soon after I got to school, we assembled in the fish room to take the identification part of the final. We were all standing shoulder-to-shoulder as Viverito held out the fish toward us. I guess we all have our blind spots. I had had a hard time spotting immediate differences between rainbow trout and brook trout. Viverito showed us an example of each, and I couldn’t make the distinction.

  Adam was immediately to my left. He was a lot taller than I was, and he held his test paper at my eye level. My eye saw that Adam did not have trouble making the distinction. I weighed the ethics for a moment; I didn’t mean to see, but I did. If I didn’t do well in the class—and I was convinced, given the condition of almost every fillet I cut, that I wouldn’t—it could mean some finance pain down the line. I didn’t mean to see it, but I did. I filled in the blanks. The test went on, and I didn’t miss any others. When it was over, Viverito asked that the tests be passed to him. This did not feel good.

  I just couldn’t do it. I erased both of the trout answ
ers and handed the test in. Adam watched me doing it. “Those were the right answers you had,” he said to me.

  “Well, actually, they were your right answers. You were holding your test right in front of my face, but I couldn’t bring myself …”

  “I’m kind of impressed.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  We went into the lecture room and took the written part of the test. I knew every answer but one. I was the first person finished. I turned in the test and my essay and left the room. It was 9:00 a.m.

  A few minutes later Adam was finished and we wound up walking the campus and talking—about Obama’s candidacy, about race in the America, about our parents, about the school experience so far. Lunchtime conversations were usually either about other students, class, or a litany of dick and fart jokes. This was the first time I’d really talked with another peer at the CIA. Adam was smart and perceptive. The guy would be going places.

  At one point, Adam asked me, “Did you like the fish class?”

  I said, “Well, I told you, I used to teach. So I’ve been on the other side of the desk. I’ve gotta say, that is one of the best educators I’ve ever encountered. Hands down. It isn’t that you’re going to remember every single thing he said or be an expert at cutting up fish after seven days. But come on, didn’t you find yourself studying really hard?”

  “Shit, yeah.”

  “Okay, that’s the mark—that guy made you and me want to be like him. Not be him, but be like him—know as much you can, to be really good. We wanted to measure up. That’s being a really good teacher.”

  At 10:45, we walked back to the fish room to see if there was any progress on the tests; Viverito had promised to start grading as soon as they were handed in. One of the others, a guy named John Howze, was seated on a bench outside the room. When Adam and I walked over to him, John looked at me, chagrined, and said, “You are a total asshole.”